All About Android 629, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Jason Howell (00:00:00):
Coming up on All About Android. It's me, Jason Howell in studio, and then it's everyone else in studio, actually, too. Ron Richards, Huyen Tue Dao, and Mishaal Rahman all joining me here at this table. A little bit of Google I/O preview, and then a ton of other news and a heck of a lot of fun. Next on All About Android

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Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

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This is All About Android, episode 629, recorded Tuesday, May 9th, 2023, the Password Paradigm. This episode of All About Android is brought to you by DeleteMe, reclaim Your Privacy by removing personal data from online sources, protect yourself and reduce the risk of fraud, spam, cybersecurity threats, and more by going to joindeleteme.com/TWiT and use code TWiT for 20% off. Also, thank you for listening to All About Android. As an ad supported network, we're always looking for new partners with products and services that'll benefit our audience. 99% of our audience listens to most or all of our episodes, grow your brand with authentic ad reads that always resonate with our audience. Reach out to advertise@TWiT.tv and launch your campaign now.

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Hello. Welcome to All About Android. Your weekly source for the latest news hardware and apps for the Android Faithful. A very, very, very, and one more, very special episode of All About Android. I'm Jason Howell.

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And I'm Ron Richards. And I, and it's, wow, they just went for it. They went, oh yes, it is my birthday. Okay, well, you go, you'll say your names in a second. Apparently there's plane. Wow. Fire and treats. Oh, beautiful. All this lovely stuff. Wow. Celebrating my birthday in all Albany there. Spread your germs all over those. Yeah, there you go. Oh, no. There you go. Okay. Yeah. There. Go. Happy. Thank you. I'm not keeping the hat on the whole show.

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Is it like one of those like joke candles? What, what, what year? What? How old are we? Okay. There you go. And, oh my God. Burke Burke. I hate you. Okay, <laugh> Victor, go ahead and cut to Huyen. So she gets to get in there. Hi, I'm Huyen Tue Dao. There we go. In studio. And finally, Mishaal Rahman. Not my birthday, but yeah, I'm glad to be here. I was like, oh God, what did I get myself into? <Laugh>. Seriously, I drove all the way up for this. Oh my goodness. Oh, that's exactly why I drove up here. Oh, thank you. Yes. Oh, it's Sparkle confetti all over you. Oh, yay. Conf. Well, thank you everyone at TWiT for the wonderful birthday wishes. Also, wishing a wonderful happy birthday at a Florence ion, who was also her, my, my birthday sister in in space. We chatted a little earlier.

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She's already down in, at the Shoreline, picking up her Google I/O badge. So yeah, she's got her badge. She's, she's flashing. And then if you're a member of the badge club, club TWiT Discord, then you can see in all about Andrea channels. She's, I mean, I don't know if that's a picture of right now, but she is there. She's there. She's got her badge, which is one step closer than any of us. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I do feel, oh yeah, I do feel bad cause don't want my birthday to overshadow the fact that we're all in the same dang room for the, we are for the first time ever with this crew. Can I also say just one, one more thing. We've got a room filled with people, right? <Laugh>? We do, yeah. Actually more people than we usually, possibly have ever had for All About Android in here, <laugh>.

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We do have Burke. Yes. Hey, behind the board, but Burke is not running the board today. It is Victor. Victor will be running the board. And I should also mention that Victor's birthday is in two days, right? Two days. Yay. Two days. So happy birthday to you, Victor as well. <Laugh>. Thank you. So, yes, we're all in the same studio. It's amazing. How, how freaking awesome is that. Thank you. We'll eat, we'll eat those later. Yes. We definitely, I the corner would just be sitting here. Yeah. You'll be lucky to get one run. I know. I'll be like, yeah, but it's good to all be at the table. I know. This is how we used to do it, right? Like, and Yes. At well, yeah. Once upon a time you would come into the studio almost every, every episode. Cuz you lived in the Bay Area.

(00:04:11):
Yep. Now we're here from all over the country Really. Right? Yeah. Like New York. Yep. Texas. Texas. Colorado. Colorado. Wow. Boise, Idaho. But I live in Petaluma. Love this. <Laugh>. Your commute was not much high commute. Yeah. Maybe seven minutes, two hours. But yeah, no, it's just great that it all coincided with Google I/O tomorrow down in Mountain View. We're all very excited to, to go to the big, the big show. The big Google show. Big show Big one and all hang out together at it. It's amazing. Yeah. And we got a lot to look forward to at the show tomorrow. What, and, and actually I'm looking through the news, like if you are thinking that you're gonna get like nothing but a Google I/O preview, I'm sorry to disappoint you. We're gonna start off with a little Google I/O just kind of give you a little taste, taste by tomorrow morning.

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It's gonna be outdated. Mm-Hmm. So it's kind of already outdated, <laugh>. Yeah, that's true. That's true. At this point we kind of know what we know. And then we've got a ton of other news, I'd say three quarters of which has Mishaal's name written on it. So Shaw's gonna do some heavy lifting, literally <laugh>. I hope you keep, keep you busy. But yeah, we've got a lot to talk about this week, so why don't we just jump, I don't even know which of these, like six cameras to look into. Yeah. Which, there's so many cameras that one. But why don't we jump into the news, Victor, take us there. Oh, whoops. That's right. I guess I'm the news. Mishaal is responsible for a lot of the news. That is true. We're gonna take a break. And this, there's so much glitter in my hair.

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It looks like it's an all Google I/O all Android news, but more so there's so many people in the studio. I couldn't come up with something <laugh>. I'd really hope that in honor my birthday. It would've, we would've, the Android news bumper would've risen to the level. But I'm glad to see that we're consistent. But but yeah, so as, as we mentioned, that's a comprehensive it is Google I/O Eve. We are very, very excited. So yeah, so we wanna touch on just what, what, what are we gonna expect tomorrow when, when all the nerds are set on Mountain View? Well, first and foremost, most likely is gonna be Android 14. Which we've been talking about, I feel like we've been talking about for months now already. It's like old news again. But we're gonna get the whole full story behind the update and we're gonna hear how Google's gonna spin the new, new version of Android.

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And not, not that they need to spin it, but how they're gonna position it and Right. And link it to everything. And within that, we're more than likely gonna find out a lot about how AI and search are gonna come into play. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and we're gonna talk about that a little later in the show. But clearly the race, you know, one of the stories in 2023 is becoming the, you know, kind of the, the race for AI with, with chat g ChatGPT leading the lead and everybody kind of catching up. And of course Bard from Google's offering is right there at the forefront of that. You know, look forward to see how Bard comes to Pixel at some point, either via Google search or a standalone app which could be an announcement at IO.

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We'll see what comes from that. And then it's funny because I feel like over the years, IO has vacillated between like a developer event. We're talking about the new version of Android, or hey, it's a consumer products event, we're gonna show you new products. Yeah. But it looks like this year we're getting new consumer products and obviously the story's gonna be how they all work together in the ecosystem of Android. But we talked about it last week. We're gonna finally get that Pixel Fold that we've been talking about for mm-hmm. <Affirmative> over a year now. Probably gonna see the Pixel the Pixel Tablet that we already know exists. Right. So those are great new hardware to, to expect. But will we get a Pixel 8 tease? It seems like in the, I kind of feel like, yeah, probably like, I think that didn't last year they showed us what the pixel looked like.

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Right, exactly. Google's playbook right now mm-hmm. <Affirmative> is to kind of give you a little teaser mm-hmm. <Affirmative> right. Will, will, will ahead of the leaks. Will they have anything to tease for a Pixel watch too? Do they wanna pick up on the wearable side? There are some rumors, there are some rumory things saying that a Pixel Watch 2 would happen by the end of the year, right? Yep. The end of the year hard work. Yeah. Yeah. I think the rumors say with the Pixel 8 launch, right? I mean, cuz it would be the ecosystem that would make, that would make sense, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, yeah. You get the phone, get the watch, get the tablet. But the underlying tech underneath all that is the Tensor chip. And Will, will they tease the tensor G 3? More than likely we'll hear about how, certainly how great the Tensor G 3 works with ai and we've had many advancements in the realm of ai, specifically how our pixel phones tensor chip made exclusively by Google, blah blah.

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But yeah, we could write the IO keynote right now, I think with, with Bard. Oh. Yeah. Maybe they did write the keynote with Bard. Oh, that would be amazing. Could you imagine at the very end of the, the show? Yeah. And by the way, everything that you've heard us say was written by Google Bard. Thank you. Everybody have a wonderful afternoon. That would actually be pretty impressive. Yeah. So that's just a quick rundown of what we're expecting tomorrow at Google I/O, but is there anything else? Hey Mishaal, what, what are you, what are you hearing in in the, is there anything else newsy that we haven't talked about? Mishaal <laugh>? No,

Mishaal Rahman (00:08:54):
I think the big thing I'll look out for is how Google is going to incorporate generative AI into everything. Yeah. So from their search products, maps, play, store development tools, Android Pixel, everything. Like, that's gonna be the big focus, the overarching theme I think of this Google I/O

Jason Howell (00:09:12):
Hmm. AI chat. I mean, there's so much ai. Yeah. There's the what was it? The the Wall Street Journal had the, the news I think in the last couple of days that, and I don't know if this is IO driven or further down the line, but that, you know, bard essentially would get roped into Android in some way, either within the search bar that we're used to interacting with or as a standalone app. But being, you know, being that kind of always present, always on device thing, which really just reminds me of like Google now of days of yours or Assistant. It's what Assistant is what assistant has been what for years now. Like that's the thing is that like I get, I get the need to have a product to compete with Chad G P T and to put Bard out there and the way they're positioning Bard and that.

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Thank you. There's so much glitter. Geez, <laugh>. But the, the, you know, positioning Bard as a, you know, like help Bard write your homework or do whatever type of, but like, I feel like why aren't they saying, Hey, we've been here for years with Assistant mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, like AI has been a piece of our operating system for years. Cause it has been like we've heard about the machine learning and what it can do in the pixel environment and what assistant can do for it. I feel bad for the team that's worked on assistant all these years to be like, Hey, what about

Huyen Tue Dao (00:10:25):
Us? It, it really feels like that meme or the guy, you know, that meme with the guy and his girlfriend, he's looking over and so assistance's his, his now girlfriend and he's looking over at Bard. Like, yeah, but I mean, and it's obvious, right? Cause

Jason Howell (00:10:36):
Nobody's looking at Chad g pt Oh, sorry. Right. He's,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:10:39):
If you zoom out even farther Chad GT's over there and he came more banging outfit

Jason Howell (00:10:43):
<Laugh>. Right,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:10:43):
Right, right. But I mean, like, and we, we reported that, you know, they had a whole executive kind of like upheaval as well. So it really seems like just in all kind of manners are shifting just to, and it's so weird, right? Because for years it was like, Google Assistant is like the best. Like, we make fun of bing, we make fun of Siri, and now the table have in have entirely flipped in like a different direction. Oh yeah. Now Google's like scrambling and we're just like gonna be sitting here in the audience watching like, huh, how's this gonna

Jason Howell (00:11:08):
Go? The, the narrative has shifted to incredible. Google was perfectly positioned to dominate in this space. And now look at Google, like sitting on the benches playing catch up, trying to play catch up. Yeah. Yeah. I think Google, what

Mishaal Rahman (00:11:20):
People kind of underestimate Google's dominance still is that, you know, ChatGPT, most people aren't going to go to ChatGPT's website and interact with them. People I'm sure have played with it, right? But the way people interact with it is gonna be through services that people are using ex like, you know, existing services. Super true. And I still think Google has a huge advantage at getting barred in front of users, you know, more so than Microsoft does.

Jason Howell (00:11:42):
Yeah, that's a really, that's a really good point. I mean, if, if Google was to bring its Bard AI to every Android phone, you know, that is GMs certified, let's say mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which I'm sure is exactly what Google intends to do at some point. Like, does that just, just that that exposure is so valuable. You're right. Most people have heard of ChatGPT or who have heard of chat G B T I've interacted with it, but it's not in their face every day. They have to remember to go to that site. They have to remember to have a reason to use it. Meanwhile, you've got Bard just hanging out on your home screen waiting for you to ask it that dumb question or to generate whatever it is it's gonna do. I mean, it's always there. So of course you're gonna interact with it.

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In the same way that we interacted with assistant, I couldn't help myself. I just went to Bard and I said, write the Google I/O keynote <laugh>. And I said, sure, here's a possible Google I/O keynote for 2023. Welcome to Google I/O. We're here to be with you to share, to share some of today's latest news and innovations for Google. This year we're focused on three key key areas, making the world a more accessible place, helping people live healthier and more productive lives, and making the world a more sustainable place. Pause, applause, <laugh> tell to add more former speak and then you'll be golden. But what's funny is that it's all previous years. It's like, it's, it's, it's like, for example, we're introducing Android 13 and we're talking about Google Fit, right? Like it just cherry picking stuff from <laugh>. It does a really good job of writing last year's keynote. Exactly. Exactly. I mean,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:13:07):
As much as as Google reuses names, that actually might not be a bad strategy to use Bard for that. And at some point it's gonna be Right. It's like the whole like monkey typing on a keyboard thing. Yeah. Eventually

Jason Howell (00:13:18):
It'll come back around at Google. They've been feeding Bard all of their internal documents for the last year. So you know, I, I don't actually think they've been doing that, but if they had, Bard might actually be really good at writing a keynote. This is interesting though actually, cuz it, not only did it provide this, but it provided, there's a, they, they, this, since I used it, they've added this functionality. It says view other drafts and there are three different approaches to answering the question. Wow. They're three different drafts that are completely different kind of yeah, it's crazy. It's weird. It's weird. I do think, I mean, I know that Chachi g p just, it's so hard not to start talking about AI and get fall down this rat hole. Yeah. rabbit hole. But I know ChatGPT just like is opening up a lot of the services to your point.

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Like it's gonna be the underlying structure that a lot of people are choose to work with, to, to build stuff. And I'm curious to see what comes out of that from the innovation of like what other people are, how they can focus the technology and make consumer facing mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, not singular use, but more, less unlimited. Right. Because I do think one of the, one of the challenges about chat G B T and Bard and whatever, what is Bings called? What is Bing? But like, it's just that it's so open-ended and it's so, like you could type, type whatever you want. Like where do I start? But having a focus on it I think is helpful, but we'll see. Well that's, that's kind of been a challenge for things like interacting with Google Home and Assistant as well in the past. I don't know if that's a challenge that we struggle with now cuz we kind of got used to the limitations, but in the beginning, I know, I, I remember when assistant came out and, you know, people were writing articles or, or reference, you know, documents that you could point to that were like, here are like 500 commands you can do with your assistant.

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And I was like, well, that's neat. That really shows the, the depth of what it can do. But I'm never gonna remember 99% of these things on the fly. Yeah. You know, it's like you have to program this on this syntax into yourself in order to get the, the advantage out of it. Yeah. And it seems like where they're going with these current systems is that syntax kind of doesn't matter anymore. It's like, what do you actually want? And we'll figure it out for with the ui, who's gonna decipher the syntax. Okay. So before we move on around the table, around the horn, one thing you're looking forward to a Google I/O fold. What? Fold. Fold. Fold. Okay. Gimme false, Jason. I mean, I wanna say that too. <Laugh>. Okay. I'm excited for the fold.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:15:37):
You get the right half. You get the left half. I'll

Jason Howell (00:15:38):
Get right. Half my real answer. Fold my official answer. And Android 14. Okay. That's fair. And mine is the tablet, obviously. That's what I'm so excited to get my hands on that tablet. Oh, the poor little Pixel seven A. It's like <laugh>. I may be a mid-range, but you guys love me the last couple of times, times. Please. <laugh>, you love the A series. You're always talking about how great I am. By the way, I've never heard Jason's Pixel seven a voice, but I love it. It, it sounds like a branch. So now every time we talk about the seven A, you need to do it. That voice guys. No, I may be mid-range, but come on. I'm powerful.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:16:10):
Actually. That character's gonna be public. Is it? What is it? Copyright. And that character is ending in like what?

Jason Howell (00:16:14):
Public, public, public domain. Public domain

Huyen Tue Dao (00:16:16):
Tune. So,

Jason Howell (00:16:17):
Okay, nevermind <laugh>. We'll just get some generative AI to create a cartoon character like a cartoon Pixel seven A with that voice. Like with Clip's face. Yes. Different Mors Cold. All right. So someone out there go to Mid Journey or do whatever and type in make a cartoon character out of the Pixel seven a. Yeah. And let's see what we get and use this voice. Yes. And what freakishly weird hands we'll get from the ai. Hey, God. So, all right, well let's, so that's our IO preview. Yeah, that's, that's all you get because in like 12 hours we'll know everything officially well. So yeah. So many of you probably listening to this. If you're watching live or if you're listening to this first thing tomorrow morning after you download the podcast, you're driving to work, go to all of our respective social media tomorrow and follow along with us as we're in the audience for the keynote and, and fun stuff.

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And, and watch it on TWiTter. Right? Leo's gonna be covering it, right? Leo and Jeff Jarvis is Andy a naco. I think Power Line could be wrong with Andy, but I'm pretty sure Andy is in as well for live coverage of the keynote TWI tv slash live tomorrow, which is May 10th Wednesday day after me birthday am Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern. So yeah, not very long from now if you're wa you know, so many people listen and, and watch this show longer distance than there is that keynote to tomorrow. So but regardless that's happening tomorrow. And then we've got a pretty special interview with Dave Burke and Samir Samat from Google. We're gonna be doing that tomorrow at Google. It will not be Livecast, but it will be put onto our TWiT news feed. So TWiT tv slash news. And you know, so it's not gonna, I should just reiterate, it's that interview is not gonna end up on All About Android.

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Usually these interviews end up on All About Android, but we didn't wanna, we didn't wanna postpone tonight's show to tomorrow. And we have this opportunity to get us all in the same room. So you kind of get both, you get tonight's show and you get the interview tomorrow, just go to TWiTter tv slash news. Yeah. And yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And we'll be in the press area sitting with flow. Although when I think you're gonna be in the developer area, I think, I'm mean. Yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna be like, oh, maybe one of us will even talk to Cinar. I don't know. Yeah. Ooh. Oh, for Lucky's probably gonna be there. Yeah. I'd like to see Hiroshi. That'd be nice. Yeah. Hiroshi. Yeah. Hiroshi will be there. Almost guaranteed. Yeah. So she'll be there so you can say hi, and it'll be the fun time where we could talk to people who work at Google and not be sure if they know that we have a little thing where their mouth moves <laugh> or not.

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So yeah, that's always fun to, that is, and then not reference it. We're like, oh yeah, that thing again, because here's the truth, here's the truth. We might think they care, but they don't watch, they don't listen. They don't know. They may, you know, that's what I've learned. They're all these, the people we're talking about on this podcast, they don't listen to the podcast. They're talking about them. So No, they're living the life. Yeah, exactly. They're busy. They're not listening to news about them living in the life. They're busy doing the stuff that we're talking about saying. Anyway. Yeah. Well, speaking of doing the stuff, all right, so let's move on from Google I/O because there are a lot of different news items outside of IO and maybe some of them venture back in, but we'll get there. We wondered on last week's show when Google was gonna finally bring past keys to Android, and sure enough, Google did the thing a day later, PA keys, <laugh>.

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Are you sure they're not listening officially? Well, yeah, that's true. Maybe they are. You know, maybe they're waiting for us, but I'm pretty sure they're Yeah, yeah. They, they have, I think it's planned. Yeah. g.co/pass keys will take you to a page for managing your own pass keys. Many of my phones when I logged into there were already registered. I was like, oh man, I still have all those phones tied to my account, <laugh>. And they all had pass keys to them. Oh, wow. You can visit a page on a new device and then create a passkey with that device. There's a, if you go to that g.co/passkey page on your new device down at the bottom, you'll see a create passkey. And so you can say, tell Google the Google Passkey system. This device is a passkey and authenticates as me.

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So it's kind of, it's a different way of logging into your account into your Google account specifically instead of entering in your password or the other authentication method methods, you, I can, for example, go to log into my site, choose PAs, my login, and then on my phone authenticate with my thumbprint or fingerprint or whatever fingerprint you use to authenticate with. And that will that will clear it. And boom, you're into your account until you can't find your phone. Well, I have other devices. I mean, luckily you devices, I have a ton of devices, but b I can also use my other authentication methods. Right. It's not only PAs keys. Right,

Mishaal Rahman (00:20:54):
Right, right. Yeah. And also I think Google will let you back up your PAs key from your phone to your Google account so you can restore it and like, you know, create it on another phone if you happen to lose yours.

Jason Howell (00:21:04):
Should we try this live, Jason?

Huyen Tue Dao (00:21:05):
Oh, that's a great idea. Jason.

Jason Howell (00:21:07):
Doing what? Ron's birthday. Why don't we get it all set up? Jason <laugh>. Yeah. Why don't you show us all the security measures you have Enable. Yeah, that's right. Let, lemme show, show you my, my total deals. If I could, if we could recreate the time Jason locked himself out of his account live on show <laugh>. Yeah. Two Doctor authentication. It was a, it, it was a thing, it was a episode this week in Google where Jason set up his two two FA live and then proceeded to lock himself out of all this. Because I used my, my Google Voice phone number as the authentication phone number. And you can't log to Google account without your two f a phone number and you can't use your two fa phone number cuz it's a Google Voice number that you used to receive the two A phones I should't

Huyen Tue Dao (00:21:50):
Tail

Jason Howell (00:21:50):
There. It was, yeah. It was a little bit of a nightmare. And it happened in real time on Live on a show. It was fantastic. It was, it was seriously, it was seriously, it's one for the Hall of Fame. It really was like a hall of fame moment search for this week in Google. The episode I think was called Two Factor Folley. And if you search for that, you'll find it. But, but hey, I for one, welcome the end of the password. Yeah. I think you know, the, it's a long ways from the end of the password. I know, but this is a step in the right direction. I mean, literally my my day job, we now has to have to have a 16 character password with multiple uppercase, lowercase symbols. Oh. And it's like, it, it's, it's hard to remember, right? Yeah. And like, admittedly, I've got bit warden in now. I'm keeping track of my passwords that way and keeping 'em all stored that way. But it's it between the, the frequency that you need, the change passwords and update them and add into a face. So, so like, there needs to be a new paradigm. So if this is the right step in the right direction, I, I I welcome it. Did you get the the, the passkey thing or did you go and check it out for yourself?

Huyen Tue Dao (00:22:46):
I, not yet. I, I, I have not yet. I wanted to kind of sit down and be calm before I changed all the things and not do it while I'm traveling.

Jason Howell (00:22:53):
Smart. You live on the show. I did it last time. Take one for the teeth wave. Come on idea. Go for it. Let's do it right now. Come on.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:22:59):
Yeah, sure. That'll only take like an hour of my life. And you get to see Win Cry for the first time when I start walking myself outta everything. Now I'm looking forward to it too. Especially like just thinking about all of our, you know, less tech savvy friends, friends and family. Looking forward to the day where I don't have to tell my dad that he needs to stop using, nevermind the same password for all his accounts. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I'll just say that much.

Jason Howell (00:23:20):
Yeah, it is, it does seem like eventually if everything is using Pasky it perhaps creates a an easier landscape. But I think right now it actually makes things more, a little more complicated a little bit

Huyen Tue Dao (00:23:34):
There. There's a learning curve,

Mishaal Rahman (00:23:35):
Password, pasky landscape we have right now.

Jason Howell (00:23:37):
Well, it's gonna be a transition. And when will we ever even be there? There, there was a point, God, was it on, I can't remember which of the TWiTch's, probably security now, but maybe this week in Google or TWiTter. I'm not sure where they basically said like, there there is a there would need to be a point where everyone, like every site you ever went to, every router, you know, all these things, they were all over on Paske. And there's so much tied into the password paradigm. The password paradigm. Oh. that, like, that will probably never happen. I mean, as long as passwords are even an option. Yeah. They've been around for so long that it's hard to see anytime in the ne even distant future where it's like pass passwords are irrelevant now entirely. We can get rid of them entirely. Like, you know what I mean? Like, old outdated sites are still gonna rely on passwords. I mean, it's just signer now.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:24:29):
Well, it's getting all hopeful over here, sitting here, like for a password this future. But now I'm just gonna of just drag back down

Jason Howell (00:24:33):
To earth destroy higher <laugh>

Huyen Tue Dao (00:24:36):
When they,

Jason Howell (00:24:36):
When they look back in history. This is the time of like turmoil and like inconsistency. Again, I'm a broken record. I want to get to the Roddenberry future, to the Star Trek future where all technology ubiquitous and everything just works and everything is secure and lovely. But we just keep waiting in our lifetime, not our <laugh> in, in

Huyen Tue Dao (00:24:55):
Corporate speak. This is, so there's storming, norming, forming, sorry, storming, forming, norming and performing. Oh wow. In terms of team dynamics. Sorry. Super corporate speak. Not very fun at all. So I guess you could see like maybe we're going from storming to forming like the ultimate solution and at some point it'll be norming when it gets more ubiquitous and then performing when things just work. I'm sorry, I've been in corporate life too long, but then I

Jason Howell (00:25:17):
Say, should we, I've never even heard. Should we do some blue sky blue sky, blue sky engineering here? Like

Huyen Tue Dao (00:25:23):
Should we Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Jason Howell (00:25:24):
There're no bad ideas. Let's get the whiteboard out. Let's do a post-it on exercise,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:25:27):
Then. Synthesize or like, ID, ID eight. Wait, ID

Jason Howell (00:25:32):
Eight. Oh Id Blue sky solution. That's what I wanna, we go,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:25:36):
Oh my God. Solutionary. Love it.

Jason Howell (00:25:37):
<Laugh>. I'd never heard that before. I, I kept hearing storming and thinking storming the castle. Have fun storming the castle. Okay. princess Bride, sorry. You've got the next story.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:25:49):
Yeah. And we already talked a little bit last week about, you know, apple and Google joining forces to make trackers a little less creepy and to kind of develop, add together a kind of wor a more industry standard for trying to detect, you know, nefarious uses of trackers, especially with Apple already having air tag and having kind of their own, you know, proprietary solutions. But Google wanting to come in there with, I forgot that their air tracker was code named Gro Go. It's probably also a copyright name <laugh>. But today, like this week, apple and Google have actually submitted a draft specification for this new kind of standard for, you know, tracking trackers or cracking down on trackers. Track tracker, tracker, cracking tracker, cracking cracker tracking. Anyway they submitted a draft specification to the internet engineering task force, I E T F, which is an organization that is the quote, premier standards development for the internet. Now, these aren't like, these are voluntary standards. It's not like they're the internet police and someone's gonna come in if, you know, some like third party manufacturer creates a tracker that doesn't adhere to these standards. But it is a way for them to kind of together draft something draft basically os level, you know, tracking of unwanted tracking devices. The OS is tracking the trackers. Who tracks the trackers, who tracks the trackers. There we go. Who's tracking the trackers? Who's tracking the trackers? And this would allow

Jason Howell (00:27:08):
Who's, who's tracking the trackers, who's

Huyen Tue Dao (00:27:10):
Tracking the trackers? I like that's those words, that's English. So that would allow Bluetooth tracking devices to be compatible with this across iOS, Android, and of course other companies like Samsung Tile Chipolo, is it ufi? A a a ufi? Yeah, ufi. Ufi ufi, yeah. Pebble B. Obviously more security is good, more privacy is good. So I any kind of, you know, OEM that is kind of interested in technology is obviously interested in this graph specification. So product ex implementation is actually expected to be released by year's end. So a little update to, you know, the end of nefarious air tag and other, other usages moving forward.

Jason Howell (00:27:48):
This seems awfully familiar. I mean, I mean we did, we did talk about this a little bit last week, but which is then, so I apologize that I didn't, didn't set this up, but they wrote a thing. There's, there's more detail here though, and especially I think it's important to bring up, because earlier today on security, now, Steve Gibson talked a lot about this mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And he basically, this episode was episode one of two where he's really diving deep in the actual spec to really get a sense of what's going on there. And you said some details about this that are, that are kind of interesting to know and definitely should know about this. They're going to know how long that a user's been away from the, or the device has been away from the owner. And then behavior changes when that happens.

(00:28:32):
So that's kind of some of the orchestration that's gonna happen on the OS level. But this is interesting. It's, there's gonna be a creation Steve says, of an industry-wide pairing registry that matches verifiable ID information of the owner of an accessory at the time of pairing. And that's gonna be recorded associated with the serial number of the accessories. So the phone, the email, so essentially it's like a tracking database of like who owns what and all of these That's cool. Tracking devices, <laugh> and availability made to law enforcement by request. Oh. So it goes down this kind of dark road where it's like on one hand, yay, this is really, you know, this has a potential to be really helpful and, and crack down on things that are really bad. On the other hand, it kind of opens the door for other really bad things. So this

Huyen Tue Dao (00:29:20):
Set Pandora's box, again, it's just like, who's, who's tracking the trackers now? The, the track, the tracking track, the tracker trackers are tracking. Oh gosh,

Jason Howell (00:29:28):
You, yeah. Yeah.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:29:29):
Oh gosh.

Jason Howell (00:29:30):
So I think I'm following, and this will not be clickbait headlines at all as, you know, one, once the first time somebody gets, you know, busted or, or

Huyen Tue Dao (00:29:37):
You know, law Yeah, the law enforcement. Yeah. The, the, just like the legal of this. And like, obviously I, from an engineering perspective, this probably makes, you know, detecting, you know, unwanted trackers easier, but the easy solution is not always the best solution. It's just this a, this a fact of life in engineering. So just like, okay, I icon, I get it that this will make it easy, easier but easier for whom and for what purpose? Ugh.

Jason Howell (00:30:01):
Gosh. Yeah. Easier one way and a lot murkier

Mishaal Rahman (00:30:05):
Than another.

Jason Howell (00:30:06):
Oh, well,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:30:07):
Well, I mean, regardless the new specification work should work with finder network, which is like Google's the Google analog to, you know, the Apples find me ecosystem that does not just like, you know, find my device like fine phones, like tablets like Google has, but kind of like is going to be more a broader scope of any kind of like, you know, location enabled device. And I feel like a downer now having to kind of gone into like the dystopian we have it in my work on invite ease ultra wideband. So that's nice. So there we go.

Jason Howell (00:30:37):
There we

Huyen Tue Dao (00:30:38):
Go. That's wow.

Jason Howell (00:30:39):
Well, unless scary privacy news. Yes. <laugh> talk about Google tv. My near and dear, I, I do love my Google TV by the way. I, I it's fantastic. But it's not without its issues. And so I was glad to hear that Google's got a, an update that's rolling out that are doing two really important things as a Google TV owner that I'm very happy to see. Google says it will reduce wait times at device wake up, which as somebody who uses their Google tv, especially with kids screaming to watch Bluey and you go to press the power button, you gotta wait for it to wake up the, that, those seconds exactly on those couple seconds are crucial. No, it's a long time. It's a long time. Yeah. Forever. And then lastly, the thing that I've had the biggest problem with they're actually gonna add automatic, automatic hibernation of apps that have been used for 30 plus days as a way, I think that's pretty close, but as a way to save space because there's not a lot of space on that device. And I've run out of space on it in the past, which is very frustrating when I can't have all the apps I want installed because I don't have enough memory. It, it's insane. So I don't care about app hibernation on my phone necessarily cause I've got tons of storage there on, on Google tv. It's awesome. Yeah. Now you mentioned Mishaal before the show that maybe this Yeah,

Mishaal Rahman (00:31:50):
There's actually there's some detail missing there. Hibernation thing is actually a bit more interesting on Android TV because it's gonna be supported by every single app on Google play for Android tv because starting this month Google Play actually made it a requirement for all apps. Not just new apps, but existing apps too, to use the app bundle format. And on phones, that's actually in still only required for new apps, not apps that were previously using the original APK format. So if you're using an Android TV device and it's running Android TV 12 or Google DV 12 version or higher it's going to be able to support this app hibernation feature. Mm.

Jason Howell (00:32:29):
Very cool. That is really cool. And then lastly, it's gonna add support for the soon to be mandated app bundles, which is exactly what Yeah, yeah. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Which we'll do that and minimize

Mishaal Rahman (00:32:39):
It by 25%, which is

Jason Howell (00:32:40):
Fantastic. So, which,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:32:41):
Which you should do anyway. It's not that hard to use app bundles. It's like just, just do the thing, y'all just

Jason Howell (00:32:45):
Do the thing. I'm not even developer and I use app bundles. <Laugh>, I know how to use, no, I actually don't know how to use app bundles, but I can imagine it's probably really tied up with a

Huyen Tue Dao (00:32:54):
Little string and

Jason Howell (00:32:55):
Yeah. That's all it is, right? Just like, yeah,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:32:56):
Just like those

Jason Howell (00:32:57):
Old, you just put it in a backpack and Yeah, totally. Bundles and the backpack over and you say, here's your app. Yeah. And they

Huyen Tue Dao (00:33:02):
Just pick out what they need from it for your

Jason Howell (00:33:03):
Users. See, I could be a developer. Absolutely. A tv. Totally.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:33:07):
And what do I do

Jason Howell (00:33:08):
All day? <Laugh>. Yeah. I could be a developer. I'll just use Bart <laugh>. Awesome. Okay. And finally to round out the news rolling back app updates I'm gonna, I'm just gonna throw this over to you, Mishaal, cuz I, I will admit this one lost me a little bit.

Mishaal Rahman (00:33:27):
Yeah, so basically, I mean, the may update security update rolled out this month and it wasn't terribly interesting. I mean, most monthly security updates aren't really interesting if you don't know exactly what's being fixed. But there was one thing that's been fixed that I think some users might care about, especially if you're a Samsung user, because a couple of months back there was this exploit that was being taken advantage of to do some cool things on Samsung devices. And basically the loophole that users were using to take advantage of that exploit has been patched. So what you can no longer do is you can't downgrade a system app anymore beyond the factory installed version. So say you have version 2.0 of a particular system application installed on the os, but version 1.0 has this cool little exploit that you wanna take advantage of to root your phone.

(00:34:18):
Before the May update, you could actually roll back the update to that vulnerable version and then do whatever you wanted. But now Andrew will say, Hey, the factory installed version is version two. We won't let you install anything older than that anymore. And this isn't really like a big security issue or big deal because the only way you could actually roll back the app is if you have physical device access and access to developer debugging tools. So it's not like some, you know, rogue app on your phone could maliciously roll back updates to all of your system apps. It's only something the user themselves or someone with physical access could do. So it's a minor little tweak, but I think some, you know, users who were taking advantage of this exploit on Samsung devices would like to know that this is no longer possible. And of course, anytime Google fixes an obvious loophole like this, you know, why did they let you roll back and up and a system app beyond whatever was installed in the factory in the first place? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why is that? Why is that

Jason Howell (00:35:18):
Something, why is that even for so long? Why is that even the thing? It's like then Google's like, I I don't know that, that you're right. There shouldn't have been then. Now it's not. Yeah. So, okay. Good job. Google. Good job. You're gonna get a lot more good jobs, I think over the course of the next 24 hours. So just get used to that Google. Thank you Mishaal. Alright, we are gonna take a little break and thank the sponsor of this episode of all About and Android. And then we will get into some more news. I know it's li listed as hardware, but that is false. It is just more news. We've just got lots of news, news and more news coming up. But first, this episode of all that and Android is brought to you by Delete Me If you've ever searched for your name online, have you ever done that?

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Huyen Tue Dao (00:40:24):
With weather. So the forecast on background work is Android, is that it's gonna be more consistent, at least on Samsung. So this is a super like, technical thing, but basically every time you run any of your favorite Android apps, there's gonna be something happening in the background. So as Android does, we do a lot of stuff that takes a long time. So whether that could be like downloading your favorite podcast and your podcast app to say, actually playing a mu a music file and your music player of choice, things like this. So these are things that take a long time and we don't wanna make you sit and wait there while the thing, the downloads happen, while the things sync, while the music plays, you wanna be doing other things. So on Android, we have this whole concept of background work which is basically a set of API tools that we have for doing things in the background and allowing you as easier to either go somewhere else, do whatever you want, whether that's the same app, another app.

(00:41:15):
And a lot of this stuff gets really heady and there's like this concept of within background work, there's still foreground and background work within your background work, but there, there's like certain, there's like a lot of divisions between, so like your music player, right? That happens in the foreground. You notice that and you get that little notification in your shade that's like, Hey, this thing is playing. Or if you have to download something very specific and very immediately, you'll usually get like a download, you know, notification in your bar. So that's a foreground service. And so in Android, in recent years, the Android team has really been trying to get us to be a little more careful about how we use these foreground services again, because of that notification, because they take up a lot more resources and because they're basically priority things they need to be done now.

(00:41:59):
Whereas kind of more kind of low key things like say when I worked at Trello, you could actually like download some boards that you used like regularly, like in the background kind of opportunistically so that when you go and you go on the subway, maybe you might have it there if it, if the app had a chance to download it. So there, there's like certain things that can be deferred that can happen opportunistically. So there's like these two different splits. Anyway, this is all very complicated stuff. And the problem is, is that it's hard to do this stuff, right? In general, you know, like what kind of work do I need to do where, and then you throw in OEMs and the OS in there. So a lot of times if say you write you're, you're doing it, you're, you're using an app and something is weird with something that's happening, like some kind of background work, it's not always our fault.

(00:42:44):
It's not always our fault. Just because it's very complicated stuff. And again, because different OEMs have their different flavors of OS is implementing these for things. So there's so much going on at there's so much going on. Yeah, yeah. Even explaining it is hard. But, so basically in an effort to make this to an effort to make things work the way they're supposed to work us, Google has announced that they are basically, you know, working with partners and strengthening collaborations to make all of this junk work better. And the first partner, they're really working hard tightly with on this is of course Samsung. And so they have committed to make,

Jason Howell (00:43:16):
Of course Samsung,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:43:17):
Of course Samsung <laugh>. So all this stuff that I mentioned about these like very restrictive consumption, you know, like high consuming like tasks. Basically Samsung's promising that on one u one UI six foreground these foreground services, these important things that take up a lot of work that, that the OS is doing will be guaranteed to work as intended so long as they are developed according to Andrew's new foreground service, a p i policy. So, I mean, that's good, but basically they're telling us if we follow the rules that they've already given us, then it should work as intended.

Jason Howell (00:43:49):
That's very, yeah,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:43:50):
That's, that's, that's that's easily

Jason Howell (00:43:52):
Written. Don't follow the rules then it's gonna break <laugh>. Okay. Yeah,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:43:57):
That's,

Mishaal Rahman (00:43:58):
It's, Google's basically trying, they, they made mistakes several, several years back and they're slowly trying to crawl the way back into like fixing it for developers. So like the issue, I think it all stems back from the fact that in China, GMs isn't allowed. So Google Play services, all those APIs for push notifications Yeah. For location, none of that is available in China. So they have to use alternative services. But then there's a fragmentation of all these alternative services and then all these Chinese OEM smartphone makers figured out, well, you know, you have 10 different apps using 12 different services that's training the battery. So let's implement these features that, you know, saves battery life by killing off these apps in the background mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but then those features make their way into the global versions of their software. And then you have this massive issue where you have a certain app just, you know, being ended in the background while you're using it. Yeah. Or like you're listening to a podcast, all of a sudden it just stops and you don't know why, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So over these years, this fragmentation has just caused a lot of these problems or app developers for users mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And finally Google's been working to implement a lot of native battery saving features into Android to hopefully wean off OEMs from their own custom features so that Android works more consistently for app developers.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:45:18):
Yeah. And it's been hard, it's been hard because part of that solution has been to kind of really enforce rules on us on how we use these things to make it better to try to like circumvent some of that. But it only goes so far and it, and it makes our job a lot harder because it, it's honestly, I had a hard time explaining it cuz it just, it just, it's just hard to understand and hard to know what the right thing to do is. And so, as Mishaal said, they're do, they're trying to fix mistakes and, and, and make things better, but it's a little bit of an underwhelming announcement. I'm sorry to be like, we're trying to make it work the way it's supposed to work and how we promised you would work. So there you go.

Mishaal Rahman (00:45:52):
They just need to assign Bard to the

Huyen Tue Dao (00:45:54):
Task y pretty much just Bard that, how do we fix foreground services? A

Jason Howell (00:45:58):
Couple lines of code, right? Yeah. Just couple. That's all it is.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:46:01):
Yeah. Not all across all OEMs, like Yeah.

Jason Howell (00:46:05):
So many different variables at play. I just can't even imagine like

Mishaal Rahman (00:46:07):
How

Jason Howell (00:46:07):
Like, ugh, anyway, making it work as intended. Yeah. oh yeah. All right. Well, cool. Well thank you and for that moving on. So Android Automotive is looking to get a little to look a little better with material design at some point but it looks like the OEMs will have more control over it. Mishaal, what's the story here? How does that, what's going on with Android Automotive?

Mishaal Rahman (00:46:28):
So if you're familiar with the latest iteration of material design, a k a material, u the wall, the colors that you get, you know, throughout your system, UI throughout your applications, that's all derive from your wallpaper. Whereas in and or automotive, you know, since you're dealing with putting software on a car, there's a lot of safety, you know, things to take into consideration when you're designing a UI or any kind of interaction that that user has to go through. So you can't just like, you know, you, you have to be very careful with how you pick the colors and the design so that you know, there's no chance that you can't see the button you're about to press or you can't see some critical information or distracts

Jason Howell (00:47:06):
You from drawing

Mishaal Rahman (00:47:07):
In Yeah. Distractions, right? Yeah. Yeah. So instead of like algorithmically determining, you know, the colors to use for the ui. Google is leaving it up to OEMs to pick the colors they want. And there's some interesting things they can do with that. They can say, oh, depending on your drive mode, we can have one set of colors. Or, you know, when you're parked another set of colors, maybe it's a nighttime or daytime, another set of colors. So they can do all sorts of things with this new system. And then applications that, you know, want to opt into this, they can use, they can add this new library into their applications that will pull the colors that are generated or that were pre-generated by the system into their apps. And I'm assuming Google's gonna be publishing some documentation soon for app developers. The documentation they publish right now is for the actual Android automotive car makers. So none of it was really directly relevant to app developers, but I'm assuming this is something we'll hear more about, you know, maybe tomorrow

Jason Howell (00:48:02):
Seems like

Mishaal Rahman (00:48:03):
It's

Jason Howell (00:48:04):
An opportune time. It is deemed at the right time. Yeah. Perhaps Google I/O <laugh>. Yeah, well, so see, I don't have Android Auto, you know, Android Automotive built, built into my vehicle. Right. I'm trying to remember, cuz when I was in Costa Rica, the vehicle that we had did have Android. Well, it had, it had an embedded Android auto system that's different than Android Automotive. Yeah. Is there any sort of, like, what ki, I'm curious what kind of color customization capability you have with Android Automotive right now versus this. Like, how would this be any different than the customization they're able to do already?

Mishaal Rahman (00:48:45):
So I think the, the examples that ga Google gave on the page is more like, so say you have a particular line of cars, you know, made by the same automaker. Yeah. But like, just different models. You might have slightly different color branding, you know, signify a particular brand. So maybe if you roll off the shop and you know, your car is like red or something, maybe you could have a reddish theme that's like still

Jason Howell (00:49:06):
Safe to use. Look, the, the list of cars that currently have Android automotive range from like a lot of Volvos 2023 Ford cars, 2023 Lincoln cars. Right? Right. So just from there, from a branding standpoint, Ford is gonna have blue, right? Yeah. Blue. Blue and metallic. That's kind of there. If you drive a, if you drive a forward, you've, you'll, you recognize that as a color palette. Whereas Lincoln, she's now, this is like car brand trivia now. Like, can you, can you name the, the signature colors of car? What is the printer of the, the Lincoln is more also metallic, but I feel like hence of red in there. Right? So yeah. So, and you're good. I would, I probably wouldn't have been able to guess either of those. Yeah. But anyway, but I dunno, but yeah. But, but it's, it's not a lot of, I mean, and admittedly I'm looking at, I just quickly did a Google search and it's as of September 21, so I'm sure there are new models added in here as well. Yeah. Yeah. But like, that's just an example of 2023 forwards. 2023 Lincolns. So, interesting.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:49:56):
That makes a lot of sense though. I think a lot of times being at, again, big company, storming, forming, norming, all those big, big corporate stuff brand identity gets, gets is a thing that people talk about all the time. Regardless of what technical innovation you want, you always have to have a strong brand identity. So this makes a lot of sense. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Cuz material design, when it first came out, like one of the big complaints was that all apps tend to look samesies. And so just

Jason Howell (00:50:18):
Makes sense that they want a strong brand identity. Go

(00:50:22):
With it. I can remember that early, early material design days. It was like, oh, another app has material design and it looks just like that other app that has material design, everything. It looks so similar. It took it make people happy, huh? It still looked be, it looked better. Totally. Right. Andrew doesn't have design. Oh, well they have design, but, and then, oh, now it's unified. It's too unified now it's <laugh>. I still think it looks better than what, what was before. Oh, for sure. Hundred. Well, and it's evolved a lot. Yeah. Since then. I think at some point the brands were able to figure out how do we keep unique to our brand, but also still kind of follow these design notes. And that just took time. They got there eventually. But well in other Mishaal News <laugh> and something that we <laugh> something that we might actually hear about at, at Google I/O as well are maybe not necessarily this news, but I feel like every Google I/O is another opportunity for Google to say, Hey, here's a new mainline module and, and mainline for those who may have forgotten or haven't heard, it's basically it's components of Android that can be updated without the need for a Major OS update.

(00:51:26):
So they're, it's like they're pulled, those components are pulled out of that main system, they can be updated on or over the air. So it allows for devices to be kept more up to date in more different ways than it could prior to mainline. Because prior to mainline you had to have a full system update in order to get all of these, you know, critical vulnerabilities in some cases. But just these major updates or major parts of the kernel, you know, all these different things updated now because of mainline those p they're, they're they're components that can be updated individually. So I feel like at Google I/O we often hear about like, new modules that are revealed to be updated by mainline. And I'm in the, in the camp of more mainline because I, I just love that direction. I think it's really pow, like really strong improvement to Android mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and has been for a number of years now. What what is the news here as far as like what we might see at Google I/O, but probably not. It sounds like from what you were writing, probably not.

Mishaal Rahman (00:52:26):
Yeah. It's probably too late for this to end up in Android 14. But there's a comment in a recent code change that was submitted to the Android open source project that said basically exactly they're planning to turn the N FFC stack into a project mainline module. So that would take, you know, all the Android components that consist of the N FFC code and that would turn that into a updateable modular system component. So that would be consistent across devices and updateable through Google Play. Now the question is, you know, will this actually land in Android 15? And if so, would it actually become a mandatory component for OEMs? Because right now there are other project mainline modules that are actually optional for OEMs like Samsung, like one plus to implement. So the Bluetooth module is one example. The wifi module is also optional. The ultra wide band is also optional. Like, so we don't know

Jason Howell (00:53:24):
Optional, what, what does that actually benefit? I mean, I guess it benefits the oem, right?

Mishaal Rahman (00:53:29):
Yeah. It benefits the OEM because maybe, you know, maybe there's a lot of issues with something as complex as Bluetooth especially, right? You wanna make sure that functions really, really well and consistently there's no bugs, right? So if you force something like you know, Google's version of the Bluetooth module onto everyone, there might be issues and that might just cause a lot of

Jason Howell (00:53:48):
Things. Don't really know Yeah. What you're setting yourself up for Yeah. By doing that. Got it. Okay.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:53:55):
I, it was so funny cuz actually on the drive up here, I listened to a, not so recent, but fairly recent version of the Andrew Android Developer's Backstage, which is a podcast run by former guests in the show, Che Haas and Ramon gui. And they rush to talk about Project mainline. It gets really confusing at the end. And it's really funny to see two, like very prominent members of the Android team get confused. But if you are kind of like, kind of curious about mainline and also compared to Project Trouble, there's a really good like 10, 12, 50 minutes at the beginning where they talk about it. And the, the, the title of it is called Mainlining, which I found extremely funny <laugh>. But yeah, it's, it, if you're kind of curious about to get more technical in depth, more, more technical depth on that you should check that out. So yeah, inter develop was actually mainlining, but I just thought it was funny that I happened to read that and then I looked at the doc and I was like, oh, this is perfect.

Jason Howell (00:54:40):
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure we're gonna hear some news about some new mainline components. If you had to guess you're, you're the right one to guess. Oh yeah.

Mishaal Rahman (00:54:48):
We've already already talked about some of that are coming in 14. Like the the Health Connect

Jason Howell (00:54:53):
Is one of them. Yep.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:54:54):
You talked about Yeah,

Jason Howell (00:54:55):
Totally. Yep. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Mm-hmm.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:54:56):
<Affirmative> makes a lot of sense.

Jason Howell (00:54:57):
Cool. All right. More to come.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:55:00):
Okay. Well we haven't finished with Mishaal yet cuz Mishaal <laugh>

Jason Howell (00:55:03):
Mishaal, all we have is Mishaal. This whole, this whole block by this one story. You guys

Mishaal Rahman (00:55:07):
Said we can't do an entire show on pre Google I/O, so I just offered off whatever news, you know, and y'all took it so <laugh>,

Jason Howell (00:55:14):
Take it away, Mishaal. Well,

Huyen Tue Dao (00:55:15):
What, what I, I, so what I hate as a consumer, but I kind of, sort of maybe understand as a developer is that a lot of times certain apps will tend to lock into portrait mode. So generally the ideal is that if you have an app on your Android phone and you turn your phone to landscape, the app should also turn to landscape. You know what I'm saying? Like, that just, that's like, seems like perfect world. In a perfect world. That's kinda how it's to work. And, and ideally if, if I had to read whatever, like the official spiritual documentation for Android development was, that would be like commitment number two or something. But it doesn't usually happen like that. And I, I say that as like, we know it's ideal, but as I've said many times people tend to ROI things like, oh, responsive layout and actually handling rotation. It, it sucks, but it's a thing. And so a lot of apps tend to lock into portrait, which means that if for some reason you're holding your phone the wrong way, you, you might be trying to read sideways, but, but I was very excited to see that Mishaal, you figured out a way to maybe get past that and, and make, make things like work the way they're supposed to.

Mishaal Rahman (00:56:18):
Yeah. So this is actually an official like Google recommended implementation that's available since Android 12. So you know, Google recognizes that there are a lot of apps out there that still lock themselves to portrait mode and you know, it's their prerogative whether or not they want to actually support, you know, large screen devices like tablets and foldables. Yeah. Google's still not in the business of forcing developers to do that, you know, cause that would cause a lot of friction and a lot of work for developers to do. But they also recognize that, you know, tablets and foldables, they're becoming more and more popular. So this, this kind of like conflict between what developers want and the experience that users are getting right now. So instead of, you know, hoping, you know, saying Google is telling developers, please, please, please, please do this. They've been saying that for years, you know, please support large screen devices.

(00:57:04):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, so kind of nice meal ground they come up with is a way to override the app's request for the orientation that they're specifying. So for example, if an app says, I want to be in portrait mode all the time, the OEM can say, no, you're gonna be in landscape mode. But as a compromise that app won't just be stretched out, fill the entire screen of landscape mode. Cause that would make it really ugly. A lot of apps would just, that's bad. Look really bad. Yeah. So instead what they're doing is they're putting it in a letter box. Yeah. So the app would still be in its native aspect ratio, like a portrait, you know, candy bar orientation most of the time. But there'd be some background you know, filling up the left to right side and that's customized by the oem.

(00:57:44):
You know, you could put like the wallpaper there, you could blur the wallpaper. You can maybe have the, the app move to the left side or the right side depending on your device. You know, that's something that Google is added there and they're hoping develop OEMs take advantage of it. But so far it doesn't seem like any really have, although there are some OEMs like Samsung and Lenovo that offer their own takes on this kind of feature, you know, through their various lab features on Samsung devices, for example. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. But this official Google implementation, you know, sees about something they might be using on their devices, you know, who knows. And you know, it's, it's interesting to see that Google has this feature, but there are some devices, like there were, I I, I heard from some reviewers complaining about the OnePlus pad and the oppo find N two, you know, like whenever they unfold their find N two because it's a wide body foldable, whenever they unfold it, it's in landscape mode. So a lot of apps that are forced to portrait mode, they have to flip it again just to use apps like Venmo or Athe mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So by using this built-in command to override the apps orientation preference, they could restore that and have the app be displayed in a letter box. I like

Huyen Tue Dao (00:58:55):
That. And so yeah, that is a big problem. And I, and on the fold it does work that way. I do get letter boxing and, you know, kind of cool extra one UI features where, as you said, I can kind of shift. Like if I'm in bed and I've got my fold open really wide and I'm just feeling lazy, I can actually kind of shift the UI over to be wherever my thumb is. And it would be nice for that to be os and to be perfectly honest, as a developer, if the OS does that for me for free mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it's, it's just more like, it's just more like up until now, cause we haven't had like kind of compensation UI like that for, for our bad decisions. It, you know, you kind of just have to pick between we don't have time or design resources to, to implement this. And like, hopefully, you know, based on usage numbers, oh well, you know, 80% of our users only use our phone. Like in this situation, usually you kind of think it's okay. But I really don't think that, I, I can't imagine a lot of developers would have a problem with the os compensating and doing things like letter boxing and, and adding that on. It just seems like reinforcing our laziness. <Laugh> just

Jason Howell (00:59:53):
We're giving you the night off. Yeah. Giving us

Huyen Tue Dao (00:59:55):
Knife. Don't, but I, I love doesn't

Jason Howell (00:59:58):
How you, you frame it.

Huyen Tue Dao (00:59:59):
Yeah. Well we should do it anyway. But, you know, thank you Google for making up for us. And I do

Jason Howell (01:00:05):
Wanna, I do wanna be the voice of turning off auto rotate in the control panel and at least on the pixel side of things mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, right? Where it's like, I wanna stay, you know port portrait mode and so just don't do any rotation. So funny, my behavior, my, my default behavior there has shifted over the years hasn't really, there was a time where I hated, I I I would not lock a place. Yep. Cuz I wanted the wide screen. At a certain point I was like, yeah, but the wide screen home screen is really ugly and weird and, you know, well what I just can't, what I can't stand is the, is the, you know, in bed or on the couch or whatever, and then the dance with whatever, and you rotate it and then like two seconds later catches up with you and, and then you try to go back and then it flips back.

(01:00:48):
And then, so just turn it off. Just turn it off. Don't rotate. Keep it, keep it, you know, like I do think it's neat to add letter boxing and like, cuz you don't want that stretch out experience, but then like you're wasting screen space. You know what I mean? So like Yeah. But I mean, but I, I, these are like these deep, deep, deep deep UI adjustments that they need to work. But whenever you talk about o OEM specific tweaks, that goes back to what you were talking about with the background stuff, where it, it, it's another, another layer or another, you know, peel off of a reality that can happen that needs to be accounted for. So Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, just turn on our rotate off. Yeah. If that's all you gotta do, take it from Ron <laugh>. All right. We've got some app news coming up here in a moment.

(01:01:27):
But first I want to give you a little word about, well, us, not, not not you three tunnel. We've talked Enough about us. Yeah. Not about you three, but about us TWiT. Because we actually, so if you come into the studio, a as the three of you did on the wall, it says, we are dedicated to building a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts by offering them the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world. That is the TWiT mission statement right there. And we've had that up there since we moved to the East Side studio a number of years ago. And what's critical to that is the partnerships that we make with the brands that we trust. Cuz we vet all of the brands that we actually work with pretty deeply in order to bring sponsors onto the network.

(01:02:18):
Because we know that you as an audience member, you know, we're introducing you to these brands, to these companies and their products and everything like that. We know that you trust us. Did you know that half of our listeners are in management positions or above? 65% are involved in their company's decision making? So we've got some really high level people here listening to TWiT and watching our shows. Our audience raises the bar for us and our partners. And that really explains why our network continues to stay at the top for delivering the, the tech news that we do every single day. We do it here on sh on All About Android and all of our other shows and doing it reliably partnering with TWiT. If you work at a company that you know is interested in partnering with TWiT, that basically means you're gonna get the gold standard in podcast advertising.

(01:03:10):
You get a ton of services. You don't just get me or Leo or Micah or aunt or any of our network hosts reading an ad. That's certainly part of it, you know, part, getting out that brand message. You get full service continuity team. So we have a whole team that supports everything that we do on an ads basis here from copywriting to graphic design. It's the whole, the whole deal. We get embedded ads that are actually unique every single time. We always over-deliver on impressions, in fact. So that's pretty awesome. Onboarding services ad tech with pod sites, which is free for direct clients and detailed reporting. You get courtesy commercials. Those are actually shareable across social media and landing pages. So you, that's a little value add there. And you get other free goodies things like mentions in our weekly newsletter that are sent to, we have this thousands of fans subscribe to that bonus ads, social media promotion.

(01:04:08):
And basically we want long-term partners that want to grow with us. And we've had so many partners grow with us over the years. If you've been a fan of the, the TWiT network, you know, <laugh>, some of these partners. In fact, we've got a couple of testimonials here. Tim Broom, the founder of IT, pro tv, they've advertised on our network for 10 years now, still with us. I might add, and actually Tim said we would not be where we are today without the TWiT network. And that is true. Mark McCreary, the CEO of Authentic who's partnered with TWiT for 16 years, said the feedback from many advertisers over 16 years across a range of product categories is that if ads in podcasts are going to work for a brand, they're going to work on TWiTch shows. That just illustrates how effective what we do here is.

(01:04:57):
So this is really just a message to, you know, tell you if you have a business, you wanna elevate your brand you should reach out to us at least, at least hit off an email and we can talk to you about what we can do to work with you on this. It's advertise at TWiT tv and yeah, you can get to work with TWiT dot TV's Worldclass audience that's advertise at TWiT tv. We love what we do here. We love being the being, being in a position to tell people about the really incredible technology and advancements happening out there. We'd love to do that for you too. So advertise at twi, do TV and thank you for that. All right. And now we've got some app news. Let's jump in. All right. All righty. I can still hear that little jingle, even though we can't. I

Huyen Tue Dao (01:05:59):
Know. Me too. I'm a dance,

Jason Howell (01:06:01):
But I can hear I'm all the jingles in my head, so Yeah. Oh, Jeff Cosmic hope he's doing well. Yeah. Yeah. Justin, love rumor ran into Jeff at a show in Brooklyn ones. Yeah, that was fun. Jeff's right. Just a good dude. All right. Get the first one. If I hear anything more about check marks. My God.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:06:17):
Well, I'm sorry. I'm, I'm sorry, Ron. You're gonna hear, so, I mean, does anybody, did anybody have a blue check mark before the check mark apocalypse on the bird site? Nope. Nope. Okay. Nope. Never

Jason Howell (01:06:25):
Did.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:06:26):
Would you like to have one? I mean, because if you don't wanna go to the bird site and deal with all that nonsense. Yeah. Gmail is actually adding a blue check mark to signal verified sender. So this is building on a system that they implemented in 2021, which was for verified brand logos using the bi m i bime, the brand indicators from message indication standard. So now they're gonna add on top of that a kind of check to make sure that, you know, basically the person that is sending you an email from a particular domain is actually the o owner of that domain. So this is going to be based on strong on the authentication with domain based message authentication, reporting, and conformance. Conformance. Oh, wow. That's a dmar, we'll call it dmar because win can't actually say the whole, the whole conformance, conformance, conformance, conformance,

Jason Howell (01:07:18):
Conformance.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:07:18):
The conforming, not

Jason Howell (01:07:20):
Conformists,

Huyen Tue Dao (01:07:22):
Conformance,

Jason Howell (01:07:22):
Conformance, conformance,

Huyen Tue Dao (01:07:23):
Conformance. Yeah. That

Jason Howell (01:07:24):
Is kinda hard to say. Conformance,

Huyen Tue Dao (01:07:25):
Conformance and luu verification with a VMC issued by certificate authorities such as interest or did you start, so basically this is what we kind of all had hoped flu checks would be, and basically allowing you to distinguish when you're getting email from an actual verified center, rather than someone who is impersonating, you know, someone sending an email from a I do. It is meaningful.

Jason Howell (01:07:46):
I do find this really interesting, despite the blue check mark aspect of it, which, which is like, come on, just be a little more creative and come up with something else. But still I just recently went down like a major dmar rabbit hole with my own server because something happened and like the, the email setup and stuff like that, and we were getting folks sending from our domain for one of my companies mm-hmm. <Affirmative> was getting rejected and getting sent back because the DM a C profile wasn't clear. So if it was sending to somebody at a Gmail account, it was bouncing back and saying, Hey, we don't, we can't verify you are who you say you are. So we're gonna bounce back. So I had to go to, I had to figure out the d a and the dkm and like SPF and like all this, like deep it ma like I was in the, in the Google help things figuring it all out.

(01:08:29):
But like, once I got into it and figured it out, it's a bunch of stuff you put in on your dns on your mail server stuff you know, kind of that, that validate and there's a, a key that matches. I use Google Workspace and so there's a key that matches to it. So now someone getting an email from my domain knows it is truly coming from someone on my domain and having a visual Yeah. Kind of cue to that I think is a good thing to do. Just don't make it a blue check mark. That's all. So it's a very cool technology. Like d the whole D mark stuff is like, yeah, I got into it for a bit. I'm like, oh, this is really cool.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:08:59):
So yeah. Why, why is it a particular Blue seal with a check with a white check mark in the middle is how we've agreed. Why, why are we agreeing that that con performance

Jason Howell (01:09:07):
Conformance? Yeah, it's line conformance.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:09:11):
Yeah. So it started rolling out as of May 3rd, and we'll be available over the coming days and weeks. It's available to all Google Space customers as well as legacy G-Suite basic and business customers. And we'll be available to, you know, the rest of us with personal Google accounts. So why,

Jason Howell (01:09:26):
Why check mark? Why not have like a little hotdog guy with thumbs up? Like something like just some, like, just something to like that make Oh look cool. This is a legitimate nothing says or authentic business email. Like smiling hot dog guy. Yeah. Fun guy. Let's all go to the lobby. <Laugh>. but I don't know cousin who John chat says green bubble. Yeah. This maybe a green bubble, green bubble or green check mark or like safe, like a, a lock, some sort of like sit, like secure, you know, like something, I don't know, I

Huyen Tue Dao (01:09:53):
Make clashes ss ah, I

Jason Howell (01:09:55):
Has this, they're getting rid of that icon though. The

Huyen Tue Dao (01:09:57):
Oh, so can they take it like, with this? That won't be confusing. Yeah, that would

Jason Howell (01:10:01):
Be confusing. Although that would, that would be confusing. And that's why I'm actually surprised they didn't do that. That's

Huyen Tue Dao (01:10:06):
Exactly. So what

Jason Howell (01:10:06):
About like a, a posted stamp in a safe, or like something to like, this is like, like, I don't know, an envelope, because we all know what a check mark means. A check mark means good, or, you know what I mean? Or, okay. Well you're, you're doing the hot happy hotdog guy because I don't have a check mark as a thumb. Exactly. So I don't know. Well, I'm trying to do a check bark with my hand, but it's just not working.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:10:27):
We'll just do the the Asian heart, which is just like that. Oh, it's just that it's a heart. It's, it's the, it's like Korean and Korean cult. You do that. Oh, okay. The hearts instead of this.

Jason Howell (01:10:37):
It's not, anyway, the, yeah. Anyway. All right. Well, all right. Well we were talking earlier in the show about ai and if you're looking for some cool ai, this stuff to come to your Google world Google messages or Android messages will start, will soon get a new AI powered feature called Magic Compose <laugh>. And actually we're taking bets on what, what, what might appear tomorrow. Google I/O. This could show up in the presentation. We'll see. And basically this will give you a little assistance in writing your me your, your messages. And so like tone or style, so you can have a formal message versus informal to delightful, where you can get across excited you know, feeling excited. You can also use the music notes emoji for lyrical responses Yeah. For kind of musical stuff.

(01:11:22):
And each of these will take what you've written and offer suggestions on how they could be rewritten in those styles. So if I wanna tell Jason, you know, can't wait to be there tomorrow, and I say, oh, I want it to be more excited, it'll make the response that much more excited. Yeah. so, whoa, it seems like a lot of work for text messages. Yes, it does. So, okay. So one of these, I want them to get the message and then propose like, here's your response, yes or no, like, right. You know, like, write it for me in advance. Don't, don't j up what I've done. So nine to five, Google has the example. Yeah. It's a response to a, a a, a text thread where the response is, okay, I'll move the van. And they, they triggered the lyrical suggestion, which actually wrote like a poem. Nice. So it took, okay, I'll move the van to sure. I'll move the van. I'll do it right away. <Laugh>, I'll get it out of the way so you can have your space <laugh>. That's a really horrible poem, <laugh>. I'm just gonna say that's really not good poem. No <laugh>. But okay. That's a strange strange example I guess as well.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:12:28):
Could you imagine you're just in an a, in a urgent situation where you just need to communicate with someone. You accidentally hit the Z up to be like a Hai coup or something, and person, I don't understand what this guy saying, what is going on, <laugh>,

Jason Howell (01:12:40):
What is this person saying? But I do, I do think, ma I think the term magic composed could be used for like, you sent me a message. It's like, Hey, you got this message. Here's a response. Is this what you were gonna say? Like, anticipate what my response is gonna be, but Well, that, that was kind of the promise of smart reply, right? Yeah. Yeah. Except what we've realized in using smart reply is it's very like, specific to a few ca very canned Yeah. Things, yeah. It's not wi it doesn't have a wider context to it. Outside of communication amongst humans is very difficult for machines to understand. This is what, this is what we're learning. <Laugh>.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:13:12):
I actually have a very funny story with smart reply. I I was messaging my husband for something in the kitchen. I, I said, I sent him baby, can you help me? And apparently Smart reply only gave him the response. No. Like, that was the only

Jason Howell (01:13:25):
Smart,

Huyen Tue Dao (01:13:26):
That was it. I was like, and then he just sent me a screenshot of that and then eventually came up and helped me after he stopped laughing. <Laugh>, to your point, sometimes the machines don't understand context, but I, I do like this.

Jason Howell (01:13:36):
No, it's a pretty succinct answer. If you, if you just need to get the point across, like, I cannot, and I only have the word in the amount of time to hit that button, but that is true. And that's what, that's what will be the failing, or not the failing, but the challenge with all this AI stuff and Jet G P T and Bard and all this sort of stuff. And it goes back to the conversations I've had with social media vendors. So like applications that do sentiment tracking or sentiment announce social media. And the example I always give when I'm talking to these vendors, cause I'm trying to use 'em for work, is like, it's very helpful to get, to get a sense of, Hey, we put this out there, do people like it or don't like it? Right? And generally, everyone that I see you get like a third, like it a third don't like it.

(01:14:12):
And the middle undetermined, because the, because the algorithms don't understand the nuance of language. And especially in our kind of geek world, you get a lot of people saying, oh my God, this is the s Right? Yeah. I don't wanna say, I don't wanna say the curse on air, but like, this is the, the boom, right? And they will see the curse and assume it's negative, even though that line is a very positive sentiment that I want to be seen, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that's just an example of how much nuance in English language there is and why it's nearly impossible for AI to figure that stuff out. So

Huyen Tue Dao (01:14:40):
Yeah. And there's always gonna be a gap because it's learning based on, you know, data from us. So, you know, if, if human culture moves forward, it's still gonna take a while for that.

Jason Howell (01:14:48):
It's always playing catch

Huyen Tue Dao (01:14:48):
Up. Yeah. It's always playing catch up. So, yeah. Mm-Hmm.

Jason Howell (01:14:50):
<Affirmative> So fascinating stuff. Interesting. What could be one of many AI announcements happening tomorrow moment? Google I/O. Alright. Over to you Mishaal, because <laugh>, it's just a kind of a joke. Take it away, Mishaal. Some people are seeing ads in their play store. I checked my play store search. I did not see an ad. I have seen ads in my play store search. So you do a, so you open up a play store, you tap into your search field and it just showed you some ads. Yes. Like, like little ad like app ads basically right there. Oh, you are? I didn't even type anything and it's giving me a calm.

Mishaal Rahman (01:15:27):
Yeah, actually. So for the past couple of months, I think in November there was a test being spotted where you would have when you just open this open Google Play store, tap the search bar, you would see a suggestion for like a recommended app, even though you haven't really typed anything. So how is I recommending you something? I mean,

Jason Howell (01:15:43):
Ironic that my recommendation is calm. The meditation app, by the way, which mine is Shaza Mine apparently got

Huyen Tue Dao (01:15:48):
One mine's Moony App Moon phases and signs causing by

Jason Howell (01:15:51):
What is this saying about us? That's what I wanna know, <laugh>, I,

Mishaal Rahman (01:15:54):
But now more and more people have started to see the, you know, those suggestions in their search page. And also some of them, those, some of those suggestions are marked ad So, you know, we previously, you know, didn't used to see ads in the search page, but now some users starting to see, you know, ads actually appear in that page. So as you know, that's making us think, is Google starting to roll out more surfaces in the Play store to show ads on, you know, I wouldn't really be opposed to it because that's kind of, you know, it's their storefront. They can do what they want. Yeah. But you know, it's kinda interesting to see this kind of just pop up and then, you know, it got silently announced on the what's new in Google system updates page. So they actually had a little snippet where they said this was rolling out to users on the latest version of the Google Play Store. But you know, there hasn't been any like, formal blog posts. Hey, we're doing this, here's our developers and Optin or whatnot. It's just been a kind of a slow quiet rollout for now.

Jason Howell (01:16:51):
I mean, if that ad wasn't there and I didn't have a whole list of like, previously searched for items, it would be a blank page. So I guess it's another <laugh>, another screen to throw ads into. I mean, monetization. It really is a shot in the dark that I'm gonna open this up to search for something and Shazams gonna be there and I'm gonna go, oh, okay. Write Shaza. Lemme do. Oh, I did wanna meditate. Thank you for and calm. I, I forgot what I was gonna search for. I'm gonna install this Shaza app, you know, like, but hey, I, I, I can't blame Google for wanting to put an ad on a screen like that if it's, it's what they do. It's their, it's their mission statement. So yeah. <Laugh>. Yep. Alright. Thank you Mishaal for all of the news. And now we get to thank JR

Huyen Tue Dao (01:17:36):
We do because our very own JR Rayfield has a little tip for us. If you find that your notifications need to be a little more flashy, but you got first jr

JR Raphael (01:17:48):
Well, hello there. Happy io week to one and all while we're waiting for Google to give us the good stuff, I thought it'd be a fine time to think about an Android 14 edition that we're expecting to see take shape soon. And more important to think about how you can bring that very same superpower onto your own phone this minute, no matter what Android version it's running. The feature in question is a nifty new set of options around notifications spotted by our dear mutual pal Mishaal Ramen. The options are all about making notifications more useful by making sure you never miss the most important of 'em. To that end, they let you tell your phone to flash a custom colored l e d like light on your screen anytime a new alert arrives, or if you really wanna get fancy to have it flash your phones back facing camera light to catch your attention and or give you an impressively affordable way to create an on demand rave ether approach could absolutely be helpful in the right situation.

(01:18:54):
And here's the really cool part. You don't even need Android 14 to make any of that happen. In fact, you can create an even more advanced and customizable version of that exact same concept on any Android device this minute. If you know where to look, we'll start with the screen flashing cuz that part's really easy. The key there is a handy little app called a o d Notify. It's one of my favorite Android enhancing tools and something I rely on constantly on my own personal devices. You'll have to make sure you get the right version cuz a o d has different apps for different types of Android phones. But once you get the right one for your specific phone and get through the initial setup, you'll be able to have your screen light up in all sorts of different ways for different notifications. You can have incoming notifications from certain apps, create a ring of light around the camera cut out at the top of your screen, for instance.

(01:19:48):
Or you can have a small l e d style.show up in your screen's corner. You can even set up an unmissable full screen outline light in any color and style you like for certain especially important notifications. Plus, unlike Android fourteens equivalent, you can actually specify which specific apps will cause any of those effects to happen. So for instance, you could have the heavy duty flashing happen with something important like Slack or Gmail, but not with every other alert you get. And you can pick which color is used for your on-screen notification lights too, and even let a o d notify automatically pull the primary color associated with each app. So it's super easy to know at a glance what type of alert is involved. Next, if you really wanna make sure something important catches your eye. An app called missed call reminder is exactly what you need.

(01:20:42):
It lets you have your phone's camera flash light up for incoming notifications and not just those from missed calls either despite what his name implies, just like our first tool, this one has tons of options and customization potential that go way beyond what Google's got cooking in Android 14. So there you have it, a couple of great Android 14 like features to hold you over while we wait for all the new Google goodies to land. If you want even more awesome new stuff to make your life easier, make sure you're not missing out on my Android Intelligence newsletter. It brings you three new things to try every single Friday. And I'll send you a trio of special bonus tips as soon as you sign up too. Just head over to android intel net slash TWiT to get in on the action. That's android intel net slash TWiT. A very happy io week to everyone. It's gonna be an interesting one. I'll see you soon.

Jason Howell (01:21:40):
JR will miss seeing you there. I was just thinking for sure we were kind of, we were we Yes, we were listening because we love the apps we do. And we were also talking a little bit about your shirt, which was, which is always a hot topic. It is. But every time Jr. Every time he wears a shirt, it's amazing. And this for audio listeners, it was a Google I/O 2015, which was the last IO I attended, I believe. Yeah. Last at mascone Center before Shoreline 2016. Yep. And I'm pretty sure I hung out with JR at that show in 2015. You probably did too. You probably wore that shirt on purpose for that very reason. Yeah, I know. I know. And just so you know, this was the year where Google's cardboard, the foldable cardboard they've got work for fabs on that.

(01:22:27):
So I, you know, larger phones, I suppose. Google Maps got offline turn by turn navigation. Ooh, ooh. Big big year. That was a big one. Android m dos mode. I remember dos mode being pretty big news. I thought that was pretty cool back then. Yeah. Anyway, anyways, also during Jr's tipper came in and threw more glitter at us, despite me saying no, wish you could have seen it. Yeah. I thought it was interesting that he waited for when the show wasn't happening. Glitter. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah. Anyway <laugh> good times. All right, cool. Oh, oh, Google preparing to launch Android. Pay an API for seamless half pay transactions and then only to change the name. Yes. And then change the name a billion times and then change the name. Anyways, that was 2015 JR. Rayfield android intel.net. Android intelligence newsletter. Subscribe Jr.

(01:23:17):
We're gonna miss you at Google I/O. But thank you for doing what you do. Indeed. All right. We have a couple of items of feedback coming up next. All right. AAA at TWiTter TV 3, 4, 7. Show a a a Ron, you've got the first one. Yes. Our first email comes from Hilton Young from Virginia, good old Hilton who, who wants to see if they can get me to say, holy cow, appro, smiley emoji. There you go, Mr. Hilton. I'm not your monkey and I'm not here to perform for you. He would never say those four words. I would never say Holy cow. After a twice. Twice. There you go, <laugh>. Anyway, that's gonna follow me to my grave. So his actual email says, anyway, your discussion on Android tablets is interesting. My first tablet was the Nexus 10 that I got for free by winning a contest.

(01:24:03):
Oh, that's a good, cool. That's a good gift. I used it mostly in a case to watch TWiT podcasts. There you go. When it died, I considered buying an iPad, but they were so expensive and didn't do everything I wanted it to do. So eventually I got a Surface Pro. Best of both wor best of both worlds at the time. Not every video streaming service had apps. So it was a simple to, it was simple to just go to the webpage in the browser. Prior to that, I had an HP touch pad for years with Android on it. Best $50 tablet ever. Woo. Look forward to hearing how the one plus tablet and Pixel tablet are longtime fan from the Eileen Rivera days. Keep it up. Nice. thank you Hilton. I too am curious how the Pixel tablet is you didn't get the one plus tablet yet, did you?

(01:24:39):
No, I didn't. I mean, if I, if I had gotten it, you better believe it would've brought her the show for sure. Showing it to what would be really funny is it's like no. Yeah, it's, it's all from my desk. It's sitting in a box. I, oh, you guys wanna see that? Wait, I'm sorry. It's my back pocket <laugh> at the end of the show. That would be such a mic drop moment. That would be great. For a long time. Listeners and viewers of the show, you might remember that I used to measure how good a tablet was by whether it could fit in my back pocket, <laugh>. That's all. Total. The Nexus. Wow. The Nexus seven was, was perfect, was the only one only qualified. It was per, in fact, I believe I got up on camera and like put it in my back pocket.

(01:25:13):
You can't do that with a Pixel 10, but Yeah, no, I'm very curious to you. And, and, and that's the thing is that like tablets tend to be media, media device. I seems to be the most common usage of tablet. You know, like I, back in the day, I used to take my tablet to the gym to watch TV while I was on the elliptical or running or whatever. Right? Yeah, yeah. You know, and like, or I, I honestly, like last night I was on the plane to California and I brought my tablet to watch the latest episode of Succession, you know? Yeah. Like meanwhile, planes now have tablets embedded in the Yeah, yeah. Bigger screen tablet. Exactly. You know, movies to watch and everything, but but yeah, but we're curious too if the Pixel tablet can change the game or not. So very curious about that and, and kind of curious. Hopefully sometime soon, hopefully while I have the Pixel tablet, I will also have the one Plus and do a nice side by side comparison. Side by side comparison. I know I'm getting the, the one plus pad sometime in the next week. Yeah. So there's that. Will I get a Pixel tablet? Mm-Hmm. The next week? I don't know. Look under your chair tomorrow. See what's there.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:26:10):
I dunno. Popcorn

Jason Howell (01:26:11):
JJ also, was it jj who said this? I someone who well, hey, jj, first of all, someone in chat said that the 2015 IO was the last hardware giveaway. Yep. Year. Is that true?

Huyen Tue Dao (01:26:25):
Wait, what did we

Mishaal Rahman (01:26:25):
Get in there? I think you've, I think they've given away like pixel a's Pixel a phones.

Jason Howell (01:26:30):
Yeah. I feel like there has been some hardware since then. But tho but those were the days of hardware extravaganza giveaway. It was like, you, you went and you knew you were getting like a gift basket full of like things and Oh, no, no, no. That has really tapered off. So Yeah, I

Mishaal Rahman (01:26:46):
Think maybe that was the last year they gave everyone something, but I know in subsequent years they gave like all the press you went there like

Jason Howell (01:26:52):
Iphone, right? Yeah. Yeah, because I remember Line. Yeah. Really? 2012 was the, was the skydiving in? Yeah. Are you press right?

Huyen Tue Dao (01:27:00):
You're now I am. I sort of guess.

Jason Howell (01:27:03):
There you go. There you go.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:27:05):
I, I pitch wrong in my career. Y off, I've gone like the press route. I would've gotten more devices at io.

Jason Howell (01:27:10):
I honestly, yeah, I honestly, I thinker. I was just gonna say, I think as some of this pay scale goes, you've chose, you chose wisely, you'll fair, fair right the right path. Fair enough. <Laugh>. Oh, good thing Flo's not here. <Laugh>. All right, love you, Flo. All right. When you have the honors.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:27:29):
Yes. And it is now time for the email of the week in studio. And this email of the week, I can't hear anything comes from Tommy from Georgia. Hey team. Hope Google I/O went is going or will go well for y'all. <Laugh>.

Jason Howell (01:27:46):
Nice way to cover it. Hold on, Tommy. Well done.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:27:48):
Thanks Tommy. In episode 6, 3 8, there was a question about Screencasting from phone to tablet for use in a car. I wonder why using the phone as a mobile hotspot was not given as a possible solution slash option. The phone handles the data connection while a tablet runs the apps natively. I don't know how many apps that work on a phone. I don't know how many apps that work on a phone, but wouldn't, won't work on a tablet. Oh,

Jason Howell (01:28:12):
I don't know many apps that work up. Sorry.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:28:14):
Sorry. I, my, my brain just That's okay. I don't know. I don't know many apps that work on a phone but won't, won't, won't on a tablet. Sorry about that, Tommy. What, okay, also, did we know that when is Jacked tickets? Anyone? She should have a segment to get us techies into shape. Anyway, looking forward to some heavy Google I/O news later. Thank you Tommy from Georgia.

Jason Howell (01:28:36):
When is and indeed Jacked. I am, as you say. And I am, yeah. I'm kind ofs like I didn't think about that. That's probably the better solution, right? Sure. Like if you're still gonna have the hookup two devices to kind of sync with each other, use the phone for the data. Just do the simple, open up your, your hotspot to your tablet, have it already kind of synced so that when the hotspot fires on it connects and then launch the app on your tablet. And there's like no, like there's no beaming or casting or anything. Yeah. Well,

Mishaal Rahman (01:29:07):
Or you could go the hardcore route. Yes. Get a, I have a Galaxy tab S five that I installed Android Automotive onto, and then I also got the Android auto receiver app. So now in my car, I use Android, Android Auto for my phone on my tablet. <Laugh> so wirelessly too. So it's I don't have a car with a head unit and Android automotive head unit built in. But I have a tablet that runs Android, Android Automotive, and I use that.

Jason Howell (01:29:34):
I saw the images of those photos of car drivers in Korea would like with the, with all the tablets in the 15 screens on their, on their dash. Wow. So there's a couple of more options. Yeah. For the emailer, who was it? Who? I think it was last week, right? Yeah, it was gotta get the name in there. Steve. Steve Miring. Yes. Steve heard. Yes. So there you go, Steve. Yep. some tips from Tommy and Mishaal. All

Mishaal Rahman (01:30:03):
Right. Don't do what I did it. It's it's not worth it. Oh, it isn't, it's not complicated.

Jason Howell (01:30:07):
<Laugh>. I mean, it, I I was sold. I was like, well, I guess if you, you know, if you go take the time to, to set it all up, it might be worth it. But it was fun

Mishaal Rahman (01:30:14):
To learn, but it's definitely not worth it over just buying like one of those suction cup Android auto things of people off Amazon

Jason Howell (01:30:21):
<Laugh>. That's funny. I

Huyen Tue Dao (01:30:24):
Mean, I, so I did, so Tommy, I did wear for you video of yours can see I'm actually wearing a kettlebell t-shirt because I did see Tommy's email and I said, I appreciate that very much. So yes, I have my Android sweatshirt and my kettlebell shirt. So these are my, these are the two halves of my lives, like working out and Android

Jason Howell (01:30:38):
Ear earlier when, when got here an and Wyn were like sizing each other up. They were like, all right, come back.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:30:46):
No, aunt,

Jason Howell (01:30:46):
Aunt, I felt very super fit aunt's super,

Huyen Tue Dao (01:30:49):
Super fit. So, but yeah, and is like my, like we're like workout co co co-chair leaders or Yeah, co cheerleader on Instagram. So,

Jason Howell (01:30:58):
Yeah. That's awesome. Meanwhile, I'll have another bowl of pasta, please. <Laugh>. Thank

Huyen Tue Dao (01:31:02):
You. Pasta is the important part. You gotta fuel up recovering.

Jason Howell (01:31:05):
Totally. Carlow. You got a carload before I The

Huyen Tue Dao (01:31:08):
Runner though. I can't run.

Jason Howell (01:31:09):
I don't run. Well, I just, cause I run doesn't mean I can't run at all. Read your legs and you go places. Yes. I, I've run, I've run, I've run multiple half marathons, so like, I've done that. That's

Huyen Tue Dao (01:31:19):
Pretty. So, you know,

Jason Howell (01:31:21):
I've never done that. Yeah, you've got that on us, Ron. Totally.

Mishaal Rahman (01:31:24):
I'm just reading through all the title recommendations. And Chads, some of 'em are pretty good. Yeah, pretty

Jason Howell (01:31:27):
Pretty. I think <laugh>, I'm actually not logged into chat. Dang it. I couldn't get logged in today, so I'm gonna have to have chat, like re re re-list them for us. After the show is done, I promise you we'll come up with a good title. You already know the title cuz you're watching and listening to the show and you saw it in your podcast. Download it. Yeah. See, see you're one step ahead of, of me. Close out, close out, close out the the, the email. Yeah.

Huyen Tue Dao (01:31:52):
So Tommy for, you know, wishing us a good past present in future io for giving us a solution last week's you know, tablet via, via phone casting solution. And for also just being very kind and calling out my ness. That does not sound right. That is why Tommy on this very, very extra special Google I/O week with all of us in studio. That is why you are the email of Google.

Jason Howell (01:32:20):
Excellent. And with that ladies gentlemen's and germs, we did it. We are done. Google I/O is in previewed. <Laugh>. Yeah, <laugh> Google I/O has been briefly previewed and many other news items that may or may not have something to do with Google I/O have also been talked about, emails have been answered and confetti has been spread around. What a fun time we've had. <Laugh>. Happy birthday. Thank you. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday to flow. Wish, wish the flow could be here so we can wish her a happy birthday in person, but we will all see her tomorrow. Yep. And the birthday celebration doesn't stop after one day. That's what we've learned. Yes. No birthday week when your birthday is on the same week as Google I/O. I'm really looking forward to them, to wishing us both a happy birthday from the keynote. Like Sundar's gonna get there before we get started, we had a couple birthdays in the audience. Yeah. You think we don't watch who hears Heard of all about Edward.

(01:33:18):
I'm not overstating it by the way. <Laugh> the audience would go crazy, right? Yeah, right. Yeah. It'll be great. Better. Totally right. Okay. Anyways alright, so we are very excited for Google I/O. We have more to come obviously next week we will be doing a kind of a post show wrap up actually as we have done as a tradition for a very, very long time. Michael Wolfson will be joining us to do the post io. Often he's been on pre io, but that's because he would be going to io. He says this is the first io he's missed, he's missing in many years. And he said he's okay with it. He's <laugh>, he's accepted it. So he's gonna join us for the post show wrap up. And then again, reminder that we're, we're gonna be interviewing Dave Burke and Samir Samat from the Android team at Google I/O tomorrow.

(01:34:08):
But you will not get that in this All About Android feed. You will get it in our TWiT news feed. So go to TWiT tv slash news, that is our kind of like our breaking news channel, news, interviews, that sort of stuff. Subscribe there or just go there, I guess tomorrow evening or Thursday morning. And you'll see our interview with them. And we've got more to come, we've got more Googlers that are gonna join in a couple of weeks for more more kind of context around a lot of the news that you're gonna hear about tomorrow. So Mishaal, thank you for being here. What do you wanna leave people with? Where should people go to follow all the crazy news that you're breaking? You feel like every single day you break a bunch of things, so dishes. Yeah. So if you're, if you're gonna follows Google I/O news, I'll be all over it on TWiTter at Mishaal Ramon.

Mishaal Rahman (01:34:57):
You know, if you're listening to this before io obviously, or if you're listening to this after io, you can still stop by my TWiTter feed where I'll be covering everything I can live from the show. Just like Ron, Jason and Wyn.

Jason Howell (01:35:11):
Yeah. Do it our best. Thank you. Mishaal. what about you? Eh, who else

Huyen Tue Dao (01:35:16):
With yeah, I usually am an Android dev. You can find most of my technical content usually on randomly typing.com. You can find me on the interwebs at Queen CodeMonkey if you're interested in like the fitness stuff mentioned. I post a lot of stuff on Instagram dot com slash Queen CodeMonkey where I get coach ba Madoo, AJ Docs Fitness in New Jersey. Hello. Okay. And yeah, just, just find me there and so happy to be in studio.

Jason Howell (01:35:43):
I know, it's awesome. Awesome, awesome. Yeah, it's a lot fun. It's, it's a whole different dynamic when we're in studio. It its a lot of fun. It's, it's also weird to see like, cuz I know it's weird. It's like you're there. Yeah, I remember. Yeah, exactly. You're, you're

Huyen Tue Dao (01:35:55):
Here so I should like

Jason Howell (01:35:56):
Look at you <laugh>. I know, right? So you could follow me on TWiTter and on Instagram. I'm still at Ron xo. I'm not breaking anything. I'm like Mishaal. So everything is still in one P dish on my TWiTter. But no, I'm actually been super busy and, and chasing toddlers, so I don't post as much, but I'll be posting from Google I/O so go check out, see what I thought of it tomorrow. So, excellent. Thank you, Ron. Happy birthday. Nice happy birthday to Victor behind the board here in a couple days. Anyways, it's a man. Thank you <laugh>. And not a happy birthday to be, cuz I don't know when his birthday is, but it's definitely not his. Even if it was his birthday, he wouldn't get a happy birthday from me. You're absolutely right. But thank you Burke.

(01:36:36):
Nonetheless <laugh> thanks to everyone. We, we had this room filled with folks here from TWiT, you know, helping set of cameras slowly. Anthony Ty, I mean the who, who else am I met? Lisa was in here for a while. It was quite the spec spectacle. It was quite the spectacle. And I'm sure there will be photos posted to our website as a result of it. So thanks for everybody for making us feel super special. JR Ray, feel Android intel.net/TWiT, definitely check that out. Me just, I, I guess like I'm thinking about like, how am I going to, like, I don't tweet much anymore. I don't really, but you do the disc. Maybe I'll tomorrow, discord tomorrow. Yeah. Or maybe I, yeah, live blog in the Discord. There you go. Go. You can get in the Discord. Bye bye.

(01:37:20):
Yeah, that's right. Okay. I like where you're headed here, Ron. The king of segment. Okay. tweet.tv/club TWiT when you go there, yes, you get access to all of our shows, no ads. Yes, you get access to bonus content that we don't release to people outside of the club. Things like pre and post show banter hands-on windows, hands-on Mac what is it? Home Theater Geeks and other, or Untitled Linux show. Lots of things. But what you really want is the members only Discord. Because if you do that, then tomorrow while we're at Google I/O, I'm gonna be in the All About Android channel. I'm gonna be live, live Discording, what is that called? Live Discord, live posting, live blogging, live, live blogging and discord. I think that's a fantastic idea. So anyways that's what I'll be doing from there. And TWiT tv slash club TWiT join $7 a month.

(01:38:10):
We would love to have you. It helps keep the lights on. After all, thank you so much for watching and listening and putting up with us and our crazy antics as we are all in studio for one, one, possibly one time ever. All four of us in this studio together TWiTter tv slash a AA is where you can go to subscribe to this show, everything you need to know. And I guarantee you that header image is gonna be changed out after today. So, you know, check back and see what it turns into, but subscribe and you'll get all of our episodes. And we thank you for watching and listening. We'll see you next time on All About Android. Bye buddy. [inaudible]

Speaker 5 (01:38:50):
Oh,

Jason Howell (01:38:51):
Hooray. Okay.

Speaker 5 (01:38:53):
Hey there. Scott Wilkinson here In case you hadn't heard, home Theater Geeks is Back. Each week I bring you the latest audio, video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system product reviews and more you can enjoy Home Theater Geeks only if you're a member of Club Twi, which costs seven bucks a month. Or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only 2 99 a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of home Theater Geek two.