Headlines this week
- Keeper Security released a report this week talks about the most popular passwords from 2016. It was not a great year. The most popular password was "123456" with various amalgamations of that taking up most of the top ten. Some of the other passwords in the top ten were "password", "111111", and "123123". That's not great news. Those who use passwords like that should seriously consider changing it.
- Nintendo confirmed that Super Mario Run will be out on Android sometime in March. It should roughly coincide with the Nintendo Switch release. It will have been a long time since the iOS release so we're not sure if the hype is going to be as strong. Hilariously, Nintendo plans on releasing Fire Emblem: Heroes on Android in February. That means Super Mario Run won't be the first true Nintendo game on Android in 2017.
- Google released its new algorithm for how they'll handle malware in the Play Store. It's a little complicated. Essentially, the Play Store checks whether or not any given device stops communicating with the Verify Apps function after downloading a specific app. Apps that cause this to happen often enough are considered risky software and they're removed before any more devices can get it. It's actually fairly elegant.
- The Google Play Store and Apple App Store had a really good 2016. A new report showed that the respective app stores had more downloads, made more money, and had people spending more time in apps than in 2015. Perhaps the most interesting factoid is that 90% of the money earned on Google Play was done through mobile games. That kind of explains why there are so many freemium games. That's simply where the money is.
- Google announced the 20 finalists for the European Indie Games Contest. Among those are Samorost 3, PinOut, Crap I'm Broke: Out of Pocket, Rusty Lake: Roots and many others. Some of these are very good games that we've talked about before. A few of the games haven't been officially released. We imagine that they will in due course. We'll let you know when the winners are announced.
- Trello was acquired by Atlassian this last week. The agreement was for $425 million. $360 million of it will be in cash while the rest will be in company shares. Unless something happens, the deal will be closed by the end of March. The way it'll work is that the Trello team will continue doing what they do best while Atlassian will provide management for resources. That's good news and this is one of the better app purchases in recent years.
- Google Drive went down for a while early last week. It came back up but it was an event of note.
- We also rounded up all of the apps in the billion-install club. Check them out!
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