The king of all Xposed modules is alive and kicking on Android Lollipop. GravityBox received an update over the weekend that will bring its bevy of UI tweaks to folks who have installed the framework on their Android 5.0+ devices.
When my girlfriend told be about a Trivia Crack cheat she discovered, I was a little dubious. Then, after witnessing her trick in action and trying it out myself, my faith in the popular trivia game was forever tainted.
Most custom ROMs are built from the freely-available source code of AOSP, so they share a lot of common ground with stock Android. The difference, though, is the fact that Google adds many minor tweaks and finishing touches to AOSP while creating the version of Android that ultimately comes pre-installed on Nexus devices.
Almost all modern Android devices have a gesture that will take you directly to Google Now. For most phones and tablets, it's a simple swipe up from the home button. With a Samsung or an older Android device, it's only a matter pressing and holding the home button.
Android's beauty is in its customization; you can have widgets for anything, launchers that look and feel completely different from one another, and fonts you can change at any time. And it doesn't stop at aesthetics—you can go much deeper than looks.
Navigating through the darkness—literal darkness, not the existential variety—is always a difficult task on its own, and my Android doesn't necessarily make it any easier. Many manufacturers offer quick access to a flashlight or torch feature, but my Galaxy S4 doesn't have an easily accessible toggle or button available to turn it on.
One of the more talked-about features of Android Lollipop is a new Priority Mode that allows you to mute all notifications except for those coming from starred contacts. As simple as that sounds, this can still be a bit confusing—or at least lead to some unwanted interruptions.
If you utilize strong passwords—which you absolutely should be—you've probably had to go back and forth between keyboard screens multiple times to input various letters, numbers, and symbols.
At $349 off contract, the Nexus 5 has always been one of the best bang-for-your-buck smartphones on the market. In order to keep the price that low, however, Google had to pass up on some of the minor features that other flagship phones offer.
There were over 1.2 million changes made to Android when the OS got updated from KitKat to Lollipop, but a minor front-facing modification has many users in an uproar.
I just about always have iTunes running in the background when using my Mac, but switching in and out of the app to change songs and albums can make focusing on my main task difficult. To help keep my mind on track, I have a few extensions enabled to take control of my music playback.
Notifications are an integral part of our day-to-day smartphone usage. They allow us to easily see and act upon all of the latest information that comes our way. Well, most of the time, that is.
Nothing else quite sums up my childhood like Super Mario, the Italian plumber who constantly had to defeat Bowser to save Princess Peach (aka Princess Toadstool) from danger. While it's easy to relive the classic gameplay on your Android with Nintendo emulators, not everyone has time for lengthy quests. Instead, you can get your Mario nostalgia fix with a live wallpaper for your home and/or lock screen.
Pets are one of the biggest sources of joy in life, but keeping track of their daily activities can easily become a chore. When you have a roommate or spouse that also likes to feed the cat or walk the dog, miscommunication can lead to double-feeding or an under-exercised pet.
Every so often, we come across an app that makes us wonder "Why didn't someone think of this before?" This is definitely the case with developer Dor Sakal's latest offering, FloatNote.
It's been a long time coming, but Google's Calendar app for Android has finally received a visual makeover. In the spirit of Android Lollipop, Google's new Material Design permeates throughout the update.
As carriers finalize their variations of the Android 4.4.4 update, we're left with only brief glimpses of what the new "Eye Experience" holds in store for us while we wait. However, thanks to a system dump of an updated European HTC One M8 and some clever hackery by donmarkoni, we can now install the new camera app on any variant of the HTC One M8.
Whether you call it chicken-fried steak, country-fried steak, Milanese, wiener schnitzel, or breaded cutlet, there's something irresistible about a piece of meat that's been treated until it's thin and tender, dredged in beaten egg and flavorful bread crumbs, then fried until the coating is crisp enough to shatter when you bite into it.
How many times have you witnessed a beautiful moment that you would have loved to capture on film, only to watch it slip away as you struggled to unlock your phone and open your camera app?
Unlike the suave 007 that Daniel Craig portrayed, I am not a spy, nor am I that charming, but I do occasionally enjoy taking a stealthy video. Maybe I'm a jerk, but I often catch people doing ridiculous things and just think, "Aren't you embarrassed?"
Your heart is constantly work for you, yet you think nothing of it—and Samsung wants to change that. They stuck a dedicated heart-rate monitor on the Galaxy S5, they're putting one in the upcoming Note 4, and they're bound to slap one in every Galaxy device thereafter.
Android has had predictive text for a while now, both with stock and third-party keyboards such as Fleksy, SwiftKey, TouchPal, et al. Apple is even getting on board, with stock predictive text and third-party keyboards for iOS 8, slated for public release later this year.
There are a lot of techniques out there for how to cook the perfect steak, from flipping it multiple times to applying a spice rub or dry brine to aging the beef. But it turns out that there's a super-easy way to make a great steak at home, and all you need is a good cast-iron skillet and some salt.
It used to be easy to hack tethering—root your device and install a third-party or modded tethering app. But snuck in amongst the changes in Android 4.3, a new data-monitoring service of sorts made its debut. There used to be a time when your data connection was yours. You paid for it, so you were free to use it for whatever you wanted. Unfortunately, those days are long gone.
Now that all variants of the Galaxy S5 have finally been rooted, we can start exploring all of the tweaks and hacks that Superuser privileges open up to us.
When I became serious about cooking, nearly every cookbook and guide I picked up emphasized the importance of using fresh stock, whether it was chicken, beef, or vegetable. When I didn't have time to make my own, I bought the highest quality boxed or canned stock I could find at the market.
A homemade burger is a delicious thing, but it can be hard to load up with all the fixings. Why? Because said burger is usually wider in the middle and thinner around the edges, like so: Chances are that patty will still be delicious, but your lettuce, tomato, et al. are going to slide off the surface because of this patty's dome shape.
With the Galaxy S5's root bounty over $18,000 and climbing, there's still no Superuser in sight. That doesn't mean we can't tweak and personalize our shiny new toys, though. Several customization options are available just by virtue of the S5's Android base, and installing a custom launcher is one of the fastest ways to get a fresh look.
In a world where mobile devices are the new norm for interacting and staying in contact with one another, it's important to make the experience as smooth as possible, and typing is the biggest problem for me.
Ever since Android 3.0 Honeycomb, Google has been trying to push phone manufacturers to do away with physical menu buttons. Samsung has been one of the lone holdouts, retaining the menu key up until the Galaxy S5, where they finally replaced it with a "recent apps" multitasking button.
As Nexus owners, we love our device's operating system, and it's probably the reason we went for a pure Google experience in the first place. But that doesn't mean there's not room for improvement in Android, especially when the OS has so many freely available softMods to tinker with.
Ah, the art of the April Fool's prank. If you're a dedicated prankster, you probably already know who you're going to get on the big day. But if you're still searching for a prank to pull, never fear—we've got one that's pretty easy to execute and is guaranteed to get reactions. Those Oreo cookies look irresistible, right? Unless you're on a strict no-chocolate diet, you wouldn't be able to help yourself from shoving those in your mouth—and that's where the fun comes in.
Allowing us to easily get features that would otherwise be available only through flashing mods and custom ROMs, Xposed Installer has been a godsend since its development, simplifying the sometimes tasking and potentially harmful process of changing the core components of Android's operating system.
When you're wearing EarPods or another set of headphones with built-in remote controls, pausing and playing music is as convenient as it gets. However, some of the better sounding headphones out there do not have remotes built in, so pausing a song when you need to is at least a few steps, which is a few steps more than I want.
If you have a limited or restricted data plan, monitoring your usage can be the difference between escaping the month without overage fees or emptying out your wallet.
Normally, you'd have to jailbreak your iPad or iPhone to play any games that aren't available in the iOS App Store, like the now-extinct Flappy Bird game. But this isn't the case if you want to play some of your favorite old school Nintendo classics.
My friends can be pretty shitty sometimes, but they're my friends nonetheless. On various occasions, they've secretly taken my device and made me look foolish by posting crude and embarrassing posts to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. With friends like these, who needs enemies, right? And it's because of these types of friends that we need to substantially upgrade the app security on our devices.
When we take pictures with our smartphones, it’s safe to assume we’re taking more than one. We're either trying to capture the right light, look, or expression… or maybe a slight nod to the right to show off your good side.
Whether it's because you travel quite often or have loved ones in another part of the country, Android makes it easy to place dual clocks on your home screen using a widget. While there are several other widgets you can use to tell the time, that's pretty much the only way you can get two different time zone clocks on your Android device. If you want an alternative option, I'm going to show you a mod that lets you get two different clocks in your Status bar on your Samsung Galaxy Note 2 or ot...
A certain selection of applications on your Android device (both system and downloaded) start running as soon as your Samsung Galaxy Note 2 turns on, laboriously hammering away at whatever tasks they have to do.
