As part of Google's latest Android Feature Drop, the company has announced 7 new features for phones, tablets, and Wear OS smartwatches. These features aren't limited to Pixel devices, either! Here's what's new!

Quick summary: New widgets for Google TV, Finance, and News; reading practice; new emoji kitchen stickers; updates to the Spotify, Wallet, and Keep apps for Wear OS; and expansion of dark web reports in Google One.

1) Google TV's new widget lets you quickly find personalized movie & TV show suggestions. The Google Finance widget helps you track selected stocks. Finally, Google News has a revamped widget to show curated headlines.

2) Reading practice helps kids improve their vocabulary & comprehension. It's available on thousands of children's ebooks marked with a "Practice" badge on Play Books. They'll hear the pronunciation of unknown words, practice mispronounced words & receive feedback in real time.

3) Emoji Kitchen now has new aquatic-themed emoji (🦈🐬🐋) combinations you can turn into stickers via Gboard.

4) Spotify for Wear OS is adding new tiles (podcasts, heavy rotation, and DJ). The "AI DJ" delivers a personalized lineup of music and podcasts.

5) Google Wallet for Wear OS now lets commuters in D.C. and the San Francisco Bay Area import SmarTrip and Clipper cards.

6) Meanwhile, Google Keep for Wear OS now lets you add a tile for a single note or to-do list.

7) Dark web reports in Google One are now available for everyone in the U.S. with a consumer Google Account and will expand to 20 more countries in the coming months. However, only paying subscribers get automatic monitoring & monitoring for more personal info like SSNs.


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Availability:

- Widgets for Google TV, Finance, and News: Globally on Android 6+

- Reading practice: U.S. only in English on Android 8+

- Emoji Kitchen stickers - Summer edition: Globally on Android 6+

- Spotify DJ for Wear OS: U.S., Canada, U.K., and Ireland in English for Spotify Premium users on Wear OS 2+

- Wallet on Wear OS: Washington, D.C. and San Francisco Bay Area in all languages on Wear OS 2+

- Keep for Wear OS: Globally on Wear OS 3+

Here's Google's blog post on these announcements; their YouTube video teasing the announcement; and finally, the page highlighting these features.

One interesting thing I noticed from this announcement is the navigation bar in the reading practice assets: It's totally different than the regular nav bar! In fact, it matches the "kids mode" navigation bar I discovered in Android 13.

Google Wallet will soon:

* Let you add any pass that contains a barcode or QR code by taking a photo of it
* Let you digitize your Humana health insurance card (private pass)
* Let you add your U.K. National Insurance Number through the HMRC app (private pass)
* Let residents of Arizona, Colorado, and Georgia add their driver's licenses
* Let you use your ID in Wallet to book a car with Turo or verify your online accounts
* Let you complete your travel check-in entirely in the Messages app (RCS required). You'll receive your boarding pass or train ticket directly in Messages. This will roll out with Vietnam Airlines and Renfe in Spain.
* Let you add your corporate badge

Starting today, Google Wallet can:

* Let people in Maryland add their driver's licenses to the app
* Let people in Germany save a Deutschlandticket purchased at select transit agencies to their Wallet.

(Private passes are labeled as such in the card details and require you to verify your ID through fingerprint, PIN, or other methods before you can add, view, or use them.)

Full details in Google's blog post.

When I found out Google's adding support for setting a different live wallpaper on the lock screen and home screen in Android 14, I thought "about damn time!"

...though I bet this was finally added because they have fancy new live wallpapers this year for Pixel users.

It's a given that Cinematic Wallpapers is a live wallpaper because, you know, it intrinsically involves motion. Emoji Wallpapers can be interacted with, as shown at I/O. AI Wallpapers, while not shown to be interactive, may still be implemented as a WallpaperService.

Android has supported live wallpapers since Android 2.0 Eclair was released in 2009, for context. But until Android 14, the OS only let you set a single live wallpaper for both the home and lock screens.

If you're wondering how you can set a separate live wallpaper on the home and lock screen, you'll need to be on Android 14 on your Pixel and you'll need root access to change the system property persist.wm.debug.lockscreen_live_wallpaper to true. Then just reboot!

Sometimes when I find a change in Android, I have to think "what is this for? What's going to use it?" More often than not, everything goes in the square hole, ie. it's related to some Pixel product lol.

Ooh, according to a new report from Kamila Wojchiechowska for Android Authority, the Tensor G3 will apparently support AV1 encoding, but not only that, it'll expose Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) to the bootloader.

I discovered a hidden "advanced memory protection beta" feature in Android 14 - now we know why it's there. For more details on Android 14's "advanced memory protection" feature and MTE, refer to this article.

Google has published the June 2023 Android Security Bulletin, which lists the security vulnerabilities patched on builds that report the 2023-06-01 and 2023-06-05 security patch levels. Patches are available for AOSP versions 11-13.

This month, there were 3 vulnerabilities in AOSP components with a severity level of "critical". It's worth noting that since March 15, 2023, Android no longer assigns CVEs to most moderate severity issues.

The June 2023 ASB doesn't provide any real details on any of the vulnerabilities beyond the type and component they affect. If you're an Android Partner, you can get a summary for the vulnerabilities impacting AOSP components from the Partner Preview bulletin.

Once AOSP has been updated with the new tags, we can see what exactly the patches do. I'll post a changelog as always. Note that this month's release should also bring Android 13 QPR3 to the fold, so there should be a lot more than just security fixes in the source code drop.

Google has updated the Android version distribution statistics shown in Android Studio to reflect the latest data as of May 30, 2023. Here's how the % of (GMS Android) devices has changed since January 2023 when the stats were last publicly updated.

- Android 13: 5.2% - 15%
- Android 12: 18.9% -> 16.3%
- Android 11: 24.4% -> 23.1%
- Android 10: 19.5% -> 17.8%
- Android 9: 13.2% -> 11.9%
- Android 8.1: 6.9% -> 6.1%
- Android 8: 2.6% -> 2.2%
- Android 7.1: 1.8% -> 1.5%
- Android 7: 1.9% -> 1.5%
- Android 6: 2.8% -> 2.3%
- Android 5.1: 1.8% -> 1.5%
- Android 5: 0.3% -> 0.3%
- Android 4.4: 0.7% -> 0.5%

The % of (GMS Android) devices running Android 13 has nearly tripled since January 2023. Android 13 was allegedly on 12.1% of devices according to data sourced from mid-April, though that data never appeared directly in Android Studio AFAIK.

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While we're on the subject of Android version distribution statistics, Reddit users noticed a pecularity with StatCounter's data.

The % of Android 10 users spiked from 16.65% in April to 47.84% in May 2023, but this can likely be attributed to how they collect their data as the rollout of Chrome's user-agent reduction was enabled for 100% of Android devices in May.

If you look at the UA string in Chrome on your Android phone, you'll likely see it reported as something like "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/98.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36." This is done to reduce passive fingerprinting of devices.

In order to declare support for Media Performance Class 14 in Android 14, devices will have to support AV1 encoding at up to 480p30 @ 1Mbps. This is not a high bar to meet, though: Using a SW encoder, a Pixel 5 can achieve 56fps and a Pixel 6 65fps, according to a Googler.

The Android 14 Compatibility Definition Document (CDD) hasn't been published let alone finalized yet, but a recent AOSP code change suggests that requirement ID [2.2.7.1/5.1/H-1-19] will talk about Media PC's AV1 encoder requirement.

Android 14 will be including the "c2.android.av1.encoder" AV1 SW encoder, which isn't in AOSP yet. This is evidenced by the attached code snippet which comes from the media_codecs file in the SWCodec APEX module. I don't see the library for this AV1 encoder yet in Beta 2, though it will likely be the AOM reference AV1 encoder.

According to leaker Kamila Wojciechowska, Google's Tensor G3 will support hardware-accelerated AV1 encoding at up to 4K30. Qualcomm just implemented a HW AV1 decoder (at up to 8K60) in their Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. No word yet on whether they or MediaTek will implement a HW AV1 encoder as well.

Google Clock 7.5 prepares to show a "local weather on clock" option when you have the com.google.android.apps.weather package installed. This was first mentioned by 9to5Google, who believes this package will be a new, standalone Weather app. I have a different theory, though.

As 9to5Google reports and I can confirm with the screenshot above/my own analysis, Google Clock 7.5 will support showing weather info on the Clock screen. This info is provided by the com.google.android.apps.weather package, which isn't available yet.

But is this package actually the new Weather experience that Google showed off recently? Weather is currently part of the Google App and can only be accessed by first searching "Weather" & then adding a homescreen shortcut (or by launching the activity directly if you know how).

Instead of a standalone app you interact with, though, I think this new app could just be a location-based weather provider for not just the Clock app but potentially other Google apps down the road. And the new experience would remain part of the Google App.

Adding location-based weather directly into Clock or other apps would require requesting location permissions. Having an external provider would avoid that. There's a lot of skepticism & concern lately around apps and location access.

Google's done this kind of thing before. Cough & snore detection, for example, is implemented by Android System Intelligence rather than the Clock or Digital Wellbeing apps.

Regardless, Google should still definitely release a "Weather" app on the Play Store, even if it's just a shortcut to the existing experience in the Google App (like they did with the Lens and Podcasts). It would be a lot more convenient and discoverable for users.