Why does Brussels have Google’s Android in its sights?

The EU is poised to open a new front in its showdown with Google as early as Wednesday by announcing formal charges in relation to the company’s mobile operating system, Android. The case would represent a fresh chapter in Brussels’ efforts to combat the alleged abuses of US technology companies, and has already drawn comparisons with its clash with Microsoft a decade ago.

Has the EU not already charged Google with anti-competitive behaviour?

Yes, this would be a second charge sheet, known as a statement of objections. The first accused Google of abusing its dominance of online search to promote its own shopping services unfairly. Google denies the charge and the case is ongoing.

How dominant is Android as the operating system on smartphones?

Very. More than 80 per cent of smartphones globally use Android’s open-source system, which can be used free of charge by anyone. By contrast Apple’s own iOS operating system, used in the iPhone and iPad, represents only about 13 per cent of the market, according to data from Gartner.

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Google Says Android Is More Secure Than Ever

Despite concerns that Android is susceptible to some scary security issues, Google argues its mobile operating system has never been better.

The company on Tuesday released its Android Security 2015 Annual Report, which shows that as long as users were downloading apps from the company’s Google Play marketplace, they were unlikely to have faced much trouble. In fact, Google’s  GOOGL -1.61%  report shows that “potentially harmful apps,” or PHAs, “were installed on fewer than 0.15% of devices that only get apps from Google Play.”

Google broke down its findings by the potentially harmful application. The company said that installs of apps that collected data were down more than 40% to 0.08% of all Google Play downloads. Spyware app installs decreased by 60% to 0.02% of installs, and “hostile downloaders,” which download malicious apps on a user’s device without their permission, were down 50% to 0.01% of installs.

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420 Million Android Devices Don't Get Security Updates, Google Reports

Google GOOGL +17.18% bust out the data to prove doubters wrong about the quality of Android security. But, according to its second-ever yearly Android security report, issued Tuesday, as many as 420 million active devices are not supported by its patches, leaving a large number open to possible attack.

According to Google’s data, nearly 30 per cent of all active Android phones and tablets (of which there are 1.4 billion at last count) are on a version that do not receive patches. Anyone running an Android version below 4.4.4 does not currently receive security updates from the tech titan. Google, for obvious reasons, recommends users run the most up-to-date operating system.

But there’s some good news: even the most high-profile vulnerabilities don’t seem to have been exploited by hackers. Despite the widespread concern around the Stagefright vulnerabilities, which affected nearly 1 billion phones, no successful exploits were ever reported.

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Europe’s antitrust chief scrutinizing Google’s Android contracts

Google will be concerned the European Commission’s antitrust commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, is not letting up the pressure in an ongoing probe of its Android mobile OS.

In a speech today at a conference in the Netherlands, Vestager said her department is now “closely” examining Google’s contracts with mobile makers and carriers — with specific concerns focused on the requirements the company places on mobile partners to pre-load its apps on devices.

“Our concern is that, by requiring phone makers and operators to pre-load a set of Google apps, rather than letting them decide for themselves which apps to load, Google might have cut off one of the main ways that new apps can reach customers,” she said.

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Lenovo A7000 Receiving Android 6.0 Marshmallow Update

It’s been more than a year since Lenovo A7000, a mid-range smartphone, made its debut in India. At that time, the device shipped with Android 5.0.2 Lollipop operating system onboard, but Lenovo promised that, at some point, it would provide a Marshmallow upgrade.
Earlier this week, the Chinese company has kicked off the rollout of Android 6.0 Marshmallow update for Lenovo A7000. Although the smartphone was launched in many countries since last year, the update is only available in India for the time being.

According to the official changelog, the update optimizes the logic of the SD card. This means that if you previously switched the default storage device, after upgrading to Marshmallow, the data and application stored on your SD card may be lost, so you should definitely back up any important data.

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Android N will support pressure-sensitive screens

Android N is going to make it easier for device makers to create their own version of 3D Touch pressure-sensitive screens on their devices. Hopefully, when it's officially released, Google will figure out what to call the feature — because Apple 3D Touch is obviously Apple branding, and "support for pressure-sensitive screens" is an awful thing to have to write over and over again.

So how do we know? Well, support for "Launcher shortcuts" is probably the most exciting new thing in the latest beta for the upcoming Android N operating system, which was released last week. It allows developers to "define shortcuts which users can expose in the launcher to help them perform actions quicker." Which is a fairly technical way of describing what people can do now with an iPhone 6S in its launcher: get a pop-up menu that lets you jump directly into a more specific part of your app.

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Android N preview 2 lets you change the pitch of Google’s text-to-speech voice

The second developer preview of Android N, the next big release of Google’s mobile operating system, comes with a neat update to the settings for Google’s core text-to-speech engine. There are now sliders that allow you to fine-tune the speech rate and pitch of the voice.

They let you make the recently improved Google voice speak more slowly or quickly, at a squeaky high pitch or at a firm low pitch. The update should be particularly welcome to visually impaired users who rely heavily on audio output features, such as the TalkBack accessibility feature. But this voice element is also present in things like Google search.

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Oracle and Google head into retrial over Java in Android

It seems that despite a lengthy meeting to settle the ongoing lawsuit between Google and Oracle concerning the use of certain part of Oracle’s software in Android, the two companies were unable to reach an agreement in the copyright lawsuit.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Oracle CEO Safra Catz, together with other executives from both companies, met on Friday to try and reach and agreement to settle the lawsuit that Oracle filed originally in 2012. Google strongly disagrees that it owes Oracle upward of $8 billion for allegedly infringing copyright by using certain parts of Oracle’s programming language Java in Android.

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Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow update now rolling out to Samsung Galaxy Note 4; What about Android N?

Android 6.0.1 M update is now rolling out to Samsung Galaxy Note 4.
The electronics manufacturer Samsung has begun to roll out the Android 6.0.1 M update for the users of Galaxy Note 4. According to reports, the new update is currently rolling out in the US regions, Turkey, Poland and India in the form of an OTA update.

The update weighs in at 1.3GB and comes with the April Android security patch that was recently released by the search giant Google.

Reports also suggest that some of the features of Samsung Galaxy Note 5 have been included in the Samsung Galaxy Note 4's update.

The more granular app permission controls and Doze standby power-saving feature are some of the updates. It is not known whether the tech company included the ability to adopt MicroSD cards as internal storage or not.

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Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Getting Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow Update

Users from the US, India and Poland have reported that the Exynos-powered version of the Note 4 has been upgraded to Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow and even a guy from Turkey has shown some screenshots of the N910C model with the Screen off memo feature that was released for the Note 5.

SamMobile and Dutch Samsung blog, GalaxyClub, have reported that Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow started rolling out to the Samsung Note 4 N910C variant with an Exynos chipset. The installation file has a size of 1.3GB and contains the April Android security patch, which was released a few days ago by Google.

This new update comes with Doze, the standby power-saving feature, Google Now on Tap, better app permissions, but it isn’t known yet if the option to use the MicroSD card as internal storage is available, considering that the Note 4 has 32GB of memory, which can be expanded up to 128GB.

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Sprint's Samsung Galaxy S5 starts receiving update to Android 6.0

Sprint subscribers rockin' the Samsung Galaxy S5 should be happy. Their phone is in the process of receiving the update to Android 6.0. And that means that the device will receive Doze. For those of you who have been dozing, or dosing, this is a feature designed to increase battery life on your handset. This is accomplished by shutting down all apps running in the background once the device has been inactive for a spell.

Other new features include users being asked to approve or deny app permissions on a feature-by-feature basis, and Google Now On Tap. The latter uses the content on your screen to offer contextual search results. The new version of the software is G900PVPU3CPCA, and it includes the latest Google and Samsung Security patches and also kills bugs dead.

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How to secure Android: 14 top tips for securing your phone or tablet

Securing your Android phone or tablet is more involved than adding a PIN lock (although you should certainly do that). Here we run through 14 ways you can keep Android secure, from dealing with app permissions to locking down apps, dealing with Android viruses and tracking down a stolen phone.

Securing your Android phone or Android tablet is more involved than adding a PIN lock (although you should certainly do that). Here we run through 14 ways you can keep Android secure, from dealing with app permissions to locking down apps, dealing with Android viruses and tracking down a stolen phone.

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10 little-known features that can make your Android taste even sweeter

You may be making the most of your Android phone, but there is much more within your easy reach that can help you make your smartphone experience even better. And this doesn’t require you to put in much effort or install additional apps (in most cases). It only needs bringing to light some useful features sitting deep inside your Android device.

While some of you may be already aware of these tools, there may be many for whom this could be a revelation. These features are easy to use and can be enabled with just a few taps.

If you have more to add to this list, tell us in the comments below.

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Nexus April Android 6.0.1 Update: 5 Things to Know

As expected and right on time, today Google released its monthly Nexus Android update. Back in October when Android 6.0 and the Nexus 6P debuted, Google promised to delivery monthly updates as a part of a new security program for Android. February and March were both quick, and now April is here already with loads of important updates.

After Google, Samsung, HTC, and other manufacturers promised to do the same, and Samsung even released the April patch for the Galaxy S7 today as well. Starting today, April 4th, the April update is headed to all Nexus smartphones and tablets. Details are available on the Nexus security bulletin regarding what changes have been made, and updated factory images for users have been released at the same time.

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Google’s Nexus security update for April fixes 8 critical Android bugs

Google is releasing the monthly security update for its Nexus Android devices today and with it, it is also announcing a list of the security vulnerabilities it has patched in this release. This month, the update includes patches for eight critical bugs, including one that affects the infamous libstagefright library, which has already seen its fair share of well-publicized vulnerabilities.

Google notified its partners about all the issues in this new bulletin two weeks ago and for them (and anybody else who is interested), source code patches will be made available through the Android Open Source Project in the next two days.

Google notes that the most severe of this month’s issues would have allowed remote code execution on an affected device “through multiple methods such as email, web browsing, and MMS when processing media files.”

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