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When it comes to ad placements inside applications and games, the more you know the better it is before you make a plunge and decide to check something out. Maybe you're willing to pay $5 or $10 for a good app or game, but you're appalled by the idea of also having to endure ads on top of that, or maybe you're just the kind of person who prefers free and ad-free software. Knowing beforehand if the app or game you're about to download contains ads can go a long way in setting the right expectations, that's the point David argued many years ago, and Google in all its wisdom decided to follow his advice (or you know, common sense).
Twitter has a bit of a love/hate relationship with mobile platforms and Android in particular. On the one hand, it's so aggressively possessive and wants an exclusive relationship devoid of any third-parties, on the other it updates its apps at a nice pace and adds new features to them. Oh well, it did let Android users hang behind iOS more than once, but we're not holding grudges.
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- CyanogenMod posted the news of this change in weather approach on its blog, calling it Plug & Play Weather and explaining that it was mostly due to the limit in API calls that CyanogenMod users were causing on their original weather providers, Yahoo! Weather and OpenWeatherMap. The post also explains that while the UI is a bit clunky now for adding a new provider, it has to be this way to allow for independent API tokens for each user and thus avoid the limits. Work on an OpenWeatherMap plugin is underway and other developers can sure provide their own apps for regional and global weather providers.
A couple of weeks ago, CyanogenMod nightlies added a new Weather settings panel that left some of its users confused. The panel had no options and all you could see was that there were "No weather provider services installed." It looked like CyanogenMod was ready to start allowing different third-party weather providers into its homescreen and lockscreen widgets, instead of forcing users to go with whichever default service was being used, but that the option was still being tested.
Remember the Gear Fit? More than two years ago, everyone was excited to check it out because it was the first fitness tracker to feature a curved display that was supposed to hug your wrist and not look completely weird on it. The hype only lasted a couple of months as Samsung released wearable upon wearable dragging the Gear Fit into oblivion by sheer intra-brand competition. It seems that the concept wasn't completely abandoned though as Samsung is gearing up (oh snap!) to release a second generation of the product.
Android TV may not have caught like wildfire, but it's still an affordable and interesting set-top box offering. If you've already bought a Nexus Player or SHIELD TV unit for example and you've been met by glares from a couple of your family members who own iPhones and iPads and can't control the darn thing with their devices, then you're in for a small surprise today.
What do you do when your phone is running low on battery and you must make a phone call because the wife expects you to do some grocery shopping before you get home or because your tummy has started rumbling and your only path to salvation is through the gooey cheese-stuffed crusts of a pepperoni pizza?
So you like the idea of Netflix but you find the prospect of setting up monthly billing with another company tedious and annoying. Maybe you don't own a credit/debit card and maybe you don't want someone else dipping into your bank account each month. Then Netflix' upcoming feature might be interesting to you.
The way I understand it, Game Of Thrones is a TV show where every character that you love or hate dies, where people get terrified when Winter is coming, and where dragons and nudes cater to every person's weird and unfulfilled fantasies. Or something. I want to watch the show, but I can't handle all the suspense, so I'm going to wait until the last season starts and then binge watch it until I forget what daylight is and what real people do.
Ever since it sold off its mobile business to Microsoft and its mapping entity to a consortium of German carmakers, Nokia has been struggling to find its identity and reinvent itself amidst a changing and challenging ecosystem. Its network arm is still going strong, but the brand has lost much of, if not all of its halo when it comes to consumer-facing technologies.
I'll be honest here. We don't know what's exactly happening with the Android N Dev Preview 2's Downloads and Files situation. There are lots of nitty gritty changes happening and we obviously can't tell if these are forgotten missteps in this release or if this is the way things will be from now on. I've been going back and forth between each screenshot of Android N Dev Preview 1 and its equivalent on Dev Preview 2 trying to understand the rationale behind some of these changes, but I haven't made sense of it all.
So many TV shows, so little time. And why does it have to be so incredibly difficult to choose a show and an episode to watch? Why do services expect you to know what you want to see, instead of throwing stuff at your screen and hoping you'll be hooked. Like... a regular TV. We've gone full circle people, and it turns out our old ways weren't that bad.
Bank of America's Android app has allowed fingerprint sign-ins since September 2015, or so it would like you to think. Support seems to have been limited to Samsung's fingerprint sensor and didn't work on the Nexus 5X or 6P with their Nexus Imprint. Reviewers on the Play Store complained about that and the developers finally updated the app to fix the issue.
When it comes to analyst firms, there are very few that I trust and even then, I rather look at all of their numbers and compare them together to get a better picture of the global smartphone market. TrendForce hasn't been on my radar — it could be very accurate, it could be all over the place. So I am going to tell you to take its report and numbers with a grain of salt, although the results couldn't be that far off.
I don't understand a lot of things about design, but if you ask me, those Jonathan Adler designs for Motorola's X Pure Edition aren't that appealing. They're interesting, sure, and I might want them for a couple of days or weeks, but I'd get bored of the pattern pretty quickly.
Social networks aiming to change the way we communicate are everywhere. Messaging applications that want to do it all are also spreading like wildfire. With Facebook, WhatsApp, and Snapchat taking a big piece of the cake, it's hard for a service to differentiate itself, but Airtime manages to do just that.
Google is on a crusade against search bars. Or so it seems to us at least. Late last year, the Play Store received an interface revamp that dumped the green search bar in favor of an overlaid grey bar with a hamburger menu, a voice search icon, and the words Google Play in grey that disappeared as soon as you started typing. Then a few days ago, it changed Play Books' search bar to a look that sits somewhere in the middle, with the blue bar switching into the grey one when you tapped to search.
A few days ago, we reported about Twitter's undergoing works on a more Material Design interface for its Android app, which was showing up for some users as part of an A/B test. But Twitter's efforts in modernizing its UI don't seem limited to the native app, as a very similar white and blue look has shown up on the Twitter mobile site.
Hype Machine isn't your typical music discovery service. It relies on music blogs to aggregate the most recent and talked about music tracks across the internet and from various genres. You can only listen to songs when the original blog has posted a link to SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or Official.fm for example, but the track itself isn't hosted on Hype Machine.
When it first launched last summer, Microsoft Translator had some potential but a lot of catch-up to do with Google's own Translate. No offline mode, no natural conversation mode, no Android Wear app, and many other missing features made me refrain from recommending it when I compared it against Translate. But Microsoft has been updating its app, bridging the gap with each new version, adding all of these features and more like Klingon support and a kickass Android Wear integration. The only major capability that was still missing from Translator's arsenal was image translation and that's finally here.
