KitKat and Jelly Bean rule Android: Over 80% of users

As detractors and critics are quick to point out, Android has a problem with “fragmentation“. Whereas Apple users are safe for a few years, depending on hardware, software, or questionable judgement, Android users may never see anything beyond the purchased build. Things have been changing however, with Motorola and HTC offering unprecedentedly fast updates, and even Samsung getting down to business. Granted the problem will always be tied in with carriers and their endless array of bloatware, but if a recent OS build breakdown offers any hope, the shift to Lollipop might be the sweetest yet.

According to Google’s latest numbers, 50.9% of users are running some form of Jelly Bean (4.1X-4.3) and 30.2% KitKat, with the previous builds comprising the remainder. Given how Gingerbread was so widely spread ages after Ice Cream Sandwich (and even Jelly Bean) released, it is impressive to note just how many devices are relatively up-to-date.

Unfortunately this visual does not offer anything conclusive about the real nature of the users themselves; what phones are they running? If 81% of those monitored are in fact using older devices that saw OEM or carrier pushed updates, that’s a good sign. If 75% are using relatively new devices, while Google and manufacturers might be pleased, it would imply customers are simply updating their devices, having given up waiting for support

With 5.0 Lollipop set to roll out in the immediate future, many customers are going to be asking the question of if, and when. We will make sure to keep you posted on the latest announcements so please check back often and subscribe to stay informed.

Sweet Spot: A visual look at the delicious history of Android

Scroll down to see the infographic

Let’s face it: the masses don’t care about IT; at least not in the way that we do. This has, is, and presumably always will be, a problem that OEMs, software developers, and marketing firms have learned to accept. Put simply, the world-at-large just doesn’t care about operating systems, CPU cores, or firmware updates.

Even new types of products such as bendable tablets and smartphones won’t appeal to many at first, and one need only look at the general reaction to current glimpses of the future to understand the resistance.

Android is an operating system. Android is a seemingly infinite stream of code. Android is open source. And yet, Android is awesome. In no small terms, Google has managed to infuse popular culture into something that goes beyond the confines of IT. It has given its cute green robot a soul.

Instead of talking about 4.4.4, people talk about KitKat. Instead of reminiscing about 3.1, tablet aficionados speak of Honeycomb.  And instead of looking ahead to 5.0, we’re all raving over Lollipop. Google’s brilliant decision to name each major OS release after a popular dessert has not only ensured things stay sweet, but that everyone is actually, and actively, trying to predict the name of the next version.

Take a second to marvel at this simplistic brilliance, and consider for how many years companies like Microsoft have, and still do, offer nothing more than a rudimentary numbering system. Even Apple opted to switch things up, finally opting to give its OSX more dynamic names.

Take a second to look at this fantastic visual history of Android, and breathe in the bakery:

Galaxy Note Edge to release November 17: $949.99 off-contract at AT&T

Love hurts: Your ego, your pride, your self-esteem. If you’re a fan of the flexible however, it’s also going to hurt your wallet.

American customers are going to be in for a world of pricing pain when sojourning to their local electronic store for Samsung’s premier phablet, the Galaxy Note Edge. Released over two weeks ago in Japan and last week in South Korea, the Note 4 variant is set to drop on 5 major US carriers (Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, and U.S. Cellular) on the 17th.

AT&T pricing has leaked and it’s pretty. Expensive that is: $399.99 on a 2 year contract, $945.99 off-contract, and $0 down on AT&T Next (with monthly payments over $40 per month).

Before anyone busts a gasket at this “outrageous” price, consider a few things: Both Japan and Korea’s variants retail for a similar price. Furthermore, the unlocked Galaxy Note 4 itself retails for around $850. In reality, Samsung has added about $100 to the Note 4’s price tag, and quite frankly given how novel the Edge screen is, it’s definitely worth the extra outlay for those who can afford it.

What remains to be answered is actually how a device the manufacturer claims is a concept to be produced in limited quantities has managed to hit so many potential customers in such a short amount of time. Either the Korean chaebol is understating its true production numbers or else it honestly doesn’t expect many to sell.

Stay turned to Android Authority for a full written and video review in the coming weeks, and make sure to check out our impressions from the Japanese model if you haven’t already.

Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra talks business models and smartphone success

Xiaomi may not be a household name in the West, yet, but the company has made a remarkable impact on the global smartphone market, despite only being founded back in 2010. Hugo Barra left Google a year ago to join the company and has overseen one of the fastest growth rates of any tech company this decade.

In a recent interview, Hugo Barra talked a little about Xiaomi’s consumer “family”, security concerns, and how the company’s low-cost smartphone business model actually turns a profit.

Xiaomi has so far sold 60 million smartphones this year, up from 18 million handsets in the year before, and has apparently turned over around $10 billion in revenue. But the cutthroat pricing of its flagship Mi series has left many to question exactly how much profit the company makes from its huge consumer base.

Barra says that a dedicated e-commerce platform and a simplified core product line-up has helped the company profit through less traditional methods. Xiaomi only has two flagships on sale and a product life-cycle spanning 24 months. A large stock sold over the course of a couple of years helps Xiaomi save on costs through the economy of scale.

The Mi4 offers flagship hardware but has a price tag starting at just $399.99.

In addition, the company has over 1,000 complementary products listed on its website, ranging from headphones and power banks, to replacement parts and Xiaomi branded gadgets. By selling products through its own e-commerce store, Xiaomi is able to keep the prices down and the margins up compared with many of its competitors.

About 10% of people who buy our smartphones are on what we call our beta track. They’ve chosen to receive software updates every Friday, with new features, some of which are still sort of only half baked, half implemented, because they want to provide feedback.

This all ties into Xiaomi’s approach to dealing with consumers. Barra believes that listening closely to customer feedback, having them test out upcoming features themselves, and building an extensive online community has helped nurture a strong and loyal consumer base. One which will likely end up spending money on the extended Xiaomi brand.

Our core belief is basically that if you treat your users or customers as friends, if you listen to them carefully for their feedback, if you respect their views, if you really take care of them, they become attached to you and to your products.

However, the past four years haven’t all been smooth sailing for Xiaomi. Early devices were plagued with accusations of copycat Apple designs. More recently, security concerns relating to user data have damaged the company’s reputation in the West. Barra defended Xiaomi by suggesting that products in similar categories are based on a similar design language and that Apple hardly has a clean record when it comes to pinching existing ideas. As for security, the move over to new data centers will help Xiaomi comply with local regulations, but he also believes that Chinese companies are, to a certain extent, held to a tougher privacy standards that a lot of other companies.

Looking to the future, Xiaomi has started its expansion outside of China and is looking to make headway in Brazil and Mexico next, before coming back to other countries in South-East Asia towards the end of 2015. There are no plans to bring Xiaomi’s handsets to the US, at least not yet, as Barra has other markets more suited to its business model to get around to first.

Xiaomi’s momentum shows no signs of slowing down. Given that it is already the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, Xiaomi is a name that we are going to hear a lot more about over the coming years.

Asus releases 3 ZenWatch apps ahead of official launch

Three free apps for the upcoming Asus ZenWatch have appeared on the Play Store – the ZenWatch Manager, Remote Camera, and Wellness apps.

Although Google already has its own Android Wear software for setting up your smartwatch, Asus’ ZenWatch Manager is there to guide you through setting up all of the basics and to act as the main companion app between your phone and wearable. The app contains options for setting a watch face, finding your misplaced phone or watch, and even creating preset emergency messages, just in case.

The two other smartwatch apps are called Remote Camera and Wellness. The first is pretty self-explanatory, allowing users to access their smartphone camera’s viewfinder and remotely control the shutter. Wellness is a basic app designed for tracking various health statistics. The app includes tracking options for calories burned, steps taken, and also tries to monitor your relaxation levels based on your heart rate. The interfaces across all three apps are quite clean and minimalistic looking.

The Asus ZenWatch still doesn’t have an official release date and it’s not exactly clear what availability is going to be like when the smartwatch finally arrives for sale. With apps appearing on the marketplace, a release date can’t be too far away.

Inbox gets a new update, adds a few minor changes

Inbox is just barely out the gate, and invite-only to boot, but that’s not stopping Google from introducing its first update. As you would expect, this isn’t a massive update, though there are a few minor changes, including one that’s specific to Android 5.0 Lollipop. For those of you rocking Lollipop (preview or otherwise), Inbox now blends the color of the action bar into the status bar.

Aside from this, some of the other changes include:

• Slide-out menu now covers action bar, giving more screen real-estate
• You can automatically scroll through email addresses by swiping on upper section of menu
• There may likely be a few other changes under the hood as well, such as bug fixes

In Google’s usual fashion, we can expect Inbox 1.1 to rollout in the course of the next few days (or even weeks). For those that don’t want to wait any longer than they have to, you can download the APK here for manual installation.Of course those without invites will still need an invitation, like always.

If you have already downloaded Inbox 1.1, let us know if you ran into any other changes or improvements, via the comments below.

Google Play Music rolling out to 13 more European countries

If you’ve been waiting for your chance to use Google Play Music and you live in or around the Eastern European area, here may be your chance. Google is rolling out Google Play Music to 13 more European countries, offering all of the bells and whistles that come with the streaming service.

With Google Play Music, users can upload up to 20,000 songs on Google’s servers, store music for offline playback, buy new music from Google Play, and have access to the awesome Play Music app. All of the new users also have the ability to subscribe to Play Music All Access as well. This service allows you to stream unlimited music, create radio stations, use unlimited skips on the radio feature, and get recommendations based on your music taste, all for a small monthly fee.

Here’s the entire list of the lucky countries:

• Belarus
• Bosnia-Herzegovina
• Bulgaria
• Croatia
• Cyprus
• Estonia
• Iceland
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Macedonia
• Malta
• Romania
• Slovenia

As Google continues to slowly roll out their music service around the world, it’s always nice to see a big list of countries that now have the ability to join in on the fun.

Google Android 5.0 Lollipop Source Code being pushed to AOSP!

Well what do we have here, Android Lollipop being uploaded to AOSP as we speak! As you can imagine, a code dump like this takes a great deal of time, and it could be hours before everything is completed. At the moment, the branch is being referred to as “lollipop-release” and it carries a build number of LRX21M, though its official release tag should be android-5.0_r1 when it ‘fully hits’.

Even more exciting, it’s also only a matter of time before device-specific repositories for all Nexus hardware shows up, and at least a few have already surfaced including the Nexus 7 (2013) LTE ‘deb’ and Nexus 7 (2013) Wifi ‘flo’. It is worth noting that a new repository for Android TV is also available now, though it is hard to say whether or not the full code will be uploaded.

Once everything is uploaded, it’ll only be a matter of time before developers and many others begin playing around, bringing us hidden goodies and so much more. And before you ask, no the Nexus factory images are not up yet. Patience my friends, all in good time.

Gmail 5.0 is rolling out to Google Play, grab the APK now! (update)

Update: While we reported on Gmail 5.0 rolling out to Google Play over the weekend, and even included an APK for download, it turns out we were a little premature. The app had not in fact hit Google Play for anyone, and the APK was simply a very far along (essentially finished) copy. We don’t have the final Google Play APK yet, though hopefully it is only a matter of days before it hits your device. We’ll be sure to update if/when we get our hands on the officially ‘final’ version of Gmail 5.0. 

Last night Gmail 5.0 apparently began to rollout, bringing Material Design goodness and even support for email accounts from other providers including Yahoo, iCloud Mail, Outlook and basically any account that supports IMAP/POP or Exchange.

Having the ability to place all your accounts under one roof is a welcome change, and means that you no longer need to juggle multiple email clients. Of course the existence of Inbox (which doesn’t support other account types) kind of gets in the way of this “one email-app to-rule them all” philosophy — but I digress.

As for the Material Design changes in Gmail 5.0? Gone is the gray coloring that was pretty everywhere in the previous version of Gmail, and the usual (for MD) splash of red coloring has also made its way to the header and status bar, as well as the circular button for composing new emails. Another big change is the redesigned navigation drawer, which looks sharper and has a new interface for switching accounts that works better (and is faster) than before.

As for the way emails work, unread messages are now bolded. Once you’ve read the messages they are then unbolded. You’ll also notice that the emails themselves now have circular images, instead of the old square pics. Those are some of the biggest changes you’ll find here, but the bottom line is that Google has revamped the entire Gmail look and feel in order to fit in with Android 5.0 Lollipop and Material Design.

If you are interested in picking up the app, you can grab it for manual installation from GappsEarly, or you can wait until the full rollout on Google Play. For those that have tried the latest version of Gmail, what do you think of the new look?

Google updates its Material guidelines for developers

Android 5.0 Lollipop is almost here, and that means more developers are (hopefully) preparing for the biggest changes to Android yet but updating their own apps to better fit Google’s new look. While I personally liked Holo quite a bit, it took a long time for many app developers to follow suit with Google’s direction and some never did. So what will be different this time around? For one thing, Google seems to be doing more to reach out to developers and show them “the way”. This includes actively updating Material Design guidelines so developers know exactly what Google wants and expects when it comes to the standard.

With that in mind, Google took to its blog today and announced a big set of improvements to its guidelines. Some of the changes are the addition of links to Android developer docs, a new “What is Material” section that gives app developers a deeper look at what exactly Material Design is all about and a ‘what’s new section’ for highlighting the changes in the specs along the way.

That’s not all, Google is also providing more details on how to better design launcher icons and more:

• A new section on product icons (launcher icons for Android apps).
• New patterns like the navigation drawer, navigational transitions, scrolling techniques, swipe to refresh, date/time formats, and errors.
• New and updated components including pickers, dialogs, and menus.
• A new usability section on bidirectionality.

Obviously these guidelines are really meant for developers, but they are important for end users too. Why’s that? For one thing it helps further illustrate Google’s commitment towards making Material Design accepted by developers. In turn, that means we should see more app developers bring this unified look to their apps and hopefully that means less ‘rogue’ apps that follow their own thing (in an ugly way..) and ignore Google guidelines completely.

For more details on the guideline changes, check out Google’s blog. What do you think of Material? Like the changes being made or not? Do you think developers will actively embrace it?

Google Calendar getting Material redesign and smart new features

Google Calendar will get a massive update soon, bringing some much needed love to one of Google’s less flashy, yet very important applications.

The update is available today on Lollipop devices (read the Nexus 9), while less lucky users can expect it “in the coming weeks.” For now, all we have is Google’s blog post describing the update and some cool animations, but from them alone, this looks like a great release.

The new Calendar is drenched in Material design, with the signature action button allowing you to quickly create new events. The bold color palette and the smooth animations are complemented by maps, thoughtful graphics, or even imagery displayed based on your events. For instance, an event set in New York will show the city’s iconic skyline, while a night out event may show a “drinks” graphic.

But not all changes are skin deep – the most exciting addition in terms of functionality is Events. Basically, Google is bringing some of the smarts of Google Now to Calendar – when you receive emails confirming dinner reservations, concerts, or just a meeting, entries will be automatically created in Calendar. That should really remove much of the friction of using Gmail and Calendar together, assuming the system works reliably. Even better, Calendar will automatically update entries when you receive subsequent emails changing details of an event.

New Calendar also introduces Assists, which is basically a smart autocomplete that lets you quickly fill out names and places, as well as event entries like “running in the park” based on your previous usage.

The new Google Calendar is coming over the next weeks (probably sooner, rather than later) to all devices running Android 4.1 and higher. In the meantime, check out Google’s Calendar page for a closer look at the new design.

Blaming Nokia deal, Samsung doesn’t want to pay Microsoft royalties anymore

If I told you that Microsoft makes 5 times more money annually off of Android than it does Windows Phone, many would probably wonder “how/why/huh?”. Not only is it true that Microsoft ironically makes a whopping 1.6 billion dollars a year off of Android (about 5 times more than it does from Windows Phone), it’s also pretty safe to say that Samsung, the reigning Android market leader, is paying quite a large bulk of that amount to Microsoft. But maybe instead of “is” I should now use the word “was”, as Samsung has recently declared that they will no longer pay Microsoft royalty fees for Android. The reason? Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia.

MICROSOFT IS RAKING IN BILLIONS OFF ANDROID

Back in September of 2011, Samsung and Microsoft reached an agreement on a cross-licensing deal for Android phones and tablets, which included Samsung agreeing to pay Microsoft a set amount of royalties for specific patents used. Fast-forward to the end of 2013, which is when Microsoft announced that they would be purchasing Nokia’s mobile division for 7.2 billion dollars. Interestingly enough, Nokia went with Microsoft instead of Android because they feared Samsung would dominate the market if Nokia also ran under the Android name. Samsung did however did go on to dominate the market, Nokia didn’t do so well, and here we are now. So why exactly is Samsung refusing to pay previously agreed upon royalty fees?

To understand the reason behind this, you have to keep in mind that back in 2011 when a cross-licensing deal was reached, the two companies also reached an agreement on something else: To cooperate in the marketing and development of Windows Phone. That naturally would involve Samsung sharing some sensitive information with Microsoft. The deal also stated that royalty fees for Android would be reduced, provided that Samsung could reach specific sales targets for Windows phones.

Crying foul

Samsung is now crying foul, stating that the purchase of Nokia has now made Microsoft a direct hardware competitor. Because of this, Samsung feels that cooperating with Microsoft and openly sharing sensitive information is no longer possible, and that it directly violates the terms of the original 2011 agreement. Samsung also stated that it could create US antitrust issues, and filed that “The agreements, now between competitors, invite charges of collusion”.

THE AGREEMENTS, NOW BETWEEN COMPETITORS, INVITE CHARGES OF COLLUSION

Microsoft is so far very confident that the original agreement will stick, and stated that they feel they have a very strong case. The Redmond company is also seeking around 7 million dollars in damages as punishment for Samsung’s late payment of the billion dollar royalty fee from last year.

I can certainly understand both sides in this issue. Microsoft is entitled to royalties, as there are Microsoft patents in use with most Android devices. But did the original agreement reached in 2011 stipulate that Microsoft becoming directly involved in mobile hardware would be grounds for voiding the deal entirely? Samsung, who currently has their fair share of problems, also has a point. How can Samsung, the most dominant Android manufacturer in the world, share hardware secrets with a partner/now competitor company that develops their own hardware and software within the mobile sector?