In this week’s top stories: Google releases its first preview of Android 12, Samsung is reportedly killing most of the background apps, Pixel phones ready to get automatic face-based rotation and more.
The biggest news related to Google this week is that, on Thursday, we all had our first taste of the next version of Android, thanks to Android 12 Developer Preview 1. Our Abner Li brought together all the features and tweaks, big and small, for quick reading.
An improvement that people were particularly interested in is that the “Display cutout” feature in the Android 12 developer options now has an option to hide the front drilling camera found on the Pixel 4a, Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5.
Activation applies a black bar to the status bar that works to partially hide the punch of the Pixel 4a, 4a 5G and 5’s. The time, notifications and other system icons remain in place with the new darker background.
This week, the wall of shame in “Don’t kill my app!” has been updated, moving Samsung to the top of the list of offenders due to the changes they made with the Android 11 update. Any application that needs to continue to collect information in the background, such as a health app, can no longer run on background by default.
Notably, this happened after Google said it would take steps to prevent exactly this type of behavior from its Android partners. Clearly, Samsung did not receive the memo or disregard it entirely.
Before Android 12 Developer Preview, we learned that Pixel smartphones may be getting a new auto-rotation option that uses your camera to see which way your face is facing. Your phone will determine which way your head is towards the phone and decide which way to turn based on that.
The technology behind this is likely to be a simplified version of the face shape recognition features of apps like Snapchat and Google Duo. For obvious privacy reasons, this camera-based scan will happen entirely on your device and will not save or send your photo anywhere.
This week, our Damien Wilde did a thorough investigation of the new company Nothing, former director of OnePlus Carl Pei, discovering that the brand is the new owner of the recently defunct Essential brand. This transaction appears to include at least Essential’s trademarks, if not also the company’s various patents.
Nothing is set to reveal more information about the next products in the coming days through its official website. Let’s hope this isn’t … essentially nothing …
It can be speculated that this is Nothing’s move to access Essential’s patent catalog, with numerous patents related to “Voice setup instructions” and “voice enabled home setup”. With a primary focus for Nothing being on smart devices and therefore smart home technology, this would allow for even faster development of improved technologies as the brand grows rapidly.
In Pixel’s unfortunate news, it appears that Google phones are getting a bad reputation for camera flaws, especially on older models like the Pixel 2 and Pixel 3 series. The growing group of people with the problem report that the app Google’s camera – just like any other application that uses the camera – simply doesn’t show any images, which may suggest a hardware-related flaw.
Reports of camera problems come mainly from legitimately unhappy Pixel 2 owners, but, as the AP notes, there are growing reports of those using Pixel 3, 3a and even Pixel 4. Given the age of Pixel 2, if this is really a hardware problem, so replacements are unlikely to be made. It can be a wear problem, but that would not explain many of the problems seen by users.
The rest of this week’s main news follows:
Android 12 |
Applications and updates |
Google |
Made by Google |
Samsung |
Wearable |
Videos |
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