Category: Android

Google has laid out a three stage process that Android developers will need to pay attention to going forward.  With the goal of improving performance and security, the company to to the Android Developers Blog yesterday to outline their requirements for apps starting next year.  This will lead to the ultimate end of apps being 64-bit enabled by August of 2019.

The first step in the process starts next year with the requirement that development of new apps be around the latest APIs in the platform.  Come August 2018, app developers will be required to code against API 26, or as we end users know it, Android 8.0.  If developers have an existing app, that app has to be updated to API 26 by November of 2018.  Going forward, as you would expect, the API requirements will go up as new version of Android are release.

Readers should not that this require does not mean that the apps will only run on Oreo 8.0.  It means that developers have to develop, using the Oreo API level, in the assumption that everyone is using Oreo.  Developers are encouraged, and will, be backwards compatible to a few API levels back.

Good news this morning for those of you who have the HTC U11 Life on T-Mobile – Today is Android Oreo day for you.

HTC took to Twitter yesterday to announced that starting today, U11 Life owners on T-Mobile will start getting the hefty update pushed to them to move them from Nougat 7.1 to Oreo 8.0.

The Android 8.0 Oreo update is now available for T-Mobile editions of the HTC U11 life. It’s a big update, so you must be on WiFi before attempting to download. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/FMd1CO28pJ

— HTC USA (@HTCUSA) December 18, 2017

HTC has, to their credit, been open about which devices would see the Oreo update and they had committed to having the update out for the U11 Life before the end of 2017.

Good news for those of you who have the ZTE Axon 7 phone.  The company has taken to their support forums to let users know that the Android Oreo update for the device is “just around the corner”.

William Guo of ZTE posted in the company’s support forums for the 5.5″ phone that the Oreo update is now in development and that they are working on perfecting it before releasing it.

We are announcing  now that we are already developing android 8 for the Axon 7, your positive feedback has been inspiring us a lot and made us very happy and because of this we try to get it customer ready as soon as  possible for the best customers in the world, and I ask for your understanding because we still need some time to perfect it.

With no definite timeline given, it could still be several months before Axon 7 owners see the update – but at least you know it is coming at some point.

Today’s Deal is on the well appointed MobvoiUS Ticwatch E Android Wear watch.  The 44mm round watch comes with Android Wear 2.0 and Nougat 7.1.1 and is available on Amazon for $127.99.  You can get that price on either the Shadow (black) or Ice (white) color options.  It is an excellent price point for a watch that is running the most current version of Android Wear.

Even better, the Ticwatch E is slated to receive the Android Oreo update shortly, making this an even more impressive value.

The 44mm watch face OLED display renders at 400×400 resolution which gives you ~287PPI.  The watch is 13.5mm thin, has a built-in heart rate monitor, GPS, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi connectivity, and is Bluetooth 4.1 compatible.  The watch is powered by the MTK MT2601 1.2 Ghz Dual Core processor, has 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage.

Since its release last year, Google Home has always responded to two hot words:  “OK Google” or “Hey Google”.  On phones, however, it has been “OK Google” since Google Assistant began rolling out to a broader set of devices.  That now appears to be changing.

Google has made a cloud side change for Google Assistant that now allows your phone to respond to “Hey Google”.  This change has been touted for months now, really since the October Pixel event where it was demonstrated.  The goal of this change is to allow users to have one consistent hot word to use and to make Google Assistant more conversational.

A small, midstream update to Chrome App for Android is now rolling out in the Google Play store for users.  The update is build 63.0.3239.111 for those keeping score at home and is a bug fix update to the browser.  It is the second update of the month for the browser, following the release to Chrome 63 a week ago and fits with Google’s normal update scheme of these past few months.  That is, a major update early in the month with a mid-month minor update.

Functionally, you won’t find any difference in this new build compared to the one released last week.  This update is purely focused on bug fixes and is a pretty small download once it does get to your Google account.