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Earlier this week the Pokémon TCG Card Dex app was soft launched on the Play Store in Sweden, and more territories were scheduled to open up shortly. Well, now that a few days have passed The Pokémon Company has officially announced the global release of its trading card management app. You can use this release to scan and keep track of your physical cards, and you can also browse the built-in Pokémon TCG database to formulate new plans for your competitive deck design or simply track which cards you still don't own.
Say what you will of Activision's Call of Duty series, one thing is for sure: it is hands down the most popular first-person shooter in existence today. It's thanks to this popularity that a stand-alone app such as the Call of Duty Companion App can exist. It serves as a 24/7 connection to all things Call of Duty, which means you can instantly analyze your performance, receive tailored recommendations, stay on top of the latest news, and most importantly, keep track of your friends so that you always know when they are online.
Do you remember laser tag? In the '80s it was all the rage. You would wear a slick looking vest while running around and shooting people with laser guns. It was the best. Heck, it's still popular to this day. You can find old closed down malls and other large warehouses that cater to the game. The thing is, who wants to commute just to shoot a few friends? A home system would be ideal, and that is exactly what the new Nerf Laser Ops Pro app delivers alongside the release of its companion Nerf Laser Ops branded blasters.
Android Oreo displays a persistent notification for each app running in the background, to give the user a better idea of what is happening on their device. But for power users that frequently run apps like Tasker and LastPass, the notification can be plain annoying. Thankfully, there's now an easy way to hide it forever - an app by developer 'iboalali.'
Welcome to the start of yet another week. It's Monday (again), which means it's time for some more app sales! As is typical for the first round of the week, the list is a bit larger than the other two. Still, there are a few gems here to note, which will be bolded.
Ever since Google started allowing paid apps and games to temporarily go on sale, we've seen dozens of great deals. Perhaps in an effort to better highlight these sales, Google has added a 'Free App of the Week' section to the Google Play Store.
The world of startups is an incredibly harsh one, with most companies ending up either getting bought or closing down — assuming they even manage to gain any traction in the first place. AppGratis is unfortunately an example of a startup that's recently fallen into the latter category, having just announced its shutdown a few days ago.
In 1988, the FOX network in the US debuted a TV show called America's Most Wanted. It was a sensationalized and, to be honest, somewhat trashy dramatization of the crimes of some of the country's most violent fugitives, accompanied with their detailed descriptions and last known whereabouts. In between dimly-lit scenes recreating brutal murders and abductions, viewers were encouraged to call the show's hotline if they had any information. The call to action may have been a paper-thin veneer to justify the show's production... but it worked. In under a week one of the FBI's ten most wanted was arrested based on a viewer tip.
Remember when Adobe at least pretended it was making a "real" version of Photoshop for Android? That was nice. Now we have no less than four "Photoshop" apps - Photoshop Express, Photoshop Mix, Photoshop Sketch, and the new Photoshop Fix. Separating and dumbing down the program's functions into bite-sized mobile experiences makes a certain kind of sense, but as someone who's been using the desktop program for half his life, I can't help but be annoyed at the nebulous branding.
Fast, smooth data download speed is kind of important to mobile video, especially now that even mid-range Android phones are rocking 1080p screens. That's part of the reason that Netflix created FAST.com, its own branded alternative to web speed tests like Ookla's SpeedTest.net, back in May. The idea is to make sure you're getting an accurate test across multiple services (there's even a SpeedTest.net link right on the page) and your internet service provider isn't throttling your connection.
Calendar apps aren't exactly hard to find on the Play Store. There are pretty ones, functional ones, cross-platform ones designed to work with every service under the sun, and then there's Google Calendar that everyone comes back to when their favorite stops updating. You might think there's nothing new to explore in the space, but you'd be wrong. OneView Calendar manages to put a new spin on a somewhat tired standard by refining it to an impressive degree.
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Amazon has had some pretty great deals as part of its Free App of the Day, but apparently that's over now. The prolific retailer is replacing it with Amazon Underground, which includes "over $10,000 of apps and games that are actually free." Specifically, Amazon is giving away paid apps and in-app purchases with an agreement that reimburses app developers based on the amount of time the apps are actually used. It's very much like Amazon Kindle Unlimited, without the extra charge.The promotion comes in the form of a brand new Amazon Underground app. This app replaces all the functionality of the standard Amazon Shopping app, with the Underground partner apps thrown in as well. And surprisingly, this isn't just a bunch of junk from developers who are desperate for a little exposure - these are premium games, well-known apps and tools, and in-app purchases that would cost considerable amounts of money on the Play Store, all available completely free to end users. Games from Rovio, Glu, Gameloft, and more are included. Not all of the in-app purchases are set to free - you can't just download an infinite amount of gems - but at least some will come at no charge. Update: see below.[EMBED_YT]https://youtu.be/QDRvenh4TQs[/EMBED_YT]To get Amazon Underground, just open Amazon Shopping or the Amazon Appstore on your phone - it should appear as a banner right at the top of either of them, prompting you for a sideload installation just like a normal Amazon Appstore app. (You can also download it directly at amazon.com/underground.) The Shopping app will be replaced with Underground, and the Amazon Appstore app (where paid and free apps and games that aren't part of Underground are still available) will include a cross-app link.
Check it out, there's a surprisingly great selection already. If Amazon is hoping to get people excited about its Appstore as an alternative to Google Play, they're off to a good start. Developers can learn more at developer.amazon.com/underground.
Seven days ago Google offered a game from Cartoon Network as its free family app of the week. Monsters At My Birthday Cake was a Zelda-inspired adventure game that, while skewing young, some of us could still find amusing for an hour or two.
Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake offers more depth than most of the previous apps Google has given away for its free family-friendly App of the Week. This title comes to us from Cartoon Network, and it's a top-down adventure game reminiscent of Zelda.
Among tech-savvy media fans, Video LAN Client (VLC for short) is easily one of the most popular video and audio players in the world. It's available for every major desktop platform, and for almost two years, it's been in beta for Android. Today the app has officially graduated to a 1.0 build, marking its formal exit from beta and a day of celebration for fans of flexible media playback on mobile devices. In other words: Good news, everyone!
My football buddy lives on the east side of Dallas. I'm way out west of Fort Worth. Since there are more than fifty miles between us, neither of us know the area of the megacity that's directly in the middle very well. When football season rolls around again, I'll give Meet Me Halfway a try: it's a simple little app that locates the midpoint between two people and helps you find good places to meet in the area.
October is the perfect storm for American sports fans: Baseball fans have the World Series, basketball fans have the opening games of the season, and football fans are just getting a good look at the playoff scenario. Against this triple threat, hockey fans (especially those in the United States) tend to get the short end of the stick, so to speak. ESPN is bucking that trend: today they posted the very first build of the network's official Fantasy Hockey app to the Play Store.
The Neatly Twitter client has been making a small but dedicated fanbase for a while now, though it's been available on Android for less than a year. Last week developer F16 Apps decided to pursue a new strategy, and the various versions of Neatly (Android, iOS, and Blackberry 10) are now free. The previous price on the Play Store has shifted between one and two dollars American.
There are more than a few note-taking apps on the Play Store, including established veteran Evernote and Google's own Keep. But Automattic, the company formed by WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, thinks you'll be interested in at least one more. After a considerable period of iOS exclusivity, Simplenote is now available on the Google Play Store. It's free to download and use.
Every once in a while we come across an app with such a practical, obvious application that we're forced to wonder why we didn't think of it first. Case in point: Botifier, which sends status updates from any app to a paired and compatible Bluetooth display using version 1.3 or later of the A/V Remote Control Profile. Translation: it sends notifications to your car's Bluetooth-enabled stereo.