Articles about Mobile App

Does the world need another messaging app? We’re not sure, but Google is giving us another one anyway, launching Google Allo for Android and iOS.

Key features include "Smart Reply", which analyses incoming messages and suggests appropriate responses you can send with a tap.

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Four months ago, Google announced two new communication apps: Duo, for video calling, and Allo, for traditional WhatsApp-style messaging. Duo arrived for Android and iOS a month ago, while Allo is available from today.

While Allo is a good looking app, it has some big privacy issues that users need to be aware of.

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Sunrise is dead, long live Sunrise! Once considered the best mobile calendar app to ever grace us with its presence, it got acquired by Microsoft and is now officially retired.

But Microsoft has taken its best features and reincarnated them into its Outlook app's calendar, and the general feeling is overall quite positive. The updated Outlook, which is available now, comes with a couple of changes. Interesting Calendars is one of the new features, which allows Outlook to connect with businesses, TV shows and similar.

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Canadian telecommunications company Blackberry announced new services for its Android Hub+ platform this week. Besides the Hub, Calendar and Password Keeper, which were available earlier, another six apps are now available for Android users, for both Marshmallow and Lollipop versions of the operating system.

These apps include Contacts, Tasks, Device Search, Notes, and Launcher, all part of Blackberry's productivity suite. They are available for a free 30-day period, after which they'll cost 99 cents per month. Hub, Calendar, Password Keeper, and Launcher will remain free, but with ads.

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Starting next week -- September 7 specifically -- Apple is starting to clear the crap out of the App Store. What does this mean? It means removing what Apple describes as "problematic and abandoned apps", as well as changing the way apps can be named to prevent developers using SEO'd titles for their creations.

Moving forward, app titles will be limited to just 50 characters, reducing the chance of naming them in a deceptive way. Apple appears to have quite a task ahead of it as it plans to review every app currently featured in the App Store, before contacting developers about those with problems.

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On all mobile platforms -- and, indeed, desktop ones -- there are no end of apps and websites that can be used to earn money and other rewards in return for providing feedback. Google, however, has a different idea.

The company has released a new app for Android called Crowdsource. The idea is to improve the likes of Google Maps and Google Translate with input from the likes of you and I. But rather than paying contributors -- or even offering any kind of incentive -- Google is rather cheekily looking for help completely gratis.

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Three months after unveiling Opera VPN for iOS, browser developer Opera Software has launched Opera VPN 1.0 for Android. The Android build offers the same functionality as the iOS version -- secure VPN encryption to the web (with support for spoofing one of five countries), plus the blocking of both ads and tracking cookies. It also offers one extra feature not (yet) present in Open VPN for iOS: a tool for determining the security of the current network.

Virtual Private Networks provide users with a secure network connection over any internet connection, including insecure networks such as public Wi-Fi hotspots. VPNs can also be used to trick websites into believing the user is connecting from a different country to the one they’re in, helping bypass geographic restrictions.

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He’s already ported OpenOffice to Android, and now Akikazu Yoshikawa has announced the release of Office 700, "the world’s first port of OpenOffice for iOS".

The package includes all the key functions: text editing, spreadsheets, presentation, drawing and just about everything apart from databases.

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Google seems to be realizing, at long last, that very, very few people care about Google+. While there have been endless -- as yet unfounded -- rumors that Google's social tool could be killed off, for now the company appears content simply to decouple it from other services.

The latest change means that Android users looking to post reviews on Google Play no longer have to have a Google+ account to do so. Cue general whooping.

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Consumer grade is the new enterprise grade, a new survey by ScaleArc says. The annual survey among IT decision makers has revealed that consumer apps seem to be much better than enterprise apps, because they’re faster, and more reliable.

"It is clear that consumer grade is the new enterprise grade", says Justin Barney, president and CEO of ScaleArc. "IT decision-makers who build enterprise apps recognize that they, and the general public, have a better experience on their personal apps than their work apps. We’ve all lost patience with websites and apps that don’t offer optimal performance".

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Time is relentless. The GDPR is moving ever closer, while at the same time apps aren’t. And that’s a huge problem for businesses, because if apps are not GDPR-compliant, they’re not GDPR complaint. That can mean huge fines, possibly even the end of businesses.

The fact that apps are far away from being GDPR compliant came as a result of a new and extensive study by Blue Coat Labs. The company analyzed more than 15,000 enterprise cloud applications in use and 108 million enterprise documents stored and shared within them.

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Until now the Latin America region has been slow to adopt mobile apps, partly because of limited availability of high-speed data connections.

But as the Rio Olympics kick off and the world focuses on the region, Yahoo's analytics arm Flurry is releasing its first-ever report analyzing mobile activity across Latin America.

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The dating app Tinder is facing criticism from Europe where lawmakers believe it breaches EU data protection rules. There are calls for the app to be investigated by the European Commission over how it makes use of personal data.

Concerns spring from the fact that Tinder's terms are written in such a way that owner Match Group Inc can continue to use user data even when accounts are closed. It is alleged that these "abusive clauses" are unlawful.

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With a desktop word processor and spreadsheet, you have great power to create a range of documents. The move to the cloud and mobile means that popular Office suites have been ported to mobile platforms, and this usually means missing out on key features -- like add-ons.

Today, this changes as Google has announced that Android add-ons for Docs and Sheets are now available. This means that Google's mobile office tools can be extended with add-ons like DocuSign, Scanbot and Zoho CRM.

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It's something that Android users have been begging for -- the ability to buy an app once, and share it with members of the family. Until now, one way around the problem was to create a shared family account that could be used to download everything, but now Google has a better solution: Google Play Family Library.

This new feature not only lets you share purchased apps with up to six family members, but also games, movies, TV shows and books. It's something that could save Android-using families a good deal of money, and it's rolling out right now.

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