Tim Cook claimed 85% of new iPhone buyers are switchers from Android back in 2015. Now, after financial analysts noted a drop in the company's stock prices, Apple has unleashed a series of ad campaigns directly targeting the users it needs to win over. That's you, Android lovers.
The latest iteration of the gaming classic, The Sims, has arrived as a soft launch for both iOS and Android in Brazil. Aptly named The Sims Mobile, this free-to-play game seems to be very faithful to the PC-based version that won it so much acclaim. There are plenty of things to do in The Sims Mobile besides the usual home and character customization, and the game also lets you interact with real life friends to fully experience its virtual world together. Maintaining relationships, whether r...
Firefox Focus has been out for iOS for a while now, so it's about time Mozilla began porting the app over to Android. It's an amazingly private browser that protects you from trackers and ads when you're surfing the web. It blocks a wide range of online trackers, erases your browsing history, hides passwords, and deletes cookies. This essentially means ads won't be able to follow you around, in the sense that you won't see ads related to your last ten searches on Google.
Google's working on a new mobile operating system called Fuchsia, and while we don't know much about how they intend to use it, we're now getting a glimpse at what the main interface will look like.
Everyone loves emojis, but some folks aren't quite happy with the way the little yellow guys look on their particular phone. In order to replace them, however, your device needs to be rooted, and you'll usually need to perform some complicated procedure that ends up making your phone hard to update since it modified a ton of files on your system partition.
Everyone feels a little safer with Android's security updates, which are welcome and often necessary protective measures. But what happens when the update that's supposed to safeguard your phone actually ends up wreaking havoc with its security system?
The first developer preview of Android Oreo 8.0 was only out for a couple of days before Chainfire created a new root method for it. For the time being, only the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P are supported by this first SuperSU ZIP, as the Pixel's dual-partition layout has created some hurdles, though Chainfire is surely working on overcoming those at some point soon.
Andy Rubin, the cofounder of Android, departed Google in 2014 to go on and start his own smartphone company, Essential. Rubin first gave us a clue at what he would be working on when he announced in January that he wanted Essential to create a premium smartphone with a bezel-less edge-to-edge display.
Android O has finally arrived—well, it's technically a beta version, but that isn't stopping Android enthusiasts from going crazy about it. The first Developer Preview was released earlier today and is available right now to install on Nexus and Pixel devices. While Android O doesn't have an official name or Android number yet (we're betting on "Android Oreo"), Google has released a feature list and a blog post explaining almost all of the new changes and features.
Considering that Google makes Android, it's rather strange that the operating system doesn't have a baked-in solution for doing a reverse image search. Sure, you can long-press pictures in Chrome to search for other instances of a photo, but it's not possible with pictures you find in other apps, or photos you've downloaded to your phone.
Everyone loves sharing pictures and quick video clips with Snapchat, but while the service itself is tons of fun, the Android app is one of the worst on the market. For one, Snapchat takes terrible photos even on high-end Android phones. And to make matters worse, the app is a notorious data-sucking battery drainer.
Anyone who's ever flashed factory images to manually update an Android phone knows how tedious the process can be. Unlocking the bootloader and flashing Android firmware requires the use of ADB and Fastboot—but, like getting a whole pizza pie when all you wanted was a slice, users in the past had to download the entire Android Studio development package or SDK in order to get the two utilities.
Android 7.0 Nougat brought a lot of multitasking improvements along with it, but the most notable addition is a unified multi-window mode (which shines bright in Google's Pixel phones). This means that every Android device can now use the same split-screen interface, and the days of software fragmentation caused by differing multi-window implementations by LG and Samsung are now over.
If you need to do some hardcore multitasking on your Windows PC, a second monitor can go a long way towards getting things done. If you opt to "extend" your Windows desktop across a dual monitor setup, it's as if you have two computers side by side, with each display getting its own set of windows and programs that can be open simultaneously.
It's now common knowledge that the blue light emitted by phone screens makes it harder to get a good night's sleep. Apple's Night Shift in iOS and its steamrolled predecessor, f.lux (still available for desktop computers), are attempts to combat these harmful effects by limiting the amount of blue light from the screen at certain times of day (nighttime, say). For Android users who installed the Developer Preview build of Android 7.0 Nougat, the included "Night Mode" feature was all set to do...
Creative thoughts are fleeting, so when an idea strikes, you have to jot it down as quickly as possible or risk forgetting it altogether. Let's say you randomly think of a perfect tweet while you're using your phone. You exit whatever app you were using, head to the home screen, dig through your app drawer, open Twitter—and by the time you make it to the "What's happening?" screen, you totally forgot what you were going to say.
It seems that fans of the Android open-source operating system are a bit peeved by some of the choices Google has made regarding the new #MadeByGoogle Pixel phones. And with good reason. The new phones are expensive, the Nexus line is dead, and some Redditors are speculating on whether or not the Pixel bootloaders may not be unlockable at all.
Android Nougat has a new API that lets apps create their own custom Quick Settings tiles. A similar feature was buried in Android Marshmallow, but that required a hacky workaround, and most manufacturers disabled it in their custom versions of Android 6.0. But since this is an official API now, all phones that run Android 7.0 and higher should be able to use custom Quick Settings tiles going forward.
During the lead up to Samsung's Note7's release, rumors swirled about a leaked "Grace UX" interface replacing Samsung's maligned TouchWiz Android skin. In the end, this seems to have been nothing more than an internal code name that Samsung was using to test a few new icons and a slightly-redesigned Settings menu, because not much else has really changed.
Smartphone manufacturers do their best to keep you tied down to their ecosystem, but the reality is that there's not much keeping you from switching. Transfer some files, install a few apps here and there, and all of a sudden, you're knee-deep in a new operating system.
Okay, so that headline definitely got your attention, but what the hell do cats have to do with Android Nougat? Well, apparently, Google's on a far-out trip reminiscent of the post-India Beatles era, because this is actually a thing.
When Google issues an Android update, the changes are usually all over the place—fixing issues, adding functionality, playing catch-up with the latest thing Apple added to iOS. It's how the smartphone wars have evolved, where the two competing operating systems continually match and one-up each other.
Android clearly wasn't made with bilingual users in mind. When you set a default system locale, every app on your phone uses that region's language—and there's no granular control here. This really becomes an issue if you use social media or news apps that are primarily in a different language, because apps are generally written in the developer's native tongue, then poorly translated to all other languages.
The skinned versions of Android that come with Samsung, LG, and HTC phones usually have a feature that displays a small icon in your status bar when you connect a pair of headphones. It lets you know that your earbuds are plugged in or connected properly, and offers assurance that your music won't be blaring out of the loudspeaker—but mostly, it's just a nice little touch.
Prior to this year's WWDC, there were lots of rumors that Apple might finally be making a version of iMessage for Android. While that never came to fruition, a few big updates to a very useful app have now ensured that we can seamlessly send and receive Android texts in Apple Messages on our Macs.
If you're a fan of sleek, powerful computers and highly-customizable smartphones, then you probably own a Mac and an Android device. But the downside to this glorious hardware pairing is that it can be hard to get the software on the two devices to play nice together.
A developer from a firm named Tendigi came up with a way to run Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 on an iPhone 6 Plus, and it's pretty awesome. The hack is the brainchild of Nick Lee, who had previously installed Windows 95 on an Apple Watch, and you can see it in action below.
Depending on your device, Android's power (aka restart) menu can range from utilitarian and boring to almost completely useless. Some devices don't even allow you to reboot, let alone reboot to recovery mode or Fastboot, and for such a centralized menu, the glaring lack of Material Design seems like a serious oversight.
Android 6.0 introduced a new feature called Direct Share that allows apps to pin a more specific set of targets to Android's share menu. You've probably seen it already—messaging apps will allow you to share a file directly to a specific contact instead of just to the main app, and there are several other implementations like this.
There are so many apps out there that it can be hard to decide which ones you should keep on your phone, especially if you're working with limited storage capacity. Sure, you can install and uninstall apps depending on when you need them, but that can be a little tedious.
One of Android's biggest strengths is its ability to interact with other operating systems. When you plug your phone into your Windows PC, you instantly see all of the files it holds—and all it takes is a simple syncing app to do the same with Mac. To top that off, apps like Pushbullet and Join bridge the gap even further by allowing you to share links, files, and messages between all of your devices.
If you tend to go over your data allotment each month, or are constantly afraid you will, Verizon Wireless is giving you chance to relax a little bit with up to 2 GB free data for two months.
As Android's official app provider, the Google Play Store is packed with thousands of useful programs. But Google's terms of service is extremely restrictive, which means that countless apps simply don't qualify to be hosted on the Google Play Store.
Android TV devices have had those beautiful Chromecast background images as their screensaver for quite a while now. Envious of this feature, Apple copied the idea for a similarly-styled screensaver in their newest Apple TV, but with one big twist—they used videos instead of still photos.
Smartphones have become such a big part of our lives these days that they're now closely associated with our personal identities. No longer is it Ford versus Chevy, rock versus rap, or PC versus Mac—now, you're either an Android person or an iOS person.
Android's main UI is looking so good these days that you hardly ever see developers spend time creating themes anymore. But even with the beauty of Material Design working in our favor now, there's always room for improvement, right?
The Google Cast feature that serves as the primary interface for the Chromecast and comes bundled with Android TV devices like the Nexus Player is a marvel of modern technology. But as these things go, troubleshooting issues can be difficult with something so groundbreaking, especially when you consider that there are two parts to the equation—the casting device (your phone, tablet, or computer) and the receiver.
If you've ever rooted an Android device in the past or installed a custom recovery, you're surely familiar with the term "unlocked bootloader." But if all of this sounds like gibberish to you, some major changes in Android have made it to where you should definitely get familiar with the concepts.
Considering that nearly half a million brand new apps were published to the Google Play Store in 2015, you can definitely call it a banner year for Android development. In fact, it's getting to the point where we're a bit spoiled as end users, since we've grown to expect something new and exciting practically every week.
Starting a few months back, you might have noticed that some text messages you received from certain friends or family members had blank or missing characters. This was because Apple included all of the new Unicode 8.0 emojis in an update to their iPhones, but Android devices didn't have some of these just yet, so they weren't capable of displaying them.
