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- We wrote our lists for the best Android apps and best Android games from January 2021. Among the highlights include AirMusic, Discovery+, Proton Calendar, Gordon Ramsay: Chef Blast, Princess Connect! Re:Dive, and a few others. January was a surprisingly decent month for apps and games and we hope 2021 keeps it up.
- Google Stadia shut down its game studios this week. Stadia hopes this helps them survive for a longer term. Stadia has had limited success but is getting better every month. Shutting down the studios is a huge blow for Stadia. Hopefully this isn’t the beginning of the end for Stadia.
- Google and Australia are having a small tiff right now. In short, Australia wants Google to pay journalists it features on its platform. Google thinks that’s stupid and wants to leave Australia if the idea becomes law. Microsoft said it would replace Google with Bing if it came to it. Hit the link to see the details.
- Bebo, an old social media site, is making a comeback. It’s a totally new site developed by the original founders of Bebo. We don’t know a lot yet. The official launch is sometime this month (February 2021) so we’ll keep you posted as we learn more. The site is in a private beta at the moment.
- Google bailed out Robinhood after the drama last week. One of the many branches of fallout was the huge number of one-star reviews on Google Play for Robinhood after the company restricted GameStop shares. Google deleted the flood of negative reviews. Unfortunately, most of them are back now so we’ll likely see a second cleanse at some point.
AdVenture Ages: Idle Civilization
Price: Free to play AdVenture Ages: Idle Civilization is actually the fourth game in the AdVenture series. All of the games are idle games and are better than most of their competitors. Players travel through time to fix broken timelines. There are collectibles, the obvious idle element, and some other stuff for players to do. It scales up pretty well and it reuses a lot of the mechanics from previous AdVenture games. It’s pretty good.
LADB
Price: $2.99 LADB is a local ADB shell app that lets you run ADB commands without a computer. It uses Android’s Wireless ADB to do so and it’s actually a pretty elegant solution. This is definitely a power user app and not meant for the everyday smartphone user. You need to be comfortable with ADB and actually have a need to use it. It runs for $2.99 with no in-app purchases or ads. There just isn’t anything wrong with this one. It does what it promises.
Rhythm Hive
Price: Free to play Rhythm Hive is a real-time multiplayer rhythm game, a rarity on mobile. It’s a bit weird for a rhythm game. It has a bunch of songs from a bunch of artists. You play the songs as you normally would in a rhythm game. The mechanics are pretty simple and are mostly tapping. The game had some big release day bugs that prevented people from download the gaming and that’s why the Google Play rating is low. However, with the developers working on it, it should be functioning better.
Virtoo by LG
Price: Free Virtoo by LG is an app by LG. It helps you integrate your phone with Windows 10. You download the app on your phone and your Windows 10 machine. The app lets you text, call, and even screen mirror your LG device on your computer. The app doesn’t support all LG devices and the PC version is quite buggy. However, this was a soft launch so LG has some time to fix the bugs before we call this a failure. Here’s hoping they do better with updates to this than the company does with its phones.
Birdie Crush: Fantasy Golf
Price: Free to play Birdie Crush: Fantasy Golf is a new golf game from Com2uS, developers of Summoners War and other popular games. Players essentially get characters, use them to play golf, and then upgrade their characters as they play. There are also online leaderboards, decent graphics, and character customizations. The game had some issues on launch but most of them are resolved now. This is actually a decent little golf sim as long as you don’t mind the anime theme.
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