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Usually any exchange of money in apps is going from you to the developers, but Google Opinion Rewards is different. It asks you questions, you provide them, and you get a few cents in your Google Play balance. It's a sweet deal, and the app just got updated with a few minor changes. Might as well have your survey answering experience be all it can be.
Since time immemorial, Yelp's Android app has been incredibly ugly. That ends today. The redesign that reached beta testing last month has been released to the general public. It's so much nicer than the old one.
The new UFS 2.0 NAND standard offers considerably faster performance than the eMMC that has been used until now. It can read and write at the same time and has command queuing to prioritize tasks. According to Samsung, the UFS chips it is making are capable of theoretical max sequential read/write speeds of 350 and 150 MB/s. That's 1.4 and 1.6 times faster than eMMC, respectively. The numbers presented by Phone Arena certainly point to monster performance from the Galaxy S6.
Add another phone to the list of Lollipop-powered devices. Sprint has started rolling out the Android 5.0 update to its version of the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. It's version N910PVPU1BOB7 and includes all the Lollipop goodies you'd expect.
Roguelike games have become a big deal lately, and several notable ones have come to Android including bit Dungeon II and Wayward Souls. The latest title to migrate to Android is Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic, which gets rave reviews on Steam. It's a little pricey at $6.99, but you should at least watch the video below. It as much a performance piece as it is a game promo.
You might know ZeptoLab as the developer of the Cut the Rope games, but now you can also steal the gold in King of Thieves. This game is basically part action-platformer and part Dungeon Keeper. If that sounds both confusing and interesting, you can try it for free.
Twitter looks to be in the process of rolling out a handy feature in its official app, but you probably don't have it yet. A number of users in the Twitter beta program report they now have a built-in browser for viewing links. This appears to be a server-side change, so you can't just install an APK to enable it.
You probably know Punit Soni best from his brief run as VP for product management at Motorola Mobility when it was owned by Google. After leaving Google in September, Soni has now announced that he's found his next gig. He'll be spending the next few years in India as the chief product officer of Flipkart.
There's a new Google app in the Play Store today—the Google PDF Viewer. You may be wondering why that exists seeing as Google Drive already opens PDFs. It's that same basic thing, but you don't need Drive. This app is intended mainly for Android for Work, but anyone can install it.
You might expect taking Hangouts all the way from v2.5 to v3.0 would come with some big changes, but then you'd be wrong. While there are plenty of things that could be fixed in Hangouts, Google has just started pushing out the 3.0 update with only a tweaks. There's more going on than it may seem at first, but a major update this is not.
We're coming up on a year since the OnePlus One started rolling out via the now infamous invite system, but you still can't get the device everywhere. OnePlus is taking steps to rectify that by expanding availability to all EU countries. Here are the new markets the company expects to get into soon.
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NVIDIA has just taken the stage at GDC for its big "Made to Game" announcement, and guess what... it's another SHIELD. This one is just called SHIELD, though, and it's an Android TV box. NVIDIA has added its own twist on Android TV, just like it does with regular Android. The new NVIDIA SHIELD has support for native 4K 60Hz video signals and NVIDIA GRID game streaming technology.
HTC has missed the 90-day deadline it set for itself to get all recent devices updated to Lollipop, but it's not giving up. The Verizon version of the One M8 is getting Android 5.0 today, and you probably know what that means by now.
Anyone who has used Android and Google services long enough will probably notice how much junk has accumulated in their contacts. There's a new version of Google Contacts in the works to fix that, and you can try a preview of it right now. Unless you have a Google Apps account. Duh.
I don't know that I've ever needed a pizza urgently enough that I couldn't spare the time to reach a phone or computer, but should you ever encounter this sort of red alert pizza emergency, Domino's has you covered. The Domino's app now supports ordering and tracking orders from Android Wear and Pebble.
Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was a sweet frozen treat when it came out in 2011, but now something else is freezing—Chrome for ICS. Google has announced that Chrome v42 will be the final build available on Android 4.0. It's a sad day for any remaining ICS users... well, more sad than a regular day of being stuck on ICS already is.
We are, at this point, familiar with fake apps in the Play Store—they pop up from time to time, but Google swiftly eliminates them. It seems like for all its efforts in cleaning up the Play Store, Google has a blind spot when it comes to books. There are multiple publisher accounts in Google Play Books that claim to offer cracked APKs for a dollar or two, and people are buying them. Instead of getting a cheap game, all people are getting is disappointment and malware.
It's getting to be that time. The first-generation Android Wear watches are officially old, and everyone is anticipating shiny new watches with updated hardware. That means the old ones are going to start showing up on sale more often. You can get the G Watch R from Groupon for $269.99 right now, $30 off the regular price.
Sonos doesn't use the Play Store beta system, so it's a bit of a pain to get the newest version of the app installed before it's official. The v5.3 update hit beta in January, but now it's ready for everyone to download in the Play Store. Sonos doesn't update frequently, so it tends to cram a lot of changes into each release, and this is no exception.
Several manufacturers are moving away from 7-inch tablets, but LG still has the small tablet form factor in mind. The G Pad 7.0 came out last year, and eventually found its way to AT&T. Now you can grab that device for just $109.99, and it's fully unlocked.