00:00 – Mishaal Rahman: Is AI enough to make the Pixel 10 a worthwhile upgrade?
00:04 And will Google and Apple actually make eSIMs and RCS work better across Android and iOS?
00:10 I’m Mishaal Rahman.
00:13 – C. Scott Brown: And I’m C. Scott Brown and this is the Authority Insights podcast, where we break down the latest news and leaks surrounding the Android operating system.
00:22 – Mishaal Rahman: So Scott, I am so jealous right now because you are in Brooklyn and I am stuck in Houston where it’s always hot and humid. I wish I was in your place because you got to attend the Pixel 10 launch and we have so much news to talk about. I cannot believe how much Google dropped on us on a freaking Wednesday of all days. They had the Made by Google event, then Android 16 QPR2, which is another topic we’ll talk about later today. And then we also of course had some Authority Insights posts from my colleague Assemble Debug, who discovered some interesting cross-platform upgrades that should improve the experience between Android and iOS users. So, why don’t we just get started? Why don’t we get started and talk about the big news from Google? You used the three Pixel 10 slab phones. Now, of course, to anyone who’s listening, we can’t offer a review right now because that is still under an embargo. There’s a separate review embargo. But we can talk about what Google announced in terms of the features, the specifications, and just our early impressions of what Google had to show at yesterday’s event. Or actually, this would be a couple of days ago if you’re listening to this on Saturday. So Scott, why don’t you give us a little rundown of your overall thoughts on the Pixel 10 series and the Qi2 charging and some of the other big highlight features?
01:42 – C. Scott Brown: Well, the number one thing that I felt as soon as the first time that I saw the devices was, wow, these haven’t changed at all. Like just like on the outset when you first pick up the phones, they look and feel exactly the same. You can find the differences, the camera bar is definitely thicker when you hold a nine and a 10 next to each other, you can immediately tell that the camera bar is wider, taller. I don’t know what the right word to use is there, but and but and you know, the SIM cards have swapped if you’re outside of the United States, it’s on the top and if you’re in the United States, it’s not there, which we will talk more about later. And you know, little differences like that, but really overall, they feel and look exactly the same. And it’s only when you start diving into the software that you start to feel, oh wait, these are very different phones with a whole lot of new features that the other pixel phones do not currently have. And on top of that, there are other things that are hardware related that are different too, but you don’t really see them when you’re holding the phone. For example, the Pixel 10 Pro XL charges faster than any Pixel ever at 45W and also charges wirelessly at 25W, which is also the fastest charging speed of any Pixel ever. And also has the biggest battery ever at 5200mAh. So really, there’s a lot of things going on throughout all four of the phones that are different, but you just can’t see it. And so I think that’s making the online discourse sort of skewed in the wrong direction. People are looking at the phones and being like, there’s nothing new here. And it’s like, no, there is a lot new here. It’s just that you can’t see it when you just see an image of the phone on a commercial or whatever.
03:32 – Mishaal Rahman: That’s right. Like if I were to hold a Pixel 9 and a Pixel 10 side by side, you would not be able to tell that they have the same camera hardware, but one of the phones can actually do 100X zoom, which is, I think, one of the big highlight features that Google showed off during the keynote. And actually, we think it’s quite controversial. My colleague Robert actually did an editorial basically talking about the controversial use of AI to enable its 100X zoom. Scott, have you had a chance to try this out yet or did you actually see it in person? What’s it like?
04:04 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, no, I tried it out and it is incredible. Like if you don’t care about the controversial nature of it, you will be blown away by how incredible the 100X zoom feature is. You know, I was at the demo area and I zoomed in with the Pixel 10 Pro all the way across the room to a tiny little bird coming out of a cuckoo clock. I mean, you know, I don’t even know how at least 100 feet away. And you know, zoomed in on this cuckoo clock and hit the shutter button and the picture as one would expect from a smartphone was grainy and gross looking and it just looked terrible. But then within a few seconds, Gemini did its magic thing and boom, it was a really crisp image of that cuckoo clock, you know, the little bird. But it was very clearly AI. Like, you just looked at it and you’re like, this is an AI generated image. If you don’t care about the idea that the photo that it spits out is not real, like it is literally not a real photo. If you don’t care about that, then you’re going to love this. If you do care about that and that doesn’t sit right with you, then yeah, this feature might not be the one you’re looking for.
05:23 – Mishaal Rahman: So just for my understanding, it seems like this is literally using generative AI to fill in details that weren’t there before. And I suspect a lot of people are going to try to do what this one Reddit user did. They zoomed in from very far on what looks to be a gift card for Mario Kart World. And because it’s generative AI, I think we all generally understand that it still has some troubles when it comes to recreating text. So you can kind of see the Google AI, it kind of like garbled the image of the Mario Kart World, the promo art and then also messed up the logo of the Nintendo Switch 2 and some of the text. But this is not the kind of thing you’re supposed to be using it for. You’re supposed to be using it on like far away landscape shots like to take in zoom in details of cars and like things that are kind of stationary and don’t really have text on them. But people are going to try to use text because that’s kind of when you’re trying to take a photo of some far away object, text is like the easiest thing you can tell, oh, is this a good upscaler? Because like if it’s if it becomes legible, then oh yeah, that’s a good use of zoom. But if it’s not legible, then people are like, oh, this is crappy zoom. And I kind of feel like we’re going to get a lot of people who get the Pixel 10 Pro, they’re going to try it out on text and they’re going to be like, oh, this thing sucks. Not realizing that you’re not supposed to be using it like this.
06:40 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I’m also worried about people. Obviously, like you just said, 99% of the time, if you’re using something like a 100x zoom, you’re not zooming in on people. You’re zooming in on stationary objects. But at the same time, like I hike a lot and I can totally imagine hiking up a big mountain and wanting to get a picture of my partner from very far away so that we can have this gorgeous landscape and then see this tiny little person in the majesty of the wilderness. Yeah, like is the AI going to accurately render my partner or not, you know, like do I want an AI generated image of my partner in a photo? So I there’s a lot of questions here. There’s a lot of things, but from a not ethical standpoint and from a technological standpoint, it is incredible. Like it is, it is a 10 out of 10 feature from a technical perspective. It works flawlessly. So, I mean maybe a 9 out of 10 because it does take a couple of seconds for the image to render using. So maybe 9 out of 10, but still, like it’s incredible. It’s just that it doesn’t sit right with me for a lot of reasons, but for other people it might be fine. They might just be like, this is super cool. I love this. I don’t care, you know, so.
08:05 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, it’s also just very clever. Like I would not have thought to use it like this, you know. Like all the companies are like, how do we balance putting a good enough optical zoom lens on a phone without making it freakishly large? You know, we used to have phones that had 10X optical zoom sensors and they were massive. Those camera lenses sticking out. And now like, it seems like we kind of settled on 5X is like the sweet spot. And then using AI as much as possible to upscale. But we’ve never had generative AI literally fill in details at this kind of zoom level. I think that’s a really neat and unique aspect of it.
08:37 – C. Scott Brown: Absolutely. Yeah. No, I agree. And Samsung agrees too at least as far as the 10X zoom goes. When we found out that the 10X zoom was going away on Samsung phones, we asked Samsung we’re like, what’s up with this? And they’re like, people don’t use 10X zoom. They predominantly go to 5X and they stop. So they took it away. So, yeah, so I think that yeah, if you want to go beyond using a generative AI is definitely an admirable solution to prevent you know, needing to have a phone with a camera bump that’s this big, you know.
09:08 – Mishaal Rahman: Well, you say admirable, but some people might argue it’s the opposite because there’s a lot of concern right now with the authenticity of online images, especially not just those taken from a smartphone camera, but like things that you can create with tools on the pixel itself, like Pixel Studio and Google Photos. So Scott, I heard there’s some new features that are available on the Pixel 10 that helps identify when you’ve taken a photo or when you’ve edited a photo using generative AI. Can you tell us what those are?
09:37 – C. Scott Brown: So, there’s a coalition that has a very long name that I’m not going to remember, so I’m not going to say it, but it’s abbreviated down to C2PA and C2PA basically is trying to fix this problem. It’s trying to make it so that you can verify an image is authentic whether it came from a camera, whether it came from a generative AI solution or whether it’s a hybrid of both. And so Google is working with this coalition and is now integrating their watermarking system, their metadata system into the Pixel 10 series. So whenever you take a photo with a Pixel 10, it automatically will watermark it invisibly. You won’t see the watermark, but you can find it in the metadata. It’ll watermark it and say this came from a camera. And then if you edit that photo with an AI based tool, it’ll say this or sorry, if you edit that camera that photo with a non AI based tool, it’ll say edited with, you know, whatever tools. And then if you use AI, it’ll say that as well. So this will hopefully be able to make it so that people can quickly and easily find how this image was created, you know, right from Google Photos. This is something that you don’t need to go trolling through metadata, you don’t need to convert the image to something else. You literally just open the photo, scroll all the way to the bottom of the photos info and boom, there’s all the information that you need listed out in plain text so you can understand exactly what happened. I think this is great. My concern is and this is a concern that you brought up when we first heard about this is how easy is this to fake? And that’s the question we have to figure out.
11:18 – Mishaal Rahman: I don’t know about faking it, but as you recall, I did talk about this when Samsung launched the Galaxy S25 because that phone, although it doesn’t apply C2PA metadata when you capture photos using the camera app, it does apply it when you edit photos using Samsung’s generative AI tools through their image editor. Now, the problem that I found was that this metadata is basically like for those of you who’ve dealt with images at all, like EXIF metadata. Incredibly easy to erase and get rid of. Right? There’s like really nothing stopping you at all. Almost any tool can get rid of it. And the other issue is it requires platform support for actually showing that metadata. We see Google’s announcement today say that, okay, Google Photos will show the C2PA metadata, but if I upload it to X or Instagram, for example, will those platforms show that metadata? Will it show that there’s been this traceable history of AI editing going on? I don’t think so. And until that happens, this kind of information will be confined to the phones and the platforms that you originally took them on. So that’s going to be a big problem because if it’s not available everywhere, especially where people are actually sharing these images, then how effective is it really going to be at preventing people from misusing AI to spread false information through images?
12:37 – C. Scott Brown: 100% and but the thing that I’m really enjoying about this feature, is it a feature? I don’t know. A safety feature. A safety feature. Security feature. The thing I really appreciate about this is that Google’s making this first step, you know, so it’s not going to happen overnight, but Google is Google. Google is one of the is literally one of the biggest companies in the world and certainly at the forefront of information distribution across the world. So, the fact that Google has made this first step, inevitably people are going to follow. Not the people, corporations, companies, they’re going to follow. It’s going to happen. And so Google has sort of drawn a line in the sand and said, we’re going with this, we’re going with C2PA and this is how we’re going to implement it. Get on board. You know, and obviously, yeah, you’re right. There’s I don’t think there’ll ever be 100% security in that, but you know, the Instagrams of the world, the social networks and and all the major platforms, they’re going to get on board. It’s just a matter of time. So, so yeah, I appreciate that Google’s taken this first step here.
13:42 – Mishaal Rahman: Well, speaking of first steps, one of the features that my mind was blown by when I saw it on stage is the new Voice Translate feature. Now, I believe you actually did get a chance to try this out, although when you said in Slack that it was quite noisy, so it was kind of hard for you to actually record a demo of it. But can you tell us what it was like actually trying this out?
14:04 – C. Scott Brown: So, I’ve used it twice. The first time I used it, I actually was the one using it. I was actually the one talking on the phone. And the second time I was witnessing someone else use it. The second time was loud. I couldn’t record it. It was difficult to get a video demonstration of it in that respect. The first time, unfortunately, I just used it and didn’t record it, but I can talk about it. And it was wild. So you’re talking on the phone and the way they had it set up is that you talk on the phone and then the guy that I was talking to had his phone on speaker across the room. So it was far enough away that there wasn’t any feedback, but it was close enough that I could hear myself on the other phone. And it was crazy. I would say, hey, how are you doing? It’s good to meet you. And by the time I got to the word doing, I could hear myself speaking German to the man across the room. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard yourself speaking a language that you don’t speak, but it’s weird. And it was my voice. It sounded just like me. And it even, as they did on the demo on stage, it even had the inflection of tone. Like if I was like, hi, how are you doing? It was hi, you know, Guten tag, you know, whatever. Uh it had that it had that tone of motion to it. It was so crazy. Now, a lot of people might think to themselves like, oh, this is going to be this, scams are going to be rampant now. Now you’re going to be able to communicate in any language and you’re going to be able to communicate with someone making the sounds of someone else’s voice. It wasn’t that good. Like it didn’t sound like me, it didn’t sound like it wasn’t me. When I wrote this in my hands on, if we used this to call my partner and say, you know, Guten tag, you know, and like try to scam her with something, she wouldn’t have bought it. She’d be like, this isn’t you. Like this is definitely somebody else that sounds like you, but it’s not you. So yeah, I’m not too concerned about the scam aspect of it, but it was pretty incredible. Once again, if you ignore the possibilities of how this could be used nefariously from a technical standpoint, from how it’s actually done to the end result, it was absolutely a 9 out of 10 feature. And I do want to call out I know the event itself with Jimmy Fallon was controversial for a lot of reasons and I know a lot of people were really upset about it. The demos were real. As a person who was in the audience and as a person who has direct contacts with people who work at Google, it was real. Like they were really doing all of those demos on stage live at the time. And I was talking to somebody who works at Google and they said they were sitting next to the director of marketing, like you know, the top brass of marketing at Google, and they literally had their fingers crossed the entire time they were doing the Voice Translate demo because they were like, if this fails, it’s going to be seen by millions and millions of people and we’re going to look like idiots. And of course, it didn’t fail, it went off without a hitch. But yeah, it was real. So any naysayers out there that are like, oh, this is all, you know, pretty it wasn’t. It was totally real.
17:08 – Mishaal Rahman: That’s surprising to me because when I was doing the live stream, the restream of the Made by Google event, someone shared a bingo card and one of the bingo cards is like live failed demo. Or sorry, live demo fail. And almost every time, every time Google’s done a live demo, there’s been at least one screw up involved. This time, I don’t think there were any mess ups. I think I was surprised that everything went well.
17:28 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, no. I mean, there were some like delivery flubs, like I think one of the I think one of the presenters, one of the guest presenters like, you know, stumbled upon their words a little bit or they flick the wrong thing or something along those lines. But really like the demos themselves were clearly they were completely successful. So it was really, really cool.
17:48 – Mishaal Rahman: I do want to get back to the aspect of the technology of the Voice Translate itself. From what Google said that this is all running entirely on device using like an audio model on the Tensor G5 processor. And I think it’s kind of incredible how far we’ve come in terms of Gemini Nano’s capabilities. Like in the first generation, all we had was like what? The ability to like summarize some text or like Magic Compose in Google Messages, which is like, in my opinion, that still sucks. Like I’ve never used Magic Compose once in Google Messages because it just did not produce anything, it does not produce messages that sound anything like what I would actually send to a friend. But this is like this is crazy that you can do this completely on device and like I know there are some people who are kind of skeptical, oh, who cares about on-device AI? I feel like this is a prime example. Like you could not do this by offloading data to the cloud because there would be so much latency involved seconds and the amount of awkward pauses you would have to have to make that work would just not be feasible in a real-time phone call. So kudos to Google for pulling this off.
18:57 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I think that the on-device aspect is truly game-changing, not only for the idea that it’s all happening on device with tensor G5, but also for the security aspect of it, you know, because a lot of people are very conscious now. They understand that generative AI is reading their stuff or, you know, being fed all this information from around the world and then, you know, just kind of regurgitating it back. And a lot of people aren’t comfortable with that. So the fact that this is all happening on device, I think is going to make people maybe a bit more comfortable with adopting these specific features. Like the Voice Translate feature, that is something that could genuinely be a world-changing feature. I mean, I’m a Star Trek nerd, the universal translator feature of the Star Trek universe is literally what makes them be able to fly to one alien race and or another and just communicate with that race and figure things out. You know, the ability to just call someone on the phone who doesn’t speak my language and talk to them. I mean, that’s game-changing. That’s world-changing. And, you know, for somebody to reject that simply because they’re concerned about the security aspects of it going off into the cloud, this is great because they don’t have to worry about that. It’s all happening on the device itself. So I think that’s really cool. I think that Google is, you know, embracing the right things there. You know, not all the time. Like I said, the 100X zoom thing kind of makes my meter go up a little bit. But yeah, so I don’t want to say that I’m not, you know, trying to say that Google’s done no wrong here, but at the same time, like the Voice Translate feature, that’s to me universally good.
20:45 – Mishaal Rahman: All right, and the final major AI feature that I wanted to talk about that pulls in a lot of data from across your Google services and what you’re doing on screen to provide some helpful suggestions is Magic Cue. And, you know, while we know, I think generally we all agree, Voice Translate is really cool and it’s going to make a big difference and there’s like not going to be that many people who are actually concerned by it. Magic Cue, I think has a potential to be a bit more controversial just because of the fact that it feels like it’s basically monitoring everything you’re doing. So, did you get a chance to try this out or like at least got a demo of it, Scott?
21:22 – C. Scott Brown: So I got a demo of it, but I don’t think they are letting the public actually do it yet. Because the demo station that they had set up was, you know, there was a person from Google. In fact, it was the person who spoke German with me at the other event. He was standing there with a phone tethered to a television and you could see what he was doing, but it was the same thing over and over again. It was a demo that was not live. He wasn’t getting live text messages and then responding to them using Magic Cue. There was no variation. He did the same thing over and over again. And I did notice that there were some YouTube videos of larger YouTubers who were showing off how this feature worked and they were using the exact same steps with the exact same information. So I don’t think this is actually out there yet. I think that Google is sort of playing it close to the chest, probably because of what you just discussed where, you know, it’s this information is coming in and it’s sort of analyzing your personal data and then and then monitoring you and giving you suggestions. So, I didn’t get to try it out for real, but I did get to see it work and it’s cool. It’s a cool idea. Like I genuinely think it would be helpful for people. If I got a text message from my dad saying like, oh, you know, I’m trying to find that photo of you and me that we took on the mountain last year for a little thing to pop up and be like, hey, here’s that photo that you’re looking for before I even have to go into photos, like, to me, that’s awesome. But you know, like I said, I haven’t seen it actually work yet. So.
22:56 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, I mean, the thing like this does save a lot of time, but the thing I’m concerned about is typically, you know, when someone asks you, oh, what’s the flight information? Or send me the reservation or share like the phone number for the customer service, right? You generally go and you open the app and you search for it and you verify this information yourself before you’re sharing it with someone else. With Magic Cue, it’s pulling in information from your Gmail, from Google services, from the web and presenting it to you, but you haven’t really had a chance to verify that information is correct. So, like if it’s like a card, like a prepared card that’s pulled in directly from Gmail, you can be reasonably sure it’s correct. Let’s say like someone asks you for the customer service number of an airline and it just pulls in like, oh, call this airline and you just tap the number. How do you know that the phone number is actually the correct one? Because I don’t know if you recall, but like a couple of years back, there’s been like an ongoing problem where fake customer service hotlines will be set up for legitimate businesses and then they’ll try to rank themselves higher on Google and then like they might be the top one or two results. They might even be promoted results because they pay for ads to be put up there and then people call them and they get scammed, right? So like I’m a little concerned by that aspect that’s something that actually AP founder Artem Russakovskii raised on Twitter earlier today and yeah, I really hope that Google has thought this part through really well.
24:18 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I mean, those are absolutely valid concerns and like I said, I believe that’s one of the main reasons why Google has not let this out into the wild yet for true examination. Obviously, the review units are going out and the review embargo is not far away now. So it’s only a matter of time before this becomes something that everyone is testing out, but yeah, I mean, I have a feeling that if something did go wrong, Google would just pull the plug. Like it’s not an integral feature. It’s not a feature that I think is going to sell the phone. I don’t think anyone’s going to buy a Pixel 10 because they really want Magic Cue. They’re going to think it’s cool, but they’re going to be like, yeah, I want the camera features or the Voice Translate feature or whatever. So, yeah, I feel like Google would just pull the plug immediately, but we’ll see. I mean, I don’t know. It’s one of those features that could go horribly awry. So, we’ll have to just wait and see how that goes.
25:15 – Mishaal Rahman: Well, speaking of features that I don’t think anyone’s going to be particularly excited to buy the Pixel 10 specifically for is the Material 3 Expressive design because that is going to be coming to all Pixel devices and for those of you on the beta track, you already have access to the Material 3 Expressive design and now you have access to a preview version of Google’s big December update because Google rolled out the Android 16 QPR2 Beta 1 release, which is the first beta for the Android 16 QPR2 December update. And there’s quite a lot of features that we weren’t expecting in this update or we were somewhat expecting but we didn’t expect them to land so soon. And I think the first big one is the themed icon support. So this one, oh boy, we’ve been waiting for this one for so long. So back in Android 13, Google released a feature called themed icon that allows developers to provide a monochromatic version of their app icon. The system will then take that monochromatic icon and then they’ll apply a tint to it that matches your system theme. So basically, you’ll have all your apps ideally following a certain color scheme that matches your wallpaper. Unfortunately, a lot of developers did not provide a monochromatic version of their app icon, which resulting in like maybe half your apps being themed and the other being unthemed, which is quite messy to be frank, if you’ve ever tried to like if you’ve ever enabled the themed icon feature, probably like you’ve noticed that there’s like a hodgepodge of apps that are themed and apps that are not. But finally, Android 16 QPR2 will automatically generate a theme version of your app icon for developers that don’t supply one. The OS will apply a color filtering algorithm to render it in the monochrome style and then the system will then theme that generated monochrome icon. So, Scott, you’re a pixel guy. I mean, that’s like that’s your channel. That’s your thing now, right? How do you feel about this feature?
27:12 – C. Scott Brown: I honestly don’t really like the monochrome icon aesthetic just because it’s very difficult to find it’s difficult when all the icons look the same. I definitely visually associate the icons. So it’s like I know to look for the specific color of an icon when I’m swiping through my app drawer. It just helps me find it faster. So if all the icons look the same, it just slows me down. So I don’t really use it. That being said, I have used it in the past and definitely did not like the fact that some of the icons were monochromatic and some of them weren’t. So I appreciate that this is finally being fixed so that the people who do like having all the icons look exactly the same, they’ll finally get that option. The thing that I hope is that the developers who are actively still developing their apps, follow along with this because even though it’s great that Google is sort of tinting them, tinting the icons that don’t have a monochromatic setup already, they don’t look as good. Like I don’t know how you feel about it, but I feel like they don’t look quite as good as the ones that are specifically designed to have that monochromatic look to them. So, so yeah, I hope this kind of pushes them. I hope this pushes those developers who have kind of just been like, I’m not going to do this to be like, oh yeah, I’m going to do this now.
28:34 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, you can definitely tell when an icon has been generated by the system versus one actually supplied by the developer. Like it’s quite obvious. So like at a glance, it might look more consistent and better, but definitely if you look up close, it’s not going to look as good. But that’s why it’s optional. Like in Android 16 QPR2, you have to specifically turn on the themed icon option, which is now this new minimal setting in the wallpaper app. So it’s not going to be forced on you if you don’t want it, you can turn it off.
29:03 – C. Scott Brown: It does look good. Like it definitely looks good. It’s just that for me, I want to open up the app drawer and very quickly get to that app and if I can’t just tell it by color, then I’m like, I don’t know where this is. I can’t tell you the amount of times I open the Google Home app instead of the drive app or vice versa. It’s like that one drives me.
29:22 – Mishaal Rahman: I feel like that’s that’s more because the Google logo design has just been completely blended together. It’s so hard to tell them apart sometimes.
29:30 – C. Scott Brown: I mean yeah, the Drive icon is a rainbow that’s in a triangle and then the Home icon is a rainbow that’s in a slightly weirder looking triangle. It’s like they’re basically the same thing. So I definitely open those up a lot. So, yeah.
29:46 – Mishaal Rahman: All right, the next big feature that’s coming in QPR2 is actually a throwback because Google is finally bringing back lock screen widget support on phones. Now, this feature used to be around on Android a long, long time ago until 2014 when Google released Android 5.0 Lollipop. That’s how long ago Android used to have lock screen widgets, but now it’s finally back for phones in Android 16 QPR2. And when you enable it, it’s not like it used to be. It’s not like it is on Samsung phones where you have your lock screen and then you have the widgets on the same page. In order to access the widgets, you actually have to go to the lock screen and then swipe inward from the right edge to go to this new page where a dedicated page for your lock screen is shown. This is how it is on the Pixel Tablet. Where the Pixel Tablet actually does have enough space, I would argue to show the widgets on the same page as your other UI elements, but on phones, I kind of understand why it has to be on a separate page. There’s just not enough space to have your notifications, your clock, your At a Glance information and widgets. So I do think it makes sense why it’s on a separate page. Some people are irked by that, but I think it makes sense. What do you think, Scott?
30:54 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I think it makes sense. I mean, you know, you don’t want there to be such a thing as too much information. There is such a thing as having too many things, too many elements on the page. And I think Google is doing the right thing and giving you this space. They’re like, you can go nuts, you know, add all the widgets you want and put them in any order you like or whatever. Just, you know, it can’t be over here. And yeah, I mean, like I get a lot of notifications, especially now that I’ve, you know, started my own YouTube channel. You know, my own YouTube channel has connected social accounts. I have a TikTok now. I have all these different things and I’m getting pinged all the time. If I had tons of lock screen widgets and then all these notifications, I wouldn’t see anything I need to see. It would just be chaos. So, yeah, so I appreciate the fact that it’s on the separate page. I mean, it might be cool if people had the choice, you know, if they could say like I want my, you know, maybe they want their widgets to appear on the main lock screen and swipe over and see notifications instead. It might be cool if Google gave people the choice, but for now, I think that this is the most ideal way to do it.
32:00 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah. Another feature being added in Android 16 QPR2 is an expansion to Identity Check. So, Identity Check is an anti-theft feature that Google introduced in December for Android 15 QPR1 and this feature basically, so let’s say someone steals your phone, a thief like, hopefully that doesn’t happen to you, but a thief steals your phone after they peek over your shoulder and see you enter your PIN. Now, before Identity Check was implemented and if you don’t turn it on, the thief who takes your phone has basically full rein to all the apps and the data on your phone because a lot of apps allow access to its data by using your PIN. But if you enable Identity Check, then Android will enforce biometric authentication whenever your phone is outside of a trusted location. So, let’s say if a thief takes your phone and they go to some, you know, some place that you don’t know, and they try to access your Google Password Manager settings, then they have to pass your biometric authentication in order to access that. And of course, they don’t have your biometrics, so they can’t do that. But the problem with the Identity Check right now is it doesn’t apply to third-party apps. But Google’s working on fixing that in QPR2 by making it so any application that requests biometric authentication will no longer be allowed to accept your PIN as a fallback because a lot of apps right now, they might ask for your biometrics, but they’ll also accept your PIN, pattern, or password as a fallback. Now, the problem, as I just mentioned, if a thief takes your phone while also knowing your PIN, pattern, or password, then they can just bypass biometrics in those apps and then gain access to whatever sensitive app you’re trying to hide. But by extending Identity Check to these applications, then that loophole will be closed. And even applications that previously allowed for your screen lock credentials to be used as a fallback, they will no longer be able to accept them. Now, Scott, I wanted to ask you, what do you think of all these anti-theft features? Do they make sense to you or are they getting a little confusing?
34:02 – C. Scott Brown: I mean, I feel like more is better. Like, you know, you I feel like the more security that you have, the better. It might be you’re right, it might be getting confusing. Like there are so many different things that are named very similar names. So it might be hard for the general user to understand like what does what. But at the same time, like the general effect is that it makes them more secure and I think that that’s universally good. Especially for something like this, you know, yeah, there are some very sensitive apps on most people’s phones, you know, banking apps, password managers, photo albums full of private photos that they don’t want getting out into the world, whatever it might be. The more you can prevent someone from getting into that information, the better. But yeah, I mean, it may be that Google just needs to streamline everything, you know, just make one section of Android that just has all this stuff and just, you know, be able to control everything and what it does seem a bit like hodgepodge now. It just seems like it’s kind of spread out all over these different things. But yeah, I mean, I think incorporating third-party apps is the right way to go because yeah, like my banking app requires biometric authentication, but that’s because my banking app did that. Like it’s like this is what you’re going to do if you know, somebody’s using a smaller banking app, maybe one from a Federal Credit Union or something like that, they might not have biometric authentication because the app was created by one dude, you know, like. So it, you know, the more to me, the more the better. So I’m for it.
35:45 – Mishaal Rahman: All right, and a couple of other features that are available in QPR2, these are features we’ve actually already talked about in previous releases. So the expanded dark theme, this feature basically allows you to enable dark theme even on applications that don’t normally support it, such as Fitbit, which is what I was going to say yesterday, but Fitbit did actually start finally rolling out an update that brings a dark mode. So that kind of went out of date. But if there if you still have applications that somehow don’t have a dark theme in 2025, this new expanded dark mode will intelligently invert the UI to make it appear like it has a dark theme. And this feature is available, although Google recommends that developers still implement a native dark theme because this is an algorithmic approach. It will inevitably mess up and turn some things dark when it shouldn’t have or you’ll have issues with contrast. So this is not like a foolproof solution to enable dark theme system-wide. This is more seen as an accessibility feature for those who really find it more comfortable to look at their phone in dark theme.
36:45 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, correct me if I’m wrong, but this had been possible before, but you needed to to turn on developer settings, right? Yeah. So this is great because I feel like so many people probably turned on developer settings specifically just to turn this on. The fact that they won’t have to do that anymore and they can just use a normal toggle like great. I think it’s awesome.
37:08 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah. Another very welcome feature in my opinion is this new enhanced HDR brightness feature, which allows you to turn off HDR content from making your phone bright. So if you ever scroll Instagram or some other social media platform at night and you see all of a sudden your phone gets super bright because there’s some HDR image on screen, this new feature will ensure that you can control exactly how bright your phone screen gets. You can either disable it entirely or you can use this new slider to make it less bright whenever you see HDR content. And I think that’s a nice feature. Like some people just don’t care about HDR seeing HDR imagery at all. So they just want to disable it all. They just want a consistent brightness level for whatever they’re using their phone. Is that an issue for you, Scott? Have you encountered this? I personally have barely ever seen HDR content on social media, so I do not It’s not been an issue for me at all.
37:58 – C. Scott Brown: I can’t say that I’ve seen much HDR content on social media, but yeah, I’m one of the few people out there who actually doesn’t really like the HDR imagery most of the time. You know, sometimes it’s good, like there are certain types of content like video games, like if I’m playing a video game, sometimes HDR makes things look a lot better. But most of the time, I think it just makes things look weird. If I’m like watching a movie, sometimes it just looks weird. So I usually turn it off anyway. But yeah, but I guess if you’re somebody who likes it but doesn’t want it to blow out their face when they’re looking at it in the dark, then this is a good feature.
38:39 – Mishaal Rahman: All right, and the final two features I want to talk about, or actually there’s a couple more, but graphical app support in the Linux Terminal, we did talk about this in a previous episode. So go back and listen to that if you want to learn more about it. But basically, this lets you run full graphical desktop Linux apps on your Android phone, which I think is a huge deal, but I’m not going to rehash that topic again on this episode. Another feature, Secure Lock Device. This feature allows you to basically remotely lock your device and put it into an enhanced state. So like right now, on a Pixel phone, probably a lot of people have complained about this, but even if you lock your phone, people can still pull down your status bar and they can access your Quick Settings panel. But this feature will finally make it so they can’t access your Quick Settings panel, they can’t access lock screen widgets, they can’t access your digital assistant when your phone is locked and you put it in this Secure Lock state. They haven’t actually rolled out a way for you to do that yet. This is probably going to be integrated in Find Hub in a future update, but hopefully they do that soon.
39:36 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, I like this feature. I like the idea of it. The thing that kind of makes me hesitant about adopting it would be the digital assistant aspect of it because having to unlock my phone anytime I want to ask Gemini to, you know, set a reminder for me or set a timer or whatever like that, I think that would get annoying.
39:54 – Mishaal Rahman: To be fair, I think this is something you have to manually enable through like Find Hub. This is like, okay, crap, I lost my phone, or I think my phone was stolen. I got to secure it.
40:02 – C. Scott Brown: Oh, okay. So this is not something that’s just on all the time.
40:04 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.I think this is more for this is more for scenarios where like you lost your phone somewhere in the house, but you know it’s somewhere there, right? So you don’t want to remotely erase it. Like you don’t want to factory reset it. That’s like the last thing if you know your phone is stolen, you want to factory reset it. If you lost your phone somewhere in the house and you’re just not completely sure that it’s gone, then you’ll put it in this Secure Lock state until you can until you can recover it.
40:29 – C. Scott Brown: Okay, I was confused about that. So, but yeah, but still, so that’s great. Like I mean, a nice little in between zone because yeah, the idea that like if you lose your phone, somebody grabs it and they they don’t have the ability to unlock it and they can put it in airplane mode. Like that screws you. Like once it’s in airplane mode, like you can’t do anything. You can’t remotely wipe it. You can’t, you know, set off a an alarm system so that you can find it. It’s just it’s just gone. You know, so yeah, that’s it seems like a pretty pretty blatant thing to to to have in your security to to have this feature. So I think yeah, that’s great that we’re getting that.
41:04 – Mishaal Rahman: And lastly, Android 16 QPR2 brings this 90:10 split screen ratio, which allows you to put one app into a 10%, a window that takes up only 10% of the screen and another app takes up only 90% of the screen. And then you can quickly switch between them by just tapping the smaller window and just like quickly swap between the two at any point. This feature is actually pretty heavily inspired by OPPO’s Boundless View or Open Canvas as it’s called on OnePlus devices. Although the companies OPPO told us is not actually directly related to it. Like OPPO didn’t actually contribute their feature to Android. But this is still a very useful feature. I’m glad that Google kind of picked it up and implemented into Android because it’s going to make multitasking on slab phones a lot better in my opinion. Have you had a chance to try this out yet, Scott, on your Pixel 10 or I guess you can’t talk about the Pixel 10 experience, but have you had a chance to try this out on any Pixel phones running QPR2 yet or any other release?
41:59 – C. Scott Brown: Well no, I can say I did try this on the Pixel 10 Pro Fold at the event yesterday. At the event okay. Yeah, I was at the event when I did it. So yeah, I did try it and yeah, it worked really well. Nice and smooth, easy to, you know, to get the two apps, you know, back and forth or whatever. Obviously, I think it’s more designed for slab phones because you have much more limited space than you do on on something like the 10 Pro Fold which has tons of space. But yeah, it worked, it worked well.
42:29 – Mishaal Rahman: Awesome. All right. So that’s it for Android 16 QPR2. We had a lot to talk about, but we still got one more topic to talk about and I think it’s still really important because we kind of hinted at it earlier and it’s a fact that the Pixel 10 does not have a SIM card slot in the United States, which means if you’re trying to come from an iPhone, you might be worried, how the heck am I going to transfer my eSIM from my iPhone to the Pixel 10 because if a Pixel 10 is only supporting eSIM, you’re going to want to be able to transfer your SIM card, your SIM plan from whatever phone you currently have to your Pixel. And our colleagues, Assemble Debug and Tushar wrote an article about if you’re switching from an iPhone, it’ll soon be easier to transfer your existing eSIM plan over from iOS to Android. And this is because both Google and Apple are working on eSIM transfer features in both platforms. So iOS 26 and then Android 16 QPR or Android 17, whatever release is going to be. And yeah, I think this is a great idea. Like we need more features like this that kind of break down the barriers between both platforms. I would imagine, given how I guess hesitant Apple is to break down that walled garden at times and sometimes I can imagine Google might also be sometimes that this is probably something that was pushed by the carriers. Like they want you to be able to continue having your plan even if you switch phones because like, you know, the carrier doesn’t care if you’re using an iPhone or an Android phone. They care that you’re using their network over a competitor. So, I think that’s probably why this is being implemented.
44:15 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, well, I mean, first off, the core concept of the Pixel not having the Pixel 10 not having a SIM card slot, a physical SIM card slot is controversial, but I think that it’s controversial for our audience. 98% of Americans don’t care. They just don’t, you know. We care, you and I care because we have dozens of smartphones and we love being able to just take out our SIM card and pop it into another one. And then our viewers and readers care because they usually a lot of them are going to be dual carries. A lot of them are going to have maybe a foldable and a slab phone or maybe even an iPhone and an Android phone in their pocket at all times. But the vast majority of the public who aren’t those people, they don’t care. They pop their SIM card in and they never think about that thing again. So it’s like I think that Google’s making the right move for the general populist. And that’s what once again, that’s what Google’s going for here. That’s why Jimmy Fallon hosted the thing. That’s why the Jonas Brothers were guest stars on the Made by Google thing. That’s why I brought in all these sports stars and influencers and people because Google’s like, this launch is for everyone. It’s not for the geeks anymore. Pixels are no longer the geek phone. They are the iPhone of the Android world. And so yeah, so I think that removing eSIM was a fine call to make. Interestingly though, it’s still in the Pixel 10 Pro fold. I don’t really know why that is, but go figure out about that one.
45:51 – Mishaal Rahman: Maybe it was just too difficult for them to make like a different SKU for the US versus the rest of the world.
45:56 – C. Scott Brown: Maybe, yeah, they didn’t want to spend the money. But yeah, but yeah, if you buy a Pixel 10, 10 Pro or 10 Pro XL in the United States, no SIM for you.
46:04 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah. I will say as a reviewer, you’re probably going to see a lot of reviewers complain about the lack of a SIM card slot in the US. But as someone who has tried eSIMs like extensively before, there are a lot of benefits to using an eSIM.
46:18 – C. Scott Brown: Absolutely.
46:18 – Mishaal Rahman: Especially if you’re traveling. If you ever travel, eSIMs are much easier to deal with if especially if you’re going to a foreign country and you don’t want to scrounge around for a local SIM plan. With an eSIM, you can just go online right now, you could just buy a foreign eSIM plan, load it up on your phone and as soon as you land, it just connects. You don’t have to worry about getting a getting a plan locally that supports international roaming that’s going to be dramatically more expensive than whatever eSIM plan you can find online or once you land going to like a like a lounge or something or wherever they sell local SIM cards, buying one there, having to present your government ID for example, with in many countries do require that. So, I think it does solve some headaches that are inherent with physical SIM cards, but at the same time, you know, it does make, you know, if you break your phone, what are you going to do with the old eSIM on that? How are you going to transfer it out? Whereas with a physical SIM, you just pop the SIM tray out, put in another phone and you’re good to go. So there are pros and cons, there are tradeoffs, but ultimately, this is probably the direction that all phones it’s going to happen to all phones eventually. It’s just a matter of when, not if.
47:29 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that that I noted when I saw the SIM the you know, the Pixel without a SIM card in it is I said to myself, okay, I know that the SIM card tray still exists in the other phones, like, you know, if you go to the UK or France or whatever. I know the SIM card is still there. So what is there now in the US model? Because now it’s just empty space. And then I thought to myself, well like Google could use that space for something, you know. And that I think is going to be the biggest benefit to removing the SIM card tray is that now Google’s going to have whatever, you know, what is it? like maybe a half inch squared maybe. I don’t know, whatever amount of space it is that a SIM card tray takes up. That is now gone and, you know, they can put cooling, battery, whatever. you know, like they could put all sorts of stuff there. So I think that to me is more important. Like, you know, there are a lot of things that I care a lot about with smartphones and having a physical SIM card tray is just not one of them. I’d much rather have more.
48:33 – Mishaal Rahman: I’ll say probably in this generation, they probably haven’t put anything in its place because, you know, it’s going to be hard for them to make two different SKUs with different internal placements. But probably in a future model when they completely ditch the SIM tray globally, which it’s probably not going to happen for a while considering even Apple hasn’t done it yet.
48:51 – C. Scott Brown: Right.
48:51 – Mishaal Rahman: Then they’re probably going to make use of that space to do something with it.
48:55 – C. Scott Brown: Yeah, and that’s what I’m excited about. So it’s like, okay, you know, if we need to make a first step here by removing it in this country and then maybe remove it in another country later and then keep rolling until it’s just gone, then now we’re going to have that extra bit of room in the smartphone for for more stuff. So, yeah, I think that it’s I think that it’s fine. I like I said, I know a lot of people are going to be pissed off. There’s probably people listening to this right now that are screaming at their speakers or their, you know, computer monitor or anything. And I apologize, but yeah, I think that this is going to be like, you know, the removal of the SD card tray or the removal of the headphone jack. It’s going to, you know, people are going to be really upset about it and maybe even still be upset about it years later, but for the vast majority of people, 98% of smartphone buyers, they’re just going to be like, yep, don’t care.
49:42 – Mishaal Rahman: Yeah. I mean, hopefully we can say the same for texting between Android and iPhones because it’s been a mess for a long time, but it is finally getting better thanks to cross-platform RCS support, but there’s still a major issue. When you text between an Android and an iPhone, there’s no end-to-end encryption support. So it’s inherently less secure than texting between two Android devices and texting between two iPhones. But fortunately, we know that Google and Apple are both working on implementing cross-platform end-to-end encryption support. Back in March, the GSM Association announced the RCS Universal Profile 3.0 and that includes support for the MLS protocol, which is a cross-platform end-to-end encryption messaging protocol. And that support is going to be coming in a future version of iOS. Apple did not announce exactly when they’ll be rolling it out, but our colleagues again Assemble Debug and Aamir Siddiqui have discovered code that suggests that Apple could be planning to implement end-to-end encryption on iPhones as early as iOS 26. Now, there’s not that many iPhone users that I text and those that do, they don’t really care about green bubble versus blue bubble or encryption versus non-encryption. But Scott, I wanted to hear your opinion, how big of a difference do you think this is going to make in pushing the envelope towards the perception that iPhone users have towards Android users?
51:08 – C. Scott Brown: None, I think. Or very little. I when I talk to, I mean, I, you know, this is this is the US. I’ve lived here my whole life and a lot of people I know have iPhones. And if you ask them what they dislike the most about communicating with Android users, it’s iMessage features. It’s the features that get broken when an Android user joins the chat. And none of them care about the end-to-end encryption thing, you know. Once again, this is one of those things that tech nerds like us care about. We want end-to-end encryption. We want to know that the information that we’re transferring to our friends and family is secure and not being, you know, intercepted by nefarious actors and things like that. But the general public, they don’t care. What they care about what they see. They don’t see end-to-end encryption. They see the green bubble. They see the fact that now that the green bubble has joined the chat, all these features that they rely on don’t work anymore. So I don’t think it’s really going to change much at all. The green bubble is still going to be there and it’s still going to be, you know, problematic.
52:16 – Mishaal Rahman: I hate to say it, but you’re probably right because I think until Apple changes the color of the bubble, I don’t think the perception is going to really shift in a dramatic way anytime soon. It’s just that darn bubble color.
52:31 – C. Scott Brown: And it’s all Apple. It’s all them. Google is literally laying out the red carpet and I love the fact that Google is attacking Apple on it for the right reason, which is that, you know, everyone should be able to communicate with everyone well, like there should be there should be as few barriers as possible for people to communicate with one another. And for Apple to say, oh, no, if you don’t have an iPhone, then you don’t get security, you don’t get these features, you don’t get the ease of use of RCS and all these other things because we don’t want to give it to you. Like that sucks. Like and it sucks for iPhone users. Like it doesn’t just suck for us as Android users, it sucks for the iPhone users too. So what Apple is really doing is throwing a garbage product at their users and being like, this is what you get. And it’s just like, that’s just terrible, you know. As a person who doesn’t use an iPhone, if I did use an iPhone, that would make me leave. I would be like, I don’t want to do this sucks. I don’t want to deal with this. Like, why are you treating me like this? You know, so I’m so glad that Google is going for the throat. It did it at the event, you know. Once again, people didn’t like the event, but there were a couple things that were pretty cool and that was one of them where they just like went right for the throat. They were like, yeah, we want to be the company that brings everyone together. Some other companies don’t want to do that. And it was just like, in the audience, I actually went like, it was just like, burn.
54:04 – Mishaal Rahman: Well, that’s why I posed the question at the top of the podcast. Like is AI enough to pull people in towards the Pixel 10? Because it seems like Google is really going all in on AI and Gemini being the thing that people will buy Google devices for and use Google services for. And right now we’ve kind of seen like Apple’s kind of stumbling when it comes to integrating AI in their products. But, you know, with the success that Google and Samsung are seeing with their AI features and how much better they are in my opinion than what Apple is offering, like is that enough to move the needle and actually get people to switch ecosystems over? Like I don’t know. There have been people who are hyping up features like Voice Translate on the Pixel 10 on Twitter that I’ve seen, but like is that hype enough to convince people to say, okay, I’m done with Apple. Like I want these features now. I want these AI features. I actually care about this stuff. That I don’t know. We’re going to have to wait to see sales figures and see if Google is actually successful enough with the Pixel 10 to make a noticeable impact on Apple’s market share in the US at least.
55:08 – C. Scott Brown: I’ve had some anecdotal evidence to that. My channel the C. Scott Brown YouTube channel is still relatively small. We just hit 10,000 subscribers, so it’s getting bigger.
55:21 – Mishaal Rahman: Congrats.
55:21 – C. Scott Brown: Thank you. But anecdotally, I have seen a 50/50 split. I’ve seen people commenting on videos that I’ve made about Pixel phones and being like, these AI features are unreal. I’m definitely buying a Pixel 10 because I want X feature. And then 50% of people have come in and just been like, this is just AI trash. This doesn’t substantially make the phones better. I’m not interested. So, I don’t know if it’s going to move the needle or not. I’m in the same boat as you. Like I feel like it’s still the jury is still out whether or not AI is really going to make the difference. What I can say though is that it’s becoming very clear even to iPhone users, even to people who defend Apple to the core that Apple is way behind. Way behind. So if AI does become the deciding factor, then Pixel’s going to win. Like because it’s just so much further ahead. But if not, if it doesn’t end up being the deciding factor, then yeah, then we’re right back where we are right now, which is, you know, what is it? 55% of Americans using iPhones and the rest using a mixture of Samsung and Motorola and Google and OnePlus and whatever. So, yeah, we’ll have to wait and see. But if anyone’s going to win in the AI race, it’s absolutely Google.
56:42 – Mishaal Rahman: Well, let’s hope you’re right because the more people who use Android, the more relevant Android Authority will be. And you know, that’s very important for the both of us.
56:50 – C. Scott Brown: Job security right there.
56:52 – Mishaal Rahman: All right folks, and that’s everything we’ve got for you this week. You can find links to all the stories that were mentioned in the episode down in the show notes below. And you can find more amazing stories to read over on androidauthority.com.
57:05 – C. Scott Brown: Thanks for listening to the Authority Insights podcast. We publish every week on YouTube, Spotify, and other podcast platforms. You can follow us here on social at Android Authority and you can follow me personally on Instagram, Bluesky and my own YouTube channel. Just search for @ C. Scott Brown.
57:22 – Mishaal Rahman: As for me, I’m on most social media platforms posting day in and day out about Android. If you want to keep up with the latest on Android, go to my Linktree and find me on the platform that you like best. Thanks for listening.
