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After being on the market these past four months, the Huawei Mate 9 is doing well for the Chinese company.  In a report from China based MyDrivers.com, the company reports that some 5 million units of the 5.9″ phablet have been sold globally.  That is up 36% over the same period for its predecessor, the Mate 8.  Generally, the Mate 9 has been met with solid reviews for its design and performance.  I reviewed it a few weeks back and it, along with its smaller sibling the P10, are impressive devices.

Huawei isn’t resting however.  They have already issued updates for the phablet that brings Daydream support, one of the few non-Google devices with the VR support, and have brought Amazon’s Alexa to the phone too.  The latter has been less-than-stellar on performance but Huawei, for their part, fulfilled the promise to bring the Amazon assistant to the phone at MWC back in February.

Google Express, the shopping app with next day delivery for subscribers, has been updated with several changes.  The biggest new feature is the ability to invite friends and family to add items to your Shopping Lists.  Items can be added to these shared lists via your phone (the app), computer or by speaking to Google Home.  As you may recall, the Google Assistant shopping list feature of Home moved on Monday from Google Keep to Google Express.  That has irked more than a few Home users who didn’t want to have to install another app to manage shopping lists.  Deeper though, it makes sense as all shopping and shopping lists are now in Express and not in both Express (if you used it) and Keep.  Your mileage, of course, will vary.

Another big part of this update is the deprecation of support for Android Jelly Bean.  That version of Android was released nearly 5 years ago and continues to fall in usage based on the Android Distribution Report.  With regards to Express, the app won’t run on a device running Jelly Bean.

Microsoft has rolled out an update for their search app Bing for Android today.  The update is versions 6.7.25183495 for those keeping score at home and on the surface, you won’t find much different from the previous version.  There have been a few UX design improvements but overall, not much to see here.  The big news is deeper however in the improved support for accessibility.  Bing supported accessibility features in Android previously but they were limited.  With this update, accessibility support can be found throughout the app, not just searching.

If you are one who has various accessibility features enabled on your phone, this update to Bing will support many of the settings including TalkBack and Magnification gesture.

Update 3: Google addressed the server-side issue late yesterday and it is no not looping from beta to stable back to beta.

Update 2:  Thanks to reader Aberr who is reporting that the looping is also happening on his Nexus 5X.

Update:  It appears that the beta build is the last beta build so devices are looping from beta to stable to beta.  Sigh….

For those of you who participate in the Android Beta program and have a Nexus 6P, the GA build of Android Nougat 7.1.2 is now rolling out to devices.  The update is just a touch over 25MB in size, indicating that the last beta and this final build were pretty much identical.  You are looking for build N2G47H and so far, only the Nexus 6P seems to be updating to this new build.  Those of you who texted on the Nexus 5X or Pixel C are still having to wait for the official build to hit your devices.

If you are looking to get out of the beta, this is the time to do it.  Once you have N2G47H installed on your Nexus 6P, you can then opt out of the Beta program and you won’t get a reset of your phone.  If you move from the beta build out of the program, you will get a reset of your phone.  And this little tidbit is important because there is already another beta build out.