Mishaal's Android News Feed

You can now send a video to Google to ask questions about it! If you open Google Lens on Android and hold down the shutter button, it'll record a short video that you can ask a question about. If you're in a region where AI overviews are enabled, then you'll get an AI-generated response to your question. Google announced this feature back at I/O in May but it's started to roll out for some users in the last few days. LMK if you have it! (Sidenote: I'm actually using the OnePlus Watch 2 not the Watch 2R, but it wasn't too far off given what little I showed of it.)

Google is starting to roll out a "turn on auto-open" button in the Play Store that lets you auto open an app after it's done installing. If you toggle this, the text changes to "automatically open after install" and the app in question will open after 5 seconds of being installed. A notification with a countdown will appear so you'll know the app is about to open. This feature was enabled by AssembleDebug a few weeks ago but is now rolling out for some users. LMK if you see it! Thanks to xyron on Telegram for the tip!

The new incident reporting button is finally here for me in Google Maps for Android Auto! This makes it much easier (and safer) to report incidents while driving. Google announced this feature in July but it seems to have taken a while to roll out. LMK if you have it!

Vivo is rolling out an Android 15 update to some of its phones, making it the first company to do so. Is this really a big deal? No, but typically Google is always first. This time they've chosen to delay the update for Pixel phones to make it more stable before rolling it out. Google released Android 15 to AOSP on September 3 but major OEMs like Vivo have had access to the source code for months before, so it's not like they rushed out this update in less than a month. Still, even if the RC was only a few months ago, they did quick work to port Funtouch OS on top of Android 15. Google plans to release the Android 15 update for Pixel phones on October 15. They'll likely be the only ones to push out Android 15 QPR updates, which are already bringing major new features like lock screen widgets and desktop windowing.

Google Chrome for Android is rolling out a new button that makes it easier to open a new tab in the tab switcher page! This "new tab" button on the bottom right just appeared for me in the stable channel of Chrome. Previously, you had to tap the three dot menu in the top right then hit "new tab" to open a new tab. That button is hard to reach on taller devices. This button has been available for some people in beta/dev versions of Chrome for a few weeks now, but today is the first I'm seeing it in the stable version without any manual flag overrides. LMK if you see it!

Just got Gemini Live on my Xiaomi 14T Pro as a free user! Google announced earlier this month that Gemini Live will be rolling out to free (non-Gemini Advanced) users. Some users got it last week, but it seems to have more widely rolled out in the past day from what I've seen. LMK if you have it and what you think of it after trying out!

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.

Xiaomi didn't mention this on stage, but another Google AI feature is losing its Pixel and Samsung exclusivity: Gemini Nano! Google's mobile-optimized LLM is coming to the Xiaomi 14T series and Xiaomi MIX Flip. More details on what this means can be found…

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?