Generative AI has wormed its way into myriad products and services, some of which benefit more from these tools than others. Coding with AI has proven to be a better application than most, with individual developers and big companies leaning heavily on generative tools to create and debug programs. Now, indie developers have access to a new AI coding tool free of charge—Google has announced that Gemini Code Assist is available to everyone.

Gemini Code Assist was first released late last year as an enterprise tool, and the new version has almost all the same features. While you can use the standard Gemini or another AI model like ChatGPT to work on coding questions, Gemini Code Assist was designed to fully integrate with the tools developers are already using. Thus, you can tap the power of a large language model (LLM) without jumping between windows. With Gemini Code Assist connected to your development environment, the model will remain aware of your code and ready to swoop in with suggestions. The model can also address specific challenges per your requests, and you can chat with the model about your code, provided it's a public domain language.

At launch, Gemini Code Assist pricing started at $45 per month per user. Now, it costs nothing for individual developers, and the limits on the free tier are generous. Google says the product offers 180,000 code completions per month, which it claims is enough that even prolific professional developers won't run out. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which offers similar features with a limit of just 2,000 code completions and 50 Copilot chat messages per month. Google did the math to point out Gemini Code Assist offers 90 times the completions of Copilot.

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Qualcomm and Google have joined forces to extend software updates on Android devices. With Google's assistance, the chipmaker has committed to providing extended vendor support to any OEM building on its most powerful chips, pushing the theoretical lifespan of Android devices to eight years. There are plenty of caveats, but this move could make your next phone more useful for longer.

The extended support window only applies to Android devices with the latest Qualcomm chipsets. To start, the eight-year support timeline will be extended to devices running the new Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile platform, which has powered devices like the OnePlus 13 and Galaxy S25. Later this year, the same policy will be applied to the company's new Snapdragon 8 and Snapdragon 7-series chips, and you can expect the same deal for at least the next five generations of Qualcomm silicon.

"Through this collaboration, OEMs can more seamlessly update the software and security on their devices, ensuring a more secure and long-lasting Android experience for our users," said Google's Android Platform manager Seang Chau.

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Nothing, the smartphone venture from OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, is on its third generation of Android smartphones. The Nothing Phone 3a and 3a Pro will be officially announced on March 4, but there won't be much left to reveal. Not only has Nothing teased the phones a few times, there's also a new video highlighting the Nothing Phone 3a Pro's design. In it, Nothing's design team speaks at length about how they tried to incorporate the chunky camera module, but what they came up with is going to be divisive.

As we approach 20 years since the iPhone made touchscreen smartphones the default, the form factor is very fleshed out. Some of today's most popular smartphones have almost reached the point of anti-design—flat, unremarkable bodies that are intended to be covered up with a case. There's something to be said for that when most people slap a sheet of plastic on their phone and only remove it once in a blue moon. Nothing, however, designs phones with transparent panels and glowing "Glyphs" that are intended to be seen. In the case of the 3a Pro, there's also a camera module so big it's sure to stand out.

People generally want big screens and big batteries that don't make phones too thick or heavy. Some components have shrunk or been dropped entirely to free up space (a moment of silence for the dearly departed headphone jack). Camera modules, however, can't shrink infinitely. Smaller lenses and sensors have an impact on image quality, so expensive phones often have gargantuan camera arrays that can make phones top-heavy. For example, look at the Google Pixel 9 series, which features a camera bump that towers above the rest of the back.

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A username and password just won't cut it anymore. Users around the world logging into Gmail have often relied on Google SMS pings to securely access their accounts, but that's changing. Google now hopes to move beyond SMS, which has become so frequently abused that it negates any supposed security benefit. Instead of using SMS, the company will reportedly switch to using QR codes.

Currently, Google sends SMS codes for two reasons: to confirm that a new login is legitimate and to block spammers from opening Gmail accounts in bulk. You type in your credentials, and a moment later, Google texts a six-digit code for you to enter as well. It's not a terribly arduous process, and it can help protect your account, but SMS is not very secure.

SMS messages are delivered by mobile carriers without encryption, and they often go through intermediaries that can be compromised without your knowledge. Even if the line is secure, phone numbers have very little in the way of security.

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YouTube dominates online video, but it's absolutely crammed full of ads these days. A YouTube Premium subscription takes care of that, but ad blockers do exist. Google seems to have gotten the message—a cheaper streaming subscription is on the way that drops YouTube Music from the plan. You may have to give up more than music to get the cheaper rate, though.

Google started testing cheaper YouTube subscriptions in a few international markets, including Germany and Australia, over the past year. Those users have been offered the option of subscribing to the YouTube Premium plan, which runs $13.99 in the US, or a new plan that costs about half as much. For example, in Australia, the options are AU$23 for YouTube Premium or AU$12 for "YouTube Premium Lite."

The Lite plan drops YouTube Music but keeps ad-free YouTube, which is all most people want anyway. Based on the early tests, these plans will probably drop a few other features that you'd miss, including background playback and offline downloads. However, this plan could cost as little as $7–$8 in the US.

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After 14 years of trying and failing to gain a smartphone foothold, Amazon has announced it will discontinue its app store. Anyone who has content in Amazon's store will be able to access it for now, but all bets are off beginning on August 20, 2025. As part of the pull-back, the company is also discontinuing the Amazon Coins digital currency.

The Amazon Appstore made waves when it launched in 2011, offering an alternative to what at the time was known as the Android Market. Amazon even scored some early exclusives and gave away a plethora of premium content and Coins to anyone willing to do the legwork of installing the storefront on their Android phone.

That level of attention didn't last, though, and the Appstore today has hardly evolved from its humble beginnings, lacking most of the content and features people have come to expect from a mobile app store. If you want to check out the store on your phone before it goes away, you'll have to sideload the client by downloading an APK from Amazon. This process isn't hard, but it proved to be a significant barrier to entry for getting people into the Amazon ecosystem.

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Over the past few years, Google has embarked on a quest to jam generative AI into every product and initiative possible. Google has robots summarizing search results, interacting with your apps, and analyzing the data on your phone. And sometimes, the output of generative AI systems can be surprisingly good despite lacking any real knowledge. But can they do science?

Google Research is now angling to turn AI into a scientist—well, a "co-scientist." The company has a new multi-agent AI system based on Gemini 2.0 aimed at biomedical researchers that can supposedly point the way toward new hypotheses and areas of biomedical research. However, Google's AI co-scientist boils down to a fancy chatbot. 

A flesh-and-blood scientist using Google's co-scientist would input their research goals, ideas, and references to past research, allowing the robot to generate possible avenues of research. The AI co-scientist contains multiple interconnected models that churn through the input data and access Internet resources to refine the output. Inside the tool, the different agents challenge each other to create a "self-improving loop," which is similar to the new raft of reasoning AI models like Gemini Flash Thinking and OpenAI o3.

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