Statement from Google given to @9to5Google.

I think the best protection Google can offer is through Play Protect. If you install a new app that was signed by a leaked platform cert, Play Protect should be able to check if that app matches.

Satement from Samsung given to Android Police. As Android Police Founder Artem Russakovski and others have noted already, many of the malware samples submitted to VirusTotal are several years old.

Google has officially announced the rollout of end-to-end encryption for group chats in Messages. This "will be available to some users in the open beta program over the coming weeks." Also, Google says that you'll soon be able to react to RCS messages with any emoji.

Google has announced the release of Android 13 for TV today, but the new release is only available right now for the ADT-3 developer platform and the Android TV emulator.

If you want a full, detailed breakdown of what's new for TVs in Android 13, I've got you covered with this blog post.

Google is testing a "Send" shortcut in the Nearby Share bottom sheet that lets you quickly select files (using the Files by Google app) to share with others. This shortcut will appear when you tap the Quick Setting tile for Nearby Share.

Yes, you can already share files through Nearby Share. However, you have to open another app, select file(s) to share, hit share, & then pick Nearby Share. This cuts out some steps and makes the QS tile actually useful (before it just let you change visibility or open settings).

H/T t.me/google_nws

Google has been working on making it easier to do platform app development using Android Studio, and this latest code change in AOSP seems to bring them one step closer.

(AOSP code change in question: Export framework turbine stubs as android_stubs_private)

You're probably familiar with Android Studio, but you can't develop platform apps (like SystemUI) using it, at least not out of the box.

One of the issues is that only public APIs are available through the SDK that Android Studio downloads. Platform apps frequently call hidden/private/system APIs.

To solve this, one solution is to replace the SDK's android.jar file with one that contains all Android framework APIs, enabling platform app development through Android Studio.

(You can build your own android.jar to unlock all platform APIs by compiling AOSP and then extracting the JAR before it gets dexed. H/T @phhusson for that info. Another method is detailed here.)

Google's solution seems similar, except it's not replacing android.jar in the SDK path but instead adding an android_private_stubs JAR containing stubs for non-private APIs, so Android Studio won't throw a fit when you try to call them. More importantly, they'll probably maintain this so you won't need to manually create your own JAR for each Android release!

(There are other methods to enable AOSP platform app development on Android Studio, eg. a tool called AIDEGen is offered to configure your preferred IDE for platform app development.)

Back in March, the Android Studio team was hiring someone to help make Studio usable for Android OS development. This effort seems related to that role.

New features in the December 2022 Pixel Feature Drop:

- Clear Calling (Pixel 7)
- Speaker labels in Google Recorder (Pixel 6 onward)
- Free VPN by Google One (Pixel 7)
- New Curated Culture wallpapers (all)
- Unified search expands to all Pixels
- Safety Center (all)
- Live Translate now in Arabic, Persian, Swedish, Vietnamese, and Danish (Pixel 6 onward)
- Cough & snore detection now available for Pixel 6
- Better insights from Sleep Profile on Pixel Watch (requires Fitbit Premium)

In addition, Google says that it'll roll out spatial audio with head tracking support to the Pixel Buds Pro in January 2023. This will work with the Pixel 6 and 7 series.

Spatial audio with head tracking is available starting in Android 13 QPR1, thanks to the new audio pipeline architecture and sensor framework integration.

The Pixel 6 and 7 series received QPR1 yesterday, but spatial audio with head tracking support isn't available yet when connected to the Pixel Buds Pro as Google says this feature will roll out next month. It's likely the reason for the wait is that the Pixel Buds Pro will need a firmware update.

For head tracking to work, the headset needs to report head pose information following Android's Head Tracker HID Protocol. Also, a low-latency codec needs to be used, as head-tracking latency must not >150ms for the experience to be good. Google will likely be using Opus; QPR1 added support for it over A2DP.

However, it's not clear if the Buds Pro currently support Opus decoding, and a firmware update may be needed to enable this as well as support for sending out that head pose information.

When it does roll out, Google says that spatial audio will initially be supported with movies from Netflix, YouTube, Google TV, and HBOMax that have 5.1 or higher audio tracks. Google recommends using content marked as Dolby audio, 5.1 or Dolby atmos.

Head tracking isn't enabled by default, though. You'll have to navigate to Settings > Connected devices > Pixel Buds Pro > Settings > Head tracking to turn it on, as shown below.

This is why I wasn't too sad when I bricked my ADT-3. I had already heard the ADT-4 was coming with these specs 😆

This upgrade is long overdue. Android TV 10 mandated launch devices to support AV1 decoding, which the ADT-3 does not support. More recently, Android TV 13 added a bunch of features/APIs related to terrestrial broadcasting, so a device like this is needed to test.