According to the latest release notes for Google Play services, Android phones will be getting a “new local file backup feature” powered by Google Drive.
[Phone] With the new local file backup feature, you can automatically save your downloaded documents to Google Drive, ensuring they are safe and accessible from any of your devices.
“Local file backup” sounds like a straightforward backup feature that works in the background for your Android device’s “Download” folder (“your downloaded documents”). It’s what the Google Drive for desktop app does on Mac and Windows.
To be clear, it’s different from Android’s existing backup that uses your Google Drive storage for Apps and app data, Call history, Contacts, Device settings, and SMS and MMS messages.
We don’t have the exact implementation details today. The simplest approach would see every file in “Download” get uploaded to a new equivalent folder in Drive that you can access like anything else in drive.google.com or through the apps. If you have multiple phones and tablets, that folder might be named by device.
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A more complex solution would keep one Download folder synced between devices. Despite the label, it should be available for both Android phones and tablets.
The feature is listed under “Utilities” with version 26.06 of Google Play services. As always, it takes some time for features that appear in these release notes to actually roll out.
This capability is a good idea given how people often download documents to their primary computing device without uploading them anywhere else. As such, they only ever have one copy of important PDFs. There’s a higher chance that images and videos get stored in Google Photos.
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The estimated Powerball jackpot is $154 million. The lump sum payment before taxes would be about $72.2 million.
The Double Play is a feature that gives players in select locations another chance to match their Powerball numbers in a separate drawing. The Double Play drawing is held following the regular drawing and has a top cash prize of $10 million.
Powerball is held in 45 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The Double Play add-on feature is available for purchase in 13 lottery jurisdictions, including Pennsylvania and Michigan.
A $2 ticket gives you a one in 292.2 million chance at joining the hall of Powerball jackpot champions.
The drawings are held at 10:59 p.m. Eastern, Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. The deadline to purchase tickets is 9:45 p.m.
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Frederick Wiseman made roughly 50 documentaries, many of which chronicled the inner workings of everyday institutions. He’s pictured above at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013.
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Frederick Wiseman made roughly 50 documentaries, many of which chronicled the inner workings of everyday institutions. He’s pictured above at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013.
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Filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has died. The celebrated documentarian started making documentaries that captured the weirdness and wonder of everyday life in the mid 1960s and did not stop until2023.
Wiseman died Monday. His family issued a joint statement withZipporah Films. He was 96.
Making movies was always an adventure, Wiseman said in 2016, during a speech at the Academy Awards when he won an honorary Oscar.
“I usually know nothing about the subject before I start,” he said at the black-tie ceremony. “And I know there are those that feel I know nothing about it when it’s finished!”
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Wiseman was extremely prolific. He made roughly 50 documentaries, many of which chronicled the inner workings of institutions as diverse as the Idaho state legislature (State Legislature, 2007), the New York Public Library (Ex Libris, 2017), and a high school in Philadelphia (High School, 1968).
“I wish I could be more like him,” said Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris in an interview with NPR about Wiseman before the elder filmmaker died.
Morris said Wiseman’s super-charged yet subtle way of interpreting everyday life had more in common with the Theater of the Absurd than documentary filmmaking. (Indeed, Wiseman also had a career as a theater director in the U.S. and Europe, helming plays by the likes of Samuel Beckett and Luigi Pirandello.)
“He has a way of finding in reality some of the most surreal, absurd moments that I’ve ever seen anywhere,” Morris said.
By way of example, Morris points to a scene in Wiseman’s 1993 documentary Zoo, in which an all-women surgical team at Miami zoo castrates a wolf.
“And it seems like the entire scene is populated by women except for the janitor standing by the exit door, looking nervously on with his hands folded over his crotch,” Morris said. “To me, this is really almost as good as it gets.”
Morris added Wiseman was a mentor to him and a close friend. After Morris lost both his father and brother to heart disease, and was worried about his own fate, the filmmaker said Wiseman organized medical help for him. “I can even credit Fred with saving my life,” Morris said.
Frederick Wiseman was born in Boston in 1930. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and living in Paris during the 1950s, he taught law at Boston University.
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It was taking his students on field trips to Bridgewater State Hospital, a Massachusetts prison facility for the criminally insane, that compelled the then law professor to direct his first, and most famous, film. Made in 1967, Titicut Follies gets its title from a stage show put on by the inmates at the institution.
After its seemingly benign opening, the movie captures the appalling conditions under which the inmates are kept, with unblinking scenes of bullying, force feeding, strip searches and squalor.
Titicut Follies was so shocking, the state of Massachusetts managed to get it banned from public screenings for more than two decades.
“In order for anyone to see that film, for years you had to sign a declaration saying that you were a professional in one of the following fields, like criminology, law or film studies,” said film scholar Barry Keith Grant, author ofVoyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman.
Still, Grant said the movie sealed Wiseman’s future.
“It gave him a lot of notoriety and it helped establish his career,” Grant said.
Over the years, Wiseman became known for his meticulous, hands-on process. He directed, produced and edited his movies. In a 2014 interview with NPR, the filmmaker described making National Gallery, his documentary about the famed London art museum.
“I was there for three months, every day for twelve weeks, probably twelve, fourteen hours a day,” Wiseman said of the shoot, adding he amassed 170 hours of footage. “So the ratio between film shot and film used is about 60 to one.”
Wiseman’s films were also known for their prodigious length, running for as long as six hours. “I don’t tailor the length to meet any commercial needs,” Wiseman said. “I assume if people are interested, they’ll watch it, whether it’s 75 minutes or three hours.”
Frederick Wiseman poses with his Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award at the Venice Film Festival in August 2014.
Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, recently revealed he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year. While his visits included stops at companies like Lovable — where he posted from its office — the trips were also about finding future Swedish unicorns before they cross the Atlantic.
This all came to light when news emerged that a16z had led a $2.3 million pre-seed round into Dentio, a Swedish startup that uses AI to help dentists’ practices with admin work. While this is a small check for a firm that just announced new funds totaling $15 billion, it confirms that U.S. VCs are actively seeking deal flow outside of the U.S., even without local offices.
Stockholm is a natural stop for a16z, which previously achieved significant returns from backing Skype, cofounded by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström. Since then, a significant number of fast-growing startups have been created in the Swedish capital, and the VC heavyweight tracked down where many of them were coming from.
“We spend a lot of time developing a deep understanding of specific markets and knowing where innovation is emerging. In Sweden, that has meant closely tracking ecosystems like SSE Labs — the startup incubator of the Stockholm School of Economics — and the companies coming out of it,” Vasquez told TechCrunch.
Like fintech giant Klarna, legal AI startup Legora, and e-scooter company Voi, Dentio is an alum of SSE Labs — a startup incubator that has produced several successful Swedish companies. The three former high school classmates Elias Afrasiabi, Anton Li and Lukas Sjögren joined the incubator after reconnecting as students at both the SSE (Stockholm School of Economics) and KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), then joined the incubator with additional backing from KTH’s Innovation Launch program. They tackled a problem close to home: Li’s mom, a dentist, had told them how admin work detracted from clinical care.
The trio intuited that they could leverage LLMs to help people like her — an idea that they also validated with her and her colleagues. This led them to Dentio’s initial product, a recording tool that uses AI to generate clinical notes. But it’s only a matter of time before AI scribes become a commodity product, and Dentio needs to prove its value to dentists so they aren’t tempted to switch providers when that happens, Afrasiabi said.
Potential competitors include fellow Swedish startup Tandem Health, which raised a $50 million Series A round last year to support clinicians with AI across multiple medical specialties. Dentio, by contrast, focuses exclusively on dentists, but it believes it can still reach the scale VCs expect through international expansion
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“Now we’re a team of seven people, and we think that it’s possible to build a unified way of handling administration all over Europe, and maybe even all over the world,” Afrasiabi said. While Europe’s healthcare systems are fragmented, they share similarities, and Dentio’s assumption is that what works in Sweden could work elsewhere in the EU.
Dentio prominently features its “Made in Sweden” branding and emphasizes that “all relevant data is processed in Sweden and Finland in compliance with Swedish and EU law.” It signals data protection to privacy-conscious European customers. But it also signals potential to VCs — a callback to Sweden’s history of producing breakout companies.
“We went to zero meetups. I reached out to zero investors,” Afrasiabi said. While the team was heads down building, the word spread out. “I think it was mostly through referrals and people talking to each other that the news got all the way over to the U.S.,” he said.
This wasn’t happenstance: a16z has eyes around the world in order to spot these companies as early as local funds might, Vasquez said. “In Sweden for example, we partnered with top founders abroad like Fredrik Hjelm, founder of Voi, and Johannes Schildt, founder of Kry, by turning them into scouts and mapping the best local talent.”
For Vasquez, who focuses on AI application investments for a16z, this isn’t just about Sweden, but about “a pattern of great global companies being born abroad and scaling quickly,” from Black Forest Labs in Germany to Manus, the Singapore-based AI startup recently acquired by Meta.
Born and raised in El Salvador, he has also been spending time in São Paulo. “I’m really excited about what’s brewing in Brazil and across Latin America in AI,” he wrote on LinkedIn at the time. “I believe AI is the great equalizer,” he added. “Most people now have access to PhD-level intelligence on a phone, and ultimately, Silicon Valley is a state of mind.”
Correction: This story originally stated that a16z is an investor in Lovable owing to an editing error.
Apple is planning a major update for its Podcasts app. The entire app is switching to the company’s . Previously, it streamed video in various formats like MOV, MP4 and M4V.
This provides several benefits for the end user. It lets people switch seamlessly between watching and listening, in addition to offering a horizontal full display option. It’ll also make both video and audio streams available to download for offline viewing. This wasn’t possible with the previous streaming method, which pulled content from an RSS-like feed.
The technology integrates picture-in-picture for multitasking on products like the iPad. Finally, the updated app will automatically adjust the picture quality to ensure smooth playback in various network conditions, including both Wi-Fi and cellular.
The update will be available on most platforms, including iOS, iPadOS, visionOS and the web. It’s in beta right now, but the company plans a major rollout this spring as part of the .
It’s a tale as old as time. Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Buds 4 have leaked, almost a full week before the company’s launch event.
The Galaxy Buds 4 aren’t the only earbuds, or even devices, getting released at Samsung Unpacked. On February 25, the company is expected to debut the Galaxy S26 lineup, and the Buds and Buds Pro series are just the cherry on top.
According to newly leaked images from a retailer’s website, the Galaxy Buds 4 have nothing left to hide (via SammyGuru). Previous leaks have emerged with images showcasing the Galaxy Buds 4’s stemmed design, but nothing as well-rounded as this.
The leak shows off images of the buds themselves, as well as the case from different angles, and the Buds 4 inside the case while charging.
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The Galaxy Buds 4 will carry on some elements of the previous model’s design, like the stem. The stem is simplified without that triangular profile. In that change, though, they look a little cheaper than previous editions, reminiscent of late 2010s earbuds that you could find for $50 or less.
The buds will notably miss out on silicone eartips, though that wasn’t unexpected. The Pro model brings more comfortable eartips to the table. The images also show off the top microphone port, and it seems Samsung is going with a larger circular design than the slotted look in previous versions.
The case seems to look pretty nice, although familiar. It has a transparent lid that allows the Buds 4 to stay visible while charging. It takes on a traditional square look with a USB-C port on the back for charging. The little box looks similar to a design we saw before the Buds 3.
It looks like the vertical storage design is going away as this more familiar case comes back into play. Even with a stemmed design, it seems Samsung wants to bring back a build that gives the user some easier access to the earbuds.
The listing notes that the Galaxy Buds 3 will bring support for “two AI assistants,” though that likely means Bixby and Gemini. The details emphasize adaptive sound with 3D sound customization and head gesture controls. Water resistance is rated at IP55.
The leak is short on battery details other than a 24-hour total playing time, but rumors are circulating that they should offer a slightly smaller battery with similar life expectancy.
This comes as Samsung seems to have apparently removed traces of the previous Galaxy Buds 3 model in the US ahead of its launch event for the new version, according to reports from SamMobile. There’s no information on why this might be the case, but the timing is curious, as is the future of the more affordable Buds design over the Pro edition.
Samsung is expected to announce the Galaxy Buds 4 on February 25 with the rest of the company’s big releases. The Buds 4 are rumored to stick with a similar price tag to last year’s release.
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After more than 130 years, Labouré College of Healthcare in Milton is closing its doors and is being acquired by its neighbor, Curry College.
The merger will create one of the largest, comprehensive nursing schools in New England, offering associate, bachelor’s and master’s degree programs, according to the schools.
Labouré has struggled with declining enrollment and finances and faced regulatory challenges, according to a Feb. 12 announcement from Lily Hsu, Labouré’s president.
The agreement, pending regulatory approvals, will allow many of Labouré’s programs to transfer to Curry College. Other students will be able to graduate before the institution closes Aug. 31 or transfer to other colleges.
“To our students, we know how hard you work — going to school while working, raising families and balancing so many other things in your life. This will not prevent you from reaching your goal,” Hsu said.
Labouré chose Curry because both schools prioritize affordable education for working adults and healthcare professionals.
Labouré’s enrollment has been in decline since peaking in 2020 at 1,188 students. In 2024, the college decreased to 530 students. Enrollment at Curry has also been in decline.
At the same time, there is a growing workforce shortage of nurses and other healthcare professionals in the Commonwealth.
“By creating the Labouré Center and adding Labouré’s nursing programs to Curry’s School of Nursing and Health Sciences, we are furthering the sustainability of this education for the benefit of the studentsand for the healthcare providers in our region who desperately need these nurses,” said Jay Gonzalez, Curry’s president.
Labouré students will be able to transfer credits and complete their program under the same tuition and fees.
Curry will also honor the college by establishing the Labouré Center for Advancing Healthcare Opportunity. The center will be funded with the college’s endowment.
“For more than a century, Labouré has educated nurses and healthcare professionals to offer equitable and dignified care to the people of Massachusetts and expanded the healthcare workforce to serve communities most in need. While I no doubt share your disappointment that the college must end its academic operations, I am comforted that the Labouré mission continues and Labouré nurses will remain essential to the health and wellness of our community for years to come,” Hsu said.
With an eye towards luring more AI investment to the country, India is hosting a four-day AI Impact Summit this week that will be attended by executives from major AI labs and Big Tech, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, as well as heads of state.
The event, which expects 250,000 visitors, will see Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis in attendance.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is scheduled to deliver a speech with French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday.
A few years ago, it may have been fashionable to spend $1,000 on the latest flagship smartphone, but for most people, that’s neither practical nor necessary. You don’t even have to spend $500 today to get a decent handset, whether it’s a refurbished iPhone or an affordable Android phone, as there are plenty of decent options as low as $160.
However, navigating the budget phone market can be tricky; options that look good on paper may not be in practice, and some devices will end up costing you more when you consider many come with restrictive storage. While we spend most of our time reviewing mid- to high-end handsets at Engadget, we’ve tested a number of the latest budget-friendly phones on the market to see cut it as the best cheap phones you can get right now.
Building a good budget phone is tricky as manufacturers have a very hard limit on what they can include while staying under cost. Samsung has balanced this nicely on the Galaxy A17 5G by equipping it with a large 6.7-inch OLED display with solid brightness (up to 800 nits) and a 90Hz refresh rate. The phone’s design also defies its price because while it is made from polycarbonate (aka plastic), it doesn’t feel cheap. You even get a microSD card slot for expandable storage and three cameras in back. However, since one of those is a 2MP macro, it probably won’t see nearly as much use as the 50MP main or 5MP ultra-wide.
The one thing I wish Samsung splurged a bit more on is the phone’s Exynos 1330 chip, as it’s a little dated and sometimes struggles with things like multitasking or running more demanding apps. That said, starting at just $200 (or less depending on discounts), the Galaxy A17 delivers a lot of value for not a ton of money. — Sam Rutherford, Senior Reporter
OnePlus
The OnePlus Nord N30 5G was our previous top pick. At $300, it’s normally $100 more expensive than the A16 5G. However, if you can find it on sale for less, it’s still worth considering over the A16. For one, the N30 features a faster 120Hz display and its Snapdragon 695 chip, while older than the A16’s Exynos 1330, still outperforms it in some areas.
Another reason to consider the N30 over the A16 is that it ships with a 50W power adapter, letting you get a full day of battery life in 30 minutes. If you hope to use your new phone for as long as possible, the A16 is the better choice, but the N30 can be a compelling alternative. — Igor Bonifacic, Senior Reporter
Motorola
For those on a really tight budget, the 2024 Moto G Play covers all the bases well. It has a decently fast Snapdragon 680 processor along with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. And while that last number might seem small, the phone has a microSD card slot so you can add more space if and when you need it.
Its 6.5-inch LCD screen is also surprisingly sharp with a 90Hz refresh rate. The Moto G Play even has an IP52 rating for dust and water resistance. That isn’t much, but it’s good enough to protect against an errant splash or two. Sure, the G Play is basic, but it’s basic in a good way. — S.R.
Motorola
The $400 Motorola Moto G Stylus 5G offers something none of the other picks on this list do: a built-in stylus. If you love doodling and jotting down notes, then this is the cheap phone to buy. Thankfully, it has a few other things going for it too. The Moto G Stylus 5G sports a big and responsive 6.7-inch display and a long-lasting 5,000mAh battery. Plus, it doesn’t look half bad.
As with other options in this price range, it would be nice if the Moto G Stylus 5G came with a more capable camera, faster charging and protection against water. With this recommendation, be sure to avoid paying full price for the Moto G Stylus 5G. Thankfully, that’s not hard to do with the phone frequently on sale. — I.B.
What to look for in a cheap phone
For this guide, our top picks cost between $100 and $300. Anything less and you might as well go buy a dumb phone instead. Since they’re meant to be more affordable than flagship phones and even midrange handsets, budget smartphones involve compromises; the cheaper a device, the lower your expectations around specs, performance and experience should be. For that reason, the best advice I can give is to spend as much as you can afford. In this price range, even $50 or $100 more can get you a dramatically better product.
Second, you should know what you want most from a phone. When buying a budget smartphone, you may need to sacrifice a decent main camera for long battery life, or trade a high-resolution display for a faster CPU. That’s just what comes with the territory, but knowing your priorities will make it easier to find the right phone.
It’s also worth noting some features can be hard to find on cheaper handsets. For instance, you won’t need to search far for a device with all-day battery life — but if you want a phone with excellent camera quality, you’re better off shelling out for one of the recommendations in our midrange smartphone guide, which all come in at $600 or less.
Wireless charging and waterproofing also aren’t easy to find in this price range and forget about the fastest chipset. On the bright side, most of our recommendations come with headphone jacks, so you won’t need to buy wireless headphones.
iOS is also off the table, since, following the discontinuation of the iPhone SE, the $599 iPhone 16e is now the most affordable offering from Apple. That leaves Android as the only option in the under-$300 price range. Thankfully today, there’s little to complain about Google’s operating system – and you may even prefer it to iOS.
Lastly, keep in mind most Android manufacturers typically offer far less robust software features and support for their budget devices. In some cases, your new phone may only receive one major software update and a year or two of security patches beyond that. That applies to the OnePlus and Motorola recommendations on our list.
If you’d like to keep your phone for as long as possible, Samsung has the best software policy of any Android manufacturer in the budget space, offering at least four years of security updates on all of its devices. Recently, it even began offering six years of support on the $200 A16 5G, which we recommend below. That said, if software support (or device longevity overall) is your main focus, consider spending a bit more on the $500 Google Pixel 9a, or even the previous-gen Pixel 8a, which has planned software updates through mid-2031.
One of the key marketing points of the Apple AirTag is “Precision Finding,” which shows you the precise location of your tracker beyond what Bluetooth is capable of. That’s accomplished using UWB, but that feature is also missing from the vast majority of Android Find Hub trackers, and there are a few key reasons why.
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Ultra-wideband (UWB) radios in smartphones can be used for a number of functions, but one of the biggest use cases is the ability to precisely calculate the distance between your smartphone and another object. For trackers, that means being able to not only get in the general area of the tracker, but have your smartphone point out the exact distance between you and the tracker and the direction to.
That’s an obvious benefit, of course, but I’ve personally never been all that sold on it. Between AirTags, Galaxy SmartTag, and various Android Find Hub trackers, I never find myself really missing UWB. Why? Firstly, it matters a lot what you’re actually tracking. If it’s a suitcase, backpack, purse, or anything else, Bluetooth is going to get you close enough to find it, where UWB really just has little to no added benefit. UWB only comes in handy with smaller items, like your keys or wallet. But, even then, I’ve largely found Bluetooth to be sufficient, with the chime built into all of these trackers filling any leftover gap in being able to actually find the item.
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But that’s just me. Clearly, there’s a vocal audience of people who want UWB in their trackers.
Not a single Android Find Hub tracker launch goes by where we don’t get comments on our coverage here at 9to5Google asking why there’s no UWB support. It happens over and over and over and over and over again – and those are just in articles from the first two months of 2026.
To date, there’s only been a single Android Find Hub tracker with UWB, and that’s the Moto Tag – with another UWB-equipped sequel in the “Moto Tag 2” on the way. Despite Google providing the software support, no one seems to be interested in latching on, with the latest being the upcoming Xiaomi Tag, which also appears to be skipping UWB.
Moto Tag 2 features UWB, but the upcoming Xiaomi Tag seemingly doesn’t
Even as someone who doesn’t really care if a tracker has UWB or not, it is a little frustrating to see functionality left to be neglected, but there are some key reasons for this.
First and foremost, there’s the “F-word” – fragmentation. Not of Android software, but of hardware.
Where Apple has been equipping every iPhone with UWB for a few years now, it’s still relatively uncommon on Android. You’ll find it in top-end flagships like the Pixel Pro and Galaxy Ultra-level devices, but even Google’s base Pixel 10 lacks UWB, as does Samsung’s mass-market Galaxy S25. Those are $800 phones that simply lack the hardware to do this entirely, and they’re not alone. OnePlus 15, Nothing Phone (3), Honor Magic 8 Pro, and Oppo Find X9, just as a few more examples, also don’t support UWB. Plus, Samsung even restricted UWB on some of its older phones solely to its own tracker, with Moto Tag not being able to leverage that hardware. So even as the market moves more and more into premium smartphones, Android as a whole just doesn’t prioritize UWB on a hardware level.
That alone is reason enough for Android Find Hub trackers to largely ignore UWB, but the bigger reason looks to be Apple.
UWB is something that Apple seems to have no interest in allowing third-party Find My trackers to support. It’s an AirTag exclusive, just like how Apple tends to severely hinder functionality on third-party smartwatches and various other accessories.
Apple loves to advertise UWB-powered “Precision Finding,” an AirTag-only feature
Tile has been fighting this one for years now, but as it stands today, the only way to make a tracker for Apple’s Find My network is to focus on Bluetooth. As such, why would anyone building a tracker that supports both networks – which is very much the trend now – even bother throwing in UWB? It only adds cost and works for just a fraction of a fraction of devices people will be using with that tracker.
That’s backed up by Pebblebee, one of the leading makers of Android Find Hub trackers. Speaking to 9to5Google, Pebblebee founder and CEO Daniel Daoura said that “creating a version” of its tracker “that only enables UWB on one platform (Android) but not the other (iOS) would be confusing for customers.”
Adding to that, Daoura said that “UWB silicon still adds meaningful cost.” In a market where the AirTag is already cheaper than most third-party accessories – $29.99 vs the $34.99 price tag we see from Pebblebee and others – adding any additional cost just doesn’t make much sense, especially as Daoura says that “we consistently hear from users… that fast audible alerts and bright visual cues solve most real-world problems. People want their item to ring loudly or flash so they can find it quickly.” As such, Pebblebee Clip 5 integrated a louder speaker and brighter LEDs when it launched last year – and it’s still louder than AirTag 2.
Pebblebee’s latest trackers still skip UWB, but they focus on being louder – both in design and speaker – because that’s what the company found users are actually asking for
So, while a lack of Android hardware support is probably a key reason, I’d argue that Apple is an even bigger reason that we don’t see UWB on third-party trackers. As Pebblebee brings out, it just doesn’t make sense to make a tracker that supports UWB on one phone but not the other, especially when you bring cost into the mix.
On that note, we’ve heard from multiple sources that the reason you won’t see any trackers that support both Apple’s Find My and Android’s Find Hub networks simultaneously is that Apple’s terms block this, so the current state of pairing to one or the other and resetting to swap is the best we’ll get for the time being.
Right now, UWB support for Android Find Hub trackers feels very much like a “chicken and the egg” situation, just with several layers to it. Tracker makers don’t have much of an incentive to support UWB if Apple is blocking it, and most Android phones don’t support it anyway. Android manufacturers don’t have much of an incentive to include UWB hardware if there are no actual use cases. And Apple has no incentive to expand UWB to third-party devices because, well, they just want to sell you an AirTag.
Things may change over time, but that’s just how it is today.
UWB is a great idea and the way it’s been implemented in trackers is genuinely useful, but it’s also pretty clear why we’re not seeing it in more devices when you look at the big picture, and it’s a shame.
This Week’s Top Stories
Android 17 Beta 1
On Wednesday we were supposed to see the release of the first beta – yes, beta – for Android 17 but… it just didn’t happen. Google pulled the Wednesday announcement at the last minute. But there are a few early details that the company provided including the schedule of when we’ll see releases.
Then, on Friday, the beta dropped, but it’s fairly minimal.
Samsung confirms Galaxy S26 launch as the leaks continue
Samsung this week confirmed a February 25 launch event for the Galaxy S26 series, but the leaks continue to make this a relatively unexciting new release.
And some Pixel 10a leaks for good measure
Google has already confirmed the Pixel 10a’s launch date and shown it off, but that hasn’t stopped the leaks, including a spec breakdown and more.
