Tag: Android

With the March Android Security Update rolling out, February’s update is just now being rolled out by AT&T to some Samsung devices.  The update for the Galaxy Note 4, Note 5 and S5 Active are just now hitting customers. The updates themselves are quite small, under 200MB, and only contain the security update changes & fixes.  To put things into perspective, T-Mobile released the February Android Security Update for the Note 5 on their network on February 1st, the day the patch was released.

The challenge of upgrades and security patches is a well trodden road that we don’t need to visit yet again.  But it speaks volumes of the problem facing the platform when one carrier is releasing a security patch some 5 weeks after it was originally released.

Samsung Galaxy Note 5

The update for these devices shouldn’t take long to download given their size.  Once you have the download completed, your will need to reboot your device to apply the update which, all in, should take about 20 minutes to get done.  For reference, the build numbers for the updates are as follows:

• Galaxy Note 4 – MMB29M.N910AUCS2EPK4
• Galaxy Note 5 – MMB29K.N920AUCS4CQB2
• Galaxy S5 Active  – MMB29M.G870AUCS2DPK5

Unless you just absolutely have to do so, I strongly encourage readers to avoid carrier locked devices from any carrier.  Updates tend to be much slower from carriers while unlocked devices from manufactures, as a general rule, will get updates faster.  That doesn’t always hold 100% true but close enough.  Obviously devices from Google like the Pixel and Nexus phones get updates the quickest.

Microsoft has begun rolling out a nice update to their Bing search app for Android.  The update brings improvements around the travel results for places to go and the best time to go to those places.  This is very similar to Google search which has a bar graph that shows you when a location is busiest.  Along with the improved time suggestions, the app also gives you tips and guides and one-tap directions to the location from your current location.

While those of you who use Google search may give a shrug of the shoulders at this being added to Bing but for those who depend on the Microsoft

Bing Local Travel Results

search solution, this is certainly good news.  Bing has continued to make solid strides in the search space over the past two years and while it is certainly behind Google in overall usage, those who are deeply tied in to the Microsoft ecosystem continue to leverage it for their search needs.

In addition to the new location information, this update also gives warning about malicious websites and has a homepage gallery filer.  This feature allows you to filter and find your favorite Bing homepage images.  If you haven’t checked out the daily images from the site, you are missing a treat.  Some of them are spectacular.

If you have the app installed then you can expect the update to hit your phone over the course of the next few days.

While the ability to run Android apps on Chrome OS continues to roll out, the question for many is when or if it will be updated.  The answer is yes and pretty soon.  This week while attending Google Cloud Next in San Francisco, I posed the question to Chrome OS product management in a breakout session and it was confirmed that Android Nougat will be coming to the platform build 58 or 59.  Given that it is already in the beta channel, I suspect that it is likely 58.

As readers may know, Android Framework in Chrome OS currently is based on Android Marshmallow.  So, in theory, if an app will run in Marshmallow, it will run on Chrome.  The tricky bit has been that some apps can’t go full screen in 6.0 and features like multi-window support for apps is not something that is supported at all in Marshmallow.  All of that changes under 7.0 obviously as the framework allows for it.

Google Play Music has released their first podcast produced by Google, City Soundtracks.  The 15-odd minute casts are aimed at highlighting an artist and the city from which they originate.  While Play Music has had the ability to listen to podcasts for a while now, this is the company’s first foray into actually producing one.  And I have to say, it’s pretty good.  Right now the cast list is only three episodes, all released yesterday, featuring artists from Austin, New Orleans and Oakland.  You can check it out here.

The official description pretty much tells you everything you need to know.

City Soundtracks by Google Play Music is a traveling conversation about the people, places and moments that shape our musical lives. Each episode features an artist and a city. Host Hrishikesh Hirway invites musicians to lead listeners on a tour of the city through conversation and music.

I’ve listened to two of the three episodes and I have to say, it’s not bad.

App Shortcuts, the ability to tap-and-hold to get to specific parts of an app in Android Nougat 7.1, continues to grow and Google is catching up too.  The latest update to Google Play Newsstand now supports the shortcuts, allowing you to quickly get to your curated news, digest of news, Magazines and items you have marked for reading later.  Newsstand undergone a lot of changes in the past six months, most of which have been pretty good.  The big knock I had on the app was that in the redesign, getting to your magazine subscriptions became confusing and not-so-easy to figure out at first.  It’s still that way but with the shortcut now available, it makes it easier to get to them.

As readers probably know, in order for app shortcuts to work, you must be running Android Nougat 7.1 or higher.  That means it is almost completely for Pixel and Nexus devices as very few other devices from other manufactures have 7.1 as of yet.

The latest Android Distribution report has been released by Google and it shows that Android Nougat made a healthy 1.5% increase in install base over the February report.  The bump means that the latest version of Android is now on 2.8% of devices that high the Play Store for the week ending March 6, 2017 but by comparison, it is still well behind the likes of Marshmallow and Lollipop.  The increase represents the largest growth version for the report period and is reflective of the significant number of devices that have had their Nougat update come to them over the course of the past few weeks.

Android Lollipop remains the leader as far as install base is concerned, coming in at 34.5% which is a drop of .4% over the February report.  Marshmallow is second at 31.3%.  That is an increase of .6% for the 6.0 build of Android.  Android KitKat saw the largest drop at 1.1% but remains on some 20.8% of devices that came to the Play Store.