Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. You can find his current work at 9to5Mac, 9to5Google 9to5Toys, Electrek, and more. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.
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In this week’s top stories: Google posts the Oreo factory images for current Pixel and Nexus devices, new information reveals “Bisto” is a reference to headphones that run Google Assistant, and the announcement of the Google Pixel 2 is rumored to be scheduled for October 5th…
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If you’ve followed us (or our friends at a couple of Android blogs), you’re probably aware of a little thing we do called APK Teardowns. Basically, we reverse engineer Google’s apps — like Allo, Duo, the Google Phone app, and others — and show you bits and pieces of code (in most cases, strings from a file called strings.xml) from within that might hint at features that are coming in the future. Lately, we’ve also found methods for enabling unreleased features in a select few apps.
But how exactly these things are done hasn’t been well publicized up to this point, and you might be surprised to learn that it’s actually a fairly straightforward process…
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The day has arrived for the unveiling of Android O’s mascot. This event has traditionally been an Android statue unveiling party at the Googleplex in Mountain View, but this year Google’s mixing things up a bit: the company is announcing the mascot and name for Android O in New York City at an event perfectly coinciding with today’s solar eclipse…
In this week’s top stories: The Essential Phone is now available for purchase, leaked images reveal a new design for Nest, and Android 7.1.1 is finally resuming its rollout to the Nexus 6.
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Google has been releasing the source code for its annual I/O app releases for quite a while now, and today marks that release for this year’s Google I/O 2017 app.
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We told you earlier this month that Google was rolling out a new Preview Program for the Google Home, and now it appears that some users are finally able to access the program. When it’s available for you, you should see a “Preview Program” option in the “Device settings” page of the Home app…
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After a long wait (Google said it would be coming in ‘a few more weeks’ back in July), Google Allo’s web client is now rolling out — although it’s currently restricted to those running the latest version of the app on Android. We revealed in our teardown of the last version of the app that the launch of Allo for web was imminent, and site is now live…
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Just like last year, Google released the first developer preview for its forthcoming major software update in the middle of spring — March, to be exact. Now, just about 5 months later, Android 8.0 (Oreo?) is finally nearing public release. According to some tweets from a pair of well-connected Android reporters, the specific day to mark on your calendar is August 21st.
In this week’s top stories: The latest beta of the Google app reveals some possible upcoming features, OnePlus releases three new icon packs to the Google Play Store, and we offer some alternatives to the Nexus 6.
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James Damore, an ex-Google engineer who has been the center of controversy this week after circulating a memo that has widely been characterized as sexist and anti-diversity, has now published an essay defending his various positions in The Wall Street Journal…
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Much of “Google Play Protect” — announced back at I/O in May — is just a public-facing rebrand of security features that have long been part of Android. We saw of the beginning of its rollout when Verify Apps was rebranded with the Protect branding last month, and now the Play Store side of things is showing for some users.
