Category: Android

After a lengthy hiatus after a lot of staff left, the all-new Paranoid Android team has returned with new AOSP-based ROMs for many popular devices.  This is the first release from the team since July of last year and the new builds are based on Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 and are available on a wide range of devices.  For those who like clean, non-bloated versions of Android, Paranoid Android is one of the best at giving you that on your device.  The team has had a heavy focus on design and the UI and the new ROMs look very clean and minimalist.

It has taken the better part of eight months but Android Marshmallow has finally broken through the 10% barrier when it comes to the install base.  The latest report was provided by Google yesterday and it shows the latest version of Android is now on 10.1% of the devices that came to the Google Play Store the 7-day period ending June 6th.  That is a jump of 2.6% over the course of the report from last month.  Given the number of updates carriers and manufactures released throughout May, the jump itself isn’t surprising but to move the needle over 2% is tough when we are talking about millions of devices out there.

The MLB at Bat app for Android has been updated today with a lot of improvements around video playback and some new features for those of you who are Lite users of the app.  The biggest change is the support of 60 FPS video on phones that support it.  Video playback in the app was my only real complaint about it as it was a bit pixelated and not very smooth.  In checking it out this morning after this update, it is not even comparable to the old build.  Video is very clear and smooth in playback.

For those of you who are on the Sprint network with the HTC Desire 626s, today is a good day!  HTC has announced that the Android Marshmallow update is rolling out to the mid-range phone starting today.  The update will take the phone from Android Lollipop 5.1 up to Marshmallow 6.0 and brings all of the goodies that comes with the latest major build of Android.  The update is a big one at just around 1GB so you will need to download it via Wi-Fi and once you start the install process, it will take about 20-30 minutes to complete it.

Google Hangouts has been updated for Android that brings a much desired feature for those who use Hangouts a lot:  Direct Share.  For those who aren’t familiar with what I’m referring to, Direct Share allows you to share content from another app directly to someone on Hangouts.  To this point, if you wanted to share something, it was difficult and involved a fair bit of cutting and pasting in some cases.  That isn’t a big deal for those who don’t use the app much but for power users, it was a time consuming step.  That, for the most part, is gone now.

It is the first of the month which means it is time for the monthly Android Security Bulletin to be released along with updated images for Nexus devices.  The June update is now on the Android Developer site in the factory images while OTA updates to Nexus devices will begin in short order.  Google has also released the full bulletin for the update, outlining all of the things that were addressed in the update.  In all there were 21 security updates in the release, six of which were considered critical in nature.  Google points out in the bulletin that no known exploitation of the issues are known but they are addressing them anyway to keep users safe and secure.