Google Apps Script enables developers to create Android applications while automating various with familiar JavaScript techniques. You will need to have the Android Studio SDK 1.2 (or higher) installed, target API 23 (or higher) and you'll need to target the Apps Script for the API. The quickstart guide should let you get an app up and running in about 10 minutes.
If you purchased your Galaxy Note 7 from AT&T (on or before September 15th), then you can go to a retail location and swap it out for a brand new one. These new units are said to be safe, and have the new batteries installed instead of the faulty ones. They recommend you turn the device off now, and keep it off until it's replaced.
We previously heard that Samsung could limit the battery capacity of the Galaxy Note 7 to 60% with an OTA update. This was later denied for devices sold in the United States, but Samsung Australia has announced this in an automatic update going out today. Customers in Australia will get an alert message to notify them of the automatic update, and the reason for the battery limitation.
Marco has been showing us a bunch of amazing homescreen designs over at XDA TV. Today's video is going to focus on Kustom widgets and wallpapers. You see these a lot in the previous videos he has done, so now it's time to talk about all the possibilities with these powerful apps.
"Make your Android Launcher look unique with Kustom, the most powerful Live Wallpaper creator ever! Use its awesome WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to create you own designs and display any data you need, at once, and with wonderful animations too! If you were looking for Rainmeter or Conky on Android, this is it!"
Download KLWP here
"Make your Android Launcher or Lockscreen look unique with Kustom the most powerful Widget creator ever! Use its awesome WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to create you own designs and display any data you need, at once and without draining your battery as many others tools do!"
Download KWGT here
The Honor 8 has a very unique fingerprint scanner. Not only is it one of the fastest fingerprint scanners around but you'll also have a feature called Smart Key, which turns this fingerprint scanner into a physical button that can be programmed to launch various tasks or apps with a single press, double press, and press-and-hold. Here are some of the best ways you could setup your Smart Key, based on the kind of phone user you are. Before we get into it, be sure you read about the partnership we have with Honor, and also check out the Honor 8 forums on XDA.
The Photographer-
Press: Camera
Double Press: Gallery
Press and Hold: Instagram
Once your camera app is open, the smart key functions are taken over by the camera app. You'll have to go back to your homescreen so that you can use double press and hold.
The Email Power User-
Press: Screenshot
Double Press: Launch Email
Press and Hold: Contacts
If you use email a lot, then you'll find this setup will save you a lot of time. Sharing screenshots is one of the more common things done through email. One press will capture your screen then go right into your email with two presses to attach the screenshot. You can also launch right into your contacts with a press and hold.
Google Docs Maven-
Press: Google Docs
Double Press: Google Sheets
Press and Hold: Google Drive
For those of you that use Google Docs for all of your work-related files, you'll find setting shortcuts to docs, sheets and drive will make things a bit easier.
Chat Addict-
Press: Snapchat
Double Press: Facebook Messenger
Press and Hold: SMS
Map your favorite chat apps to the Smart Key and easily get to Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, and also your SMS app. Boom!
The Driver-
Press: Voice Search
Double Press: Google Maps
Press and Hold: Camera
When driving, keep your eyes on the road. One press will activate Google voice search, two will launch Google Maps and hold will launch your camera. The camera shortcut is ideal because you never know when you'll need to take a photo of someone's licence plate.
Tweak your smart key settings until you find a setup that is perfect for you. After a while you'll be wondering how you ever get along without it. Let us know in the comments how you would set up your Smart Key.
Buy an Honor 8!When Google Allo was previewed at Google I/O 2016, the world got excited about talking with bots all over again. Allo and its Smart Assistant features placed a personal bot at your fingertips, one that was promised to learn over time and make your life a few clicks and taps easier. Google Allo was promised to be publicly released by in Summer of 2016, and as promised, Allo is rolling out now!
Allo is Google's (yet another) take to create a name for itself in the personal IM arena. Unlike a few of its past offerings, Allo is tied to your phone number, meaning that there are no accounts to be created or passwords to be remembered — which definitely aids in enticing the average consumer to try it out. Along with these, Google also lists out a few features over in the announcement blog post:
There are a few limitations to Google Allo though. As of now, there is no desktop client for Allo. Further, you can send SMS messages to people not using Allo, but if these people are on Android, they will get an App Preview Message prompting them to download Allo. Also, SMS do not come from your number, but are instead relayed through Google Servers. There are likely to be more, and we'll update if we find other significant shortcomings.
If you would like to try out Allo, you can download it from the Play Store. If the app is not live for you, you can download the app from ApkMirror instead.
Have you tried out Allo yet? Let us know your experience in the comments below!
It's only Tuesday, but it's already been a pretty great week for Nexus Pixel fans. In a single day, we've seen the first alleged non-blurry pictures of the upcoming Google flagship phones and have gotten official confirmation from Google about the mythical October 4th event date.
Besides the news about the supposed pricing model for the Pixel phones, it looks like Pixel hype is now in full blast from now until October 4th. We've even gotten on the hype train to Pixel-ville, in our own patented XDA-tweaked engine, with our piece over the weekend discussing the potential custom development possibilities underlying seamless updates. But we weren't being entirely honest with you in that piece, as not every piece of information we've uncovered paints a rosy picture. Because while digging around for clues about the Pixel phone's partitions, we discovered an uncomfortable truth: it seems that root methods (in their current implementation) seem unfeasible for the time being.
The Superuser's Losing Battle with Android
If you're reading this article, chances are that you probably have a favorable opinion of rooting. After all, thanks to root access we're able to do block ads system-wide, install custom themes, or forego the need for the a custom ROM thanks to the myriad of customizations available within the Xposed Framework. But for the average user, root access is absolutely meaningless. The term itself will draw a blank among non-enthusiasts. For carriers and OEMs, root access is a headache that prevents these companies from locking down your phone within their ecosystem of apps and services. We've argued ad nauseam that root and bootloader access should be a right for an informed consumer, and it might seem like we've been winning thanks to the availability of phones with unlockable bootloaders such as the OnePlus 3, Axon 7, Honor 8, and of course every Nexus device. But behind the scenes, there's a different story: attaining root access has been a losing battle for consumers.
Google is responsible for patching exploits that allow for user apps to attain root access, as well as buffing Android's security in general. Before the introduction of Android Marshmallow, there existed many different one-click root exploits that required neither a bootloader unlock nor boot image tampering. You might have heard about one of the more popular one-click methods, Kingroot. Kingroot is actually an amalgamation of multiple pre-Marshmallow root exploits – the app simply cycles through and tests which of its included exploits your device is vulnerable to. There are no prompts, no requests for user input, no indication that your device is being exploited besides the obvious fact that you explicitly started the app.
The implications of this should scream "unsafe" in your mind. Because of course these exploits could easily be repurposed for malicious purposes. And indeed, they already have been. That's why Google sought to re-do how it approached Android security with Marshmallow. You will notice that with Android Marshmallow, one-click root methods that are accessed simply by opening up a user app have basically vanished. That's thanks to the introduction of device-mapper-verity (dm-verity) checking the integrity of the /system partition at boot-time.
Any persistent root exploit that modifies /system would fail dm-verity, and cause your phone to fail the booting process. Dm-verity works by building a cryptographic hash tree of the /system partition. Each 4k block of storage has a corresponding SHA256 hash, and there exists a top-level "root" hash that the OEM uses with a special key to verify the integrity of the hash tree. Modifying even a single block of the /system partition (say, in the event that a root exploit attempts to grant itself su access) would break the cryptographic hash, and result in your phone saying that your /system partition is "corrupt." Whether or not you can still access your device is up to the specific implementation of dm-verity by the manufacturer, but by default dm-verity is configured in a strictly enforcing "restart" mode which will reboot the phone when a corrupted block is detected. By the way, it's worth noting that starting with Android Nougat, this strictly enforcing mode is now a requirement.
You can read a more technical explanation of dm-verity from this article.
The Rise of Systemless Root
With root exploits modifying /system out of the foray, how exactly do so many of our users on Marshmallow and Nougat have root access? In a previous article by XDA Developer Admin and famed CyanogenMod device maintainer, Pulser_G2 laid outlined the changes that developers would need to make in order to achieve root access on Marshmallow devices. Rather than re-iterate what Pulser_G2 laid out, I will quote from his excellent article about root challenges within Android Marshmallow:
If you want root today, on Android Marshmallow (6.0), you're going to need to use a modified boot image. While it remains to be seen if this remains true indefinitely, it looks likely to be the case for some time – SELinux changes make it much harder to get root access without modifying the boot image. And as modifying the boot image requires an unlocked bootloader, this could put an end to root (and Xposed and other root features) on devices which are shipped with bootloaders that can't be unlocked by end users. Dm-verity is also making an appearance, and it appears to be enabled in enforcing mode on new devices. That will make it hard to modify /system, even if you were to gain root access, without again having an unlocked bootloader.
What Pulser_G2 is saying here is essentially that we must find a way to attain root access without modifying /system. This is where "systemless" root comes from. In order for root access to work on our devices, the superuser executables and su daemon need to be started at boot. Before Marshmallow, this was achieved by modifying /system to include the scripts in init needed to achieve root access at boot, but thanks to dm-verity that it was no longer possible to modify /system. In order to get around this barrier, Chainfire developed a method that involved modifying the ramdisk in order to accomplish the following:
This is how SuperSU works on most devices post-Lollipop (and with Samsung phones, post-KitKat). When "systemless" root was initially released, you might have gotten the impression that this method would co-exist with the "traditional" root that we've grown accustomed to. If you've been reading this article thus far without getting lost, then you've probably come to the realization that in reality, systemless root is currently THE default root method.
SuperSU Installation Process. Source: HowToGeek
Systemless Root Moving Forward
Taken all of the information we've outlined for you above, what exactly does this mean for Pixel phones? The answer lies within the changes to the partitions to accommodate seamless updates. Specifically, Google made a rather significant change to the /system partition. Dees_Troy discovered an interesting commit within the Nougat kernel source code as well as another commit within the ROM source that allowed him to come to the following conclusion:
What we used to think of as the system partition is now a complete root file system that includes what we traditionally thought of as the ramdisk as well as what is usually in /system.
Given what we know above about dm-verity and how systemless root currently works, it really does seem like current systemless root methods will no longer work. This is because since the ramdisk is now included within the /system partition, we can no longer make changes to the ramdisk to disable dm-verity. Thus, with dm-verity still active, we won't be able to make changes to /system. How, then, will we achieve root access?
We spoke to Dees_Troy about this issue, and it looks like we would likely need to modify the kernel in order to disable dm-verity. This makes sense, since dm-verity protection lies within the kernel. Modifying the kernel to disable dm-verity and acquire root access is not a novel proposal, but it certainly complicates matters. For instance, installing a custom kernel would disable the ability to take OTA updates. Although, we won't know exactly how many complications would arise, nor are we sure of exactly what approach developers would need to take to achieve root access, without having a device on hand. But given that current methods won't work, achieving root access is definitely going to need a team effort from developers. Given how quickly Chainfire and co. seem to achieve root access on new Android versions, though, we're confident that developers will be able to quickly overcome these hurdles.
