Google's Motion Sense coming to Australian Pixel 4 - thanks ACMA

Google's Motion Sense coming to Australian Pixel 4

Will we see Google’s Motion Sense in the Pixel 4 when it comes to Australia? It seems the answer was we would, we won’t and now again, we will. That is how it has been for us Australians with Google’s latest innovation coming to the Pixel 4 — Motion Sense.

Ausdroid has been pointed to a filing from Google to ACMA regarding the Soli frequencies and upon further investigation we have found that the frequencies are now licensed and usable in Australia for Google’s purposes.

On Saturday we saw 9to5Google dig into the Motion Sense APK file from the pre-release Pixel 4 of Nextrift and lo and behold contrary to what Best Buy had leaked a while back, Australia was missing off the list of supported countries.

Now we have two sources that suggest that the APK used was old and outdated, and in fact Australia will be included in the list of countries supported by Motion Sense or Soli.

Thanks to one of our readers, MJay, we were linked to a Google submission to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) made earlier this year. The submission urged the ACMA to license the frequency bands required for Motion Sense to work in Australia. Google’s submission was ultimately successful, with the class licence varied in August this year to permit Project Soli (and other technologies operating in the 60GHz range) to operate in Australia.

Corroborating our findings, XDA did some of their own digging and came up with a more recent list that suggests that Australia will be included (sorry Kiwis, New Zealand does not seem to make the cut). XDA’s list comes out at at least 53 regions and 23 media apps  currently supported, not 38 and 9 as previously reported. XDA reported:

The list that we found was in an internal Google database used for controlling configuration values for its apps. The more complete country list comes from a config called “mcc_whitelist” while the more complete supported app list comes from a config called “media_app_whitelist,” both of which are for “oslo,” the code-name for Motion Sense.

It looks like Australia is going to get lucky this time around, and we’re pretty thankful for that. Now, we just need Google to hold a launch event in a couple of weeks and we’ll know what’s what.