latest
Google's latest Easter egg lets loose the caped crusader
He's the hero your search experience deserves
The premiere of "The Batman" starring Robert Pattinson is just days away. Because we've been missing tales of rogue billionaires exacting vengeance in the night, fans of the superhero are likely itching to hit the theater. Google clearly doesn't want to be left out of the fun, and has just put together a new Dark Knight Easter egg for its Search page.
Love confetti? How about arbitrary palindromic holdiays? Use the internet? You probably will have fun using Google today.
Google's always putting fun little touches in its products, and probably none more so than Search. With useless but fun flourishes like commanding your search results to do a Star Fox-style barrel roll or even dance the Cha Cha Slide, it's a suprisingly easy place to waste time. Yet another new easter egg seems to be rolling out now, but it's one you shouldn't often see if Google does its job right.
Google loves Easter eggs more than any other company I can think of, and it especially enjoys hiding games inside its various products. The most famous example of this would be the dino game in Chrome, but there are plenty of others to find. Google I/O is a little more than a month away, and it seems Google has taken the opportunity to hide a fun game of Breakout in the countdown page.
Android 11's Easter egg has landed as part of the Beta 3 release, and it should probably be familiar to folks that remember Android 7 Nougat. That's right — the cats are back. Get ready for some kitty collecting.
Google Play Games is officially going dark. Well, the latest update is making its dark theme accessible to everyone. But that's not the only thing this update brings, there are now app shortcuts and a new sorting feature for achievements coming soon. A teardown also shows the team is preparing to add Minesweeper to the built-in games repertoire. Oh, and we're heard from the dev team, and we've got a hunch they're having a good time.
Read update
The Google Assistant is a serious tool that helps us through each day in various ways, but it also has a whimsical side. In a similar vein to last year, with Halloween just around the corner, Google has unveiled some special Assistant easter eggs relating to the most terrifying of holidays.
The Play Games app went through a major visual refresh just a little less than a year ago, but an update from today is taking that work and refining it further through almost every corner of the app. A teardown also reveals some interesting new things are coming, including achievement rarities, notations for the rarity of achievements, a home screen widget, and more. And best of all, the previously spotted Boingo game easter egg is now operational, but it's hidden.
The Play Games app is riding high with a series of recent changes and still a few more things to come. The latest update doesn't bring any revolutionary changes, but it does change the icons adorning the built-in games so they can all share a uniform style. Buried within the APK are also signs that a new easter egg is in the works that will probably launch another new mini-game.
Hey, remember that time when a Hangouts update added a shruggie code? How about a month later when the following version expanded to a whole library of ASCII and emoji shortcodes? Then that time about a year later when a few more were dropped in. Look, I'm not trying to draw a parallel between shortcodes in Hangouts and the stickers in Allo, but... #inb4. But seriously, the cool thing about the one and only easter egg phrase added to the latest Hangouts is IT'S F*#&)@& ZOIDBERG!
Duo has done well positioning itself as a simple, yet innovative app for video chat. Despite a focus on simplicity, it's time to begin experimenting with enhancements that can establish Duo with new audiences. The latest update contains clues suggesting the development team may bring some advanced camera settings to the app so users can make sure they're sending the very best image possible.
An update to YouTube Gaming began rolling out last week, but this one is pretty tiny by most standards. While it surely has the typical bug fixes and performance improvements, the only visible change is a brand new counter above the chat box on live streams. Of course, with the increased version number, there is also a new Easter egg to track down, and the answer is in this post – if you happen to be a collector, that is. As always, if you don't already have the update, there's a download link at the bottom of the post.
The YouTube Gaming app received an update yesterday, taking it to v1.7. Google has already posted the changelog and this release appears to be mostly about fixing up the chat experience. There are improvements to both the chat interface and the underlying code that drives it. There are supposed to be changes to better support Android 7.0 Nougat, although it's unclear what they are, and the typical assortment of bug fixes and performance improvements. Of course, with each new version comes a new easter egg.
Hangouts v12 finally adds the most important emoticon ever and will eventually ask other people if their messages are important [APK Teardown + Download]
Hangouts finally includes the classiest text art known to mankind and it's rendered in high-resolution Roboto Slab.
Forget video messaging, direct share, and whatever happened here. The most important update in Hangouts history finally happened and you're all here to witness it. The Master of Meh has come to Hangouts for Android and really wants you to know it's all okay. It's Shruggie! Yep, the latest update brings Google's greatest non-easter egg to the messaging screen in all its unconcerned glory. You're honor-bound to get the update immediately and begin showing just how unimportant things are to you, too.
It has been about six weeks since the last YouTube Gaming update rolled out, and it's clear the developers have been keeping pretty busy on making changes. The latest update has quite a few improvements to be found throughout the app, not to mention at least one feature that might be considered pretty huge. Topping the list is a new live comment stream that overlays gameplay videos so you can see the action and watch the commentary at the same time. A few features have been moved to more convenient places and a video history is now available. Finally, there's a new easter egg, and it's pretty awesome.
The fifth and final Android Nougat developer preview has arrived, and with it is the new Android Easter Egg. In Lollipop and Marshmallow we were treated to a version of Flappy Bird, and this time we get a built-in version of Neko Atsume—a kitty collector. Can you entice all the cats to visit your phone?