Just as we're processing today's news regarding an upcoming video-sharing app from Apple, a new report claims Google is set to enhance YouTube's social experience in the fall by unveiling a new Backstage section in the mobile app and on the web.
According to VentureBeat, Backstage will let YouTube users share not just videos, but also photos, polls, links, text posts and more with their subscribers.
Google today issued a small update to its YouTube client on the App Store, adding a feature that enables better suggestions while fixing three annoying bugs.
Bumped to version 11.32, the iPhone and iPad application now makes it easy to improve personalized suggestions by marking recommended videos under the Up Next section as “Not Interested,” which helps train the algorithm to better tailor recommendations to your personal tastes.
Despite not being in danger of closing down thanks to its cash cushion of $1.4 billion, the popular ride-sharing service Lyft has in recent months attempted to sell itself to Apple and a few other Silicon Valley giants like Google, Amazon and Uber, The New York Times reported yesterday. None of the mentioned companies commented on the story.
The nation's second-largest ride-hailing firm also attempted a sale to China's leading ride-sharing service, Didi Chuxing, into which Apple invested $1 billion, and to General Motors, one of its largest investors that refused to make a written offer to buy it.
Robocalls, phone calls that uses a computerized autodialer to deliver a pre-recorded message, may become a thing of the past as Apple, Google and other Silicon Valley giants join forces with the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to crack down on spammy automated phone calls, according to Reuters this morning.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is expected to make the announcement at the first “Robocall Strike Force” meeting at the FCC later today.
Duo, a video calling app announced at Google I/O 2016, released today in the App Store as a free download. A one-to-one video calling app “for everyone,” Duo allows iPhone users to call their Android-toting friends, and vice versa. After signing up with your mobile phone number, you can place video calls to contacts who also have Duo installed on their device. According to Google, Duo for Android and iOS began rolling out today and will be live worldwide in the next few days.
Like many photo-syncing apps, Google's Photos online service and the mobile app provide an optional feature that automatically backs up to the cloud every image and video in a user's photo library. Apple, too, offers such a feature with iCloud Photo Library but its free five-gigabyte iCloud storage tier is no match for Google Photos unlimited cloud storage for your (recompressed) images (up to 16MP) and videos (up to 1080p). To drive that point home, they've put together an amusing new ad solely focused on that feature.
We were first to tell you about the most recent update to the mobile Google Photos app, which packs in 3D Touch shortcuts on the Home screen whilst highlighting a storage optimization feature. The following day Google published this video, a nice play on the widely criticized problem of entry-level 16GB iPhones having nowhere near the capacity to hold all of the photos people take on their iPhones.
“Because life shouldn’t stop when your phone storage does,” says Google. “Free up space with Google Photos and never run out of storage again.”
Google today issued a minor refresh to its native Photos app on the App Store, introducing 3D Touch shortcuts for the Home screen and a much-needed new feature designed to optimize storage space on your device. Bumped to version 1.13, Google Photos for iPhone and iPad produces a 3D Touch menu upon pressing its Home screen icon, giving you access to the following shortcuts: I'm Feeling Lucky, Free Up Space and Make Shared Album.
In addition to these 3D Touch shortcuts and the new storage-optimization feature, this edition of the app packs in unspecified performance improvements.
Following its debut on the App Store nearly three months ago, Google's gesture-driven predictive keyboard for the iPhone and iPad—called Gboard—today received its first feature-focused update. Gboard 1.1 for iOS, a free download, includes a darker keyboard theme, smart GIF suggestions and increased global availability with language support for English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal) and Spanish (Spain).
Since buying Snapseed from Nik Software in September 2012, Google has been somewhat neglecting this once popular mobile image editor, issuing maintenance updates that were light on new features. Today, the search firm announced that Snapseed, at long last, is getting some interesting new capabilities via an update on iOS and Android. The Text filter is now available and you can configure the app to resize photos when sharing/exporting.
UI adjustments and bug fixes are included in Snapseed 2.8 as well.
According to a post published yesterday on the official YouTube Engineering and Developers Blog, 97 percent of YouTube's traffic is now encrypted since the Internet giant began rolling out encryption using HTTPS two years ago. Encrypted traffic increases your security by garbling the data as it travels from servers to your computer, and vice versa, in order to make these transmissions unreadable to rogue parties without an encryption key.
Google Translate is a very useful tool when you deal with pages or people that may write in different languages than your own. With it, you can immediately translate text from one language to another.
One of the great features of the Android platform is the Tap to Translate feature that lets you translate text from anywhere, and with a new free jailbreak tweak called Tap to Translate, you can now have this feature on your iOS devices as well.