Category: Android

After doing a limited A/B testing of the new look, YouTube has begun a full scale roll out of a new full screen width thumbnails look to the stream site.  Instead of having smaller thumbnails with the titles of the just below them, you have have a widescreen looking thumbnail with the title under it in a cleaner font.

The update appears to be a cloud-side update so as long as you are running the latest version of the app, you should see this new look roll out to you over the course of the next few hours.

Twitter has begun the process of rolling out a new bottom navigation bar to everyone.  The update to the Twitter for Android app is a cloud-side update meaning that so long as you have the latest version of the app, you should get the new navigation bar in the social app.  For those that are curious, the latest version is 7.53.0.

There isn’t a lot of mystery here – you get a bottom navigation bar when this update is pushed to your account.  You have the Home (feed), search, notifications, and direct messages all a single tap away with the tab you are on highlighted in blue.

Google Clips, the autonomous AI-driven camera from the Mountain View company, has a new update rolling out for the Android app that supports it.  It brings a new timelapse feature to the camera as well as other improvements to things like recognizing facial expressions.  The new build is version 1.6.2026903322 for those keeping score at home.

The big new feature in the app is timelapse support.  Now you can setup your Google Clips camera in this mode and it will capture a continuous stream of everything that the camera sees.  It will then condense it into a fast-forwarded timelapse which you can then save to your Google Photos account.  While it goes somewhat against the grain of what Google intended Clips to be – a spontaneous event capturing camera with your family, kids and pets – this new timelapse feature should give you a quick and easy way to capture things like sunrises and sunsets.

Yesterday, Google announced that a Morse Code keyboard was coming to the Gboard app for iOS while improvements to the keyboard were made to the Android version.  The idea behind the keyboard came from Tania Finlayson, a developer who also has cerebral palsy.  The disease essentially left her with the ability to only answer yes or no questions which is why she worked with Google to develop the keyboard.  When Tania learned Morse in her youth, it greatly expanded her vocabulary and ability to communicate.  You can read more about her and her development efforts in the blog post from yesterday.

After the post was made by Google, I had a few friends and some of you readers email me asking a pretty simple question:  “How do I turn on the Morse Code keyboard in Gboard?”  It’s a fair question because it isn’t exactly intuitive and, to be honest, took me a few minutes on how to remember how to do this with any keyboard, let alone the Morse Code one.  In this How To, I’ll show you how to enable it so you have a reference for it.

The weeks leading up to a new release of Android are always fun, especially when it comes to the guessing game of what the new version will be named.  Google famously names each version after a tasty sweet treat, like Android Oreo for example.  The question to this point has been what will Android P be named?  Well, it seems Android Pistachio could be in the mix.

The Polish site TableTwo from one of their readers who reached out to Huawei support regarding the recently announced Oreo update for their phones.  In the exchange, which you can see the screenshots of at the link above, the tech drops the name Android Pistachio as the name of the next version.

After being in a limited test mode for the past several weeks, the new YouTube incognito mode is now rolling out to everyone.  The feature allows you to eliminate the virtual footprints you leave while watching content on the streaming service.  For Android users, you need to make sure you have the latest version of the app, build 13.25.56.

The new feature significantly cuts down on the amount of traceable information left when you view YouTube.  All of your activity will not be tracked by the app so you won’t see similar content pop up later when you return to the app.  Don’t want anyone to know about your cat video watching habits?  Incognito mode is your answer.