The Google Play Console will soon require 2FA for most developers

Besides the Android Studio IDE, the online Google Play Console webpage is probably the most important place for Android app developers. On the Play Console, you can see how your applications are performing in various metrics, read user reviews, gather manual and/or automatic feedback for improving your app, and much more. Because most of this information is sensitive and highly valuable, it is crucial for developers to protect their Google accounts. One of the best ways to do that is to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) during the sign-in process. Google already offers optional 2FA sign-in options for all their products, but they will soon make it mandatory for most developers looking to sign into the Google Play Console.

2FA adds a second layer of protection to your account by requiring you to authenticate with something other than just a password. You can use a token generated by a 2FA app, send a sign-in request or a one-time passcode to your device, or even use an external hardware key. Each of these options decreases the chance of someone gaining unauthorized access to your account.

According to Google, making 2FA mandatory for Play Console accounts will be a two-part process:

1. New users of Google Play Console will be required to set-up 2FA starting Q3 of 2020;
2. Existing users with high-risk permissions (app publishing, changing the price, removing the app, etc.) will be required to set-up 2FA later this year.

Google will also send out emails to developers 30 days before the change takes effect on their accounts. The company is also providing a feedback form for those who think that their workflow will be negatively affected by the change. If that describes you, then you can follow this link and detail your concerns. I think that pushing mandatory 2FA is the right thing to do for a platform like the Google Play Console which not only holds a lot of sensitive information but also affects the experience of regular users downloading apps from Google Play. However secure the service may be, you should always take precautions like enabling 2FA to guarantee the safety of your accounts.

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Source: Android Developers Blog

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August 2020 security update rolls out for Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy S20, and more Samsung phones

It’s the first Monday of a new month, which means it’s time for a new round of Android security updates from Google. The search giant on Monday published the latest Android Security Bulletin and Pixel Update Bulletin for August 2020. The update is rolling out now for Google Pixel devices, of course, but several Samsung phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S20, have also already started to get the update.

Similar to last month, there doesn’t appear to be any functional changes for Google’s Pixel devices — at least Google doesn’t specifically mention anything in the bulletin. There are, however, plenty of patches that address high and critical severity issues.

Build numbers (Global)

• Pixel 2: QQ3A.200805.001
• Pixel 3: QQ3A.200805.001
• Pixel 3a: QQ3A.200805.001
• Pixel 4: QQ3A.200805.001

Pixel 2 Forums ||| Pixel 2 XL Forums ||| Pixel 3 Forums ||| Pixel 3 XL Forums

Pixel 3a Forums ||| Pixel 3a XL Forums ||| Pixel 4 Forums ||| Pixel 4 XL Forums

Download Factory Images ||| Download OTA Images

Samsung devices including the Galaxy S10 series, Galaxy Note 10 series, Galaxy A50, and Galaxy S20 series are also receiving the August 2020 security update in some regions, so be on the look out for that. Apparently, some of the other improvements included in the update from Samsung feature camera and Wi-Fi improvements.

For more information on how Android security patch updates work, check out our in-depth explainer on the topic.

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Source: Android Bulletin, Pixel Bulletin

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Google Pay will add digital-first bank accounts from 8 banks in 2021

Starting next year, Google will begin offering digital-first, FDIC-insured bank accounts directly in the Google Pay app. The search giant is said to be partnering with eight different banks for the new initiative.

If you’ve ever used services such as Simple or Monzo, Google’s announcement sounds similar in that it’s all digital and will provide users the right financial insights, built-in budgeting tools, and an elegant interface. Partner banks will manage the financial side of accounts.

As of now, Google hasn’t confirmed if they’ll offer a Google-branded card (which we previously heard was in the works), so all payments will likely be done online or via NFC. One of the banks partnering with Google, BBVA, said the new initiative is designed to improve the financial health of its users.

“Google is excited to work with BBVA USA in enabling a digital experience that is equitable for all and meets the evolving needs of a new generation of customers,” said Felix Lin, Vice President of Payments Ecosystems at Google. “We believe that we can use our technology expertise to benefit users, banks and the entire financial ecosystem.”

Today’s announcement is actually an extension of an earlier partnership with Citi and SFCU; the other banks include Bank Mobile, BBVA USA, BMO Harris, Coastal Community Bank, First Independence Bank, and SEFCU, bringing the total to eight.

Google didn’t provide an exact date as to when consumers can take advantage of the new initiative in Google Pay, so we’re left with a vague 2021 timeframe for now. The company is always working on many different projects simultaneously, with their hardware division just recently announcing the Pixel 4a and upcoming Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5.

Google Pay: Pay with your phone and send cash (Free, Google Play) →

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Source: BBVA USA

Via: 9to5Google

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Current Trends in Retail and Culture, and How new Technology can help Merchants Grow Business

Livestreaming has become a cultural staple among youth and internet users of all kinds. If you’re an Instagram or TikTok user, you will have seen videos and livestreams used to push products to potential customers. These types of sales techniques are wildly successful. Many companies rely exclusively on their sales through video and livestreamed content.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, more people are shopping from home than ever. This has caused a massive explosion in online retail. E-commerce is seeing a large spike in demand as users and developers drive the marketplace to expand and innovate. As more people shop online, the opportunities for e-commerce have grown quite a bit. Huawei is addressing the new demand with its new Live E-commerce solutions.

In the past, livestreamed sales events needed multiple people, large spaces, lots of equipment, and could be quite expensive at times. Huawei aims to make the process easier and more affordable with their Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) kits. These kits allow anyone to stream and sell products directly from their phone. As long as you have a smartphone, the rest of the process can be done virtually. This opens up the new live e-commerce industry to everyone.

Even those who do have access to all of the equipment needed for a successful online retail stream, the current world of social distancing prevents a large group of people from working closely together. If this is the case for you, Huawei’s new Live E-commerce kits could be the perfect solution.

Stream with live comments from your viewers

Stream with a minimal setup

The new e-commerce solution is designed to help merchants boost their traffic while lowering costs. Live streaming brings new opportunities driven by e-commerce transformation. Online retailers will be able to easily implement this solution, which is based on HMS to enhance live commerce capabilities.

Live E-commerce features will include:

Next-gen Live Studio

• Easy Controls
• Detailed info display
• Fluid streaming
• Digital backdrops

Versatile Mobile Phone Shooting

• Ultra-portable
• Highly-accessible
• Wider shooting angle

Real-Time Backdrops

• Digital backdrops replacements
• Immersive live sales

In-Depth Look at Products

• Internal product display
• Visual product specs
• Simplified AR materials development

Fluid Streaming Experience

• Buttery smooth streaming
• Prevents sudden disconnections

To learn more about Huawei’s new Live E-commerce solutions, be sure to check out their official launch on the upcoming Huawei Developer Webinar #HDD.

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Huawei Developer Webinar

The Huawei Developer Webinar | Connect LIVEs with E-commerce
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE EVENT LIVE

August 6th, 2020

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For developers that host their apps on Huawei AppGallery, they’ll have access to additional resources like splash screens, banners, featured pages, promotional campaigns, and more. These are just some of the ways that Huawei helps you market and grow your app. With Live E-commerce, your opportunity to grow your business is better than ever.

This article is sponsored and written in part by HUAWEI. Our sponsors help us pay for the many costs associated with running XDA, including server costs, full time developers, news writers, and much more. While you might see sponsored content (which will always be labeled as such) alongside Portal content, the Portal team is in no way responsible for these posts. Sponsored content, advertising and XDA Depot are managed by a separate team entirely. XDA will never compromise its journalistic integrity by accepting money to write favorably about a company, or alter our opinions or views in any way. Our opinion cannot be bought.

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Google offering 3 months of Disney+/Stadia Pro, 100GB of Dropbox/Google One, and more for Chromebook users

Chromebooks are some of the best bang for the buck laptops the average consumer can get if all they need is a safe, secure, and speedy PC to browse the web, work on documents on the go, and watch some videos. Chrome OS is no longer as web-centric as it used to be since they added a lot of offline functionality, Android apps, Linux apps, and soon, full-fledged Windows apps. Just in case you’re still not completely sold on getting a Chromebook, Google is continuously offering various incentives to get you to dive into the ecosystem, and they all seem pretty awesome.

Two of the bigger promotions are 3 free months each of two popular subscription services: Disney+ and Stadia Pro. We’re sure you’re familiar with both, but in case you aren’t, here’s a recap. Disney+ is a Netflix-like streaming video service that allows you to stream all of your favorite Disney, Marvel, and more. After 3 months of this promotion, you’ll have to pay only $6.99 a month. Stadia is Google’s cloud game streaming service that allows you to play games like PUBG on your Chromebook, so long as you have a stable and fast Internet connection. It is free to join but you’ll have to pay for each game you want to play (though the $9.99/month Stadia Pro subscription will get you free games each month).

Not all Chromebooks come with a lot of storage, so Google is also offering free trials to popular cloud storage services: 100GB on Dropbox and 100GB on your Google account through Google One. Both of these offers are available for 12 months, after which you’ll have to pay monthly fees to both to keep using the extra storage.

Other perks include:

• a $20 discount towards Stadia Premiere Edition (only applicable for Google’s in-house Pixelbook/Pixelbook Go/Pixel Slate)
• a copy of The Fall of the Dark Brotherhood story expansion for The Elder Scrolls: Legends for free
• a copy of Stardew Valley for free
• 30 days of free Calm Premium
• a free in-app item pack for Fallout Shelter
• a copy of Duet Display for free
• 1 year of free VSCO membership
• 6 months of free Squid Premium

Many of these perks aren’t new (though the Stadia one is brand new), but we know that many people don’t routinely check the perks page for new promotions. So if you haven’t been keeping up with what promotions are available to claim, check them out right here.

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Google details “trust tokens”, its alternative to third-party cookies for web browsers

Back in January 2020, Google had mentioned its intent to phase out third-party cookies from Google Chrome within the next two years. Initiatives like the Privacy Sandbox are believed to be the drivers of a healthy, ad-supported web that would render third-party cookies obsolete. While we are still far from reaching that goal, Google is now showcasing its proposed alternatives to third-party cookies: trust tokens.

A cookie, in the context of the Internet, is a piece of data that is stored on the user’s device when the user accesses a website. The cookie stores data related to the user’s interaction with the website, such as items added to a shopping cart, login data, form data, and much more. First-party cookies are cookies that are created by the visited website itself and are necessary for the website to track your activity as you move from page to page. Third-party cookies, on the other hand, are cookies that are created by a party other than the visited website or the user; these usually refer to cookies created by external content, such as advertisements. Since average users often have little or no control over the advertisements that providers can serve them, they inadvertently allow these ad providers to track and build the user’s profile based on their browsing history across websites that have ads from the same provider. For an ad provider, tracking the user is an important task as it allows them to serve users with ads that are more relevant to the user’s taste, and therefore, have a higher probability of attracting the user’s attention and interaction. While this goal sounds reasonable on the surface, in practice, third-party cookies have been used for much more nefarious purposes, trampling upon user privacy with little concern.

Unlike cookies, trust tokens are designed to authenticate a user without needing to know their identity. The idea behind a trust token is to differentiate between a user and a bot, and not to track every individual user. As Google mentions, the web ecosystem heavily relies on building trust signals to detect fraudulent or spammy actors, and this coarse segmentation is crucial for the ad-industry which receives a large amount of invalid, fraudulent traffic. Trust tokens are non-personalized and cannot be used to track users, but they are cryptographically signed, so they cannot be forged by bad actors either.

Google’s announcement does not go further into the workings of trust tokens, but there is an explainer document available if you are interested in further details and implementation. Trust tokens are available for testing by developers through the API. If all goes well, we should see them become popular on the web before Chrome’s migration away from third-party cookies.

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Source: Google Blog, Web.Dev
Story Via: The Verge

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The new Google Assistant will soon support German, French, Spanish, and Italian on the Pixel 4a/4

Today, Google lifted the veil on the Pixel 4a, the company’s second-ever mid-range Pixel smartphone. They also surprisingly teased the Pixel 4a 5G and the Pixel 5 for a fall launch. But new hardware isn’t all that Google announced today. The company also announced software updates to two of its nifty AI-powered features: Live Caption and the new Google Assistant. The former can now work over voice and video calls while the latter will soon work in 4 new European languages: German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Back at Google I/O 2019, Google demonstrated a much faster version of its Google Assistant service. According to Google, the “new Google Assistant” processes speech at nearly zero latency, offers nearly real-time transcriptions, and works without a network connection. They accomplished this by trimming down 100GB of speech recognition and language understanding machine learning models to less than 0.5GB in size. The new Google Assistant experience also supports Continued Conversations and integrates with other Google apps on your device.

At launch, the new Google Assistant was only available on the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL in U.S. English and with personal Google accounts. However, Google has since expanded support to G Suite accounts, new English locales including Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and Singapore, and the first foreign language: Japanese. With the Pixel 4a launch, however, Google announced that the new Google Assistant will be available in the aforementioned 4 European languages.

Introduced last year, the new Google Assistant is also available on Pixel 4a to help with multitasking across apps and getting things done quickly, like finding a photo or sending a text. You can now try out the new experience in German, French, Spanish and Italian, in addition to English, with more languages coming soon.

Google’s support page has been updated to reflect today’s announcement, with the notice that support for these 4 languages “will be available soon.” We’ll let you know when these new languages are added. Meanwhile, check out our Pixel 4a coverage to learn more about Google’s latest device.

Google Pixel 4 Forums ||| Google Pixel 4 XL Forums ||| Google Pixel 4a Forums

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