5 Android apps you shouldn't miss this week! - Android Apps Weekly

• Essential surprised all of us this week when they purchased CloudMagic. CloudMagic closed its app, Newton Mail, down earlier this year citing financial problems. Now, a phone OEM with financial problems owns the email developer with financial problems. We enjoyed that particular bit of irony. We have no idea why Essential purchased CloudMagic. The company says it is always on the lookout for great technology, but nothing further. Take that for what it’s worth.
• Google+ is shutting down sooner than originally expected. Google announced a second data leak with an estimated impact of 52.5 million users. It’s very similar to the first data leak. It exposed a lot of user information to developers on the Google+ API. In response, the shut down is now April 2019 instead of August 2019. Of course, it had plenty of problems before that as well. On a positive note, you can make donations through Google Play now!
• Pandora is now in the podcast game. The service launched its podcasts earlier this week. It boasts hundreds of podcasts with over 100,000 individual episodes ready for consumption right now. This follows in the footsteps of iTunes, Google Play Music, and Spotify. Pandora also uses machine learning for its podcast discovery and recommendation platform. They call it the Podcast Genome Project. That could help Pandora with its music recommendations someday as well.
• One of Pokémon Go’s most requested features is now available. Trainers can finally battle one another. Trainers use the Trainer Battle League categories to limit Pokémon CP levels for fairer fights. Additionally, players can also block damage a few times per battle. They can also only battle Ultra Friends or Best Friends for right now. We imagine that Niantic will expand that in future updates. In any case, player versus player battles are live and Pokémon Go continues to evolve.
• Google investigated the Cheetah Mobile ad fraud issue from a few weeks ago. The results were not good. Google removed two apps from the Play Store for ad fraud. They include CM File Manager and Kika Keyboard. Those apps used outright fraud to earn money from advertisers. Google also uncovered abuse of three ad network APIs, although none of them were Google’s own ad API. Google is continuing their investigation for the time being. We’ll let you know if anything else happens.

If we missed any big Android apps or games news, tell us about it in the comments!