Category: Android

Google Reply, the app that adds the ability to use smart replies to a variety of messaging apps on your Android phone, has been released in beta by Google’s Area 120 team.  For those that aren’t familiar with Area 120, it is the experimental development area within Google.  For those who are familiar with Microsoft Garage from Microsoft, it is the same concept.

Google Reply adds smart replies to the notification shade for Android Messages, Facebook Messenger, Hangouts and Twitter Direct Messages.  But it also brings the ability to send auto replies for when you are driving or, later on, when you are exercising or sleeping.  It is a handy app indeed.

Yesterday I posted on the discovery of a code commit in Android P that prevents idle apps (those running in the background) from gaining access to your phone’s camera.  This is a security measure and one that, until this point, Android hasn’t properly addressed.  Now it seems there is a new commit that limits access to your phone’s microphone too.

The new commit has strikingly similar language to that of the commit found yesterday.

If a UID is in an idle state we don’t allow recording to protect user’s privacy. If the UID is in an idle state we allow recording but report empty data (all zeros in the byte array) and once the process goes in an active state we report the real mic data. This avoids the race between the app being notified aboout (sp) its lifecycle and the audio system being notified about the state of a UID.

This commit, like the one yesterday, essentially cuts off any app trying to gain access at a base level within Android.

Based on a new commit found in the Android code review repository, it looks like Android P is going to have a significant security improvement built into it.  The commit suggests that idle apps will no longer have access to the camera and it looks like it will be universal across all apps.

If a UID is idle (being in the background for more than cartain (sp) amount of time) it should not be able to use the camera. If the UID becomes idle we generate an eror (sp) and close the cameras for this UID. If an app in an idle UID tries to use the camera we immediately generate an error. Since apps already should handle these errors it is safe to apply this policy to all apps to protect user privacy.

Today, a rogue app could access your camera without you knowing, even if that app is running in the background.

Google Pay, the rebranded merging of Google Wallet and Android Pay, is going live today.  With a new app rolling out and a rebranding of another… wait, I thought there was only going to be one app?  Yeah… we’ll get there.

First, Google Pay is the rebranding of Android Pay and that app is going live in the Play Store today according to the company’s blog.  If you have Android Pay installed on your phone, you will get an OTA update to the new app over the course of the next few days.  Regardless of which one you have installed right now, you can still go and use it.  This, to an extent, is a rebranding exercise at this point.

In the latest stable channel build for Android, Chrome 64, there is a new automatic URL shorter for those long, unwieldily URLs from shopping sites and other locations.  The new feature was uncovered by the team over at Android Police and should make sharing of URLs a little bit easier.

The new feature is used when you use the Share feature in Chrome for Android.  When you share a URL or copy it to the clipboard, a smaller version of the URL copied.  You can then share it with whatever apps or contacts as you would normally.

The Android Wear 2.9 app is now rolling out to compatible devices.  The update, which was announced last month, brings new notification dots to watch faces as well as improved glanceability to notifications, particularly those with long titles.  This update is to the phone app itself which, in turn will trigger an OTA update for your wear device.

Interestingly, my Ticwatch E was already running the latest Wear 2.9 build for watches prior to my phone app being updated this morning.