Tag: Android

Good news this morning for those of you who have the Honor 7X here in the United States.  The Huawei sub-brand has released its Android Oreo update for the midrange phone with a select roll out already underway.  The update comes as EMUI 8.0, Huawei’s flavor of Android and it is more-or-less the same build that is on the Mate 10 and P20 lineup of phones.

The update brings all the normal goodness that Oreo brings but also includes a lot of Huawei/Honor features such as Face Lock (similar to that on the iPhone X), a floating dock, improved settings layout and other features.  It also comes with the April Android Security Update Patch.

A small but important update is rolling out to Google Assistant on Android.  You can now rate apps and services leveraged by Assistant to give your feedback on how well it works or doesn’t work.  It is a cloud side update so as long as you have the latest Google app installed, you should be good-to-go.

To access the apps and services in Google Assistant so you can rate them, long press the Home button on your phone then press the blue envelop in the upper right corner to open up the Assistant Explorer.  You will then see suggests services and apps that tie into Assistant as well as services that you already use.

On the Apple Developer site, the Cupertino company has released the latest update of iOS distribution figures and it is pretty astounding.  For the report which is dated April 22, 2018, 76% of all iPhones and iPads coming to the App Store were running a variant of iOS 11, the latest version of the mobile platform.  A further 19% were running iOS 10, meaning that stunning 95% of all devices are running the last two major updates to the platform.

The numbers stand in stark comparison to Android Oreo, the latest version of Android from Google.  There, you will find just 4.6% of Android devices coming to the Google Play Store.  In fact, if you add up Oreo and Nougat, the version prior, you only get to 35.4%.  While it is easy to point the finger at Google, the reality is that the blame for the lack of updates to the majority of devices in the Android ecosystem lies with manufactures, a problem Apple clearly doesn’t have with iPhones and iPads.

Google has finally released a standalone task management app.  A round of applause please….  Google Tasks is a new app for both Android and iOS that allows you to create and management your tasks that formerly, you could only get to from Google Calendar.  The app, though, doesn’t remove your tasks from Calendar but instead, provides you a way to management without having to dive into Calendar itself.

The new app has been rumored for a while and was leaked a few weeks ago but there wasn’t much information on it until it was released today.  The new app is a beautiful example of Material Design and makes task management easy.

Three years ago on Sunday, Google launched Project Fi.  The MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) solution combined T-Mobile and Sprint as carrier options for the Nexus 6 and allowed for seamless switching between the two carriers automatically.  Fast forward to today, you still have T-Mobile and Sprint in the mix but now you also have U.S. Cellular in there for additional coverage.

The idea was a unique one and remains so today.  Project Fi also brought low cost data usage at the time of its launch, particularly for those who traveled internationally.  That part of the service has improved too as you are not longer as severely throttled on your data speed as you were back three years ago.  As for the cost, it still remains mighty competitive in the market.

A new update to the Google Pay app is rolling out in the Google Play Store today.  While the update itself, version 1.57 for those keeping score at home, doesn’t bring a lot of excitement on the surface, there are some potentially exciting things in the code that could bring big improvements to the app.

A teardown of the app by the team over at Android Police points to code within the Google Pay app where airline boarding passes could be supported.  This would allow for the Pay app to be the center of your travel, not just a tap-to-pay app.  Given that the app already supports some transit tickets with more coming, supporting airline boarding passes isn’t a big stretch.