All eyes are on Apple right now, as the company has just introduced its next major iPhone software update, iOS 16. But Apple isn't the only company to introduce new software, as Google has quietly released its June feature for Pixel Phones, and it comes with some eye-catching improvements of its own.
Perhaps the biggest update is improvements to Google's At a Glance widget, which makes important information visible on both the home screen and lock screen.
The update adds new options for what information can be displayed on the lock screen, including a video stream from your Nest Doorbell, air quality alerts, and a reminder that your flashlight is on.
But that's not all this update brings. It also allows you to add a shortcut to a captured vaccination card on your home screen, so you can see proof of your vaccination status with just one click.
Elsewhere, Google's Live Translate feature now supports Traditional Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Turkish, and Thai; new wallpapers are available; and the update lands along with a Pocket Operator app (opens in a new tab), which lets you edit and add sounds to your recorded videos.
There's also the usual plethora of bug fixes and security updates, so even if you're not interested in the new features, the update is worth downloading. It's already started rolling out, but it won't be available to everyone right away, so keep an eye out for an alert on your phone.
Analysis: lock screens receive updates on iOS and Android
One of the great new features in iOS 16 is the ability to fully customize your lock screen and add widgets to it. It's a big change, but with the removal of this feature, Pixel users currently get a host of new widget-like features via the at-a-glance update.
These new features follow other recent updates to At a Glance that added earthquake alerts and details about connected Bluetooth devices to the lock screen, so you can see a lot without having to unlock your phone.
That said, these features are only available to Pixel owners, not the Android world at large, and it looks like iOS 16 will allow users to add an even wider variety of things to the lock screen.
So it's not quite up there with what Apple is doing, but on the other hand, it's already available, while iOS 16 probably won't be released in its final form until September.