ClintonFitch.com

Google has made a pretty significant announcement with regards to Google Drive today.  In a blog post, the Mountain View company announced that Google Drive would be rebranded as Google One and bring with it more storage and features.

The most visible change to Google One over Drive is the tiers and pricing structure.  For $1.99 per month, you can pick up 100GB of storage.  That is the same price as today but if you need just a little bit more, there will be a 200GB tier that will be $2.99.  Perhaps the bigger news is that current 1TB account which is $9.99 per month will double to 2TB at no additional charge.  This puts a huge amount of pressure on other cloud storage providers like Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive.

It looks like that Android app access to USB drives in Chrome OS is a little bit closer than anticipated.  When I wrote about this feature coming to Chrome OS back in April, it looked like the feature would land in the Chrome 68 build which isn’t due until July.  However, in the latest Chrome 67 build for the Chrome OS Beta Channel, the feature is available and SD cards or USB drives show up as a storage option.

The feature is a big deal for those who use Android apps in Chrome OS.  It means that you can store documents, music or videos on an external drive and not eat up what is often a small amount of built-in storage on your Chromebook.

Google is taking another step forward when it comes to manufactures and Android security updates.  In a session at Google I/O this week, the company indicated that changes would be coming soon to the OEM agreement for Android, requiring more regular security updates.  While the exact details weren’t laid out in the session nor what is meant by “regular”, it is clear that Google is trying to make sure that manufactures keep devices up to date with the latest security updates.

This also, in a roundabout way, would encourage manufactures to offer the latest versions of Android as the security updates are regular on the new versions.

A second Chrome 67 based build has arrived in the Chrome for Android Beta app.  The app update, which is now live in the Google Play Store, is build 67.0.3396.42.  Unlike other beta builds of apps in the Play Store, you don’t have to join a beta program to try it out on your phone.  Just download it here and you can run it at the same time that you run the stable version on your device.

To a large extent, Chrome 67 is a bit of a maintenance release with not a lot of new features expected.  The only real notable change is the Home button near the omni bar at the top of the display.