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Sync for Reddit's Material You makeover is now available for beta users — here's what it looks like
Browse your feed in style
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Material You has brought us into a whole new era of design on Android — even if Google currently seems a little too obsessed with the past. While the company spent the entirety of 2021 updating its apps with dynamic themes and all sorts of enhancements, third-party developers have been slow to bring this new look to their apps on Android. One of our favorite Reddit clients on the Play Store is getting an all-new look and feel, now available for beta testers.
Your Chromebook is getting a new wallpaper feature from... Windows 10?
Custom wallpaper syncing is on the way
Hunting for that perfect family photo or stylish Unsplash pic to use for your PC and smartphone wallpaper can be time consuming, especially when you get around to applying it everywhere. That situation is mostly unchanged with Chromebooks — the exception being with its stock backgrounds, which can magically sync across all your Chrome devices when applied. Chrome OS started testing sync for custom wallpapers a few months back, but the ability got pulled shortly thereafter. There's been radio silence on whether the feature will come back — until our discovery made today.
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Strava's one of the most popular tools for runners and cyclists to track their progress, and its usefulness can depend on its interoperability with existing platforms, like Fitbit, Apple Fitness, and Google Fit. Unfortunately, that last one had been presenting something of a problem, as Strava users found themselves unable to sync their fitness data with Google Fit.
Microsoft Edge is rolling out cross-device history and tab sync
Starting in the UK and coming to other countries soon
Microsoft's new Chromium-based Edge has turned out to be a reliable alternative to Chrome — while similar to Google's browser, it is less resource-intensive and even offers a few extras like Collections. However, one thing it lacks is the ability to sync tabs and history across devices — not anymore. Microsoft has started rolling that out to users in the UK.
Microsoft Edge Beta now syncs tabs and history across Android and Windows 10
Copying one of Chrome's most helpful features
It's good to have the luxury to seamlessly switch between your laptop and your smartphone while browsing. Google Chrome is one browser that syncs tabs across devices. It seems like Microsoft is also on the verge of rolling out this feature to its Edge users, although only between Android and Windows 10 devices.
Google recently announced that the link between Drive and Photos is going away in July, saying that many users find it confusing. Thus, the company leaves us without a simple solution to see our backed up images right in Drive. Thankfully, as is so often the case, there's a third-party app that can do a similar job for us. Autosync for Google Drive could fill in the gap for some users going forward, although it comes with its own limitations.
Google made some big changes back in May with the launch of Google News, bringing both Play Magazines and the News & Weather app together in a new format and completely redesigned app. A few months later, Google announced several new automatic features for the Google News app that would make it even more data-efficient. Unfortunately, something went wrong and many users found that the app had taken to downloading multiple gigabytes of data over cellular connections and racking up huge overages. While those bugs seem to have been fixed, the latest update includes signs that Google may be putting countermeasures in place to help prevent similar bugs in the future.
Since 2014, Chrome has featured a delightful little time waster that kicks in when your device doesn't have internet access. It's a game featuring a dinosaur that hops over cacti (and, eventually, other dinosaurs), in which your score increases as you progress through a pixelated desert. Until recently, that score was lost when you stopped playing, but as of Chrome version 72, it's finally saved — and it even syncs between your devices.
Google has been working on a Chrome OS phone syncing feature for over a year, called 'Better Together'. It started out as a way to respond to SMS messages from your phone on your Chromebook, but it has evolved into something more general-purpose. Now the functionality is rolling out on the Chrome OS Dev channel.
Chrome 69 was a major update. It finally rolled out the Material Design makeover that has been in testing for months, added a password generator, and brought Linux app support to Chromebooks. There was also a feature change that Google didn't publicize, which has been a source of controversy over the past few days - the new login functionality.
Smart home devices can become extremely complicated. You have to use different apps for each brand, and new devices you add might not be visible to a Google Home. Google has now (partially) solved this problem, with a new voice command.
One of the most basic and convenient features of life in Google's ecosystem is contacts sync. From email to phone numbers and Google+ profiles, you know that whatever platform you are on, you'll be able to reach out to the people you need to with a minimum of fuss. But for some this essential feature isn't working correctly, and contacts aren't being successfully synced to their Oreo-powered Android devices.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Microsoft announced last month that it would bring its Edge Browser to Android and iOS. The Android version went live a week later, and despite having limited functionality at first, it has the basics right. Microsoft has started to fill in the feature gaps, with the latest update adding a dark theme and password syncing.
At today's Google for Brazil event in São Paulo, the company introduced several new features for its products - such as audio calling in Duo. Another announcement involves new backup options for Google Photos, designed to make backing up on poor connections less tedious.
Google Calendar covers most of the basics for synced calendar users, but anyone who wants something more robust needs to go on a bit of a hunt. Titanium Track, the indie developer team behind the power user favorite Titanium Backup, is on the job. Their latest project is EvGenie, an advanced calendar designed for seamless backup across multiple devices and sharing with family members or coworkers. It's currently on the Play Store in an open preview. It's free to download.
As we reported yesterday, SwiftKey's synchronization service has been down for several days. At the time, there was speculation that the outage was related to reports from users that they were getting predictions from other accounts. That's not speculation anymore—in a brief post on the SwiftKey blog, the company confirms that it disabled sync because of the prediction bug.
Since the release of Android 6.0 Marshmallow, Gmail users have been reporting some syncing problems on their app that appeared simultaneously with their update to Android's latest flavor. (Very few users mentioned being affected on Lollipop, but it's worth pointing out.) The problems seemed to be divided in two categories: one that specifically stopped Hotmail accounts from being synced inside the Gmail app and another that caused a lot of delays in syncing and notifications regardless of the account type.
Google rolled out a new version of Calendar the other day with support for creating new reminders in the app, but that's not all it seems. Google's App Updates blog explains that there's a new option for syncing your accounts right from the navigation menu.
There's no nice way to say this: interesting and new apps were a bit thin on the ground in September. Maybe it was the double-threat of new announcements from both Google and Apple that scared off developers, or maybe they're all hung up on ancient Green Day lyrics. Either way, things were looking pretty sparse, but we still managed to find a few interesting tidbits for you. Here are our top seven and a few honorable mentions.