Interesting. Some of these improvements are great, others are more of a mixed bag.
To point out some of the latter:
> heif support
A shame they didn't put their weight behind avif for this one. Maybe there are some "lobbies" at play?
> Live caption
I love it for accessibility. I loathe it for privacy. Local, self-hosted, or bust. Same for Live Transcribe. Awesome and scary.
> Family link
It was about time google shared a tiny bit of the data it has on us, so that we can put it for good use. Of course, this really shows the level of control and insight Google has on us.
> Smart Reply
Some commenters here wrote that this was done locally. I would like some source on this (is training also done locally? Nothing is sent back?). If so, this might be interesting. Otherwise, that's plain scary.
> Keep your data private with more controls
More control is great, but that's still not enough. The app may refuse to launch if denied a permission, we would need an option to "lie" about it. "ad retargeting and personalization", from the screenshot, sounds like preventing apps (or maybe just asking) to use the advertizing ID for such purposes. Of course, they can still do it with everything else.
> Get security updates faster
Everyday Android strays further from the GPL. The way forward should be to help manufacturers play nice (use a few persons full-time for support, promote "mainline" devices to the public as the ones that will always receive updates). I haven't looked into the details, but this sounds like furthering their "trebble" HAL to run (and update) closed-source blobs on an outdated kernel (but who cares, right? because they put less and less stuff in the GPL'ed kernel).
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My apologies if that reads like a rant. The level of control Google has on our (digital) lives is downright horrifying. I'm honestly pulling all my weight behind free software alternatives to google, both donating and contributing, but that's not nearly enough, as the vast majority of people simply don't care. You know what they say about putting all of your eggs into the same basket? One that will not hesitate to blackmail you to get them back, and maybe taste one or two. And now, how about putting yourself into that basket, for good measure?
I'm quite interested in alternatives such as postmarketos, pinephone, librem 5, plasma mobile, ubports, lineageos, replicant, mycroft, mozilla voice, firefox, peertube, nextcloud, collabora online, openstreetmap, Matrix, and countless others. Most projects lack manpower and funding, unfortunately. Yet most of the ones I quoted are quite likely to succeed, IMO.