GoKawiil
Tech News
Android Authority found strings in a Google Messages beta build referencing a new 'Games' section with titles like Chess, Pool, Basketball, Darts, Crazy 8s, Checkers, Cup Pong, Four in a Row, and Word Scramble. The feature's internal codename is 'Midnight,' and the discovery stemmed from a tip by Abhishek Yadav on X. Details on how gameplay would actually function remain unknown.
Google is widening the rollout of a redesigned Google Wallet card selector that replaces the horizontal card carousel with a vertically stacked list of saved debit and credit cards. The new layout opens as a separate screen, leaving transit cards, loyalty cards, and passes accessible from the main Wallet screen as before. Android Authority says the interface, previously seen only by a small number of users, has now appeared on Pixel phones used by its own team.
Code strings found in the latest Pixel Watch app update (version 5.1.0.990450614) indicate Google is deprecating Safety Signal, a Health Premium feature that provides cellular connectivity to the Pixel Watch 2 and Pixel Watch 3 LTE when paired phones are out of range or the watch lacks its own carrier plan. The service currently supports emergency contact calls, Safety Check, Emergency Sharing, Emergency SOS and Fall Detection in the US, Canada, the UK and Germany. Google has not announced a shutdown date or a replacement.
A post on Hacker News poses a hypothetical in which a US government nationalizes Alphabet via constitutional amendment to restore Google Search to its 2010-era quality and strip out all LLM features. The author asks commenters what they would be willing to accept or trade for a search engine that works again, after what they describe as years of commercial degradation of the product.
MapQuest has launched beta support for Android Auto, extending its mapping app to in-car displays on the platform. The move follows a surge in MapQuest's popularity after it kept the name 'Lake Ontario' unchanged while Apple and Google altered references under pressure from President Trump, with MapQuest saying usage rose 50-fold and downloads topped 1.5 million.
Google introduced EmbeddingGemma 2, a 740M-parameter embedding model that maps text, code, images, video, and audio into a single unified embedding space. It supports flexible output dimensions from 768 to 128 via Matryoshka Representation Learning, offers an 8K context window—four times larger than the text-only EmbeddingGemma—and is released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Google has issued its October 2026 Pixel update, with separate builds for the Pixel 6 and 7 series plus Fold and Tablet, the new Pixel 11 line, and Pixel 8-10 devices. The update fixes audio distortion during VoIP calls on Pixel 8-10, a virtual keyboard bug on Pixel 8-11, and incorrect photo/video orientation on Pixel 11. No fixes were specifically listed for Pixel 6 or 7 hardware.
Google announced Nano Banana 2.1, an update to its image generation model that follows Nano Banana 2.0's February release of 4K output support. The company says the new version improves visual design, mask-based editing, and subject consistency, with fixes for tiling artifacts, better text rendering, multi-image fusion of up to 14 reference images, search grounding, and adjustable thinking levels.
Code strings found in a new Google Messages beta build indicate the app will remove the ability to turn off RCS for individual conversations, forcing users back to SMS/MMS only on a conversation-by-conversation basis. The strings show an in-app banner warning that the 'Only send SMS & MMS messages' setting is going away, offering users the choice to switch to RCS now or have it switched automatically.
Google disclosed that attackers hijacked DNS infrastructure of three country-code top-level domains — .gh, .sl, and .as — and used that control to obtain unauthorized TLS certificates for several Google domains and other major brands. Google says it has updated Chrome to block the identified fraudulent certificates and worked with other certificate authorities to do the same across browsers.
Google's comparison highlights that Photos automatically backs up images to the cloud via a toggle in account settings, while Gallery requires manual backup. New Google accounts created after March 9, 2026 will get only 5GB of free storage by default, down from the current 15GB, though verifying a phone number unlocks an extra 10GB. Storage is shared across Gmail, Drive, WhatsApp and Photos, and additional space can be purchased through Google One starting at $2 per month for 100GB.
A teardown of Android System Intelligence version C.8.playstore.pixel11.993387747 by Android Authority uncovered a string change suggesting Google may add location data as a new factor in Pixel Launcher app suggestions. Currently, the feature's settings page states suggestions are based on recently used apps, most-used apps, and routines, with no mention of location.