Category: Android

A new beta of Google Play Service is currently available and it is bringing a much desired fix to the “Check for Update” button on Google Pixel devices.  The new beta build is version 12.2.09 and multiple sources are reporting that at least on the Pixel 2 lineup, you can actually tap the “Check for Update” option in Settings and it will immediately go download the new February Android Security Update patches.

The Check for Update button has been broken for a while now.  A fix was to come with Android Oreo but an update to Google Play Services, the culprit in all of the issues, broke it again late last year.  Google then indicated that a fix would be coming in 2018.  That fix now appears to be happening.

Google has released a new beta of Chrome for Android today in the Play Store.  The new build is version 65.0.3325.53, bringing the mobile browser up to the Chrome 65 version of the browser.  The build is mostly a bug fix and building upon the current stable build of the browser.

As the name suggests, this new build of Chrome for Android is beta and while anyone can get the beta from the Play Store, it is recommended that it not be your primary browser.  It can crash and there will likely still be bugs to be addressed.  If you can live with that however, and need to do some testing, give it a try.

The Essential Phone could be the first phone to get the February Android Security Update patch.  Those patches were released yesterday by Google and today, Essential has begun rolling out build NMK24B to the PH-1 which contains the patch.

While the Essential Phone got off to a rough start and still lacks its Android Oreo update (it will be getting 8.1 in a few weeks), the company is certainly making strides to keep the device updated from a security perspective.

Over the course of the next few days, a new version of Google+ will be rolling out to Android users.  While visually the app won’t look much different than it does today, Google’s Leo Deegan has taken to the community site to let everyone know what to expect.  Given he is the lead engineer of G+, he should know.

Though it very closely resembles the current app, this new version is the culmination of a complete rewrite of many core features using Google’s latest Android app infrastructure which will allow our Android team to build new features on a modern tech stack.

During the rewrite, we were able to build in some subtle updates. For instance, stream rendering and scrolling have been improved, the photo lightbox has been redesigned, comment options slide up from a bottom sheet, and grey-spammed comments are now viewable by post authors.

All of these changes point to a smoother experience overall with the community app.

Over the weekend, the Huawei Mate 10 Pro became available for pre-order from several retailers, including Amazon.  The $799 flagship phone will ship on February 18th and if you buy it at Amazon, you get a $150 Amazon gift card with it.  Not a bad deal.

As with previous Huawei phones, the Mate 10 Pro will come with a selection of EMUI themes that are unique to it – for now.  As these things go, it doesn’t take much to extract these stock themes and now you can download them yourself for your current Huawei or Honor phone.  In all, there are 9 themes that come on the phone and you can download the files here in one ZIP file.

The slow and somewhat painful adoption of Android Oreo continues but there are some highlights to point out in this month’s Android Distribution Report.  Google released the report today and it shows that the latest version of the Android platform, Oreo, was installed on 1.1% of the devices that hit the Google Play Store for the 7-day period ending February 5, 2018.  That’s up .4% from the January report but there isn’t much to applaud frankly.

Android Oreo has been out now six months and despite Google and manufactures releasing updates, the needle has hardly moved on adoption.  This is likely due to a couple of reasons.  First, manufactures are being painfully slow in getting the updates out themselves.  Two, lots of people are using devices that are over 2 years old and will not be updated.