(Pocket-lint) – Google looks to have confirmed that it’s going to add the ability to connect through satellite communications to the next version of Android, Android 14.
The news is straight from the mouth (okay, Twitter feed) of Hiroshi Lockheimer, a senior vice president of platforms and ecosystems at Google, and indicates an interesting direction of travel for the world of smartphones.
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Wild to think about user experiences for phones that can connect to satellites. When we launched G1 in ’08 it was a stretch to get 3G + Wifi working. Now we’re designing for satellites. Cool! Excited to support our partners in enabling all of this in the next version of Android!
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) September 1, 2022
In the last week or so chatter has started to really spring up about satellite communications after Elon Musk’s SpaceX partnered with T-Mobile to announce a new connectivity drive using its technology, and it looks like Google is being proactive on this front.
For now, it seems like this is unlikely to change how we use our phones other than in very remote situations, when low connectivity through regular signal could be shored up using satellite comms to let you call and message as you like.
Either way, if the feature does indeed make it to Android 14 we’re still looking at late 2023 before it’s actually in most people’s phones, so this will be one to keep an eye on in the coming months.
Writing by Max Freeman-Mills.
