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Stadia is getting two new features it should have had on day one
Search? In a Google product? How novel!
Google might not be making its own games for Stadia anymore, but the platform is still very much alive and kicking. Today, the company announced a handful of tweaks that'll make using Stadia on desktop a smoother experience — including a couple that should have been there from the get-go.
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The YouTube app is only two years younger than Android itself, but it has always lacked some features compared to the service's website. Among them is the ability to sort a channel's videos and playlists, which you could historically only view by date added. A new A/B test finally gives the app the same sorting options that have been available on the website for a long time.
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Photos is one of Google's best products. It gives you a searchable, unlimited vault of all of your shots and memories. The company is constantly working on making editing and finding images in it more effortless, and the latest updates further improve these aspects. You can export frames from videos shot on the Pixel 4 as stills starting with version 4.28 of the app, and individual sorting options for albums are currently rolling out to some people.
Over the last several months, most of the changes to the Play Store have been on the smaller side, usually part of A/B tests to determine if individual tweaks to the interface would work better than others. An update began rolling out to users yesterday, bringing the current version up to 7.4. No significant changes seem to be turning up yet, but there are bits and pieces that hint at future plans. In this teardown, we'll be looking at a new version of the My Apps screen, statistics about reviews over recent history, remote authorization for family purchases, and even a strange requirement to install the Play Games app before taking some actions.
When you think of the intersection between America Online and email, you probably think of the phrase "you've got mail," septuagenarians forwarding politically-charged but factually lacking messages, and/or Meg Ryan. But AOL Mail is still going strong, and it looks like the company is actually trying to branch out into mobile software. Take Alto Mail, for example: it's a new stand-alone mail client just published in the Play Store alongside more antiquated options like AIM and AOL On.
The Play Store's web market has come quite a long way since it was first announced back in February of 2011. Still, that doesn't mean it's perfect - among others, there are quite a few filter options still on the request list. For example, many users want to separate their free and paid apps in the My Apps interface. Thanks to a Greasemonkey script Artem just stumbled across, now you can.
With somewhere around 200 apps on my phone at any given time, it can be a pain to scroll through all of them to find what I'm looking for. Categorizing apps into handy folders can also be time-consuming. Fazik Logic takes the concept of sorting your apps one step further however with LiveSorter, a new app that automatically sorts installed applications into appropriate categories.