Category: App Update

The 2-factor authentication app from Microsoft, Microsoft Authenticator, has a new update rolling out that brings a slightly refreshed look to the app as well as compliance with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) directive in the European Union.  The new update is version 6.2.26 for those keeping score at home and it has been released to the Play Store.

As for the new look, it is a slight one compared to the older version of the app.  Now an account is shaded grey if it isn’t setup for identify verification and is only used to access organizational resources.

About two months ago, Google Play Books picked up the ability to play audiobooks natively and overall, the experience was pretty good.  But Google is wanting to make the experience better, especially when audiobooks are played in conjunction with Google Assistant.

First, you now have what Google is calling Smart Resume.  When you are interrupted by something on your phone and you need to pause your audiobook mid-sentence, when you return, Smart Resume will rewind you back to the beginning of the word or sentence you were on so you can pick back up where you left off.  Prior to this update, you had to manually rewind so this make that feature far more helpful.

Readers who subscribe to YouTube TV may want to check for a new feature that is rolling out.  A cloud-side change is happening for the app and when it lands on your account, you will have the ability to customize your live channel guide.

The new feature is found under Settings>Live Guide and allows you to move channel orders around to one that works best for you.  This way you can have your favorite channels at the top of the list instead of having to go find it.

Google Maps, one of Google’s apps with over 1 billion users, has been updated to bring nearly four dozen new languages.  The update is a cloud-side change so as long as you are running latest version of the app on your phone, you are good to go.

As for the 39 new languages, here is the full list:  Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Mongolian, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese, and Zulu.

A new update to Microsoft Outlook for Android is rolling out, bringing improved conversation viewing and interactions for users.  The new update is version 2.2.121 for those keeping score at home.  It has been released to the Play Store so if you have Outlook installed, you should get the OTA update over the next few days.

First, all messages now appear uncollapsed in conversations and with cleaner separation between messages.  This makes it easier for you to scan email conversations to find a particular email in the thread.  Previously, everything was collapsed into one header and you it looked like one giant email.

Google has rolled out a great new update to the Google Files Go app for Android.  The update brings three key new features to the lightweight file management and storage clean up for all Android phones, not just Android Go devices.

First, Files Go now has Google Search built into it and it is proper Google Search.  It gives you instant results, search history, autocomplete and filters to file management on your phone.  The search feature is found on the Files tab at the bottom of the page and it works offline.