Xiaomi unveiled a bunch of new products today, including the Xiaomi 13T, Xiaomi 13T Pro, Xiaomi Watch 2 Pro, and more.

In case you're curious about any of these products, I've got a rundown of the Xiaomi 13T series and Xiaomi Watch 2 Pro on Reddit.

I've also shared my initial impressions of both phones over on Twitter.

(Xiaomi invited me to attend their launch event in Berlin this week, which is why I haven't been posting as much. I'll be back to posting a lot more about Android soon!)

Google is rolling out an update to the Pixel Buds Pro app that prepares for the buds' new Conversation Detection, Hearing Wellness, and Clearer Calls features.

Conversation Detection: Automatically switch to Transparency and pause media when you talk.

Hearing Wellness: See current loudness levels and an accumulated exposure report.

Clearer Calls: Bluetooth super wideband doubles the bandwidth for clearer calls. (SWB involves the use of the LC3 codec over HFP, as I previously reported.)

(First heard of this app update rolling out via Kamila Wojciechowska, but the screenshots above are from Nail Sadykov. This update also brings additional features not mentioned here, which Kamila will share more details on.)

Google has published the Android Security Bulletin for October 2023, detailing the vulnerabilities addressed in the 2023-10-0X security patch levels.

As I previously reported, there's a 2023-10-06 SPL that signifies builds that are patched against that recent critical WebP 0-day vulnerability (CVE-2023-4863).

The Android Management API has finally added support for Lost Mode for company-owned devices.

Google first announced Lost Mode back in September 2022 as a new enterprise feature in Android 13, but the feature was said to be "coming soon". With the August 2023 update to the Android Management API, though, Lost Mode support has been added.

"Lost mode is a feature available on company-owned devices, allowing employers to remotely lock and secure a lost device and optionally to display a message on the device screen with contact information for the employee or IT department. This helps protect organization and employee data while attempting to recover the device, and may improve the likelihood of recovery."

Lost mode supports work profiles on Android 13+ and fully managed devices on Android 11+. Google recommends remotely wiping the device if it hasn't been recovered within 24 hours of activating lost mode.

Google Play Games Services has added a new "Recall API" that "lets games manage links between PGS users and their in-game accounts by storing recall tokens with Google servers".

This makes it easier for games with their own identity systems to restore a user's progress on a new device signed into the same Play Games account used on their other devices that have previously played the game.

eg.

1) A user started playing a game on another device. This game has its own identity system to track user progress, and it also supports PGS for authentication.

2) Through the Recall API, the game sends a recall token to Google that corresponds to the user's in-game account. Google stores that recall token against the user's PGS account.

3) The user tries to play the game on another device, like on Google Play Games on PC, while signed into their PGS account. The game server queries Google to see if there are any recall tokens, and since there are, Google sends it back which the server then uses to find the user's in-game account.

So Linus from Linus Tech Tips just posted a video about how he's looking for a new phone after he dropped his current one in the pool (RIP), and he brings up how Sony's Android OS is great except for the fact that the back button is on the left side.

Fortunately, Sony's working on fixing this.

If you aren't aware, the 3-button navigation by default has the back button on the left, the home button in the middle, and the recents button on the right. This is the default AOSP placement and is what you get on Google and Sony phones (among others).

Samsung and a few others like Xiaomi swap the position of the back and recents buttons so that the back button is on the right by default (but you can swap them back if you want). Honestly, I can see why Linus is put off by the thought of switching to a Sony device, having built up years of muscle memory around the back button being on the right.

Back in January, an engineer for Sony submitted patches to AOSP that allow for swapping the position of the back and recent buttons. The patches went dormant for months; there were some merge conflicts with SystemUI and a Googler didn't like the setting was going to be exposed to users by default (it's now controlled by a config flag that the OEM can override).

Last week, though, a Google code reviewer gave a +2 to it, so there's a chance interest in it has been revived and it could be merged to AOSP. If it does, we could see it land in an Android 14 QPR or Android 15. After seeing Linus' complaint, I definitely think this feature should be standard. Sony could add this in before it gets merged to AOSP, but a user with an Xperia 1 V tells me there's no such feature right now on their device.

(Ignore the title of the patches which says it adds support for swapping recent and home button positions; the code shows it's actually for swapping recent and back button positions.)