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The vast majority of companies use some form of market research to communicate with their customers and ask them what they want. Google is no different, but this latest attempt is pretty cool: the company is asking for Android developers to fill in a form describing their experience with the operating system. Google will then choose a few select applicants to go to Mountain View to discuss their thoughts on Android development.
So, LineageOS has been out for a few days now. As promised, .zip packages for rooting the ROM have been put up on the community project's site, as it is not pre-rooted when flashed.
It's great when we see games that have been on consoles arrive on Android, especially ones as fun as Xenoraid. The side-scrolling shoot-em-up has been available on Steam, PlayStation 4, XBox One, and Playstation Vita for a while now, but has just made its way onto Google Play.
Back in December, T-Mobile announced AT&T customers would get a free year of DIRECTV NOW if they switched to the T-Mobile ONE plan. As DIRECTV NOW is, in the words of the press release, "a complete disaster," T-Mobile has now amended that to a free year of Hulu as well.
The Verizon variant of the Moto Z, along with other Motorola devices, got its Nougat update in November. The company said it would release Nougat to the unlocked Moto Z in February (that's a good few months after the Verizon variant), and now the Moto Z Play is on course to be updated too, via an early preview of the software in the Motorola Feedback Network.
Carrier billing, a process whereby paying for things on Google Play out of the monthly bill from your phone carrier, is a process that is getting infinitely more popular as time goes on. Indian prepaid mobile recharge company Paytm is now offering a slightly different spin on the concept, by allowing a user to buy, or 'recharge' Google Play credit through their Paytm account.
Back in June, Facebook released a new feature to the iOS app, Slideshow, which takes photos uploaded to the service and turns them into videos, much like in Google Photos. We've received a tip that says this is now being tested in the Facebook app on Android, although it's hard to say how widely.
Google Home is great, in certain situations; it's a cool party piece so you can say "Hey Google, play [insert artist name here]" and it'll play, impressing all your friends and causing them to want Google Home too. However, in other areas, such as setting reminders or home automation, it's a bit lacklustre (if you haven't already, read Corbin's great piece on Home's inadequacies). Well, the latter is getting fixed today with the addition of two new partners.
Sword Art Online: Memory Defrag is the new entry in the hit anime series, available from Google Play
Bandai Namco seems to pump out anime games at a rate of knots unseen by man, so it's no surprise to see a new one in the Sword Art Online series, this time called 'Memory Defrag,' originally announced in June. This is the third game available for Android, after End World and Code Register were released in 2013 and 2014.
So you know how the Play Store has been changing things up a little recently, with new-look results, a different shade of green, a new Top Charts UI, and changes to how My Apps works? Here's another one, this time on the search results side of things, with one expanded card a line, instead of the more normal layouts, such as one big card then lots of little smaller ones.
Most of the time, the 0.10 deals we report on are limited to a very specific subset of countries (such as the UK, Italy, France, Russia, etc), but this week it's different. Goo Saga is on sale for 0.10, and as far as we can see, this one's international; even the United States is included.
After three-and-a-half years in China, Hugo Barra is coming home. That's right: Barra, a former Google VP, is leaving Xiaomi and coming back to Silicon Valley, to '[embark] on a new adventure'.
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HTC's Android Wear watch, codenamed Halfbeak, leaked back in October on Chinese social network Weibo. Since then, we haven't heard a peep from the Taiwanese company regarding the watch. Nevertheless, a bucketload of new photos have popped up, again on Weibo, showing the watch in all its glory.
It's a sad time when couples decide to split - the end of an era. It's even sadder when an app that was specifically meant for couples announces it's shutting down. And yet that's exactly what's happening to Avocado, the messaging app aimed at two humans who have a close relationship.
The Google Photos 'free up space' option is a great addition to the photos app, especially for phones with low amounts of storage space. Microsoft obviously thought this too, as the OneDrive team announced on Google+ that its app would be getting a similar option.
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- The full OxygenOS 4.0.2 ROMs for both the original OnePlus 3 and the 3T are now available on OnePlus's site. To install, reboot into OxygenOS recovery and use the 'adb sideload' command. Make sure you read the instructions on the site before flashing, and if you are unsure what you're doing at any point, back out.
You may remember that right at the end of December, OnePlus started rolling out OxygenOS 4.0, essentially Android 7.0 Nougat, for the OnePlus 3 and 3T. And you'd be completely correct. However, this was halted after 4.0 was found to be buggy and unstable for the OnePlus 3T. Now, 4.0.2 is rolling out, fixing the bugs and stabilizing the update.
After Google improved the Docs, Sheets, and Slides apps a few weeks ago, Microsoft is responding with updates to the Android apps for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The update adds small, incremental improvements which won't matter to the vast majority, but for a little subset of users, might be the thing that gets them to use one or all of the apps.
It's that time again: multiple TWRP builds for a multitude of various devices have become available, ranging from some obscure Pantech phones to LG and Samsung mid-range handsets.
The Mozilla Foundation is most well known for Firefox, the popular web browser, but it makes many other products too: Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, BugZilla, and a programming language, Rust, among lots of other things. After seven months of public consultations and submissions, the non-profit organization has launched a new brand identity, named 'the Protocol', to push forward in the heavily congested market that is apps and services, and signalling the renewed focus on the internet.
File storage and home servers are getting more and more popular these days, with people getting wary about what companies such as Google and Apple are privy too. In light of this, Drobo has launched a new Android app for photo storage, named DroboPix, prompted by "high customer demand" after the iOS release last year.