While the day has been coming for a long time, last month was the first time that mobile overtook desktop in total worldwide Internet usage, says analytics company StatCounter.
Following the introduction of AMP articles to Android, iOS, and the mobile web, Google News will now highlight local coverage of national stories by using a new “Local Source” tag. The feature is live on all platforms, including the full web, starting today.
After launching Skype for Web worldwide back in June and also bringing it to Chromebook users, today the previously chat-only web app is adding support for making phone calls and other new features.
Yahoo today announced that it’s revamping the way it aggregates news content and in the process launching redesigned commenting, news discovery, and notification features to users on Android, iOS, and through its Yahoo homepage on the web.
Skype today announced that it’s bringing free group video calling— a feature it’s long had available on the desktop—to mobile devices including Android users.
Yes, it really has been a decade since Skype changed the way people connect with their loved ones. 6 years ago, we innovated again with one-to-one video calling on mobile phones. Today, we are excited to announce the next evolution – group video calling on Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows 10 Mobile.
The feature will officially launch in the coming weeks, but you can pre-register through Skype’s website here starting today.
And keep an eye out for updates to the Skype for Android app. In the latest update to the app, Skype also introduced to the ability to “Send video messages to groups directly from group chats.”
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t20MzFcwWVM]
Google’s latest Chrome feature includes more ways to improve your web browsing experience by reducing data consumption by up to 70%. Chrome’s Data Saver achieves the impressive consumption savings by blocking images when the web page initially loads, although it does give users the opportunity to manually select to show images if they want to. Google announced the development in a blog post yesterday…
Google is rolling out a couple notable updates to its Google Translate apps that adds additional languages for translations of printed text and support for the new Split View app mode on iPads.
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AT&T is announcing a new network-level advancement called NumberSync capable of sharing one phone number with all connected devices. With NumberSync, AT&T customers will soon be able to use what’s called mobile twinning to share a single phone number with multiple SIM cards in smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, and other connected devices. The goal is to let you send and receive phone calls or messages from all your connected devices without relying on a specific app or operating system feature.
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Google looks to be rolling out a redesigned version of Google Maps on the web that introduces a tweaked user interface that in many ways mirrors its mobile app experience on both Android and iOS. As pictured above, Maps gets a redesigned menu/sidebar/search UI that is clearly inspired by Material Design and the user interface of its mobile apps.
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It looks like Google has been working behind the scenes to make searching for apps a much more intuitive and better-looking experience on Android. As spotted by the folks at Android Police, if you go searching for apps from the default search feature in Android, you’ll now get a very attractive, Material-themed grid of apps. Although it doesn’t work for every single term, simply search for anything followed by ‘apps’ and it’ll bring up a grid of downloadable options from the Google Play Store.
Kamcord, a popular platform that lets game developers add gameplay recording features to their mobile apps, is today taking its first step into live streaming. The move is a notable one as competitors such as live game streaming service Twitch, now owned by Amazon, move into the mobile space and live streaming apps like Periscope and Meerkat begin to gain traction among users.
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Google AdWords, the online advertising service that allows marketers to purchase advertising across multiple platforms and formats (i.e. images, video), has a neat new addition which recognizes that more people are connecting to the Internet from more devices.
Estimated Total Conversions, a larger tool which tracks ad clicks that lead to a conversion (i.e. a sale), can now track the number of display advertisement clicks that occur in a browser and end as a sale in an app, or vice versa. This also works cross-device when the converting customer has at any point logged into their Google account from both devices.
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comScore today released its report on United States smartphone subscriber market share for the three month period ending in May. The report, released monthly, tracks the rankings of the top smartphone OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and operating systems by consumer adoption. Month-to-month fluctuations in market share aren’t typically major, but they can provide a look at how companies’ new flagship smartphones are doing.
Almost immediately after Pushbullet unveiled its Portal app today for easy file transfers between desktops and smartphones, BitTorrent is out with its own similar app, called Shoot.
While Google’s ad business is definitely in a transition phase, largely due to the shift away from personal computers towards mobile handsets, Google’s Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy says that the company is handling this move well. Selling ads to advertisers may be harder with more of those ads ending up on mobile devices with smaller screens than notebooks and desktops, meaning more difficulty for customers to complete purchases, but Google is definitely taking steps toward slowing the rapid decline in ad prices.
According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, while Google is making several moves to make advertising more valuable, the market’s more recent move to larger-screened devices has helped significantly…
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According to a statement from a member of the Google Chrome team, there are currently “no plans” to bring extensions to the mobile version of the browser. It’s a feature that has long been wanted, but the Chrome for Android Technical Program Manager says that they haven’t been able to implement them and still provide a good UX.
As per the AMA from yesterday:
There are no plans to add extensions support on mobile. We haven’t been able to implement these on mobile and still have it be a good user experience.
This seems a bit like the team is dodging the question here, and they don’t provide any details as to what exactly it is about the mobile experience that gets worse with extensions in the picture. One of the most popular extensions, AdBlock, would put an end to mobile ads—many of which Google themselves serves. Maybe this is what’s keeping extensions from allowing a “good user experience.”
As you probably could have expected would happen eventually, Google this evening has revealed that more searches are now performed on mobile devices than on desktops. In a post on the Inside AdWords blog, Google wrote, “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US and Japan.”
Google is set to debut a reworked version of its search result ranking system tomorrow, Fortune reported today. The new rankings will place websites with mobile-friendly designs ahead of those that work best on desktop machines in search results.
The decision to make this change was prompted by the fact that over 60% of Google’s search traffic now comes from mobile devices, the company said. The modification was first announced in a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog earlier this year.
Just days after Google’s Sundar Pichai announced the company’s new Inbox email app would arrive for Google Apps customers soon, today an invite system is launching to allow for exactly that.
Like the invite system that is currently being used to allow new users to download the Inbox email app, Google is today allowing Google Apps for Work admins to request service access for their users. Google said it will let in only select users that request access as it works to get feedback from early adopters and improve the experience:
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Google today, in a post on its Inside Search blog, has revealed a new interface for browsing news on its mobile website. Starting now, when you search for a topic, you’ll see a “carousel” of recent articles regarding your query that you can horizontally scroll through. The carousel contains articles from a single source of information.
After announcing its first dev con last December, Yahoo today kicked off its mobile developer conference in San Francisco where it unveiled five new products for mobile app makers. As suspected, Yahoo revealed the latest tools from Flurry, the mobile ad and analytics firm it acquired last July.
This includes Flurry Analytics Explorer, a new dashboard for the Flurry Analytics system which it says enables developers to discover more insights with than before, and Flurry Pulse, which lets app builders “share app signals with partners using their existing Flurry SDK implementations and the click of a button.”
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Reddit has hired seven people to join its growing team, among them David Forsythe, a mobile engineer that specializes on Android. The hiring is further evidence that an official Android app for Reddit could be on the horizon, following the company’s acquisition of Alien Blue for iPhone and subsequent rebranding of the app as its official iOS client.
Forsythe did not directly confirm that he will be working on an Android app, although he cites experience building things like web apps and mobile apps in the past. Despite being one of the most highly-trafficked websites online, Reddit surprisingly still lacks a mobile-friendly website for smartphones and tablets.
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Facebook introduced a new “Trending” section on the web in January to display trending stories that are frequently shared and discussed on the social network. Today, the company announced that it has improved this feature by organizing trending topics into five categories so that it’s easier for people to explore stories from different sources.
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HP’s annual two-day Mobile Pwn2Own competition came to a close this afternoon, with a group of veteran security researchers and other competitors able to compromise several flagship smartphones across the top-three mobile operating systems: Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The devices that were exploited include the Samsung Galaxy S5, Nexus 5, iPhone 5s, Amazon Fire Phone and Nokia Lumia 1520.
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