Posts by Alex Heath

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HipChat is the software we Cult of Android writers use to chat with each other throughout the day. It’s a pretty good solution for communicating with a group of people across different platforms, but the Android app has been lagging behind.

Not so with today’s 2.0 update. HipChat has redesigned its official Android app to feel more like an Android app. The whole goal of the redesign is to “better conform to Android’s latest design guidelines.”

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Facebook Home is now available on Google Play, but only for specific Android devices. The HTC One X, HTC One X+, Samsung Galaxy S III, and Samsung Galaxy Note II are supported. AT&T has also begun preorders for the HTC First, the first (get it?) smartphone to come with Facebook Home preinstalled.

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Cinemagram was the Instagram of video before there was Vine. The app allows you to create what are essentially animated GIFs and share them with followers. Up until now, Cinemagram has been iOS-only, but now it is available for Android devices in Google Play.

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Google has been stepping up its game with app curation in Google Play. TechCrunch has discovered that a record 60,000 apps were pulled from the store in February alone. Coincidentally, Google just launched a major redesign of Play today that focuses on highlighting great Android apps.

While not all of the bad apps are being pulled by Google directly, many of the deletions are related to spamming and other Google Play terms of service violations. You don’t normally think of Google when you hear about an app being pulled, but Apple isn’t the only one who regulates its app store—the two companies just do things differently.

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Today Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled “Home,” his company’s new experience on Android devices. Rumors leading up to today’s event said that Facebook has been working on its own Android device in conjunction with HTC, and that has turned out to be true.

Zuckerberg started by explaining how modern smartphones are built around different apps that communicate with people, and that Facebook wants to switch that paradigm and focus on people first. Home allows you to quickly interact with your Facebook account anywhere from your device, including the lockscreen.

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