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In its quest to become the only app where you share photos, moments, and messages, Instagram is adding one new feature to its direct messages: activity status. Just like you'd see when a person was last active on WhatsApp or Telegram or plenty of other messaging services, now you can do the same on Instagram and chide them for not replying with "oohs" and "aahs" to the preettay pic of a sunset that you just posted or the kissy face you messaged directly to them. Or you know, there's one more way to track every online activity of your significant other and get many more proofs and reasons to pick a fight over "Are you still checking out your ex on Instagram?"
There are a few smart home device types that your Google Assistant/Home can control natively. Lights, plugs and switches, and thermostats were some of the first, but recently we've seen the addition of dryers, washers, dishwashers, vacuums, fridges, and even scenes. However, one type of device I've been personally waiting for are smart locks. Up until now, all smart locks were, uhm, locked into using the Assistant apps for integration, and not the native smart home capability. So users of August locks had to "ask August to lock the door," and those with Vivint had to "ask Vivint if the door is locked," for example. That is cumbersome because it doesn't feel native (a different voice answers you) and it's voice match-dependent so every person in the household has to connect the app in their own Assistant account, otherwise Assistant/Home will refuse to answer.
Android Pay launched in June of last year in Taiwan with only 2 banks under its wings: Chinatrust Bank and First Bank. Since then, it has expanded to more institutions including Cathay United, Union Bank, Shin Kong, Standard Chartered, Taishin International, E.SUN Commercial, Entie Commercial, Hua Nan, and it's now making its way to HSBC as well. According to the Android Pay page, all HSBC VISA and Mastercard credit cards can now be added to the Android Pay app in Taiwan, allowing you to use them for store and online purchases with merchants.
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- Maps Go finally opened up a beta program on the Play Store, which you can sign up for here. That means we were able to grab the teensy 0.09MB file and it's now up on APK Mirror for you to download and try. As suspected, the app runs in Chrome so it is a Progressive Web App and technically the same thing as if you'd pulled out a homescreen shortcut for its URL.
Android Go, the lightweight edition of Android made for low-end hardware, officially launched about a week ago, and promised to come with several optimized versions of apps to make better use of the limited resources. We've already seen Files Go and Google Go but the Android Go site says there are more apps, like Assistant, Gmail, and Maps. The latter has just showed up on the Play Store, though it may have been available for a while but invisible.
OnePlus has been in the news for a few bad reasons lately, which to me has further solidified my dichotomous feelings toward the company, but that's not stopping it from churning software updates. Up today we have the OnePlus 3 and 3T, which are getting bumped to the Open Beta 30 and 21, respectively, with the same changelog for both.
30 days ago, Amazon announced that it was in the process of assorting Apple TVs and Chromecasts to start selling them again. Since then, the Apple TV and Apple TV 4K have been available and sold on the site, but the Chromecast and Chromecast Ultra are still showing as "Currently unavailable" from Amazon, with no third-party sellers at all. Even searching for "Chromecast" on Amazon doesn't bring up the product pages linked above, you'd have to know the URL to see them. We've reached out to Amazon several times over the past weeks to ask about this and to inquire about an exact availability date, but were told there were no details to share.
Given the thousands of press releases coming out of CES, we almost missed the news that your TiVo DVR/Set-top box will soon integrate in your smart home setup, almost regardless of which platform you've decided to delve into.
I've been using a Netatmo Welcome camera for the past month or so (review coming soon) and enjoying its facial recognition features, its completely free plans which save everything to an SD card and can connect to your Dropbox, and its neat little cylinder design. What I haven't liked, however, is the fact that it doesn't integrate with anything else I own. SmartThings? Nope. Google Home? Nada. Echo/Alexa? Niet. There's an IFTTT channel but that's about it. The cams are like the bastard children of Netatmo's ecosystem. Whereas the thermostat and weather station have Assistant and Alexa integrations, the cams aren't supported in either of these. But now, there's another way to control the Netatmo cams and no it's not what you think... Well it technically is because you already read the title of the post, but let's suppose you didn't. It's with (pause for effect) Facebook Messenger. Wait, whaaaa?The Netatmo team thought it wiser to forego all these voice assistant fads and integrate with Messenger as a bot. After all, who doesn't want to type to check their camera instead of opening an app? Ok, ok, I get that there's a legit use case somewhere, but of all possible integrations to think of, Messenger was the first?!
The addition of skin tones in emojis has been a nice but cumbersome feature. Most keyboards will show a pop-up when you use an emoji with skin tone modifier options, thus requiring two taps to insert a thumbs-up or facepalm or astronauts or dancers and dozens of other emojis. Worse yet, the different keyboard apps almost never remember your choice, so you have to do this for each emoji the first time you use it. Gah.
It's 1 AM and you're lying in bed. It's been a long day and your brain is still overworked with everything you did and everything you still need to do tomorrow. To avoid forgetting things, you shout at your Google Home or Google Assistant on your phone, "Ok Google, set a reminder to read Android Police more diligently tomorrow at 10 AM," or you know, something more critical than that (HOW DARE YOU?!). Then you stop and think... it's technically "tomorrow" already, because we're past midnight, so when did Google actually set the reminder for? In 9 hours or in 33 hours? But you're already dozing off and you can't be bothered to check, so you fall asleep and think that you'll find the answer in the morning. You wake up and lo-and-behold, Google reminds you to read AP more diligently at 10 AM, which is awesome because you then discover this little priceless piece of information we're sharing with you here.
We knew it was coming but it's now official: JVCKENWOOD has debuted 7 new car head units under its JVC and Kenwood brands with support for Wireless Android Auto. This means no more fussing with the USB cable and plugging your phone in every time you get in the car: the Auto interface will work wirelessly. This will be great for short trips, but you're still better off charging your phone during long drives, especially if you're using GPS for navigation, lest the battery die prematurely.
Some things baffle me about the US. The blind love of SMS is one, and the fact that the FM chip in smartphones isn't activated on many devices in the country for some reason (read: operator greed) is another. But things have been moving in the right direction: LG announced a partnership with NextRadio to unlock the FM chip in its smartphones a few months ago and now the same is happening with Samsung.
In today's other sunsetting news, Chrome is deprecating its Supervised Users feature, which was in beta and allowed you to have Chrome users under your profile but with limited access to certain features - think young children and teenagers. Google emailed users who had set up Supervised Users to let them know that starting January 12, they won't be able to create or import supervised users, and three days after that, the management dashboard won't allow them to change any settings for their existing supervised users.
Well, Samsung seems to be on a cleaning spree this year. Just yesterday, the company announced that it was going to consolidate over 40 disparate apps under SmartThings and now it seems that a different app will be killed: Game Recorder+.
Many companies are still trying to make VR happen, though it feels like those couple of years when 3D TVs were being pushed and then completely disappeared. If you ask me, there's merit to the immersive experience of VR in certain situations, but the wider and easier adoption will be for AR when it's commoditized. But I digress. We've been keeping an eye on HTC's VIVE and Oculus for a while, even though they're not technically related to Android, but for the sake of information here are the two companies' CES 2018 news.
The Google Assistant seems to be in everything at CES 2018 and the latest trend right now, beside the new smart display form factor, is to put it in desk or bedside clocks. We already saw iHome's iGV1 that looks like a Google Home sawn in half with a hidden LED display, and now we have two new clock speakers to look at from SōLIS and Jensen.
The Play Store keeps trickling down to more Chromebooks. The last time we covered it, 17 new models had received the Play Store either on the stable or beta channel, and now 10 more are joining the ranks. The most prominent of these is the Toshiba Chromebook 2, but only the 2015 model. If you're like me and you got way too excited thinking this is for your computer, hold your breath and make sure you have the 2015 model (the best way to know is if you have vents on the back next to the display hinge like so). If you don't, tough luck to you and me both. We'll have to keep on waiting.
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- Here are a couple more photos of the ThinQ View from LG taken at their CES booth. Also, as I suspected, the orange flip is a manual camera privacy cover.
The new Google Assistant smart displays keep trickling in. Shortly after the announcement of Assistant coming to display-endowed speakers, we discovered the Lenovo Smart Display then we learned about the JBL Link View. Now we have the third device of its kind, the LG ThinQ WK9 (could also be called the ThinQ View).
You can already control a few car brands with Google Assistant and Google Home (Hyundai and its Blue Link come to mind), and now Kia is joining the ranks. The car manufacturer announced at CES that the Assistant will be compatible with its UVO infotainment system, through UVO Agent, which will allow users to execute some remote functions on their vehicle by talking to Google Assistant.
After months of speculations on Cody's part, the Assistant devices known under the "Quartz" codename were announced yesterday as smart displays and Lenovo unveiled the first one of the range. Google said that other companies were on board too, like LG and Sony, but another one is now also known: it's the JBL Link View.