SwiftKey has only recently received an update that made many of its fans unhappy with changes to the toolbar. A new release to the beta channel doesn't mitigate these issues, but it packs some much-needed improvements: SwiftKey's settings have been completely redesigned with a more conventional interface that now also supports Android 10's dark mode. The keyboard itself doesn't switch themes automatically yet, though — baby steps.
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Google barely flexes its muscles by announcing concrete numbers of shipped physical products, but loves throwing around numbers for things that are technically out of our immediate reach – just like the number of smart home devices its Assistant supports. That number has climbed to 30,000 devices from 3,500 brands, as the company just announced at Google I/O.
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This year has been a tumultuous one for Huawei. The company launched one good smartphone after the other, whether on the low end of the spectrum with the Nova series, or in the high-end market with its P20 and Mate 20 series. It also faced stiff regulatory opposition and found itself caught in the midst of a political/economical war between the US and China. From seeing its deals to enter the US market vanish with AT&T and Verizon to having its CFO arrested in Canada, the rollercoaster of Huawei's 2018 hasn't slowed down. But the company is ending its year on a high note and with one number worth celebrating: it shipped over 200 million smartphones in 2018.
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Google first demoed its Digital Wellbeing initiative back in May at I/O, but it took until this month for it to officially debut with Android 9 Pie. We've already checked it out and given our thoughts on it, but it's no surprise that Google is still working on it. 'Time watched' statistics have just been added to the YouTube app, allowing for better control over your watching habits.
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We don't usually cover infographics and comparisons on Android Police - most are biased, pointless, or without much credibility - but this latest data set from appfigures made us stop and do a double-take because it presented interesting stats from a rather reputable app analytics company.
appfigures' report looked at 10 different questions regarding the Play Store and App Store and tried to answer them with stats pulled from its Explorer app research tool. The answers are all very interesting in their own right, but a few of them caught our attention. First of all, as shown in the graph at the top of the page, it's clear that more apps are going cross-platform from iOS to Android than the other way around.
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The research arm of StatCounter, an independent web analytics company, has revealed an interesting stat today: according to its numbers, Android has overtaken Windows for the first time in terms of worldwide total internet usage.
This bold statement comes with a lot of asterisks. We're talking about total internet usage here, not sales numbers or users. We're also looking at worldwide usage across all platforms combined (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile). And even then, the difference is minimal at 37.93% for Android compared to 37.91% for Windows.
The distinction of platforms is important because if we were only looking at desktops, Windows would have an 84% usage share.
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CyanogenMod has been the most widely-used custom ROM for years, with at least 10 million users at one point. After Cyanogen Inc kicked the bucket, the community-maintained LineageOS continued CM's efforts. The official statistics page for the project now shows 515,000 active installs (at the time of writing), a great achievement for the relatively-new ROM.
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The Android army marches on, killing other operating systems left and right, leaving carcasses of once vibrant and flourishing platforms in its wake, dangling them more and more from the Gartner and IDC market share tables, until there's no place left for them but the ambiguous "Others" row.
The latest report is brutal for both BlackBerry OS and Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile / whatever Microsoft is calling its platform nowadays. It's the Q4 2016 report from Gartner and in it we learn that smartphone sales have grown 7% compared to Q3, that overall 2016 sales also increased a little, that Samsung lost its top spot as smartphone vendor for the first time in a while to Apple (likely thanks to the Note 7 kaboom), but most importantly, we also learn that Android still managed to grow its market share by 1% year-on-year, despite having crossed 80% worldwide.
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Google is imbuing the Street View app with some clever new features in its latest update. This version adds automatic face detection for 360 photos for quick blurring, groups together unpublished 360 photos by place or time, and adds a share link to user profiles. Additionally, a teardown shows that there's a new feature on the way that will clue in ambitious users about nearby places that should be photographed.
Official Changelog:
Several of you - there are dozens of us! - have asked on a number of occasions that Android Police list off some of the most popular mobile devices used on the site by our readers. Using Google Analytics, we actually have pretty granular insight on this, and so I figured I'd share with you the top devices in the last month as well as some of my obscure favorites and their respective positions on our list. Ready? We'll start with the top 12 (more on why in a second), in order of popularity.
The reason I used a list of twelve, you may have guessed, has to do with those Apple asterisks.
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