Jonathan Kanter’s team won two antitrust trials against Google for the DOJ. But the big question is what happens next.
Several units within Google have told remote staffers that their roles may be at risk if they don’t start showing up at the closest office for a hybrid work schedule, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC. Some of those employees were previously approved for remote work.
Google brought back many employees to the office three days per week in 2022.
Google has finally revealed the lineup for next month’s event, which will include keynotes with updates across Gemini, Android, Chrome, and more. You can check out the full schedule of live sessions and keynotes from the Google I/O website.
[developers.googleblog.com]
As reported earlier by The Information, data shown in court during the remedies portion of Google’s search antitrust trial says that as of last month, Google’s internal data counted 35 million daily active users for Gemini.
Those numbers show it trailing the Google analysts’ estimates for ChatGPT (160 million daily active users, with an additional one million users added in an hour at the end of March, according to Sam Altman), but ahead of other tools from Microsoft, Perplexity, and Anthropic.
Nearly one year ago, Google said it would upgrade its photo picker with a way to search your local or cloud library to find specific photos to share with an app. Now, Android Authority contributor Kamila Wojciechowska has spotted the feature on her device, hopefully saving you from digging through countless photos.
It’s still not clear when Google plans to widely roll this out, though Android Authority notes that it’s “enabled in recent Google Play System Updates” but not yet on Google Photos.
[androidauthority.com]
After the September Pixel Watch update to Wear OS 5 ran into issues, Google released a fix in November and said its wearables would have to wait until March for another update.
However, that March update and Google’s first attempt at an April update introduced some bugs of their own, and now it’s rolling out the April update again (version BP1A.250305.019.W8) to hopefully get Pixel Watch owners on Wear OS 5.1 without all of those problems.
[support.google.com]
The landmark search trial has entered its remedy phase, and the government has big goals for the world’s biggest search engine.
My big question coming into this remedies trial was how serious the government was about making Google divest Chrome. It’s a swing, and seemed like maybe a negotiating tactic. But in opening arguments it became clear that getting Chrome out of Google is very much part of the goal. So far, judge Amit Mehta seems skeptical of the idea, but Jonathan Sallet, a lawyer representing the states, argued that something has to be done with maybe the most-used app on the planet:
“This kind of asset — 4 billion users — does not come up very often for potential companies to acquire.”
