At Google’s I/O conference last month, the company introduced the concept of “Instant Apps” – a way of more quickly downloading apps by breaking them into small, runnable pieces that deliver you just the part of the app you need. However, it didn’t address how users would come across these apps in the first place. […]
Security researchers discovered a bug in Facebook Messenger that would allow an attacker to modify or remove text, pictures, links, and other data from chats in the Messenger Android app and in desktop Facebook chat — opening up some of Messenger’s 900 million users to potential fraud. The bug could be used to alter conversations and spread malware, […]
Google’s Android Wear smartwatch platform launched more than two years ago and it’s now supported by more than a dozen brands and runs on more than 100 watch designs. Today, the company took the wraps off version 2.0 of Android Wear, the biggest update of the platform yet. Google will release the developer preview of Wear 2.0 at […]
Mobile apps often provide a better user experience than browser-based web apps, but you first have to find them, download them, and then try not to forget you installed them. Now, Google wants us to rethink what mobile apps are and how we interact with them. Instant Apps, a new Android feature Google announced at its […]
Google is launching a major update to its Play developer services today that should make life a little bit easier for Android developers. With 65 billion app installs in 2015, Google obviously knows a little bit about what its developers want; with this update, the company is focusing on giving developers more tools to test […]
After announcing the expansion of Android Pay in the U.K. earlier today, Google also made a few additional announcements around its mobile payments service at its I/O developer conference today. Pali Bhat, Google’s senior director of product management for Android Pay, told me that one and a half million users in the U.S. now set up Android […]
Running out of room on your smartphone is a problem many mobile consumers have today, thanks to sizable photo, video, and music libraries saved on their device. That means that when these users try to download a new app, that process may fail due to a lack of disk space. Since mid-May, Google been testing a new […]
There’s been a lot of speculation as to whether Google will end up building its own phone. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had sort of an answer on stage at Vox Media’s Code Conference: “Our plan is still to work with OEMs to make phones.” That’s not entirely a yes or a no, but for the most […]
Apple device owners in the same family can share content like music, videos, e-books and apps through iCloud’s Family Sharing. Now, it appears that Android owners will have a similar option. Just ahead of Google’s keynote at its I/O developer conference yesterday, the company updated developer documentation with new details about a feature called Family […]
Lenovo has admitted that it has failed to build on its acquisition of Motorola. The Chinese firm acquired the phone-maker from Google for $2.91 billion in late 2014 and, in its end-of-year earnings report published today, it said the post-deal performance “did not meet expectations.” That admission underscores why Lenovo plans to phase out the Motorola […]