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

• Ad scammers messed with a lot of users. A report this last week showed that some apps stack ads behind other ads. This shows the ads as seen and the developers walk away with piles of money. This sort of ad stacking bilks advertisers out of millions of dollars. It also drains the batteries on user smartphones to a surprising degree. There isn’t a lot that end users can do about it. However, if you notice your battery life draining much, much faster than normal with any app, we recommend uninstalling it and sending a report to the developer.
• YouTube had a big week this week. YouTube TV finally reached the entire U.S. market after a lengthy and tedious rollout. Anyone who wants to try it (in the U.S.) now can. That’s big news because it finally brings YouTube TV in parity with other live TV streaming. Meanwhile, YouTube is working on its YouTube Premium subscription, including its original series. Hit the links for more details!
• Our own Adam Sinicki visited Facebook’s headquarters in London, England. We learned some interesting things about Facebook’s app development practices. For instance, the company prioritizes the most important work and breaks that work into modular pieces for the whole team to work on. In addition, it uses a heavily modified version of Mercurial for its development process. Hit the link if you ever wanted a look at how Facebook does things. Oh, and Facebook also had another security problem this week.
• The Elder Scrolls: Blades launched on Google Play this week, sort of. The game is downloadable. However, there is still a closed beta process in place. Thus, you need to get an email from the developer to get access to the full game. Those invites are rolling out right now. The full game should launch later this year. Any in-app purchases or progress made during the beta should carry over as well.
• BBC pulled all of its podcasts from Google Podcasts, Google Assistant, and Google Search this week. This is rather surprising. However, there is a somewhat reasonable explanation for it. BBC cites poor user statistics with the Google Podcast platform. The two companies met about it and couldn’t come to an agreement. You can still listen to BBC stuff on other platforms. You can also use the iPlayer Radio app on Google Home to continue using that ecosystem for BBC podcasts.

If we missed any great Android apps or games news, updates, or releases, tell us about them in the comments! You can also click here for our latest Android Authority podcast episodes!