Category: App Update

A new update to the diet and wellness tracking app, MyFitnessPal, is rolling out in the Play Store.  The update, version 6.24-10373 for those keeping score at home, brings a lot of general fixes and improvements to the app as well as bottom tab navigation.

The new navigation in the app falls in line with what Google expects from apps today and provides three options to users.  The Home tab is your news and information feed with posts from MyFitnessPal themselves as well as achievements that friends who use the app have completed.  The Diary tab is where you log your food and exercise for the day while the Me tab gives you an overview of your profile, see your friends profiles, and your achievements.

Build 61.0.3163.98 of Chrome for Android has been released by the Chrome team at Google, bringing with it a handful of fixes and improvements.  The update is now in the Google Play Store and should roll out to devices via an OTA update over the course of the next few days.

The update, as is usually the case, brings a lot of under-the-hood updates to the browser as well as security fixes.  Most of these updates are focused on stability and performance of the app.  There are, however, other fixes that are specifically called out in the release notes.

Apple’s music app for Android, Apple Music, has a new update rolling out that brings several new features and enhancements.  Perhaps the most interesting of these is support for Google Assistant in the app.  Now you can use the “OK Google” command to open the app and stream music from it much like you can Google Play Music.

There is also a new widget for the app that will allow you to see your recently played songs which also has the ability to play music from your home screen.

The Google+ app for Android has an update rolling out in the Play Store that brings support for Android Oreo’s new Notification Channels feature.  The update is version 9.20 for those keeping score.  It was released yesterday and should come to everyone who has the app installed over the course of the next few days.

For those who aren’t familiar, Notification Channels are built into apps by developers as a way to allow you greater control over the notifications you see and how you are notified.  They bring granularity to notifications and not just a general “on or off” type functionality.  That’s an over simplification but you get the idea.

With this update to Google+, you have three channels now available:  App Status Updates, New Activity, and Content.  You can now customize the notifications for the app to different levels depending on how you set it up.  To setup the channels, go to Settings>Notifications then select the Google+ app.  There you will see your stock notification settings which you can tap to adjust.

Microsoft is in the process of rolling out a new integration between their personal assistant, Cortana, and the Skype messaging client.  The new integration essentially makes Cortana a chat-bot inside of Skype, allow it to give you suggestions for replies to messages, get weather and news information, as well as facts and other information.  In order for it to work, you have to give Cortana various permissions for Skype and since it is rolling out now, not everyone is seeing it just yet.

If this sounds familiar as an Android user, it should.  Essentially Microsoft is replicating what Google has done with Allo and Google Assistant which, for Windows 10 PC users and those who are heavily in the Microsoft ecosystem, this is great news.

The experimenting with the layout of the Google Play Store continues as Google trots out yet another new look & feel for the app.  The latest update brings a new top level sliding navigation to reach different parts of the Play Store as well as a slightly condensed menu.

The top navigation, in my opinion, is quite nice.  All of the major areas of the store are now in a sliding navigation bar at the top of the screen, which makes finding specific areas of the store much easier.  This new navigation bar can be slid left to right and then you tap on the area you want to see.  Those areas include For You, Top Charts, Categories, Editors’ Choice, Early Access, and Family.

Previously, to get to these areas, you either had to find it on the menu (depending on which flavor of the store you had on your phone or tablet) or you had to scroll down to that section on the main page.  Neither was a great user experience and this new navigation bar greatly simplifies the process.