Great point brought up by Saket Narayan on Mastodon:

DisplayPort Alt. Mode support on the Pixel 8 would also enable it to connect to wired AR smart glasses like the Nreal Air (now called XREAL Air). I wonder how/if this would tie in to a potential new Google Glass.

Although current Pixels won't be able to get DisplayPort Alt. Mode support via a software update, it might still be possible for them to get desktop mode support, albeit in a roundabout away.

For the Pixel Tablet, on-device desktop mode would make a lot of sense, like how DeX on Galaxy Tabs work.

For the other Pixel phones, maybe if you connect your phone to an external display using a DisplayLink adapter, the system could create a virtual display and then an app can use MediaProjection API to record & send only the virtual display over instead of the main display.

Hopefully Google considers some of these alternatives and doesn't lock the feature to the Pixel 8!

You can't use the Pixel Tablet's dock speakers when you have a USB cable connected as pointed out by Al Sutton on Mastodon.

I think the reason is Android sees the dock as a USB audio dock and can't handle routing audio over USB and data over the actual USB port simultaneously.

Android's virtualization framework now also supports MediaTek's GenieZone hypervisor. The kernel patches have not yet been merged, though.

AVF launched with initial support for KVM, which only Tensor Pixels exposed on Android 13. In late April, AVF added support for Qualcomm's Gunyah hypervisor.

Future Android (15) devices with Qualcomm and MediaTek chipsets launching with the android14-6.1 GKI kernel should thus support AVF.

AVF is still limited to system apps, though, so don't expect to be booting Android in VMs yourself anytime soon (unless you root your device).

Android is dropping support for flattened APEXes, a legacy format of APEX (the file format used for most Project Mainline modules) that can't be updated outside of regular OTAs.

This is only relevant if you maintain a device with a pre-Linux 4.9 kernel that doesn't support the Linux kernel's loop driver. Flattened APEXes don't have a file system image to mount, which is what makes them support these legacy devices but also what makes them non-updatable.

H/T @SebaUbuntu

With the release of Android 13 QPR3 earlier this month, the code implementing the DeviceConfig toggle for separating the notification and ringtone volumes has been readded to AOSP.

If you have a custom ROM, you can enable this feature by overriding the flag, but note that you will need to also override config_deviceConfiguratorPackageName as otherwise GMS may reset any flag changes.

See these links for an example implementation by the OmniROM team: [1] [2] [3]

The android14-6.1 ACK branch has enabled support for the NVMe driver (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_NVME=y). This is the GKI release that'll ship on next-gen flagships powered by Qualcomm (and likely) MediaTek chipsets.

The patch was submitted by a Qualcomm engineer and I suspect is intended for automotive (AAOS) devices, as the rise of "self-driving" capabilities necessitates increased storage capacity and performance.

H/T Luca Stefani

Google has reportedly ended its plans to release "Iris", its next-gen AR glasses, according to Business Insider. Instead, they're pivoting to building an Android XR platform for Samsung's headset as well as a "micro XR" platform for glasses.

Android already powers a lot of XR experiences. Meta uses AOSP for the Quest. Xreal (formerly Nreal) rely on Android phones, etc.

And Google announced a partnership with Samsung earlier this year to build an Android XR platform that'll need a lot of resources to succeed.

You can now use Nearby Share to send text/files to your devices even when they're sleeping! You no longer have to turn on your device's screen and unlock it just to share something.

More details (and a demo) here.

Here's a look at a potential new feature in Android 14: a toggle to change back to the old "persistent" taskbar style from Android 12L. The Pixel Tablet and Pixel Fold use Android's new "transient" taskbar which doesn't stay on screen for long.

Read more here.

The DirtyPipe vulnerability (CVE-2022-0847) is apparently under active exploitation according to Google (H/T @flawedworlddev).

This vulnerability was addressed in the May 2022 bulletin, though, so if your device reports a security patch level of 2022-05-05 or newer it should already be protected against it.