The Android home screen hasn’t changed much in the last 15 years. It’s still essentially a grid for app icons and widgets. I wanted to try using my phone without what we’ve come to know as a “home screen,” and I’m glad I did.

I love building things in the physical world, but when it comes to software, I have a hard time getting ideas out of my head. Coding is the big barrier—it’s just not something I’ve ever been good at. Recently, however, I’ve been using Gemini in Android Studio, and I’ve made my very first app.

I have been using smartphones for just about as long as Android has existed. Countless phones have lived in my pockets, and I begrudgingly put cases on many of them. However, screen protectors are where I’ve always drawn the line—until disaster finally struck.

You know your Samsung Galaxy phone has a fingerprint scanner. But what you might not know is that the fingerprint scanner can be used to launch apps and shortcuts (I didn’t). Samsung hid this ability behind a poorly named feature in Good Lock, and I’m glad to have found it.

Samsung is known for offering high-end hardware and tons of software features. But part of being on the cutting edge is letting some old things fall by the wayside. Galaxy phones have lost almost as many features as they’ve gained, and I miss a few of them more than others.

Sideloading apps from outside the Play Store is a beloved feature of Android phones. You may not know it, but it’s possible to sideload apps on a Samsung Galaxy Watch as well. That’s good, because there are a few handy apps that are worth the effort of manually installing.

When Wear OS 7 landed on my Pixel Watch last month, there wasn’t much that caught my eye. To be honest, I pretty much forgot about it entirely. Recently, though, I’ve noticed something, and I realized this update was more important than I thought.