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Google says it won't pull a 'Voltswagen' this year
The company will skip its elaborate April Fools' Day jokes for a second year running
2020 sucked hard. A year ago Google decided to skip its tradition of elaborate April Fools' Day jokes, on account of, you know, a worldwide pandemic that killed millions of people. A year later things are looking up — I'm getting my first vaccine dose tomorrow! — but it's far from over. So maybe it's a good thing that Google is reportedly skipping the levity for a second year running.
Google has added a few entertaining Easter eggs to Google Assistant since its release, including fully interactive quiz games. In the spirit of the season, a few new holiday-related commands have made their way to Google Assistant.
The internet has really gotten serious about April Fools—it's hard to even remember what this day was like before some of the world's largest companies started playing tricks on you via your browser. April Fools is sometimes amusing, but also frequently annoying because you can't trust anything you see, and those joke pages will live on long after the day is done like joke landmines for you to come across when you're least expecting it. Such is life on the internet. To help you keep track of the gags this year, we're going to keep a running list of everything right here.
So, Family Guy is still on TV, in case you were not aware. We don't have much opportunity to talk about animated network TV series on Android Police, but the most recent Family Guy episode featured an amusing dig at Samsung. Here's the punchline spoiler: Samsung's phones are really big. Ha. Jokes, I like jokes.
Google likes to have a laugh from time to time, even though sometimes the jokes are too geeky for non-programmers to grasp. Still, the teapot error page is fun even if you don't get the reference. Go to google.com/teapot and feel free to pour it out. It works best on a phone or tablet.
April Fool's 2013 is here (at least in some time zones), and the Internet has already given birth to a few early pranks. We will spend the next two days second-guessing every piece of written content, getting rickrolled, and generally feeling the way members of bomb squads do on their missions.And we will hate love every minute of it.
When Matt reviewed Tiny Bang Story yesterday, he found it big on imagination, but gameplay came up short. If the $3 price tag was too large of a risk for you, though, maybe this sale will be more your size. HeroCraft has shrunk the price by two thirds, bringing it down to an outright miniscule $1. Any smaller and you'd need a magnifying glass to find it.
Simultaneously the most despised and glorious day of the year is upon us - April Fool's day 2012. The day we spend questioning whether anything and everything we see is real and expect a prank around every corner link. Click, click, rickroll, click, rickroll,
Personally, I both love and despise April Fool's day. On one hand, it is a lot of fun, but on the other, it makes me waste entirely too much time trying to see as many jokes as I can and then figure out which stories are real and which ones are not. Alas, such is life, and April 1st will keep coming every year (at least until 2012 :-S), so we'll just roll with it and link the best Android-related trolls of the day.