We don’t have a working model yet, but Android 14 should come with a satellite cellular service. A lot of regions in the United States have already been on the list of wireless carriers, but there are still many places where satellite connectivity isn’t active.
Recently, T-Mobile and SpaceX announced their partnership working on the future of mobile connectivity where they will cover those areas where connectivity hasn’t reached yet. Google is also expected to use this functionality by offering a Satellite Cellular Service.
Note, connectivity will be 2 to 4 Mbits per cell zone, so will work great for texting & voice calls, but not high bandwidth
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 26, 2022
As shared by Google’s Senior Vice President of Android, Hiroshi Lockheimer confirmed that the next version of Android will support satellite connectivity and they have been partnering with different carriers. At the end of the T-Mobile and SpaceX event, CEO and President Mike Sievert said they will end mobile dead zones.
Launching satellites and then covering those areas will almost cover everything and this service is also expected to launch in late 2023. Users will be able to use services which include messaging, MMS, and also work with selected messaging apps.
Wild to think about user experiences for phones that can connect to satellites. When we launched G1 in '08 it was a stretch to get 3G + Wifi working. Now we're designing for satellites. Cool! Excited to support our partners in enabling all of this in the next version of Android!
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) September 1, 2022
The company is also working on expanding plans to launch voice and wireless internet connectivity later. Which could take some serious time. The company has yet to fix and troubleshoot the problems that evolve and then later launch such services.
As Google’s Android is in the hands of millions of people, with this feature a lot of users will be able to use this functionality. Moreover, this is actually a useful feature when it comes to improving the quality of life for everyone at one go.
