Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
This is the app roundup. The game roundup from last week can be found here.
Today's roundup is brought to you by PassWallet (formerly Password Wallet) by HandyApps. Passwords are hard, thanks to the thousands of logins required for modern digital living.
A lot of people are excited for Google Glass right now. The first Explorer units began rolling into the happy embrace of those selected for the exclusive pilot program just last week, and we've already seen a ton of feedback. Combined with decent pre-release coverage, it's clear that Glass has the potential to shake things up once more people have it in their hands. Of course press coverage and user excitement only form part of the story. Another critical piece is advertisement and marketing.
Public image and privacy concerns aside, Glass will need to win the hearts of consumers, in a way Google has striven in the past to capture hearts through advertisements for the Nexus family.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
This edition focuses only on new games. The app roundup is coming up soon.
Today's roundup is presented by Ice Rage from HeroCraft. Somewhere between air hockey and foosball lies Ice Rage, a hockey-themed casual game with the publisher's typically high production standards.
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.
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.
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.
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:
So basically, it's a tethering app - a tethering app that Glass appears highly dependent on.
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.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
This is the app roundup. The game roundup from last week can be found here.
Today's roundup is brought to you by PassWallet (formerly Password Wallet) by HandyApps. Passwords are hard, thanks to the thousands of logins required for modern digital living.
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.
Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.
This edition focuses only on new games. The app roundup is coming up soon.
Today's roundup is presented by Strategy & Tactics: WW II from HeroCraft. You could be forgiven for thinking that this turn-based strategy game looks a lot like Risk, but instead of Napoleonic struggles, the digital adaptation takes the battlefield to WWII-era Europe.
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:
The build.prop file will give us a basic idea of the phone this ROM is meant for, so let's take a look.
104,669
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