Google Lifts Storage Limit for Linux Terminal on Pixel Phones: 16 GB to Infinity Minus 1GB
Google Pixel users will soon be able to run a full Debian Linux environment using the Linux Terminal app. The Android 16 Beta 4 update removes the previous 16GB storage cap for the Linux virtual machine, which was first introduced in the March 2025 update. Now, it lets users allocate nearly all of their phone's available storage to the VM—except for 1GB, which is kept free for system stability.
In Android 16 Beta 4, this adjustment is managed through a disk resize slider in the app's settings. Google says that in a future release, the slider will be replaced by a storage ballooning system, letting the Linux VM's storage grow or shrink automatically based on the phone's available space.
The Linux Terminal app is made to let users run Linux apps alongside Android apps and not to replace Android's native desktop mode. Google says that the main purpose is to give users access to Linux tools and software within Android. However, users can still install full desktop environments like GNOME or KDE Plasma inside the VM if they choose, as reported by Android Authority.
However, the app does not yet support graphical applications with hardware acceleration or audio output, and graphical environments rely on software rendering, which may affect performance for tasks that need more resources.
This update is currently available on Pixel devices running Android 16 Beta 4. The process to expand the Linux VM's storage is pretty straightforward, and users have reported that the increased storage is recognized immediately after restarting the VM.
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Android Authority
an hour ago
- Android Authority
I used a self-hosted app to track all my receipts and it's shockingly good
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority If you've ever tried to keep track of your receipts, you know how quickly it turns into a mess. Some are paper, some digital, and some are screenshots that you'll forget about in your phone's gallery. I've tried everything to get a handle on them. India-specific money management apps. Expensify. Google Sheets. I even built a little Notion template to manually track my receipts. And while each of them worked well enough for a while, they all broke down in the same few ways. Either they were too clunky to use daily, didn't play nice with different file types, were too complicated for family members to use, or locked useful features behind subscriptions I didn't want to pay for. But it wasn't until I tried a self-hosted tool called Receipt Wrangler that I found a system that finally made sense. From Google Sheets to Expensify, nothing clicked till I tried out Receipt Wrangler. I'll be honest. I wasn't expecting much when I stumbled upon the app's Github page. The description is minimal, the documentation isn't exactly welcoming, and there's no flashy pitch video or subscription model trying to upsell me. However, installing Receipt Wrangler isn't as complicated as it might look. The documentation might seem intimidating at first, but unlike many open-source projects, the developer has done a solid job detailing nearly every part of the installation process. I had it up and running using Docker on my Synology NAS within minutes. A surprisingly powerful, fast, and frictionless workflow Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority First impressions are everything and Receipt Wrangler does a very convincing job right from the get go. Not only did it work, it worked better than most paid solutions I've tried. It's fast. It's flexible. And most importantly, it gives me a few very intuitive ways to manage my data. It hasn't just become my personal receipt tracker; I've set it up for my family, too. And that's the true litmus test for any self-hosted tool. Receipt Wrangler puts the most obvious use cases front and center. You can set up a dashboard or even multiple dashboards with widgets showing amounts you owe to someone or are owed. You'll also see recent receipts right up front. Pretty straightforward. It's worth pointing out that Receipt Wrangler isn't the prettiest app around. There are no flashy graphics or onboarding tooltips. But after five minutes inside the dashboard, you don't miss any of that. Everything's where you expect it to be. Click a receipt, view the details, and start tagging or editing immediately. It's built around speed and clarity. The UI might not be flashy, but Receipt Wrangler just gets out of my way and works. The real magic, of course, is in how it handles receipt input. You can rename receipts, tag them, group them, and search. If a file has embedded text, the app indexes it. If it doesn't, you can manually input the data through one of the most frictionless forms I've used in a while. And this matters more than it sounds. Because it lets you build a consistent, searchable archive that doesn't depend on weird folder structures or convoluted filenames. That frictionless interface also plays a huge role in making the app stick. Google Sheets, for all its flexibility, really started to show its limits when I put it through the same kind of workflow. A spreadsheet just isn't made for entering long lists of data on the go. I tried building linked folders and matching upload dates with bank transactions, but that approach fell apart fast. If I forgot to log something, it vanished into the ether. If I scanned a receipt but didn't rename it, I'd waste ten minutes later trying to remember what it was. Receipt Wrangler fixes that by putting everything in one place, with metadata you can actually use. Elsewhere, tagging might sound like a basic feature, but it's become my favorite way to sort information across self-hosted tools, whether it's notes, photos, or receipts. It's what turned me from a casual user into someone who now relies on Receipt Wrangler full time. I started tagging receipts by store, category, and purpose. So when it's time to send invoices to the chartered accountant at the end of the month, I don't have to dig through emails or bank statements. I just filter by 'Office' and month, and everything is right there, even if the filename is nonsense. It's made filing monthly invoices almost boring, in a good way. Receipt Wrangler's efficient tagging system is critical to sorting your pile of receipts. Of course, Receipt Wrangler isn't the only tool with tagging support. But most other apps don't do it in a way that fits naturally in my workflow. Expensify, for example, lets you tag but is focused on reimbursements and team reporting. Shoeboxed forces you into their preset categories. Receipt Wrangler lets you make your own. Want to tag every invoice from your freelance gigs? It can do it. Want a tag for 'Reimbursed' and another for 'Pending'? That works too. You can sort out your archive of receipts however you want without working around a pre-defined system. The little things that make it stick Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority I've always been skeptical of automatic OCR. Too many tools promise to extract all your data and then get half of it wrong. Receipt Wrangler plays it smart. If a file has embedded text, it pulls it. If not, you can hook it up to self-hosted AI models like Ollama or external ones like OpenAI or Gemini. Once configured with API keys, it can send receipts to these LLMs to interpret and complete tagging. I like the flexibility, and in a quick test, it worked pretty well. However, I'm not totally ready to send my financial data to an external AI. That said, I've been thinking about running an Ollama instance locally to handle it. But that's a project for another day. Receipt Wrangler lets you connect to LLMs to automatically scan and tag your receipts. The biggest advantage isn't just the features. Self-hosting the app is the biggest win when investing your time and energy into getting an app like Receipt Wrangler running. It's the fact that I own the whole thing, uptime pain-points included. The database lives on my server. Files don't get sent to someone else's cloud. I can back it up how I want, archive to cold storage, and trust that nothing disappears if a company shuts down or moves features behind a paywall. That kind of control is rare now. Most tools try to lock you in, not help you out. Receipt Wrangler flips that. It feels like something built for people who actually care about owning their data or future-proofing their workflows instead of renting convenience. 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This is how receipt tracking should feel Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority I didn't expect to care this much about a tool for scanning receipts. But here we are. Receipt Wrangler turned a chore into something I actually enjoy. It gave me more control, more peace of mind, and fewer excuses to procrastinate. Compared to everything else I've tried — Google Sheets included — this is the first time I feel like I'll actually stick with a system. I'm not hoping that a free tier stays generous, I'm not bracing for a broken update, and most importantly, I'm not at the mercy of someone else's business model. All of that combined with the general excellence of the app has made it an integral part of my daily productivity workflow.
Business Insider
an hour ago
- Business Insider
OpenAI chairman's career advice? Remember what Eric Schmidt told Sheryl Sandberg about joining Google.
Bret Taylor, the chairman of OpenAI, believes that if you have the chance to attach yourself to success, you shouldn't let ego get in the way. "I think this is the quote I always heard, was Eric Schmidt to Sheryl Sandberg: 'If someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat,' you know? I like that philosophy of life," Taylor said on an episode of "Grit." At the time, Sandberg, who would famously later become Facebook's chief operations officer, was deciding whether or not to join a different tech company: Google. Google was a tiny fraction of the size in 2001, with fewer than 300 people. Eric Schmidt had recently been brought on by cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to be CEO. Sandberg talked about her conversation with Schmidt during a speech to Harvard students. "So I sat down with Eric Schmidt, who had just become the CEO, and I showed him the spreadsheet and I said, this job meets none of my criteria," Sandberg recalled. "He put his hand on my spreadsheet and he looked at me and said, 'Don't be an idiot. Get on a rocket ship. When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.'" Sandberg did end up taking the job, and joined as the general manager of Google's business unit, which had four people at the time. "I do think, especially in Silicon Valley, there's just unique moments, and you just have to be self-aware and aware of the market," OpenAI's Taylor said. Beyond being ready to jump at opportunity wherever it comes knocking at your door, remaining broadly flexible is also important, he added. "Most of the unhappiest people I know are rigidly following a plan and not observant of their own happiness or observant of the opportunities around them," Taylor said. "I actually think that a big part of life is recognizing when there's a unique opportunity that you didn't plan for, and asking yourself the question, ' Should I change my plans? ' Whether that's in your personal life or your professional life." Taylor's own career spans Big Tech and startups alike — from leading the team that helped create Google Maps and acting as co-CEO of Salesforce, to founding his own AI company, Sierra. "The idea of sitting on the sidelines, and drinking a mai tai on a beach, doesn't give me joy at all," he said. "I want to build." Just as Taylor was leaving Salesforce, ChatGPT was released. After a conversation over lunch with his cofounder, Clay Bavor, Taylor said the decision to start Sierra was set. But even if he wasn't heading this particular company, he added, he would still be working in an adjacent sphere. "I would be building open source software if not running a company right now, because I just want to work in the technology and help shape it," Taylor said. "Because it's the most exciting technology of my memory, and I want to play a part in shaping how we all use it." That's another key piece of Taylor's personal philosophy: being as involved as possible in shaping the trajectory of the world. "There's this Alan Kay quote: 'The best way to predict the future is to invent it.' And that is like, my operating principle," he said. "I want to impact the future, and I want to help invent it."
Tom's Guide
3 hours ago
- Tom's Guide
AI on phones feels too much like homework — and Apple should use iOS 26's redesign to fix that
Tech companies, especially the ones that make and sell phones, have been telling us how important AI is for several years, and offering a range of new AI-powered features that promise to make our lives easier. But despite promising that, it seems a bunch of those companies forgot the most important thing about new features — making sure people can actually find and use them. As someone who's spent a great deal of time reviewing new phones, nothing irritates me more than being told about new AI features and then having to do a bunch of research to figure out how to access them. Even Apple, a company that has made its own AI suite a lot more transparent, is guilty of this in some regard. And since iOS 19 (or iOS 26) is set to redesign the entire Apple ecosystem, WWDC 2025 is a chance for the company to make AI feel less like homework and transform it into something a lot simpler and more intuitive. I'll preface this with an admission that not all AI features are difficult to find. If it involves going through some kind of voice assistant, like Google Gemini or Siri, then AI capabilities are literally only a voice prompt away. Similarly AI photo editing features, like Google's Magic Editor, have long been available in photo gallery apps, like Google Photos or Apple's equivalent. But at the same time, considering all these features have been around for quite some time, their location and functionality have already been ingrained into our collective memories. Plus, once you know about one of those features, you can often find similar ones in the same spot. Or in the case of voice assistants, physically ask it about the kind of things it can do. There's also a bunch of AI working in the background that the user doesn't actually need to initiate. All that processing that happens to your photos? AI has a hand there, just as it does in helping translate foreign languages for you. We've also seen AI applied to software that helps manage the battery and displays, to help phones run more smoothly and efficiently. None of this is the flashy AI that gets promoted in keynote speeches or TV commercials. It's the boring stuff that makes your phone run and perform better, without you even realizing what's going on. But if a company is trying to add some fuel to the AI hype train, the focus ends up on the new and showy AI features that look and sound good. The problem is phone makers haven't put much consideration into helping users find the darn things. One good example I've found in this area are specialist translation apps — ones that do more than Google Translate. Samsung's Interpreter Mode is the one I've noticed this with most recently, offering the ability to translate two-way conversations happening in two different languages. I know that it exists, Samsung has talked about it at great length, but looking at a Galaxy S25, it's nowhere to be seen. It's not in the app drawer, nor the home screen, nor is it one of the default apps in the Quick Settings menu. Instead you either have to use the search bar to find Interpreter Mode, or change the Quick Settings features to include it — which isn't ideal when you only have 6-8 slots to choose from. The more I think about Galaxy AI features Samsung has talked about, the more I realize that I also have no idea where they are. The same is true for Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini and the countless other AI features that have been added to smartphones in recent years. I made a point of criticizing this in my review of the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, but the problem is a lot more widespread than that — and it's like phone makers don't realize this is a complete hindrance. In the days when new AI features weren't all that common, this probably wouldn't be so bad. Users get the time to get to grips with new features as they arrive, and by the time the next big software update comes around it'll be second nature. But the sheer number of new AI features being added to phones, and with little communication on how they work, makes this much more difficult. The distinct lack of official guidance on how to use new AI features is definitely getting in the way of me wanting to use them — and I doubt I'm the only one who feels that way. If phone makers really care about us using AI features more regularly, then this needs to change. I've often spoken about my severe lack of interest when it comes to using AI on phones, and a big part of that is due to the fact it's usually so difficult to find any of the new features. Back in the day, Apple would proudly declare that "it just works," with die-hard fans parroting that line for several years. But when your new smartphone comes with homework, it certainly isn't passing the intuitiveness test with a particularly good grade. Apple's not the only party guilty of this, but with WWDC set to majorly shake up how Apple software works, be it on iPhone, Mac or another Apple product, it's in a position to try and help users use Apple Intelligence without doing a thesis-load of research first. Who knows, maybe making AI actually intuitive can help make up for all its AI missteps over the past year.
