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G Suite is getting a small but time saving feature for admins who have corporate owned Android devices, or devices with a corporate work profile.  They will now be able to allow any app to be installed on those devices, saving the tedious work of having to whitelist apps one at a time.  It is a change that will be rolling out to all domains over the course of the new few weeks.

To this point, if a corporate owned or corporate work profile device needed to install an app beyond what the admin’s had whitelisted, they had to go and approve that app for that specific device.  As you can imagine, this can be time consuming if you have a lot of corporate devices.  Now admins can allow any app to be installed but, and this is important, end users will still only see the whitelisted apps in the corporate version of the Google Play Store first.  It is only when they search for an app that they will be able to find it and install it.

The Android Distribution Report for April has been released and it reflects a sizable gain for Android Oreo.  The latest version of Android, either the 8.0 or 8.1 builds, jumped 3.5% over the February report’s figures for the version.  It now is on 4.6% of all devices that went to the Google Play Store for the 7 day period ending April 16, 2018.  It is the biggest single jump for Oreo in the reports so far.

The gains have been helped largely lay the number of manufactures who have released the Oreo update for their devices.  Samsung, Sony, HTC, Nokia and OnePlus have all been updating devices in the two months since the last report.

The second beta of iOS 11.4 has arrived for testers running their iPhones, bringing several bug fixes along with the new Messages in iCloud.  The beta is only available to those who have registered their devices in the Apple beta program with the official release of the new version expected to be late in May or early June.

The big new feature in this build is Messages in iCloud which returns to the beta program.  It originally showed up in the 11.3 beta program but was dropped and not released as part of that update.  It appears that Apple has been doing their homework and will allow users to enable it.  This will allow for new messages to be sync’d to your iCloud account along with photos and videos which will save space on your iPhone.

The ultimate Android gaming phone, the Razer Phone, has its shiny new Android Oreo 8.1 update rolling out according to the company.  While it will take several weeks to get to everyone, once it arrives, you will get all the goodies that 8.1 brings along with some stability improvements and the latest Android Security Updates.

For those that don’t recall, the Razer Phone was borne out of the acquisition that the company made of Nextbit last year and their first phone is a powerhouse of a gaming and entertainment device, sporting HDR video and Dolby audio for Netflix to name but a few of its high end features.  Couple that with its 120MHz refresh rate and it provides a great gaming experience in your hands.