Android Circuit: New Galaxy S6 Plus Leaks, Microsoft’s Trojan Horse, Google Attacks Apple Music.
Today, smartphones have multi-core processors, ample memory, and all kinds of fancy sensors. Taking a look back at seven days of news across the Android world, this week’s Android Circuit includes leaked details on the Samsung Galaxy S6 Plus, Google’s counter-attack against Apple Music, Microsoft Office’s arrival on Android smartphones, Hello Kitty’s official Android Wear watch face, BlackBerry CEO’s desire for a secure Android, Medium’s updated Android application, research on why developers update apps, and details on Google’s ‘undo send email’ option.Along with a tweak in the application design guidelines, Google has updated its own applications for Android with a subtle graphical tweak to remind users just who the driving force behind the ecosystem actually is.Fourteen apps, which combined represent an estimated 80 million downloads, have serious flaws in the way they handle social logins, according to an analysis by AppBugs.AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS of post I/O boredom, or in the case of this year’s rather bland keynote, even-border-om, it’s nice to have some interesting new Googley things for you.
Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android in the last week (and you can read the weekly Apple news digest here). Not only are splash screens now an acceptable part of Android design, Google is making immediate use of them in a defensive move against other cloud providers such as Microsoft. AppBugs, which makes an app for tracking security vulnerabilities, found the problems in a variety of Android apps, all of which use social logins — in which you log in to the app using your Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, or similar accounts. So sit back as we enjoy the materialisation of Dropbox, the dematerialisation of Beardy Branson, the graduation of the undo button and some bangin’ tunes, constantly being interrupted by adverts. Google touted its Android M at Google I/O and Apple its iOS 9 at WWDC (worldwide developers conference), and here we give you an overview of how they will continue to shape smartphones.
Opening the latest updates to its apps will result in a white screen and an oversized icon to be shown, along with the familiar Google corporate logo (reports Tom Maxwell). For example: gReader, a popular news app, is, in AppBug’s words, “completely exposing all social accounts of the users, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Microsoft, and Evernote.” It has between 1 million and 5 million downloads. One of the standout features of Android has been Google Now, an intelligent “personal assistant” that offers customised information based on your searches, preferences and location. The changes are rolling out across the platform now through the automatic app updates through the Play Store, with the productivity apps of Google Docs and Google Sheets some of the earliest apps to show the Google emblazoned splash screen. US users, initially at least, are being offered a range of curated radio stations, rather like the Spotify apps free option, but with even more adverts.
Previous versions of Android discouraged this practice, and there’s no technical reason why they should be brought back now in terms of the time required to open an application on an Android device. The flaws make it possible for an attacker to use a forged SSL certificate, enabling their own server to receive the users’ login credentials. “The vulnerable apps may be using a social library which is vulnerable, or they may put some vulnerable code by themselves due to whatever reason,” Wang said. “Sometimes it could be that the developers changed the library by themselves and introduced the bug.” “Until now, only 1 developer (Foxit MobilePDF) fixed the issue,” Wang said. “So it is really concerning that those developers do not act to protect the important user accounts.” It is not uncommon for apps to transmit usernames and passwords in plain text, according to security experts. Trello is an excellent organization app in its own right, letting you organize projects into shareable virtual whiteboards full of to-dos, photos, and comments from anyone you’ve invited to work on a board with you.
For instance, while listening to Spotify, you could say “Ok Google, who’s the lead singer?” and Google Now will get you the right answer even though you didn’t name the song or band. It’s always been in the best interests of a developer to have an app open as quickly as possible, and resorting to a splash screen to cover a few seconds of background action was always a rather quick sticking plaster over a complicated subject.
Apple’s answer to Google Now is Proactive Assistant and, as the name suggests, it will offer recommendations for what you might do next even without you asking. How large is the audience for a phone that is ever so slightly bigger than the S6, ever so slightly smaller than the Note, and likely slower than both? …If Samsung really has an S6 Plus ready to ship, then my advice would be simple. Whether this lures people away from Apple Music rather depends on whether you think the service (which will be coming to Android) is a threat – which garners differing opinions in The INQUIRER office. It will also scan your e-mail messages and automatically set reminders and appointments, and even create calendar events for hotel or flight reservations. They’ll especially be useful on large-screen phones like the Galaxy Note 4 or Android tablets, as you can use all that space for collaboration and working with various file types.
The Google Camera app is a straightforward and useful replacement for your phone’s stock camera app, and its Android Wear tie-in allows you to remotely snap photos from afar. Finally graduating from Google Mail Labs, where it has spent the best part of the last decade, the option to Undo a recently sent email is now standard in Gmail. But it doesn’t stop there – at WWDC, Apple software engineering vice president Craig Federighi said it will even monitor traffic conditions and suggest to you the ideal time to leave for your appointment.
With this move, Mountain View is going after both the free music portion and the curated portion of Apple Music, as explained by Chris Welch at The Verge: Today the company is launching a free, ad-supported tier that offers curated playlists (a la Songza) designed to accompany every moment of your day. Dragging cards around on such a tiny screen is less cumbersome than you’d think, with helpful snapping intelligence to guide your card to where it needs to go. News has reached the Week In Google desk that an email has gone out to subscribers to Virgin Media announcing plans to migrate away from Google Apps, which has been the backbone of the service for many years.
SMART APP: Google Photos uses machine learning to intelligently organise photos according to various categories such as buildings, sculptures, bridges, cars as well as faces. Google already exerts a significant amount of control over the look and feel of Android handsets that sign up for Google Play certification, such as the placement of a Google search box, where applications and widgets can be found, and visible Android branding when handsets are booted. There’s a full-enough feature set—draw one, draw three, next-move hints, different background designs—to keep you entertained for a while, and there’s a left-handed orientation for you southpaws out there. The free golf app serves up bird’s eye views and on your phone, while the Android Wear component relays yardage to the front, middle, and back of the green for each shot. Photos will also be automatically sorted according to cities, countries, building, sculptures and other tags without any input form the user which is really great as most users have no time or can’t be bothered to organise their photos these days.
With Google For Work being front and centre of Google’s current strategy, one has to wonder what on earth it is doing to not meet the needs of telcos? The apps are available to download for free from the Google Play store (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), although you will need a subscription to Office365 to gain access to all the features.
This isn’t about the market share of Android – that’s pretty much a given, with only Apple’s iPhone a getting anywhere close to the numbers of Google. Finally for now, on a lighter note, congratulations, first to Dropbox, who have upgraded their Android app to Material design standards and are making a big noise about the fact and even moreso to the Google Hangouts team. The release continues Satya Nadella’s vision to give Microsoft a focus on software and cloud services as the primary product, a point I raised earlier this week: Perhaps it [releases for Android and iOS] would have been a step too far for Ballmer, but not for current CEO Satya Nadella. These steps are the exact steps he wants Microsoft to talk, moving the focus of the company from a hardware-led solution to one that focuses on cloud services and being in every location where a consumer could find them.
Cloud storage companies such as DropBox are on the rise, and with extra services including photo and data backup can be seen as a commercial threat to Google. While Apple continues to limit the customisation on the Apple Watch to small widgets of information called customizations (a strategy that mimics the control over on-screen widgets on the iPhone), Google continues to open up the watch face market to developers and brands around the world. And this week saw a truck-load of big names coming to Android Wear, including Rubiks, Bang & Olufsen, Moomins, Gundam, and the biggie… The Hello Kitty Watch Face features six cute and creative designs that come to life on your smartwatch. Unfortunately, the biggest problem for us is that Apple Maps is not updated as often or accurate as Google Maps – with our ever changing roads, you may never get to your destination. Both Google and Apple are finally making it possible to run multiple apps at the same time which is a no-brainer as the devices are getting more powerful and bigger screens.
It looks like Google is still in experimentation mode, as not much info is available but the feature has already made it to the preview version of Android M. Todd Haselton for Techno Buffalo: “People asked me, will you ever build one?” Chen told Bloomberg TV, according to Fierce Wireless. “And I said, well, if I could make it secure. I can’t say that it’s conclusive at all right now.” Given BlackBerry’s quarterly financial report shows the majority of growth is in software, rather than hardware sales, the focus on ‘BlackBerry equals security’ is a smart one.
The content destination site Medium continues to evolve and while many people question what exactly its mission goal is for writers and publications, it is gathering readers towards the long-form content the site encourages. Natasha Lomas for TechCrunch: We also find that a poor past performance of the app increases the chances that the developer releases a minor update but has no impact on major updates. Joseph “Joe” Kava, head of data centers at Google Inc., speaks to members of the media at the opening of the Google data center in Changhua, Taiwan (image: Ashley Pon/Bloomberg) Ever wanted to take bake an email you’ve sent? The latest addition to Gmail might be exactly what you need. ‘Undo Send Email‘ is available in the web-based Gmail client, and also in the ‘Inbox By Gmail’ app.
Whichever you choose, it’s time to start saving, as Google’s Android M is expected to go live in the third quarter and Apple is expected to release iOS 9 in September.