Author: Clinton

Google has announced a further integration of Google Drive and Slack where you will now be able to see Slack related activity on a file that has been shared on Drive.  The announcement indicates that the new activity feed works two ways:

Two types of actions are logged as events: someone sharing a file stored in Google Drive, and someone commenting—within Slack—on a Google Drive file that has been shared in Slack.

The good news is that these comments and activities are only available on files that have been shared on specific Slack teams or channels.

Reading much into code commits in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) Gerrit is risky business, much like it is for the Chromium Gerrit for Chrome OS.  But it all indications are that the next major release of Android, Android P, is getting ready to hit the Developer Preview 1 stage.

A new commit simply states The future is now (2018 edition) and diving deeper into the platform Bionic, there is complete file structure that suggests everything is ready for a build of Android P to be completed.

Google has announced an improvement the Google Mobile Management feature in G Suite today. The improvement allows administrators to publish a private app to up to 20 different organizations in their domain.  This gives admins more flexibility to deploy a private app to a particular region or a test group as an example.

For those not familiar with it, Google Mobile Management is part of the G Suite business offering that allows companies to have a private Google Play Store that regulates which apps can be downloaded to corporate phones.  This also allows for private apps, those not published in the public Play Store, to be available to employees.  To this point, the publishing of apps in this private store was across the entire domain.  Now admins can be more selective.

A new update to the Google Photos app is now rolling out in the Play Store, bringing several tweaks and enhancements to the photo storage app.  The update is version 3.13 for those keeping score at home.  One of the first changes you will notice is around Photo Books.  In this update, you can now get much more granular around book notifications, your draft photo books and promotions being offered.  Previously these were on by default.

There is also a new Share Back feature.  This works when you have an album shared with you in Google Photos.  In the overflow menu, you have the option to share back to that person immediately.  This will be a great feature for friends who want to share albums together.  For family members, it is still recommend you use the Partner Account sharing feature.

After being released in various other markets, the Android Oreo update for the US variant of the Huawei Mate 9 is now rolling out.  Both the MHA-L29 and MHA-L09 are getting the update and it should be coming to your Mate 9 over the course of the next few days.  The 29 is the dual SIM variant while the 09 is the single SIM.

Along with the update to Android Oreo itself, you will be getting the January Android Security Update patch, a new portrait mode for the rear camera, and the new AI-driving EMUI 8 user experience.

In a somewhat surprising announcement on Twitter yesterday, Essential, makers of the Essential Phone, said that they were abandoning their current Android Oreo 8.0 build to start an 8.1 build for customers.  The 8.0 build has been in beta for a few weeks now and the company stated that stability issues where the driver behind the decision.

An update on the public release of Oreo: pic.twitter.com/fPJRtX7kvY

— Essential (@essential) January 30, 2018

The decision means that any Oreo build for the Essential Phone is going to be delayed, in the company’s terms, “a couple of weeks”.