Android’s new features: Wider privacy canvas, BMW car keys and new Google Photos

Android phone users have several new features to look forward to. In the days to come, Google will roll out new apps and feature sets. The good thing with the latest bucket of updates is that as they land on your phone, they won’t be dependent on your phone maker. Google will enable them directly. The staggered roll-out starts shortly.

There will be an expansion of the app permissions privacy feature that will now be available for more Android phones, as well as updates for Google Photos and Android Auto apps, a new Family Bell, while BMW owners will be able to use Google Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S21 series phones as a key for their car.

Let us talk about Google Photos first. The new Memories update will now appear in the photo grid and can be set to feature a curated selection of photos and videos from holidays or important milestones such as birthdays.

You’ll be able to see this in your Photos app sometime in the next few days. The Google Photos widget for Android phones can be set to show photos of select people or pets on your phone’s home screen. Till now, the widgets weren’t customisable to this extent. The new widget will be available from next week.

Also Read: Nokia T20 can stop the budget Android tablet market from drifting aimlessly

If you own a BMW car and any of the Google Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro or Samsung Galaxy S21 series phones, you can now use your phone as a digital key to access your car. Google doesn’t list which BMW series and models this will be available with at the time of the rollout, except the rather ambiguous “compatible BMW cars” guidance - this should include all of BMW’s 2020, 2021 and 2022 portfolio.

It was in May that Google had first announced the car key feature for Android 12 and works with the ultrawide band (UWB) and near-field communication (NFC), for wider compatibility with the older vehicles requiring the latter connectivity to work.

Android Auto is also in line for its biggest update in years, which is optimised for the “wireless Android Auto” functionality which is becoming common in cars now. As soon as your phone connects with a paired vehicle once the car is switched on, the Android Auto interface will automatically load on the phone.

Next in line is the voice search functionality, with which you’ll be able to call out with your voice to search for media across apps, when using Android Auto.

Google also confirms Android Auto will get the smart reply option too, allowing users to respond to a text message using Google Assistant within Android Auto.

Android’s built-in privacy feature, which limits permissions available to an installed app if it hasn’t been used for a specific number of days, will now be available on more versions of the operating system.

From January 2022, this will be made available on all Android phones that run Android 6.0 or higher versions. That’ll be a demographic worth a billion devices. Till now, this was largely available for phones running the new Android 12 or last year’s Android 11 iterations.

Family Bell alerts, which tie in well with smart speakers and smart displays, will now work on smartphones, too. You can set a time-based alert for the rest of your family members for any important moment through the day. Or you can just set an alert for yourself, to avoid missing something that’s in plain sight.