Google’s official Project Fi app has now landed in the Play Store, following the announcement of the Mountain View company’s MVNO earlier this month. The app lets you activate service, tweak your account settings, check how much data you’re using, see your monthly bill, and more…
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Google Analytics for iOS has received an update this evening that bumps it to version 1.2.0. The update includes a handful of features, such as new comparison capabilities and some small interface tweaks.
Google has—finally—officially announced Google Play Services 7.3 (which first surfaced a couple of weeks ago), bringing several important new features to the company’s Google-powered app support package. Most importantly, the update brings new Android Wear APIs allowing multiple wearables to be connected to a single phone…
Multiple wearable devices can be connected to a user’s handheld device. Each connected device in the network is considered a node. With multiple connected devices, you must consider which nodes receive the messages. For example, In a voice transcription app that receives voice data on the wearable device, you should send the message to a node with the processing power and battery capacity to handle the request, such as a handheld device..
The update also brings the addition of nutrition data to Google Fit, as well as “improvements to retrieving the user’s activity and location, and better support for optional APIs, there’s a lot to explore in this release.” Check out the goofy and entertaining announcement video below, and learn more over at Google’s Android developers blog:
SwiftKey is one of the most popular third-party keyboards across both iOS and Android, and the company today released the latest beta version of its Android app. The app’s main functionality hasn’t changed, but this update brings a completely redesigned options menu—and I think it suits the keyboard pretty well…
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Google has announced today that its Keep note-taking app has now received full Android Wear support, letting you view your check lists, photos, and notes straight from your wrist…
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Twitter has today announced that it’s bringing a new feature called “Highlights” to its official Android app. The feature aims to condense your Twitter feed to be much more easily digestible, giving you only the tweets and stories that you really want. When you don’t have time to flick through your entire timeline, Twitter hopes you’ll go to Highlights for a grab-and-go fix…
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Screenshots via <a href="http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/04/21/android-wear-app-v1-1-rolls-out-with-an-updated-look-support-for-cloud-sync-over-wi-fi-and-calendars-for-multiple-accounts-apk-download/">Android Police</a>
After unveiling a handful of new features for Android Wear yesterday, Google this evening has started rolling out an updated version of the Android Wear companion app. The update prepares the app for many of the features revealed by Google yesterday, including WiFi support, wrist gestures, and always-on apps.
Update: Various reports have confirmed that certain Android Wear devices, including the LG G Watch and G Watch R as well as the Asus ZenWatch, will not be getting WiFi support.
Android Wear is getting a pretty big update. Over at the official Android blog, Google this morning showed off the latest version of its mobile OS, packing several useful new features including wrist gestures for flicking through cards hands-free, WiFi support to free your watch from needing to be directly connected to your phone, support for quickly drawing emoji replies to messages, always-on screen support in apps, and a lot more…
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Most of the money transfer services that have popped up in Silicon Valley over the last several years don’t directly offer any federal-level insurance, and Google Wallet—until today—was a pretty good example. But now, according to a report from Yahoo Finance, Google is adding FDIC insurance to the money you keep in your Wallet Balance by storing your funds in various FDIC-insured banking institutions…
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The latest version of Google+ for Android—which started rolling out earlier today—gives G+ communities a pretty nifty new redesign. First shared on Google+ by Googler Danielle Buckley, the update makes the community screens a bit more unique with a UI that’s a notable change compared to the rest of the app. One of the annoyances of the Google+ app has long been that it can be hard to tell what you’re looking at because it’s so uniformly designed, and this update seems to make it a bit easier for you to instinctively know that you’re viewing a community.
Announcing: Improved look & feel for Communities
Check out your favorite community on Android to see the new and improved look in this week’s app update (currently rolling out). We hope you’ll love it!
Google+ isn’t the most popular social network, but it does have many loyal users—who, unsurprisingly, are commonly loyal fanboys of Google as a whole. I personally can attest to the fact that Google+ isn’t necessarily the ghost town that it’s claimed to be, though, as I’m the owner of the largest Android Wear community (with more than 40,000 members). It makes me glad to see that this community is now going to look just a bit better on mobile. This visual redesign can be found in version 5.3 of the Google+ app, which is rolling out on the Google Play Store today.
Niantic Labs is the group within Google that’s behind the famed Ingress augmented reality game, but they have another app that definitely gets a lot less attention. It’s called Field Trip, and it lets you quickly and easily find places of interest around your physical location. You don’t even have to use the app yourself—it runs in the background and automatically lets you know when you’re getting close to “cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you.” Now, the app will send those notifications to your wrist…
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Popular live streaming app Meerkat has announced today that it is opening up a public beta for its upcoming Android client. Currently, Meerkat is available only on iOS. Meerkat promised Android support when it first launch, as did its primary competitor, Periscope.
Google has today released version 1.0 of its new “Handwriting Input” keyboard, which lets you manually draw the text you would like to type. The app works on both smartphones and tablets as you can see in the gallery below, and it’s—based on my first few minutes using the app—actually pretty good at deciphering your handwriting no matter how bad it may be. It works in any Android app that has a text input field.
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After unveiling a revamped “quote tweet” functionality for iPhone and web users last week, Twitter today has revealed that the feature is coming to Android devices today. With this change, using the quote tweet feature will now embed the actual tweet instead of simply quoting it as plain text.
Snapseed, the excellent free photo editing application, today received its first major update since Google purchased developer Nik Software back in 2012. Version 2.0 arrived in the Play Store with a brand new user interface and a huge collection of new features, most notably including spot healing, lens blur effects, perspective transformation, and a non-destructive editing system that can copy edits from one image to another. The app has been refreshed has a minimalist UI with Material Design influence on Android.
Snapseed’s unique ability to selectively fix small parts of photos — such as improving the brightness level of one dark face in an otherwise bright image — has kept it relevant as a key photo editing tool for years. Snapseed 2.0 expands upon that feature, letting you apply filters and brushes selectively with a brush tool. You can also go into individual layers and make adjustments to changes that were previously applied during the editing process.
Snapseed 2.0 is available for free from the Play Store now, although it’s still rolling out so it may not be available for your device just yet. Additional details are after the break…
Dunkin’ Donuts is a pretty big breakfast food and beverage chain in the United States, and Google has today announced that they’re partnering with the seller of donuts to bring Google Wallet integration to the Dunkin’ Donuts Android app.
Dunkin’ Donuts now brings its guests a faster way to purchase and recharge their mobile Dunkin’ Donuts Cards in the Dunkin’ Donuts Mobile® App on Android. By simply selecting Google Wallet at checkout, Dunkin’ Donuts guests can recharge their cards with a couple of clicks—no need to type in credit card information anymore. And hungry Seamless customers will start to see the Google Wallet payment option available in their Android app, helping them get their grub – a delicious array of 80+ cuisine types – in a snap.
While you previously had to use a Credit Card (and spend minutes typing in the appropriate information), the latest version of the Dunkin’ Donuts app lets you recharge your perks cards with a couple taps. Selecting Google Wallet from the “Payment method” section will simply ask for your Google account information.
Google says that Seamless, a company specializing in food delivery and takeout, has also this week integrated Google Wallet in their app. You can download both the Dunkin’ Donuts and Seamless apps on the Play Store for free.
Google is usually pretty good at acting on user feedback, and today they’re doing so with the return of month view to the Google Calendar app for smartphones.
The view “provides a high level view of all scheduled events for a full month, allowing people to then tap on a specific day for a closer look,” according to Google’s blog post…
Instagram is adding a few new features to its Android app today including two new creative tools for editing photos and a new post notifications feature.
For the two new creative tools, the Fade feature offers “a quiet tone to your photos by softening colors,” while the Color tool allows you to apply a yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, blue, cyan or green tint to the shadows and highlights in your photos.
Also new in the updated Instagram app is a Post Notifications feature that allows you to receive notifications when people you follow post once enabled: You will see an option to “Turn on Post Notifications.
The updated Instagram app, version 6.19.0, is available on Google Play now.
Twitter this evening has announced a change to the “quote tweet” functionality of its service. With an update that’s rolling out to Android users soon, using the quote tweet feature will now embed the actual tweet instead of simply quoting it as text.
Today, thanks to an update to the Amazon Prime Instant Video app, Amazon is finally allowing users to stream video content on Android tablets (via Android Police). Previously, Prime Instant Video only worked with Android phones, and more recently with Fire devices and iOS devices. The functionality of the app hasn’t changed—users still have to launch Prime Instant Videos from their web browser.
Sadly, support for Chromecast is nowhere in sight, and probably won’t be around any time soon considering how long it has taken Amazon to support Android tablets.
Now watch Amazon Instant Video on your Android phones and tablets. Android tablet customers can search and browse for videos on Amazon.com in their web browser and tap Watch Now to have the Prime Instant Video app begin playing the video.
You can download Amazon Instant Video version 2.0.45.1010 for free from the Amazon App Store (and only the Amazon App Store, sadly).
Recently, Dropbox updated its Mailbox email app with Material Design, bumping the version number to 2.0.1. Google first introduced Material Design at Google I/O 2014, but it has definitely been a trend that some apps—even those made by companies as large as Dropbox—are still only just now pushing their visual overhauls. The update includes a new FAB (floating action button), rearranges the navigation drawer and action bar to better fit their purposes, and more.
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ARC Welder is a new Chrome extension that’s designed to be a developer tool, but it comes with a nice bonus: You can use it to install and run dozens upon dozens of Android apps within your browser. Running Android apps in Chrome isn’t exactly a new concept, as Duolingo, Evernote, Vine, and more were previously installable specifically on Chrome OS via the Chrome Web Store. But now Google’s App Runtime for Chrome can run most Android apps to some capacity via ARC Welder anywhere a Chrome browser can be installed (including Chrome OS), and developers can also use the extension to test their apps.
It’s actually pretty easy to get running, and we’ve put together this quick guide to walk you through the process of using your favorite Android apps on the desktop:
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Google has announced today that a useful new feature is coming to Inbox by Gmail, namely the ability to customize morning, afternoon and evening “Snooze” times. Once you have the update, all you have to do is open the app, slide left on an email, tap “Pick date & time,” and select the time you’d like to snooze to. You should see a prompt at the bottom of the app asking you if you want to make this your morning, afternoon, or evening time.
Google announced today that a new version of Gmail is now available, featuring several notable enhancements. First up, you’ll notice that the new version brings the oft-requested ability to view all of your mail in one place; just tap “All inboxes” and you’ll get a look at all of your email across added accounts. This is probably the most monumental change here, but there are a few other minor updates as well…
These days, many of us have more than one email address. If you’re a student, you may have one account for school, one for a campus group you lead, and one for your blog. If you’re a parent, you might have one for family and one for your business. However many email addresses you have, today’s improvements to the Gmail app for Android make it easy to manage all your mail from all your accounts (yes, even @yahoo and @outlook) while you’re on the go.
Messages from Yahoo, Outlook.com and other IMAP/POP accounts now have the familiar stacked conversation view (as has previously been available for Gmail conversations only), search has been updated with better auto-complete, and the app also has some nifty updated animations. Finally, you’ll find larger attachment previews and the nifty ability to “save to Drive with a single tap.”
You can grab the Gmail app on the Play Store for free as usual, and you should start seeing the update rolling out if you haven’t received it already.
