Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

If you use Google Home to help with automation, there are new options coming your way. Google has announced the addition of new starters, conditions, and actions which it says help to give more granular control.

The various combinations allow for a huge degree of flexibility and personalization. With the Google Home ecosystem continuing to expand to include more products, users are becoming more demanding of what the system can do – and Google seems to be responding.

Google has started the process of rolling out the first update of 2026 for its range of Pixel devices. There are a large number of bug fixes within this update as well as the usual raft of monthly security patches.

The rollout is taking place on a global scale over the course of the coming weeks. Among the problems this update addresses is an issue that causes battery drain, and another related to flickering AOD.

Microsoft Lens – once known as Office Lens – has been hanging on by a thread for some time now. The original plan had been to kill off the document scanning app last year, but it was granted a stay of execution.

But now, just as we ease into 2026, Microsoft has announced a revised schedule for the retirement of the app. For fans of Microsoft Lens, there are mere weeks left until it vanishes.

The first Insider build of Windows 11 for the new year has hit download servers. The KB5072046 update takes the operating system up to build 26220.7535, and it is available to Insiders signed up to the Dev and Beta channels.

As you would probably expect, there are Copilot-related changes and additions to be found in this latest build – including Microsoft deciding to finally gives sysadmins the option to uninstall the Microsoft Copilot App on managed devices.

TikTok may not feel like a medium through which to organize anything, but the social media platform is trying to change that. Teaming up with Linda Tong Planner, there is now a new feature called the “For You” Calendar.

Announcing the somewhat unusual addition, TikTok says that the idea is to “help families connect and build positive digital habits”. The start of 2026 is being used as a reason for trying to help people get organized.

If you are a fan of sending documents from Microsoft Word to your Kindle device, there is some bad news. Microsoft has announced plans to retire the Send documents to Kindle option in Word some time after next month.

As is so often the case when features and options are killed off, Microsoft does not provide much in the way of detail. While the company would probably cite low usage as the reason for retirement, it has not yet provided a specific reason. We also only have a pretty vague timeline for retirement to work with.

If you were concerned about your Instagram account over the weekend, you were certainly not alone. Many Instagram users received an email telling them that they needed to reset their account password, and this was quickly linked to a data breach from 2024 affecting 17.5 million accounts.

While the emails about resetting passwords really did come from Instagram, there was in fact no danger, and no need to boost account security. So far, so unclear. So, what is going on?

There are many concerns about how younger people use the internet in general, but certainly in relation to social media. There have been pushes around the world to limit – or even ban – access to the likes of Facebook, but WhatsApp is looking at a different approach.

With a messaging app, it can be difficult to keep an eye on who a child is contacting, so Meta has come up with the idea of introducing parental controls. The system is currently under development, and involves linking two accounts together – one belonging to a child, the other to a parent or guardian.

Microsoft has announced changes to the way in which hyperlinks are added to Word documents. The company says that it wants to make working with hyperlinks as easy as working with text, and is therefore simplifying link creation across Word for Windows, macOS and the web.

While it could be argued that the previous method of converting a word or portion of text into a hyperlink was not exactly an arduous task, the change Microsoft has come up with makes it even faster and easier. So, how does it work?

Google has announced changes to the search functionality of YouTube, adding new filters and renaming some options for the sake of clarity.

One of the biggest changes is the new option to choose the type of content which should be included in results. For anyone who is more interested in seeking out long-form videos, this is extremely significant as it provides a way to avoid YouTube Shorts by opting to exclude them.

WhatsApp moving towards usernames has been much-requested, but progress remains slow – or perhaps slow and steady is a better way of thinking of it. While the timeline for the eventual rollout of usernames in the app remains unclear, there are new tests underway.

The latest version of the Android beta app sees WhatsApp testing switching from phone numbers to usernames. There are many reasons for the switch, not least of which is privacy.

Music is connective, and this is something that Spotify is trying to use to its advantage. Aware that people love to talk about their musical tastes, the company has come up with Listening Activity, a new way to share what you are listening to with the people you are connected to.

Spotify itself already lets you share your listening stream, and there are various apps that can plug into Spotify to share the data as well. The new Listening Activity, as well as the new Request to Jam, are the latest addition to Messages.

It should surprise no one that Google is filling up just about all of its apps and services with a dose of AI. Now the company says that it is “bringing Gmail into the Gemini era” with new AI-powered features.

The aim is to transform Gmail into “your personal, proactive inbox assistant”, and Google has a smattering of new features that it believes will kickstart this process. Borrowing an idea from Google Search, Gmail’s new AI Overviews is very much what you would expect, but it is also just the start of the story.

Google has announced a significant change to the way in which it releases the source code for its Android operating system. The company has, until now, released source code several times a year as part of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

Moving forward, Google says that it is going to be using a twice-a-year schedule for source code release – once in Q2 and then in Q4. With the latest code drop having come in November, we won’t see the next one until some time near summer. But what does all of this mean?

Last year Google started the rollout of the Material 3 Expressive redesign to Google Drive, bringing it in line, aesthetically, with other products and services. Then, for reasons best known to Google, the company then seemed to change its mind and pulled back some of the new look.

Now there has been another change of heart. Google Drive users are now seeing the reappearance of a visual tweak that had been yanked.