Here's another workday distraction for all you social media lovers out there: Pasted, launching out of beta today on iOS, is a simple collage and photo editing app mixing iconic '90s imagery with a love of the The Shins.
Blizzard's Hearthstone was a rousing success with more than 10 million downloads on the Google Play Store. Not taking things lying down, Bethesda, the creator of The Elder Scrolls, has come up with a card game based off its popular fantasy franchise. The Elder Scrolls: Legends is now out in the wild, though, officially only available for select Android tablets. But with a little creativity, there's a way to game the system and play Legends on any Android device. The Elder Scrolls: Legends is ...
Pinterest, a worldwide catalog of ideas shared by over 175 million users every month, is dominated by Android users, who are now the app's fastest growing group. Pinterest has since taken notice, and has started to incorporate handy home screen shortcuts for users with Android 7.1 or higher.
As you may have heard by now, YouTube has launched its own live streaming TV bundle available for users in the select markets of New York, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Chicago, and Philadelphia. A subscription to the new streaming YouTube TV bundle costs $35 a month, but the service is drawing in users by offering a free 30-day trial.
No one is safe anymore, it seems. Google's Project Zero has just uncovered how easy it is for attackers to target your phone's Wi-Fi chip, which is essentially a mini processor for Wi-Fi that detects and processes networks.
Great news, zombie killers! Zombie Gunship's long overdue sequel, Zombie Gunship Survival, has finally arrived for iOS and Android devices as a soft launch available for download in the Philippines—which means that with a little tinkering, you can play the new game in any country.
Apple's music streaming service just got a major update on Android devices. The Spotify competitor has implemented some changes for users on non-Apple phones that have been available to iOS devices for some time now. Nevertheless, Apple Music users on Android should welcome these updates.
Android lovers out there might be sad to hear that a high-end version of the Samsung Galaxy S8+ with 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage won't be released in the US, but rather, in China.
Lyft is experimenting with commuter ride sharing by debuting a new "Shuttle" option, which offers pickups and drop-offs along select routes, much like a metro bus would do. The company is trying out the new option in San Francisco and Chicago, but if all goes well, we might all be ordering a pickup soon through Lyft's new Line ride share option.
Oh, Waze—you know, that Google-owned traffic navigation app that tempts drivers into stopping at local food joints like Dunkin' Donuts and Taco Bell? Well, now you can even order a large iced coffee through the app before you even arrive at a fast food hotspot.
Facebook Messenger has now incorporated a live location sharing feature, one week after Google Maps revealed its own real-time location tool. On Monday, the social media giant announced the new feature, which will allow users to share their live whereabouts with friends at the press of a button.
Earlier last week, there were a number of fake five-star WhatsApp reviews to be found on the Google Play Store. Now, Gmail, Chrome, Messenger, and Firefox are all the latest victims to be saturated in five-star spam that wrongly refers to the word "game" in reference to non-game apps.
Based in the DC Universe, Injustice: Gods Among Us was a runaway success on the iOS App Store, generating enough downloads to rival its console-based iteration in terms of popularity. But now, the sequel to this long-running game, Injustice 2, is finally out in the wild, as it was soft-launched in the Philippines this past February.
Dynasty Warriors has finally been unleashed on the world of mobile gaming. The latest installment in the popular series is called Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed, and it sends you rampaging through armies using a variety of devastating attacks, all while collecting and upgrading over 80 unique characters from the Dynasty Warriors series. Each offer their own unique abilities, which lets you create the ideal team to take on the seemingly endless hordes coming your way with cold, cruel efficiency.
T-Mobile just unveiled two new services—Scam ID and Scam Block—which specifically target those pestering robo-calls that reach out to 2.4 million Americans every month.
During the last few months, WhatsApp's Google Play Store ratings have been tanking—all the way down to an average of 3.4 stars from the instant messenger's usual average of 4.1. Within the last week, though, WhatsApp has received thousands of seemingly fake 5-star reviews that have bumped up the company's overall average to a 4.4.
Google Maps now allows users to share their location in real time and update their friends and family on their location and estimated time of arrival when making a trip.
Instagram enthusiasts will be pleased to know that there is finally a way to post your Live Photos on the service.
A new app called Roadie now makes life a little easier by connecting users to people who can transport their stuff. The app allows users to transport anything from dogs to getting rid of your ex's things. Furthermore, anyone can register as a sender, or become a driver to make an extra buck. The app is very easy to use: simply download (the app is available on both iOS and Android) and register using an email address or with Facebook. Using the profile you've created, users then select whethe...
Thanks to Google's latest update to their Motion Still app, iPhone users can now pick a new frame for Live Photos. The app fixes everything annoying about Apple's Live Photos, and this is just another great feature to add to Motion Still's impressive features list.
In February, the popular Facebook-owned WhatsApp Messenger service jumped on the "stories" bandwagon and replaced their in-app, text-based "About Me" status (you know, those lovely little messages where you can say "Sleeping" or "Not Sleeping" under the tiny nub of your profile picture). Taking its place was a clone of Snapchat's Stories feature, continuing the social media giant's recent trend of shamelessly copying Snapchat.
Google Assistant has introduced tappable shortcuts on the Google app for Android, iOS, and Google.com this week.
Google's personal messaging service Allo could reveal your search history and other private information to friends if the Google Assistant bot is called upon in chats, according to a story from Re/code.
Xiaomi phones run a skinned version of Android known as MIUI, which, over the years, has been a popular custom ROM. One of the standout features Xiaomi has added to the mix is something called Quick Ball, which lets you navigate your phone by swiping inward from a small circle that resides on the edge of your screen.
One of the biggest hurdles for making touchscreen text input easy on the user has been finding a simple way to move the cursor around. With all the advancements in mobile technology, we're still left fumbling around with tiny arrow indicators or magnifying glasses when we need to add a letter to a word we've already typed. But thankfully, developer Ouadban Youssef has found a better way.
Over a billion people use WhatsApp, which makes it the most popular standalone messaging service out there. But if you're one of the many people whose group of friends relies on WhatsApp for all communication, chances are, you have several years-long messaging threads with all sorts of random pictures and GIFs cluttering up the place.
Anybody who was around in the '80s and '90s associates Sony with music still to this day, thanks to their wildly successful Walkman brand. And that's not even mentioning their major label record company. Indeed, the Tokyo-based electronics maker/media conglomerate has music embedded in its DNA, and that's certainly noticeable in the stock Music app included with their Xperia phones.
When it comes to ad blocking on Android, there's no better app than AdAway. The popular root mod filters out ads at the hosts file level, so no extra processing power is used, and your phone is literally incapable of loading most ads.
If you have stuck volume buttons, it can be a real pain to adjust sound levels since your only other option is to use the volume menu in Settings. But even if your volume rocker is working fine, it's still a little weird to have to click a mechanical button to control one of the most central aspects of an operating system that is otherwise entirely touch-based.
If your phone has an AMOLED display, it doesn't waste any battery to power black portions of the screen. This is because the individual pixels that make up an AMOLED screen emit their own light, which means the backlight you'd find behind a traditional LCD screen is not present. In other words, showing a full-screen black image on an AMOLED phone is like turning your display completely off.
The Pixel and Pixel XL both use AMOLED screens, which are noted for their deeper blacks and sharper contrast ratios when compared to traditional LCD panels. However, AMOLED displays still have one fairly major downside, and that's the fact that they're vulnerable to screen burn-in.
Android is a highly customizable operating system. Sometimes, we use these capabilities to add core functionality or streamline the user experience, but there are other times when customization is just about having fun and making your smartphone's interface more enjoyable.
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.
Sometimes it's the smallest feature in your smartphone that makes the biggest difference in user experience. Take screen timeout, for instance. You can probably think of plenty of times when your handset's display blacked out while you were in the middle of something. You could have been cooking with a recipe on the screen or looking at chords while you learned a new riff on your guitar.
Emoji, emojis, smilies, or smileys—whatever you want to call them, those little yellow icons have firmly implanted themselves in the human lexicon. However, just like with localized languages and dialects, emoji can be very different from one another depending on the device or operating system you're using.
Android has separate volume levels for various system sounds like incoming calls, notifications, alarms, and media. This means that when you want to adjust volume levels for just one of these categories, you usually have to press the physical volume rocker, tap a button to expand the volume menu, find the category that you want to adjust, then finally raise or lower the volume.
If you have multiple Bluetooth accessories, Android's volume system can be pretty annoying. For one thing, most phones reset to a "Safe Volume Level" every time you reconnect a pair of headphones, which means you'll probably need to turn up the volume once or twice a day. But even if your phone doesn't exhibit this obnoxious behavior, you might want your car's Bluetooth connection to be louder than, say, your home stereo or your wireless earbuds.
Android's notification system is quite robust, especially now that Google added bundled notifications and quick reply features to Android 7.0 Nougat. However, things can still get quite cluttered when you have several unread messages, which fills your status bar with icons and makes your notification tray take up half of the screen by itself.
With smartphone makers ditching the headphone jack in the hopes of a truly wireless future, we're having to rely on Bluetooth devices like earbuds and headphones more and more. But the downside here is that these devices aren't physically connected to your phone in any way, which makes it way too easy to leave an important accessory behind.
If your mechanical home button or capacitive navigation keys are on the fritz, doing something as simple as navigating your phone's interface becomes a tedious chore. In this situation, some users have turned to root mods that enable Android's software navigation bar to solve the problem, but not everyone is willing or able to root their device.
