Android in 2014 was a playground for innovation. The ecosystem was much simpler, and everyone was kind of doing their own thing. This led to more frequent fresh ideas compared to what we have today. Here’s some of the stuff we thought was groundbreaking back then—and I would really love it if a lot of these things were still around.
Use your phone without touching it
In the early to mid-2010s, smartphones were evolving at a breakneck pace, and manufacturers were desperate to find the next revolutionary input method. Samsung led the charge with features like Air Gestures and Smart Scroll, introduced heavily in flagship devices like the Galaxy S4. The premise was intoxicatingly futuristic: you could interact with your digital world without ever physically touching the glass.
Using a complex array of infrared sensors and the front-facing camera, the phone would actively track your hand movements and eye position. You could wave your hand above the display to accept an incoming call while cooking, swipe through a photo gallery with a flick of the wrist, or have a webpage automatically scroll down simply by tilting your head or looking toward the bottom of the screen. It felt like wielding a superpower, a sci-fi dream suddenly sitting right in your pocket. I was a teenager back then, and I really wanted one because of it—I remember watching the commercials and thinking how revolutionary and useful that looked.
However, not only was it a gimmick, but the reality of living with this technology quickly shattered the illusion. The sensors required highly specific lighting conditions to work consistently, often failing in bright sunlight or dimly lit rooms. Waving frantically at a phone that refused to respond in public was far more embarrassing than empowering. Furthermore, constantly polling these sensors absolutely devastated battery life, which was already a major pain point for smartphones of that era.
Ultimately, the industry learned a valuable lesson in user experience. While touchless controls were a brilliant engineering flex, they solved a problem that did not actually exist. Swiping a thumb across a remarkably responsive capacitive glass screen was exponentially faster, infinitely more reliable, and physically less demanding. The feature was quietly retired, as it should have, but maybe we can eventually get a variation of this—one that actually works in multiple lighting scenarios, perhaps.
IR blasters
Can we bring these back?
There was a brief, glorious window in Android history where your smartphone was truly the absolute center of your ecosystem, thanks to the inclusion of the Infrared, or IR, blaster. Prominently featured on legendary flagship devices like the HTC One M8, the LG G3, and the Samsung Galaxy S5, this tiny, unassuming diode housed at the top edge of the device granted users a tremendous amount of localized power. By utilizing pre-installed remote control applications, your phone could flawlessly mimic the infrared signals of practically any television, set-top cable box, stereo receiver, or even air conditioning unit on the market.
It was an incredibly practical tool that also offered a distinct sense of mischief. Walking into a crowded sports bar and discreetly changing the channel, or mercifully muting a blaring television in a waiting room without searching for the physical remote, felt like possessing a digital master key to the physical world.
Sadly, the demise of the IR blaster was brought about by the very technological evolution it helped pioneer. As the concept of the connected smart home gained massive traction, the underlying infrastructure of our appliances shifted dramatically. Televisions, sound systems, and climate controls began connecting directly to local Wi-Fi networks and utilizing Bluetooth protocols, rendering line-of-sight infrared beams completely obsolete. Companion apps and cast protocols offered richer, two-way interactions that a simple IR blaster simply could not match.
Compounding this shift was the relentless manufacturer drive for internal smartphone space and cost reduction. Removing the dedicated infrared hardware saved fractions of a penny per unit and freed up precious millimeters of internal real estate for larger batteries and advanced camera modules, ensuring the universal remote feature was relegated strictly to the history books. Too bad.
Android Beam
Beam me up, Scotty
Long before seamless wireless file dropping became the ubiquitous standard we expect today, Android users were physically tapping their devices together to exchange data through a feature known as Android Beam. Introduced back in the Ice Cream Sandwich era, Android Beam utilized Near Field Communication technology to create an instantaneous bridge between two smartphones.
The way it worked is that you would open a webpage, a contact card, a YouTube video, or a photograph, physically press the back of your phone against a friend’s device, wait for the distinct haptic buzz, and tap your screen to send the payload. It bypassed the tedious friction of pairing devices via Bluetooth menus or exchanging email addresses, making the act of digital sharing feel wonderfully tangible and immediate. The physical tap became a sort of secret handshake among early Android enthusiasts.
However, the underlying system was inherently flawed in practical ways that ultimately doomed it. The primary issue was spatial precision. NFC chips have an incredibly short, highly localized range, meaning you had to rub the phones together in an awkward, exploratory dance to find the exact millimeter where the two sensors aligned, which varied wildly depending on the phone manufacturer. Additionally, while NFC was fantastic for transmitting tiny packets of data like a simple web link, it was agonizingly slow for transferring actual media files. Trying to send a high-resolution photo or a video clip over Beam was an exercise in extreme patience.
Google deprecated Android Beam in favor of modern iterations like Quick Share, which simply uses Bluetooth to negotiate a connection and Wi-Fi Direct to transfer massive files in seconds, eliminating both the awkward physical contact and the excruciating transfer times. But I would be down for a modern version of this. There’s a distinct charm to putting your phone together with someone else’s phone to share stuff. Apple waited years until people forgot about it to launch SharePlay, a similar tool in practice but that worked with modern features rather than old, slow NFC.
Project Tango
Way ahead of its time, and with way too many issues for today
Perhaps the most wildly ambitious and genuinely futuristic endeavor of this entire era was Google’s Project Tango. Announced in 2014, Tango was not merely a software feature, but a fundamentally new hardware paradigm designed to give mobile devices a human-like understanding of space and physical motion. Tango-enabled devices, like the experimental Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, were equipped with a dense array of specialized hardware, including a standard camera, a motion-tracking camera, and an infrared depth sensor. Working in tandem, these sensors allowed the device to track its own trajectory and map the physical environment in real-time, high-fidelity three-dimensional space without ever relying on GPS or external signals.
The implications were staggering. It represented true, spatially aware augmented reality years before the term became a mainstream industry buzzword. Users could instantly map the exact dimensions of a room, seamlessly drop life-sized virtual furniture into their actual living spaces, or play immersive games where digital characters hid behind physical couches.
Yet, the immense physical demands of Project Tango were its ultimate undoing. The specialized multi-lens sensor array was incredibly expensive to manufacture, physically bulky, and consumed enormous amounts of processing power, often causing the devices to overheat rapidly during extended use.
Ultimately, the rapid advancement of computer vision software algorithms made the dedicated hardware completely obsolete. Engineers realized they could achieve highly accurate environmental mapping and tracking using just a single standard smartphone camera lens paired with sophisticated machine learning. Project Tango was shuttered, but its pioneering hardware spirit directly paved the way for the accessible, software-driven augmented reality ecosystem that runs flawlessly on billions of ordinary smartphones today.
