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Several months ago, Google outlined a change that was going to be happening for Google Play Games.  That change mostly circled around the removal of the Google+ account requirement for sign-in and the establishment of Gamer IDs, ala Microsoft Xbox.  The update to the Play Games app for Android that supports this change is now rolling out in the Play Store, giving users the opportunity to setup their Gamer ID and take advantage of the automatic sign-in process for games.

Google Contacts is a great contacts management app that has been available for Android 5.1 and higher users despite being a stand alone app for some time now.  That is changing a bit now and it is a good change.  The latest build of the app, version 1.4.9 for those keeping score at home, lowers the minimum Android version to Lollipop 5.0.  This may seem like a small thing but it actually opens up the app to a huge number of potential users.

About a month after the first Developer Preview as released, Google announced today that the 2nd preview for Android N has been released.  While Android N remains very much in beta mode, this update addresses a significant number of bugs that were identified by testers and also brings some new features for testing.

A small but important update has come to the Chrome OS Stable Channel that users will want to get downloaded to their Chromebook, Chromebox or other Chrome devices.  The update you are looking for is build 49.0.2623.112 (Platform version: 7834.70.0/7834.71.0) and Google indicates that this build is for all devices running on the platform.  Not much is shared on what exactly was addressed from a security fixes perspective, with the release announcement only stating This build contains a number of bug fixes, an update to Adobe Flash Player (21.0.0.216-r1) and security fixes.