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Web pages are becoming more and more complex, but browser vendors have been hard at work trying to offset that with performance and caching improvements. For example, Service Workers allow sites to cache certain data locally to speed up load times (or work offline entirely). ‘Lazy loading’ is another performance enhancement that has been in […]

A sad bit news hit Project Fi users’ emails today. Google’s MVNO service is shutting down text forwarding on September 12. While I’m sure not everyone on the carrier uses this feature, I personally have relied on it since joining Fi.  Google notes that call forwarding to another number will continue to work, so there’s […]

Most of our audience is at least familiar with seeing the name TensorFlow appear in our coverage. For the uninitiated, Tensor Flow is a machine learning framework/library created by Google that allows developers to leverage the emerging technology for their own uses. Although v1.0 only landed last year, the team behind the project has continued […]

With the release of the Fire TV Cube in June, Amazon also debuted a more minimalistic interface for Alexa. The new UI has been exclusive to the Cube up to now, but the version 5.2.6.6 update for Fire TV and Fire TV Stick devices brings them in line with their square-sided sibling. Old vs New. As […]

OnePlus is pushing out an update to its latest flagship, addressing the screen flickering issue some people had and adding some other improvements, optimizations, and fixes. As always, you’ll find the official changelog below. I never had the screen flickering issue on my unit, but I’ve heard plenty about it. Basically, with auto-brightness enabled, if […]

While Android Pie rolls out to phones from Google and Essential, most OEMs haven’t announced which devices will receive the update. HTC revealed a few days ago which of its phones are being updated, and now it’s Motorola’s turn. Motorola’s long-term software support has deteriorated quite a bit over the past few years, so it […]

The Play Store has long warned about the dangers of downloading large apps and games over mobile data. Just one big download can wreck your capped data plan. Now, the Play Store appears to have sprouted a new menu option to control this. You can now choose network download preferences. Head into your Play Store settings, […]

Elite hackers aren’t the only thing Google has to worry about when it comes to its platforms. Perhaps just as pernicious are simple abuses of its systems and products — often stumbled upon by an average person with too much time on their hands. For instance, finding ways to purchase items from Google without paying, […]

Update 1: 2018/08/14 9:23am PDT Chinese firm Mobvoi — founded by ex-Googlers — has a history of making connected watches that stretches back to its original TicWatch and TicWatch 2 running the proprietary TicWear OS. Around this time last year, the TicWatch S and E were launched with Wear OS (then Android Wear) on board, and […]

If you’ve been a Wear OS user for a while, odds are you’ve noticed that wearable apps in the Play Store are sometimes not very good. Google is looking to change that, and asking nicely didn’t work. Soon, the app quality guidelines that rolled out with Wear 2.0 will become mandatory. According to Google, it […]