Category: Android

Google has just released the factory images and security bulletin for the May 2016 Android Security Update.  Those who want to manually flash their Nexus devices to the latest build can get the images to do so while those who want to wait until the OTA is available will have a few more days or weeks to wait.  The update is a fairly big one with 25 fixes for security issues.  Once it is available via an OTA, it is highly recommended that users download it and apply it to their devices.  Of the 25 updates in the release, 6 were marked as critical and mostly focus on elevation of permissions or remote code execution.  Most users will never see these issues but Google and those who help them “bug hunt” continually work to close any potential issues before a customer encounters them.

Google has been tinkering with the Google Play Store behind the scenes and that has lead to the addressing of two annoying and sometimes confusing issues.  The company is rolling out an update that fixes the download size indicator when you are viewing an app’s details and the download progress bar when you download the update.  So what’s the big deal here?  For some, this will be a no big deal but for others, this was a real annoyance.  The first issue was on the update size for an app you have installed.  Before now, the Google Play Store would show only the full size of the download.  Unless it is a comprehensive redo of an app, an OTA update is usually a fraction of that size.  So take Gmail for example.  The app itself is 40MB and the latest update was only about 6MB.  Before this update, you would see the update size as 40MB, not 6MB, so it would lead people to believe that these update were taking up a huge amount of space on their devices.  The reality is that it wasn’t but this not-so-clear download size didn’t help matters.

Microsoft has rolled out an update to the Outlook for Android app that brings much improved calendar and task integration from other services.  If you are an Outlook for Android user, after you get this update, you will be able to add tasks and calendar events from Wunderlist, Facebook and Evernote to the app. The idea, of course, is that Outlook becomes your single place you go to manage any tasks or calendar events.  To this point you could only have events from your Exchange account, Hotmail or Gmail calendar show up in the calendar section of the app.  Tasks where strictly limited to whatever you did locally or Exchange.

Microsoft has released an update to the OneDrive app for Android that brings several new features.  The updated version is build 4.1 for those keeping score and out at the Google Play Store now.  The biggest feature change in this update is the ability to “scan” a document from within the app directly to your OneDrive account.  The new feature leverages the Office Lens functionality which, if you haven’t tried it, is mighty impressive in its own right.  Now OneDrive will leverage that technology and give you a clean, crisp image of a document.

Apple has released an update to the Apple Music app for Android today, bringing with it support for those subscribers with Family Plans as well as support for playing music videos within the app.  The update brings it more inline with Google Play Music for Android as the streaming music and video content battle (not really a war – yet) continues to heat up between the two tech giants.  Google has had Google Play Music for iOS for some time.

Microsoft has quietly rolled out updates to the Office suite apps Excel, PowerPoint and Word for Android today, bringing a few product enhancements and tweaks to each app.  For those of you who use and have the apps on your phone or tablet, the OTA updates are in the Google Play Store now and should be hitting your devices over the course of the next few days.  With these update, each app has gotten a bit of attention when it comes to new features or improvements to existing features.