What secrets does the inside of the Pixel Watch hold? iFixit -- Google's new repair partner -- tore down Google's first self-branded smartwatch to see exactly how this thing was put together. From a report: Like us, iFixit came away with strong "first generation" vibes. The good news is that it does not look impossible to replace the display. The usual bit of heat and prying pops the top off, but the less-than-ideal layout means you'll have to remove the battery, too, since the connector is buried under the soft battery pouch. A display replacement is a real concern here, considering the entire top half of the watch is glass. If you bang the watch against something or drop it, there's a good chance you'll shatter the all-glass corners. [...] iFixit took a good amount of time in the four-minute video to call Google's internal construction "ugly." After cracking open the front, iFixit's Sam Goldheart noted, "Right away, it's obvious we're in Android country. The silver battery pouch and Kapton tape are almost a shock after all our Apple teardowns," later adding that the welds holding together the haptic feedback buzzer were "kind of ugly."

A new report from The Information details more changes Google CEO Sundar Pichai's budget cuts are having across the company, with some divisions surviving and others getting ominous resource cuts. From a report: First, we have news that the hardware division, other than losing laptops, seems mostly safe. Google's biggest Android partner, Samsung, is in decline in many established markets, and Apple is hitting an all-time high in US market share last quarter. The report says Google views Apple as more of a problem than it has in the past, thanks to worries that regulators might shut down the usual multi-billion-dollar Google/Apple agreement to put Google Search on iPhones. If iPhones stop showing Google ads, the rise of Apple and fall of Samsung is one of the few things that could actually be a major problem for Google's revenue.

According to the report, Google views itself as the solution to this problem. As a hedge against what the report calls the "further decline" of Samsung, Google is "doubling down" on its investment in Pixel hardware. Google is apparently doing this by "moving product development and software engineering staff working on features for non-Google hardware to work on Google-branded devices." The goal here is to not spend more money, so Google is apparently sacrificing partner devices to focus on the Pixel division. So what projects are seeing cuts? Google TV is one, with the report saying: "Executives also have discussed moving some product managers working on Google TV software for television sets" to Wear OS and the Pixel Tablet. This is the only OS called out as specifically receiving less OS development. A lot of this report seems to focus on cuts to Google Assistant's support for specific form factors, which is strange since Google Assistant is more or less the same on every platform. The whole point of the Assistant is one reliable, predictable voice assistant that lives everywhere, and it's not clear what platform-specific support needs to be done other than whipping up an app that can receive audio and read back results.

Mark Zuckerberg, writing in a Facebook post: WhatsApp is far more private and secure than iMessage, with end-to-end encryption that works across both iPhones and Android, including group chats. With WhatsApp you can also set all new chats to disappear with the tap of a button. And last year we introduced end-to-end encrypted backups too. All of which iMessage still doesn't have.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: As it turns out, the Google Pixel 7 series appears to be the first set of Android smartphones that only support 64-bit applications. [Android expert Mishaal Rahman first reported the news.] Rahman later corrected himself to say that it's a 64-bit Zygote but a 32-bit and 64-bit userspace, not a 64-bit only build of Android 13 as initially reported. This certainly lends credence to the claim that the Google Pixel tablet may come with a 64-bit only build of Android 13, though.

What this means is that for any apps that don't have 64-bit libraries, you won't be able to install them. This includes older versions of apps such as Jetpack Joyride and even older, completely defunct apps like Flappy Bird. It's not as if Tensor G2 doesn't support it either -- its three different cores all support AArch32 execution. Google could have enabled 32-bit support as they have done in its previous smartphones. Listing the Android Binary Interfaces (ABI) returns that there is nothing present for "armeabi-v7a" or "armeabi". "arm64-v8a" support is listed, but as per the Android documentation, it only supports the AArch64 instruction set.

What does this mean, and does it have any benefits? Most benefits won't really be visible to consumers, as these improvements are primarily found in heightened security, better performance, and reduced processing cost thanks to the lack of additional ABIs. All apps on the Google Play Store have had to have 64-bit support since August 2019, and the company stopped serving 32-bit apps that don't have any 64-bit support last year.

schwit1 shares a blog post from Signal, the popular instant messaging app: In the interest of privacy, security, and clarity we're beginning to phase out SMS support from the Android app. You'll have several months to export your messages and either find a new app for SMS or tell your friends to download Signal.

[...] To give some context, when we started supporting SMS, Signal didn't exist yet. Our Android app was called TextSecure and the Signal encryption protocol was called Axolotl. Almost a decade has passed since then, and a lot has changed. In this time we changed our name, built iOS and desktop apps, and grew from a small project to the most widely used private messaging service on the planet. And we continued supporting the sending and receiving of plaintext SMS messages via the Signal interface on Android. We did this because we knew that Signal would be easier for people to use if it could serve as a homebase for most of the messages they were sending or receiving, without having to convince the people they wanted to talk to to switch to Signal first. But this came with a tradeoff: it meant that some messages sent and received via the Signal interface on Android were not protected by Signal's strong privacy guarantees.

We have now reached the point where SMS support no longer makes sense. For those of you interested, we walk through our reasoning in more detail below. In order to enable a more streamlined Signal experience, we are starting to phase out SMS support from the Android app. You will have several months to transition away from SMS in Signal, to export your SMS messages to another app, and to let the people you talk to know that they might want to switch to Signal, or find another channel if not.

Google has approved Donald Trump's Truth Social app for release in its Play Store, opening up a key distribution channel for the social network ahead of US midterm elections. Bloomberg reports: Google had previously declined to distribute the app, saying it needed to address the fact that it hosted violent threats and other content that goes against Google's standards. Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., confirmed on Wednesday that Truth Social was now available. Truth Social has agreed to take down content that violates Google's policies, Google said.

Devin Nunes, chief executive officer of Trump Media & Technology Group, said in a statement that the development represented "a significant milestone in our mission to restore free speech online." "It's been a pleasure to work with Google, and we're glad they helped us to finally bring Truth Social to all Americans, regardless of what device they use," Nunes said.

Mullvad VPN has discovered that Android leaks traffic every time the device connects to a WiFi network, even if the "Block connections without VPN," or "Always-on VPN," features is enabled. BleepingComputer reports: The data being leaked outside VPN tunnels includes source IP addresses, DNS lookups, HTTPS traffic, and likely also NTP traffic. This behavior is built into the Android operating system and is a design choice. However, Android users likely didn't know this until now due to the inaccurate description of the "VPN Lockdown" features in Android's documentation. Mullvad discovered the issue during a security audit that hasn't been published yet, issuing a warning yesterday to raise awareness on the matter and apply additional pressure on Google.

Android offers a setting under "Network & Internet" to block network connections unless you're using a VPN. This feature is designed to prevent accidental leaks of the user's actual IP address if the VPN connection is interrupted or drops suddenly. Unfortunately, this feature is undercut by the need to accommodate special cases like identifying captive portals (like hotel WiFi) that must be checked before the user can log in or when using split-tunnel features. This is why Android is configured to leak some data upon connecting to a new WiFi network, regardless of whether you enabled the "Block connections without VPN" setting.

Mullvad reported the issue to Google, requesting the addition of an option to disable connectivity checks. "This is a feature request for adding the option to disable connectivity checks while "Block connections without VPN" (from now on lockdown) is enabled for a VPN app," explains Mullvad in a feature request on Google's Issue Tracker. "This option should be added as the current VPN lockdown behavior is to leaks connectivity check traffic (see this issue for incorrect documentation) which is not expected and might impact user privacy." In response to Mullvad's request, a Google engineer said this is the intended functionality and that it would not be fixed for the following reasons:

- Many VPNs actually rely on the results of these connectivity checks to function,
- The checks are neither the only nor the riskiest exemptions from VPN connections,
- The privacy impact is minimal, if not insignificant, because the leaked information is already available from the L2 connection.

Mullvad countered these points and the case remains open.

Android Developers Blog: Passkeys are a significantly safer replacement for passwords and other phishable authentication factors. They cannot be reused, don't leak in server breaches, and protect users from phishing attacks. Passkeys are built on industry standards and work across different operating systems and browser ecosystems, and can be used for both websites and apps. Passkeys follow already familiar UX patterns, and build on the existing experience of password autofill. For end-users, using one is similar to using a saved password today, where they simply confirm with their existing device screen lock such as their fingerprint. Passkeys on users' phones and computers are backed up and synced through the cloud to prevent lockouts in the case of device loss. Additionally, users can use passkeys stored on their phone to sign in to apps and websites on other nearby devices.

Today's announcement is a major milestone in our work with passkeys, and enables two key capabilities: Users can create and use passkeys on Android devices, which are securely synced through the Google Password Manager. Developers can build passkey support on their sites for end-users using Chrome via the WebAuthn API, on Android and other supported platforms. To try this today, developers can enroll in the Google Play Services beta and use Chrome Canary. Both features will be generally available on stable channels later this year. Our next milestone in 2022 will be an API for native Android apps. Passkeys created through the web API will work seamlessly with apps affiliated with the same domain, and vice versa. The native API will give apps a unified way to let the user pick either a passkey or a saved password. Seamless, familiar UX for both passwords and passkeys helps users and developers gradually transition to passkeys.

For the end-user, creating a passkey requires just two steps: (1) confirm the passkey account information, and (2) present their fingerprint, face, or screen lock when prompted. Signing in is just as simple: (1) The user selects the account they want to sign in to, and (2) presents their fingerprint, face, or screen lock when prompted. A passkey on a phone can also be used to sign in on a nearby device. For example, an Android user can now sign in to a passkey-enabled website using Safari on a Mac. Similarly, passkey support in Chrome means that a Chrome user, for example on Windows, can do the same using a passkey stored on their iOS device. Since passkeys are built on industry standards, this works across different platforms and browsers - including Windows, macOS and iOS, and ChromeOS, with a uniform user experience.

Epic Games and Match Group are looking to fortify their antitrust lawsuits against Google by adding new counts to their initial complaint, filed last year, which illustrate the lengths Google supposedly went to in order to dominate the Android app market. From a report: The companies on Friday filed a motion to amend their complaints in their cases against Google, which now allege that Google paid off business rivals not to start other app stores that would put them in competition with Google Play. This would be a direct violation of U.S. antitrust law known as the Sherman Act, the amended complaint states. [...] Now, Epic Games and Match Group are looking to add to their complaint with two new allegations specifying how Google had either paid or otherwise induced its potential competitors to agree to not distribute apps on Android in competition with the Play Store, including through their own competing app stores. Google, it says, had identified developers who were "most at risk...of attrition from Play" and then approached them with an offer of an agreement. The complaint now deems this a "per se" violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits "every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations," it says.

Samsung has confirmed the first third-party smart TV makers to ship with its Tizen operating system (OS), with several manufacturers preparing to launch Tizen-powered TVs this year across Europe and Australasia. From a report: Tizen, for the uninitiated, is a Linux-based OS hosted by the Linux Foundation for more than a decade, though Samsung has been the primary developer and driving force behind the project, using it across myriad devices, including smartwatches, kitchen appliances, cameras, smartphones and TVs.

Although Samsung has essentially abandoned Tizen in smartphones and smart watches, TVs have remained fertile ground for Tizen to flourish, chiefly due to the fact that Samsung is the biggest selling TV maker globally. But while recent figures from Dataxis show that Tizen's market share in 2020 was roughly one-third in terms of installation base, the number has been slowly creeping downward with the likes of Android TV and Roku edging upward.

Meta is warning Facebook users about hundreds of apps on Apple and Google's app stores that were specifically designed to steal login credentials to the social network app. From a report: The company says it's identified over 400 malicious apps disguised as games, photo editors, and other utilities and that it's notifying users who "may have unknowingly self-compromised their accounts by downloading these apps and sharing their credentials." According to Bloomberg, a million users were potentially affected. In its post, Meta says that the apps tricked people into downloading them with fake reviews and promises of useful functionality (both common tactics for other scam apps that are trying to take your money rather than your login info). But upon opening some of the apps, users were prompted to log in with Facebook before they could actually do anything -- if they did, the developers were able to steal their credentials.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is clawing its way back into wearable relevance. Today the company took the wraps off what is officially its first self-branded smartwatch: the Pixel Watch. Google started revamping its wearable platform, Wear OS, in partnership with Samsung. While Wear OS 3, the new version of Google's wearable platform, technically launched with the Galaxy Watch 4 last year, this is the first time we'll be seeing an unskinned version on a real device. First up: prices. Google is asking a lot here, with the Wi-Fi model going for $349 and the LTE version clocking in at $399. The Galaxy Watch 4, which has a better SoC, and the Apple Watch SE, which has a way, way better SoC, both start at $250. Google is creating an uphill battle for itself with this pricing.

Google and Samsung's partnership means the Pixel Watch is running a Samsung Exynos 9110 SoC, with a cheap Cortex M33 co-processor tacked on for low-power watch face updates and 24/7 stat tracking. This SoC is a 10 nm chip with two Cortex A53 cores and an Arm Mali T720 MP1 GPU. If you can't tell from those specs, this is a chip from 2018 that was first used in the original Samsung Galaxy Watch. For whatever reason, Google couldn't get Samsung's new chip from the Galaxy Watch 4, an Exynos W920 (a big upgrade at 5 nm, dual Cortex A55s, and a Mali-G68 MP2 GPU). It's hard to understand why this is so expensive.

The display is a fully circular 1.6-inch OLED with a density of 320 ppi (that should mean around 360 pixels across). The only size available is 41 mm, the cover is Gorilla Glass 5, and the body is stainless steel in silver, black, or gold. It has 2GB of RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage, NFC, GPS, only 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 802.11n support (Wi-Fi 4), and a 294 mAh battery. For sensors, you get SPO2 blood oxygen, heart rate, and an ECG sensor. It's water-resistant to 5 ATM, which means you're good for submersion, hand washing, and most normal water exposure. Usually 10 ATM is preferred for serious sports swimming, but the Apple Watch is 5 ATM, and Apple does all sorts of swimming promos. Google's black UI background does a good job of hiding exactly how large the display is in relation to the body, but a few screenshots reveal just how big the bezels are around this thing. They are big. Real big. Like, hard-to-imagine-we're-still-doing-this-in-2022 big. Other things to note: the watch bands are proprietary, it'll be able to charge to 50 percent in 30 minutes, will work with any Android phone running version 8.0 and newer, and features Fitbit integration.

"Unlike the Pixel 7, which is expanding to 17 markets, the Pixel Watch is only for sale in eight countries: the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan," adds Ars. "The watch is up for preorder today and ships October 13."

Further reading: Google Unveils Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro Smartphones

Alphabet's Google on Thursday said its new Pixel phones will deliver improved voice and camera features while bringing back facial recognition for unlocking the device as it seeks to better compete with Apple and Samsung Electronics. From a report: The company's Pixel 7 and 7 Pro devices offer more affordable prices than the dominant duo of the mobile market, coming in at $599 and $899, respectively, and introduce the second generation of Google's in-house Tensor chip. The 6.7-inch Pro version has an additional zoom camera, better display and more memory than the 6.3-inch Pixel 7.

Google's Pixel phones every year serve as the showcase for the company's latest Android software and artificial intelligence-based services, such as the Google Assistant. They demonstrate how Google hopes device-making partners will best use its operating system. Google continues developing its own hardware, which has only ever sold in small numbers, in part as insurance against missteps by Samsung, the only credible Apple rival in the US. Google AI shows up in the upgraded language-processing capabilities of its latest software. The Recorder app for voice memos can now automatically label different speakers in transcriptions, and transcriptions are also being added to audio messages in the new Pixels' messaging app.

Apple's App Store net revenue fell about 5% in September, according to Morgan Stanley, the steepest drop for the business since the bank started modeling the data in 2015. From a report: The App Store saw declines in markets including the U.S., Canada and Japan, Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring wrote in a report Monday. His analysis was based on data from Sensor Tower, a firm that tracks app downloads and sales. Morgan Stanley said the main culprit for the drop was gaming revenue, which was down 14% in September, according to the data.

Apple customers may be spending less due to economic concerns, Woodring wrote. Across much of the globe, consumers are facing soaring inflation and recessionary risks. "We believe the recent App Store results make clear that the global consumer has somewhat de-emphasized App Store spending in the near-term as discretionary income is reallocated to areas of pent-up demand," Woodring wrote in the note. Morgan Stanley analysts also expect to see a drop in sales on Google Play, the primary Android app store. They estimate revenue there fell 9% in September.

The Pixel 4 is officially hitting its end of life this month after three short years of service. We sometimes see these dead Google phones get one more wrap-up update before Google cuts the cord, but the Android October 2022 update is the end of the line here. From a report: The Pixel 4 was a big batch of Google experiments passed off as a consumer product, and we did not take kindly to it. It was the first (and only) Google phone to attempt to copy Apple's FaceID by using a grid of IR dots and extra hardware to scan the user's face. The system was much slower than the fingerprint reader on the Pixel 3, and it oddly worked on sleeping people for several months after launch.

The Pixel 4 was the first and only Google phone to integrate "Project Soli," a tiny Google radar chip that can detect motion. The laboratory versions of Soli promised that the technology could capture "sub millimeter motions of your fingers," but the commercial implementation in the Pixel 4 could only (sometimes) capture giant arm movements. Soli lives on in Google smart displays for sleep tracking, but the phone version is dead. Combine that with very high prices for the two device sizes ($800 and $900) and very small batteries (2800 mAh and 3700 mAh), and you have the makings of a very bad device.

Google Translate, one of Google's last remaining products in China, has been shut down "due to low usage." According to CNBC, "The dedicated mainland China website for Google Translate now redirects users to the Hong Kong version of the service. However, this is not accessible from mainland China." From the report: Google has had a fraught relationship with the Chinese market. The U.S. technology giant pulled its search engine from China in 2010 because of strict government censorship online. Its other services -- such as Google Maps and Gmail -- are also effectively blocked by the Chinese government. As a result, local competitors such as search engine Baidu and social media and gaming giant Tencent have come to dominate the Chinese internet landscape in areas from search to translation.

Google has a very limited presence in China these days. Some of its hardware including smartphones are made in China. But The New York Times reported last month that Google has shifted some production of its Pixel smartphones to Vietnam. The company is also looking to try to get Chinese developers to make apps for its Android operating system globally that will then be available via the Google Play Store, even though that's blocked in China. In 2018, Google was exploring reentering China with its search engine, but ultimately scrapped that project after backlash from employees and politicians.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg would like you to please stop asking Tumblr to bring back porn because it isn't going to happen. After widespread and inaccurate speculation that Tumblr would lift its ban on adult content, Mullenweg posted a long explanation yesterday of why Tumblr will never go back to the old days. Or, in his words: "the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible." That doesn't mean Tumblr's policies will stay the same. Mullenweg has said before that Automattic (which bought Tumblr in 2019) wants to loosen the rules its old owner Verizon implemented in 2018, and he reiterated that here, echoing comments he made earlier this week. Verizon's ban "took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists," Mullenweg wrote in his post. "This policy is currently still in place, though the Tumblr and Automattic teams are working to make it more open and common-sense." Tumblr is supposed to implement those policies soon, putting the site more in line with Automattic's WordPress.com blogging platform.

"That said, no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007," Mullenweg wrote, quoting Tumblr's old liberal policy slogan. (If you're wondering, it was "go nuts, show nuts.") "I agree with 'go nuts, show nuts' in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible." On Tumblr, that era helped produce a lot of unique, often queer, blogs with sexual content. The 2018 ban changed the tenor of the site for good -- and this week, many users were enthusiastically but prematurely celebrating its end. Why is returning to that era impossible? For now, it's largely because of intermediaries that play a massive role in how people access the web. Payment processors have long been leery of adult content, and they've stepped up enforcement in recent years, in part because of concerns about child abuse and nonconsensual pornography. Apple's iOS App Store has been staunchly opposed to it since launch. And without those two pieces of infrastructure, running a for-profit site is incredibly difficult. "If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we'd probably have to shut the service down," Mullenweg noted. Some nonprofit sites that do allow things like explicit artwork -- primarily the Archive of Our Own fanworks site -- have remained persistently web-only despite years of requests for apps. [...]

If you reached this article through Twitter or Reddit, you might have a fairly obvious question right now, and Mullenweg raises it: why can both those platforms, fairly unusually for modern social networks, allow a lot of porn? "Ask Apple, because I don't know," says Mullenweg. He speculates that Tumblr and Reddit are both too big to ban -- although Apple has forced moderation changes even for giant services like Facebook. The overall upshot, to Mullenweg, is this: "If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you'd need to be web-only on iOS and side-load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don't go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don't dox your users, and make a ton of money. I do hope that a dedicated service or company is started that will replace what people used to get from porn on Tumblr. It may already exist and I don't know about it. They'll have an uphill battle under current regimes, and if you think that's a bad thing please try to change the regimes. Don't attack companies following legal and business realities as they exist."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Questions about what's going on with Microsoft's support of the predictive SwifKey keyboard app for iOS have been bubbling up over the past few weeks. A Reddit thread from a month ago highlighted the lack of updates to the app for more than a year. When a reader asked recently for an update on the situation, I asked Microsoft. The official word is in. On September 28, a spokesperson emailed the following statement, attributable to Chris Wolfe, Director Product Management at SwiftKey: "As of October 5, support for SwiftKey iOS will end and it will be delisted from the Apple App Store. Microsoft will continue support for SwiftKey Android as well as the underlying technology that powers the Windows touch keyboard. For those customers who have SwiftKey installed on iOS, it will continue to work until it is manually uninstalled or a user gets a new device. Please visit Support.SwiftKey.com for more information." I asked for the official reason why Microsoft had made this decision and was told officials had nothing more to say.

During Intel's Innovation keynote today, Samsung Display showed off a prototype PC that slides from a 13-inch tablet into a 17-inch display. Intel also announced that it's been experimenting with slidable PC form factors. The Verge reports: The prototype device that Samsung Display and Intel have shown off today essentially turns a 13-inch tablet into a 17-inch monitor with a flexible display and a sliding mechanism. Intel was quick to demonstrate its new Unison software on this display, which aims to connect Intel-powered computers to smartphones -- including iPhones. The slidable PC itself is just a concept for now, and there's no word from Intel or Samsung Display on when it will become a reality.

Intel has announced an intriguing new app called Unison, which aims to "seamlessly" connect Intel-powered computers to smartphones -- not just Android phones but iOS devices as well. From a report: Following what Intel says is a "simple pairing process," the Unison app will allow PCs to replicate four key features of the connected phone. They can answer and make calls; they can share photos and files (pictures taken with the phone will show up in a specific Unison gallery on the PC); they can send and receive texts; and they can receive (and, in some cases, respond to) notifications that the phone receives -- though if Unison is closed, they'll go to the Windows notification center. "The advantage we can bring to a PC user that's got a well-designed Windows PC is not having to choose their device based on the PC they have. They have an iPhone, they have an Android phone, any device they want to use will be able to connect with this capability," Josh Newman, Intel's VP of mobile innovation, told The Verge. "When you're ... on your laptop, and you get notifications or texts on your phone, you can keep it in your bag and get right back into the flow of your work."