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For over 10 years, Instagram has been a cornerstone of the online presence for millions of people and organizations. The online social network has 500 million daily users, and for 10 years, one feature that's been requested over and over has been the option to add more links to the Instagram bios. Instagram has finally given in to the will of the people. Now all accounts — personal, business, and creator — can add five links to their bios. And if you're looking to upgrade your pics, check out these top phones with cameras for ultrawide photography.
Chrome wants its 'copy link to highlight' feature to also support images and video
Giving users another way to share
The internet is all about sharing content, and recently we got another powerful tool for helping us do just that. While historically you could only share links to full webpages, or to specific pre-defined “anchor” points within them, these new “text fragments” offered to let us create custom links that highlighted specific passages within a page itself. Now Chrome developers are working to bring us the logical next step: the ability to link to pictures and other media on a page in much the same way.
Phone Hub for Chrome OS won't destroy your phone's battery in a future update
Phone Hub is great, but not when it ruins your Android phone's battery life
Phone Hub was a big deal when Google launched it with Chrome OS 89 a few months back. The feature finally brought the cross-device synergy that Android and Chromebook fans have been waiting for, with the ability to respond to your phone's messages, view its status, and more. The launch didn't go smoothly at all, however, with many reporting bugs like severe Android battery drain that outweighs any reason to use it. That may soon change, though, as Google is finally working on a fix to prevent it from killing your phone's battery.
IFTTT, the service that connects all of your smart gadgets, services, websites, and various other sources with each other in an automated "if this happens here do that there," has made one neat improvement to its Notifications channel on Android. Previously, when you created an applet that triggered a notification on your phone, you could only personalize the message it displayed and it always opened the IFTTT app when tapped. Now you can also change its name, add a custom URL to be opened when you tap it, and append a custom image.
The idea behind Chromer, when it first launched, was that it would open all links you clicked on in a Chrome Custom Tab. At the time, not many apps had implemented Custom Tabs so Chromer avoided their built-in browsers, and it also saved your device from having to open the full Chrome browser while still giving you the benefits of its rendering, security, and saved passwords. Now with Custom Tabs being used by more and more apps, the benefit of Chromer is a little less clear. That's why the app has been overhauled, renamed from Chromer to Lynket, grown to version 2.0, and it's now more geared toward giving you the freedom to handle your links whichever way you want.
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- We've heard through several sources and have confirmed independently that this is not caused by a random glitch but by code that was added to WhatsApp with the specific purpose of blocking of Telegram links. The smoking gun is a pattern match performed on any URL string that begins with the word 'telegram.' In the most recent version of the app, these strings are classified as a "bad host," so that no hyperlink is generated and it becomes impossible to copy or forward any message with that URL. No other strings trigger the match, so this block is purposefully targeted at Telegram.
Honest companies are expected to retain their users by offering the best service they can provide and not by actively locking them in and making it hard to switch to a competitor. Google, for example, lets users easily download all their contacts, bookmarks, photos, emails, and other personal data though Google Takeout. From there, anyone is free to close their account and move to a competing service, no questions asked. There are certainly companies that don't behave this way, but this is usually viewed with disapproving eyes — particularly when the company in question is already the biggest player on the market.
It looks like Google is performing some surgery on the Google bar, the familiar toolbar that appears across the top of many of Google's web properties (including Chrome's new tab page). Until recently, the bar held a G+ sharing shortcut, a profile switcher, an "app drawer" to switch between Google products, and a link shortcut to your Google+ profile.
At long last, Nintendo is loosening the reins on its intellectual property and developing games for devices that don't bear the company brand. Yesterday in the yearly financial results briefing, the video game giant outlined plans for bringing five games to mobile platforms by March of 2017, with the first title available by the end of this year.
There's also a new Clear Image camera feature that stitches together over 10 individual photos to produce an image with a higher resolution. Here is a comparison shot with the photo of interest positioned on the right.
While the majority of Nexus and GPE devices have received their Android 4.4.3 OTAs relatively quickly, the rollout for certain other devices has certainly been... unusual. We still haven't heard anything about the 2013 Nexus 7 LTE, the LG G Pad 8.3 GPE, or the Moto G GPE, and until today, the OTA for the 2012 Nexus 7 Wi-Fi (I've been waiting for it to post both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi+3G links together).
Nexus 4 and Nexus 10 owners, your Android 4.4.3 OTAs have finally begun, and the zip urls have been captured. A bit later than some others, but all things considered, waiting for an Android update for an extra day or two hasn't killed anyone.
The Android 4.4.3 rollout is in full swing, with the 2013 Wi-Fi Nexus 7 getting its OTA early this morning and a bunch of flavors of GPE devices and various Motos receiving theirs just a few hours ago. Nexus 5 owners with locked bootloaders even started feeling a bit snubbed waiting for their OTA to arrive, but they can now breathe with ease - not only has the OTA indeed begun, but we have the download link and manual flashing instructions right here.
Yesterday was a relatively big day for Android, at least compared to our regularly scheduled programming - Google sent us a gift in the form of the 4.4.3 update, available immediately via factory images and in AOSP. The problem with factory images, however, is that they require an unlocked bootloader to flash, so many of you opt in to wait for the respective OTAs.
Hey look, everyone - Google sent us all a treat tonight in the form of the first Play Store update in over 3 months. And we just love new things (hi, Kirill!). As usual, you'll find the apk for v4.6.16 towards the bottom of this post.
It's that time again - Google has pushed out an update to the Play Store with plenty of enticing new features. We've got the APK, so after a brief rundown of some of the more notable features (we'll scour the APK in the coming days for any hidden goodies), we'll give you a link to download the app for yourself.
Following yesterday's unveiling of Android 4.4 and the Nexus 5, we've been enjoying a nonstop barrage of APKs which got here before any of us even got a chance to receive our own Nexus 5s in the mail thanks to the Nexus 5 factory image.
Last week, we published the first look at Play Store 4.4, which most notably replaced the menu-accessible navigation buttons with a new slide-out UI. An APK teardown of this update also yielded the news of Google Play Newsstand and a special message to the AP teardown team that we humbly enjoyed quite a bit. Today, this update is live.
About a week ago, Google released a fairly major update to the Play Store with version 4.3.10. The update brought combined update notifications, the new Recently updated section of My apps, and a bunch of other tweaks. Today, a minor update with version 4.3.11 is rolling out. As always, you can download and install it manually using one of the links below.
Google is rolling out an update to the Android Play Store with version 4.3.10. The new update follows version 4.2.9 which was discovered on July 25th, only a week and a half ago, and brought several very minor changes. Unlike the previous update, 4.3.10 is more significant in user-facing features (yay, new stuff!).
Simultaneously with the Android 4.3 release, Google started rolling out an update to the Play Store with version 4.2.9, which follows closely behind 4.2.3 from last week's Nexus 4 system dump leak.