Google has brought Playtime, its developer education event, back to San Francisco with some news for those that help to make Android awesome. If you missed the event or the video highlights, there is a handy blog post with a summary of the information announced. The most interesting points from it are that Google is now giving developers the ability to run subscription promotional prices and to see which users have requested refunds. Fun stuff, right?
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CloudMagic has long been one of the most popular third-party email applications on Android. Today, the developers are really testing the loyalty of their users by changing the name and payment model of the app. It's now called Newton Mail, and it will cost you $49.99 per year after an initial 14-day trial. Thus far, people do not seem pleased with the change.
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BlackBerry is trying to make Android phones these days, or at least sell them. Its latest device is just a re-branded Alcatel Idol 4, but you don't have to get a BlackBerry phone to get all of BlackBerry's software features anymore. The company has released Hub+ in the Play Store, which gives you access to features like unified inbox, BlackBerry Calendar, and a password manager.
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Back in December, we reported on a new "pseudo-drawer" for the YouTube app on Android - replacing the horizontal list of avatars and activity indicators found on phones, the drawer gave users a scrollable vertical list of subscriptions - avatars and names - along with actual numbers.
Now, it looks like the drawer is getting some tweaks. First, it overlaps the UI when expanded now, rather than pushing everything to the side. Whether this is better or not is debatable, but the more important change is inside the drawer itself. Instead of just "Channels," the drawer header now has filters to let users sort their subscriptions by relevance or new activity.
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The YouTube app's hamburgerless layout has been with us for a while now, and while it's gotten a mixed bag of reactions, Google is still iterating on it slowly but surely. It seems like the latest development is a new layout on tablets for the subscription tab.
Previously, a strip of avatars lined the top of the content area, with blue dots to indicate whether the channel had a new video for you. In the new layout - which seems to be rolling out pretty quickly from the server-side judging from our inbox - subs have their own sort of pseudo-drawer on the left of the screen.
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Google wants to be the undisputed leader in live streaming video games. With the announcement of YouTube Gaming, Google declared its intention to do battle with Twitch over an industry that may eventually amass a mind-blowing number of viewers. We're now receiving the first major app update to YouTube Gaming, and it's a huge one. Version 1.1 introduces screen recording and live screencasting directly from an Android device. On the content consumption side of things, the Watch Later feature from YouTube has been added in, and there's also a new import tool for quickly and easily porting your gaming-related subscriptions over to the new app.
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Yesterday a reference to something called "music gifts" appeared on a Google Play support page. Now a separate page has popped up that fleshes out precisely what this feature is, something Cody came across in a recent Play Music teardown just under a month ago.
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If you live in the 4th, 5th, or 11th most populated countries in the world — in layman terms, that's Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico — you should pay a visit to the Play Store and check out the Newsstand section — or Banca (de jornais) in Portuguese. There you will find that you now have access to paid magazine subscriptions.
Thanks to this addition, users in Brazil and Mexico will be happy to know that they have access to almost all Play Store content (only TV shows are missing on their checklist), whereas Indonesian Android fans still lack access to movies and music. But this is good news nonetheless: users get more choice and Google gets a new revenue source.
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There are uncountable multitudes of weather apps in the Play Store, which makes Earth Networks' latest move all the more perplexing. The company has removed its popular WeatherBug Elite app from the Play Store, much to the chagrin of paying users. We reached out to Earth Networks looking for specifics about the removal, and have learned that there will only be a single WeatherBug app going forward, and it will offer an ad-free experience in the form of an annual subscription.
The Google Play Newsstand Android app is pretty and all, but without the ability to subscribe to magazines, it's little more than a dumbed down pseudo-RSS reader. So it's a pretty good thing Google is rolling out access to the digital magazines to more countries. By now, residents in France and Germany should have access to the Newsstand content available in Google Play.
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