MWC 2023 is under way and every company in the mobile market, be it the mobile equipment providers, smartphone manufacturers, wearables manufacturers as well as tech giants supporting them are all present on the floor announcing their newest features. As part of the summit, Google has now announced 9 new exciting features for Android and WearOS.

Google Keep single note widget

For those of you who love the checklist/to-do feature of Keep, can now pin notes, check off to-do lists, view reminders and customize the colors and images from your Home screen—all from the new Google Keep widget on Android phones and tablets.

Google Keep notes on your smart watch

If you are one of the smart watch users running WearOS, you can now browse or create notes on Google Keep using your voice with two new shortcuts for your Wear OS watch face.

Annotate PDFs in the Google Drive app for Android

Use a stylus or simply touch the screen to annotate PDFs in the Google Drive app for Android. You can also try different ink strokes to provide notes or feedback freehand, or use the highlighter tool to save important text neatly on your tablet or phone. Then hide, undo, delete or save a new copy of your annotated documents.

Google Meet noise cancellation

Google Meet now has built in noise cancellation feature, available to all Android devices. You can now be better prepared for your next meeting!

Fast Pair on Chromebook

Soon, Fast Pair will be able to connect new Bluetooth headphones to your Chromebook with just one tap. And if you’ve already set up headphones with your Android phone, your Chromebook will automatically connect to them as well.

New Emojis

Google seems to keeping adding to the collection of its emoji library and this time its not missed either. New emoji combinations are now available on Emoji Kitchen for you to mash up, remix and share as stickers via Gboard. Use them to make some noise for your favorite basketball team (just in time for March Madness ) or express your spring colors with friends.

Google Wallet Tap to Pay Animations

Fun new tap to pay animations on Google Wallet to help confirm your in-store transactions, so keep an eye out for some cheerful penguins, plus many others.

Google Chrome Zoom upto 300% while still preserving page layout

You can now easily increase the size of content on Chrome — including text, images, video and interactive controls — by up to 300% to suit your vision preferences while still preserving the page layout. This includes the ability to set your preferred content size as a default so you don’t have to change it every time you open up Chrome.

Improvements in smart watch accessibility

With Wear OS 3+, we’ll now have Mono-audio to help limit disorientation caused by split-audio and while color-correction and grayscale modes give you more choice for your watch display.

It can get really irritating if an email containing an event that you didn’t ask for, or don’t want to attend, directly gets added to your Google Calendar. This in effect is spamming your calendar.

Google has now brought in an easy way to keep your calendars clean. If you’ve never interacted with someone, their invitations won’t be added automatically to your calendar unless you indicate that you do know them. You’ll still be able to respond to the invitation sent to you in the email and change this behaviour at any time in Settings > General > Event settings > Add invitations to my calendar. Here you can select whether you would like to add invitations from everyone / only if the sender is known / when I respond to the invitation in email.

On Android, you can check your device’s permissions to prevent untrusted third-party apps from adding events to your calendar.

Android, since version 10, has been supporting Modular System Components. This allows to expedite functional and security updates to the Android ecosystem outside of major API level releases and make new functionality backward compatible on already-released Android versions. End-user devices can receive updates to these modularized system components from the Google Play Store infrastructure or through a partner-provided over-the-air (OTA) mechanism.

With Android Extension SDKs, it is possible to extend the support of certain platform functionality to existing Android versions, increasing user reach.

For example, the PhotoPicker APIs previously available only on API level 33 (Android T) and above are now also available all the way back to API level 30 (Android R) through the Extension SDK on devices with an R extension version of at least 2.

The API reference pages for SDK Extension APIs specify the earliest SDK extension version that your app can use to access an API. If the documentation also specifies an Android platform version (referenced by API level), then that API is also available for all devices running that version of Android or higher.

Digilocker, the cloud storage platform for all Government issued official documents in India is soon going to be integrated into the Files app in Android. Now Digilocker users on Android can directly access official government issued documents, straight from their Files app.

Google made the announcement during the annual Google for India event. “We expect that DigiLocker’s integration and partnership on Android will drive smoother and ubiquitous access to digitised documents in a safe and secure manner for all our users” Abhishek Singh, President and CEO, NeGD and MyGov, MD and CEO, Digital India Corporation, said in a statement.

Google will make the Digilocker issued files accessible only with a secure password, inside the Files app.

DigiLocker has more than 137 million registered users who have issued more than 5.6 billion documents to date.

Google is yet to disclose the date of launch and support for iOS.

Celebrating 30th Birthday of SMS – Short Message Service! The first SMS, wishing ‘Merry Christmas’ was sent by a software engineer on 3rd December 1992! Most of the first generation mobile phone users would have sent a free SMS as the first operation on their phone to simply get it activated!

To celebrate SMS’ 30th birthday, Google announced that its Messages app will support end-to-end encryption for group chats over the coming weeks – a feature that’s been available for one-on-one conversations for a couple of years.

Texting changed the way we communicate, but it’s out of date (today almost 30 years out of date!). Today we want messaging that lets us do things like share high-res photos and larger files, chat with a group, know when messages are read, or make video calls. To introduce all these features into text messaging, Google had introduced Rich Communication Services (RCS). Google’s native messaging client, Messages, supports RCS.

Most of the mobile world is using RCS, but there is one company, Apple, that’s dragging its heels. But after 30 years of SMS texting, it’s truly time. So here are three big reasons why the whole industry should get behind RCS — one for every decade SMS has been around.

It’s been a long known resistance from Apple to accept the RCS standard, considering all the features of RCS are already available since long, on their iMessages app, although it is restricted to only the iPhone users.

With RCS, Google had already brought end-to-end encryption to messaging, and with its biggest messaging competitor, WhatsApp and its own ever changing chat and messaging strategies, today Google is getting end-to-end encryption to its group messages.

In addition to announcing end-to-end encryption for group chats, Google also announced that the Messages app will soon let users react to RCS (Rich Communication Services) messages with any emoji, similar to WhatsApp.

Here’s wishing a very Happy 30th Birthday to SMS and wishing it a happy farewell for good!

Google, like every year, has announced the most awaited Android app of the year 2022 awards! The awards themselves were given as best Android Game of the year 2022 as well as best Android App of the year 2022 separately, keeping in line with the target audience for the same.

Google said, “this year we relied on apps to keep us connected and explore new worlds. We found comfort in entertainment, value in learning new skills, and inspiration in everyday routines. That’s why these are Play’s best apps of 2022“.

And the best Android app of the year 2022 overall is Dream by WOMBO.

With Dream by WOMBO, you can create beautiful artwork using the power of AI! Enter a prompt, pick an art style and watch Dream by WOMBO turn your idea into an AI-powered painting in seconds.

WOMBO AI is a Canadian artificial intelligence company transforming the ways that entertainment and AI work together. WOMBO Dream is expanding art to the masses. You don’t need a paint brush, pencil, or any art supplies to make beautiful artwork, all you need is an idea.

Along with the overall winner, Google also announced winners in speicifc categories…

Best Android app of the year 2022 for fun : PetStar

Best Android app of the year 2022 for Personal Growth : Breathwrk

Best Android app of the year 2022 for Everyday Essentials : Plant Parent

Best Android app of the year 2022 in the hidden gems category : Recover Athletics

Best Android app of the year 2022 for good : The STIGMA App

Best Android app of the year 2022 for wear : Todoist

Best Android app of the year 2022 for tablets : Pocket

Google also introduced a new category this year, with their focus being across various platforms where Android works…

Best Android app of the year 2022 for Chromebooks : BandLab

WhatsApp has rolled out a feature where you can now message yourself!

Have you been amongst those people, who would simply send your friends and family members a message or share a link, just so it stays noted for you to refer back to later? Well, looks like WhatsApp has noticed that and made it simple, by now allowing you to simply message yourself and stop bombarding others WhatsApp threads!

Messages sent to yourself will be visible on all of your linked devices, and they will continue to remain end-to-end encrypted as per the USP of WhatsApp security.

Simply open a new chat, and when you’re selecting a contact to message, you’ll see your own contact right at the top of the list. Additionally, a different chat caption shows up when opening this chat – Message yourself.

This feature had been around for quite some time in most of the messaging platforms including Slack and Telegram where you can message yourself. Even most of the Email clients allow you to do this. WhatsApp seems to have taken note of this, and tried to offer it the easier way… Simply chat with yourself!

Google, in collaboration with Samsung, has come up with their new Google Health Connect app, now in Beta. It’s the one app that can track all the health and fitness data coming in from multiple other apps which track their own devices respectively.

So I used to have Google Fit to track my runs, Fitbit to track my Heart Rate, WeightWatchers to track my weight and so on. However, with all my fitness data fragmented across apps, I would never have one wholesome view of all my Health data. To answer this problem, Google has launched Health Connect by Android, giving me a simple way to share data between my health, fitness, and wellbeing apps without compromising on privacy.

Whether you’re focused on activity or sleep, nutrition or vitals, sharing data between your apps can help you better understand your health. Health Connect gives you simple controls, so you only share the data you want to. Health Connect stores the health and fitness data from your apps in one place, offline and on your device, so you can easily manage the data from your different apps.

At launch, more than 10 health, fitness, and wellness apps will support Health Connect, including Fitbit, Samsung Health, MyFitnessPal, Oura, and Peloton.

For users, one can easily manage permissions in a single place, with granular controls to see which apps are accessing data at any given time. Android users will now be able to sync and get credit for their Peloton workouts in apps like Oura, MyFitnessPal, WeightWatchers and Lifesum. Now, through a single integration with Health Connect, Peloton Members will have the option to share their workout stats across the ecosystem of apps they use to support their overall wellness.

For developers, the new app reduces the cost of building multiple API connections for data sharing between different apps. Now, with Health Connect, building an integration with a new app is as simple as reading in new data from Health Connect, rather than building a whole new integration. Health Connect’s data schema supports more than 40 data types across six categories to ensure data consistency across apps.

Google is raising the quality bar on Android apps, with sharing insights and notices to both, the developers as well as users. Quality of an app is as important to the end user as it should be to the developer, as that is what will get in the performance as well as good reviews.

One of the most important ways to boost your app quality and attract more users is to focus on technical quality. For this, the developers would need to follow a certain set of guidelines as well as receive insights from Play Store, in order to keep track of the usage and keep improving the app based on the metrics and feedback.

The starting point for maintaing the technical quality of the app should always be Android’s Core App Quality Checklist. Make your app experience as compelling, smooth, and safe as possible. Work through the tests on this page to assess your app’s visual experience, performance, security, and more.

The next pit stop in the journey to improve your app quality would be to keep monitoring Android Vitals in your Play Console.

Android Vitals reports on key user-impacting issues and helps you to debug and prioritize across them. It gives you a comprehensive understanding of your stability on Android with visibility of user-perceived crashes and ANRs (Application Not Responding errors), includes stack traces, event tags, and device information to help you understand and resolve problems as well as set up alerts so you can respond to new and emerging issues as quickly as possible.

To improve quality across the board, Google enforces an overall bad behavior threshold. The threshold is 1.09% for user-perceived crash rate, and 0.47% for user-perceived ANR rate. To maximize your app’s visibility on Google Play, it’s important to stay below these thresholds. If your title exceeds the device bad behavior threshold on any core vital for a given phone model, then Google Play may reduce the visibility of your app for users on that phone model and start showing a warning to the users downloading the app, below the Install button.

Users expect great experiences on their devices, and developers who deliver on their expectations will achieve greater success on Google Play!

Now in Android is the Google’s official reference app for Android developers.

Google’s Now in Android is a sample application, that Android developers can refer to, in order to get a complete reference of what the Android team has done recently, what is expected, what app policies and app design guidelines are to be followed along with library and platform releases, articles, videos, podcasts, samples, codelabs – whatever seems relevant and interesting for Android developers.

Now in Android is a fully functional Android app built entirely with Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and designed with Material 3. Its source code and supporting material is intended to be a useful reference for developers.

With the latest release of Now in Android, Google released the new Material 3 design which is the latest update to the Material design that is a part of their design guidelines to the Android developers. As per Google, their main focus on the design direction was more on the energy they want to showcase with Now in Android: Fun, Bold and Lively

Google has released Now in Android as an open source app under the terms of the Apache License (Version 2.0) so a developer can always refer to the app’s own codebase in case they need to clarify anything that they weren’t able to understand while following the documentation.