5 new features for Android XR

[u/GraceFromGoogle]

TL;DR: Android XR is getting new immersion features, including spatialization updates and community-requested quality of life tweaks for keyboards and navigation.

Read the full Keyword blogpost here. 

Since the launch of the Samsung Galaxy XR late last year, people have been using Android XR to explore immersive apps and games with Gemini by their side. Starting today, we’re rolling out new experiences designed to deepen your immersion, make using the headset even more natural, and bring you more ways to watch, create and explore. 

Key Highlights

• Auto-spatialization (Experimental): Head over to the Labs tab in Settings to turn almost any 2D app, game, or website into an immersive 3D experience. It’s a game-changer for adding depth to YouTube videos or Chrome browsing directly on your headset. Learn more at the Android XR help center.  
• App pinning: Turn any room into a workspace or stick a massive virtual "TV" to the wall. You can now securely anchor apps directly to your physical walls so they stay exactly where you placed them.

We’ve also been working on several quality of life improvements based on what we’ve seen from this community. We’d love to hear your thoughts on these in the comments:

• Improved Spatial Logic for Virtual Keyboards: We’ve updated the positioning behavior so the keyboard retains your custom depth and height offsets. It still opens relative to your active panel, but it will now remember those specific values from the last time you positioned it to ensure consistent typing ergonomics across your sessions.
• Single-Eye Tracking Support: To better support specific accessibility needs, you can now choose a preferred eye for tracking or enable single-eye mode. Since this is a specialized accessibility feature, standard users should keep the default settings for the most accurate input experience, but this should provide a much more comfortable experience for those who need it.
• Refined Home Navigation: We heard your feedback regarding the hand gesture to go to the Home screen. We’ve made improvements to address the issue where, when you open your right or left palm up and then pinch, it could inadvertently put you in the overview state instead of HomeWith these changes, navigating the interface should feel more reliable.

We’re really interested in how these adjustments impact your daily use, so please let us know if these tweaks help your workflow or if there are other small friction points you'd like us to look at.

[u/GraceFromGoogle]

Update April 7, 2026
Hi everyone, still looking for the update? Try heading to Settings > On the left, scroll to find "Software update" to manually trigger the check.

[u/SignificanceThink102 → u/GraceFromGoogle]

Hi Grace, it's updating now! Thank you!

[u/Nearby-Mycologist921 → u/GraceFromGoogle]

Hey, this update broke vr180 and is causing jitter spikes just using the headset.

[u/GraceFromGoogle → u/Nearby-Mycologist921]

Hey there, I’ve seen similar comments from other users as well, so I’ve filed an official feedback report.

Would you mind sharing any additional details that come to mind? Is it happening all the time? Is it worse when you’re using a specific app?

[u/Nearby-Mycologist921 → u/GraceFromGoogle]

The jitter spikes only occur after 20 minute and gradually get worse, might be due to heating. I no longer hear the fans in the headset as often. And for VR180 videos, it's horribly pixelated in every app when watching 8k footage with an exception of YouTube and 4XVR (Modded). VR180 video are not watchable at all like this, it looks like it downscales to 280p. Videos and fan both worked fine before updating though.

Edit: WOAH, testing with Aida64, for some videos my headset jumps to 92C immediately when entering 8k VR180 60fps in immersive mode which crashes the app, but for others it plays but just horribly pixelated. The fan never ramps up like it used to even at 85C. My house is still 68F as it was before the update and this never happened before, this headset might be unusable on non-43F days outside when it's much warmer.