Category: Android

For some of you, the news that Kickstarter finally launched an Android app will come as a bit of a surprise.  If you haphazardly visit the crowd-funding service site, you probably didn’t even know there wasn’t an app despite there being one for iPhone users for a couple of years now.  Frequent visitors, like me, have felt the pain of not having a dedicated app because it meant that if I wanted to go check out some new projects and potentially help fund them, I was relegated to my browser.

No more.

The new app is now available in the Google Play Store and even though it is a 1.0 release, Kickstarter did a great job on the app overall.  You can search for projects to support in a wide range of categories and you can fund a project right from within the app itself.

Kickstarter – Free – Download Now

While Microsoft’s own mobile platform is struggling to survive, the company continues to pump out their apps for Android and iOS.  The latest, exclusive to Android, is Mimicker Alarm.  Aimed at helping those who need a little help getting going in the morning, this beautiful Material Design app requires users to mimic actions given to deactivate the alarm.  Those mimic games can include matching a color by snapping a picture, matching an emotion by taking a selfie or by repeating a tongue twister phrase out loud.

The app is powered by Microsoft’s Project Oxford API which is aimed at improving the understanding and recognition of emotion, computer vision and speech.  You can read more about the project here.

Mimicker Alarm – Free – Download Now

Securing your personal information on mobile devices is paramount in today’s world.  With our phones and tablets containing banking information, credit information, work information and other sensitive content, having that information get into a thief’s hands is a borderline nightmare.  While a security PIN or swipe pattern helps, there is one thing you can do that adds another layer of security:  Encrypt your device.

Encryption is pretty straight forward to do in Android Lollipop and Android Marshmallow if your device isn’t already encrypted.  On phones that have Android Marshmallow on them, chances are that it has already been encrypted as that is part of the requirements for manufactures to enable it to deploy Marshmallow.  This is one reason why I think that adoption has continued to creep along – but that’s another story.  If you have a tablet however, it hasn’t been encrypted and on Lollipop it wasn’t required.

How the encrypt process works in Android is pretty straight forward.  It encrypts your entire device – apps, data, accounts, media and basically any other user files – so that a PIN or pattern is required to unlock it.  But here is the added juice:  If someone got your phone or tablet and connected it to a PC via a USB cable, they could hack the device and get to your sensitive content.  If the device is encrypted, they can’t unless they can break a 128-bit AES key.  Is it possible?  Sure.  But we are talking about determent.  If a hacker gets your phone and they see it is encrypted, chances are they will simply reset the device (which erases everything) and use it or sell it.

In this How To I’ll outline how to encrypt your device for this added level of security.

Starbucks has released a great little update to their already pretty impressive Android app that allows you to capture the music you are hearing in the store with Spotify and add it to your account.  The update is version 3.4 for those keeping score at home and is rolling out to the Google Play Store now.  If you haven’t seen the update yet, you should in the next day or so.

In participating stores, you can use the Starbucks app on your phone to capture the music you are hearing and then add it to your Spotify playlist.  I’ve always found the music playing in most stores to be pretty good and often music that I wouldn’t discover on my own.  Now you have a great way to capture it, take it with you and listen to while you are away from your local Starbucks.

Starbucks – Free – Download Now

Last week I reviewed the great podcast app Pocket Casts, an app that I have no hesitation in recommending to anyone who is looking for a solid podcast app for the Android (or iOS or Windows Phone) devices.  This week, as these things go, the developer of Pocket Casts, Shifty Jelly, has released a significant update to that app that brings a host of new features and improvements.  Two of the big ones are time-based filters and support for Android Marshmallow data backup.  The update is version 5.3 for those keeping score at home and it is available now in the Google Play Store.

“You can now filter episodes by time. In the filter settings page there is a new option called “Released in the last” which you can set to 24 hours, 3 days, 1 week etc. We have changed the episode filters new users will have and this update will also add them to your list of filters.” according to the release notes from Shifty Jelly.  The best example of when to use this is if you have a lot of podcasts to listen to or watch and you only want to catch up on the last 2 or 3.  It makes searching and sorting much easier.

Pocket Casts – $3.99 – Download Now

From time-to-time as with your PC, Mac or any other mobile platform, you will have an app that misbehaves.  It doesn’t load or it crashes or, worst case, it loads and runs but consumes a huge amount of memory on your device.  This is often referred to as a memory leak and it can cause other apps to misbehave and for your device to run sluggishly.  In Android Marshmallow there is a way to see not only the amount of memory you have available on your device but also the ability to see individual apps and the amount of memory they are consuming.  If you have an app that is consuming all your available memory, you can even force it to stop so you can regain the memory.