Someone just needed an article and Google likes things they don't really care about.
Why does it need one?
To tell the temperature of things.
Why does it need to tell the temperature of things?
Supposedly Google planned to use it to measure a person’s temperature (for health tracking) but they haven’t gotten it approved for the use case yet. Could be yet another feature Google never properly realise and it’ll be removed in the Pixel 9.
That's the point of the article.
Haven't there been other phones with a temperature sensor? I remember some app that crowd sourced temperature data and I could see that being maybe a useful feature. From the article though it appears to be inaccurate so maybe not so much in this case, though maybe Google didn't calibrate it on the software side because their primary use case hasn't been approved.
Edit: looks like they can do it through a temperature sensor on the battery, though this isn't what I remembered. https://news.agu.org/press-release/crowdsourcing-weather-using-smartphone-batteries/
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