Enlarge (credit: Eric Lagace / Flickr) Android’s January security patch is out, and it’s addressing one of the nastiest Android bugs to come up in some time: certain apps can stop you from contacting 911 or other worldwide emergency services numbers. In early December, a harrowing tale popped up in the GooglePixel subreddit from a user […]
Enlarge / Google is putting more emphasis on Android apps on Chromebooks. (credit: Google ) The number of people using Android Apps on Chromebooks grew 50 percent year over year, according to a blog post from Chrome OS product managers Fahd Imtiaz and Sanj Nathwani this week. The execs cited internal Google data recorded from […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) An Android app with more than 500,000 downloads from Google Play has been caught hosting malware that surreptitiously sends users’ contacts to an attacker-controlled server and signs up users to pricey subscriptions, a security firm reported. The app, named Color Message, was still available on Google servers at the time this […]
Enlarge (credit: Vivaldi) Vivaldi is one of our favorite web browsers, and the company (of the same name) behind it recently announced another major release. Vivaldi 5.0 is now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and, perhaps most notably given the changes in this release, Android. Version 5 of Vivaldi has some new features for the […]
Enlarge / Gabriel Weinberg, creator of DuckDuckGo. (credit: Washington Post | Getty Images) At the end of April, Apple’s introduction of App Tracking Transparency tools shook the advertising industry to its core. iPhone and iPad owners could now stop apps from tracking their behavior and using their data for personalized advertising. Since the new privacy controls […]
Enlarge Welcome to Android API level 31, aka Android 12. Google’s latest OS had one of the weirdest rollouts ever. An anticlimactic source code release happened in the beginning of October, but if you wanted to run Android twelve on a device officially, you had to wait until Pixel 6 launch day, when Google also […]
More than 1,000 Android users have been infected with newly discovered malware that surreptitiously records audio and video in real time, downloads files, and performs a variety of other creepy surveillance activities. In all, researchers uncovered 23 apps that covertly installed spyware that researchers from security firm Zimperium are calling PhoneSpy. The malware offers a […]
Enlarge / Only five Android-only games for now, but Ars Technica is famliar with more Netflix Games projects for smartphones in the pipeline. (credit: Netflix ) After a region-limited tease earlier this year, Netflix’s gaming push officially begins this week in the form of a global update to the streaming company’s Android app. Starting tomorrow, […]
Enlarge / Mozilla’s current logo for Firefox. (credit: Mozilla) Today, Mozilla updated the mobile versions of its Firefox web browser on iOS and Android with an overhauled home page and a new tab management feature. Mozilla wrote in a blog post today announcing the update that the mobile version of the browser is specifically designed […]
Enlarge (credit: Google Play) Google has made another tweak to the fee structure for apps hosted on the Google Play app store, again granting certain developers a larger slice of the pie. The change specifically affects apps that rely on recurring subscription revenue. Previously, Google took a cut of 30 percent in the first year […]