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- A moderator on the Netgear forums has confirmed, via a comment to the official thread made within the last hour, that the issue has been resolved. All Arlo systems should now be operational. The company apologizes for the interruption in service, and would like to reassure its customers that all cloud recordings should be safe, and alerts for activity will still be recorded. Furthermore, speculation that the outage was due to suspicious activity has also been refuted.
Arlo is a well-known name in the smart home/wireless security camera game these days, and we're pretty big fans of their products here at AP. But right now some people are a bit upset with the company, and it doesn't have anything to do with the recent IPO. Widespread outages are being reported for the service, but Arlo is looking into it.
Earlier today, subscribers to Google's Project Fi may have run into a problem sending or receiving SMS or MMS messages. The brief outage appears to have started this morning, with reports of resolution emerging around 3:50 PM Eastern Time (12:50 PM Pacific). SMS and MMS are now reported as working by many, though it may not be resolved for all subscribers and you may run into additional delays as a result of a backlog of messages waiting to hit your phone.
Free or cheap international service is something many US carriers have been doing lately. Not having to buy a separate SIM card when you travel abroad is a very nice convenience, even if some aspects of your plan suffer a bit. Today, Sprint has announced that it's ramping up its international service to 165 countries, as well as some other new tidbits.
You've probably heard of TuneIn. It's that app that some kids these days think of as the radio (not to be confused with the static that old people are still able to get their cars to produce). TuneIn lets you stream stations from all over the world, regardless of how far outside of their coverage area you may be.
Sprint would really like you to buy a phone. Really. So much so that they're willing to throw a salesperson and a bunch of phones in a branded car and drive to your door to sell it to you, preferably along with a service contract and a $30 case. The new Direct 2 You service will also offer assistance to existing Sprint customers; the example given in the press release is moving data from one phone to the other.
The music industry has changed a great deal over the course of the past decade, and Spotify is one of the most well-known brands leading the transition. The company announced today that going into 2015, its music-streaming service has 15 million paying users, with another 45 million who consume content for free. This is an increase from the 12.5 million subscribers (over 50 million total) announced in November.
Google's been updating apps left and right recently to fall in line with its new material design philosophy, and the results have been impressive. There are a few apps it appears Google's saving for the final Lollipop release though - Gmail 5.0 among them.
Google Glass is inviting users to "stay connected to your favorite phone apps with notification sync on Glass." The new feature, as you might have guessed by now, grants Google's MyGlass app notification access, relaying all your Android notifications up to your eyeball for quick and easy viewing/interaction. Previously, only apps compatible with Glass (like Gmail and Hangouts) could send up notifications.
Google has big plans for both YouTube and Google Play Music. We've heard a lot about YouTube's potential subscription music playback service, background audio, and offline playback, and there's been much speculation about what such an arrangement would mean for Play Music All Access. What we've got today gives those rumors and clues some clarity.
Right now, in the slide-out "hamburger" menu of most Google apps, there's a Help button, with a tiny circled question mark icon. If a user needs help with the app (or anything else), this button will pull up a web page. Once on the web page, users can browse through categories for help articles and potential solutions or, if all else fails, request a support call from Google.
We have heard tell (from Forbes) that Google is preparing a new service called Google Fit, supposedly for debut at I/O, where the company is expected to also announce partnerships with certain wearables manufacturers. The report says that Google Fit will provide developers with APIs to plug into the service, and that the overall goal is a second take at the quantified health data space.
Google's reinvention of the Chrome bookmark system, called Google Stars, was first spotted by Florian Kiersch nearly a month ago. Today, it looks like the Chrome extension and web interface are already live for the public, preceding any official word from Google about the burgeoning bookmarking service. For now, it looks like Stars is still in a dogfooding or testing phase.
One of the fundamental differences between Android and every other mobile operating system is the practically unrestricted capability to run services. Without this freedom we could not enjoy something as powerful as a homescreen widget or as straight-forward as a Twitter client with background updates. Aside from games and very simple utilities, it’s becoming increasingly rare to find an app that doesn’t run a service, at least for a short span of time. However, a bug has snuck into recent versions of Android and it can cripple background processing in some apps and widgets.
After its update to 5.0 on iOS about a week ago, Pocket has been upgraded for Android as well. I'm a long-time user of Pocket, and while my use case is probably different from the typical user's (there are probably only about 10 items in my list at any given time), it's clear to me that Pocket is always trying to find new ways to make simple save-and-read functionality better and more convenient. To that end, Pocket's new update offers users a new "Highlights" selection, which will pull and organize the best stories from your list, placing them in categories like "quick reads," or sorting by source, trending status, or subject matter (like "#photography"). Pocket says that the highlights feature can learn and adapt to your habits in the app, making for better selections.
A few weeks ago we found some Newsstand-related goodies in the Play Store APK, hinting at the possibility that the upcoming news service is poised to absorb Google's Play Magazines.
Recently, we tore down an unreleased version of Google's Play Store 4.4 update and discovered that Newsstand, an upcoming Play service we first learned about back in March, had made some progress.
Courtesy of an anonymous tipster, we've got a nice weekend treat for those caught up in Nexus season rumor hysteria. A document, purported to be an internal Service Manual for the LG-D821 and posted to scribd, gives us an in-depth look at the next Nexus phone.
[I/O 2013] Google Gives Developers A 'Better Distribution Experience' In Revised Play Store Console Coming 'This Summer'
Between Hangouts, the gorgeous new Maps, Play Music All Access, and everything else discussed in I/O's opening keynote this morning, several revisions
Between Hangouts, the gorgeous new Maps, Play Music All Access, and everything else discussed in I/O's opening keynote this morning, several revisions to the Play Store developer's console were announced.
From poorly-executed "leaks" to potential legitimate sightings, there's been a lot of hubbub about Google's supposed unified messaging service, likely called Babel. This isn't necessarily surprising. After all, if you asked most Android enthusiasts what feature they most wanted from the platform in its next iteration, you'd hear a lot about unified messaging. We've tried to stay clear of covering every flurry of Babel-related murmurings so far, but today we saw something new – Google+ user Patric Dhawaan posted a screenshot of what he says is a notification in Gmail, triggered when "pruning" his inbox.