clair037

Update : Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's SVP for Android, Chrome OS and Chromecast says that Chrome OS is here to stay : "While we've been working on ways to bring together the best of both operating systems, there's no plan to phase out Chrome OS." Original post : Wall Street Journal reports that Google works on integrating Chrome OS into Android and will release a unified OS that runs on phones, tablets, laptops and more. "The company plans to unveil its new, single operating system in 2017, but expects to show off an early version next year." So why kill Chrome OS and switch to Android? Chrome OS has a small desktop market share, while Android is the dominant mobile OS. There are a lot more apps in the Google Play Store than in the Chrome Web Store and Google had a hard time convincing developers to build Chrome apps. Google even ported the Android runtime to Chrome, so that you can run Android apps in Chrome OS. Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, has re...

As promised, YouTube Red was launched today in the US. If you use the mobile apps for Android and iOS, you probably noticed that the title changed to "YouTube Red" and there's a new "YouTube Red" section in the settings. YouTube didn't even update the apps: the changes were probably triggered automatically. There are 3 different ways to sign up for YouTube Red: from YouTube.com or the Android app, from Google Play Music and from YouTube's iOS app. If you use in-app purchases on iOS, you'll spend 30% more every month ($12.99 vs $9.99 regular pricing), so it's not a good idea to do that. The desktop site has a new logo: Here are some screenshots from the iPad app: "With a YouTube Red membership, you’ll experience YouTube without video ads, be able to save videos to watch offline, and play videos in the background on your mobile device, all for $9.99 a month. And just like with our advertising revenue, the majority of revenue we get from YouTu...

Daniel Fletcher, a reader of this blog, noticed that Google Calendar's URL changed from www.google.com/calendar to calendar.google.com . This seems to be a recent change, even though the Google Apps Blog announced it back in September. "In an effort to further increase security, in the coming weeks we'll be changing the main Google Calendar URL from 'www.google.com/calendar' to 'calendar.google.com.' Following the launch, the old Calendar url will simply redirect to the new one, so the overall impact of this change on Google Apps customers should be minimal," informed Google. Browsers like Chrome and Safari will ask you for permission again to show notifications. Greasemonkey scripts and extensions that use the old URLs will probably stop working, so developers will need to update them. Daniel Fletcher wonders why "Maps is now google.com/maps, when it used to be maps.google.com and Calendar seems to have gone the other way". Maybe Google Ma...

One of the best features from Android Marshmallow is auto backup for apps . Android used to have a backup feature that only worked for system settings and a few apps that enabled it. Now Google saves the settings and data for all the apps and backs it up to Google Drive, so you can quickly restore it when needed. I've checked the Android section from Google Dashboard and noticed the difference between Nexus 7 running Android 4.3 and Nexus 5 running Android 6.0. While Nexus 7 only backed up system settings, the wallpaper and some data for Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Keyboard, Nexus 5 backed up the data for almost all the apps: from QuickPic Gallery to MyFitnessPal, from Firefox to Opera Mini and Angry Birds 2. There are still some apps that don't support auto backup, but at least the feature is now opt-out instead of opt-in. The Android section from Google Dashboard shows a lot of useful information about your Android devices (IMEI number, registered date, last activity d...

For many people, routers are an afterthought. Stuck in a closet, out of sight and out of mind, regular users only think about their routers when something is wrong. Dealing with routers is frustrating: they usually have poor user interfaces, buggy firmware, annoying lights and most people don't know how to change their settings, update firmware or improve their performance. Google hopes to solve these issues with OnHub, a series of routers designed by Google and manufactured by third-party companies. After launching a TP-LINK router, Google announced a second router  with similar specs, this time from ASUS. The new router is even more expensive ($219.99) and can only be preordered in the US . OnHub routers are designed to be fast, secure, easy to use and to look good. "Like our first router, the ASUS OnHub comes with faster Wi-Fi, easy set-up, and simple management with the Google On app. With the ASUS OnHub, we're also introducing Wave Control, which lets you boost the W...

A lot has changed since Google launched Chrome back in September 2008. Chrome's popularity has been growing ever since then and all the other important browsers became more like Chrome. Google focused on the things that mattered and transformed the browser from a simple application into a "modern OS" for web apps. While there are many services that claim to measure the market share for browsers, I tend to think that StatCounter is the most accurate. StatCounter's stats for 2008-2015 show that Chrome's market share grew from 0% to 53% in 7 years, while IE's share declined from 67% to 15%. According to StatCounter, Chrome is now the dominant browser, while IE and Firefox are continually losing market share. It's clear that Google did a lot things right when it launched Chrome, but few people anticipated that Google's browser will take over the world. Most people didn't know what's a browser and only knew that they were supposed to click on the b...

Google's search engine hasn't always been very smart. In its early years, Google only tried to find the pages that matched the words from your query and ranked them. It's hard to answer a question without understanding it, but that's what Google did. Google constantly improved its algorithms, added personalization options, started to match synonyms and expand abbreviations, but Knowledge Graph and Hummingbird were the greatest leaps that put machine learning to work and made Google smarter. Google started to understand the meaning behind a question, to disambiguate words and to find answers, not just pages that include the words from the query. Bloomberg reports that Google uses even more artificial intelligence to answer questions and rank results. RankBrain is a new AI system that has been used for the past few months to improve search results. "If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn't familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrase...

With all this talk about Android and software updates, I realized that one of the biggest Android advantages is that you can install custom firmware or downgrade to an old Android version. My old Nexus 7 tablet from 2012 doesn't support the latest Android release. Instead of installing custom firmware from some independent developers, I decided to go back to the smoothest Android version I can find. Asus skimped on quality storage and Nexus 7 was pretty slow and laggy, especially when using Android 5.x. Google has a page with factory images for Nexus devices and it's pretty easy to install any Android version that's officially available. You have to backup your data, enable USB debugging and run some scripts. I've installed Android 4.4.4 and Nexus 7 was much smoother, but there was still room for improvement. Android 4.3 was even better and I decided to keep it. It's like having a completely new device, even if it runs some outdated software released 2 years ago. ...

Google has  some stats about Google Photos , the online photo sharing service released 5 months ago. Google Photos has 100 million monthly active users. They created more than 15 million animations and collages and their backed-up photos and videos use more than 3,720 TB of storage. Paris is the top photographed place, followed by New York and Barcelona. Besides people, food and cars are the most photographed things. Sky, beaches and mountains are also included in the top 10 things photographed by Google users. The top 6 events in Google Photos are: wedding, concerts, Christmas, dancing, birthday and clubbing. The most popular searches are for baby photos, but "me" is also a popular query.

Android started as an open platform that brought together many competing companies. iPhone's launch changed Android's development and was an important reason for Android's success. Phone manufacturers and carriers wanted an "iPhone killer" and Android was a good bet, but it still had a lot of rough edges and there were many missing features. This was a great opportunity for manufactures to fill in the gaps, create their own user interfaces and develop their own apps and widgets that brought value and differentiation. Here's an image from Android's original SDK emulator: Why did Google acquire Andy Rubin's company and invested in Android? One of the reasons was to make a better platform for developing mobile apps. Google already had a few mobile apps for feature phones, Symbian, Blackberry and it was very difficult to add new features and to test the applications because of the inconsistent APIs and their implementations. Android seemed like an interest...

Do you remember Music Key , YouTube's subscription service that allowed you watch ad-free music videos, download them and play music videos in the background? It's now called YouTube Red and it's no longer limited to music videos. YouTube Red is launching on October 28 in the US and it will bring the features from Music Key to all the YouTube videos. "YouTube Red lets you enjoy videos across all of YouTube without ads, while also letting you save videos to watch offline on your phone or tablet and play videos in the background, all for $9.99 a month. Your membership extends across devices and anywhere you sign into YouTube, including our recently launched Gaming app and a brand new YouTube Music app we're announcing today that will be available soon." Just like Music Key, YouTube Red will include the Play Music subscription and Play Music subscribers will get access to YouTube Red for free. Of course, YouTube Red will need to be available in your country fir...

It looks like the Google Notifications section is not only for Google+ and Google Photos. Daniel Fletcher, a reader of this blog, noticed a Chrome notification from a supervised user who sent a permission request. It's likely that more Google services and products will show notifications in the navigation bar. Google already stacks the notification cards for Google Photos. { Thanks, Daniel. }

Google's password manager available at passwords.google.com has an interesting list of URLs in the source code. Most URLs redirect to Google's My Account page, but there's a new subdomain which returns a 404 error: families.google.com. It's not clear if Google intends to launch a new account manager for families. Google Chrome already has a feature that lets you add supervised users and setup parental controls. You can block certain websites, review browsing history, change settings. Google Play has a Family section that highlights family-friendly content  and Google Play Music will offer a family plan  for $14.99. There's also YouTube for Kids . { Thanks, PhistucK Productions . ]

When you're searching Google for a song that has multiple cover versions, Google shows a new section below the video: "other recordings of this song". For example, if you're searching for [Felix Jaehn Ain't Nobody], Google shows the original version of the song from 1983 (Rufus and Chaka Khan) and a recent cover version from 2013 (Jasmine Thompson), which was remixed by Felix Jaehn, a German DJ. You can click the other recordings to find more about them and watch their videos.