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There are times when applications add a new groundbreaking feature that surprises us, flabbergasts us, elates us, and makes us go "wooooow, that's really cool!" This is not such a time. Instead, we're here to talk about Spotify adding the basic of most basic features of any music or audio playing app: a sleep timer. It's 2019 and this has just happened. Miracles, my friends. Don't stop believing.
To me, the whole idea of using voice search when I can just as easily type the exact query I want isn't appealing, but perhaps I should start changing my perception. Google's voice recognition algorithms are getting better and smarter, and one of the areas where you can notice this improvement is YouTube. Even more appealing now is the fact that YouTube immediately starts playing a video when you do a voice search.
It's been a couple of years since Messages (then known as Google Messenger) started rolling out RCS, the chat-like features that work on top of regular SMS. In the time since, RCS has spread to more operators and devices, but it's still not the universal solution Google wants it to be, and nor is it a foolproof one. To help users understand what's going on, especially when things don't work as intended, Messages now shows you the status of your RCS connection.
One of the cumbersome things I deal with when traveling to a city with public transit is the transportation card. Not being used to carrying one and wanting to keep it safe but also quick to access, I struggle to find a decent place for it. Sometimes it's in my pocket, other times in my bag, and sometimes inside my phone's cover. So I can understand a daily commuter's annoyance of carrying these small, easily-losable cards around. That's why services like Google Pay, which aim to replace all your cards, including transit ones, are awesome. Transit card support has been slowly rolling out to various cities around the world, and now it's New York's time.
What do you get when you mix a popular TV show, a coveted smartphone from a popular brand (that isn't Huawei), and a customization company that wants to bank on both? A special Samsung Galaxy Fold, Game of Thrones edition, that you could pre-order now, for the lowly sum of $8,200. There are supposedly only seven of these, so if you absolutely must have one, you better start looking for Benjamin Franklins under the sofa cushions and making sure you have the full price ready for your pre-order.
We all associate the name Mozilla with Firefox and web browsing, but the company has been spreading its wings lately and releasing different kinds of tools. First there was Notes by Firefox, then Lockbox the password manager, followed closely by Firefox Send which shares encrypted files privately. The company now has another tool in beta and, although it has "Firefox" in its name, it's essentially an independent screenshot management tool.
Not a lot has changed with Digital Wellbeing since its official release in November of last year, but we know big things are on the horizon for Google's built-in digital nanny. While the added Parental Controls and per-app grayscale settings aren't live yet, and likely won't be for a few more months, there's one significant addition in the latest Digital Wellbeing update. It's now integrated in the Pixel Launcher and provides an instant pause control for apps.
About a month ago, Google Duo began rolling out its much-awaited group calls. They started out in Indonesia, then quickly spread to India, Brazil, Mexico, the US, Canada, and many more countries. Although it's not official yet, it seems to be rolled out worldwide, but could possibly be behind a server-side flag so some users may have it while others not. However, until recently, group calls were limited to four people max, so you could only add three other participants beside yourself. Now, that's expanding to eight.
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- OnePlus has issued an official statement explaining that although this file works on older-gen devices, there are issues such as some notifications still coming in while the mode is activated. This is because the app isn't fully optimized yet for these models. Zen Mode will make it into next week's open beta build for the 6/6T and should also come later to the 5/5T.
If you have one of OnePlus' older devices, you may be a little jealous of the new 7 Pro and its updated hardware and software. We can't do anything about the former, but for the latter, we've started discovering, one after one, that the APK files on the new device do indeed work on older models. Last week, we went through Camera and Gallery, then today we covered the new Screen Recorder, but we just tested Zen Mode's APK file and as it turns out, it too works on older devices.
When the Galaxy Watch Active launched earlier this year, it brought with it Samsung's new One UI look for wearables. That updated interface is now rolling out to the company's earlier smartwatch models, namely the regular Galaxy Watch, Gear S3, and Gear Sport.
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- OnePlus has issued an official statement explaining that although this file works on older-gen devices, there are issues such as audio from games or music not playing. This is because the app isn't fully optimized yet for these models. Screen Recorder will make it into next week's open beta build for the 6/6T and should also come later to the 5/5T.
Every time a company launches a flagship with useful software additions, users start wondering whether these would make it to the previous gen that they already have in their hands. For the OnePlus 7 Pro, we recently learned that the screen recorder and Zen Mode would come to older models, but it turns out you don't need to wait to get the first one working. An APK of the 7 Pro's Screen Recorder was uploaded to APK Mirror and it works great on the 6T and older devices too, possibly.
I/O's main keynote was a blur of announcement after announcement, so you'll forgive us if we didn't notice this two-second slide where Google's Scott Huffman showed off Assistant's worldwide expansion and explained that it was "now [...] available on over 1 billion devices, in over 30 languages, across 80 countries." We love milestones like this, but many of the countries he pointed out appear to be in beta.
I'm not a gamer, but even I knew that Call of Duty coming to mobile is big news. Big enough to have people trying to find ways to play it even before it's officially released, and scammers using the opportunity to prey on those who aren't knowledgeable or perceptive enough. And today we have the first signs of the latter: a scam listing for Call of Duty: Mobile has surfaced on the Play Store and it costs a — hold your breath — whopping $32. Yeah... no.
Millions of people watch YouTube videos on their phones nowadays, but despite displays getting larger and larger, we all wish we had a bit more screen estate to enjoy the experience. Switching to fullscreen and landscape helps a lot, but you lose a bit of the YouTube experience. Some actions, like thumbs-up and down, or viewing the channel and subscribing aren't immediately accessible, so you have to get out of the fullscreen mode to do those. Not anymore though.
Part of the changes introduced with Chrome's Duet interface (previously known as Duplex) is a new search button in the bottom bar that lets you jump to the address bar and perform a Google search. But until now, it wasn't clear that you could start typing a new query immediately, as the URL was still there and highlighted. A new Chrome flag has been added to clarify things, plus make it easier to share or copy the current page's URL.
After the OnePlus Camera update from the 7 Pro that brought better Lens integration and customized modes, we're taking a look at a few minor changes in the latest Gallery app v3.2.7. Most prominent is a new carousel interface for Collections, but there's also a small update to the image viewer.
The OnePlus 7 Pro was announced yesterday and some users have already gotten their hand on the device. Beside discovering that it's among the best smartphones they can buy now, they're also digging deep into the device's apps and sharing some of them with us on APK Mirror. One of those is the new Camera app v3.2.91 which, when installed on previous OnePlus phones running Pie such as the 6T, brings an updated, Pixel-like Lens integration and customization to the scrolling modes.
Google Podcasts started with a bare-bones interface and even more bare-bones functionality. However, over the past months, it has slowly but steadily been adding some trequisites, such as playback speed, sleep timer, silence trimming, Auto support, a web interface, episode search, as well as one particularly special feature based on full transcriptions of shows with keyword search suggestions. But today, we're talking about an addition that fits in the former category: auto-downloads.
When you're watching a YouTube video, the app often taunts you with other recommendations you should watch next, and if you have Autoplay turned on, it even goes through that list automatically. However, you rarely have any control over what shows up in this list. A server-side test tells us that this might be changing soon.
For years now, OnePlus devices have enjoyed a signature homescreen look thanks to wallpapers created by Swedish artist Hampus Olsson. The designer started with the OnePlus 2 and has added his unique blend of abstract paint-like wallpapers to each device released by the company since. He also worked on Paranoid Android, and has a big portfolio of artwork for smartphones. Now, he's released his official wallpaper app on the Play Store.