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Facebook Analytics, a tool that helps brands measure things like customer engagement, now has its own app. The service offers insights into user demographics, app usage, and more, and can even send push notifications when significant anomalies from normal user activity occur.
One of the features we've been expecting WhatsApp to add is the support for mentions in group conversations. That way, not only you would be able to quote someone or some specific message, you'd also be able to directly address a contact inside a group to get their attention. This feature is now live in the latest WhatsApp beta v2.16.272.
Earlier this year, the Dropbox Android app ran by the 500 million installs milestone on Google Play. The problem with that metric is that it tracks the number of times the app has been downloaded from the Play Store, which includes updates to pre-installed versions. That makes this a very unspecific marker of how many people actually use Dropbox on Android.
WhatsApp has come a long way since its origins as an instant messaging client in 2009. By this time 2013, over 300 million people were running the app, and that was before Facebook decided to pay $19 billion for the service. By the beginning of this year, it had reached 700 million.
Seven hundred million is a big number. 700 million of almost anything is a lot, but when you're talking about users, it's the kind of number that makes investors and analysts start to drool. It's also the amount of monthly users that popular alternative messaging app WhatsApp now has, at least according to an announcement by CEO Jan Koum. For context, Facebook initialized a purchase of WhatsApp last February (finalized in October) for approximately 22 billion dollars, when the service reportedly had "only" 450 million users.
If you're a fan of the CyanogenMod family of custom Android ROMs, then you're in extremely good company. According to CyanogenMod's official statistics page, the ROM and its derivatives are now running on just over 10 million Android phones and tablets. Those statistics come from CyanogenMod users who voluntarily report activity via the built-in CMStats function, so the actual number of devices could be higher. CyanogenMod's head honcho and Cyanogen Inc. CTO Steve Kondik announced the news on Google+.
Samsung's ChatON comes pre-installed on a good number of the world's Android devices, and while many of you would take that as reason alone to overlook the app, a good number of other people take the time to check it out. 100 million, apparently. Samsung's happy to announce that its instant messaging platform has doubled the number of users it had back in May. Their excitement is understandable, considering the app first launched in October of 2011. Suffice to say, it took much longer to get the first 50 million users than the second.
Update: The update is now live in the Store – find it by hitting the widget at the end of the post.
Recently, Google quietly began to test auto translation for app reviews in the developer console. Today, the company publicly announced that same feature and began rolling it out to all devs. Now, when they log in to their control panel, they can see the reviews in their preferred language, along with the original text. Neat.
YouTube announced something fairly incredible yesterday: it now has more than 1 billion unique visitors to the site every single month. That's a LOT of people, almost half of everybody around the world with internet access, in fact.
Winning a 0 bounty and the hearts of Droid RAZR/MAXX users, Dan Rosenberg has found a successful root method for the phone's 4.1 JellyBean OTA, which began rolling out last Christmas Eve.
As if the news out of Google couldn't get any hotter today, the company decided to just casually announce that it has over 500 million users with Google+ accounts, 235 million of whom are active "across Google" which means anything from +1ing things in various Google products to "connecting with friends in Search"...whatever that means. The most important stat, though, is 135 million users are active in the stream. That means, if we can assume past definitions are still true, those users either visit plus.google.com or use the mobile app to view content.
The lack of expandable storage in Nexus devices becomes one of the hottest and most controversial topics every time Google does a refresh and we find out that the next generation lacks SD cards entirely yet again. Couple that with the decision to limit onboard storage options to 16GB max, which is the case with the Nexus 4 at the moment and was the case with the Nexus 7 for a while, and you've got a full-blown revolt.
Google Announces Mobile App Analytics, Lets You See The Who, Why, And Where Of Your Mobile App Users
In the second half of a double Google Analytics whammy, Google has introduced new features for mobile developers and marketers in the Analytics dashboard.
In the second half of a double Google Analytics whammy, Google has introduced new features for mobile developers and marketers in the Analytics dashboard. While Google's other announcement, an Analytics mobile app, made our site's founder combustible with joy, this announcement is sure to bring cheer to those with products already in the Play store. These new features give insight into how Android users discover apps, along with their usage patterns, in order to enable developers and marketers to increase their products' reach and improve their performance.
It's amazing what a new look can do for a platform, isn't it? Back in January, we reported that CyanogenMod, the most popular third-party Android ROM, reached one million unique installs. Now, a little more than four months later, that number has doubled, according to CM's stat tracker. This is huge.
To any hardcore modder, overclocking (or underclocking) your CPU is one of the best ways to get the most from your device. While some popular ROMs now have the ability to control your CPU baked in, many don't - and in the earlier days, virtually none did. Enter SetCPU - the de facto standard.
Everyone knows that smartphones are awesome, but it’s hard to beat using a large screen and full keyboard to control a device. Developers Peter Mora and Zoltan Papp believe they have come up with a compelling compromise: Webkey, for Android. Webkey allows users with a rooted Android device to text or call contacts, view SD card contents, and more - all from a web based interface.