For those readers in the UK, there is good news for you this morning. In a few months, when exactly isn’t known, you will be able to use your NFC compatible Android phone to use Android Pay. The announcement came on the Official Android Blog in the UK and when it does roll out, there are a wide range of retailers that you will be able to tap-and-pay at across the country and most of the major banks in the UK will be supporting it as well.
Google has thrown the switch on a behind the scenes update that allows you to place a shortcut to Google Now weather on your Home screen. This feature has been slowly rolling out over the past couple of weeks, first as a beta, but seems to have been enabled more widely over the past 24-48 hours. As users of the launcher will know, the weather portion of the app was updated a couple of months ago to a more colorful and informative page when you tap on the weather information in Google Now. This latest update doesn’t change anything other than providing you an option to add a shortcut to your Home screen for faster access to local weather.
As readers of this site, you know I am a big fan of Project Fi. The mobile service Google rolled out a year-and-a-half ago has provided me a great experience and I’m at the point now where I don’t know if I could return to one of the big carriers here in the United States. I posted a ton of things about Project Fi over the past six months but one thing I have not covered is not necessarily the service itself on my Nexus device. Rather, it is the customer service that the Fi team has provided me in times of need. Admittedly, those times have been rare but each time I have contacted them, the attention to detail and the earnest effort to sort out my issue has been nothing short of exceptional. This is in stark contrast to what many of us experience with other providers.
Google has announced that the Chrome App Launcher for Windows, Mac and Linux is being retired with it being completely eliminated by July of this year. Citing the lack of use and the preference for users to launch apps from within Chrome itself, the launcher will be slowly phased out over the coming weeks with apps no longer being able to be added and warning messages that the app is going away in July. By the time July hits, it will no longer be available or supported.
Google Photos is getting updated with a new Smart Album feature that will automatically create a new album for you from your latest trip or event. The update is coming in an update to the Android, iOS and the website for the service starting today. Users should see an OTA update come to their devices over the course of the next few days with the new feature.