Alphabet Scoop 002: Our homescreens, first Wear OS watch, and ARCore galore

This week, we talk about our homescreens, wearables, and setups, the first Wear OS watch, a slew of ARCore announcements, and all of the week’s most important app updates.

Alphabet Scoop is available on Google Play, iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app, and through our dedicated RSS feed for Pocket Casts and other podcast players.

New episodes of Alphabet Scoop are recorded every Friday and published on Saturday mornings. Subscribe to our podcast in Google Play or your favorite podcast player to guarantee new episodes are delivered as soon as they’re available.

Hosts:

• Stephen Hall
• Abner Li

Links:

• Nest Diary: Set up, impressions, and review of the Nest Thermostat E
• The first Wear OS watch is Hublot’s luxury Big Bang Referee for the 2018 World Cup
• IKEA and Overstock announce ARCore integration for AR home furnishing on Android
• eBay uses ARCore to help better package products you sell
• Google’s ‘Just a Line’ AR app lets you draw on the world around you w/ ARCore [Video]
• Android Instant Apps will soon be available for games with Google Play Instant
• Google Pay adds transit tickets that appear automatically on your Android phone
• You can now send & request money with Google Assistant on Android, iOS
• You’ll soon be able to do an image search and then buy the product thru Google Express
• Report: Best Buy to stop selling Huawei devices over the coming weeks
• Google reportedly acquiring VR camera company Lytro for its light field technology
• ‘Subscribe with Google’ simplifies sign-ups w/ auto log-ins as $300M News Initiative tackles ‘fake news’
• YouTube music boss details how extra ads will ‘frustrate’ users to paid music service [Update: ‘Prompts’]
• YouTube Live streaming now works on the web, coming to Android camera apps including Samsung & LGYouTube testing new full-width search bar UI on Android
• YouTube for web testing new ‘miniplayer-bar’ that keeps videos in view as you scroll
• Google’s built-in podcast player updated w/ a homepage, subscriptions, & app icon [Gallery]

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