Falcon Pro 3, the “ultimate” Twitter experience for Android, has received a new update that brings some changes for avid users of the real-time communication network.
Expand
Expanding
Close
After around seven million downloads of its popular third-party keyboard app, Fleksy is today announcing that its mobile apps will be completely free for all going forward.
The company was originally charging $4 for the app but had dropped the price to $1 and even made the app free temporarily a couple times in the past. Starting today, however, Fleksy says its apps for both iOS and Android will be free forever.
For everyone that has paid for the app and feels left out, Fleksy is offering a free gift that it says is worth $8 to make up for it. The in-app download includes a selection of new themes and extensions, which also arrive with today’s update. While the app is going free for all to download and use, the company will continue offering premium themes and extensions as paid in-app purchases.
In addition to going free, the company highlighted some other new features and improvements arriving today:
Going free is not the only big update today. We also launched an improved rich content view called Highlights. Meaning, Fleksy will better assist with GIF, sticker and other content discovery based on what you type. Instead of manually searching for stickers and GIFs on separate pages, now you’ll only need to tap on the auto-recommended hashtag (Highlight) and Fleksy will take you to an integrated page of relevant content all in one convenient place.
The Fleksy Keyboard app for Android is available now. A full list of what’s included in the update below:
In a blog post this morning, Sony announced that it has partnered with Twitch to let select Xperia smartphones broadcast live gameplay to the popular game broadcasting service. While Twitch has offered Android users the ability to watch live broadcasts for some time, this will be the first time you’ll be able to broadcast your mobile gameplay live to Twitch watchers.
Image via Android Police
Google has published an update to its Android mapping app, as noted by Android Police, that allows users to hide certain UI elements and adds support for new sharing options. The first of these new features lets users hide the majority of the interface when browsing maps in all modes except for turn-by-turn directions.
Adobe recently discontinued its original Photoshop Touch app in favor of a new generation of mostly single-use applications for Android (and iOS) including Photoshop Mix, Brush CC, Shape CC, and Color CC. Now large corporate customers subscribed to Creative Cloud for enterprise can take advantage of the new apps in conjunction with the high-bandwidth features that come with their tier of service, including fast deployment of these new products to teams within their companies on a case-by-case basis and 24/7 dedicated IT support. Updates with enterprise support for the aforementioned apps hit Google Play today.
This new suite of mobile apps for Android allows users to connect to the Creative Cloud platform and save new content to be used on whatever platform they choose to use to access Adobe’s suite of products. For example, Color CC allows users to pick colors from imported images and save them to a color palette which then be accessed from desktop, tablet, or wherever else Creative Cloud apps are available. Maybe a marketing employee comes across a color in the real world that they’d like to consider using for their next campaign. Now they can rest assure that prying eyes won’t be able to steal their inspiration from them.
Along with the features mentioned above including quick deployment of new Adobe tools and services to employees and priority 24/7 support, Creative Cloud for enterprise puts more power (read: liability) in the hands of corporations by allowing them to store assets – new designs, marketing campaigns, etc – on their own servers, behind their own firewalls. Large businesses are typically slow to adopt new technologies due to stringent security requirements put in place by the same employees who are tasked with considering what new technologies to introduce to their workforces. That’s just to name a few of the additions that come with that costly tier of service, though.
The updates are available now in Google Play. For those who want the APK downloads, they can be found below.
Towards the end of June, Adobe launched brand new versions of its Creative Cloud apps for Android. There were four main ones in total, each offering unique features and purposes for existence. This is our first look and walkthrough of those apps.
Expand
Expanding
Close
If you’re someone living on the bleeding edge by running the Android M Developer Preview on your main device, you may be happy with today’s update to the Waze traffic and navigation app.
After many complaints in the Waze forums (like this thread) and other locations around the web about the app crashing on startup for users on Android M, version 3.9.5.0 released today seems to fix the issue. Before I downloaded this update the app would not work at all, and as soon as I installed the update it to function. One commenter on APKMirror indicates that this update fixed the app for them as well.
This update only seems to include bug fixes like this support for Android M – I haven’t been able to find any above the hood changes. Though if I do, I’ll update this post. The size of the update is 37.56MB, and can be downloaded from Google Play or as an APK from APKMirror (click here). If you’re running Android M there’s a good chance you know how to install an APK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tWsehRHHaw
You know what I haven’t once thought since purchasing my ASUS ZenWatch? “Man, I wish this thing had a software keyboard!” Nope, not even once. But someone clearly has, as the developers behind the 5-TILES keyboard for Android smartphones have brought their signature tile-based keyboard to Android Wear users in the form of a messaging app, called Wear 5-TILES.
Instagram has announced today that it is rolling out support for higher resolution 1080 x 1080 pixel images. This doubles the previous upload resolution of 640 x 640 pixels, and you’ll probably notice very soon that the photos in your stream are looking a bit crisper.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Microsoft today has introduced a new app for iOS and Android that makes it considerably easier for friends and family to make plans while on the go. Dubbed Tossup, the app was developed by the Microsoft Garage, which means it implores new ideas and thinking that the company hopes will catch on to the masses.
Not many apps have managed to hit 1 billion installs on the Play Store, but today another has been added to the list. Facebook Messenger became the 10th app to hit 1 billion installs early last month, Google Hangouts managed to hit the same milestone just a couple weeks ago, and now Google Chrome is following suit to become the 12th app to hit 1 billion.
Not many apps have reached this number, and third-party apps from Zuckerberg and Co. are the only outside of Google to do it. Only three, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp, have managed to see this many users. As you might expect, other popular Google-made apps like Google Maps and Gmail passed 1 billion a while ago.
(via Android Police)
Between Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the 100 other apps and services that vie for my attention in any given day (okay, maybe an exaggeration), it can sometimes feel very debilitating to try and keep up with everything happening in the world. Unless you read all day and train yourself to be a speed reader, how are you to see everything that’s happening in your areas of interest? Most of us just don’t have that kind of time in our lives to stay informed, work 8 hour days, and still maintain a healthy lifestyle. And as we’ve seen in cases like Internet providers’ attempting to prioritize their own services over those of companies like Netflix, being informed matters.
Fallout Shelter, the free-to-play mobile game inspired by the popular ‘Fallout’ franchise, is expected to be launched on Android next month, according to developer Bethesda’s Vice President of Marketing Peter Hines.
In a conversation with a user on Twitter asking about an expected launch date for the game, Hines responded that the game is “coming along nice. haven’t announced a date, but should be out next month. we’ll let you know when we have specifics.”
@kolos_kovacs coming along nice. haven't announced a date, but should be out next month. we'll let you know when we have specifics
— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) July 1, 2015
The game launched for iOS back at E3 last month with Bethesda at the time promising that an Android release was in the works, but didn’t offer much more information than that. The game hasn’t received the most glowing reviews, however, with many across the Internet saying it gets repetitive very fast and serves as not much more than an advertisement for Fallout 4, the next chapter in the Fallout game for desktop and consoles, which is slated for a November 10th launch.
After a major update just last week that saw Pushbullet on Android and several other platforms receive an overhauled design and rethinking of how its messaging works, the company has made a small update to its Android app based on community feedback. It’s available in Google Play or you can get the APK from APKMirror.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Update: The premium version is on sale today (July 2nd) for $1.49, or 50% off its regular price. Just press the Google Play icon from within the phone app to upgrade.
Have you ever found yourself standing in line at a coffee shop and thought to yourself, “Man, I really wish I could watch that video of the squirrel playing a tiny violin”? Me too! Fortunately for both of us, our prayers have been answered: Wear Video Tube will stream videos from your Android smartphone to your Wear watch.
Google’s My Maps product was launched all the way back in 2007 and still isn’t very well known, but it’s a really cool service for Apps customers and it’s receiving even more attention now with a quick-access button inside Google Drive.
Player FM released version 2.6.4 of its podcast player to Google Play today, bringing with it integration of the Subscribe on Android protocol. The protocol was created to “give Android listeners the same One Click subscription experience that iOS and iTunes users have.” Basically, once you have Player FM installed, any raw XML podcast feed URLs you click will launch to Player FM where you can then subscribe to the podcast to get new episodes automatically downloaded as they’re published. It’s basically like deeplinking but works with far more URLs than deeplinking traditionally can, and is less convenient than Android app intents.
Deeplinking is a way through which constellations of apps can become more interconnected by quickly and seamlessly moving users between one another when specific links are pressed. And while Android M is bringing with it improved app linking so links from anywhere, not just from within a developer’s own apps, can launch to an app without needing to open the intents menu, this won’t work for URLs that aren’t owned by the developer. Feed URLs for podcasts found from around the web won’t just seamlessly open to your favorite podcast app, but with an app that uses Subscribe on Android like Player FM, they can. Mostly, at least, as Feedburner podcast feeds don’t seem to work.
You can get Player FM on the Play Store for free.
Snapchat, the don’t-call-it-a-sexting-app picture and video communication app of youth ages 14-35, has received a major update today which will include a change in the mechanism for viewing content, as well as a new way to add friends. There’s also a fun—but less functional—change to Snapcodes, those QR codes that make it easy to add friends using just your camera…
BlueStacks, a free desktop Android emulator that lets users play any mobile game or app on the big screen with a mouse and keyboard, has mostly been limited to PC users until today. But Mac users are about to get access to the software that the company says already has around 90 million users on Windows.
Expand
Expanding
Close
Google announced today that it’s rolling out a ton of new themes for Gmail — the built-in feature that allows customization of your inbox with color palette options and background images — as well as new emoji.
Expand
Expanding
Close
WordPress, the popular content management system which powers approximately 19% of all websites on the Internet (including this one), has released version 4.2 of its Android app with some nice new changes.
Pushbullet has redesigned their app a bunch of times since the service launched, and now they’re pushing yet another big update. With the latest version of Pushbullet, things have been reorganized to be split between three distinctive categories: friends, me, and following….
We’ve completely reorganized our app, putting things where you expect them to be. Instead of a big chaotic list of messages, they’re now categorized based on where they came from. The most important category is Me, which are things you’ve shared between your own devices.
The company has also completely re-thought how messaging with friends works. Instead of a confusing list of all the pushes you’ve received, messaging friends looks a lot more like… well, messaging. You can tap any friend, see your messaging history with them, and quickly send a message or file.
This move toward the Pushbullet app being more similar to any other messaging client is odd to me, as it makes the app seem parallel with other —more popular — offerings such as Facebook Messages and Hangouts. But Pushbullet makes sure to note the difference here: “They’ll receive your message on whatever device they happen to be using, whether phone, tablet, or computer.”
The company’s Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera extensions have also been updated, along with the Pushbullet desktop client for Windows and the company’s web interface. The Windows app in particular has some nice features, including real Facebook-inspired chat-heads for messaging.
Head over to the Play Store to grab the Android client update for free.
R.I.P., Beats Music. With Apple Music – Apple’s new streaming service that takes its recently acquired Beats Music and mashes it with the company’s home-grown iTunes – having officially launched today, the Android app has received an update that kills off the ability to start a free trial. Above are pictures before and after the update. The first image is of Beats Music 1.2.5, released on April 21st, and the second is of Beats Music 1.2.6, released today.
In a first for Apple, and alongside a recently released application that makes it easy to switch from Android to iOS (ugh, I know), the company will be pushing out an Android version of Apple Music, expected sometime in the fall. And Apple Music for iOS includes a migration assistant that makes it super easy to transfer playlists and saved music from Beats Music over to the new service, so we expect that to be in the Android version, too. If you, however, aren’t a huge fan of Apple, maybe now is the time to give Google Play Music All Access a try?
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IzK9qtb8Gc]
If you’ve been following your favorite artists on Shazam, you can now find out what music they are checking out using the service. An update to the Android app due to roll out today lets you see which tracks they are identifying via Shazam.
Shazam says that the feature is available for hundreds of artists, including Alicia Keys, Coldplay, Enrique Iglesias, Pitbull, Shakira, Adam Lambert, Fifth Harmony, Clean Bandit, Maroon 5, Nick Jonas and Jason Derulo.
Don’t expect to catch any of them Shazamming anything terminally uncool, however: artists have the option of keeping individual searches private. The updated app hadn’t yet gone live at the time of writing, but check for it on the Play store later in the day.
Shazam finally made it to Android Wear last month.
Via Engadget
