Battery Failures May Delay Release of Samsung Galaxy S8

As previously explained, Samsung revealed the exact causes of the battery failures that ultimately led to the Note 7's global recall in a press conference on January 22nd. While it was likely one of the most expensive consumer recalls in history, Samsung is still expecting Q4 2016's gross income to be more than a three year high, defying expectations. Given the impressive transparency Samsung demonstrated in their press conference and their likely continuing profitability, the company is clearly prepared to shrug off the Note 7 failure and move forward.

Following the press conference, Samsung's Mobile division President Koh Dong-jin answered several questions about the company's near future. Intriguingly, he revealed that Samsung was not currently planning on unveling the Galaxy S8 at Barcelona's Mobile World Congress, set to commence in just over a month. With a wounded reputation and soaring expectations for their follow-up devices, President Dong-jin acknowledged that Samsung was taking a deeply introspective look at their culture and practices. Furthermore, he went on to say that at the moment Samsung is more focused on repairing the damage that the Note 7 has caused the company, as well as the internal aspects that may have led to its consecutive failures.

On top of internal changes, Samsung has also stated that it has yet to decide if it will reuse any parts from the recalled Note 7 devices. With nearly 3 million devices recovered in an undertaking that will likely cost upwards of $5.3 billion, there are hard choices to be made. While the thought of nearly 3 million highly capable Exynos 8890s being tossed aside might leave us at XDA wiping away our tears, the consequences for consumer perception that reusing any parts from the Note 7 may end up being a powerful deterrent.

Time will only tell, and it looks like those of us eagerly anticipating a potentially bezel-less Galaxy S8 will have to wait a bit longer than normal for it to be revealed – arguably a worthy trade off if it gives Samsung the time it needs to ensure that the Note 7 remains an isolated incident of the past.

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Android Instant Apps Starts Initial (Limited) Live Testing

At last year's CES 2016, Google previewed Android's "Instant Apps", a project that would allow users to effectively "stream" applications via partial code downloads. With Instant Apps, Google attempted to minimize the installation friction and allow developers to reach wider audiences through the web.

Instant Apps are essentially a deeplink you can trigger from, for example, a Google Search result — instead of linking you to the specific website, though, it can instead take you into the company's application, right into the instance matching the web result. Instant Apps can deeplink straight to the relevant Android activities as your phone only downloads the necessary code to display such activity, which is compartmentalized in a module dictated by Google's guidelines. After the app is split into modules, only the relevant components get downloaded and executed, allowing the user to accomplish their task – say, looking at a recipe or purchasing a product – in fewer taps and with the better UX a polished application can offer.

Moreover, Google's demos showed that users would be able to use proper seamless payments and authentication via Android Pay and Google services, including access to location, identity, and Firebase. The Instant App instance also offers a shortcut for the user to download the full application if he or she is pleased with the experience, too, and Instant Apps were said to work with Android versions ranging back to Jelly Bean.

While the Instant Apps feature is a very interesting proposition by Google, the company did say that they'd open up testing in 2017, as they had decided to start with a small set of developers and show those who were interested how to set up their app to work with Instant Apps (Google claimed it could be less than a day's work, but they haven't released the SDK yet). We haven't heard much else about Android Instant apps since then, but today we finally hear news regarding the ambitious feature: according to the Android Developers Blog, Android Instant Apps has begun initial live testing!

Google tells us that starting today, a small number of applications via Instant Apps will be available to Android users in a limited test, including many of the sites we saw demoed in videos and screenshots — Buzzfeed, Wish, Periscope, and Viki. Google is hoping to collect user feedback and iterate upon the product to expand the service to more apps and more users.

Here are some important steps to prepare your app for Instant Apps support. You'll need to modularize your app for it to be downloaded and run on-the-fly, using the same Android APIs and Android Studip Project, but Google says the full SDK will become available in the coming months.

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Source: Android Developers Blog

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Google Voice Finally Gets Updated with New App Design, Crucial IM Features

Google Voice was an ambitious project through which Google aimed to give people a phone number that's their own, anywhere and any time, on any device. The actual apps have stagnated for nearly 5 years, though, a contributing factor leading many to think it was slowly being abandoned.

Today, Google is bringing a fresh coat of paint and a much-needed set of features to Google Voice for their apps on Android, iOS and their web client as well. The new Google Voice apps are much cleaner and they've been refreshed for 2017 with a new aesthetic to match the rest of Google's IM repertoire. The design is more intuitive as well, with separate tabs for text messages in properly labelled threads, calls and voicemails. Conversations stay in one continuous thread and the messaging experience supports group and photo MMS and in-notification quick replies. There's also voicemail transcription for Spanish, with accuracy said to improve with time.

Going forward, Google says they are committed to supporting Google Voice and providing new updates and features to these apps, including RCS messaging according to The Verge. While there is no reason for you to switch from Hangouts, the dedicated apps aren't gimped in a way to make you necessitate Hangouts for the IM functionality you'd expect out of any 2017 messaging app.

It's nice to see that Google Voice, a service which many people at XDA are fond of, is making a return with a facelift in a dedicated app that was in dire need of an update. It's certainly a very strong and flexible alternative to traditional phone numbers, and while this strengthens yet another one of Google's IM apps (thus perpetuating the messaging mess the company got itself in) it at least gives Voice users a better way to communicate.

Check out Google Voice on the Play Store; according to Google, the update should be available to anyone in the coming weeks.

Via: The Verge Source: Google Blog

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Official Lineage OS Builds Start Rolling Out For Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X, Nextbit Robin, and More

For those of you eagerly awaiting official builds for Lineage OS, we have some good news for you: the official Lineage OS builds have now finally started coming in. The team behind the Lineage OS project announced in an official blog post that they will start rolling out official builds. In the first phase, official builds are planned for more than eighty devices.

Following the announcement, builds for the Google Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X, Moto G4/G4 Plus, Nextbit Robin, Xiaomi Redmi 1s, and the OnePlus One have gone live. Unlike CyanogenMod builds, these ROMs won't ship with superuser binaries pre-installed. Instead, you will need to flash a separate zip file that the team will provide.

Migrating to a new custom ROM can be a hassle for many users as the developers usually request that you perform a factory reset. However, the developer team will be throwing us a bone here and will be offering experimental data migration builds for the first two months which allow users to flash Lineage OS on top of an existing CM 13 or CM 14.1 installation without having to wipe any user data. These experimental builds will feature an ugly watermark reminding users that they should not use the build as a daily driver, but should treat it as a stepping stone for migrating to Lineage OS. Users who install these experimental builds are strongly recommended to then flash the weekly build.

Release candidates will roll out every week and will be signed by a private key for authentication, so users know that they are running an official Lineage OS build. To grab the builds, head over to the official download page here. You can check out the installation statistics page here or the newly minted wiki page right here. If you're a developer, you can keep up to date with all of the latest changes to Lineage OS by following its Gerrit project page here.

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Source: Lineage OS Blog

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Qualcomm Shares Opinion on the Recent Apple Lawsuit: “Apple’s Claims are Baseless”

Qualcomm has been under some fire all around the world recently due to their business practices. Thanks to an anti-monopoly investigation, Qualcomm agreed to pay China over $900 million towards the end of 2015. They were also accused of violating antitrust rules within Europe that same year.

We saw Qualcomm agree to pay a $7.5 million fine to settle with an SEC investigation in early 2016. And just last month they faced a fine of over $850 million in South Korea from alleged antitrust violations.

We see big companies such as Google facing these antitrust allegations in many parts of the world as well. So it feels almost inevitable for these claims to surface once your company gets so big and does business in so many countries. The latest to go after Qualcomm is actually Apple themselves, as they have announced they're suing Qualcomm for $1 billion in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Apple claims that Qualcomm is overcharging for chips, and that they've even refused to pay close to $1 billion in promised rebates.

Apple believes Qualcomm withheld these rebates because they were in discussion with South Korea's antitrust regulator, the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Apple even goes as far as to say Qualcomm attempted to extort Apple into giving the Korea Fair Trade Commission false information in exchange for the release of those rebate payments to Apple. Qualcomm immediately put out an official statement once this lawsuit was made public and says "Apple's claims are baseless."

Qualcomm says that Apple has been "actively encouraging regulatory attacks" on the business that Qualcomm does in various regions around the world. Claiming that Apple is "misrepresenting facts and withholding information" when they talk to those in the KFTC and FTC. Qualcomm says they're looking forward to hearing these claims explained in court and they'll be there to prove Apple is intentionally mischaracterizing their agreements and negotiations.

Read the full statement by following the link below:

Source: Qualcomm

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Google Play Services v10.2 to Introduce an ‘Instant Tethering’ Feature

While many people complain that OEMs are slow to push out big official updates to Android, Google is able to roll out the latest version of Google Play Services to over 90% of the active user base. Updates to Google Play Services doesn't change the core UI of Android, and it doesn't add in new APIs for developers to utilize.

However, it can add in new features to smartphones and tablets that have a deep level of integration into the Android platform.

We've just learned that Google is in the process of rolling out a new update of Google Play Services at this very moment. This update will bring its version up to 10.2 (10.2.91 to be exact right now) and we're already seeing one big feature added in this update. This update likely adds in other fixes and optimizations as well, but Andreas Proschofsky has uploaded a screenshot of the new Instant Tethering feature that they were able to discover once they received the update.

You can manually download and install this update by yourself by clicking here (just be sure you grab the appropriate version for your specific device), or you can wait for the update to be pushed to your device via the Google Play Store. It seems the Instant Tethering feature is a server side switch though, and Google will be testing this on a small percentage of Pixel and Nexus devices which are running Android 7.1.1 Nougat at first.

Once you get the update and once the feature is activated for your device, you'll see two toggles that will let you designate if you want the device to provide a data connection or receive a data connection. Sometimes you'll be able to toggle both of these on, but Google says the Nexus 9 and Pixel C will only be supported as clients.

Source: +AndreasProschofsky

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Google Creates a Landing Page for Developers to Help with Android Security

Security within the Android platform has become very important to Google lately. This isn't to say that Google didn't care about vulnerabilities for Android in the past, though. It just became clear that when Google started rolling out monthly security updates to the Nexus devices back in November of 2015, they were getting very serious with it.

The company ramped up their Android Security Rewards program and this has paid out over half a million dollars to more than 80 researchers since it was launched.

Google even recently shared a couple of methods that enables them to catch malicious applications that were able to bypass their own scanning definitions. So the company has just created a new landing page that focuses on Android security for people who are developing on this platform. This is part of the Android Developers website and it offers a number of tools and tips for developers who want to keep their applications clean and user friendly.

The first thing we see on this landing page is a collection of Android security-related articles that appear on the many, many other established Google blogs. For example, the latest post on this new Android security landing page is from the Google Security Blog, and it takes a look back at 2016 and highlights the ways they were able to help developers fix security vulnerabilities in 100,000 applications. This is all thanks to Google's Google Play App Security Improvement (ASI) program and it has resulted in over 90,000 developers updating over 275,000 applications.

This new Android security landing page also has a security essentials checklist which has links to training articles on the Android Developers website. These training articles include tips for how to store data safely, how to enforce secure communications, suggesting that developers only use the required permissions and more. So if you're an Android application developer, or just someone who is interested in the effort Google puts into Android security, then be sure to check out the new landing page that's been set up.

Source: Android Developers

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