Gemini Goes Free, One UI 7 Goes And Comes, And It’s Almost Go Time For Android 16
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Gemini’s best feature goes free for all, and all features go free for some in this week’s news
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The week in mobile had a few surprises, but none bigger than Google practically giving away Gemini Advanced on multiple fronts. College students can get the whole shebang without giving up a dime, and everyone else now has access to its single best feature — one that’s actually kind of mind-blowing.
Elsewhere, Samsung did the two-step with One UI 7, pausing its rollout after a long wait, then resuming after a brief delay. Meanwhile, Google Assistant died yet another death, and there’s a peculiar problem with the Pixel’s wallpaper app. We’ll get you caught up on the week’s top Android headlines below.
Last Week’s Roundup
Gemini’s best feature goes free for all (and all features go free for some)
On Wednesday, people on the free tier of Google Gemini started noticing that Gemini Live’s new camera and screen-sharing features were available, despite having rolled out to most Gemini Advanced users just two weeks prior. If you haven’t seen it yet, the feature is borderline mind-blowing, even if it’s not perfectly seamless. In short, you can talk to the AI about what’s around you in real time — basically Project Astra incarnate.
Google followed that up with another free Gemini drop on Thursday. From now until June 30, 2025, every eligible college student in the US can claim a free Gemini Advanced subscription that lasts until spring 2026. This even comes with 2TB of Google Drive storage, so it’s a lot like the Pixel 9 Pro’s Gemini deal — and that means you’ll also get access to the new Veo 2 video generation feature Google rolled out on Tuesday.
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Android 16 hits its last milestone before a stable release
Google published its development timeline for Android 16 alongside the first Developer Preview back in November, and so far, things have been going perfectly according to plan. In an interview with Android Police’s James Peckham last month, Google’s President of the Android Ecosystem let us know that things are still on track for a Q2 2025 stable release — which would mean anytime between now and June.
On Thursday, Google released Android 16 Beta 4, which was the last bullet on that development timeline before the public version. There could still be another 4.x release or two if any significant bugs arise, but it appears the company’s new Trunk Stable approach to development is working. At the rate things are going, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Android 16 make its stable debut at Google I/O 2025 next month.
One UI 7 is off again, on again
Seven is considered to be a lucky number in many cultures, but if you asked Samsung’s Android engineers right about now, they’d say it’s a cursed digit. After apparent delays and a drawn-out beta period, the company released its One UI 7 update for 2024 flagships last week, and those engineers no doubt felt like they finally got a monkey off their backs.
Except on Monday, Samsung had to hit the emergency stop button on One UI 7’s rollout — apparently there was a major bug, so the update was put on pause across the globe. Thankfully, this delay didn’t drag out as long as the beta bugs, because on Thursday, Samsung started rolling out a fresh new build of One UI 7 in Korea.
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Google Assistant dies another death
It was about a month ago when we learned that Google Assistant would be phased out by the end of this year, with Gemini taking its place on most devices. Now, Fitbit users are getting notifications that say Google Assistant will stop working in the coming weeks on those devices. It’s unclear if Gemini will be offered as a replacement on Fitbit, and even though we all saw this coming, things seem to be happening faster than most expected.
Google’s wallpaper app has a peculiar problem
This week, we noticed something strange in the Pixel’s Wallpaper & style app — when you select one of the recent wallpapers on the overview screen (before you drill down into all the available backgrounds), you get kicked right back to the wallpaper you were already using. We noticed this on Android 15 stable builds and Android 16 betas alike, though not all of our devices were affected by the bug.
Interestingly, it’s more of a visual glitch than a functional one. When you select a wallpaper and get “rejected,” you’ll still see the new background when you head to your home screen. But this still creates a problem — once you select an image and get booted back to the original, you can’t reapply the first wallpaper since the system thinks it’s still selected.
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