Category: App Update

Last month, Google announced that they were going to be releasing an update to Google Play Services to address a network issues caused by the service.  The issue would essentially flood your home network with packets as your phone would continually try to connect to Chromecast devices on it – your Chromecast and Google Home devices specifically.

The update, at the time, rolled out into the beta for Play Services but today is rolling out to everyone.  The new build is version 11.9.75 and should be coming to devices over the course of the next few days.

A new update to Chrome for Android has been released into the Play Store, bringing a fix to a rendering crash that was impacting some users.  The new version is build 64.0.3282.137 for those keeping score at home.  This update follows the original release of Chrome 64 for Android last month.

This update is purely a bug fix release, addressing a rendering crash that was impacting a small number of users as well as a fix for issues around geo location notifiers.  Otherwise, there are general bug fixes and improvements in the update.  You can read the full change log here but there are not any new features.

The camera app for the Essential Phone has a new update rolling out in the Play Store that brings a lot of new features and improvements.  The company announced the new camera app build on Twitter a couple of days ago.

Today we released an update to Essential Camera App that includes app shortcut support for mono, selfie and portrait modes, optimized Camera Roll performance, and various stability fixes. Download it here: https://t.co/zXoZ765GHF

— Essential (@essential) January 26, 2018

If you have an Essential Phone, the app update is now live in the Play Store.

Microsoft Bing has a new update rolling out for Android users that brings an improved in-app browser experience along with a handful of other tweaks & improvements.  The new build is version 8.1.26158908 for those keeping score at home.

The biggest change in this new build is the improvements around in-app browsing.  Generally the entire experience is better but video and image viewing is better along with easier tab navigation and the ability to find text on a page.

Microsoft has released an update to Outlook for Android that brings a number of improvements to the calendar portion of the app.  The update is version 2.2.91 and should be coming to those have the app installed over the course of the next few days.

The biggest changes in this update are the ability to set events on your calendar as free or busy as well as being able to mark events as private when you are sharing your calendar.  This is most often used in corporate environments but can also impact personally shared calendars too.

The Google Phone app has a small update rolling out but it has a big fix for some users who have had issues with answering calls with a Bluetooth device connected to your phone.  The update, version 16.0.181771308 is rolling out now and it fixes an issue where users couldn’t answer calls because their phones wouldn’t wake up when a call was incoming.  The issue seemed to impact mostly Pixel 2 owners but others in the Google Product forums reported it as well.

The issue, based on reports in the forums, seems to have been resolved with this update which became an issue after the last update to the app.