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Welcome to the 428th edition of Android Apps Weekly. Here are the big headlines from the last week:
- Google is suing a man for using its Google services to do bad things. A man set up a face dog adoption website, accepted money from clients, and never delivered any puppies. The guy also used Gmail, Google Voice, and other services to conduct this shady business. Google responded by suing the crap out of the guy and we couldn’t be happier about it.
- A security researcher found an SDK that sent large amounts of data to a US defense contractor. It reported those apps to Google and Google remove them. It’s believed that apps with the SDK was downloaded over 60 million times across a variety of app genres. Click the link to learn more, but rest assured, the apps are now gone.
- Unlimted Google Photos is back, but it’s not free. Google announced a new Google One plan for $15 per month. It includes 2TB 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 run and this lets Google fund it appropriately. It seems like a decent deal, especially with all of that extra cloud storage space.
- Plex released an update that is actually pretty awesome. It lets you log in to your various video streaming services so you can watch video from any of them without needing to switch apps. It’s available now for all users except Roku. Roku users have to wait a bit longer. We asked our readers if they like Plex, and most of them do, so we’re happy to see such a good update going out to so many people.
- Samsung unveiled another fold in the big throttling debacle that’s been going on this year. Samsung says it throttles its phones to prevent overheating. Apparently, the new Spadragon 8 Gen 1 chips are causing some overheating issues when left at full throttle. Hit the link to read more.
Bonju
Price: Free
Bonju is a sort of social network for people who travel a lot. You make friends all over the place 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 hit them up. That’s the core functionality of the app. It’s relatively niche, but does its job better than mainstream social media apps. Of course, whether you like it or not depends on if you can get your friends to use it. It has potential.
The Ancestral Legacy
Price: Free / $3.99
The Ancestral Legacy is the latest game from Buff Studios. This one bills itself as a mystery thriller and a visual novel. Players work their way through the story and make decisions at key plot points. The decisions you make affect the outcome of the game. Some other features include achievements, multiple endings, and multiple story branches. It played fine in our testing and it should scratch that itch for fans of the genre.
Wisdom
Price: Free
Wisdom is a kind of self-help app. It lets you share and accept advice about a variety of life challenges, including things like making more money, improving your physical or mental health, and other stuff like that. It’s a community-focused app so you can help out 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 a lot of 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 obtain a team of heroes that they use to battle bad guys a bunch. You upgrade your heroes as you play and continue through the game. It has simple combat, over 100 heroes to collect, and plenty of things to do. Some folks may not like the simplicity of certain parts and we get that. However, this is a nice time-waster with a bit more depth than something like an idle RPG. The developers seem to be working out some bugs that cause the animations to be 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 at 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 either device. It can also collect your email attachments and other stuff, although that functionality does cost extra. From there, you can move files, manage them, organize them, or do whatever you like. You can even sort or filter by file type for added functionality. It seems to be pretty decent even if it requires a subscription.
If we missed any big Android apps or games news, tell us about it in the comments.
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