Google has a lot of new new features improvements and deprecations that are coming in Chrome 54. The beta version has just been announced and the biggest feature is the ability to play videos in the background. After pressing play on the video (they demo a TED video), you can press the home button or lock the device and continue playing that same video.
We first heard about this Samsung Focus application back in May of this year. The rumor claimed it would launch with the Galaxy Note 6 (which later became the Galaxy Note 7), but that never came to pass. Samsung Focus offers one single app for Exchange ActiveSync, IMAP and POP3 users to manage email, calendar, task, memo, and contacts.
Google started building their Safe Browsing database back in 2007, and they've been improving on it more and more as time goes on. Now, they've opened up this infrastructure to 3rd-party application developers. Starting with Google Play Services 9.4, developers can now utilize this database for their apps so they can protect the people who are using their apps.
Along with the Nexus 7, the Nexus 5 was also dropped from Google's update list. Luckily XDA-Developer recognized user Santhosh M has created an ASOP ROM that will bring Nougat to your Nexus 5 device.
Given the hardware that the ROM is running on, the experience is very smooth. Multi window is very fast when you snap windows into place but pulling them out is a little sluggish. YouTube playback is solid along with playback through VLC and MX Player. We also tested a few third party apps like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Everything runs very well and this ROM appears to be daily driver ready. Check it out for yourself here.
SwiftKey is integrating neural network predictions to its keyboard via an update pushed from the Play Store listing. Previously, neural network predictions were restricted to SwiftKey Neural Alpha app, where there keyboard would be able to understand the context and relationship between words based on the situation. Now, the tech has been integrated into the public app, although limited to English US and English UK only for now.
Leaks suggest that the Xiaomi Mi 5S will be ditching the home button as a place for the fingerprint sensor. Instead, the device will be amongst the first mainstream devices to make use of Qualcomm's ultrasonic fingerprint scanner tech will allow the scanner to be present beneath the glass panel. It is unknown at how exactly and up to what capacity the Mi 5S will be embedding this technology.
XDA Recognized Developer Chainfire has released an update to his SuperSU app, involving a few bugfixes and one critical update to supolicy.
The critical update to supolicy is best explained in the man's own words:
Due to an initialization bug, introduced in v2.68 BETA, some SELinux contexts (including shell and untrusted_app) could be granted sys_module capability. If this happens, and your kernel is compiled with module loading support (most modern stock kernels have this disabled) and an exploit is used to gain uid 0, this then allows for a complete SELinux bypass and kernel pwn.
Chainfire mentions that the exact combination required for this vulnerability make the chances of its exploitation very slim. Nonetheless, it is a vulnerability, which is now fixed in this release. Hence, it is recommended to update SuperSU by flashing the SuperSU zip as the apk update would not be sufficient in this particular instance.
The rest of the changelog is as below:
Apart from this, this v2.78 SR1 also brings a change to the versioning system used by SuperSU. With this update, SuperSU is moving from BETA to Service Release naming scheme. The next test release would be using the same main version number as the current stable release, meaning that v2.78 SR1 would have been called v2.79 Beta otherwise. The version numbers are to be kept the same to reduce the effectiveness of people trying to upload the test releases to app stores outside of Google Play, as most non-Play stores do not accept a version number already present.
You can download the flashable zip for v2.78 SR1 from here. Alternatively, the forum thread for the same can be found here.
Chainfire also took the moment to mention some upcoming announcements related to Coding Code Mobile Technology LLC. We talked about them and SuperSU's future before, in case you wanted to read that. We'll be on the lookout for the upcoming announcement.
Have you tried out the latest SuperSU? Let us know in the comments below!
