There was a time when the best apps and games were mostly exclusive to the iPhone and iPad family, but that has been less true over the last few years. Nowadays, many of the most popular games and apps end up on Android, even if they often appear much later than on iOS. Unfortunately, many apps have held off on adding Android support for so long that it is pretty much guaranteed they will never make the move.

Below are some of the best iOS apps out there, and ones I would highly recommend if only they would come to Android. While most on this list likely never will, let’s look at nine apps that I wish would come to Google Play.

It’ll run on the new (wonderfully named) Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chipset, with a premium camera system and excellent sound. We don’t know many details about the phone yet, but I do know it has a legitimate shot at success in the US.

Samsung launched three foldable phones at its Unpacked event in July, but the Galaxy Z Fold 8 caught my eye and commanded my attention at the company’s pre-briefing. The new foldable differed from the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra and previous Galaxy Folds thanks to its short yet wide form factor. It’s not the first wide foldable phone on the market, as Google, OPPO, and HUAWEI have all offered them before. But Samsung’s is clearly the most popular one running Android, and it comes just as Apple is getting in on the scene, too, with its first-ever foldable and the Galaxy Fold’s de facto biggest rival, the iPhone Duo.

I came extremely close to pre-ordering the Z Fold 8, but couldn’t bring myself to hit the checkout button. Now, after two weeks with Samsung’s long-rumored “Wide Fold,” did I make a mistake by not buying the device? It’s time to find out in our Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 review.

I talked about a lot of these things in my Pixel 11 Pro review, but there’s one feature I didn’t mention: Face Unlock. Since the Pixel 8 Pro launched nearly three years ago, every Google Pixel phone has launched with Google’s Face Unlock feature.

Qualcomm is talking a big AI game with two flagship chipsets this year, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. But a closer look at the differences between these two chips reveals that the Extreme nomenclature is doing quite a lot of heavy lifting. Rather, it might be more realistic to call the regular version of the chip the 8 Elite Lite Gen 6.

While the two flagship processors share the same 5GHz peak clock speeds, new GPU architecture, and many of the same new AI features, the “regular” version of the Gen 6 misses out on a few of Qualcomm’s most impressive technologies. The list includes cutting-edge video codecs, Matrix cores for AI graphics, and 50% more local memory to support on-device AI models.

That’s why I wanted to push it beyond what it was designed to do, making it useful in a different way. I know smartphones work best as smartphones, yet giving my eight-year-old Pixel a second wind is far better than simply watching it limp to the finish line.

• Google Health 5.09 is rolling out now for both iOS and Android.
• The update delivers the new Pixel Watch Health Guardian features already announced yesterday.
• We also get a few updates related to activity logging and custom food items.

With Friday quickly coming to a close, what’s your weekend looking like? Will you be camped out on the couch, catching up on some all-important reality TV? Or will you be out and about, staying active and working up a good sweat? If your idea of good weekend leans a little more towards the healthy side, we’ve got some good news for you, as we learn about the latest upgrades arriving for Google Health.

We’re looking at the release of Google Health 5.09 for both Android and iOS, and the big news here is something we’ve already talked about earlier this week: new Pixel Watch Health Guardian features. Owners of the Pixel Watch 3, 4, and 5 will find their wearables picking up the ability to track blood pressure, chart insulin resistance trends, and offer new sleep breathing quality data.

The Pixel 11 Pro is objectively a very good phone, but at a cool $1,100, it’s hardly a no-brainer in the current market. Indeed, it has plenty of competition. Some of that comes from the usual Android rivals, while Google itself offers a couple of compelling alternatives if you don’t need the latest Pro model.

We recently picked out five phones that we think are worth considering instead of the Pixel 11 Pro, including the Galaxy S26 Plus, Nothing Phone 3, and even last year’s Pixel 10 Pro. We then asked which of the five you’d choose if you were looking elsewhere. More than 2,200 of you voted, and the results made for an interesting comparison.

This has been a big week for Google, as pre-orders for Googlebooks opened up on Monday. Googlebooks are a new category of laptops that combine ChromeOS and Android into a single desktop operating system, for those unaware. So far, it seems these notebooks are selling like hotcakes, as the laptops are already out of stock on the company’s US store. If you’re interested in learning more about these computers, don’t bother turning to Search, as you won’t find what you’re looking for.

As it turns out, Googlebooks have somewhat of an SEO problem. Spotted by The Verge, typing Googlebooks into Google Search will instead get you results for the tech giant’s index of actual books. The company’s digital database for full-text books and magazines just happens to share a very similar name with its new laptops, Google Books. An oversight you’d think the Mountain View-based firm would’ve caught.

• Users of several Samsung phones are reporting YouTube playback issues.
• Navigating away from YouTube and back while a video is playing can cause the video to freeze.
• Most reports come from Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra users.

Even the most expensive devices are subject to bugs. Case in point: a number of users of the $2,100 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra have reported that the YouTube app isn’t working correctly on their phones.

A post on the Korean-language Samsung community forum has been racking up comments from users of the Z Fold 8 Ultra and other Galaxy phones for weeks now, with many echoing the initial post’s point that YouTube streams have been freezing up.

• Back in 2024, Google first started working on swipe gestures to view timestamps in Messages.
• That new interface is now widely rolling out to users.
• Messages also now supports swiping right to directly reply.

When you’re looking back on your text message history, it’s not just the texts and the GIFs you care about. The metadata also tells a story, too: when messages were sent, if they went out with encryption, and whether or not they were even received. If you’re opening up Google Messages this week but suddenly are having trouble finding some of those details, worry not — Google’s just tweaking how you access them.

So far, when you’ve gone to tap on a message in your chat history, Messages would pull up its metadata right below: timestamp, delivery status, encryption — the works. But 9to5Google has now spotted a new design that’s been rolling out to more and more users, changing up how we see this info — and it’s not without its improvements.

In late August, Google rolled out a much-welcomed feature to the Calendar app. The change gave meeting organizers and their delegates the ability to choose whether or not to receive RSVP emails and automatic responses. This month, Calendar is getting another update that should prove convenient for team members in other time zones.

While converting time zones isn’t the hardest thing in the world to do, it is inconvenient. Especially so if your meetings are frequently set to a time zone other than yours. Fortunately, Google is addressing this problem by allowing more time zones to be displayed on Calendar.

• Google AI subscriptions now include premium Colab benefits, giving users access to faster computing resources without a separate Colab subscription.
• Google AI Ultra subscribers get additional perks, including premium GPU access and uninterrupted background execution.
• Existing Colab subscribers can stack benefits, with the new perks rolling out to eligible paid Google AI subscribers over the next few weeks.

If you’re a power user who utilizes Google’s services for daily tasks, you’re definitely missing out if you haven’t already subscribed to a Google AI plan. Beyond giving you increased access to Google’s most capable AI models, the plans also bundle benefits across other Google products, cloud storage, and even the option to share your subscription with family members. Now, Google is adding another perk to the mix.

Google announced that its AI subscriptions now include access to premium Google Colab perks.

• An update to the Nintendo DS-themed Nitrodeck Launcher is set to make the launcher compatible with dual-screen Android handhelds.
• Developer Mr. Rubik has posted a video of the launcher running on the Anbernic RG DS handheld.
• Mr. Rubik says the update should be available on the Play Store sometime either this week or next.

Affordable Android-based gaming handhelds have been gaining in popularity lately, and they come in a wide range of shapes and sizes. A handful have two screens, making them ideal for emulating games that originally appeared on the dual-screen Nintendo DS. This week, the developer of the DS-themed Nitrodeck Launcher announced that an update to make the launcher compatible with these dual-screen devices is coming soon.

As brought to our attention by Retrododo, developer Mr. Rubik has been showing off an update for Nitrodeck Launcher that makes it compatible with Android handhelds that come with two screens. He’s also published a video showing the launcher running on the Anbernic RG DS handheld, and the software certainly looks the part.

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Google is currently working on powering up editing in the Photos app by improving the markup tools. In case you haven’t seen our previous coverage, we recently found evidence that Google could add a brush size slider, more colors, text alignment, and more. But before those changes are rolled out, the company may want to look into a new problem affecting the app’s editor.

After you take a photo, the Google Photos editor lets you perform a variety of actions, which include sharing, editing, deleting, and adding to an album. Normally, you can perform one of these actions and immediately follow that up with another. For example, if you made an edit to a picture, you could also share the image without leaving the editor. However, it appears a bug has broken this functionality.

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• Pixel Buds earbuds already support a number of tap and swipe gesture controls.
• Those include options for answering, rejecting, and ending voice calls.
• That call support could soon expand to also let you tap to mute and unmute.

When we’re shopping for new earbuds, we may talk a lot about sound quality, battery life, or noise cancelation, but there’s another factor which really impacts earbud satisfaction that all too often goes overlooked: the quality of the on-bud controls. We don’t always want to be pulling our phone out to make every adjustment, so a pair of earbuds that lets us easily tap and swipe to control playback and adjust settings is a big deal. Today we’re checking out what could be the next way Google upgrades the touch controls on its Pixel Buds.

You’re reading an Authority Insights story. Authority Insights brings you all the latest exclusive reports, app teardowns, leaks, and in-depth tech coverage from the Android Authority team that you won’t find anywhere else.

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• A future version of Snapseed could introduce an extensive collage-making tool, with granular control over textures, layers, and more.
• We are now getting a detailed look at the full set of tools that may be introduced in a future update.
• This feature could also let you share your templates with other users via a QR code or by copying their link.

Snapseed took its sweet time bringing the big 4.0 update to Android. But now that it’s here, we’re seeing a wave of potential upgrades that could reach the photo editing app. In July, we discovered strings for a new collage-making tool. We can now exclusively reveal what that looks like, along with some of the features that would complement it.

You’re reading an Authority Insights story. Authority Insights brings you all the latest exclusive reports, app teardowns, leaks, and in-depth tech coverage from the Android Authority team that you won’t find anywhere else.

We’re here to help with a new regular series covering the best and freshest AI apps and services that you should know about.

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• Google Messages is widely rolling out its redesigned long-press menu to stable users.
• The floating menu puts common message actions closer to your thumb and supports selective text copying.
• The features were previously made available to beta users in August, but the stable rollout still appears to be server-side.

Long-pressing a message should be one of those tiny interactions you never have to think about. In Google Messages, though, it has long meant reaching toward the top of the screen for basic actions — hardly ideal when phones keep getting bigger. Google began cleaning that up months ago when it widened access to its redesigned menu in beta in August, and now the upgrade finally appears to be making the jump to stable users.

Reddit user Lazy_Excitement_2602 spotted the new menu on the stable version of Google Messages, specifically version 20260903_04. Several other users in the thread also confirmed seeing it outside the beta program, including on a Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus and S25 Ultra, suggesting the rollout is no longer limited to Pixel devices or testers.

Upcoming Android flagships might soon deliver better battery endurance, both physically and in terms of battery life. According to a new leak, Android manufacturers are actively experimenting with steel-cased batteries paired with stacked-cell technology to push energy density to as high as 9,000mAh or 10,000mAh.

The revelation comes courtesy of reputable leaker Digital Chat Station on Weibo. Highlighting Apple’s continued use of steel-encased battery cells on the iPhone 18 Pro Max, which reportedly pushes the rated capacity to 5,391mAh (with typical capacity hovering around 5,500mAh), the leaker notes that a major Chinese smartphone maker (most likely to be Xiaomi, based on Digital Chat Station’s post format) is testing a similar steel-shell architecture. Combined with stacked-cell manufacturing, the brand could aim to deliver 9,000mAh to 10,000mAh batteries in future top-tier flagship devices.