Category: Android

The US territory Puerto Rico was for all intents-and-purposes destroyed a couple of weeks ago by Hurricane Maria.  Millions are without power and even basic human needs like food and water are scarce.  One of the challenges is for people here in the US to get in contact with friends & family on the island since the hurricane but Microsoft is trying to help.

Until further notice, calls to Puerto Rico landlines and mobile numbers will be free via Skype.  The company announced the waiving of fees this morning and it is in effect for both domestic and international calls via Skype.

Google Assistant has grown up a lot in the past year thanks to developers and services leveraging APIs to create services for it.  While Assistant still lags behind Amazon’s Alexa when it comes to the number of services available, the gap is closing.

That presents a challenge for users who are looking for a service or feature but aren’t quite sure if it is there.  Google has addressed this and made it easy to find services for Google Assistant right from within it or the Google Home app.  Now you can simply type in a keyword to search and the Assistant will return all of the services that do that particular thing that you searched.

T-Mobile has begun sending out an OTA update for the Galaxy Note8 on their network that brings a handful of improvements and fixes to the phablet.  The new version is build N950USQU1AQ15 for those keeping score at home and the over-the-air updates have already begun.  It is a small download, just 198MB.

The update brings the August Android Security Update to the Note8 along with a lot of stability improvements.  Most of the improvements are aimed at individual apps but there are also general improvements to be found in the update.

Paranoid Android, the AOSP-based build for a wide range of phones, has a big update rolling out that brings a lot of improvements and features. The new update is build 7.3.0 and is rolling out now.

The biggest new feature is their own camera app.  The new camera app is a simple but effective app with easy-to-understand controls (swipe left or right to go between camera and video for example) and has all the camera features you’d expect like slow motion, HDR and red eye reduction.

After an update rolled out to the app late last week, several users are reporting that notifications in Android Messages is no longer working.  The update in question is version 2.5.207 users are reporting that the SMS/MMS app simply stops giving notifications and there is no way to enable them again.  Indeed, the app will indicate that notifications are enabled but none are given to users.

The problem appears to be widespread.  Multiple reviews within the Google Play Store indicate that notifications have quit working across multiple devices and Android flavors.

OnePlus has begun the process of releasing core apps within OxygenOS, their version of Android, to the Google Play Store.  This allows for the apps to be developed independent of OS releases which, in turn, makes updates faster on the apps while concentrating the major system releases on new features and fixes.

This step is very similar to what Google themselves have been doing over the past 18 months and other manufactures such as Samsung and Huawei have been doing recently too.