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.
Read MoreYouTube's new 'Time watched' statistics add to the Digital Wellbeing portfolio
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.
Read MoreSome interesting stats about Google Play Store vs. Apple App Store apps and development
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.
Read MoreAndroid has overtaken Windows for the first time as the most popular OS in total internet usage across desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile combined
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.
Read MoreLineageOS passes 500,000 active installs worldwide, OnePlus One is the most popular device
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.
Read More[Brutal] Android market share is still rising, decimates Windows Mobile and BlackBerry OS
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.
Read MoreStreet View can now automatically detect and blur faces, group unpublished 360 photos, and soon point out places that should be photographed [APK Download + Teardown]
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.
What's New
Official Changelog:
- Unpublished 360 photos will now group together based on place or time.
- Automatically detect faces for blurs in 360 photos.
- You can now share links to user profiles.
The most (and least) popular devices used to browse Android Police (Aug. 2016)
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.
- Google Nexus 6P
- Apple iPhone*
- Google Nexus 5X
- Google Nexus 6
- Google Nexus 5
- Galaxy S7 edge
- Apple iPad*
- Galaxy S6
- Galaxy S5
- Galaxy S7
- Galaxy Note 5
- Galaxy Note 4
The reason I used a list of twelve, you may have guessed, has to do with those Apple asterisks.
Read MoreThe Best Of AP
SwiftKey Stats Give You Insight Into Your Top Topics, Emojis, And Other Typing Trends
Your keyboard knows more about you, your language habits, your weird infatuation with the pile of poo emoji, and your eccentric words than you could ever imagine. SwiftKey knows even more, not only because it's been available for years and has been collecting your data for as long as you've used it, but also because it can scan through your entire email and social accounts to learn more and more from your typing behavior.
Now SwiftKey is ready to turn that knowledge into infographics (because those are cool) to let you in on the secrets of your own language and typing habits.
Read More5 Months After Launch, Google Photos Has 100 Million Active Users Who Love To Take Pics Of Food, Babies, Dogs, And Themselves
Google Photos' decoupling from Google+ dates back to May, which means five months have now passed since. In this time, Google Photos has received several updates and gained essential features like Chromecast support and albums for adding and reordering images. Now the Photos team is ready to reflect on these five months and share with us a few stats about the app and service's use.
Photos now counts 100 Million active monthly users, but how that number is tallied I couldn't tell you. Does a single search or view count, or did they require uploads for users to be marked as active? I'm not sure. 15 Million animations and collages have been created, either manually or through Assistant.
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