More than a year after launch, Google is still bringing slow, but tangible improvements to YouTube Music. While the ability to upload your own tracks to the service isn't yet live, we now have confirmation that it's coming. A little less exciting piece of news is that the app is testing a new, improved Now Playing interface.
Read More
Google's new, less intrusive Assistant is already available on the Pixel 4, but the redesign it received has mostly affected the voice command interface. The updates tab, Google Now's spiritual successor, kept the same look. Now, Google appears to be testing an overhauled dashboard with more gradients and chronological organization.
Read More
It's been nearly a year since the Google app added an incognito search mode, but anyone who's used that option noticed one major oversight: Once you tap on a search result, it opens in a Chrome Custom Tab, which is saved into your Google account, and thus gets logged into your browsing history. If you'd like your entire search to remain incognito, you need another solution, and that's what the Google app is now starting to offer.
Read More
Many of us would really like Spotify to overhaul its entire interface and make it smoother while speeding up access to various areas of the app. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be happening soon. Instead, Spotify is content with changing little bits of the app, one by one. In the most recent test, the homescreen is getting a new section up top with time-specific recommendations.
Read More
Google Contacts is particularly useful if you want to sync your contacts to your Google account and ensure you never lose them, but until now it hasn't been able to back up information stored on a phone's internal storage. On many Android phones, this is where details end up being stored thanks to alternative apps included by OEMs, so Google has now added a feature that will capture these contacts.
Read More
Google’s popular mapping service turned 15 last week, and the company marked this occasion by face-lifting the Maps app and giving it a chic new icon. As part of this redesign, the app did away with the sliding hamburger menu and replaced its three-tab navigation bar with a five-tab one, which retained the Commute option. Within days of the general rollout, Google is now testing a tweaked UI where the Commute tab has been swapped for a new Go tab, as well as adding a bunch of new functions to these menu options.
Read More
One of the joys of listening to music is singing along, but if you don't want to make a fool of yourself or if you really want to understand what the artist is saying (or mumbling, humming, growling), you need to have quick access to lyrics. Spotify, one of the world's largest music streaming services, was still behind on this feature until now. The service is now slowly catching up and rolling out proper lyrics support to users.
Read More
The dark mode rollout was a pretty smooth experience for some of Google's apps, which received a single update with a new toggle for dark/light/automatic theme and that was the end of it. For other apps, it's been a rollercoaster of updates, rollbacks, server-side switches, and inconsistent experiences across Android versions and phone brands. Google's search app is one of the latter, but the company now claims dark theme is available to everyone on the app's beta channel.
Read More
Songs and lyrics come hand in hand, at least if you don't listen exclusively to instrumentals and electronic music. When you're failing to understand what an artist is saying — be it because they're talking too fast, growling too much, swallowing letters left and right, or speaking a foreign language for you — lyrics help you decipher the mess and understand the song's message. Several music streaming services offer lyrics along with songs, like Spotify (though in its own Behind the lyrics flavor) and Apple Music, and now YouTube Music is getting ready to join the fold.
Read More
Many of Google's most popular apps have received an update with dark mode, but Translate remained an outlier until now. It hung on to its white-only interface like it did to its outdated, first-gen Material Design look. Things are moving in version 6.5 of the app, though I wouldn't say they're going in the right direction. A dark mode started showing up for some users, but it really looks like a work in progress or the result of the lowest possible effort.
Read More
Loading ...
