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[APK Teardown] Next Up For Google Play Music: Integrated YouTube Playback

Ron Amadeo — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 20:09:00 +0000

As I was digging through the latest build of Google Play Music, I noticed something strange: lots and lots of YouTube stuff. "That's odd," I thought, "What does YouTube have to do with Play Music?"

Oh, right, music videos!

Sure enough, there's some fairly revealing text included, too:

<string name="finding_videos_for_track">Finding related videos for the track...</string>
<string name="no_videos_for_track">No videos found for the track.</string>
<string name="youtube_video_details_hd">%1$s | %2$,d views | HD</string>
<string name="youtube_video_details_nonhd">%1$s | %2$,d views</string>
<string name="youtube_video_duration_hms">%1$02d:%2$02d:%3$02d</string>
<string name="youtube_video_duration_ms">%1$02d:%2$02d</string>

While listening to music, you'll be able to tell Play Music to hunt down the YouTube video for that song. It looks like the video will play in the music app, since there's lots of "video" views and styles in the xml.

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[APK Teardown] Next Up For Google Play Music: Integrated YouTube Playback was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

[APK Teardown] Google Play Services 3.1, Part 2 - All Your App Data In The Cloud, A New Cloud-Based Location Service, And More

Ron Amadeo — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:16:00 +0000

Welcome back! Google Play Services 3.1 is such a ridiculously huge update; I had to stretch it out over two articles - that's a first for APK Teardown. If you somehow missed the Google Play Games extravaganza, part one is right here.

Part two is all about the non-games discoveries, which there are a lot of. Before we get into that though, there is one detail I left out of the games article that I really should mention:

The Play Games Codename

Google always comes up with the coolest code names for projects, and the Play Services games client is no exception.

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[APK Teardown] Google Play Services 3.1, Part 2 - All Your App Data In The Cloud, A New Cloud-Based Location Service, And More was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

"Google Play Games" Leaks Out In All Its Glory Ahead Of Google I/O - Hello, Cloud Game Saves [APK Teardown]

Ron Amadeo — Sat, 11 May 2013 22:35:00 +0000

Remember how we told you Google Games was coming, and how it's going to pack multiplayer functionality, leaderboards, achievements, and stuff like that? That's happening. There are going to be cloud game saves too.

Fresh out of Google HQ, we've managed to score a copy of the new Google Play Services v3.1.36, which is very slowly rolling out to devices right now. For comparison, the current Play Services that most people have is v3.0.27. 3.1 is a massive update - the strings file, for instance, has more than doubled from 300 to 700 entries. This is how Google is pushing out all the shared files for Google Play Games.

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"Google Play Games" Leaks Out In All Its Glory Ahead Of Google I/O - Hello, Cloud Game Saves [APK Teardown] was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

[APK Teardown] Google Glass XE5 - A "Take A Note" And Menu Voice Commands, More Wink Work, And Localization Progress

Ron Amadeo — Thu, 09 May 2013 01:48:38 +0000

Man, Google Glass moves at the speed of light. This is crazy.

The big XE5 update just hit the interwebs, so that means it's time for a teardown! XE5 is still Android 4.0.4 based, but now we're up to build 4.0.4-665738; the old version was 4.0.4-625737.

The Glass Team is still extraordinarily messy; any new file usually has copies in a million different locations. Basically, everything ships in every APK. Maybe the Glass Team is using extremely bad organization as a form of Teardown obfuscation. (It's not working.)

Take A Note

It looks like note taking is coming to Google Glass!

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[APK Teardown] Google Glass XE5 - A "Take A Note" And Menu Voice Commands, More Wink Work, And Localization Progress was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

[APK Teardown] Google Glass "XE4" System Dump - Are You A Typophile?

Ron Amadeo — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:46:00 +0000

Despite not (yet) having Google Glass, I've managed to get a hold of a system dump, so it's time to have some fun for the day and see if Glass has any (more) hidden goodies for us. It'll also be fun to see just what makes Glass tick, and how the OS is laid out.

APK Teardown is usually at its best when I have a previous version to diff against and, you know, when I've actually used or at least seen the software in question. I don't have any of those benefits for this teardown, so things could get interesting.

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[APK Teardown] Google Glass "XE4" System Dump - Are You A Typophile? was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

[APK Teardown] Google Games, Anyone? Play Services Is Getting Real-Time And Turn-Based Multiplayer, Invitations, In-Game Chat, Lobbies, Leaderboards, And Achievements!

Ron Amadeo — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 15:57:00 +0000

We've got a good one for you today. A teardown of MyGlass, yes that's right, the Google Glass companion app, has given us what looks like the entire Google Games Service feature list. You just can't make this stuff up.

The games service probably has nothing to do with Google Glass; Glass can't run complex apps. The Glass team accidentally shipped the full suite of Google Play Services with their new app, which is not normal. This included a never-before-seen backend for an extensive multiplayer gaming service, with just about every gaming feature you could possibly imagine.

Background

To understand just what has happened, and why this is not related to Glass at all, we've got to talk about "GMS." GMS originally stood for "Google Mobile Services"; they changed the name to "Google Play Services," but never changed the acronym.

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[APK Teardown] Google Games, Anyone? Play Services Is Getting Real-Time And Turn-Based Multiplayer, Invitations, In-Game Chat, Lobbies, Leaderboards, And Achievements! was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

[APK Teardown] MyGlass v1.0 - Bluetooth Tethering, Google Voice Support, And Pushing Navigation To Glass

Ron Amadeo — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 14:10:00 +0000

MyGlass, the Google Glass companion app, has just hit the Play Store. Since no one actually has a pair of Google Glass yet, no one actually knows what this thing does. To save myself from going crazy while waiting for my Glass email, ripping apart this new app seemed like a good distraction.

Permissions

The package name is "com.google.glass.companion," and, naturally, this release is version 1.0.0. MyGlass has a decent amount of permissions, here are a list of the most important ones:

Access Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (ACCESS_WIFI_STATE/ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE/CHANGE_WIFI_STATE)
Google Voice Send and Receive permissions
Full account access (GET_ACCOUNTS/USE_CREDENTIALS/MANAGE_ACCOUNTS)
Receive and send SMS and MMS
Full location access (ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION/ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION)
Full internet access
Read contacts

So basically, it's a tethering app - a tethering app that Glass appears highly dependent on.

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[APK Teardown] MyGlass v1.0 - Bluetooth Tethering, Google Voice Support, And Pushing Navigation To Glass was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

[APK Teardown] Google Voice 0.4.2.80 - Something Wants To Read Google Voice’s Settings

Ron Amadeo — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:14:15 +0000

For the first time in a million years, Google Voice got an actual update. While the changelog is, as usual, of no help whatsoever ("Improved the reliability of SMS delivery"), a teardown teases out an eyebrow-raising tidbit: Google Voice’s configuration settings can now be read by other apps.

The GV update comes packing a new service for handing out this info, called “GoogleVoiceConfiguration,” and a new permission, "com.google.android.apps.googlevoice.permission.FETCH_CONFIGURATION."

There’s an explanation of the permission in the strings file:

<string name="google_voice_fetch_configuration_permission_label">Read Google Voice configuration</string>
<string name="google_voice_fetch_configuration_permission_description">Allows applications to read the configuration of Google Voice, including your Google Voice phone number.</string>

That's about it for the cold, hard facts.

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[APK Teardown] Google Voice 0.4.2.80 - Something Wants To Read Google Voice’s Settings was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

[APK Teardown] Google Search 2.4 - Time And Location-Based Reminders! Plus Website Update Tracking, Mysterious Help Cards, And More

Ron Amadeo — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:29:00 +0000

Google Search teardowns are always a huge mess, because there's really no way of knowing what is or isn't implemented. I'm up against a scary combination of Now's entirely context-based UI and Voice Actions, which has absolutely no UI. Rather than try and guess at what does or doesn't work, I'll just post everything that Google neglected to add in the change log. If you manage to see something working, send in a screenshot and I'll add it.

If you follow me on Google+, you'll know that APK Teardown has been in a bit of a dry spell lately, but wow, Google has made up for it today - there is a treasure trove of hidden things in this update.

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[APK Teardown] Google Search 2.4 - Time And Location-Based Reminders! Plus Website Update Tracking, Mysterious Help Cards, And More was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

[APK Teardown Exclusive] The HTC Myst Facebook Phone - The Facebook App Is Now A Launcher, Looks Like They're Planning A Play Store Release, Too

Ron Amadeo — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 15:00:00 +0000

We've managed to score a system dump of the Facebook phone! There's nothing in it that's too earthshattering, and you could probably guess most of the features, but, since we've got it, we might as well take a look at it.

[This is not an April Fool's joke. I promise.]

Now, this being Facebook, nothing really works unless you sign in. The problem is, all of this is pre-release, so it's set up to only work for Facebook employee accounts. Everything is basically packing unintentional always-on DRM, so screenshots are going to be a little sparse. This is all it will do right now:

Build.Prop Specs

The build.prop file will give us a basic idea of the phone this ROM is meant for, so let's take a look.

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[APK Teardown Exclusive] The HTC Myst Facebook Phone - The Facebook App Is Now A Launcher, Looks Like They're Planning A Play Store Release, Too was written by the awesome team at Android Police.