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Rarely do tech companies apologize for mistakes or issues.  The only exception is usually a data breach and even then, it is usually well after the fact.  So when Google’s Vice President of Google Home products, Rishi Chandra, sends out an email apologizing for an outage, you tend to take note.

As you may recall, and may have been impacted yourself, there was a wide spread outage of Google Home earlier this week.  The email went out to all Google Home customers yesterday, apologizing for the outage and giving a bit of detail on what happened – well, as much as Google is willing to talk about it.

The second Chrome 69-based build for the Chrome OS Dev Channel has arrived today.  Build 69.0.3473.0 (Platform version: 10820.0.0) is making its way out now to devices registered in the channel but you can manually check for the update by typing chrome://help in the browser bar and then tapping the Check for Update button.

As you would expect with a build in the Dev Channel, which is essentially the alpha build channel for the Chrome OS platform, this release has a significant number of bug, performance, and security fixes in it.  Google did not release a log of all the changes which isn’t uncommon in these early builds, especially in the Dev Channel.

Instagram Lite, a much smaller version of the full Instagram app, has now landed in the Google Play Store.  The app, which only 573K in size, was quietly released into the store late yesterday and appears to be limited to testing in Mexico at the moment.  A broader roll out is expected, but it isn’t clear when that will happen.

The introduction of a lite version of Instagram goes with a current trend that is happening within app development which is to bring lighter weight apps that require less resources to mass of Android devices out in the market, especially in developing markets.

If there was any doubt that Google is planning to make Linux available on a wide range of Chromebooks, a find by XDA Developers should put them to rest.  The code snippet found in a Chromium commit has added 18 new Apollo Lake powered Chromebooks to Project Crostini, the codename for the project to add Linux to Chrome OS.

The new additions are Chromebooks from the likes of Acer, Dell, and Lenovo, offering a much broader group of devices that will be able to run Linux and, notably, not the upper end of processing power.