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Strava adds Messaging on iOS and Android, and it’s free

Strava, the popular social networking app for athletes and a leading digital community, today released its newest feature in the latest update – Messaging. Messaging allows Strava members to connect with one another and motivate each other in ways that they couldn’t before today. Head below the fold for more details on Strava’s Messaging feature.

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Snapchat introduces new Geostickers feature as another way to customize images and messages

Hot on the heels of a new Snapchat-esque Stories feature coming to Instagram, Snapchat today has announced Geostickers, which is a new feature that gives users yet another way to decorate their snaps. Geostickers are location-based overlays that can be applied to images before they are sent, as well as sent via the messaging feature of Snapchat.


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Hands-on: ‘Evie’ launcher brings iOS-like search to the Android homescreen, and it’s pretty great

Customization is at the heart of Android and one of the easiest ways to change up your device is with a custom launcher. With just a few taps, you can easily change the look and feel of your device. Over the past few years we’ve seen dozens of great options, but lately I’ve been trying out a relatively new one called “Evie”.

Let’s a take a quick look.


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Chrome OS will finally get a storage manager in an upcoming update

Chrome OS has always been pretty bare bones, but as an avid user and fan of the OS, even I have to admit it’s missing features it really shouldn’t be. With the limited storage available on most Chromebooks, you’d think a storage manager would be available, but you would be wrong. Thankfully, that will be changing very soon.


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VLC 2.0 launches w/ Android N support, video playlists, popup video mode, more

I remember back in the day when VLC was just the necessary media player for pretty much any Mac owner. Since then, the free and open source cross-platform multimedia player has expanded beyond Mac and PC to mobile devices running Android and iOS. Today, the VideoLAN organization has pushed out VLC for Android 2.0, and it’s probably the app’s biggest release since its first out-of-beta release in February of last year


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Opinion: Google’s future is in AI, but Chrome OS getting the Play Store is a big deal today

This year’s I/O was a big one. Maybe not the largest in terms of new products and services, but definitely not the smallest either. Among other things, the Mountain View, California company announced its Daydream VR platform for Android, an evolution of the Google Now assistant in the form of an AI-powered “Google Assistant,” a couple of new messaging apps and some hardware to play the part of debuting the Assistant, a new version of Android Wear, and more.

The keynote had this overarching theme that Google is no longer just a company that does search and ads. Now, Google is diving head first into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and most of the things that were announced in the keynote fell into that narrative for the most part. This is the stuff that’s not coming out for at least half a year. Most things, from Allo and Duo to Google Home, felt half-baked. It felt like everything was unfinished, and to some degree, that’s true. It’s still early days.

While Google wanted to paint this big picture of what the company envisions for the next few years and beyond, it saved some of the stuff that’s actually really cool today for other events at the conference. The most obvious of these was the press-only event Google hosted on day 2, showing off a huge new feature for Chrome OS: support for the Play Store that has long been tied down to Android. We’ve known this was coming for a long time, but now it’s here — serving as the next move to make Chrome OS and Android more alike than ever…


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Betas will now appear in Play Store search, localized suggestions for Brazil & India, more

The Play Store is adding a few features for both developers and users. Betas are now easier to find and join from the Play Store with Google even highlighting beta apps in a new Early Access section. The store also has new smart collections for tasks that require a combination of apps.


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Play Store v6.7 lets you join and leave the beta testing program, leave feedback for devs, more


For those who are fairly experienced in the app world, joining betas is always exciting and fun — since it allows people to access the latest features and design tweaks — despite the usual presence of bugs.

With the rollout of version 6.7 of the Play Store, Android Police first spotted, Google will now allow you conveniently see if you’re in a beta testing group from within the Store itself, leave and join potential betas, and even give developers some feedback regarding the latest build…


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The latest version of Google’s Messenger app lets you view messages on your SIM card

Depending on how long you’ve been using cell phones, you might remember the days when you could store SMS text messages on your SIM card. Typically these were just stored there temporarily so that — when switching between phones — you didn’t lose anything sentimental. Now, it appears (via Android Police) that the latest version of Google’s Messenger app lets you manage these SIM card messages…


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This week’s top stories: Galaxy Note 6 leaks, Huawei P9, HP Chromebook 13 & hands-on w/new Android phones

In this week’s top Google stories: new Android device news surrounding the Galaxy Note 6, the death of the Nexus 9, Huawei’s upcoming P9 flagship, and more. And we went hands-on with LeEco’s new Snapdragon 820-powered Le Max2 w/ 6GB of RAM, the BlackBerry PRIV running Android Marshmallow, and the Oppo F1 Plus in this week’s top videos.

In addition, HP and Google launched the impressive new Chromebook 13, and a handful of notable Google and Android app updates arrived as well as news of a completely overhauled design for Instagram in testing.

Head below for all of the quick links to this weeks top stories, videos and more. 


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Opinion: If bots are the future, Google needs to play it smart in the war with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple

We’ve recently argued that the Galaxy S7 edge may represent the culmination of the “Smartphone 1.0 era”. It won’t please everyone about everything — and no such thing will likely ever exist — but it’s indubitable how all of the cornerstones of a modern smartphone have been tackled cleverly by the Korean giant, and all its positives can even justify its hefty price tag. Actually delivering something that steps up the game in a significant way, in fact, looks like a very tough challenge. Perhaps we will have to wait until true, Project Ara-like modular smartphones show up before radically rethinking the way we look at hardware, but the software roadmap seems to be getting clearer, with a future studded with bots.

Microsoft is betting big on them as a major part of the future of computing, and so is Facebook. There is a case that could be made for them to become the new apps — and this certainly is how these two firms are pitching the concept. Chances are that Google will follow sooner than later, and I think that if the general idea of bots we have been so far given remains valid, the owning of a platform as popular as Android may leave the Mountain View behemoth with quite an interesting card up its sleeve, which could give them a notable lead in the upcoming war for bots dominance, were they to play it cleverly…


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Google Maps traffic alerts feature expands, now available in India

Google announced in a blog post this morning that it has expanded its the popular Google Maps traffic alerts feature to India. This means that any smartphone user based in India will get real-time notifications during navigation if traffic conditions change for the worse, and before a journey is set to begin, so that they can choose the quickest route more easily.


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Google’s easy to use ‘Accessibility Scanner’ analyzes apps for accessibility issues

Google has published a new tool to help Android developers improve the user interface and experience of their apps. Accessibility Scanner can analyze any app with an eye towards accessibility issues that might not be a problem for most users but may cause user experience problems for some.


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Sony forms ForwardWorks corporation to bring its PlayStation games to mobile

It’s 2016, billions of smartphones are in use across the globe, and traditional video game companies are only just coming around to the idea that there’s some money to be made from smartphone gaming. Nintendo only recently launched its first mobile app, and plans to release a more familiar character-based game soon. Sony, likewise is about to make another foray in to the world of smartphone-based gaming with its newly-formed corporation, ForwardWorks.


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Todoist app for Android gets updated with more Quick Add functionality, keyboard support, speed improvements, more

Todoist, one of the best productivity apps released for any platform, has been updated to bring more smarts to its Android app. Unlike the last major update, this version doesn’t include a massive visual overhaul. Instead, the team focussed on bringing more intuitive and productive methods of adding, searching and filtering your projects.


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Google Hangouts now lets App customers video chat with up to 25 participants

You’ll soon be able to hold video chat meetings with much larger groups as today Google begins increasing the number of participants Apps customers can have in a Google Hangouts video call at any one time. The old limit of 10 participants today gets increased to 25 users.

The change comes to Apps customers only— Business, Government, and Education—  while all other Hangouts users will still have the old limit of 10 participants for video.

Google notes that it will only show “the 10 most active video call participants” along the bottom of the video chat to maintain quality, but it will switch on the fly between active users for the new limit of up to 25 participants.

All Apps customers should start to see the new participant limit increase roll out over the next few days.

Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, & Slides will soon let you set expiration dates for document access

Google is adding the ability to set expiration dates for access to documents across Google Drive, Docs, Sheets and Slides apps. The idea is that you can limit a contributor’s access to a  document for a specific time period, which Google points out will come in handy for companies and organizations that often share files with third-parties temporarily:


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