Full Changelog:

1. Massive performance improvements across the app
2. What’s Hot!
3. View who +1′d a post or comment
4. Stream posts shortened to fit more per scroll
5. Infinite photos feed in ‘From your circles’
6. Stream no longer jumps to the top for an automatic refresh

If you don’t already have it downloaded on your device, hit the source link below to download it. Also don’t forget to circle the best Android site in the world, Android Authority so you can stay up to date with all the latest Android News, Reviews, How To’s and much more.

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Earlier today, Google released the beta version of Chrome for Android which excited a lot of people. One of the things that attracted people to the browser is because it provides support for the internet’s modern standards. At the same time, it includes several features which are not found on the default browser of Android. Unfortunately, there is one feature that is not included on the mobile port—the integrated Flash runtime.

Because this saddened a lot of people, Adobe issued an official statement which confirms this: Chrome for Android does not support Flash content. In addition to this, Adobe has mentioned they do not have any future plans of working with Google to add a support for Flash functionality on the new mobile browser. Instead, Adobe will continue supporting Flash on the default Android browser.

“Today Google introduced Chrome for Android Beta. As we announced last November, Adobe is no longer developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, and thus Chrome for Android Beta does not support Flash content,” Bill Howard, Adobe’s Flash Platform product manager, wrote.

For years, Adobe has been struggling to make the Flash player plugin available on smartphones. While it was able to make the plugin work quite well on Android phones, there were other results on different systems. Moreover, Apple is unwilling to allow the plugin to work on its iOS platform. Also, Android users were unable to enjoy using Flash on their devices compared to their PCs.

These issues have caused Adobe to abandon its strategy for mobile Flash player, which they have announced last year. They have recently announced they will be phasing out development of the mobile plugin, so they can concentrate more on web standards.

Perhaps when Google decides to replace the current default Android browser with Chrome in the upcoming versions of Android OS, then Adobe will be able to revive their mobile Flash player plugin strategy once again.

What do you think of this? Were you looking forward to a mobile Flash player plugin for your Android smartphone? Let us know in the comments below!

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We received information that Google has just hired Apple’s former Senior Director for product integrity, Simon Prakash. While both Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt may have had a ‘no poaching’ agreement in the past, it seems like this is no longer in effect. This got us thinking if this will spark another series of patent issues and what-not.

Prakash was with Apple for 8 years and was recently the head for ensuring quality control for all Apple products. As of this writing, there is no news as to what Prakash’s new title will be, or if he will ever be working on Android related tasks. We heard Google assigned him to work on a ‘secret project.’ Does this have something to do with the mysterious device they recently signed up for at the FCC?

But our source believes that this ‘secret project’ will be operated by Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, who has also worked on multiple secret projects for the company.

Perhaps Apple will realize that they have lost a great man, considering that they have been well known for their product quality. But with Prakash’s transfer to Google, we hope for better things to come!

And going back to that ‘no poaching’ agreement, the Department of Justice is currently investigating the two companies.

Anyway, we’re more interested in this ‘secret project.’ Do you have a clue? The suspense is killing us! Can you give us a hint what you think it is all about?

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I bet if you just hang out at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) all day long, you’ll discover who the latest to get a patent is. In most recent stories, Google is the latest to ask the FCC for permission. However, they have not disclosed what this mysterious ‘entertainment device’ is. All we know is that they got permission to use it in the four major US cities over the next 6 months. This got everyone pretty excited! The device was described as equipped with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. According to GigaOm (who discovered the FCC application), Google submitted the request back in December.

As of the moment, there are unclear details about the device. This is why people have their own assumptions on whether it could be an Android or a Google TV device. But after reading the description of the device, it looks like this mysterious device will take video content straight from the internet and will distribute it across several connected devices. As experts have assumed, this would lessen strain on current broadband internet connections.

Because it is such a mystery, we couldn’t help but snoop around as to what this device may be. As such, a number of theories have been generated—including an extension of Android @ Home, which was unveiled at Google IO 2011.

Another theory is that it is the Project Tungsten, which was only demonstrated as a central, connected device running on Android OS. At the time of its demonstration, Project Tungsten was merely a prototype. So maybe this is the real thing?

All we know, at this moment, is that Google is currently testing over 250 of these entertainment devices in various locations such as New York City, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles. At this point, all we can do is wait.

What do you think it could be? Let me know in the comments section below!

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This piece of news is probably a bigger hit to RIM than anyone else, because when it comes to enterprises and Governments who want to use secure smartphones, they have always been their first choice. Now it’s becoming increasingly more clear that Android is a viable choice for Governments, military, security agencies and companies who want secure devices.

Currently, those with access to classified information are not allowed to view it using unsecured smartphones, and unfortunately for them they still have to use “secure” phone models from maybe more than 5 years ago, that don’t even have touchscreens. That is starting to be unacceptable for many Government officials when they’re using much more modern touchscreen smartphones for their personal affairs already.

One of the most important features of this secure version of Android, is the ability to block any app permission you want. Google isn’t allowing normal users to customize the permissions an app can get in Android right now, probably because they want to make it easier for developers, so they don’t have to worry about making their app work only with certain permissions.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt Google to at least clarify some of their permissions better, because people get scared when they a SMS app require full Internet connection (which usually just means needing access to retrieve the ads) or read/write access to the SD card (which might be because the app is keeping data on the SD card).

So whether they will give the user more fine-grained control or not, they certainly need to make those permissions more fine-grained, because some apps do require certain permissions that it shouldn’t get, but because it’s not clear enough to the user what it wants, the user accepts it anyway.

One interesting tidbit of information is that the people working on the Security Enhanced Android said that they can deliver updates to their Android phones within 2 weeks. Well that could certainly put our favorite manufacturers and carriers to shame, who sometimes update one of their phones in 6 months or more. If only private companies could be as efficient as the Government in updating Android! (that’s something you don’t hear everyday, do you?).

Now, the question remains, will Government officials get ICS on their phones before most of us do?

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Market research reports appear all too often, but some of them seem very different or contracting. It’s important you know what type of market share the new chart represents and what the numbers show. Some of them show market share based on last quarter alone, which is all about *new* sales market share. Others, like this one here, show how many subscribers in *total* the main platforms have, while others are simply being misleading by combining data that doesn’t make sense.

Also, some  are for US while others are for global market share, so that’s always good to recognize, too, because the US and global market shares are not always very similar, although it seems that the US and global ones for Android are pretty similar this time around, but still not identical.

So what we have here is a US market share statistic for the total number of subscribers for all these companies. So when they say Google has a 47% market share, almost double of their next competitor Apple, what they mean is that out of the almost 100 million smartphones currently being owned in US, 47 million of them are Android smartphones, 29 million are iPhones (not sure if iPod Touches are still included in these), 16 million are Blackberries, less than 5 million are Windows Mobile and WP7 phones (mostly Windows Mobile ones), and a little over 1 million are Nokia Symbian phones.

Once again, this is not about the last quarter’s sales, it’s about the total number of mobile devices in US. The only part that shows something about new sales in this table is that “change” column, which shows how many percentage points they all gained (or lost) during the September-December period.

So for now it looks like Android is still the fastest growing platform in US, and it also has a user base that is almost double that of Apple in US for smartphones. If nothing else, this should at least put developers on their toes, because many of them live in US and develop mainly for the iPhone, when Android is already on twice as many phones there.

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Google has just revealed a new security system for the Android Market called Bouncer. They made this last year, and it’s been already running for a number of months, making sure that there are no malware infested applications in the Android Market. Here’s how Bouncer actually works:

The service performs a set of analyses on new applications, applications already in Android Market, and developer accounts. Here’s how it works: once an application is uploaded, the service immediately starts analyzing it for known malware, spyware and trojans. It also looks for behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving, and compares it against previously analyzed apps to detect possible red flags. We actually run every application on Google’s cloud infrastructure and simulate how it will run on an Android device to look for hidden, malicious behavior. We also analyze new developer accounts to help prevent malicious and repeat-offending developers from coming back.

If you caught that last part, it says they are running every single application from the Market on their own cloud systems (much like Amazon demos their Android apps, I believe, but just on the back-end and done automatically). This way they get to check every application that exists in the Android Market for malware.

According to Google, malware reports have already dropped by 40% in 2011 for the Android Market. This is an important distinction, because according to Google (and what I’ve always believed, too) the security companies that want to sell their own “anti-virus” applications are mostly talking about malware that exists in apps outside the Android Market.

This includes apps you find on pirated sites, apps that exist in other “app stores”, like say the ones in China, and so on. While Google is always looking to improve Android’s security, which is already a very secure OS compared to say Windows for most of its lifecycle, but ultimately, if you decide to get an application from outside their own Market, and from an untrusted source, then there’s little blame you can put on Google for that, and you just need to be more careful with what you’re installing. Freedom to install anything you want from anywhere comes with a price – and that price must be paid in responsibility and vigilance.

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Bloomberg News has reported a few days ago that Google Inc. is sparring with a law firm they’ve been using since 2008. This is after they discovered that the law firm had lawyers representing a patent-licensing business which sued their Android partners just last month.

According to Google, the law firm (Pepper Hamilton LLP) did not provide them any notice that they were hired by Digitude Innovations LLC. This same company filed patent-infringement complaints against several handset manufacturers, including Google’s Android partners Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC Corp. In a Jan. 27 request, Google said that Pepper Hamilton should be disqualified from the case. This request was given to the US International Trade Commission in Washington, where a complaint was filed.

“In short, Pepper Hamilton is accusing its own client of infringement,” Google said in the filing. “Pepper Hamilton should not be allowed to continue alleging infringement against the products and interests of its current client.”

Google accused Pepper Hamilton of disloyalty and said confidential information it shared created conflict of interest with the Digitude case. Since Google previously used the law firm to help them apply for Android mobile OS patents, it is no shock why Google felt betrayed.

“With so much patent litigation among technology companies, there is bound to be some overlap among lawyers.” said Scott Daniels, a Westerman Hattori Daniels in Washington partner said. “Conflicts are hard on law firms.

“You don’t want to anger your clients,” he added.

When asked about comment on the issue, Pepper Hamilton lawyers did not return any telephone messages. But on their website, they claim that they have around 500 lawyers.

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This could be just a coincidence, but it seems that a few unofficial 3rd party Steam apps were removed from the Market, just after the official Steam app was made available. Is it Google behind this or the company behind Steam itself (Valve)?

The API that those 3rd party developers were using is still public and available to developers, so if Steam did it, then they are only blocking access to the API for those few developers. But why would they do it? It’s possible that they thought some of those apps were infringing their trademark. But let’s be honest here. In most of these cases, they usually just want to remove the competition.

This reminds me of when Skype blocked Fring’s access to their own API because Fring offered video-calling before them, and they were afraid they would take too much market share for that before they could get a chance to show their own video-calling feature. I think that was a pretty low blow from Skype. Companies should be careful what they give an API for if they think they will try to compete in the same area in the future. Don’t just release an API to get others to promote your platform, and then when you decide to compete in a certain market, you take it away from them just like that.

Google is also a potential aggressor here. It wouldn’t be the first time they do it either. I remember when they removed the unofficial (yet very legal) PS1 emulators from the market as soon as Sony made available theirs. Google shouldn’t play on other corporation’s side like that just because some 3rd party developers are competing with the corporations they are friends with.

Still, if I were willing to bet on it, I’d say it’s just Valve doing it this time. Maybe we’ll hear from those developers soon and see if they know  what’s really going on.

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DoCoMo (Japan’s leading mobile phone service provider) will be asking Google Inc. for help in modifying its Android OS. Nikkei.com has earlier reported the reason behind this request is so DoCoMo smartphones running on Android OS will generate less data traffic.

This request came after DoCoMo identified a free-of-charge voice communication Android app that intervened with the service of the provider last Wednesday. In addition to this, there are some Android apps that send out some control signals every three to five minutes despite not being used. As a result, the network encountered much of a strain by these apps.

There is a current issue with the sharp rise of data consumption which adds pressure to wireless network operators to continually boost their capacity investments. This is so they can avoid clogging telecom networks as the demand for on the go data services continue to shoot up.

According to Nikkei, DoCoMo plans to request Google to lessen the amount of time that Android automatically transmits control signals. Currently, it does so every 28 minutes; which results to frequent service disruptions. This could possibly give a negative impact on the popularity of Android smartphones.

In lieu with this, DoCoMo hopes that Google and other mobile service providers will collaborate with them in requesting Android app developers to put a limit on the frequency control signals are sent. However, considering that Android’s biggest edge is its open source platform, this request may not be taken seriously.

What do you think?

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