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As more and more consumers continue to cut the cord and move to digital subscription services, we often find that our favorite television shows are spread out across multiple different providers. If you are watching their content on your mobile device, then you may find it annoying to switch from application to application to application to keep up with all your shows.
With the launch of the Android O Developer Preview 2, we've learned that Google is also shipping a new version of the Pixel Launcher with it. XDA Recognized Contributor & Social Contributor linuxct has been kind enough to port this launcher to older versions of Android and it should work on any device running 6.0.1 Marshmallow and up. This port took longer than normal as they were able to reverse-engineer the GMS portion to get it working.
Last week, the news about the Netflix application being hidden for rooted users when searching the Play Store made waves across the community. At first it wasn't quite clear exactly why this was happening but then Netflix released a statement saying this was intended behavior. The company said they were using Google's Widevine DRM as a way to block unsupported devices, but that didn't make sense because it could still be side-loaded very easily.
While there isn't any shortage of criticism about how Facebook runs their service, the ChatHeads feature for their messaging platform has received a lot of praise over the years. The sad part is that it is limited to Facebook's messaging service, but a new application from XDA Senior Member Gurjot95 called DirectChat looks to bring this feature to other messaging applications. By default DirectChat supports other messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Kik, Hangouts, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Allo, Textra, Skype, Threema, Line, Disa, and Plus.
It was recently announced that the Jelly browser would be replacing the AOSP browser on new LineageOS builds. So XDA Senior Member mayanxoni built a standalone APK for it, to share it with users who rather not update or switch ROMs. The browser is targeted to low-end Android devices, features Chrome-like tabs in the recents menu, is based on the system webview and uses a new home page from DuckDuckGo. Check it out by following the link below!
McAfee is a household name in the consumer security market since 1987. Intel announced they were acquiring the company back in 2010 and had plans to rename it to Intel Security, but ultimately backed out of this decision. McAfee's security software is available on most major platforms including Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android as well. This week the company announced they were extending their partnership with Samsung.
Substratum is an incredibly popular theming system for smartphones and tablets running compatible firmware. It has evolved from Sony's RRO framework and used to be called Layers until it evolved into the Substratum project that we know of today. We've talked about Substratum on multiple occasions here on XDA and have even produced a few tutorial videos so you can theme elements yourself. The process can seem tedious and there is some setup involved before you can get things to look the way you want.
Manually Remap the Bixby Button on the Galaxy S8 and S8+ with Root
Follow along these instructions to manually remap the Bixby button on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ using Root access on your device.
Many were surprised when Samsung first revealed they would have a dedicated button on the side of the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ for their new personal assistant. Sony has had a dedicated button on a number of their smartphones, but it was used to take photos with its camera. This has been a button that has been remapped by many enthusiasts, and button remapping itself has been done on Android since its inception. So even if you didn't care to use the Bixby button on the Samsung flagship, then at least you hoped to have an option to remap it.
Many feel that Google is still playing catch up to Amazon in regards to Google Assistant versus Amazon Alexa. Both have their positives and negatives, but we're seeing Google making a lot of progress with both Google Home and Google Assistant as of late. Google recently released the Google Assistant SDK for developers to start tinkering with. It is in a developer preview stage right now, so it doesn't have all of the features they have planned for at this time.
Google continues to improve the Google Assistant with additional integrations in an effort to stay competitive with Amazon's Alexa home assistant. Google Home just received the ability to detect who is talking to the device and it can also read you step by step instructions for recipes, for instance. We're even seeing signs of it being able to read your notifications to you, but that's not live just yet. Google still has some more catching up to do to compete with the Amazon Echo products, but they seem committed to this project and are continuing to add features.
Millions of people use their Chromecast to watch media on their TVs, and many are doing this directly from a tab within Chrome itself. If the video service doesn't support Chromecast directly, you can simply cast the entire tab to the TV and then play the video in full screen mode. Google realizes this isn't the best solution due to an decrease in battery life as well as video quality. To improve this experience, the company is experimenting with a new Cast a Tab Feature.
Google is always adding to the Google Play Developer Console to enhance the UX for application developers. A little over a year ago Google added some very useful ratings and review tools to the platform. We went hands-on with the Developer Console last year so that developers and regular users alike could get an idea of how certain features work. People are still hoping to see Google add more features to it and right now they are beta testing one with a select number of developers.
In November of last year, Google released an application that lets you digitize your old photographs. The application is called PhotoScan and it uses algorithms to stitch together multiple photos of a traditional photograph. This is one of the easiest ways to transfer your family photo albums to a digital form and it doesn't require you to buy a scanner either. However, many felt there was a big downside to this application since it actually limited the finalized photo to about 3MP.
A while back, Google announced some new features and services that enabled game developers to engage with the people who played their mobile games. This service was added to the Google Play Games platform and was known as Google Play Games Services. A number of these features and services have been popular among the developer community, but some of them have not been so popular and that is why Google has decided to announce they'll be discontinuing a few of them.
Samsung Slightly Cut Back on Research and Development Spending in 2016
In 2016, Samsung cut back its research and development while focusing on various asset and patent acquisitions. How does this compare to previous years?
Samsung is the leader of multiple technology markets across the globe. Love them or hate them, they sell the most Android smartphones each and every quarter and this also puts them at the top of the heap when it comes to all smartphones too. The IDC reports that Samsung shipped over 72 million smartphones in Q3 of last year while Apple held onto second place with just over 45 million shipments. This was even down compared to 2015 when Samsung shipped almost 84 million smartphones during Q3.
Android is an incredibly versatile operating system that we've seen integrated in all sorts of products like smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, refrigerators, ovens and more. There's been a number of companies trying to adopt it to a desktop platform as well lately, and we've talked about Remix OS from Jide quite extensively in the past. They aren't the only people working on this idea though, and we've touched on Phoenix OS a couple of times before as well.
The WebGL JavaScript API makes it possible to display hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on websites and it's becoming more and more popular these days. In version 56 of Chrome for Windows, macOS, and Linux, those with modern graphics hardware can now take advantage of WebGL 2.0. This is a major upgrade to the API that enables the possibility of websites to display a variety of new graphics features, as well as some advanced rendering techniques.
Parental controls are important for a lot of families since they keep kids safe and give the parents peace of mind when they're children are using internet connected devices. Android has had a minor version of this ever since they introduced the profile system, since it allowed you to limit which applications your child's profile could have access to. This idea is being taken to the next level now with a new program that Google is calling Family Link.
Android doesn't have the best of luck when it comes to Bluetooth devices. Some have simply refused to connect and work right in the past, but this has changed over the years. Today though, we're still seeing devices have issues with their Bluetooth connection (even on the Pixel phones), while others are surprised at the number of things that will connect to their Android device. Connecting a Bluetooth device to an Android smartphone or tablet is one thing, but having it work properly is completely different.
With few people having the time to go through developer changelogs, the folks over at LineageOS have been nice enough to provide "week in review" posts. This has been happening once a week since February 13th and many of us in the Android community love to see these summaries.