Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt has owned up to the worst-kept secret in Silicon Valley: that the leader of the Android mothership leans on an arch rival for his day-to-day communications.
Rather than focusing on the incremental innovation needed to win back the attention of enterprise users and premium consumers, Google's vision for Android this year has again leapt in new directions which appear even less attainable. Android's scattered, imitative strategies du jour are resulting in a platform that looks a lot like Apple's—albeit the very unsuccessful Apple of the mid 90s.
Google's Android installed base has long suffered a major problem with fragmentation at the OS API level, due to the fact that licensees continue shipping low end phones paired with old versions of Android. Here's what the company is ostensibly doing to address that in a new project introduced at its I/O 2016 conference: Instant Apps.
Over the last year, the pace of Google's Android deployment, already very slow, actually rolled backward by 20 percent over the previous year. Google is leading Android and Chrome toward stagnant beleaguerment.
Google's forthcoming Daydream platform for virtual reality has support from Android device makers including Samsung, HTC, LG, and Huawei, though the hardware is predicted to only be "slightly better" than Samsung's own Gear VR.
Widening the battleground with Apple Pay, Google on Wednesday announced that Android Pay will soon be usable at some ATMs, as well as by mobile Chrome users.
At the beginning of its I/O developer conference on Wednesday, Google revealed that the next major version of Android — codenamed "Android N" — is launching in beta later today, and will introduce features like better performance, improved multitasking, and even virtual reality support when it officially arrives in late summer.
Google hopes to shake up the mobile communications landscape this summer with a cross-platform release of both Allo, a new smart messenger, and Duo, a simplified one-to-one video calling service.
Google has reportedly interally delayed its own equivalent of 3D Touch, the pressure-sensitive Apple technology that allows iPhone 6s and 6s Plus owners to take shortcuts through iOS apps.
Android phones continued to see the most devices failures in the first quarter of 2016, although the gap with iPhones shrunk hugely quarter-to-quarter, according to a research study published on Wednesday.
Two of Silicon Valley's most accomplished heavyweights stepped back into the legal squared circle this week, as the search giant defends its use of Oracle's Java APIs in Android for the second time.
A variety of wireless carriers and smartphone and tablet makers, including Apple, are reportedly being asked by U.S. regulators to explain how they review and push out security updates to their customers.
Apple on Thursday pushed out an update for the Android version of Apple Music, delivering support for music video playback and new billing options for families.
The FTC is expanding its investigation into Android related to complaints that Google is exploiting its ostensibly open platform to shut out rivals.
Apple — the world's most profitable public company — is a day away from releasing its March quarter earnings. That means that while the company itself is in an official quiet period, everyone else is free to publish false and misleading information about it. Let's take a look at some of the worst fallacies.
As anticipated, the European Commission on Wednesday pressed a new set of antitrust charges against Google, saying the company is hindering competition by locking in certain Android apps, or even versions of Android, despite it being an open-source operating system.
The European Commission and global media giant News Corp. on Monday confirmed separate actions against Google, with both factions suggesting that Google may be violating European regulations.
HTC on Tuesday unveiled the HTC 10, its latest flagship smartphone, with an unusual feature in the form of native support for Apple's AirPlay wireless streaming protocol.
Apple's nascent Swift programming language could have a bright future ahead with one of the company's chief competitors, as Google is reportedly considering bring Swift to Android as a "first-class" language.
In continued efforts to improve its flagship Android app, Apple pushed out an update to Apple Music on Thursday that, among other improvements, builds in a home screen widget for playback control.
{{ summary }}
AppleInsider Staff
Daniel Eran Dilger
Neil Hughes
Roger Fingas
