The best apps download superpowers to your smartphone. The Verge covers the new and noteworthy Android apps, iPhone apps, and games, highlighting great design, impressive utility, and novel features. If it belongs on your phone, you’ll find it on The Verge.
That’s according to WABetaInfo, which spotted that a recent beta of the Android app supports sharing motion photos, Android’s GIF-like animations that accompany some photos, similar to the Live Photos feature found on iPhones (and which, the outlet notes, WhatsApp for iOS already supports).
[wabetainfo.com]
During his weekly AMA, Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged that “we really should build” a small-but-important feature that competitors like TikTok and YouTube offer: picture-in-picture (PIP). Maybe you’ll be able to multitask and watch reels soon.
Also, Instagram is working to improve its search feature this year — including the ability to search for content, not just other accounts.
Google has felt like a product in decline for a long time. Kagi offers a new, better vision for search, but the only way it works is if you’re willing to pay.
I tried out the new productivity app Touch Grass, which just came out for iOS. It blocks apps of your choosing and only unblocks them after you take a picture of your hand literally touching grass. I even tried tricking it with fake grass with mixed results. You can block two apps in the free version of Touch Grass and an unlimited number of apps in the subscription version, which costs $5.99/month or $49.99/year.
One of the malicious apps masqueraded as a file manager and had more than 10 downloads, according to the cybersecurity firm Lookout. The app contained Android spyware called KoSpy, which Lookout attributes to the North Korean hacking group APT37. It’s capable of collecting a device’s SMS messages, call logs, location, files, and more.
Lookout says the apps it found have since been removed from the Google Play Store.
The iOS and iPadOS versions of Dropbox’s mobile app were updated this week with support for Live Photos which was first introduced on the iPhone 6S and iOS 9 in 2015, as spotted by 9to5Mac.
As with Apple’s Photos app, you can press and hold on a Live Photo in Dropbox to play the short video. You can also convert Live Photos to still images and back again, and convert HEIC Live Photos to JPEGs.
Pocket Casts has been my podcast app of choice for years now, mostly because of how well it works across different platforms. Its mobile apps opened up access for free a few years ago, and on Tuesday morning the company announced that now applies to its (previously paying customer only) web and desktop apps (Mac, Windows PC) as well.
I have an idea about which podcast you could queue up first.
[blog.pocketcasts.com]
Google made the change to the feature, which adds app integrations to Gemini, in a beta version of the Google app for Android last week, later mentioning it in a Workspace weekly recap published Friday.
The recap adds that Gemini Apps are now powered by Gemini Flash 2.0, Google’s latest small on-device AI model, bringing “improved performance and better advanced reasoning capabilities with efficiency and speed.”
[workspaceupdates.googleblog.com]
The keyboard app’s latest beta transforms its rectangular keys into... circles, as spotted earlier by Android Authority. It kind of looks like a digital version of Logitech’s Pop Keys keyboard, which isn’t all that pleasant to type on.
The company recently met with investment bankers “to discuss preparations for an initial public offering as soon as this year,” sources tell The New York Times. Discord was last valued at $15 billion in 2021, but it has since launched several notable upgrades, including more features for Nitro subscribers, along with better integrations on PS5 and Xbox.
