Because of the way Android is laid out, you automatically lose a portion of the top and bottom of your screen thanks to the status and navigation bars. The thing is, you don't always need the navigation buttons. By hiding them, you can enjoy more of your Galaxy S10's big, beautiful display.
If you updated your iPhone to iOS 12.2, you'll notice in the Apple News app that there are no longer "Love" and "Dislike" buttons inside stories. Why did Apple remove them? And will they make a comeback?
The camera punch hole on the S10 has gotten our creative juices flowing more than any notch ever could. First, we saw wallpapers that served to camouflage the cutout or even accentuate it. Now, if you want to go the opposite direction and highlight your S10's camera hole, there's an app that turns it into a circular battery meter.
You see them all over your Instagram Stories feed — post after post, video after video of dramatic, silly, or otherwise fun zooms. Your friends are showing off their lives through the lens of a Hollywood blockbuster, and you can do the same. Luckily, it's quite easy to accomplish, whether you're running iOS or Android.
When you think of companies that represent pillars like "privacy" or "security," Facebook is pretty far from the top of that list. However, the social media empire is making strides — small strides — to win trust with how it handles your user data. One of those efforts involves a way to prevent Facebook from tracking your iPhone or Android phone's location when you're not using the app.
Your Instagram feed is jam-packed with interesting and lively photos, videos, and stories that largely offset the iOS app's comparatively bland user interface. If the interface's dull colors have always bothered you, you can splash on some much-needed color to better reflect your personality and tastes.
On Monday, Feb. 4, Apple released the second developer beta for iOS 12.2. The update features bug fixes to users running iOS 12.2 beta 1, as well as four new Animoji for Face ID devices. Developers are strongly encouraged to update their iPhones. It's unclear at this time whether the update includes a fix for the Group FaceTime bug discovered last week.
I love finding new artists on Spotify to listen to but hate when musicians I don't like keep popping up in recommended playlists and radio stations. For the longest time, there was nothing you could do about it, but now, Spotify lets you block specific bands and singers from ever playing again.
If you're an Apple fan, AirPods are the must-have wireless headphones to own. They know when they're in your ears, will pause music when one is taken out, and when you pair them with your iPhone they'll already work on your Mac, iPad, and iPod touch using the same Apple ID. However, whenever you use them on any other device, you have to manually reconnect them later to your iPhone.
Bitmoji are personalized emoji that look like you and can be used to make funny memes or snappy replies. Normally, you have to find one of these reaction emojis in the Bitmoji app, then use Android's share menu to send it to the app where you ultimately want to post it, but there's a much better way.
These days, cellular connections can be just as fast — if not faster — than traditional internet providers. That, coupled with the prevalence of unlimited data plans, means less worrying about hopping on a Wi-Fi network to download something. However, try to install an app or update over 150 MB, and your iPhone will insist you switch to Wi-Fi. We don't think this is very fair, so here's a way out.
With the rise of OLED displays, Android users have been begging Google for a true system-wide dark mode for years. While a system-wide solution is still somewhat unlikely, Google has given in by providing a dark mode for certain apps, including Contacts.
The quality and length of your sleep will almost always dictate how the rest of your day unfolds. Sleeping fewer hours increases your chances of spending the day in a tired and cranky state, while having a restful night's sleep contributes greatly to being alert and productive. Luckily, if you want to track your sleep patterns to figure out how you can improve your circadian rhythm, Samsung Health has you covered.
You really can't go wrong with Samsung Health when it comes to staying on top of fitness-related data. Its features help you keep track of workouts, track calorie and nutrition intake, and monitor your heart rate, just to name a few. And if you start exhibiting symptoms you've never had before, you can even use the app to find out more about what's wrong with you.
In 2017, Google introduced a new feature called Fast Pair. This made discovering and pairing Bluetooth devices completely stress-free, as it eliminated the need to fumble through settings. Google has now made it even easier, so Fast Pair is a must-have feature for your next headphones.
Amazon Prime Video is undoubtedly one of the best services out there for streaming and downloading movies and TV shows to your iPhone. If you try to buy or rent a movie or show in any of Amazon's iOS apps, however, you'll notice that there's no apparent way to do so. No buttons, no links, nada. What gives, and how can you buy and rent content from Amazon on your iOS device?
Thanks to leaks that let us try out the latest Android Pie beta on the Galaxy S9, we already have a good idea of what the update has in store for Samsung's flagships moving forward. As we've come to expect, Android 9.0 brings a slew of notable updates, such as the addition of a system-wide dark theme and an all-new TouchWiz replacement called "One UI."
Apple released the first major iOS 12 update Tuesday, Oct. 30, just hours after the company's iPad and Mac presentation. While iOS 12.1 is the first official update to hit iPhones since iOS 12.0.1, beta testers had enjoyed an exclusive first-hand look at all the new features the latest OS has to offer. So what's new in iOS 12.1?
Let's say you want to download an Instagram video to your iPhone. What do you do? While Instagram doesn't offer an official solution, there are backchannel methods that exist to get the job done. However, if you want native support for downloading Instagram videos directly to your Photos app, you can start by updating your iPhone to iOS 12 and installing Shortcuts.
While they don't do augmented reality just yet, the latest styles of Snapchat's Spectacles 2 camera glasses serve as a peek into the future of how mainstream AR wearables may look.
OnePlus pulled out almost all the stops with their latest flagship, but there are a few areas where the phone falls just short of perfect. The single bottom-firing speaker leaves a lot to be desired, for instance, but thanks to the awesome development community for the OnePlus 6, you can already give your phone true stereo speakers with a software mod.
Thanks to cloud storage's increasing accessibility, permanently losing photos is becoming less and less common. Still, if you accidentally delete a picture from your smartphone without first making a backup of some sort, that data is pretty much toast — unless we're talking about photos from WhatsApp.
If you cover a particular area in tech long enough, you develop certain pet peeves, and one of mine happens to be devices that attempt to keep us wed to the Google Glass style of augmented reality. And while I remain mostly uninterested in such devices, one of these products recently earned my admiration and might work for you, too, under the right circumstances. It's called the Golden-i Infinity.
Let's say you wake up in the middle of the night and check your phone to see the time. As soon as you do, you're greeted by a wall of notifications on your lock screen. You just wanted to know how much longer you could sleep, but now your mind's racing after seeing all of the messages you need to deal with. Thankfully, iOS 12's new Bedtime Mode has a solution for this problem.
While privacy and security are cornerstones of Apple's ecosystem, your iPhone isn't bulletproof. Creating a strong passcode will protect you from most threats, but there exist tools that can break through even the toughest passcodes via the Lightning port. Luckily, Apple has implemented a new security feature to disable your Lightning port and keep your data safe and secure.
Soon, you'll be able to buy your OnePlus 6, but you can experience some of its apps today thanks to XDA user erayrafet, who ripped a few OxygenOS apps like Weather and this Gallery app. While Google Photos is a great service, this Gallery app should be your go-to app for locally-stored photos.
Auto rotation is generally useful, but it gets annoying when you trigger it accidentally. In past Android versions, you could lock rotation into portrait mode as a workaround, but you'd have to disable this every time you wanted to put your phone in landscape mode. Luckily, Android Pie has a great fix for this.
Marvel's Future Fight gave gamers the ability to brawl through near-countless levels as their favorite superhero. Not to be outdone, DC has soft launched DC Unchained in select Southeast Asian countries in preparation of a worldwide debut. If you're willing to put in a little work, however, you can try this game anywhere right now.
When traveling or sightseeing, you may come across a landmark you can't quite identify and want to know what exactly it is and the history behind it. It could be a building, waterfall ... anything. If there are no signs around or they're in a different language, you'll have no idea what you're looking at. Fortunately, Google Photos can be your personal tour guide with the power of Google Lens.
Android Pie is bringing in plenty of changes, but the headlining feature is a set of navigation gestures like the iPhone X uses. With Android 9.0, you can now navigate through your phone using a total of seven new swipe gestures.
While Instagram users can attach links to images, they can only do so in stories, and only if they meet the special requirements that most users cannot obtain. Snapchat, on the other hand, lets anyone add a link, and it can be done in regular snaps and in your story. This feature has only been around since July 2017, so you may have missed it and not even realized it was a possibility.
Samsung's Galaxy S9 was recently announced with features like AR Emoji and Dual Aperture, but great functionality lives underneath them — such as the ability to have your home screen auto-rotate to landscape mode. It's a nice feature, but with a little work, you can already do this on any Android phone.
In one of the worst-kept secrets of the upcoming Mobile World Congress, Google has officially released ARCore on the Play Store for owners of the latest flagship Android smartphones.
One of the more exciting features in Android Oreo is the Autofill API. With this tool, third-party password managers can autofill login information into other apps. LastPass added this feature to their beta app a while back, but now, Autofill is finally available in the official stable version of LastPass.
When you accidentally close out of an important tab on your iPhone, Safari's "Recently Closed Tabs" list really comes in handy. However, when it comes time to clear the list, things get a bit complicated. There's no "Delete" or "Erase" button on this page, but don't let that fool you — there are three easy ways to clear your recently closed tabs list.
The app that started as simply a photo-sharing social media platform has expanded to encompass so much more than that. Between live videos, stories, chat, and animated stickers, Instagram is more than the sum of its pictures. Now, there's a new feature to add to that list for Android and iOS — video and audio calls.
A while back, we told you about NoChromo, a no-root ad-blocking browser based on Google Chrome's open source code base, Chromium. That browser was wildly successful, as it offered an identical interface to regular Chrome, but without any ads. Sadly, the developer abandoned NoChromo, but a new ad-blocking Chromium port called Bromite has been released to fill its void.
If you work with multiple email addresses, you need an app that can organize and declutter your day-to-day messages. Outlook is a great choice, but if you only have one account attached, it somewhat defeats the purpose. Lucky for you, adding additional email accounts is both quick and simple.
With all the hype surrounding meteoric rise of Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin (LTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Bitcoin Cash (BCH), it's easy to overlook the fact that you can send and receive cryptocurrencies as a form of payment. And thanks to Coinbase, sending and receiving digital coins couldn't be any easier.
Coinbase sets itself apart from other wallet apps by making cryptocurrency transactions incredibly convenient. You can easily withdraw cash from the app and deposit it into your bank account within days — and now, if you want to cut the time from days to mere minutes, Coinbase has you covered as well.
