Category: App Update

Microsoft has released an update to OneDrive, their cloud storage app & service, for Android that brings a much improved photo sync capability to your phone or tablet.  The updated version is build 3.9.1 for those keeping score at home and it is available now in the Google Play Store.  The entire update seemingly is focused on helping you make sure that the photos you have on your device get sync’d up, not just those you take with your phone’s camera.  Let me explain.

For baseball fans, it is a great time of the year.  Spring Training has started and the season is just a little over a month away from starting.  One of the best sports app out there – and it has been for a long time – is MLB.com At Bat.  It provides a huge wealth of information during the baseball season on your favorite team, players and from around the league and if you love the National Pastime, this app is a must have on your devices.

The league has issued an update to the Android version of the app, build 5.0.0 for those keeping score at home (see what I did just there?) and is available now in the Google Play Store.  The biggest part of this update has to do with the general look of the app.  The update has a far more Material Design look to it than in the previous builds and that new look flows for both the phone and tablet UIs.  With so many apps now following the Material Design look, the MLB app felt a little out of place towards the end of last season.  Now it looks the part a bit better but doesn’t lose it’s baseball look either.

Google Drive for Android has been updated with a feature that many of us who spend more time on their mobiles versus their desktop have wanted:  Trash management.  With the latest version of the app, version 2.3.583.20.30 for those keeping score at home and like playing Google Version Bingo, you now have the ability to view items in your Trash, permanently delete those items or restore them to your Google Drive files.  It is a simple feature but a huge step forward if you accidentally delete a file.  Until this point that mean going to a PC, Mac or Chromebook and going to the Google Drive site.  No more!

The latest update to Gmail for Android is finally bringing Rich Text Formatting to the email app.  The update has been released to the Google Play Store but it may be a few days before you see the OTA update on your devices.  Once you do, the ability to bold, italic, color, highlight and underline text will be available for you when you are creating an email.  Rumors of these features coming to Gmail have actually been floating around for a few months now.  Several sites have done APK teardowns that have shown the handlers in the code for the ability to do this type of formatting but until this point it hasn’t been available.

Last month I posted about a change that is coming to Google Play Games around Gamer IDs and the deprecation of the Google+ linking requirement.  That change is starting to roll out now via some back end changes in the service along with an updated app for Android.   To this point, if you played a game on your Android device and signed into the service, it required you to have a Google+ ID to do so.  It created a multi-step process for users and is a bit of a hold over from when Google tried to push everyone and everything through Google+.  At some point this year, Google is going to eliminate this requirement and gamers will be able to sign in one time per account and any new games they start playing, they will be automatically signed into the service.

Yesterday there was a lot of news floating around Gmail and the new Gmailify feature.  First things first, what is Gmailify?  This is a feature that allows you to take your non-Gmail accounts like Hotmail and Yahoo and give them Gmail-like features such as spam filtering, Google Now cards and other features that up to this point have been Google only.  It is a pretty slick feature, especially if you have an email account other than Gmail.

With this update comes a new Android version of the app which will allow you to fully enable this feature.