Android Archive

That's right: beginning today, a select set of Android Wear smartwatches (and all future watches) will work with the iPhone. The app should be rolling out worldwide soon. It’s been a long time coming - and it means that Google will be challenging the Apple Watch on its home turf. Those Android Wear watches will be both cheaper and more varied than the Apple Watch - just like Android itself.

Recent changes to the rules phone makers need to follow to get a Google approved version of Android have allowed for certain apps to no longer be mandatory. Google Play Games, Google Play Books, Google+ and Google Newsstand now join the ranks with Google Earth and Google Keep as apps that aren't a required part of the Google applications package. They are still in the Play Store, are still regularly updated and will work just as well for those of us who want them. And this is how things ought to be. In fact, we'd like to see even more Google apps get sent packing, but still be there in the Play store for those who want them.

What does it mean to use a flagship smartphone in 2015? It likely means that you're using a phone with a great display, fast performance, good battery life, good build quality, and a great camera. If I'm being honest, I have to say that the OnePlus 2 doesn't hit all of those marks, but it hits most of them and does so at a price that's just over half that of a comparable iPhone. It's not a flagship killer by any means - this year or next - but it's a really solid smartphone that does most everything you need it to do really well. It's easily the best deal on the market right now if you want a high-end smartphone.

Whether you like them straight out of the bag, roasted to a golden brown exterior with a molten center, or in fluff form, who doesn't like marshmallows? We definitely like them! Since the launch of the M Developer Preview at Google I/O in May, we've enjoyed all of your participation and feedback. Today with the final Developer Preview update, we're introducing the official Android 6.0 SDK and opening Google Play for publishing your apps that target the new API level 23 in Android Marshmallow.

In order to address some of the sources of CPU overhead and provide developers with more explicit control over rendering, w've been working to bring a new 3D rendering API, Vulkan, to Android. Like OpenGL ES, Vulkan is an open standard for 3D graphics and rendering maintained by Khronos. Vulkan is being designed from the ground up to minimize CPU overhead in the driver, and allow your application to control GPU operation more directly. Vulkan also enables better parallelization by allowing multiple threads to perform work such as command buffer construction at once.

It's been 10 days since Zimperium's Joshua Drake revealed a new Android vulnerability called Stagefright - and Android is just starting to recover. The bug allows an attacker to remotely execute code through a phony multimedia text message, in many cases without the user even seeing the message itself. Google has had months to write a patch and already had one ready when the bug was announced, but as expected, getting the patch through manufacturers and carriers was complicated and difficult.

But then, something unexpected happened: the much-maligned Android update system started to work. Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony and Android One have already announced pending patches for the bug, along with a device-specific patch for the Alcatel Idol 3. In Samsung's case, the shift has kicked off an aggressive new security policy that will deploy patches month by month, an example that's expected to inspire other manufacturers to follow suit. Stagefright seems to have scared manufacturers and carriers into action, and as it turns out, this fragmented ecosystem still has lots of ways to protect itself.

With Lollipop, Google did something that developers had wanted for a while: a dev preview of the upcoming Android build. With the M release, it made that even better with OTA updates for the first time... But that hasn't gone quite as smoothly as we'd hoped it would.

From a specs perspective, the OnePlus 2 features a 5.5-inch, 1080p screen, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, and either 16GB of storage with 3GB of RAM or 64GB of storage with 4GB of RAM. The back-facing camera has a 13-megapixel sensor with optical image stabilization, while the front camera lets you shoot selfies at 5 megapixels. That back camera also includes a two-tone flash and a laser focusing system. While most of these specs are pretty standard fare for a high-end smartphone, the price remains anything but: the 16GB model will retail for $329, while the 64GB version will go for $389. That's more than last year's model, but after spending some time with the phone, I feel like the price increase is justified for what you get.

Got an Xperia Z3 and a home address somewhere in the Kingdom of Sweden? Sony wants your help with testing its next round of software updates for Android, which the company has rounded up in an initiative it's calling "Android concept." The goal, says Sony, is to develop new software "from the ground up," meaning no additional Google Play apps like YouTube on the test build, just the core Google communications software and Sony's stack of custom apps like Camera, Music, and Xperia Lounge.

Every year we see the same promise: this is the year that Android-first development will become a reality. At the same time we see big companies like Instagram repeatedly introduce new apps that are iOS-only. Android has been able to tout more market share than iOS for quite some time, but that doesn't seem to have translated into app developers releasing Android apps at the same time as their iOS counterparts, much less Android-first. Over the past few weeks I've been talking with developers and researching why this is still the case.

If you pay close enough attention to these things, you've probably seen Google Play Services updating from time to time on your Android devices. If you follow the more technical side of Android, you'll know it was announced a couple of years ago to introduce new APIs and features in a way that doesn't require a firmware update. You could be forgiven for dismissing it as a dry and technical part of the OS, but in reality it's a crucially important part of the way modern Android works.

But internally, Android One was seen as an attempt to avoid another China, where Android is popular but comes without Google's services. It was also a hedge against the rising power of Facebook, which is becoming, in many parts of the developing world, the gateway to the Web.

So far, it has done neither. And the audacious hardware program has been anything but.