By using Safe Coding, a "secure-by-design approach that prioritizes transitioning to memory-safe languages (like Rust) for new code," Google says that the share of vulnerabilities caused by memory safety issues have plummeted from 76% in 2019 to 24% in 2024.

(2024 isn't over, obviously, so Google is extrapolating that there'll be 36 disclosed memory safety vulnerabilities in Android by the end of the year.)

Google's blog post talks in great detail about their Safe Coding approach for new code and how it "quickly and counterintuitively reduces the overall security risk of a codebase, finally breaking through the stubbornly high plateau of memory safety vulnerabilities and starting an exponential decline, all while being scalable and cost-effective."

There are two important takeaways:

1) New code is overwhelmingly the most problematic, which is why they made a fundamental change in how they developed new code.

2) However, code matures and gets safer with time, exponentially, which makes the returns on investment for things like rewrites diminish over time as code gets older.

Memory safety vulnerabilities tend to be much more severe, more likely to be remotely reachable, more versatile, and more likely to be maliciously exploited than other vulnerability types, which is a big reason why Google is looking to mitigate them.

Circle to Search isn't rolling out for the Xiaomi 14T series until October 6...but I enabled it early 👀

It's pretty funny how I did it, too, lol. All I had to do was be on the right version of HyperOS and change the date to October 7.

Android 15 QPR1's upcoming notification cooldown feature was briefly being developed under a different name: adaptive notifications.

This feature automatically reduces the device's volume and alerts for up to 2 minutes when you get too many notifications at once.

Personally, I think notification cooldown is a better name than adaptive notifications, but what do y'all think?

Gemini Nano is rolling out to the Xiaomi 14T Pro!

I just got an update to the AICore app on Google Play that took it from a stub to a version that's built for the MediaTek chip in this phone.

So far, Gemini Nano is only used for Magic Compose in Google Messages.

After fully downloading, the Gemini Nano model takes up about 1.5GB of space. This is the v1 not the multimodality model by the way.

More details on Gemini Nano expanding to the Xiaomi 14T series can be found in this article.

Google is rolling out an update to the "Dreams" app on some Pixel phones.

If you're confused about what this is, it's actually the app that contains the screen savers for the Pixel Tablet.

Pixel phones had a stub for this Dreams app for a few months but Google is now pushing an update that brings a few new screen savers, but notably many of the unique ones from the Pixel Tablet are still missing.

The update adds News & Weather and Photos but doesn't bring the tablet's Art Gallery, Full-screen clock, Google Photos, and Weather Frog screen savers.