News & Reviews:   Google

Google Maps for iOS recently rolled out a quality-of-life update that makes it easier for users to share their current real-time location. Now, instead of navigating through the menu, you can just easily tap the blue dot signifying your current position on Google Maps to access and execute actions based on your current GPS location on the app.

Google Senior Vice President (VP) Prabhakar Raghavan has revealed that TikTok and Instagram are becoming competitors to its core services, Search and Maps. During a discussion about the evolution of search, Prabhakar revealed that younger users are now turning to TikTok and Instagram instead of Google services for discovery purposes.

Google employees have been told by its chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai to work with ‘greater urgency’ and ‘hunger’ as well as be ‘more entrepreneurial’ amidst a potential global economic recession. Asserted by Pichai in an email to staff yesterday (12 July 2022), the tech giant also announced that it plans to slow down hiring for the remainder of the year.

It seems that all the major tech companies have been updating their app or platforms’ icons recently and Google is no exception. Fresh from updating its Chrome web browser icon, the Android de facto app store, the Google Play Store has also discreetly received a refresh recently.

Gmail users worldwide have been reporting a bug at the top of their emails in the form of a grey banner with an exclamation in a hexagon for the past two days. The bug, which asks users whether they want to ‘continue receiving messages from this sender’ are reportedly appearing too frequently (even with contacts and frequent senders) to the annoyance of users.

Moving your data between an Android and iOS device can be quite a hassle. However, Google's Switch to Android app has been around earlier this year and not many people know about it. This makes transferring seamless from iOS users and furthermore, it has been announced that all Android 12 phones support this. 

Despite the AR/VR headset not making an appearance at the WWDC22, which the rumours are saying, there is still some pretty exciting stuff for us to anticipate from the event. Today, AR evangelist Robert Scoble brings the news of Apple introducing a new user-centric web search engine similar to Google, and it's something we've never expected.

Just yesterday, we saw the news regarding the Pixel 7 series bringing a new variant besides the standard Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro. Although we're still unsure about it as Google hasn't mentioned anything, there's one thing we can assure you about the upcoming series, which is it's packing the second-gen Tensor chip. Now, it's claimed that the next-gen Tensor will get manufactured by Samsung again.

Google is reportedly working on built-in snore and cough detection features for Android devices so as to provide more in-depth and insightful health data. Currently only available for Google employees under the company’s new digital wellbeing study, both features are part of ‘Sleep Audio Collection’ study which may be embedded in Android OS in the future.

After introducing the immersive view, Google has added another exciting feature to the Google Maps. To celebrate 15 years of Street View support, the app now allows access to available imagery for various locations from different points in time, which basically means you can travel back in time to find out how the places looked like back then.