Every year around April, things get a bit confusing with Google’s beta firmware, as the company introduces a preview of its next major OS version while it’s still running a beta program for the last one. If that weren’t confusing enough, it happens around the same time as the company unveils everything it’s been working on for the last year at I/O — but this year’s keynote was all about AI, making the bombardment of headlines a little easier to sift through. Still, hardware is an important part of the Android experience, and Samsung’s got us covered there with internal gossip and juicy rumors this week. All this and more is covered below as we take a look back at the week’s top Android headlines.
Catch up on last week’s biggest Android headlines here
Google sings the vowel song as Android 15 crosses Ts and dots Is in this week’s news
Android betas come out of the woodwork
After a few weeks of silence, Android 15 Beta 2 finally dropped the day after the I/O 2024 keynote last week. We expected that one, but were slightly caught off guard when Google dropped Android 15 Beta 2.1 on Monday. The reason for the quick turnaround was a bug with the new private space feature, but even then, Google came back a day later and said the bug was still not squashed. So we’ll remain vigilant for an Android 15 Beta 2.2 drop in the coming days.
Meanwhile, things got a bit confusing when Android 14 QPR3 Beta 2.2 hit Google’s servers on Thursday — it even sports the same beta version number as the Android 15 build we’re expecting any day. But this build won’t reach nearly as many users as the other Beta 2.2, because it’s only being sent out to users who remained on the Android 14 QPR3 beta program even after the Android 15 beta kicked off. For those who have persevered, Google’s latest beta build offers connectivity fixes for the firmware version that will soon make its public debut as the June 2024 Pixel Feature Drop.
Google’s June Pixel Feature Drop just got one step closer to a stable release
Android 14 QPR3 Beta 2.2 is finally here
Galaxy Watch 7 Ultra rears its ugly head
We’d been hearing rumors for a while that this year’s Galaxy Watch series might switch to a square design — something longtime Samsung users might remember from the Galaxy Gear. We’re still not sure if the standard Galaxy Watch 7 will be square or circular, but it turns out the Watch 7 Ultra might be a bit of both. New renders from a source that’s about as reliable as it gets show a watch with a square body that awkwardly blends into a rounded face — a look that might take some getting used to.
Samsung’s upcoming Apple Watch Ultra alternative might have a controversial design
Samsung’s next flagship smartwatch might sport a unique design
Samsung’s repair policies cause an uproar
Thursday was not a fun day to work for Samsung PR, as the company’s repair policies had it making headlines twice within 24 hours for all the wrong reasons. First, a report came out shining light on the deals Samsung forces third-party repair shops to sign in order to receive genuine parts from the company. According to the contract seen in the report, these repair shops must disclose personal information about their customers, including name, contact information, IMEI numbers, and the reason for their complaint.
Similar policies were at the heart of a second story on Thursday, when iFixit revealed its self-repair partnership with Samsung is ending. The company, which established a name for itself amid the ongoing right-to-repair movement, alleged that some of Samsung’s tactics were not aligned with its own vision for the partnership, including the practice of only shipping replacement batteries in tandem with replacement screens, pushing repair prices higher with bundled parts. It was also revealed that Samsung had yet to provide iFixit with parts for any of its newest models, leaving many to question Samsung’s commitment to self-repair in general.
iFixit is ending its self-repair partnership with Samsung
‘Samsung’s approach to repairability does not align with our mission’
RCS spammers aren’t even bothering to decrypt their scams anymore
A two-year-old Reddit thread saw a sudden spike in new comments and replies this week, all because the thread’s original poster had received a message from a friend with jumbled up letters and numbers and a link to Google’s support page for RCS messages that failed to decrypt. Why the sudden spike? Because many people had seen the same behavior in the last week and googled the message’s phrasing — except these folks weren’t getting garbled texts from a friend.
Like some of us at Android Police, the users who swarmed that Reddit thread this week were receiving spammy-looking encrypted RCS messages from random numbers. It appears Google has another RCS spam problem on its hands, much like the spoofed businesses in India in 2022 and the USPS scam in the US that started last year. We suspect the culprit might be a spambot using RCS to farm for read receipts and verify active phone numbers, but it appears to be failing at the RCS registration phase while spoofing the phone numbers it’s using, leading to the still-encrypted message being sent.
Google Messages users are getting spam-like encrypted RCS messages
Encrypted spam seems to have spiked this past week
You can’t spell ‘advertisement’ without ‘AI’
Google Search’s new AI Overviews have appeared for most users this week after being formally announced at I/O, and the internet has not embraced it, to say the least. While changes to something as ubiquitous as Google Search are generally met with pushback, the disdain might be merited, given some of the dangerous misses the AI tool has had. Making matters worse, we also learned this week that Google will be injecting ads into these AI Overviews — but we probably all saw that one coming from a mile away.
One week in and Google’s AI Overviews are already getting ads
Google announced AI Overviews for Search at Google I/O ’24
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