Google Is Adding One Of The Best iPhone Features To Android 14, And This App Has The First Traces Of It Now

Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google is adding one of the best features of iPhones to Android 14 – emergency SOS via satellite. Code snippets have revealed that Google has already added this feature to its Messages app.

What Happened: Google is working on adding the life-saving emergency SOS feature to Android 14. While it is currently available only on iPhones, adding it to Android will help companies rapidly expand it to other countries and users as well.

See Also: How To Turn Off SOS On iPhone

Android researcher Mishaal Rahman found the code in the Android 14 update, and although the feature is hidden for now, a new finding suggests that the default Messages app will be able to use it.

According to the code snippets discovered by Neïl Rahmouni, the default Google Messages app will allow users to send messages along with their location to Emergency SOS services even when there is no cellular network, allowing responders to find their location and rescue them.

This is quite similar to how emergency SOS works on iPhones currently. iPhone 14 and later come with Emergency SOS via satellite feature, and it has already saved several lives, with many of them in the recent Maui wildfires.

Qualcomm Inc.'s QCOM Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset already includes the satellite connectivity feature. However, since Android doesn't support it yet, it's unavailable on currently available Android smartphones.

Samsung's Galaxy S24 Could Get It, Too: Samsung's Galaxy S24 series, expected to launch in early 2024, could be amongst the first Android smartphones to support emergency SOS via satellite feature.

South Korea’s Minister of Science and ICT, Lee Jong-ho, said in an interview with Yonhap News that the country’s smartphone companies are working on adding a feature that would allow their phones to communicate with satellites.

Image credits – Shutterstock

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