7 Android 17 upgrades that could change the way you use your Android phone — from 3D emojis to Gemini Intelligence
Google’s pre-I/O Android Show for 2026 has now concluded, and it was packed full of announcements surrounding new features and upgrades to existing Android tools.
Many of these upgrades are related to AI, as you might expect, but we also saw Google announce new emojis, improvements to Android security, and a whole lot more.
So, below, we’ve rounded up seven of the biggest and best Android 17 upgrades that were announced at The Android Show.
1. Gemini Intelligence
Gemini Intelligence is perhaps the biggest single announcement we saw at The Android Show — it’s essentially an upgrade to Gemini that makes it a lot more capable and more of an agentic AI.
With this upgrade, Gemini can seamlessly move between apps to carry out tasks for you, with minimal oversight on your part. One example given was long-pressing the power button when a grocery list is visible on your phone, and then asking Gemini to build a shopping cart with all those items for delivery.
Another was taking a photo of a travel brochure and asking it to find a similar trip for six people on Expedia. You can then track Gemini’s progress with the task via notifications.
Plus, Gemini Intelligence also allows you to build custom widgets with a new ‘Create My Widget’ feature. You could, for example, ask it to suggest a new vegetarian meal recipe every day, and it will then create a resizable home screen widget for that specific request.
These tools will be rolling out from “this summer”, starting with the latest Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones. For the full list of features, check out our dedicated Gemini Intelligence features roundup.
2. Rambler
Using speech-to-text can massively speed up your communication in messaging apps, but it’s not perfect in its current state. In recent years, it has generally gotten better at understanding what you’re saying, but presenting an exact one-to-one version of your speech in text means you’ll probably see various “uhms” and “ahs” or repeated statements, as tends to happen in speech where you’re thinking about what you’re saying as you say it.
But Google’s new Rambler feature (which technically falls under the aforementioned Google Intelligence umbrella) will simply identify and extract the important parts of what you’ve said, and translate them into a clear and concise message.
For the multilingual among you, Rambler can also handle seamless switches between languages in a single message, and it doesn’t store or save the message data, so you shouldn’t need to worry about privacy.
3. Gemini in Chrome
Gemini’s Chrome implementation is also getting smarter and more agentic, as starting in late June, it will have an auto browse feature that can do things like book appointments or reserve parking spots for you via Chrome. This isn’t a totally new feature, but it is new to Android.
Gemini in Chrome is also getting better at providing contextual assistance, as it will be able to provide responses that are tailored to your hobbies, interests, and life (assuming you opt into Personal Intelligence).
And it can work beyond Chrome by, for example, adding things to your calendar, searching your Gmail, or adding to-do lists to Keep.
Plus, there will soon be Nano Banana integration, allowing you to create new images and customize ones you’ve found online directly in Chrome.
4. 3D emojis
Emojis are also getting an upgrade, as Google has announced a new range of 3D emojis, dubbed Noto 3D.
Google claims these icons will add more physicality to your online communication, so your feelings still have weight even when expressed through messages.
Those are some lofty claims, but if nothing else, it’s always nice to have some new emojis to choose from, and these new ones will be landing later this year, starting with Pixel phones.
5. Pause Point
Pause Point is a new tool designed to help you spend less time on your phone — or at least, less time scrolling apps that are more addictive than additive.
It does this by letting you choose which apps you want it to be enabled for, and then presenting you with a 10-second ‘pause’ before you can access one of those apps. During this time, it will give you the option to do a breathing exercise, set a timer to limit how long you spend in the app, look at some of your favorite photos, or switch to an alternative suggested app — one that you perhaps consider more worthy of your time.
Plus, Pause Point requires you to restart your phone to turn it off, so you’re less likely to disable it in a moment of weakness.
6. New creator tools
Google is also introducing new ways to create and share with Android 17. These include ‘Screen Reactions’, which make it a breeze to record both yourself and your screen at the same time.
There are also improvements to how your photos and videos look on Instagram when using an Android phone, with Google working with Meta to enable ultra HDR capture and playback, built-in video stabilization, and improved low light performance.
Plus, Google and Meta are rolling out some Android-exclusive tools for Instagram’s Edits app. These include ‘smart enhance’, which uses on-device AI to upscale your photos and videos with a single tap, and sound separation, meaning that the Edits app can automatically identify and separate audio tracks, so you can more easily boost the sounds you want and reduce or remove those that you don’t.
7. Major security upgrades
Finally, as far as the big updates go, there is a wealth of security upgrades coming to Android. These include a new spoofing protection feature, which will automatically end calls that are coming from a spoofed number.
Google is doing this by partnering with select banks and financial institutions, and then asking that institution’s app (if it’s installed on your phone) whether a call that appears to be coming from them really is. If the app says it’s not, then the call is automatically terminated.
This isn’t an Android 17 feature, per se — in fact, it will be rolling out to phones on Android 11 onwards in the coming weeks, but initially it only works with Revolut, Itaú, and Nubank, though Google has promised more banks will be added later this year.
Google is also upgrading Live Threat Detection — an existing feature that alerts you to suspicious apps on your device — by expanding the types of behavior that it considers suspicious and alerts you to. It’s also gaining “dynamic signal monitoring”, which will help it more immediately spot suspicious app behaviors, so your device will never be at risk for long.
Plus, Android 17 will allow you to lock a lost phone with biometric authentication — meaning even if someone has both stolen it and somehow knows your password or PIN, they still won’t be able to unlock it.
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