Keeping your Android phone up-to-date should be a straight-forward task. You have updates for apps in the Google Play store and system updates that show up at some point in most months. Those system updates can be smaller and include security patches or they may bring new Android versions or bigger quarterly builds that can introduce new features.
What if I told you there was another update area, one that is semi-secret and that you may not have checked, but could have items available for updating? For the ultra-power users in the Android space, this may not be new to you. However, for everyone else, you might want to go looking for the “System services” area within your phone.
On a Google Pixel, you’ll find this by opening Settings on your phone and tapping your Google profile at the top where it says your name and “Google services and preferences.” On a Samsung phone, you’ll also open settings, but then scroll until you see “Google services,” tap that, and then switch over to the “All services” tab. Once in these areas, you’ll look for “System services” and tap on it.
Of course, you could also just search your phone for “System services” and any modern Android phone should find it and take you directly to this same place.
Now that you are here, the image above is what you’ll see. It tells you that “Google system services give you useful features that make your Android devices more secure and reliable.” It then lists all of the available services in here, most of which should be “Up to date.”
However, as you can see for me, the Google Play Services for AR has an update available. The system hasn’t prompted me about this update and will likely end up doing it behind-the-scenes at some point, but I know there are plenty of you out there (like me) who frequently check everything for updates and would love to initiate this update on your own. You can do that here!
You’ll also notice that this is the area where the Quick Share Extension now lives. That Quick Share Extension is the service that has given us AirDrop on Android and is a pretty big deal at the moment.
So look, this area isn’t going to necessarily give you the latest Gmail update before anyone else as Google slow rolls it out. Google has mostly used it to makes things “more secure and reliable,” as they describe on this page, but with the arrival of the Quick Share Extension, it’s obvious that Google could (and may) end up doing more here.
Add this one to your daily updates routine.
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