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The most (and least) popular devices used to browse Android Police in 2020
Spoiler: Y'all like Pixel phones
Back in 2017, we published a list of the most and least popular smartphones and tablets used to browse Android Police (the site you're reading right now). Many of you loved seeing where your favorite devices ended up in the rankings, but we never published followup posts for subsequent years — until now! We're back with a new installment for 2020, with more fun facts about the kinds of phones and tablets our readers use.
Latest SwiftKey Beta comes with an incomplete dark mode and revamped settings
Microsoft pulls a Facebook and puts its name front and center in the app
SwiftKey has only recently received an update that made many of its fans unhappy with changes to the toolbar. A new release to the beta channel doesn't mitigate these issues, but it packs some much-needed improvements: SwiftKey's settings have been completely redesigned with a more conventional interface that now also supports Android 10's dark mode. The keyboard itself doesn't switch themes automatically yet, though — baby steps.
Google barely flexes its muscles by announcing concrete numbers of shipped physical products, but loves throwing around numbers for things that are technically out of our immediate reach – just like the number of smart home devices its Assistant supports. That number has climbed to 30,000 devices from 3,500 brands, as the company just announced at Google I/O.
This year has been a tumultuous one for Huawei. The company launched one good smartphone after the other, whether on the low end of the spectrum with the Nova series, or in the high-end market with its P20 and Mate 20 series. It also faced stiff regulatory opposition and found itself caught in the midst of a political/economical war between the US and China. From seeing its deals to enter the US market vanish with AT&T and Verizon to having its CFO arrested in Canada, the rollercoaster of Huawei's 2018 hasn't slowed down. But the company is ending its year on a high note and with one number worth celebrating: it shipped over 200 million smartphones in 2018.
Google first demoed its Digital Wellbeing initiative back in May at I/O, but it took until this month for it to officially debut with Android 9 Pie. We've already checked it out and given our thoughts on it, but it's no surprise that Google is still working on it. 'Time watched' statistics have just been added to the YouTube app, allowing for better control over your watching habits.
We don't usually cover infographics and comparisons on Android Police - most are biased, pointless, or without much credibility - but this latest data set from appfigures made us stop and do a double-take because it presented interesting stats from a rather reputable app analytics company.
The research arm of StatCounter, an independent web analytics company, has revealed an interesting stat today: according to its numbers, Android has overtaken Windows for the first time in terms of worldwide total internet usage.
CyanogenMod has been the most widely-used custom ROM for years, with at least 10 million users at one point. After Cyanogen Inc kicked the bucket, the community-maintained LineageOS continued CM's efforts. The official statistics page for the project now shows 515,000 active installs (at the time of writing), a great achievement for the relatively-new ROM.
The Android army marches on, killing other operating systems left and right, leaving carcasses of once vibrant and flourishing platforms in its wake, dangling them more and more from the Gartner and IDC market share tables, until there's no place left for them but the ambiguous "Others" row.
Your keyboard knows more about you, your language habits, your weird infatuation with the pile of poo emoji, and your eccentric words than you could ever imagine. SwiftKey knows even more, not only because it's been available for years and has been collecting your data for as long as you've used it, but also because it can scan through your entire email and social accounts to learn more and more from your typing behavior.
Google Photos' decoupling from Google+ dates back to May, which means five months have now passed since. In this time, Google Photos has received several updates and gained essential features like Chromecast support and albums for adding and reordering images. Now the Photos team is ready to reflect on these five months and share with us a few stats about the app and service's use.
In just 3 weeks, we expect Google to officially announce a new subscription option that will allow users to enjoy YouTube completely ad-free. In the lead-up to this, both the web service and its Android apps have received a swarm of updates and features. In just the last month, there has been a revised web player, search for 360-degree videos, and some improvements to YouTube Kids (with more to come). There has even been a pretty severe service interruption for Music Key subscribers, most likely as a result of upgrades to the software. With so much happening, it comes as no surprise that the YouTube Creator Studio app also received an update. The new version finally brings a Material redesign and adds traffic sources to the Analytics screen.
Xiaomi isn't letting its devices' limited geographical availability get in the way of its heated competition with other brands for worldwide smartphone sales. As reported by both the IDC and Strategy Analytics, the Chinese manufacturer has shipped the third most smartphones in the world in Q3 2014, leapfrogging LG, Lenovo, and Huawei, and only trailing behind Samsung and Apple.
Excitement over products like the Ouya, nVidia's Shield line, and even numerous gamepads proves that gaming on Android has entered the mainstream. Developers have been jumping at the opportunity to build games that work across many of the different operating systems; and thanks to the Cross-Platform SDK, they're able to integrate most of the Play Games services into their products on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Until now, this SDK has lagged behind the SDKs for Android and iOS on one specific feature: real-time multiplayer support. As of today, Google is rectifying this oversight and making a number of other improvements with updates to the Play Games SDKs, along with some new features in the Google Play Developer Console.
Mankind loves to obsess over numbers, statistics, and data. Ok, maybe not everybody is stuck on tracking every last thing that happens; but if you're reading this site, there's a good chance you're already checking your monthly activity reports each time Google fires off an email reminder. That addiction to numbers is about to get much more interesting. Google is merging the monthly activity report with Dashboard to produce a super-sized page full of facts and stats about how you're using Google's services.
No one app is going to make an Android device immediately safe from any and all threats, but some can make it easier to remain ever vigilant. viaProtect may one day be such a app. This piece of software gives you a basic idea where the apps installed on your phone or tablet are sending your information. It doesn't go into specifics, but it will at least show you how much of your traffic is encrypted and some other security-related information.
PowerLine Is The OSD For People With OCD, But It Will Probably Make Matias Duarte Cry
PowerLine Is The OSD For People With OCD
I really enjoy having a great looking home screen with a good balance of colors and very little distraction. But I felt like destroying something beautiful by splashing tons of brightly colored pixels everywhere. The app responsible for this is PowerLine, an on-screen display that uses persistent lines to keep you apprised of almost any live stat you could ever ask for. This comes to us from Urbandroid Team, the developers of Sleep as Android.
AppAnnie: Play Store Downloads Reach Nearly 90% Of App Store Levels, iOS Still Bringing In 2.6x Revenue
Back in January, we learned that if you want to be a developer and avoid leaving money on the table, you need to be on both Android and iOS. One or the
Back in January, we learned that if you want to be a developer and avoid leaving money on the table, you need to be on both Android and iOS. One or the other isn't going to cut it. However, according to AppAnnie, if you have to choose just one platform, Android is still struggling to prove it's the one you should go with.