While some voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant are duking it out for smart home dominance, there are others that focus on offering more specialized voice support. One such assistant is the new one being launched by Pandora today. Soon, everyone listening to Pandora on iOS and Android will be able to navigate the app, discover new music, and play songs using voice commands.
YouTube is pushing out updates for its Android and iOS apps that bring a new swiping gesture. With this change, users are able to swipe on the screen in order to quickly jump forward or back to different videos -- either to the next recommended video or the last one they were watching. The change comes at a time when the vast majority of YouTube viewers watch on mobile.
If you don't count yourself among the Facebook Stories users of the world, you certainly aren't alone. Taking a page out of Snapchat's book, Facebook rolled out Stories back in 2017, but since then, there hasn't been much in way of meaningful updates to the feature. That all might changing soon, as Facebook is at least toying with the idea of integrating Events with Stories.
Tidal may trail far behind rivals Spotify and Apple Music, but it's not dropping out of the streaming music game. You might take the same view about car company Lincoln, which is far from the biggest name in luxury SUVs, but over the last several months it's been working hard at updating both its image and vehicles. This may not be the reason behind their teaming up, of course, but Tidal and Lincoln have announced up to a year of the high-quality music streaming service for new car owners.
Instagram has made it possible to post content to multiple accounts at the same time, a convenience feature that saves a lot of time for brands and the many users who juggle more than one account. The new feature hasn't been officially announced, but the company confirmed the change this week after users spied the option. The feature is rolling out to iOS now, but Android plans remain unclear.
DVR company TiVo is working on an app that will enable its customers to watch their recordings on other televisions using a Roku device, Apple TV, or Fire TV. The upcoming product was recently spotted at CES 2019, where it was demonstrated on video ahead of its official launch to the public. This represents a big change for the company, which has thus far required users to buy a TiVo Mini for each TV.
As with Twitter, Reddit, and other services before it, Facebook is finally working on a dark mode for its messaging app. Earlier this year, a leak revealed that Facebook's team was internally testing a Messenger dark mode, and now that same mode is showing up publicly as a test for some users. As the name suggests, the dark mode changes the appearance of Facebook Messenger to a dark color scheme.
Earlier in the year, Epic took the fight to Steam by launching its own PC storefront. Epic's plan is to undercut Steam by offering developers and publishers a larger percentage of their sales - while Valve starts off by taking 30% of each sale made on Steam (a cut that shrinks as games sell more copies), Epic only takes 12% of each sale for itself. That, combined with the built-in reach of the Epic Games Store thanks to sharing a launcher with Fortnite, could potentially make Epic's storefront an attractive place for developers to publish their games.
It used to be that spam was something we only really dealt with in our email, but these days it annoys us in the form of phone calls and text messages as well. Thankfully Android has introduced several features to combat this, and Google seems to be rolling out it latest feature for preventing spam in its Messages app.
Back in August, rumors surfaced that Netflix planned to eliminate in-app subscriptions for iOS users, instead requiring them to sign up through a Web browser. The move would eliminate Apple from the purchasing equation, particularly its significant cut of the subscription fees Netflix gets from the in-app signup. Now that change has quietly been made official.
Earlier this month, Google pushed out the most recent update to its Google Fit fitness-tracking app, the latest of multiple big updates this year. Now the company is preparing to add 30-day challenge events, the first of which will go live on January 1, 2019. These events will enable users to earn Heart Points for completing activities.
It would appear that a malicious app by the name of "Setup for Amazon Alexa" climbed the Apple app store charts all the way to the top 10 before its removal. This app's true intent is not yet known, but it most certainly was not made by any sort of official Amazon entity. This app reached at least number 6 on the app store charts for Utilities, and within the top 60 for "top free" apps in general. Now it's been removed.