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Click the image above to watch the video on YouTube!
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Android Apps you shouldn't miss this week
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Muviz
Muviz is a nav bar audio customization that puts a visualizer right in the nav bar on your device!
Download from Google Play
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Google Cast Preview
Google Cast Preview is a new thing that Google is doing that gives people the ability to test out upcoming features!
Click here to get it!
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VG Vulkan Beta
VG Vulkan Beta is actually the popular MOBA Vainglory, but with some Vulkan API goodness baked in!
Download from Google Play
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Animation Throwdown
Animation Throwdown is a fun little card collecting game where your favorite cartoons throw down!
Download from Google Play
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DeskDock
DeskDock is an app that allows you to share your mouse between your Android device and your computer screen, almost like it makes your Android device a third screen in your setup!
Download from Google Play
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Headlines this week
- A fun little study was released this week that showed which countries use the most emoji and the countries that use the least. India is the country that uses the least emoji with 29%. The winner was France with a whopping 71% of smartphone users that use emoji every day. United States smartphone users sit somewhere in the middle with 48%. There isn't any real importance to the study, but it's a cool little fun fact.
- Reports were released last week that showed that Amazon and Pandora were working on $5/month streaming services to compete with Apple Music, Google Play Music, and Spotify. Pandora released theirs this week that introduces unlimited skips and an improved offline mode while free users can get unlimited skips if they opt into video ads. Now we'll wait and see what Amazon has cooking.
- Google DeepMind's WaveNet is getting ever closer to replicating human speech. It's a significant breakthrough that could mean improved virtual assistants, better voice recognition, and better computer generated speech. For those who don't remember, DeepMind is the AI that beat all those players in various games of Go and it was purchased by Google for $500 million. It's pretty powerful and it's getting better every month.
- The new Nexus Launcher that was going around a week or two ago is now called the Pixel Launcher. On top of essentially confirming what we already knew about the Nexus name change, the app now appears to work slightly better than before. The calendar icon now shows the actual date and it seems to be a bit smoother. It's downloadable now if you want it.
- Respawn's Titanfall is the next major gaming franchise that will get its own game on mobile. According to their PR department, it will be a card collecting game that features characters, names, and scenarios from the actual game. It'll be called Titanfall: Frontline and you can pre-register for the game now if you're interested. As with most card collecting games, it should be freemium.
- Sunrise Calendar closed its doors for good this week. We knew it was coming after they announced as much months ago, but now it is officially dead and gone. The good news, though, is that many of the more unique features are currently being added to Microsoft's Outlook. It's obviously not the same thing, but the memory of Sunrise will live on in another app. You can expect these new features to hit Outlook sooner or later.
- Despite a ton of downloads in its first month, Google Duo actually isn't doing that well. Over the last couple of weeks, it has dropped down on the top charts fairly quickly and seems to have peaked really early. They have released a handful of advertisements to try to perk things up, but Duo is apparently going to take longer to get everyone to use than expected.
- Jide has released a new Android emulator called Jide Remix OS player. The basic concept is that you run the Jide Remix OS on Microsoft Windows and then use it to run Android apps. It works similarly to most Android emulators, except these guys seem to have a history of doing things the right way. It's about the only emulator that uses Android Marshmallow and it's completely free to use.
- Ouya has officially quit the hardware business and is now a publishing company. So far, they have published three games, all of them exclusive to the Nvidia Shield Tablet. None of them are overly amazing or anything and they tend to feature retro graphics and rock steady game play. Still, it'll be interesting to see what Ouya comes out with. Many of us still miss Android's first really good gaming console.
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App Updates this week
- Whatsapp received an update this week that gives it stickers and scribbling similar to what you may have seen in Snapchat.
- Action Launcher 3 also got a big update this week. This one adds in almost all of the features that are currently found in Pixel Launcher.
- Rovio has updated Angry Birds 2 with a fairly substantial number of new levels, piggies, powers, and content. The game is still free so you can pick it up and check it out for yourself!
- Starting next week, Twitter will tweak their mechanics to allow for longer tweets. Starting this next week, the only thing that Twitter will count as characters are words. Links, mentions, images, and other things won't count. It's a surprisingly large change for Twitter and it should help make tweets more engaging.
- Google Maps is apparently doing some experimental tweaking with their Explore section to make it easier and more enjoyable to use.
- A new Gmail update is rolling out soon will make emails scale properly on your device no matter how big the screen is.
- Google Photos released their 2.0 update this week. Included in the release is a brand new sorting system that puts all your photos into albums. There were also some UI tweaks and other things.
- Nova Launcher beta received an update this week that adds in new Pixel Launcher based features. They should roll out to the stable release sooner or later.
- SwiftKey updated their app this week. Now the prediction algorithms are run by a neural network instead of its previous prediction algorithms. That should be interesting.
- YouTube is apparently preparing to enter the social media space. A blog post from Google indicated that content creators will be able to post things like text-only content, gifs, live video, and other types of content that you normally don't see on YouTube. The idea is to give creators a better method to communicate with subscribers without requiring them to go to other sites like Facebook and Twitter. It's only available to a few people now to test it out.
- CloudMagic has received a serious update this week. It has been rebranded to Newton and it has also received a bunch of new features. There is a free version and a paid subscription version as there was before, but the subscription version now has far more features than it did before. It's still an awesome email client, but we understand if you're not excited about forking out $50/year for the app.
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App Deals and Additional Releases
- Google Play is hosting a sale where you can get a lot of games for up to 60% off. Some of the games include Terraria, Hitman GO, Minecraft Story Mode, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, and Never Alone: Ki Edition. As of Friday evening, the sale is still going on and these are some great games that you can pick up for super cheap. It's worth giving some of them a shot!
- An interesting new app called Parallel Windows for Nougat allows you to do a few interesting things with the new Android OS that you couldn't do before. For instance, you can use the same app in split-screen mode if you want to. It's a free download so check it out!
- Pavilion is a new fourth person (?) puzzle adventure game that has you doing all sorts of nifty things. It's a bit expensive like most Shield exclusives, but it looks really cool.
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Pokemon Go news:
- Pokemon Go received a gigantic update this last week. Included is the buddy system which allows you to assign Pokemon as your buddy and then you get candy for that Pokemon when you go walking. The bigger story is that the game now forbids root users from playing the game. A ton of root users are fairly upset which is understandable, but given that most of the cheating methods required root, everyone had to know this was coming eventually.
- Any root users who have been affected by the Pokemon Go update can use this method to get around the no root limitation!
- After the giant fuss that occurred when it was announced that Pokemon Go would be heading to the Apple Watch, a report this week surfaced that said that Pokemon Go should likely be coming to Android Wear eventually as well.
- Pokemon Go has allegedly lost about 80% of its paying customers, but they are still making a ton of money. Through all the stats showing that Pokemon Go is losing its steam, few people stop to think of why that might be. It could be that people don't enjoy the game, or it's school season starting up and no one has time to play. In any case, despite this stat, Niantic is doing just fine right now.
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