Corbin Davenport
Contributing since August, 2015
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3615articles
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About Corbin Davenport
Corbin is a tech journalist and developer who worked at Android Police from 2016 until 2021. Check out his other work at corbin.io.
Latest Articles
There are plenty of reasons why you would want to extract APKs from your device. Maybe you want to back up an app or game that was taken off the Play Store, or you want to upload the latest Google app updates to APKMirror. There are about as many APK saving/extracting tools on the Play Store as malware-ridden flashlight apps, but ML Manager is probably the easiest one to use.
No Android phone is without issues, and the Google Pixel is certainly no exception. One of the problems reported was a strange bug related to sending screenshots over MMS. If someone sent a screenshot from an iPhone 7 Plus to a Pixel in a text, regardless of the SMS app being used on the Pixel, the screenshot would be displayed as a garbled mess (seen above).
A little under a year ago, Google added podcast support to Google Play Music. Spotify is currently working on several exclusive podcasts for its service, and now Google is doing the same with 'City Soundtracks.'
The Galaxy S7 Active is a more rugged version of Samsung's flagship, exclusive to AT&T customers. AT&T started to update its Galaxy S7 and S7 edge devices last month, and starting today, the Nougat update for the S7 Active is rolling out.
Google's Daydream View VR headset was released last year alongside the Pixel phones. One of the headset's features is the removable facepad, which you can hand wash occasionally to keep the headset clean. If something happens to the facepad, or maybe you just want a spare, Google is now selling them separately for $14.99.
NVIDIA has one of the best track records for software support among Android manufacturers. The original Nvidia Shield tablet, originally released in 2014 with Android 4.4 KitKat, is still being updated and currently runs Android 7.0 Nougat. Now both the original Shield Tablet and the newer Tablet K1 have a new update.
Much to my dismay at the time, my high school Spanish teacher could always tell when I used Google Translate. Automatic translation tools often produce results that mostly get the point across, but with strange sentence structures and other quirks. Google is now testing neural machine translations for Google Translate, with the hope of producing more accurate results.
Most major tech companies offer 'bug bounties' for major security flaws found in their products. For Google, a company dedicated to cloud services and internet-connected hardware, the bounties ensure its products are as safe as possible. Now Google is increasing the rewards for certain vulnerabilities.
One of the problems content creators face is keeping their followers/subscribers informed. YouTube solved this with the Community tab, allowing some channels to create text posts that show up on the main subscriptions feed. Now Twitch has unveiled Pulse, allowing streamers to better interact with their followers, and vice-versa.
Today is the fifth anniversary of the Google Play Store. That's right, it has been five years since we saw the last of the Android Market - unless you had a very old device that never received the redesigned store app. To celebrate, Google is taking $5 off any book on Google Play Books - as long as it costs more than $5 to begin with.
As you may know, Samsung has been working on its own NFC payments platform for a while now, fittingly called Samsung Pay. While it shares much in common with Android Pay, Samsung's platform is notable for supporting Magnetic Secure Transmission, which allows payments on terminals without NFC.
LineageOS, the successor to the ill-fated CyanogenMod project, has already achieved hundreds of thousands of active installs. Many former CM developers have moved to the new project, and just like CyanogenMod, LineageOS is rapidly expanding to more devices. Several new devices are now supported by LineageOS 14.1, including the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge, Galaxy Note 8 tablet, and more.
Customization is one of the best parts of Android. Even if you have the same phone as someone else, your home screen, icons, and perhaps system theme can look entirely different. While I haven't personally used icon packs in a while (my launcher of choice is the Pixel Launcher), they still remain very popular.
Samsung has a tendency to make its own Android applications with little-to-no advantages over the Google equivalents. However, the Samsung Internet browser has a few features that Chrome for Android doesn't. Now the company has made a beta version of the browser downloadable from the Google Play Store.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 9.7" (that's a mouthful) was released in July of 2015, and later an updated model with a Snapdragon 652 was released in 2016. But you can now get the S2 9.7" for $279.99 on eBay, and just $252 if you use a discount code.
Ever since Google started allowing paid apps to temporarily become free, we've seen several major apps and games become discounted. We've already covered that HorseWorld 3D is free for today only, but now Weather Live and Etaria are also temporarily free of charge.
Snapchat should need no introduction, as it is currently one of the most popular sexting messaging services worldwide. Although the Android app has never been particularly great, it has still achieved a massive user base on both Android and iOS. Now the app has officially passed 500 million installs on the Play Store.
Dacor has been selling Android-based smart appliances for years - including the bizarre Dacor Discovery IQ wall oven and the above Discovery Dual-Fuel Range oven. Samsung acquired the company last year, presumably to expand its own smart appliance business. Now Samsung has published a new remote control application for Dacor iQ devices, available on the Play Store.
There are countless horse-themed games on the Play Store, ranging from somewhat strange to extremely bizarre. One game in this category is HorseWorld 3D, which as you can imagine, is a 3D game starring horses. The game is temporarily free on the Google Play Store, down from a price of $5.99.
Back in November of last year, AT&T announced a new feature called 'Stream Saver.' This would force streaming videos to be limited to around 480p - but still count towards your data usage. AT&T made it clear that the feature would be enabled by default when it arrived in "early 2017," and now it appears to be rolling out to customers.