The Google graveyard is littered with beloved hardware and software, but premature product deaths certainly aren’t exclusive to the Mountain View search giant. This week, it seemed like all the big tech companies had a hit out on nostalgia, with devices and services getting killed off left and right by the hands of Amazon, Google, and HP.
The week in mobile was more than a bunch of obituaries, though. Nothing has a pair of phones in the pipeline, and they’ve been all but revealed by an onslaught of leaks. One of their biggest competitors, the Pixel 9a, also made headlines, and the Google phone coming after that was even in the news.
Last Week’s Roundup
Google’s Android 16 update gains ground on Samsung’s Android 15 rollout in last week’s news
Will the Pixel 6a get 16 before the Z Fold 6 gets 15?
RIP Chromecast
It’s been almost a dozen years since Google released the original Chromecast. At $35 a pop, they were impulse buys, bordering on stocking stuffer territory. Originally meant to serve as a bridge from your phone to your TV, the first models didn’t have a user-facing OS. But that issue was addressed with the release of the Chromecast with Google TV.
Now, the company has moved on to a set-top box form factor, and its new Google TV Streamer is all about connecting you to ads — er, content. This apparently didn’t leave much room for the good old fashioned dongle, so this week, the Chromecast with Google TV was removed from the company’s online retail store. Chromecast had an amazing 11+ year run, but that appears to have finally come to an end.
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Google officially pulls the plug on Chromecast with Google TV sales
The Google Store is no longer selling the Chromecast
RIP Amazon Appstore
In the early days of Android, the Amazon Appstore was a serious competitor to the Android Market, now known as the Google Play Store. To entice users, Amazon would offer paid apps for free on a regular basis, with the caveat that you’d have to keep the Amazon Appstore installed to receive updates to that app in the future. So if you snagged SwiftKey for free, for instance, you were all but guaranteed to come back to Amazon’s app hub.
Over the years, those deals dwindled, and so did the active users on Amazon’s Appstore. Now, Amazon is shutting the entire service down, at least on the Android side of things. Its Kindle App Store will remain in operation for the foreseeable, but the Android app is shutting down later this year. The closeout is already underway, with developers no longer able to upload new apps — only updates.
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RIP Humane AI Pin
You may have wept for Chromecast and the Appstore, but we’re betting you won’t shed a tear for the next product on the chopping block. That is, unless you’re one of the very few people who dropped $700 on the
Humane AI Pin
— in which case, nobody would blame you for sobbing your eyes out right now.
Famed laptop maker and printer ink hawker Hewlitt-Packard is buying Humane after the AI company’s months-long search for a bidder. It appears to be an IP acquisition, as HP isn’t buying the AI Pins themselves. Meanwhile, the remnants of Humane will cease selling pins immediately, and all the AI functionality on existing devices will stop working at the end of this month. At that point, Humane will delete all customer data on its way into oblivion.
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Hello Nothing Phone 3a
Out with the old, in with the new. This week, we saw an onslaught of leaks around Nothing’s upcoming Phone 3a series, which is now thought to include the midrange 3a and a not-quite-flagship offering in the Phone 3a Pro. A mid-week leak suggests the more expensive 3a Pro model will one-up most phones in its price bracket with a telephoto camera lens, something the company itself had been teasing on social media for some time.
At the end of the week, the leaks turned into full-on floods. On Friday morning, renders of both phones surfaced, showing the 3a and 3a Pro from multiple angles. That was quickly one-upped by what appears to be Nothing’s official promotional videos for both phones, showcasing the midrange models in all their glory while detailing their more exciting features.
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Nothing’s pitch for the Phone 3a and 3a Pro is revealed in leaked promos
Nothing’s next lineup is almost here
Live long and prosper, Pixel
We’re expecting the midrange Pixel 9a to make its debut sometime around Google I/O 2025. With a potential release now less than a few months away, we’ve seen lots of rumored details, like four predictable colorways. This week, a massive specs leak spilled all the juicy details, like a 120Hz display with 2,700-nit brightness and a hearty 8GB of RAM.
Just a few blocks further down on Google’s product roadmap, the flagship Pixel 10 lineup is looming. Right on schedule for a summer launch timeframe, the Pixel 10, 10 Pro, 10 Pro XL, and 10 Pro Fold made their first appearances in a database maintained by the GSMA, the commission behind mobile standards like the RCS Universal Profile. So we now have model numbers to go with the horse-themed codenames spotted last year, but otherwise, details are still surprisingly scarce for the series.
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Google’s Pixel 10 series seems right on track for a summer launch
We’re seeing model numbers for the first time
