One of the more competitive aspects to chat apps these days is customizability. It seems every messenger wants to offer the largest number of options for users to make the app feel like a truly personal experience. Telegram is no stranger to this customizability, offering tools where you can select backgrounds and chat bubble colors.
WhatsApp stickers can make your chat more fun. The stickers that come with WhatsApp are fine, but they're standard and accessible to everyone. What if you wanted to show off unique stickers that your friends haven't seen? To take things to the next level, you can create your own WhatsApp Stickers.
For quite some time, popular messaging apps such WhatsApp and Skype have let you set a profile picture along with a display name to make you more instantly identifiable to loved ones and colleagues. Apple has finally caught up with this fad in iOS 13. That means you can set a custom name and profile image within iMessage so others can quickly view who's messaging them at a glance.
Featured on MTV's Catfish TV series, in season 7, episode 8, Grabify is a tracking link generator that makes it easy to catch an online catfish in a lie. With the ability to identify the IP address, location, make, and model of any device that opens on a cleverly disguised tracking link, Grabify can even identify information leaked from behind a VPN.
For some reason, the Slack app on Android and iOS is a little less customizable than Slack on other platforms, so you can't adjust the sidebar theme to different colors directly inside the app. But that doesn't mean you can't customize the look of your mobile app at all. It's just a little less convenient.
With the recent launch of the OnePlus 6T, the company continues to impress us with some of the best phones when it comes to the rooting and modding. OnePlus has made it easy enough to get up and running with the rooting process as fast as possible. The OnePlus devices follow the same core principles Google uses for their Pixels, which is excellent news for both the user and the development side of things.
Haptic feedback and vibration of our smartphones have come a long way in recent years. These features are much more premium now than they once were, but most users are still unable to adjust the intensity for notifications or phone calls. Most higher-end devices make less noise on surfaces than in the past, but adjusting these values can still come in handy even today.
Perhaps you've thought about rooting your OnePlus 5, but thought again when you heard SafetyNet would prevent you from using apps like Google Pay, Pokémon GO, or Netflix. Those are valid struggles when you root using traditional methods. There are no such worries when using Magisk, as it masks the fact that your device has been modified.
For modders, there are few tools more important than TWRP. TeamWin's custom recovery makes flashing mods like Magisk, Xposed, and custom ROMs incredibly easy, and it lets you root your phone at the press of a button. On top of that, it can make complete backups of your phone in case you mess up. That's why, for Essential users, this should be the first mod you add.
When it comes to modding Android, there's no better tool than Team Win's TWRP custom recovery. You can use it to root your phone, flash mods like Magisk or Xposed, and even replace the entire operating system with a custom ROM like LineageOS — honestly, there's not much this utility can't do.
When it's all said and done, it doesn't really matter who did it first — the more important question is who did it best. Still, it's nice to know who's really responsible for groundbreaking innovations in the smartphone space.
If you recently received your new Galaxy S9 or S9+, you're probably excited to try out all of the features the flagship offers. While many of the features are self-explanatory and easy to access, there are a handful of very useful items that Samsung has buried in the settings menu. Enabling these hidden features will help you unlock the true power of your new device.
There are a couple swipe gestures in ProtonMail for Android and iOS that let you swipe right on an email to mark it as spam or swipe left to trash it. If you don't get a lot of spam or don't delete a lot of messages, it's easy enough to changes these gestures to perform another action.
Google's launchers are some of the most polished home screen apps out there, but they lack the ability to customize. With the old Google Now Launcher, we had Xposed GEL Settings to add options for tweaking the layout, but that project was abandoned when the Pixel Launcher came out. Now, a new root mod will give us some key customization settings for Google's latest launcher.
Root, TWRP, Xposed, Magisk, custom ROMs — before you can have any of these, the first thing you should do is unlock your bootloader. Thankfully, the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL are some of the most modder-friendly phones out there, so you only need to send a single fastboot command to unlock the bootloader.
The new and improved Side button, as well as a plethora of new swipe gestures, are responsible for picking up the slack left by the missing Home button on the iPhone X. If you're really missing that Home button, however, Apple's built-in AssistiveTouch tool can help you out by adding a virtual Home button on your iPhone X's screen.
Hak5's products get a lot of attention. Popping up in popular shows like Mr. Robot, their hacking tools are bold proof of concepts with space built into the design for the community to add their own tweaks and modifications. On Friday, Oct. 27, Null Byte attended the Hak5 release event in San Francisco to check out their latest devices, including the new Packet Squirrel.
If you need a tiny, flexible attack platform for raining down human-interface-device (HID) attacks on unattended computers, the USB Rubber Ducky is the most popular tool for the job. By loading the Ducky with custom firmware, you can design new attacks to be effective against even air-gapped computers without internet access. Today, you'll learn to write a payload to make "involuntary backups" through copying a targeted folder to the Ducky's USB mass storage.
The Raspberry Pi loads an operating system from whatever SD card you insert, allowing you to keep different operating systems on separate SD cards depending on which OS you wish to run. A tool called BerryBoot cuts down on the number of SD cards needed by providing the ability to boot multiple operating systems from a single SD card, similar to Boot Camp for Mac computers.
Now that Android Nougat lets you add your own custom Quick Settings tiles, your pull-down menu is probably getting a lot more crowded than it used to be, with all sorts of new and useful toggles. But the trouble is, you can only add up to nine entries before your Quick Settings tiles spill over into a second pane that you have to access by swiping, and that's not exactly "quick."
When it comes to modding an Android device, a custom kernel can take you farther than almost anything else. Most offer the ability to overclock your processor for performance gains, change your CPU governor, or even under-volt to increase battery life, among other features.
Whether you made the switch from iOS, or you came from a different Android device, there's a lot to learn about your new Galaxy device. Samsung does things a bit differently, and thanks to their TouchWiz interface, there are tons of added features to take advantage of—though some folks might find these extras to be a bit too much.
Welcome back, my neophyte hackers! Metasploit is such a powerful tool that I can only scratch the surface of its capabilities here. As it has developed over the years, it is now possible to use Metasploit for nearly everything from recon to post exploitation to covering your tracks. Given its versatility, every aspiring hacker should have at least a tentative grasp of Metasploit.
With over 10,000 possible combinations, a four-digit passcode may seem secure, but it's fairly easy for someone to crack your code—no matter how clever you think it is. Luckily, there are many other options for securing your iPhone's lock screen—especially if your running iOS 9.
Whether you're just getting your first Android, or are already on your fifth annual cycle of picking up the latest flagship, there is always the question of what to do after booting up your device for the first time.
KNOX is a major pain for Samsung owners who like to modify their devices. Its combination of hardware and software security measures make things rather difficult when you're trying to modify system-level files and functions without voiding your warranty.
Video: . Project Overview
Without a comprehensive root method for all Android phones and tablets, a device-specific approach is needed. And since we always cover new rooting methods for all the popular phones here at Gadget Hacks, we've built this always-updated guide to rooting many mainstream Android devices.
If you've ever owned an HTC device or anything in the Nexus line, odds are, you have typed the word "fastboot" into your command line at one time or another. That said, odds are, you have only just barely scratched the surface of what this handy little Android tool can do. Let's take a deeper look.
Because of Android's massive array of supported smartphones that carry vastly different display sizes and resolutions, the operating system uses a value known as DPI to determine the size of icons and visual assets that will best suit a given screen.
Transition animations are an essential element of any mobile operating system. They give the user a sense of what's happening on the screen, where the apps are coming from, and where they're going.
The beauty of having a Google Play Edition HTC One is the ability to get as close to stock Android as possible while still getting some extra non-Google, proprietary HTC features. The newest version of Android, 4.4.3, has just hit the Nexus and Google Play Edition line of phones, but if you are rooted with a custom recovery, you will not be able to apply the OTA.
Probably one of the most sought after features of the LG G2 is its "Knock Knock" capabilities. Rather than dealing with that pesky power button, you simply double-tap portions of the screen to either sleep or wake your device.
You've unlocked your bootloader and rooted your HTC One running KitKat, but there's still one lingering aspect of security you've yet to rid yourself of—S-On—the extra security measure HTC implemented into Sense.
It seems nowadays the word "easy" has taken on an alternate meaning. When I see "easy," I expect a quick and painless process, but when it comes to flashing or installing a custom ROM, easy means anything but.
For new Android users, rooting an Android phone can often be an intimidating process, especially since there are so many different ways to gain root access, depending on your model and firmware version.
If you've seen our guide on the 18 coolest features in iOS 7, you know that there's a lot to like about Apple's new mobile OS, but there's also a laundry list of grievances to go with it. One that bugs me is the lack of Home screen customization, something that has always driven me to jailbreak in the past.
Xposed, by XDA developer rovo89, is a framework for your Samsung Galaxy S4 (or other Android device) that lets you add tweaks and customizations to your ROM (either stock or custom) without any real hassle.
Like many other smartphones, the HTC One has a few capacitive keys on the bottom of the device, but that's the problem. It only has a few keys, meaning two, which are the Back and Home keys.
Customizing isn't all rooting and ROMs—there are plenty of ways to customize your Samsung Galaxy Note 2 or other Android device without gaining superuser access. One of the easiest ways is to install an Android launcher, sometimes called a home launcher, that matches your style.
