Category: App Update

The first significant update to the popular Super Mario Run game is now rolling out to Android players.  The update ups the version to 2.1 and brings several improvements and additions to the game.  For those who haven’t kept up, in the game, you are the ever popular Mario and you are doing what you do best:  Collecting coins and progressing your way through six worlds in the game.  The way gameplay works is that you can only move forward, up or down so no going back to get coins you missed for example.  The object of the game is to collect as many coins as you can before get to the flagpole at the end of the level before time runs out.  Sound familiar? Oh, and yes you still can save Princess Peach and defeat Bowser too.  There are two other game play modes as well to keep you entertained.

With this update, the number of toads (which you collect through Toad Rally playing in the game) has now increased to 99,999.  This should make it limitless for casual players.  You can now also use your customized Mii character as your player icon that you have created in Miitomo.  Finding friends also got easier with this update as you can now find them with your associated Nintendo account in the game.

Microsoft has rolled out a pretty significant update to their enterprise chat & messaging client, Microsoft Teams.  The update, version 1.0.0.201742301 for those keeping score at home and who like to play version Bingo, and it brings some features that make it much more productive and useful.  First, you can now add and remove team members, something that was only available on the Teams site.  You can also create new channels in the app.  This was also something that was web-only when Teams launched and frankly, was a bit of a handicap for the app.  The ability to quickly create channels while on the go is a critical feature for this type of app, especially if Microsoft is positioning it as a Slack competitor.

Other improvements around chats include the ability to rename group chats and add members to existing chats.

Microsoft has rolled out another update to OneDrive for Android, bringing the ability to mark folders available for offline use.  The updated build is version 4.12 for those keeping score and is out in the Play Store now.  Expect the update to hit your devices over the course of the new few days.  The new offline folder feature is available for Office 365 Personal, Home and Solo users currently with support for work and education accounts “will be rolled out soon!”.  When is soon?  That’s not clear but given Microsoft’s consistent updating of their Android apps, likely not very long.

But not all is lost in this update for work and education users of OneDrive.  This update brings an updated design to the Discovery view which now gives you access to a feed of the most relevant content across your company or campus.

Google Express, the shopping app with next day delivery for subscribers, has been updated with several changes.  The biggest new feature is the ability to invite friends and family to add items to your Shopping Lists.  Items can be added to these shared lists via your phone (the app), computer or by speaking to Google Home.  As you may recall, the Google Assistant shopping list feature of Home moved on Monday from Google Keep to Google Express.  That has irked more than a few Home users who didn’t want to have to install another app to manage shopping lists.  Deeper though, it makes sense as all shopping and shopping lists are now in Express and not in both Express (if you used it) and Keep.  Your mileage, of course, will vary.

Another big part of this update is the deprecation of support for Android Jelly Bean.  That version of Android was released nearly 5 years ago and continues to fall in usage based on the Android Distribution Report.  With regards to Express, the app won’t run on a device running Jelly Bean.

Google Photos version 2.13 is rolling out right now in the Google Play Store and with it comes a new video stabilization feature.  The new feature allows you to post-process videos you have shot and uploaded to the service to give your videos a more stable look.  This, my friends, is Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence at its best.  Using ML and AI, Photos is analyzing your video and essentially correcting the video at the pixel level.  It is astonish that it can sort it out and even more astonishing that you have this in the app.  A free app.

The new feature is located on the edit menu when you select a video from your Google Photos library.  Once you have the video open, you will see a new stabilize button.  Tap it and Photos will start processing the video and smoothing it out.

Google Text-to-speech is not an app you probably do a lot of tweaking on but it is an important foundational app for Android.  The app essentially serves as an engine for other apps so they can read text on the screen aloud to you.  For example, if you are in Google Play Books and want the app to read aloud a book, this is the app that makes the magic happen.  Or Google Translate to translate text.  So when an update comes out for it, it is important to get it.  The latest update to Google Text-to-speech is rolling out now and it is version 3.11.12 for those keeping score at home.  It comes with several new tweaks for users as well as new languages.

First, let’s cover the languages.  In this update, support for Bangla (India, Czech, Khmer, Napali, Sinhala and Ukrainian have been added to the engine.  Along with this, Google has added intonation control over several more voices that are in the engine and have made general improvements on many of the voices in the app.  Google did not specifically call out which languages were impacted by these latter two.