One UI 7 is so close, yet so far away in this week’s news

Mobile news moves fast — maybe not Apple A-series fast, but at least

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fast — and if you aren’t following closely, you’ll start to feel left out in no time. But we keep our ears to the ground and our eyes peeled on all things Android, so we’d be doing you a disservice if we didn’t recap the week in mobile. Here are five of the biggest stories you might have missed.

One UI 7 is so close, yet so far away

With the Galaxy S25 finally hitting store shelves on Friday (though technically some people got it a bit earlier through preorders), One UI 7 is now officially available. So far, it’s been one of the biggest positives mentioned by reviewers, so Samsung seems to have knocked it out of the park here, except the beta program hasn’t progressed as many had hoped.

Samsung’s Android 15-based update has been available in beta on the Galaxy S24 series since the first week of December, but not for older flagships or even the latest foldables. We were hoping for a stable One UI 7 update alongside the new phones, but instead, we got another beta build to fix a few bugs at the end of the week. This doesn’t bode well for widespread availability, but Samsung could still surprise us — until then, we’ll have to keep waiting for things like a more usable battery saver mode and the iOS-inspired Now Bar.

Free movies and TV had an up and down week

Free, ad-supported TV has become so popular recently that it even has its own acronym now. But while tech companies like Google and Amazon are busy reinventing broadcast TV on the internet, traditional producers are just trying to adapt their medium to the changing times.

Case in point, Warner Bros. just released a playlist of 31 movies that you can now stream for free on YouTube. They’re not exactly blockbusters — more like the DVD bin at a thrift shop — but it’s good to see a movie company find a consumer-friendly way to monetize its out-of-circulation films. Meanwhile, YouTube TV added free access to Starz on its base tier, but Google TV killed nine of its existing FAST channels, so it was a bit of a mixed bag this week.

You might want to check your Google Search widget settings

The Google Search widget is probably the single most commonly-used home screen widget on Android, but it does its job so well that it rarely gets new functionality. That changed this week, as Google rolled out a customizable shortcut button that takes advantage of some of the empty space in the search bar. There are some handy options to choose from, but note that you have to enable the new shortcuts before they appear.

The Nvidia Shield TV simply refuses to die

The original Nvidia Shield TV set the record for most-updated Android device of all time when it got its Android TV 11 upgrade way back in January 2022. It received some bug-fixing patches in the months that followed, but the last update that added noteworthy features came through in November 2022.

Since then, Google TV has become all the rage — but just when we were starting to think Nvidia’s Android TV box was finally dead, Shield Experience Upgrade 9.2 started rolling out on Thursday. The update brings new functionality like frame rate enhancement and a “Match audio content resolution” feature for DACs, plus a laundry list of bug fixes, adding to Nvidia’s already legendary reputation for software support.

Super Bowl ads are Google’s new meta

While Android TV devices like the Nvidia Shield are few and far between these days, the OS still powers Google TV devices behind the scenes. The biggest difference is the Google TV home screen — much like the Pixel Launcher or One UI Home, Google TV is essentially just an extra layer of OEM customization built on top of the Android TV OS.

The biggest difference between Android TV’s home screen and Google TV’s is clear: The former was about apps, the latter is about recommendations — in other words, ads. Google TV was already plagued with them, but this week, things went meta: An OS designed by a company that gets most of its revenue from ads now has ads about ads. Granted, they’re Super Bowl ads, but celebrity guest spots don’t make the ad-ception any less egregious.