Google Announces Holiday Themes and New Features for Android

Last Updated on December 2, 2021 by Anu Joy

The holiday season in the US spans from Thanksgiving in November to New Year’s Day in January. To offer a personalised feel to your devices, Google is now bringing holiday-themed widgets, UI elements, new features, security updates, and a lot more to its Android operating system. That’s not all, it is also offering holiday-themed photo memories to make your Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year celebrations even more exciting and memorable.  

Google’s Holiday Season Features For Android

Google’s Family Bell feature allows you to fix daily schedules and important tasks for all your family members. It ensures that your family members are on track by sending notification alerts to their smartphones, smart displays or home speakers. Members can also set individual goals from their devices. Family Bell can be easily managed and customised from your selected device.

Google has introduced three new holiday-themed widgets. The new Google Play Books widget provides access to your favourite library of books and audiobooks. The YouTube Music widget enables you to play your favourite tunes right from the home screen.  Lastly, the Google Photos People & Pets widget offers AI (Artificial Intelligence) decorated home screens with images of your dear ones. Google Photos also displays memories in the form of images and videos in your photo grid. It will also allow you to rename, personalise, edit or remove the memories from your photo grid.

Hitting the road for some errands or taking a trip somewhere this season? Android Auto has received some updates to assist you while you stay focused on the road ahead. You can set Android Auto to launch automatically when you connect it to your car’s infotainment system. It will offer smart reply options via Google Assistant, which are also customisable. A single tap on the always-on play button on the home screen will start playing your favourite playlist. Google is also bringing voice search for music soon to Android Auto.

Devices running on Android 6.0 and above will get a permissions auto-reset privacy feature. This feature will automatically turn off runtime permissions for apps that you haven’t used for a while. You can enable permissions to such apps again if you wish to by opening the app or via the settings menu.