Category: Android

For those of you who are starting to receive your pre-ordered Samsung Galaxy S9 or S9+ from T-Mobile, you already have a new update rolling out to your shiny new toy.  The update, which is just over 250MB in size, brings stability improvements to the camera as well as the face unlock feature of the phones.

Users are reporting that they are getting the update within a couple of hours of activating their phone on T-Mobile so it appears that the US carrier had the update ready to roll out as soon as the phones started getting into customer’s hands.

Because we live in the future and we also love coffee and donuts, Google Assistant once again makes your life easier.  Dunkin Donuts has enabled the ability to place orders at your local store through Google Assistant.  Everyone say donuts in your Homer Simpson voice.

How it works is similar to other Actions within Google Assistant.  First, you will need to have linked your Dunkin Donuts Perks account to Google Assistant, which you will be prompted to do the first time you say, “Hey Google, talk to Dunkin Donuts”.  After your card is linked, you can choose your pick up location and you can select something from your recent orders.  Once done, you can confirm the order and then go pick it up at your local Dunkin location.

A new cloud-side change is rolling out to the Google+ app for Android that brings the same “Delete, Report, and Block” feature that is found on the web site to your mobile.  So long as you have the latest G+ app installed on your phone, you should see this new feature roll out over the course of the next few days.

Google+ has had a spam problem for a long time and the company has continued to try to give administrators of communities and collections the tools needed to deal with it.  The ability to delete a comment, report it and block the user is something that admins have had for a while but with this update, everyone gets it.

The Microsoft To-Do app has a new update rolling out that brings support for hashtags and improved readability of reminders in tasks.  The update is version 1.26.58 for those keeping score at home and has rolled out to the Play Store.  If you have it installed, you should get the OTA update over the course of the next few days.

The big new feature is hashtag support.  Now you can use them in your notes for tasks and can search for those hashtags later.  Think of it as tagging of notes, something that other apps have done for a while now.

Firefox for Android has a new update rolling out that brings several fixes as well as the ability to set it as your default Assistant app.  The new update is version 59 for those keeping score at home and has been released to the Play Store.  If you have the app installed already, you should see the OTA update for it over the course of the next few days.

The big change in this update is the ability to set Firefox for Android as your default Assistant app.  This is done via the Default apps settings on your phone.  For the Pixel devices, thats Settings>Apps & notifications>Default apps>Assist & voice input.  There you can select Firefox to be your default assistant app.  When you do this and you long press your Home button, you will see a search option via Firefox instead of Google Assistant.

Version 3.0 of Android Messages, Google’s SMS app, has started rolling out in the Google Play Store today.  While it doesn’t sport a lot of changes, mostly bug fixes and performance improvements, it does drop support for Android KitKat.

KitKat was released back in October 2013 so dropping support for the now 4 year and a bit year old version is not entirely shocking and it fits with Google upping the minimum supported API level in other apps.  Frankly, at this point nobody should be using KitKat purely from a security perspective.