Category: Android

In early October, Microsoft's head of gaming Sarah Bond announced the launch of the Xbox game store for the Android platform in November. However, as of today, the launch has not taken place.

Google is inventing a special mechanism for app developers that will allow disabling APK sideloading for the app. If the feature is enabled for an app, it will refuse installing from any other source besides the Google Play store.

Android 15 is expected to introduce an innovative feature known as the Powered Off Finding API, enabling users to locate Pixel devices even when they are powered down. However, this advanced functionality will comes with hardware requirements available in Pixel 8 and later. Android 15 is expected to release in October alongside the Pixel 9 series.

During the Google for Games Developer Summit, company representatives announced exciting updates coming to the Google Play app store. The PC version of Google Play Games will now feature a collection of PC games alongside popular Android titles such as Lineage2M, Odin: Valhalla Rising, Genshin Impact, and Dragonheir: Silent Gods. These games can be run on Windows computers, expanding the gaming options available to users.

Google is currently testing parallel downloads in the Play Store, allowing users to download two applications simultaneously. Also, by enabling specific flags in version 40.0.13 of Google Play Store on a rooted Android device, you can unlock the parallel downloads for up to 5 apps.

Android users can now set Microsoft Copilot as their default assistant instead of the one from Google. This follows the suit of the ChatGPT app, which was previously spotted as having the same capabilities.
But it is still a work in progress, so Microsoft is testing the new option among Copilot Beta users.

Google has introduced a new optical character recognition (OCR) tool in Gboard. The new addition is called Scan Text for Android. The user can add its button to the keyboard's toolbar for faster access.

Microsoft has introduced a new version of SwiftKey for Android, where Bing Chat was renamed Copilot and also included GPT-4 Turbo.

According to new reports, Google is considering blocking the development of Google Camera ports in Android 15. This decision is driven by the company's transition to using its own mobile processors, potentially allowing them to make certain features and applications exclusive to Google Pixel devices.