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Microsoft has released a new update to their OneDrive app for Android.  The update is version 5.1 for those keeping score at home and brings a refreshed UI to the cloud storage app.

With this update, Microsoft has finally moved away from the hamburger style menu and opted for a bottom, tab-style navigation.  This brings it more inline with other Microsoft apps as well as how Android apps look & feel in general.  These changes should help simplify navigation throughout the app.

Following the release of an updated Chrome for Android, the Chrome browser for Windows, MacOS and Linux has a new update rolling out today.  The updated version is build 63.0.3239.84 for those keeping score at home and gets desktop users of the browser on the Chrome 63 train.

Along with the updating to the base version of Chrome, this update also brings a lot of fixes.  There are 37 named fixes in this update but the details of exactly how it was fixed will remain confidential for a few more weeks.  This is a normal practice by Google to assure that users have had time to update and are not exposed to the vulnerability.  Most of the have to deal with spoofs or other exploits.

The Flags page in Chrome has been updated too.  Now if you type chrome://flags in the ominbar, you will see the new Material Design inspired look to these experimental settings in the browser.

About a year ago, Google announced that they would be eliminating Chrome apps on the desktop versions of the Chrome browser.  That process has begun today as Chrome apps are no longer available to download from Windows, MacOS or Linux versions of the browser.

You can see in the splash screen above that Apps has been removed.

The move is based more-or-less on the fact that nobody uses Chrome apps.  Google’s own numbers suggest 1% of Chrome users use the apps.  I, as a Chrome user on my Mac and on my Chromebook, can attest to this.  I don’t have a single app installed, especially now on my Chromebook as I’ve been using more Android apps.

Developers have been notified of this change and while their apps will work through the first quarter of 2018, after that, the code will be removed from Chrome all together.

The replacement?  Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs

If you have been wanting to get your hands on the Pure White edition of the Essential Phone, you can get one at Amazon right now at a great price.  Featuring all of the same specs, the Pure White version is down to $499 on Amazon, a savings of $200.

The phone got off to a bit of a rough start but through multiple software updates, it has become one of the best out there.  As I posted earlier this morning, the December Android Security Update is already rolling out for the phone.

The Essential Phone has a titanium body with a ceramic back, a 5.7″ 2560 x 1320 Quad-HD display, 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage built-in.  It is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor.  This octa-core processor has four cores running at 2.45GHz and the remaining four clocked at 1.9GHz.