You might have noticed some reporting a few days ago that Android 17 was rolling out in beta form, but that didn't happen. For reasons Google still has not explained, the release was canceled. Two days later, Android 17 is here for real. If you've got a recent Pixel device, you can try the latest version today, but don't expect big changes just yet—there's still a long way to go before release.

Google will probably have more to say about feature changes for Android 17 in the coming months, but this first wide release is aimed mostly at testing system and API changes. One of the biggest changes in the beta is expanded support for adaptive apps, which ensures that apps can scale to different screen sizes. That makes apps more usable on large-screen devices like tablets and foldables with multiple displays.

We first saw this last year in Android 16, but developers were permitted to opt out of support. The new adaptive app roadmap puts an end to that. Any app that targets Android 17 (API level 37) must support resizing and windowed multitasking. Apps can continue to target the older API for the time being, but Google filters apps from the Play Store if they don't keep up.

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We are now a few years into the AI revolution, and talk has shifted from who has the best chatbot to whose AI agent can do the most things on your behalf. Unfortunately, AI agents are still rough around the edges, so tasking them with anything important is not a great idea. OpenAI launched its Atlas agent late last year, which we found to be modestly useful, and now it's Google's turn.

Unlike the OpenAI agent, Google's new Auto Browse agent has extraordinary reach because it's part of Chrome, the world's most popular browser by a wide margin. Google began rolling out Auto Browse (in preview) earlier this month to AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers, allowing them to send the agent across the web to complete tasks.

I've taken Chrome's agent for a spin to see whether you can trust it to handle tedious online work for you. For each test, I lay out the problem I need to solve, how I prompted the robot, and how well (or not) it handled the job.

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Like most cloud-enabled home security cameras, Google's Nest products don't provide long-term storage unless you pay a monthly fee. That video may not vanish into the digital aether right on time, though. Investigators involved with the high-profile abduction of Nancy Guthrie have released video from Guthrie's Nest doorbell camera—video that was believed to have been deleted because Guthrie wasn't paying for the service.

Google's cameras connect to the recently upgraded Home Premium subscription service. For $10 per month, you get 30 days of stored events, and $20 gets you 60 days of events with 10 days of the full video. If you don't pay anything, Google only saves three hours of event history. After that, the videos are deleted, at least as far as the user is concerned. Newer Nest cameras have limited local storage that can cache clips for a few hours in case connectivity drops out, but there is no option for true local storage. Guthrie's camera was reportedly destroyed by the perpetrators.

Expired videos are no longer available to the user, and Google won't restore them even if you later upgrade to a premium account. However, that doesn't mean the data is truly gone. Nancy Guthrie was abducted from her home in the early hours of February 1, and at first, investigators said there was no video of the crime because the doorbell camera was not on a paid account. Yet, video showing a masked individual fiddling with the camera was published on February 10.

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Do you feel popular? There are people on the Internet who want to know all about you! Unfortunately, they don't have the best of intentions, but Google has some handy tools to address that, and they've gotten an upgrade today. The "Results About You" tool can now detect and remove more of your personal information. Plus, the tool for removing non-consensual explicit imagery (NCEI) is faster to use. All you have to do is tell Google your personal details first—that seems safe, right?

With today's upgrade, Results About You gains the ability to find and remove pages that include ID numbers like your passport, driver's license, and Social Security. You can access the option to add these to Google's ongoing scans from the settings in Results About You. Just click in the ID numbers section to enable detection.

Naturally, Google has to know what it's looking for to remove it. So you need to provide at least part of those numbers. Google asks for the full driver's license number, which is fine, as it's not as sensitive. For your passport and SSN, you only need the last four digits, which is enough for Google to find the full numbers on webpages.

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Google continues to turn the screws on free YouTube users, expanding a test that restricts access to song lyrics on YouTube Music. Users without a premium subscription have found that Google's streaming music service only shows song lyrics a few times before demanding money.

For as long as YouTube Music has existed, lyrics have been accessible to all users in the mobile app. That started to change over recent months as Google tested a paywall. The lyrics section still appears in the app when playing a song with a free account, but opening it eats into a limited allotment of lyric views. A substantial uptick in user reports, spotted by 9to5Google, suggests this restriction is now rolling out widely.

"You have [x] views remaining," the app now warns free users who access lyrics. It looks like users get five free lyric views before they have to pay up. Google has still neglected to officially announce the addition of this feature to its Premium subscription—there's no mention of lyrics being part of the paid tier on Google's support page.

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Google-spinoff Waymo is in the midst of expanding its self-driving car fleet into new regions. Waymo touts more than 200 million miles of driving that informs how the vehicles navigate roads, but the company's AI has also driven billions of miles virtually, and there's a lot more to come with the new Waymo World Model. Based on Google DeepMind's Genie 3, Waymo says the model can create "hyper-realistic" simulated environments that train the AI on situations that are rarely (or never) encountered in real life—like snow on the Golden Gate Bridge.

Until recently, the autonomous driving industry relied entirely on training data collected from real cars and real situations. That means rare, potentially dangerous events are not well represented in training data. The Waymo World Model aims to address that by allowing engineers to create simulations with simple prompts and driving inputs.

Google revealed Genie 3 last year, positioning it as a significant upgrade over other world models by virtue of its long-horizon memory. In Google's world model, you can wander away from a given object, and when you look back, the model will still "remember" how that object is supposed to look. In earlier attempts at world models, the simulation would lose that context almost immediately. With Genie 3, the model can remember details for several minutes.

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There is very little functional difference between iOS and Android these days. The systems could integrate quite well if it weren't for the way companies prioritize lock-in over compatibility. At least in the realm of file sharing, Google is working to fix that. After adding basic AirDrop support to Pixel 10 devices last year, the company says we can look forward to seeing it on many more phones this year.

At present, the only Android phones that can initiate an AirDrop session with Apple devices are Google's latest Pixel 10 devices. When Google announced this upgrade, it vaguely suggested that more developments would come, and it now looks like we'll see more AirDrop support soon.

According to Android Authority, Google is planning a big AirDrop expansion in 2026. During an event at the company's Taipei office, Eric Kay, Google's VP of engineering for Android, laid out the path ahead.

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Chromebooks debuted 16 years ago with the limited release of Google's Cr-48, an unassuming compact laptop that was provided free to select users. From there, Chromebooks became one of the most popular budget computing options and a common fixture in schools and businesses. According to some newly uncovered court documents, Google's shift to Android PCs means Chromebooks have an expiration date in 2034.

The documents were filed as part of Google's long-running search antitrust case, which began in 2020 and reached a verdict in 2024. While Google is still seeking to have the guilty verdict overturned, it has escaped most of the remedies that government prosecutors requested. According to The Verge, the company's plans for Chromebooks and the upcoming Android-based Aluminium came up in filings from the remedy phase of the trial.

As Google moves toward releasing Aluminium, it sought to keep the upcoming machines above the fray and retain the Chrome browser (which it did). In Judge Amit Mehta's final order, devices running ChromeOS or a ChromeOS successor are excluded. To get there, Google had to provide a little more detail on its plans.

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It took Android devicemakers a very long time to commit to long-term update support. Samsung and Google have only recently decided to offer seven years of updates for their flagship Android devices, but a decade ago, you were lucky to get more than one or two updates on even the most expensive Android phones and tablets. How is it, then, that an Android-powered set-top box from 2015 is still going strong?

Nvidia released the first Shield Android TV in 2015, and according to the company's senior VP of hardware engineering, Andrew Bell, supporting these devices has been a labor of love. And the team at Nvidia still loves the Shield. Bell assures us that Nvidia has never given up, even when it looked like support for the Shield was waning, and it doesn't plan to stop any time soon.

The soul of Shield

Gaming has been central to Nvidia since its start, and that focus gave rise to the Shield. "Pretty much everybody who worked at Nvidia in the early days really wanted to make a game console," said Bell, who has worked at the company for 25 years.

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Last year, Google showed off Genie 3, an updated version of its AI world model with impressive long-term memory that allowed it to create interactive worlds from a simple text prompt. At the time, Google only provided Genie to a small group of trusted testers. Now, it's available more widely as Project Genie, but only for those paying for Google's most expensive AI subscription.

World models are exactly what they sound like—an AI that generates a dynamic environment on the fly. They're not technically 3D worlds, though. World models like Genie 3 create a video that responds to your control inputs, allowing you to explore the simulation as if it were a real virtual world. Genie 3 was a breakthrough in world models because it could remember details of the world it was creating for a much longer time. But in this context, a "long time" is a couple of minutes.

Project Genie is essentially a cleaned-up version of Genie 3, which plugs into updated AI models like Nano Banana Pro and Gemini 3. Google has a number of pre-built worlds available in Project Genie, but it's the ability to create new things that makes it interesting. You can provide an image for reference or simply tell Genie what you want from the environment and the character.

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Google began stuffing Gemini into its dominant Chrome browser several months ago, and today the AI is expanding its capabilities considerably. Google says the chatbot will be easier to access and connect to more Google services, but the biggest change is the addition of Google's autonomous browsing agent, which it has dubbed Auto Browse. Similar to tools like OpenAI Atlas, Auto Browse can handle tedious tasks in Chrome so you don't have to.

The newly unveiled Gemini features in Chrome are accessible from the omnipresent AI button that has been lurking at the top of the window for the last few months. Initially, that button only opened Gemini in a pop-up window, but Google now says it will default to a split-screen or "Sidepanel" view. Google confirmed the update began rolling out over the past week, so you may already have it.

You can still pop Gemini out into a floating window, but the split-view gives Gemini more room to breathe while manipulating a page with AI. This is also helpful when calling other apps in the Chrome implementation of Gemini. The chatbot can now access Gmail, Calendar, YouTube, Maps, Google Shopping, and Google Flights right from the Chrome window. Google technically added this feature around the middle of January, but it's only talking about it now.

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It can be hard sometimes to keep up with the deluge of generative AI in Google products. Even if you try to avoid it all, there are some features that still manage to get in your face. Case in point: AI Overviews. This AI-powered search experience has a reputation for getting things wrong, but you may notice some improvements soon. Google says AI Overviews is being upgraded to the latest Gemini 3 models with a more conversational bent.

In just the last year, Google has radically expanded the number of searches on which you get an AI Overview at the top. Today, the chatbot will almost always have an answer for your query, which has relied mostly on models in Google's Gemini 2.5 family. There was nothing wrong with Gemini 2.5 as generative AI models go, but Gemini 3 is a little better by every metric.

There are, of course, multiple versions of Gemini 3, and Google doesn't like to be specific about which ones appear in your searches. What Google does say is that AI Overviews chooses the right model for the job. So if you're searching for something simple for which there are a lot of valid sources, AI Overviews may manifest something like Gemini 3 Flash without running through a ton of reasoning tokens. For a complex "long tail" query, it could step up the thinking or move to Gemini 3 Pro (for paying subscribers).

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