Essential Phone is getting support for the Android 11 Developer Preview

Earlier this month, Essential dropped the news that they were shutting down. The company would no longer continue working on its second smartphone, the Project GEM device. More importantly for customers, Essential stated they would no longer provide software support for its first and only smartphone, the Essential Phone. That meant the device, which initially launched in 2017 with Android 7.1 Nougat, won’t get any updates after the February 2020 security patch rolled out earlier this month. Even though the company has shut down, it looks like Essential will give customers the opportunity to test one more update: the Android 11 Developer Preview.

As spotted by Braden Farmer on Twitter, Essential engineers have opened a new branch called “r-preview” on their GitHub repo. The commits are aimed at making the Essential Phone compatible with the Android 11 Generic System Image (GSI), a prebuilt system image that can be booted on devices that support Project Treble. It should already be possible to boot the Android 11 DP1 GSI on the PH-1 thanks to the work that Essential has done to support Project Treble; in fact, Essential’s ability to roll out day 1 updates of monthly Android security patches and major OS updates can be credited to their work on Treblizing the device and how close to stock the software is.

Jean-Baptiste Théou, System Software Lead at Essential, confirmed in a comment that they “just need final internal review and validation on the latest GSI for Android 11 to allow the community to use it.” Once that is finished, Essential will release prebuilt vendor, boot, and system images that users must first flash onto their devices before flashing the official Android 11 GSI from Google. Even though Essential won’t be rolling out an official Android 11 update, users can thus try the latest version of Android on their own.

Essential Phone Forums

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One Shade themes your notification panel to be like Samsung’s One UI

Samsung’s One UI has largely been acclaimed to be one of the most user-friendly user interfaces. Although One UI is the successor of the maligned TouchWiz and Samsung Experience, it has a different reputation. Samsung smartly designed the user interface in such a way that it prioritizes navigation with a single hand. Therefore, in first-party Samsung apps, user interface elements are moved towards the bottom of the display, instead of being at the top. This is done to ensure one-handed navigation on modern smartphone displays that have large display diagonal sizes and tall aspect ratios. The notification panel and Quick Settings in One UI follows the same UI design philosophy, and it works. What if you don’t have a Samsung phone running One UI, though? Can you still get that one-hand friendly notifications panel? It turns out you can, thanks to an app called One Shade.

One Shade is an app made by Treydev Inc. It acts similar to Power Shade in that it completely replaces an Android phone’s notifications panel with a custom notification panel. The design of the One Shade notifications menu is inspired by the one in One UI. The One Shade version is customizable, however, unlike One UI. One Shade also brings extra utilities that are detailed in the features list below. The developer mentions that users are given a full walk-through for every step to setup the app so that they can change their quick settings. Having a custom ROM or root is not required for the app.

The app’s key feature list is quoted below from the developer’s Play Store listing:

• “Key Features
  Full color customization: Take the base layout and color all the elements how you like.
  Advanced notifications: Get it, read it, snooze or dismiss.
  Advanced music: Dynamic colors based on the currently playing album artwork. You can skip to any part of the track right from the notification’s progress bar.
  Quick reply: Reply to your messages as soon as you see them. For all Android devices.
  Auto bundled: Tired of that one app that spams you notifications? Now they’re all grouped together, for easy control.
  Custom background picture: Pick your favorite image to be displayed in the shade.
  Notification card themes: Android 10 inspired.
  – Light: your ordinary notifications
  – Colored: dynamically uses the notification’s color as the card background.
  – Dark: blend all your notifications with a pure black background (great on AMOLED screens).
  Quick settings panel
  – Choose a different color for the background or foreground (icons) of the quick settings panel.
  – Change brightness slider color.
  – Useful icons with your current device information
  – Choose your own profile picture to be displayed in the shade.
  – Choose between a number of tile icon shapes (circle, square, teardrop, gradients and more)
  – (Pro) Change quick settings grid layout (ie. number of columns and rows).”

The aforementioned feature list is not exhaustive, according to the developer, as there are more features such as auto-expanding notifications and repositioning of elements where the user wants them to be.

How does One Shade work if it doesn’t require elevated privileges that have to be satisfied either through root or ADB? The answer is that it uses Accessibility Services to achieve its functionality. Accessibility Services are hugely powerful on Android as they can enable innovative experiences, and users wanting to see what kind of experiences they can enable can look through our past coverage. One Shade’s primary source of revenue is ads, but it has premium features as well.

I tried out the app, and it seems to work surprisingly well. The feature set is broad, as you see in the screenshots. The one major negative point is that the developer is using full-page interfering ads that degrade the user experience.

One Shade has an official Telegram group. It can be downloaded from the Play Store below.

One Shade: Custom Notifications and Quick Settings (Free⁺, Google Play) →

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Samsung starts rolling out Android 10 with One UI 2.0 to the Galaxy A70

Samsung’s Android 10 update train is going at full steam. The company has already updated its flagship phones with the latest Android version in most regions and has now shifted its focus to updating its mid-range lineup. Last week, the mid-range Samsung Galaxy A30 and Galaxy A50s received a stable Android 10 with One UI 2.0. Now it appears the Galaxy A70 is also getting the sweet treat of Android 10 — at least starting in Ukraine.

Samsung Galaxy A70 Forums

Coming in at over 2GB in size, the Galaxy A70 Android 10 update carries version number A705FNXXU5BTB9 and also packs the February 2020 security patches. As expected, the new update brings along all the exciting changes users have been waiting for. You get a system-wide dark mode, new navigation gestures, improved Digital Wellbeing tools, overhauled app permissions and more. On top of these usual Android 10 changes, the update also brings a ton of One‌ UI 2.0-specific additions such as redesigned icons and colors, a built-in screen recorder, a new One Handed mode, an improved camera app UI, updated Samsung apps, and so on.

At this time, the Galaxy A70 Android 10 update appears to be rolling out to Ukrainian models only. However, the global rollout shouldn’t be too far away and Galaxy A70 owners in other regions can look forward to receiving the update in the coming weeks or so.

To check whether your Samsung phone will receive the Android 10 update, you can refer to this list.

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Via: TizenHelp

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HTC is still making phones and will launch a 5G smartphone this year

Do you remember HTC? Yes, it was the world’s largest Android smartphone vendor at one time. HTC has many firsts to its name, the most significant being that it was the first to launch an Android phone in the form of the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1. In recent years, however, it became a sorry spectacle. Its revenue declined continuously throughout 2016 and 2017. Google acquired part of HTC’s smartphone division for $1.1 billion in 2017, and the deal closed in 2018. HTC vacated the Indian smartphone market in July of that year. Its last flagship phone launch remains the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845-powered HTC U12+, which was launched in May 2018. In 2019, it made a deal with Indian smartphone vendors to use its name. It stopped selling phones in the UK due to a patent dispute, and the HTC Elevate community shut down in December 2019. The last “true” HTC phone launches to date were the HTC U19e and HTC Desire 19+, and the last HTC-branded phone launch was the budget Lava-made HTC Wildfire X. According to most observers, HTC essentially left the smartphone market to focus on other ventures such as VR in the form of the HTC Vive, but the company kept saying it wasn’t dead. In a strange turn of events, HTC’s new CEO, Yves Maitre, has now said in an interview that HTC is planning to launch a 5G phone this year.

Maitre is the new CEO of HTC since September 2019. He said that 2020 will be a year with many development opportunities in the Taiwan market, especially in 5G connected applications and the development of virtual visual content driven by 5G connected applications. HTC will invest more aggressively this year for two reasons. Firstly, it plans to launch its first 5G-connected phone, and secondly, it wants to invest in virtual vision applicatoins.

The interview didn’t go into more details regarding HTC’s first 5G phone and the expected time of its announcement, unfortunately. The United News Network did state that it’s expected that HTC will have a further cooperation with Qualcomm. The company will also launch high-end flagship phones first, apparently. However, the interview is unclear whether HTC will adopt a multi-device strategy compared to other manufacturers or launch a mid-range 5G phone. (If HTC wants to launch a 5G phone, it has multiple options. It can either launch a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865-powered flagship, or launch a Snapdragon 765-powered mid-range phone. It can even use one of MediaTek’s 5G Dimensity SoCs.)

There wasn’t anything else smartphone-related in the interview. HTC’s focusing on 5G and VR. Virtual reality and mixed reality are HTC’s topics of focus, as seen in the HTC Vive and the Vive Cosmos. AR will also be the future development focus for the company as the copmany wants to provide the best application solutions for such needs. HTC’s opinion about AR is that while many people are optimistic about AR applications, there are still many parts that need to be refined based on the development of the technology application. HTC will, therefore, think about the appropriate layout, and will not launch related applications too soon. VR will take priority. Finally, the new Vive Cosmos Elite, Vive Cosmos Play, Vive Cosmos XR, and Vive Sync are expected to be showed in San Franscisco in mid-March. They will be further displayed during GDC 2020, where content applications will be communicated with more game developers during the conference.

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Via: UDN

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Samsung says the Galaxy Buds+ multi-device feature only supports Galaxy phones with SmartThings installed

Last year’s Samsung Galaxy Buds were Samsung’s attempt to enter the truly wireless earbuds market, a market that had been popularized by the Apple AirPods. By most accounts, the Galaxy Buds were a success as they made Samsung one of the major players in this expensive and profitable market. The Galaxy Buds launched alongside the Samsung Galaxy S10 series. One year later, the company launched an upgraded variant of the earbuds called the Galaxy Buds+ alongside the Samsung Galaxy S20 series. The new Galaxy Buds+ have better battery life, better audio quality, and better microphones. At launch, Samsung even mentioned “multi-point” (multi-device) support for devices using Bluetooth 5.0, which would have been a major new feature addition. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. The Galaxy Buds do sort of have a multi-device feature, but as Droid Life discovered, it only supports Galaxy phones with the Samsung SmartThings app installed.

The Galaxy Buds+ can now be bought for $149. Droid Life tested their multi-device connectivity. The publication’s report starts by saying some people had noticed that Samsung had edited the Galaxy Buds+ product page to remove this sentence: “Multi-point connection is available for devices using Bluetooth 5.0.” No reviewer was able to figure out how to connect multiple devices to a pair at the same time, as it didn’t work between devices of different manufacturers. This indicated that Samsung had pulled back the feature, but after looking at the Galaxy Buds+ product page, Droid Life noticed it still had a section called “Switch Seamlessly,” where Samsung describes how the Buds+ “intuitively switches between two paired devices at once.” The example was “So you won’t miss a call on your phone while you’re using your tablet.” This made it seem that the feature still existed, contradicting the removal of the multi-point sentence.

Droid Life reached out to Samsung for comment as this was supposedly one of the upgrades of the Galaxy Buds+. The company made the following statement:

“Galaxy Buds+ offers users a convenient way to transition across devices that are logged into the same Samsung account with the SmartThings app installed. This feature can be accessed in the media panel (by selecting Galaxy Buds+), and is only available on Samsung mobile devices running Android 7.1.1 or later.”

This means the Galaxy Buds+ can only perform a multi-device switch between two Samsung devices running Android 7.1.1 and newer, and the SmartThings app must be installed on both. SmartThings will enable the user to tap within the media panel on each device to move the Galaxy Buds+ connection between the two devices, and Droid Life was able to make this happen with a Samsung Galaxy Note 10 and a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip. For non-Samsung phones, the procedure remains the same: users must turn off the Bluetooth of the currently connected devices and then re-connect to the second device.

So it’s multi-device support indeed, but it’s not a useful feature for those users not having multiple Samsung devices. Those users who use multiple phones from different device makers will still have to move the device connection in the traditional way, which is why it made sense for Samsung to remove the incorrect sentence on the product page of the Galaxy Buds+.

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Source: Droid Life

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Google Assistant’s redesigned “Today” view has started rolling out

Google Assistant is the digital assistant that most people use on Android. It was released during Google I/O 2016, alongside some smart devices that can take advantage of it. So far, the Assistant has proven to be a worthy successor of Google Now. Despite the obvious superiority, there are some things that it can learn from its predecessor. For example, the “My Day” user interface, which was added in the Assistant nearly two years ago, is a resemblance to one of Google Now’s main features. It looks like the UI of this feature is getting updated and renamed to “Today.”

The update was first noticed by Max Buondonno on Twitter. He was able to access the new Google Assistant interface on the Pixel 3 and Pixel 4 XL. The updated UI looks cleaner and more up to date with Material Design standards as it introduces cards with drop shadows. Functionality wise, it doesn’t look like much has changed. The activity still displays information like weather, work commute, stocks, news, and reminders. To access the new “Today” view, all you have to do is trigger the Google Assistant and swipe up on the card.

I tried the latest stable and beta versions of the Google app on my Pixel 3 and I still can’t access the new “Today” UI, so I think it’s safe to assume that this is a server-side staged rollout. This is not the first time Google’s using this practice to test new features. There is no telling as to when this feature will be more widely available to Google Assistant users.

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Source: Twitter

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Smartphone skin maker “Slickwraps” got hacked and its customer data has been exposed

If you have ever purchased a skin from Slickwraps you may have received an alarming email today (be sure to check your spam folder). The email, titled “ATTN: ALL SLICKWRAPS CUSTOMERS,” explains that the company was hacked and thousands of users’ information is at risk. If that sounds bad (it is), it gets worse.

That email was actually not sent by Slickwraps, but by someone who was able to access the 377,428 email addresses from their customer database. All of this started when a Medium post by a security researcher on Twitter by the handle @Lynx0x00 went semi-viral. The Medium post (which at the time of publication has been suspended) explains how they were able to hack Slickwraps due to the company’s poor security practices. Lynx was able to gain so much access that they could have essentially “deleted their entire company.”

What’s more important to anyone who has purchased a Slickwraps skin in the past is that customer data was unprotected. Slickwraps eventually sent out an official email that claims that only names, user emails, addresses were exposed, but that passwords or personal financial data were not. This is evident in the first “ATTN” email that was sent, which included the recipient’s address and phone number (which Slickwraps does not mention).

A copy of the email that Slickwraps sent to its customers affected by the breach.

This statement implies that they were only informed of the breach today (February 22nd?), which is not true based on what was revealed in the Medium post. They also claim only information from users who created an account was compromised, but that also doesn’t appear to be true. Slickwraps has closed their databases and they are now partnering with an unnamed third-party cybersecurity firm to improve security.

Slickwraps says more details will follow, but for now, they recommend users reset their passwords. The damage, however, has already been done, both to customers’ personal data as well as to Slickwraps’ reputation. We highly recommend you read the archived version of the original Medium post here to see the entire story of how this unfolded. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the company.

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