To be honest, if you have been paying attention to the smartphone market over the past year, you know that HMD Global’s Nokia brand has been making a serious comeback. Now we have a more substantial report that reflect what everyone suspected: Nokia has had a killer year.

Counterpoint Research has published their report on the Smartphone market and they, like IDC earlier in the week, confirm that Huawei has passed Apple as the number two smartphone company in the world. But the Counterpoint report goes into more details than the IDC report on the “other” brands, of which Nokia is lumped into. That’s where you find that the brand has gained some 782% in market share since Q2 2017.

#Counterpoint #Android #HMD #Nokia

It looks like we don’t have much longer to wait for Android P. August 20th appears to be the day and we have, once again, Evan Blass to thank for the news. He posted on Twitter this morning a somewhat cryptic calendar with a bright green “P” on August 20th.

#Android #AndroidP

Gboard for Android has another update rolling out, bringing the ability to make GIFs from text as well as support for 28 new languages. The update is version 7.4.19 for those keeping score at home and is out in the Play Store now.

#AppUpdate #Android #Gboard #Google

The Starbucks app for Android has been updated this morning and it brings the ability to do a one time adding of funds to your account from Google Pay. The update is version 4.11.1 for those keeping score at home and should be out to everyone who has the app installed by now.

#Android #AppUpdate #Starbucks #GooglePay

Croatia has become the latest country where Google Pay is now available. It means that Croatians can now use their phones to tap-and-pay for services in supporting retailers as well as for online purchases. The country marks the third central European country to get the service after Czech Republic and Slovakia earlier this year.

#Android #GooglePay #Croatia

The new LG Stylo 4, which was released back in June, has made its way to Amazon as an Amazon Prime Exclusive Phone.  The $249.99 price tag is $50 less than the normal price for the phone and, like other Prime phones, will com pre-installed with the various Amazon apps.

For that $249.99 price tag, you get a solid mid-range device and a phone that is running Android Oreo 8.1.  The LG Stylo 4 has a 6.2" Full HD display that renders at 2160x1080 on at 18:9 aspect ratio.  It has 3GB of RAM and 32GB of built-in storage which can be expanded up to 2GB thanks to the MicroSD slot.

#LGStylo4 #Android #AndroidOreo #AndroidOreo81 #Amazon #AmazonPrime

Despite significant challenges in getting into the US market, Huawei has become the second largest phone manufacture, measured in phone shipments, in the latest report from IDC. The shipping of 54.2 million devices in the second quarter of 2018 means that the Chinese manufacture has moved well past Apple, who was number two behind Samsung until this report. Apple shipped 41.3 million devices in the same quarter.

#Android #IDC #Huawei #Apple

Yesterday, Hauwei’s sub-brand Honor released the new Honor Note 10. The 6.95″ phone is packed with performance and while it is only available in China currently, it is expected that a global variant of the phone will be available later this year or early next. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get the wallpapers from the new phone today.

#Wallpapers #Huawei #Note10

LineageOS has rolled out support for the 2016 Google Pixel and Google Pixel XL in their latest firmware build of Android Oreo 8.1. In LineageOS terms, that build 15.1. The addition of the two Google phones adds to an ever increasing number of devices that the independent Android development group, which rose from the ashes of CyanogenMod, supports.

#LineageOS #GooglePixel #GooglePixelXL

Regardless of if you like, don’t like, or vehemently hate sensor notches on smartphones, the reality is that they are coming into vogue. Google themselves are expected to have a notched device in the Pixel 3 XL and there are already notched devices out there from the likes of Essential and Huawei. That said, Android Oreo has never fully supported notches but that changes under Android P.

The Android team over at Google took to the Android Development blog yesterday to outline some key code elements that developers need to use in order to make sure their apps work with a notched device in Android P. They also laid down the law for manufactures too. No device will have more that two notches.

#Android #AndroidP #Developer #AndroidDev