About Rita El Khoury
Rita was a Managing Editor at Android Police. Once upon a time, she was a pharmacist as well. Her love story with Android started in 2009 and has been going stronger with every update, device, tip, app, and game. She lives in France, speaks three languages and a half, and watches a lot of TV series.
Latest Articles
Developers in 13 African countries can now sell paid apps and games on the Play Store (Update: Three more)
The Play Store continues its worldwide spread
Every few months, Google opens up developer and merchant registration on the Play Console to more countries. The last few times it happened, devs in Iraq, Bermuda, Palestine, Somalia, and many more nations were able to sign up for an account on Google Play and start distributing their apps. Now, 13 African countries are joining the fray, plus Turkmenistan.
Fitbit and Peloton offer free 90-day Premium memberships to help you exercise, eat, and sleep better (Updated)
Only for new subscribers, though
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With everyone stuck at home, stressed, moving very little and probably eating a lot more, it's becoming crucial to take care of our bodies and minds to be able to sustain our quarantines and fight the coronavirus pandemic. Fitbit is here to help us with that thanks to a new offer on its paid service.
WhatsApp adds two features to combat coronavirus misinformation
You can now chat with the WHO and search text messages on Google
In regular times, social media is crucial in helping us stay in touch with relatives and catch up on some news. Its role has been massively amplified these days, as the world faces one of the biggest challenges we've seen in recent times. But you need to keep in mind that not everything you see online is right, and not everyone knows that fact. WhatsApp understands the role it plays in information propagation and is adding two features to keep everyone properly educated and help them spot wrong stories and facts.
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Google Assistant has supported the Indonesian language on phones and TVs since March 2018, but since not all Assistant devices are created equal for languages and features, that meant smart speakers were left out of the loop. That's changing now.
Simple Gallery Pro is a local gallery app that properly handles Pixels' messy portrait folder structure
Say goodbye to the hundreds of portrait folders littering your albums
If you only use Google Photos to view all the pics and videos you've taken, you likely never came across the messy way that media, especially portrait photos, is organized in the background. Pixels, for example, create a separate folder for each pair of portrait pics. When you browse your local storage, you can find these folders under DCIM/camera/IMG_date_time, where the date and time are specific to each pair of snaps. Besides Google Photos, local gallery apps don't usually handle these hundreds or thousands of folders properly, but now Simple Gallery Pro does.
G Suite users are starting to get the Pixel 4's new Google Assistant (Update: Full rollout)
Google slowly removes those silly limitations
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After launching with a tons of little restrictions, the new Google Assistant interface is spreading to more and more devices. It's no longer restricted to US English, has added Japanese support, and doesn't require gesture navigations anymore. Another limitation is now slowly being abolished: incompatibility with G Suite accounts.
Google rolls out redesigned, reorganized Assistant updates tab (Updated)
A new 'Snapshot' of your day and what's ahead for you
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Google's new, less intrusive Assistant is already available on the Pixel 4, but the redesign it received has mostly affected the voice command interface. The updates tab, Google Now's spiritual successor, kept the same look. Now, Google appears to be testing an overhauled dashboard with more gradients and chronological organization.
Google app adds a shortcut to open an incognito tab in Chrome
For your more exotic searches
It's been nearly a year since the Google app added an incognito search mode, but anyone who's used that option noticed one major oversight: Once you tap on a search result, it opens in a Chrome Custom Tab, which is saved into your Google account, and thus gets logged into your browsing history. If you'd like your entire search to remain incognito, you need another solution, and that's what the Google app is now starting to offer.
Google Lens helps you choose the best dishes when browsing restaurant menus in Maps
Deciphering foreign menus of unfamiliar cuisines should be easier now
Back at Google I/O 2019, the company announced a few new features for Lens to help you when you're dining out. One of them is the ability to point your camera at a physical menu and get dish recommendations and reviews powered by Google Maps. While this particular feature doesn't seem to be live (at least for me in Lebanon), a similar one is showing up in Google Maps. The app now lets you scan uploaded images of menus and get all the info you need about each dish.
Spotify's new homescreen focuses on your favorite playlists, podcasts, and albums (Updated)
The recommendations should change depending on the time of day
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Many of us would really like Spotify to overhaul its entire interface and make it smoother while speeding up access to various areas of the app. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be happening soon. Instead, Spotify is content with changing little bits of the app, one by one. In the most recent test, the homescreen is getting a new section up top with time-specific recommendations.
Google Assistant finally supports sensors and smoke detectors, paving the way for smarter alerts and automations
Water purifiers and softeners were also added
One of the cornerstones of the smart home are automations that get triggered based on certain conditions. SmartThings, Wink, and other hubs built their whole proposition on top of that, but then voice assistants came and shook that foundation. Voice commands, and thus active requests, became the focus, but that didn't stop everyone from bemoaning the loss of passive automations. To implemented that functionality you need sensors, and Google Assistant is finally adding native support for them.
'Require eyes to be open' setting for Face Unlock shows up on the Pixel 4, doesn't work yet
It's hidden and only seen from Settings search
Shortly after the Pixel 4 began making its way into users' hands, people started noticing an important oversight. The phone's Face Unlock could be used even when your eyes are closed, so if someone wanted to abuse this "security method," they could wait for you to be asleep (or dead, in a more tragic turn of events) and easily unlock your phone. Google said it was working on a setting to require your eyes to be open, but it hadn't showed up until now.
I wish all music and audio apps on Android wouldn't stop playback when swiped away
Spotify, YouTube Music, why do you do this?
Several years ago, developers of music players on Android had to implement a persistent notification in order to keep their app running and music playing even when users switched to another app. With better memory management and more available RAM on modern phones, this isn't a concern anymore, and most devs have forgotten about that commodity. That has had one annoying consequence on several audio apps: If you mistakenly swipe them away, your music or podcasts or audiobooks stop playing.
After a month of testing in beta, WhatsApp's dark mode went live this week for everyone. That left professional users a little behind, as WhatsApp Business was still on the white-only interface. The app's latest update puts it back on par by bringing this promised dark theme.
The new Google Assistant bugs out when you try to start a routine from the Home app
Add this to the list of things the new Assistant isn't good at
Despite launching with the Pixel 4 several months ago, the new Google Assistant still carries many restrictions, which make it practically unavailable for the grand majority of Android users. This limitation is a good thing, though, because it gives Google time to iron out bugs like the one we'll describe below: The Google Home app fails to start a routine if you're using this new Assistant.
OnePlus publishes its file manager on the Play Store for faster updates
It's still in 'Early Access'
Android manufacturers resort to three strategies when updating the apps they've built into their phones: they can keep them bundled with the system and only update them with new firmware versions, they can install their own store on the phone and issue updates through it, or they simply publish these apps on the Play Store for faster and easier updates for everyone. The latter is obviously the most consumer-friendly solution and OnePlus' File Manager can now count itself in its ranks.
Google messed up the Play Store's sorting order for recently updated apps (Update: Fixed)
Checking recent app changelogs is getting more and more difficult
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Google has been trying different things with the Play Store, including changes that have been enabled and reverted so many times we've lost track — hello, account picker and review section. However, not all of these are welcome modifications, like the controversial removal of update notifications. If your workaround was to manually check your recently updated apps, Google has just made that task a little bit more difficult by messing up the Play Store's sorting method.
Twitter rolls out tabbed home UI for faster access to up to five of your favorite lists (Update: Wide rollout)
You can even swipe between them - Hello 2013!
Your Twitter timeline is likely a cacophony of voices and topics. The more you scroll the more you have to exercise brain gymnastics to understand the context and meaning of each tweet. Custom lists help you narrow down that overwhelming timeline into a more palatable, less crowded list of tweets which are closer in scope. Twitter is now simplifying access to these custom lists: By pinning them, you'll transform the app's homescreen into a swipeable tabbed interface with your lists right next to your main timeline.
Android warns you when your phone isn't properly aligned on a Qi pad (Updated)
Only on the Pixel 4 with the March 2020 monthly security patch
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Every few weeks, there's that one night where I either plug my phone loosely or place it slightly wrong on a Qi pad and I wake up to an empty battery. Scrambling to get a bit of power in before I hit the road is never fun, so I always wish my phone could warn me when it's not charging properly. In Android with the latest March security patch and Feature Drop, one of these situations is resolved as the always-on display shows a message when the device is misaligned on the Qi pad.
Grab the excellent Stardew Valley for free if you recently bought a Chromebook
Plus a $20 IAP in Lineage 2: Revolution
Chromebook owners can redeem a lot of freebies through Google, but the problem is that many users never realize these offers exist or stop checking after they redeem the first batch. That's why we like pointing out newly-added perks to remind you to grab them before it's too late. The two latest additions are for gamers: the excellent Stardew Valley and an IAP in Lineage 2.