Welcome to the 428th edition of Android Apps Weekly. Here are the big headlines from last week:
- Google is suing a man for using his Google services to do bad things. A man set up a facial dog adoption site, received money from customers and never delivered any puppies. The guy also used Gmail, Google Voice and other services to run this shady business. Google responded by suing him, and we could not be happier.
- A security researcher found an SDK that sent large amounts of data to a U.S. defense provider. It reported these apps to Google and Google removed them. It is believed that apps with SDK were downloaded over 60 million times across a number of app genres. Click on the link to learn more, but don’t worry, apps are now gone.
- Unlimited Google Photos is back, but it’s not free. Google announced a new Google One subscription for $ 15 a month. It includes 2 TB of data for Google Drive along with an unlimited photo and video backup. This seems like the endgame for Google Photos. Google says the service is quite expensive to operate and this lets Google fund it properly. It seems like a decent deal, especially with all the extra cloud storage space.
- Plex released an update that is actually quite amazing. It lets you log in to your various video streaming services so you can watch video from any of them without having to switch apps. It is now available to all users except Roku. Roku users will have to wait a little longer. We asked our readers if they liked Plex, and most of them do, so we’re excited to see such a great update that goes out to so many people.
- Samsung unveiled yet another fold in the big throttle debacle that has been going on this year. Samsung says it throttles on its phones to prevent overheating. Apparently, the new Spadragon 8 Gen 1 chips cause some overheating problems when left at full throttle. Click on the link to read more.
Bonju
Price: Available
Bonju is a kind of social network for people who travel a lot. You make friends everywhere and Bonju helps keep track of where they all are. It notifies users when you’re in the same city as a friend so you can look them up. That’s the core functionality of the app. It’s relatively niche, but does its job better than regular social media apps. Of course, whether you like it or not depends on whether you can get your friends to use it. It has potential.
The legacy of the ancestors
Price: Free / $ 3.99
The Ancestral Legacy is the latest game from Buff Studios. This one publishes itself as a mysterious thriller and a visual novel. Players work their way through the story and make decisions on important plot points. The decisions you make affect the outcome of the game. Some other features include performance, multiple endings, and multiple story branches. It played fine in our test and it should itch for fans of the genre.
Wisdom is a kind of self-help app. It allows you to share and accept advice on a variety of life challenges, including things like making more money, improving your physical or mental health, and other things like that. It is a community focused app so you can help or receive help depending on what you want to do. This is one of those apps that may or may not help, depending on who and how you are. It has great potential and early adopters seem to like it.
Brave Soul: Frozen Dungeon
Price: Free to play
Brave Soul: Frozen Dungeon is a mobile RPG with gacha elements. Players get a team of heroes that they use to fight villains a bunch. You upgrade your heroes as you play and continue through the game. It has simple combat, over 100 heroes to collect and lots of things to do. Some people do not like the simplicity of certain parts, and we understand that. However, this is a nice time waster with a little more depth than anything like an inactive RPG. The developers seem to be figuring out some bugs that are making the animations choppy, but otherwise it played fine on our test devices.
FileShadow
Price: Free trial / $ 7- $ 15 per. month
FileShadow is an interesting file management app. It works a lot like Resilio Sync or NextCloud, except it aims for productivity instead of self-hosted cloud storage. Basically, you install the app on your phone and computer. From there, you can manage the files on both devices from both devices. It can also collect your email attachments and other things, though that functionality costs extra. From there, you can move files, manage them, organize them, or do whatever you want. You can even sort or filter by file type for extra functionality. It seems to be pretty decent, even if it requires a subscription.
If we missed any great Android apps or game news, please let us know in the comments.
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