Things are finally heating up for Google’s Pixel Thermometer app

There’s lots of stuff you rely on your Pixel phone for every day, from keeping track of your schedule, to navigating you to appointments, to even keeping you safe with a little help from satellites. But how often are you using your phone to measure temperatures? Last year’s Pixel 8 Pro introduced a weird new feature, as it picked up infrared thermometer hardware able to measure temperatures at a distance. Now some important new functionality for it is on its way to a lot more people, as Google gets ready to bring body temperature measurement to users in Europe.

When it first debuted on the Pixel 8 Pro, Google’s temperature sensor was a little underwhelming. Besides not delivering particularly accurate measurements, Google was still waiting for regulatory sign-off for it to be used to measure human body temperature — arguably one of its more important uses (especially with its development spinning up during the pandemic, when quickly assessing people for fever was a big deal). With the release of the January 2024 Pixel Feature Drop, that support finally arrived… for people in the US.