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New York state senate passes sweeping right to repair bill
The bill would require manufacturers to provide information, parts, and tools to end users and third-party repair shops
There's a consumerist revolution blooming in the United States, centering around the right to repair and modify the things you buy without the approval of the manufacturer that made them. The latest major victory occurred in the New York state senate, where a sweeping bill making repair information and parts available to consumers passed by a wide margin.
Long ago, before Google Now turned into the Feed, Google used to provide you with an easily accessible summary of custom tailored, account-scraped stuff, useful for keeping track of various deadlines or ongoing details. In that transition to Feed, though, the information was relegated to a new "Upcoming" tab in the Google app, and the personal overview started to stagnate a bit. Well, Google's bringing it all back better than ever via the Assistant.
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A couple of months back, Google introduced a brand new mobile payments app exclusive to India. The country's banking landscape is a little different to many of the territories that currently have access to Android Pay, and so it needed a different approach. Until now, Tez has only been able to pay participating merchants or transfer between users, but it will soon be possible to pay utility bills, too.
Mint has been on Android for years, long before it was acquired by Intuit. It's always been able to track your money, but bills are a more tricky matter. The service recently added bill tracking and payment to its list of features, and now the main Android app has been updated to take advantage of it. This is separate from the bills-only app, which hasn't been updated since earlier this year.
Google apparently has a service in the works called Pony Express that will improve the way Gmail users manage the bills flooding into their inboxes, and perhaps even some that currently don't. This news comes through a Re/code report stating that the search giant is working with third-party vendors that print and mail out bills to bring even more of them online. Google will then give users the ability to pay these bills without having to leave Gmail.
Paying bills is a monthly burden that doesn't need any help whatsoever with being a pain in the rear. But living with roommates can amplify the difficulty. You have to track them down (if they're not particularly responsible) or deal with the unpleasant task of asking in the first place (even if they are). Unbill is a new Android app that seeks to erase both of these issues.
Bank statements. Insurance policies. Credit card bills. All of these are things that you should hang on to, and you might not. FileThis is a service that hopes to make proper filing as easy and painless as possible by automatically fetching those documents and dropping them right into your cloud storage service of choice. It's kind of like having one of those automatic scanners... without all that, you know, tedious scanning.
Update: Well that didn't take long. Here's what T-Mobile had to say in response.
[New App] Mobilligy Hopes Consolidating All Bills Into A Single App Will Make Paying Them Less Sucky
Paying bills sucks. Everything about the entire experience, from reading the email/letter, writing the umpteenth check/visiting the umpteenth website, and kissing that hard-earned money goodbye, is considerably unpleasant. Then there's the consistently broken promise of doing better next month only to find that after forgoing all of that fast food, you actually managed to spend more money than the month before. Again, it sucks. The new Mobilligy won't make it not suck, but there's a chance it will at least make it suck less.