Starting today, profile links and hashtags in Instagram bios will work the way they do elsewhere on the platform: as clickable links. Instagram is billing the functionality as "a new way to express yourself and the things you care about."
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreIn its continuing quest to improve your News Feed/app experience, or just be creepy, Facebook has announced a shift in how it shows you external links to other webpages. The gist is that FB will show you more stories that will load faster, and less of the ones that may take longer for you to see.
Read MoreBack in February of last year, Google unveiled Accelerated Mobile Pages - or AMP, for short. In a nutshell, sites can choose to generate AMP versions of their pages (with an automated tool or site plugin), which load extremely quick compared to normal sites. This is due to various restrictions, compression on the included images/video, and caching by Google's own servers.
Read MoreGoogle+ is a pretty great social media platform - it allows content of all lengths, many types, and it presents in a readable, ad-free way. But not everybody uses Google+, and that's understandable, we've all got plenty of social media in our lives at this point, and Google+ is just another platform to keep track of. But sometimes you want to share a great Google+ post, and if you were to do that on your Android device, that meant just copying a link to the post to your device's clipboard. Not ideal, necessarily, given that Android has literally been built upon sharing content between various apps seamlessly and with as few taps as possible.
Read MoreHunting down good libraries can be a pretty tedious chore for developers. Sometimes we know what we want, but can't find the right keywords for a search. Other times we're already familiar with one option but want to find alternatives that might work better for our project. And sometimes, we just need a little inspiration. Take a look at The Android Arsenal, a large categorized directory of Android-oriented projects that can go a long way toward speeding up your development.
Android Arsenal is only a few days old and it's already up to 254 links (at the time of this writing).
Read MoreRemember the latest Facebook beta update v3.5? The one that brought photo saving and got rid of the legacy menu button, among other things. Looks like there's another change we didn't spot - one that's roughly 3 years overdue.
Starting with v3.5, the Facebook app finally registers itself as one of the apps capable of opening facebook.com links, so that when you click on, say, a new comment email notification, Facebook is right there instead of all your installed browsers. Hallelujah.
The support is very limited so far - in fact, only links that start with facebook.com/n (n stands for notifications, presumably) are being handled at the moment.
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