- Google unveils version 2.2 of its open source UI development kit Flutter, with a payment plugin for IAPs, says 200K apps in Play Store were built using Flutter (Paul Sawers/VentureBeat)
- Early look at Google's Project Starline, a video booth with a 65" display and several sensors and cameras allowing for 3D representations of video call subjects (Lauren Goode/Wired)
- Amazon says it is extending its ban on selling facial recognition tech to police indefinitely (Drew Harwell/Washington Post)
- Ethereum Foundation says "in the upcoming months" Ethereum will fully transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake, which requires far less power consumption (Carl Beekhuizen/Ethereum Blog)
- Google unveils a tool that uses AI to help spot skin, hair, and nail conditions, based on images from patients, says it plans to launch it later this year (Zoe Kleinman/BBC)
- Google teams with Shopify to let Shopify's 1.7M+ merchants easily sign up to have their products appear across YouTube, Search, Maps, Images, and Lens (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- Google unveils Wear OS 3.0, with a revamped design and 30% performance boost, and partners with Samsung, which will use Wear OS, not Tizen, for its next watches (Scott Stein/CNET)
- Google says Android now powers over 3B active devices worldwide, up from 2.5B in 2019 and 2B in 2017 (Kyle Bradshaw/9to5Google)
- Google debuts Material You design language, letting users personalize the look of apps and the OS, coming to Pixels this fall, then to Chrome OS, the web, more (Abner Li/9to5Google)
- Google details Android 12's new design, based on the flexible Material You system, with better widgets and buttons, more animation, privacy features, and more (Dieter Bohn/The Verge)
- Google updates Photos with AI-powered Memories, a Locked Folder, Cinematic moments to animate static photos, and more (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
- Google announces LaMDA, a language model for dialogue applications that it says represents a "breakthrough" for having natural conversations with AI (James Vincent/The Verge)
- Microsoft confirms that Windows 10X won't launch in 2021 as planned, instead being integrated into parts of Windows and other products (Mary Jo Foley/ZDNet)
- Google says Duplex will help Chrome users more easily fix compromised passwords, rolling out slowly to Chrome users with limited site compatibility at first (Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch)
- Google details fourth-gen tensor processing unit, which demonstrates an average improvement of 2.7x over TPUv3 performance, boosts memory bandwidth, and more (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)