Google

Following up on the Digital Markets Act, the European Union is launching a “non-compliance investigation” into Alphabet, specifically centered around Google Search and specific rules in the Play Store.

Google’s Vulnerability Reward Program paid out a whopping $10 million to over 600 researchers for bug bounties in 2023.

A major outage from Meta has taken down Facebook, Instagram, and other products, but it seems that some users are also seeing issues with some Google services.

The Google app on Android is starting to roll out a new design for context-aware buttons that extends out of the search bar.

Generative AI is an incredible tool when it’s used properly, but one big fear is that AI will be used to flood the internet with articles. Despite this, though, Google is reportedly paying some independent publishers fairly large sums of money to publish AI-generated articles on their websites using an AI model that’s not yet been released.

Google today announced an “expanded partnership” with Reddit that sees it get access to the forum website’s data for training and other product uses.

Google debuted Circle to Search earlier this year as a big new AI feature in Android. While it’s only available on some devices, the feature does have one limitation that seems rather obvious, which is that Circle to Search is disabled if you switch your default assist app.

Google Search is starting to pull information from TikTok videos in results, featuring the information quite prominently.

Alphabet today announced Q4 2023 earnings with $86.3 billion in revenue. These numbers range from October to December and summarize the fiscal year.

Earlier this week, Sundar Pichai said that Google has “ambitious goals and will be investing in [its] big priorities” in 2024. This includes AI and spans Google’s consumer to enterprise platforms. 

AI is the big selling point of the new Samsung Galaxy S24 series, and one of the features is support for AI-generated wallpapers. But an annoying little watermark takes away from those wallpapers just a bit.

So far, Google has made job cuts and reorganizations across hardware, Assistant, ads, core engineering, and YouTube. Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the layoffs are about “removing layers to simplify execution and drive velocity in some areas.”

AI features are a big part of the Samsung Galaxy S24 series and Google’s Gemini models are directly powering many of the new capabilities.

We’re not even two weeks into 2024, and Google has initiated a wave of layoffs across multiple teams throughout the company. In addition to cuts to the hardware division reported on Wednesday, further position removals have reportedly impacted other teams, including core engineering and Assistant.

Google is reorganizing the Devices & Services teams responsible for Pixel, Nest, and Fitbit hardware. This change was announced to employees today, and Google confirmed the changes in a statement to 9to5Google. 

Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 with a focus on providing “more realistic, detailed experiences.” 

Google has reached a settlement in a US antitrust lawsuit which will have effects on the future of sideloading on Android, and we’re getting an idea of what that means for app sideloading and more in court documents.

Budget phones are always coming and going, and some don’t deserve your time or money. This year has proven that there are great options out there. Here’s our list of best budget Android smartphones in 2023.

The Epic vs Google court battle has come to a verdict, with a jury unanimously voting in Epic’s favor, and declaring that Google has an “illegal monopoly” with the Play Store and Google Play billing.

The number of announcements that Google made in the past week or so truly felt like I/O. Gemini 1.0 was, of course, the highlight and most consequential for Google.