Android Kenya

Google Pay appears to have finally arrived in Kenya, although there is a little more to the story than simply downloading Google Wallet and tapping your phone at any payment terminal. Nancy Kilimo, Head of Card Centre at Diamond Trust Bank (DTB), has confirmed that she successfully made a payment using her DTB card through Google Wallet.

Samsung has launched the Galaxy Tab S12 series, and the company has thrown a fairly serious hardware upgrade at its latest tablets. The lineup consists of the Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra and Galaxy Tab S12+, both running Android 17 and powered by MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500. The Ultra is also just 5.1mm thick, which is the sort of number Samsung clearly expects people to mention every time the tablet comes up.

Samsung has launched the Galaxy SmartTag3, and the biggest change is not the smaller design or longer battery life. For the first time, Samsung’s tracker works with iPhones. That makes the SmartTag3 considerably more useful for families and groups that do not all use Galaxy phones, although Samsung is still keeping some of its best tracking features inside the Galaxy ecosystem.

Google has spent 15 years building ChromeOS into one of the simplest operating systems you can put on a laptop. Now it is effectively rebuilding it. The company’s new Googlebook devices introduce Googlebook OS, a new operating system that combines the ChromeOS experience with the Android technology stack.

Samsung has started rolling out the stable One UI 9.0 update to the Galaxy S25 Edge and Galaxy S25 FE, giving the two remaining S25-series phones access to Android 17. The rollout comes shortly after Samsung released the stable update for the Galaxy S25, S25+ and S25 Ultra, with South Korea once again getting the software first. One UI 9 brings a number of changes to Samsung phones, including additional interface customisation, new Galaxy AI features and improvements to existing tools.

Qualcomm has another flagship Snapdragon, and thankfully the name is only Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Yes, that is the actual name. Qualcomm has been moving its flagship naming around for years, from the Snapdragon 888 to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, 8 Gen 2 and 8 Gen 3, before deciding that “Elite” was apparently needed in 2024. Now we have “Elite”, “Extreme” and “Gen 6” all sitting in the same name.

WhatsApp has stopped working on phones running Android 5.0 and Android 5.1, with the change taking effect on September 8. According to a report by WABetaInfo, the messaging app now requires at least Android 6.0 Marshmallow, and the requirement applies to both WhatsApp Messenger and WhatsApp Business. So, if WhatsApp suddenly stopped working on your old Android phone this week, the version of Android you are running could be the reason.

Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra has emerged as the world’s best-selling Android smartphone, beating every other Android device in global sales during the second quarter of 2026 according to a report by Counterpoint Research. The flagship ranked fourth overall, behind Apple’s iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro Max and iPhone 17 Pro, according to Counterpoint Research’s Global Handset Model Sales Tracker.

Google has introduced a new feature on Google Messages that allows users to personalise individual conversations with custom colours and wallpapers. The new Chat Theme feature gives users more control over how their conversations appear, allowing them to change message bubble colours and add images as chat backgrounds. Users can, for instance, select a favourite family photo, a picture of their pet or a holiday photo and use it as the wallpaper for a specific conversation.

WhatsApp is rolling out three new security updates aimed at giving users stronger protection against account takeovers, making login easier with passkeys and providing more context when unknown callers reach them. The updates are being introduced on Android and iOS, although some of the new caller information is specifically available to Android users. The announcement comes as WhatsApp confirms that more than one billion people have already set up a passkey on their accounts.