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Many of you are visiting family for the holidays, which means you're sharing meals, telling stories, and exchanging gifts. In fact, quite a few of you may be giving phones or tablets to family members this year. If you're a regular around here, you're probably also known as the resident gadget expert, an honor that is both a compliment and a curse — you know what I'm talking about. While you might be trying to avoid impromptu tech support work, we would like to encourage taking a few minutes to do something for the greater good: Clean the trash apps from your family members' devices.
If you haven't already seen enough activity with Google Pay in the last month, there are a few notable things happening in the last couple updates. Version 2.80 brings changes to the notification settings screen by dropping the long list of loyalty cards and adopting a new setting to notify you about places those cards can be used. A teardown also reveals upcoming notification channels and a brand new feature that will automatically import relevant tickets and passes when they arrive in your Gmail account.
If we're to listen to complaints about Wear OS, the one thing everybody agrees on is that OEMs should try new things. That's why it's interesting to see that LG's announcement of the Watch W7 instantly became the most criticized smartwatch of 2018 — possibly ever. It had an old chipset, a small-ish battery, and hands that obscured the screen. The watch was mocked so relentlessly, we had our doubts that it would ever come out.But does it really deserve so much hate? There are certainly some compromises and problems, but when you start to consider that the W7 also comes with solutions for some of the common complaints about smartwatches, it might have some potential. I've been using the Watch W7 for a little while and I think there's actually a lot to like about this thing. With some refinements, it might be the start of something good.
Google Play Games is officially going dark. Well, the latest update is making its dark theme accessible to everyone. But that's not the only thing this update brings, there are now app shortcuts and a new sorting feature for achievements coming soon. A teardown also shows the team is preparing to add Minesweeper to the built-in games repertoire. Oh, and we're heard from the dev team, and we've got a hunch they're having a good time.
If you're the proud owner of a OnePlus 6 or 6T, you have a new option for dressing up your phone. Moment, the company known for putting out some pretty nifty add-on lenses, is expanding its line of Photo Cases to support the pair of community favorites. The OnePlus 6 case is available for order today in Walnut Wood and Black Canvas. If you're the owner of a OnePlus 6T, you'll have to wait a bit longer, but Moment plans to have these cases ready for February 2019.
A new update to Duo is out in the wild, but like many others, there's not much to see upon installation. We're all about the teardown on this one, which hints at some kind of pre-call notification and adds follow-ups on the topics of Low Light mode and sending pre-recorded videos to somebody else through Duo.
Google's fling with Allo is officially coming to an end, and as we've seen with many other products in the past, that usually means it's time to grab your data and go. A new update to the Allo app is rolling out today that will make this much easier. Using a simple tool, you'll be able to export your chat logs and any media for safe keeping before Allo closes its doors for good at the end of March 2019.
Google is sending out a new version of Messages, the one chat app everybody expects to live at least to the end of 2019. So far, there's not a lot to see on the user-facing front after the update, but there is at least one change to message attachments. The teardown is more interesting, featuring more details on the upcoming spam protection and support for new file types in the share dialog. There are also some bits of polish coming to group messaging.
While most of Google's core apps have gone through some pretty monumental changes in their adoption of Google's Material Theme, many of the other apps have been slower to take on a new look. In some cases, like the latest Play Movies & TV app, the changes are also much gentler, spanning over the course of a few versions.
Google made some big changes back in May with the launch of Google News, bringing both Play Magazines and the News & Weather app together in a new format and completely redesigned app. A few months later, Google announced several new automatic features for the Google News app that would make it even more data-efficient. Unfortunately, something went wrong and many users found that the app had taken to downloading multiple gigabytes of data over cellular connections and racking up huge overages. While those bugs seem to have been fixed, the latest update includes signs that Google may be putting countermeasures in place to help prevent similar bugs in the future.
The latest update to the Gboard app is now out, but it doesn't appear to be adding any features in this update, or at least not yet. A teardown points to some enhancements to some features we've either seen in the past or expect to go live in the near future, including tweaks to the Clipboard Manager, an option to delete search history, follow-ups related to voice typing, and of course, a ton of new languages and localized keyboards.
A new update for Google Photos is rolling out, and this one is taking aim at making backups possible in regions where data connections are generally slow and expensive. A new Express backup mode is in the works that automatically downscales images and video for more timely and less costly transmission to the cloud. There will also be a new setting that allows users to set daily limits on how much data to spend on performing backups.
The latest Auto update is rolling out and it's making a couple of substantial changes, at least by the standards of an Auto update. You'll now have the option to see the first several words of incoming messages when they arrive, and the music player has been given a makeover that changes both its looks and a little bit of functionality. It seems this update is rolling out to a pretty small number of people right now.
Now that we're deep into the holiday season, plenty of people will be talking with their families, even if they can't necessarily travel long distances to reunite in person. Video calls will be skyrocketing for the next few weeks, and for many people, that will be happening with Google Duo. The latest update to v44 is now out, and while it doesn't appear to bring any new features immediately upon installation, there are a few things spotted in a teardown that will be pretty useful when they do come to life.
Every week, I examine somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred app updates while looking for changes. The most interesting things turn into APK Teardowns or Download posts. Many of the remaining updates are unremarkable, amounting to a few bug fixes, routine updates to libraries, or even just pixel-level adjustments to layouts and images. However, there are usually a few updates that land somewhere in between. I don't want to spam readers with dozens of short posts, but I hate to ignore things that people might want to know about, so I'm going to wrap up the leftovers for a little weekend reading and call it Update Notes.
As we get ready to wear out our credit cards buying gifts for family, friends, coworkers, and probably ourselves, it's a good time to talk about Google Pay and what's in store for it in the future. Unfortunately, we won't be building on the holiday shopping theme with any of the teardown topics, but at least there are a couple of cool features that might get us feeling a little more festive about spending our hard-earned cash with our phones.
You've been asking for it, and asking for it, and asking for it, and... well, you get the point. Just after the Google Contacts app brought in the long-awaited, long-demanded dark theme, the Phone app is now following closely behind with the dark theme we've seen for the last couple versions. It's finally out of testing and available for the rest of the world to enjoy.
An update to the Messages app (formerly Android Messages) has begun making the rounds, and unlike so many other updates lately, this one has a few standout changes after installation. There are a handful of smaller UI tweaks floating around, but a more significant change has been made to the camera interface for taking quick snapshots. There's also a new button in the messaging interface that will get you to the camera even faster.
Moment originally launched with a Kickstarter campaign back in 2014, featuring a pair of lenses and a stick-on mounting plate. But these days, Moment cases and lenses have become some of the top accessories for those aiming to get a stylish look on their phones and more control over their photos. Today, Moment is launching a newly updated 58mm Tele lens designed to work with the latest smartphones, including those with dual-camera configurations.
Friday evening brought us another update to the Google app. Unlike the previous version, there are a fair number of topics to discuss from a teardown. Google is preparing a screen for viewing your image searches from Lens, Collection sharing, a few changes to the layout of settings, and there are even hints of a mystery feature named Workspaces.