Google Play services 26.43 adds automatic Android photo backup to Windows PCs

The update reaches devices directly, without waiting on phone makers or carriers. That is the point of Play services: Google ships it to most Android hardware on its own schedule. According to t3n, the rollout started on 2 November. The report was published at 16:30 CET on 3 November.

The photo backup is the headline feature. Windows users can have photos and videos saved automatically over Quick Share, Google's wireless file transfer tool. t3n notes that Google's release notes do not explain how the feature works in detail. They say only that it uses "qualitatively better protocols for device connection."

What else is in the update

The build also bundles changes that have nothing to do with Windows. Family accounts get a single management screen under the Google settings. It shows members, any Google One subscription and storage use, and shared services. The password manager gains a manual choice when imported credentials conflict, covering both passwords and passkeys. Google says the updated system management services should improve battery life, connectivity, device performance, privacy, security, stability and updatability, per t3n.

Developers get new support for location and context based routines inside apps. Google also fixed bugs in security and emergency services and refreshed loyalty cards in Google Wallet. Rollout is staged. On t3n's own test device the new Play services build had arrived. But the Play Store itself was still on an older version when the article went out.

The automation thread runs wider than phones

Lab automation is moving on a separate track. A GitHub repository for OpenScience, an open source research agent, describes a desktop, browser or terminal tool. It plans a task, pulls literature, writes and runs code, executes experiments and drafts the write-up, with every step logged. According to the repository, it ships hundreds of bundled skills across biology, chemistry, physics and machine learning. It also has connectors to ChEMBL, UniProt, PubMed and arXiv.

The academic work is testing how far that delegation can go. A paper submitted to arXiv on 30 October by Jae-Hyun Baek, Byung-Sun Won and Jon-Lark Kim describes a researcher-in-the-loop pipeline for entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes. Evolved programs produced finite constructions that researchers generalised into a family formula, and Lean checked the algebraic certificate. The authors report the family closes 54 gaps in archived EAQECC tables. That is backed by 115 verified code records and ten nonexistence results with checked DRAT proofs. In a controlled cohort of eight paired generation blocks, validation-selected iterative programs reached 46.1% and 31.6% success on held-out executions at lengths n=13 and n=15. Independently generated programs reached 19.5% and 3.1%.

A second arXiv paper, submitted the same day by Akshat Jani, Sakhinana Sagar Srinivas and Venkataramana Runkana, asks whether agents can specify problems for automated PDE simulation. On 120 template-related requests the full workflow hit 98.3% correct first-turn specification and decision outcomes. Schema-assisted single shot reached 92.5% and model-only reached 82.5%. It made no false-ready decisions among 42 requests that needed clarification or rejection. In 12 live user-to-results tests, 9 achieved joint specification, execution, export and numerical-reference success, or 75.0%. The authors flag consistency in fresh responses as the next problem.

Hardware is advancing alongside. IBM Research published work on meter-scale quantum interconnects between two 120-qubit Nighthawk R1 superconducting processors. It demonstrates four L-couplers, according to a summary at Semiconductor Engineering of the October arXiv paper by Sundaresan and colleagues. None of this replaces the judgment of the people running the experiments, and the papers say so.