Earlier this month, YouTube for Android was updated to version 6.0 with Material Design, new search filters and several other features. One enhancement in YouTube 6.0 that wasn’t mentioned following the update is newly added support for live chat on streaming videos (via Android Police). The feature is accessible by tapping or dragging open the Live Chat menu at the bottom of the app on live streaming videos. Expand Expanding Close
Plex, a popular app for streaming media from your personal computer or server to a smartphone, tablet or other device, has been updated (via Android Police) with support for playlists, improved usability of play queues, bigger art and a dismiss button for playback notifications, the ability to play unwatched TV shows and seasons by default, option to play episodes from On Deck continuously and more. Expand Expanding Close
Action Launcher has always been one of the better known launchers to hit the Play Store, and today, Android developer Chris Lacy has released an updated version of the app with a bunch of new features that takes everything that was already great about the app and brings it up to date for Android 5.0 Lollipop. But this update isn’t just an iterative Material Design update; it packs a bunch of great completely new features as well.
Back in October, Amazon updated its official Android app with hidden yet fully functional access to its own app store. Amazon then vaguely mentioned the new feature in a subsequent press release, perhaps hoping the move would go unnoticed. But it hasn’t taken long for Google to catch wind of what happened, and the search company clearly isn’t happy about the move. Expand Expanding Close
It’s been a long time coming, but the maker of the famed Minecraft has released its much-anticipated card-collecting game, Scrolls. It’s been about 18 months since the game first entered beta, but during that time Mojang has spent countless hours perfecting the card-based strategy game that intends to give players an experience that mashes both card trading and board games into one medieval-themed adventure.
Here are the game’s main features according to the app’s description:
A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE: Building your army is only half the battle. Develop strategies and take control of the battlefield. The best bits of card and board games, combined.
BUILD YOUR ARMY: We currently feature over 350 scrolls spread across 4 unique factions. You can mix and match them as you please.
PLAY SOLO, OR WITH FRIENDS: Scrolls includes single player challenges along with online competitive and casual play.
CHAT AND TRADE: Trade with other scrolldiers on the black market, or spend your hard-earned gold in our store. Chat with other players both in and out of battle. Please be nice.
CROSS PLATFORM: Develop your skills and scrolls library by playing on Tablet, PC, or Mac. Battle with others, no matter which platform they’re playing on.
JUDGEMENT MODE: Build a unique deck in Judgement mode, then see how it fares against other’s creations.
The game is available today on the Play Store to download for free, but freemium content is available in-game ranging in price from $4.99 to $19.99 per item—and unlocking the full version of the game is going to run you that $4.99 price tag. Additionally, the game is available for Mac and PC and you can try it out for free as long as you have a Mojang account. Anyone who participated in Alpha or Beta testing of the game, or purchased Scrolls at any point in the past, will get the full version for free.
Mojang has said that an iPad version is also on its way, but won’t be available until sometime in 2015.
We told you back in June that ultrasonic pairing would be coming to Chromecast, and today the technology has officially arrived. Without any WiFi connections involved at all, Google has now given the green light for guests to be able to connect to your Chromecast and cast what they please.
Forsythe did not directly confirm that he will be working on an Android app, although he cites experience building things like web apps and mobile apps in the past. Despite being one of the most highly-trafficked websites online, Reddit surprisingly still lacks a mobile-friendly website for smartphones and tablets. Expand Expanding Close
Google has slowly but surely been updating its apps to fit its own design guidelines, and even as late as yesterday updated the Hangouts application (and that one’s still not quite there). Today, both the Android Wear and Chromecast apps have been updated to sport the Material look and, while not many other drastic changes have come to either app, it’s nice to have a bit of consistency between Google’s first-party offerings.
The Android Wear app companion app was suitably updated today amidst the release of Android Wear 5.0.1 Lollipop, providing support for the new version of the operating system. But the new version, thankfully, packs a redesign that brings it more in line with Material. The Chromecast app also got an update today, and on top of the fact you can now use the screen casting feature on any Android phone running 4.2.2 or higher, it now sports Material as well.
Google Wallet was also updated today, with its main new feature mentioned on Google+ as being the fact you can now manage your gift cards and loyalty programs from just one section of the app. As you can see above, under the “Loyalty and gift cards” section, you now have three sub-sections: Active, Expired, and Featured. The app also got a slightly tweaked appearance, bringing the app closer in line with the Material Design guidelines.
DeviantArt is one of the largest creative hubs on the net, but until today, you were stuck with choosing between half a dozen third-party unofficial apps if you wanted to browse the site on your Android device. Now you can do so via DeviantArt’s brand new official app, and while it doesn’t come anywhere close to following the trendy Material Design scheme (because it didn’t want to), the app definitely gets the job done.
Facer, a popular Android Wear app that lets you create your own watch faces, has today been updated (via Phandroid) to support the official watch face API part of the newly-released 5.0 update to Google’s wearable OS. The new API, which this update takes advantage of, allows faces to act more like a native watch face and less like a hack, which is going to make them just a bit more functional, efficient, and easier to manage.
Google has today announced that a new feature called reactive prefetch has been rolled out to mobile search, making searches somewhere in the realm of 100 to 150 milliseconds faster—a notable improvement if you’re on a fast enough internet connection. Sadly, the feature is limited to those using the Chrome app for Android at the current time because, according to Ilya Grigorik, “it is the only browser that supports (a) dynamically inserted prefetch hints, and (b) reliably allows prefetch requests to persist across navigations.”
This is a powerful pattern and one that you can use to accelerate your site as well. The key insight is that we are not speculatively prefetching resources and do not incur unnecessary downloads. Instead, we wait for the user to click the link and tell us exactly where they are headed, and once we know that, we tell the browser which other resources it should fetch in parallel – aka, reactive prefetch!
How does the feature work? Unlike other prefetch methods, reactive prefetch will wait for the user to click a link so that Google knows exactly where they intend to go, at which point the search engine will tell the browser to fetch certain parts of the page in parallel—namely, resources that Google has determined are likely to slow page load times. This is possible due to Google search crawlers getting an idea, for every page on the web, what parts should be “hinted” at to prefetch reactively.
You may or may not notice the improvement, but it’s rolling out to mobile search for Chrome on Android today.
VLC (Video LAN Client) has long been one of the choice media players for Android users, but—while every release has been basically stable—the company hasn’t been in any rush to push the app out of beta and on to version 1.0. Today, that finally happened, and the update packs a bunch of other goodies including fixes for ARM V8 processors and Android 5.0 Lollipop.
According to the app’s Play Store listing, version 1.0 includes the following:
This release fixes ARMv8 processors, Android 5.0 crashes and minor improvements. The 0.9.x series is major release with hardware decoding and a new interface available in dark or white colors. It integrates DVD iso and menu support, an equalizer, playlist management, Widi screens support and updated SD cards detection. Hardware acceleration is now enabled by default on 4.3+ and has better subtitles support. Software decoding has been accelerated too.
As mentioned by Android Police, it doesn’t appear that the 1.0 release includes previously announced Chromecast support. The app, which has always been known for how many video and audio formats it can play, is basically the Android go-to solution if you have some kind of media that you aren’t sure how to get working. It’s available on the Play Store right now for free.
Google Glass may seem to be fading into obscurity, but—especially with recent rumors that it may soon be getting a reboot—I don’t think we should discredit the platform and assume it has been a failed experiment just yet. In fact, Google seems to be focusing on the workplace use cases of the device, as do many of its developers, and today we’ve learned that the people behind one of the most popular pieces of Glassware—LynxFit—are joining one of the “Glass at Work” certified partners: APX Labs.
TorrentFreak is reporting that Google has removed several Pirate Bay apps from the Play Store today after strong pressure from copyright holders. Google sent an email to a handful of developers, informing them that their apps were being removed from the Play Store. The email explains why the apps were removed, citing violation of the intellectual property portion of the Google Play Store Content Policy.
“REASON FOR REMOVAL: Violation of the intellectual property and impersonation or deceptive behavior provisions of the Content Policy. Please refer to the IP infringement and impersonation policy help article for more information.”
The apps removed include The Pirate Bay Proxy, The Pirate Bay Premium, The Pirate Bay Mirror, and PirateApp…
AirDroid is a well known Android app that has long allowed you to remote-control your Android phone from a Windows or Mac OS X machine. But with the countless updates that Apple brought to iOS this year and the continuity features that tie the iPhone and Mac OS together seamlessly, Android users were left with much to desire. The latest version of AirDroid makes an attempt at filling that hole in Android users’ hearts with its latest release, bringing tons of features that make using your phone from a desktop environment easier than ever.
Google’s Update Wednesday regiment is in full effect this afternoon as the company has rolled out updates to a handful of its Android apps. While many of the updates contain merely bug fixes, several are somewhat notable.
Google today released a new Android app called Device Assist that offers live tech support, troubleshooting, tips and more for Nexus, Google Play edition, and Android One devices. Expand Expanding Close
Cyanogen on Monday introduced its upcoming Themes app that will serve as a one-stop storefront for Cyanogen OS smartphone users to download themes that customize everything from fonts and animations to wallpapers and icons. The company also launched the initial beta release of Themes Studio for designers to publish and distribute themes. Expand Expanding Close
In addition to a major update to its OS X app, Evernote is also now rolling out an update to its Android client. The update brings a handful of new features, the most notable of which is the ability to scan business cards into the app. The process is incredibly simple and involves just taking a picture of a business card. The Evernote app will then auto-populate all of the appropriate contact fields.
Google, in its continued effort to support developers and users from all across the world, announced today that developers in China are now be able to list both free and paid apps on the Play Store. The company made the announcement via a post on the official Android Developer Blog, saying that the addition of China means that developers can now sign up to be merchants in more than 60 countries. Users in more than 130 countries can purchase apps those apps, as well.
As part of that continued effort, we’re excited to announce merchant support in China, enabling local developers to export and sell their apps to Google Play users in more than 130 countries. Chinese developers can now offer both free and paid applications through various monetization models, including in-app purchasing and subscriptions. For revenue generated on Google Play, developers will receive payment to their Chinese bank accounts via USD wire transfers.
Google has today announced that the Google Drive app within Hangouts has been discontinued, and is being replaced by the ability to share links to Drive files directly within the Hangouts chat window. Expand Expanding Close
The Wall Street Journal reports that WhatsApp has been updated with end-to-end encryption for messages sent and received between Android smartphones and tablets. The cross-platform messaging service claims it will be unable to help decrypt messages for law enforcement, a noteworthy move given increasing concerns about government surveillance and tracking over the past few years. Expand Expanding Close
Amazon has today updated its Android app to support Lollipop, but with the update comes a very nice surprise. With the newest version of the app, you can use your Android Wear device to make search for products, make purchases, and save things to your Wish List.
The app will work for anyone who’s on Android 4.3 or later and also has an Android Wear device—all you have to do is say “Start Amazon.” To get the Android Wear counterpart, all you have to do is update the Amazon app. As mentioned, today’s update also packs Android 5.0 Lollipop support and the usual bug fixes.
Here’s the full changelog:
* Includes the Amazon app for Android Wear. Customers with Android 4.3 and above in the US with an Android Wear watch can use their voice to search, buy and save shopping ideas to their Wish List. Just say “Start Amazon” from your Wear watch.
