Google is showing some love for Nest’s biggest rival
We’re less than a week away from the Pixel 6a being available on store shelves, which means a whole new round of customers can upgrade and experience just what Google brings to the table on software. Its At a Glance widget is one of the best Pixel-exclusive features around, offering loads of contextual information right on the home screen — and it’s getting more powerful by the day. The next update to At a Glance seems right around the corner, and it sounds like it might build a bridge between Google’s smartphones and its biggest competitor in the smart home market.
As spotted by Esper.io’s Mishaal Rahman, Pixels are getting support for Ring doorbell previews, just weeks after similar functionality for Nest doorbells came to the platform. A string of code from the latest update to Android System Intelligence sets the stage for anyone with the Ring app to enable doorbell alerts on their phone. Currently, this setting specifically mentions Nest — it’s the only platform supported — but once Ring’s lineup of video doorbells work with At a Glance, the system will check to see if the corresponding app is installed.
It’s unclear when this feature will launch or whether it will be limited to the forthcoming Android release. The folks at 9to5Google note that, currently, this feature has only shown up on Android 13-specific builds of System Intelligence, hinting that a final version of this feature isn’t ready for primetime just yet.
Rahman also noted a handful of other tweaks to the app powering the most interesting interactions with At a Glance, including a shortcut to “control using data from apps.” It sounds like part of Google’s recent push to provide more information about how user data is gathered, as it links to the “personalize using app data” toggle under Privacy.
