Tech News - Mobile

Mozilla announced a major update to Firefox Focus, a free and open-source privacy-focused browser by Mozilla for Android, iOS smartphones and tablets, yesterday. Firefox Focus allows you to stay “focused” by automatically blocking ads and trackers. The new updates explore new features, revamped design, and GeckoView Technology behind Firefox Focus for Android. New Features There are three new features added in Firefox Focus, namely, home screen tips, search suggestions, and Siri shortcut for iOS users. Home Screen tips It’s good news for people who like to keep tabs on feature releases. Now, you can see the core functionalities of Firefox Focus on the start screen. This will provide an overview of the whole range of possibilities that your privacy browser needs to offer. More than that, this new addition will not interrupt the usage at all and will get automatically refreshed after every click on the Erase button. All you need to do is just open the browser and a bunch of helpful feature recommendations will be presented in your preferred language on the start screen (Android). However, for iOS users, this feature is currently available only in the English language. Search Suggestions Search suggestions make the entire searching process more convenient. You can activate the feature by opening the app and select settings > “Search” > select the checkbox “Get search suggestions”. Now, keeping in mind the privacy of the Firefox Focus users, you don’t have to share what you’re typing in the address bar with your search provider. The search suggestions feature has been turned “off” by default, so you can choose whether or not you want to turn it on. Siri shortcuts for iOS users Siri shortcuts have been added to the updated Firefox Focus. You can now set and open a favorite website, erase and open Firefox, as well as erase in the background using Siri shortcuts. Mozilla’s aim with this was to improve the Firefox Focus experience for iOS users. Revamped Design Visual design for Firefox Focus browser has been completely optimized for the recently released Android Pie. New icons, a customized URL bar, and a simplified settings menu make Firefox Focus easier to use. It also offers a consistent user experience. New engine for Firefox Android users Focus has been using Android’s built-in WebView all this time, but it has some limitations. WebView is not designed for building browsers. To add next-generation privacy features to Focus, Focus developers require deep access to the browser internals. This is why, they have opted for their own engine, Gecko. Firefox Focus is now based on GeckoView, Mozilla’s own mobile engine, making it perfect for use in Android apps. GeckoView will help them leverage all of their Firefox expertise to build more compelling, safe, and robust online experiences. GeckoView will enable Mozilla to implement unique privacy-enhancing features in the future, such as reducing the potential of a third-party collection. For more information, check out the official Mozilla website. Mozilla releases Firefox 62.0 with better scrolling on Android, a dark theme on macOS, and more Firefox Nightly browser: Debugging your app is now fun with Mozilla’s new ‘time travel’ feature Firefox Nightly’s Secure DNS Experimental Results out

The Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) is Apple’s yearly summer event for developers where the tech giant announces all the major updates related to its software and hardware platform. The event spanning from June 4-8, at McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, is expected to make big news as Apple plans to launch iOS 12 for iPhone and iPad, MacOS 10.14 for desktops among other announcements. Along with these annual OS releases we can also expect to see improvements to Apple’s very own Swift programming language slated to be released later in the year and plenty of other updates to ARKit and Siri as well. iOS 12 will have rigorous testing and digital wellbeing in focus Image Source: Apple iOS A number of rumors are circulating about what new features will be added to iOS 12 and it sounds like it is going to be a subtle change rather than drastic upgrades. Codenamed “Peace” iOS 12 will heavily focus on performance and bug fixes. Earlier this year on his visit to China, Tim Cook, stressed on the fact that due to the growing user base of the iOS devices, it becomes imperative to do rigorous testing before releasing an update to the software. This response from the Apple CEO came after a lot of advertisements featuring iOS 11 bugs surfaced on the internet. So what features are expected to be rolled out in iOS 12? Here is a list of possible announcements at WWDC: A Digital Health tool for parents, enabling them to manage children’s digital time. Animoji Update Animoji integration into FaceTime Sleep tracking improvements Multi-user sessions support for AR games and FaceTime Improved message and presencing technologies Another important update that is rumored to be added this time around is the Unified App Framework named Project Marzipan, which will let developers create a single app with an interface that adapts to the device it’s running on. While sources from Bloomberg say that this could be rolled out only as early as next year, we could see some sort of announcement at the conference next month. Will macOS 10.14 finally bring iOS into its fold? Image Source: Apple macOS The 2018 edition of Apple’s Mac operating system is likely to be released as a public beta, a month after the WWDC; followed by an actual release in September or October, based on the release trends from the previous editions. While Tim Cook, hinted that there would be no cross-platform compatibility between iOS and macOS applications, such a feature will greatly increase the number of available apps on Macs. It could also mean that Apple will bring some of its iOS-only apps, like Home, to the Mac. Apart from this, we can see several minor additions to macOS like improvements in Safari for better video conferencing and AI image identification capabilities. ABI (application binary interface) comes to Swift 5 Image Source: Apple Swift Swift continues its evolution as one of the safest, fastest, and most expressive languages, with better performance and new features in every release. One of the most awaited features in this year’s edition is Application Binary Interface (ABI) stability, a feature which was originally intended for the Swift 4 release, but got delayed. If you already know what an API is, then understanding ABI becomes a lot easier. It is a compiled version of an API. When you write source code, you access the library through an API. Once the code is compiled, your application accesses the binary data in the library through the ABI. One of the big advantages of ABI is that it enables OS vendors to embed a Swift Standard Library and runtime in the OS that is compatible with applications built with Swift 5 or later. Other notable features to be announced at WWDC are: String ergonomics to improve processing of the string type Improvements to existing standard library facilities Improvements to the Foundation API so the Cocoa SDK can work seamlessly with Swift Syntactic additions Laying the groundwork for a new concurrency model Is 2018 the year when users say, “Hey Siri, you the best!”? Image Source: Apple Siri Siri was one of the most widely-used voice assistants in the world when it was first introduced in 2011. Since then Apple has faced some stiff competition from Amazon powered Alexa and Google's me-too efforts tied to its Assistant running on Android, iOS and most of the Google products. The pressure is mounting on Apple to compete in this wildly competitive voice platform space. Hopefully this year Apple would address or add several key capabilities in Siri that could help them stand out. The most likely enhancements include: SiriKit: New domains to be the added to the current APIs. Siri already includes messaging, payments, phone calls, and ride bookings. Workflow: Apple acquired Workflow a year ago, a Workflow Intent for Siri could enable third parties to craft any sort of skill for users to launch with their voice, or graphically from any iOS device. Apples hope that this could be their answer to Alexa skills or Google’s Actions. Better “Hey Siri”: Apple has been enhancing how different Siri devices work together on the same network, an issue that neither Amazon or Google have really had. This is still a work in progress, but HomePod already does a good job of silencing your iPhone when both are listening for "Hey Siri." ARKit Image Source: Apple ARKit Last year at WWDC Apple debuted ARKit and enabled developers to create engaging virtual experiences augmented over the real world. This year we can expect a lot of improvements in this tool. For starters, the new ARKit 1.5 which was released last month brings a lot of new features to the framework such as the ability to detect vertical and irregularly shaped surfaces, detecting 2D objects and allowing developers to interact with them with better resolution. With the framework now evolving we expect to see some cool demos in this year’s conference; perhaps an integration of ARKit with Maps, along the lines of what we saw in the I/O conference earlier this month. These announcements are exciting, confirming our hunch that Apple will show off their high-profile initiatives that will shape the coming year. While only a few thousand lucky developers will get a chance to attend, others can live stream the event on Apple’s official website. Apple steals AI chief from Google F8 AR Announcements Watson-CoreML : IBM and Apple’s new machine learning collaboration project

Yesterday, Google announced the stable release of Android Studio 3.2 with a variety of new features and improvements. This version comes with 20+ features including Android App Bundle, Energy Profiler, and Android Emulator Snapshots. What’s new in Android Studio 3.2 Android App Bundle With Android App Bundle, the new app publishing format, you can deliver smaller APKs to your users and reduce the download size of your app. Once Google Play has your app bundle, it uses an app serving model named Dynamic Delivery. This serving model processes your app bundle to generate and serve optimized APKs for each user's device configuration. This eliminates your efforts of building, signing, and managing multiple APKs to support different devices, and users get smaller, more optimized downloads. Android Studio 3.2 provides you a CLI, using which you can easily build your code as an app bundle. Energy Profiler Battery life is one of the key concerns of users, so it is important to check the energy consumption done by your app. Energy Profiler helps you find where your app is using more energy than necessary. With the Energy Profiler, you can visualize the estimated energy usage of system components, plus inspect background events that may lead to battery drainage. To use it, ensure you are connected to an Android device or emulator running Android 8.0 Oreo (API 26) or higher. Slices support Slices are UI templates that can be used to display rich, dynamic, and interactive content from your app in the Google Search suggestions and Google Assistant. Built-in templates are available, to help you extend your app with the new Slice Provider APIs. You can also do lint checks to ensure that you're following best practices when constructing the Slices. To start constructing your Slices, right-click on your project folder, and navigate to New | Other | Slice Provider. Sample data You can now add sample data to a TextView, an ImageView, or a RecyclerView from within the Layout Editor. This will make it easier for you to visualize the look and feel of a layout while designing your app. ‘What's New’ assistant This newly added assistant panel automatically informs developers about the latest changes in the IDE. You can also open the panel by navigating to Help | What's New in Android Studio. AndroidX Refactoring Support You can now add the Android extension (AndroidX) libraries in a new project by adding the following line in your gradle.properties file: android.useAndroidX=true To help you migrate your project to the new namespace and dependencies, Android Studio 3.2 provides you a new built-in refactoring action. Also, the Android Studio build system will automatically convert any Maven dependencies that have not migrated to the AndroidX namespace. With Android Studio 3.2 and higher, you can quickly migrate an existing project to use AndroidX by selecting Refactor > Migrate to AndroidX from the menu bar. IntelliJ Platform and Kotlin update Android Studio 3.2 comes with IntelliJ 2018.1.6 platform release and  Kotlin 1.2.61. Many improvements to dataflow analysis, debugging, new inspections, have been added to this release of IntelliJ. Kotlin 1.2.61 provides support for the Kotlin-friendly Android 9 Pie SDK. Emulator Snapshots With the latest Android Emulator, you can create a snapshot of the current state of your emulator and boot up and switch into any snapshot in under 2 seconds. In Android Studio 3.2, Android Snapshots are even faster to save and load due to underlying speed enhancements. Using Android snapshots you can pre-configure an Android Virtual Device (AVD) with the presets, apps, data, and settings that you want in-place, and repeatedly go back to the same snapshot. Microsoft Hyper-V and AMD processor support Google has finally addressed this long-standing user request from the Android developer community. Now you can run the Android Emulator on Windows 10 computers that have Hyper-V enabled while Intel HAXM remains the default hypervisor. Support for AMD processor is added to provide developers hardware-accelerated performance. Screen Record in Android Emulator With the new screen recording feature in the Android Emulator, you can now perform screen and audio recording on any Android API and save this recording to a WebM or animated GIF file. You can enable this feature via the Android Emulator Extended Controls panel, command line, or from Android Studio. These were few of the features that they have added, and there are more to explore. You can find the full list at Android Developer Blog. Entry level phones to taste the Go edition of the Android 9.0 Pie version Did you know your idle Android device sends data to Google 10 times more often than an iOS device does to Apple? 6 common challenges faced by Android App developers

Update, 18th July 2018: The European Commission fined Google with €4.34 billion today for breaching EU's antitrust rules. According to the European regulators, Google has put illegal restrictions on Android device manufacturers and mobile network operators to maintain its dominant position in the internet search market. Google, now, needs to bring this conduct to an end within 90 days or face penalty payments of up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet ( Google's parent company). For more coverage on this news, check out the official press release by EU. Google is expected to face a record penalty this month from the European regulators. This is over the concern that Google’s policies threaten its corporate rivals by having manufacturers provide consumers pre-installed Google’s apps on Android devices. The European Union had already charged the tech giant with a $2.72 billion antitrust fine last year for unfair promotion of its shopping services in its search result pages, thereby, breaking the antitrust laws. Many experts speculate that the penalty from Margrethe Vestager, European Union’s Competition chief, could range somewhere around $11 billion which is 10 percent of Alphabet’s (its parent company) annual turnover. Even if it doesn’t get fined for the full $11 billion, any amount over $2.7 billion is bound to set a new record for the company. This antitrust case has the power to cause some big changes to the world’s most widely used mobile operating system. It subsequently has the potential to cause a ripple effect on the overall mobile market altering existing business models. Here’s what you must know about the case before the decision gets made later this week. What are the charges made against Google? Back in April 2015, the E.U. commission had initiated an official investigation into Google and released a statement accusing the company of allegedly using Android to maintain its dominance in the online search market, thereby, hampering the competition. Here are few of the concerns raised: Limiting access to its Play Store unless the phone makers also include the Google search and other Chrome apps, a practice that breached E.U. antitrust rules. It reportedly blocked phone makers from creating devices that are based on the Android open source code but are not affiliated with the Google-owned property. It also provides financial incentives to manufacturers for pre-installing its Search services on devices. For instance, HTC and Samsung need to set Google Search as the default search app and include its Chrome browser within the devices. If not, they lose access to Android’s popular app store which will make it hard for the Android smartphone owners to easily download games or other apps. What has Google got to say? Google doesn’t deny the fact that Android has helped expand its advertising business. But, it has dodged the accusations made by E.U. by saying that its play store allows it to offer the entire package to phone makers which include the browser and other apps, for free. It argues that it provided a base to the phone makers to create low-cost and reliable Android devices. It also emphasized the fact that users are free to download other apps if they want. According to Kent Walker, senior VP at Google, an average Android user downloads more than 50 apps in addition to the ones pre-installed on his/her phone in Europe. It doesn’t take a lot of time to download or replace an app. So, is E.U. convinced with Google’s arguments? E.U. acknowledges some of the points made by the tech giant but is not convinced entirely. According to E.U., Google has set up a restrictive contract with the mobile set manufacturers which forces them to pre-install its apps within the devices. With the help of Android, it has managed to extend the reach of its super popular apps such as YouTube, Google Maps and its play store to millions of users. The E.U.’s concern is that when provided with pre-installed Google services, users would prefer to leverage the existing Google apps over other apps. This unfairly expands Google’s control over the mobile web market. According to comScore, a data provider, six of the top 10 smartphones apps downloaded in Europe’s markets which includes France, Germany, Britain, Spain, and Italy are Google apps. Also, the Chrome browser is used by roughly 65 percent of the smartphone users in Europe. What’s at stake for Google? The stakes are quite high for Google. Apart from the hefty fine, it might have to unbundle its apps from Android and the related contracts. Now, though these apps are widely loved by the Android smartphone users, removing the tech giant's “required” apps from the future Android phones would greatly diminish its market share. It would also hit hard on its advertising sales which is worth billions of dollars. It will also hamper Google’s product quality because it collects the user data through these apps which helps it improve the product quality. All these efforts were a part of its strategy to beat the competition from Apple, Facebook and Amazon to remain at the core of the ever-expanding mobile web. But, if EU had their way, it is one decision away from a domino effect trampling Google’s mobile growth strategy. What next? E.U.’s decision would not mean the end of the world for the tech giant. It can still appeal, but, it’ll have to carefully alter its business practices and decisions. Otherwise, it risks additional penalties for each day as it fails to comply. As for now, we can only wait for the EU decision to watch Google’s next move. Google releases Android Things library for Google Cloud IoT Core Top 5 Google I/O 2018 conference Day 1 Highlights: Android P, Android Things, ARCore, ML kit and Lighthouse  

Nativescript version 4.1 has been released with multiple performance improvements and major highlights such as support for Angular 6, faster app launch time, new UI scenarios and much more. Android 6 support NativeScript 4.1 Angular integration has been updated with support for Angular 6. And since Angular 6 requires webpack 4, developers have to update to nativescript-dev-webpack 0.12.0 as well. V8 engine now available in v6.6 The V8 Engine is now upgraded to version 6.6. The new engine adds major performance boost, JavaScript language features, code caching after execution, removal of AST numbering, and multiple asynchronous performance improvements. Faster Android startup time The upgrade to V8 6.6 and webpack 4, also brings faster app launch time on Android making it on par with iOS. Depending on the device and the specific app, Android app startup time is now between 800ms on high-end devices, to 1.8s on older devices. This is an improvement of almost 50% compared to the startup time in Nativescript v4.0! Improvements to user interfaces Nativescript 4.1 adds augmented reality with support for ARKit for iOS by adding the built-in vector type. Multiple iOS Simulators Nativescript 4.1, can now run applications simultaneously on multiple iOS Simulators, iOS devices, Android emulators, and Android devices. Developers can LiveSync change on iPhone X, iPhone 8, iPad 2, etc. and immediately see how the application looks and behaves on all of them. Navigation in a Modal View There are updates to navigation in modal view as well. Before version 4.1, for navigation inside a modal view, you had to remove the implicit wrapper and specify the root element of the modal view. With the new changes, the first element of the modal view becomes its root view and developers can place a page router outlet there, for proper navigation. LayoutChanged Event Nativescript 4.1 introduces layoutChanged event that will be fired when the layout bounds of a view changes due to layout processing. The correct view sizes are obtained with getActualSize(). Proper view sizes are especially useful when dealing with size-dependent animations. The full list of bug updates and other fixes are available in the changelog. You can read more about the release on the Nativescript blog. NativeScript: What is it, and how to set it up How to integrate Firebase with NativeScript for cross-platform app development

CES 2019 is kicking off in Las Vegas, Nevada today, January 8, Monday for 3 days. The conference unofficially kicked off on Sunday, January 6 and you may have a look at the announcements made on that day. Yesterday was the main press day when the majority of the announcements were made with a lot of companies showcasing their latest projects and announcing new products, software, and services. HTC HTC announced their partnership with Mozilla, bringing Firefox’s virtual reality web browser to the Vive headset. Mozilla first announced Firefox Reality as a dedicated VR web browser in April. In September, they announced that the browser is now available on Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream. Now, it is available for the HTC Vive headset. As part of the deal, HTC is also teaming up with Amazon to make use of Amazon Sumerian. HTC also announced the Vive Pro Eye virtual reality headset with native, built-in eye tracking. It uses “foveated rendering” to render sharp images for wherever the human eye is looking in a virtual scene and reduces the image quality of objects on the periphery. Intel Intel made a number of announcements at CES 2019. They showcased new processors and also released a press release with updates on Project Athena. With this project, they are getting PC makers ready for “a new class of advanced laptops.” These laptops will be Ultrabooks part two with 5G and artificial intelligence support. New Intel processors: New 9th Gen Core processors for a limited number of desktops and laptops. A 10nm Ice Lake processor for thin laptops. A 10nm Lakefield processor using 3D stacking technology for very small computers and tablets. A 10nm Cascade Lake Xeon processor for data processing. 3D Athlete Tracking tech which runs on the Cascade Lake chip and shows data about how fast and far athletes are traveling. Intel’s 10nm Snow Ridge SOC for 5G base stations. Lenovo Lenovo has made minor updates to their ThinkPad X1 Carbon and X1 Yoga laptops with new designs for 2019. They are mostly going to have a material change, and are also going to be thinner and lighter this year. Lenovo has also released two Lenovo is two large display monitor. The first is Lenovo’s ThinkVision P44W, which is aimed at business users, and the second is the Legion Y44w Gaming Monitor. They both have a 43.4-inch panel. Uber One of Uber’s partners in the air taxi domain, Bell, has revealed the design of its vertical takeoff and landing air taxi at CES 2019. Their flying taxi, dubbed the Bell Nexus, can accommodate up to 5 people and is a hybrid-electric powered vehicle. CES 2019 also saw the release of the game Marvel's Avengers: Rocket's Rescue Run. This is the first demo product from startup Holoride, which has Audi as one of its stakeholders. It's the result of Audi and Disney's new media format, which aims to bring virtual reality to passengers in cars, specifically to Uber. More announcements: Harley-Davidson gave a preview of their first all-electric motorcycle. It will launch in August 2019 and will cost $29,799 TCL announced its first soundbars and a 75-inch version of the excellent 6-Series 4K Roku TV Elgato announced a professional $199 light rig for Twitch streamers and YouTube creators Hisense announces its new 2019 4K TV lineup and the Sonic One TV Griffin introduces new wireless chargers for the iPhone and Apple Watch Amazon is planning to let people deliver packages inside your garage Kodak’s release a new instant camera and printer line GE announced a 27-inch smart display for the kitchen that streams Netflix. Google Assistant will soon be on a billion devices. Their next stop - feature phones Vizio announces the most advanced 4K TV ever and support for Apple’s AirPlay 2 Toyota shared details of it’s Guardian Driver-Assist System which will mimic a technique used in fighter jets to serve as a smart intermediary between driver and car. CES 2019: Top announcements made so far HTC Vive Focus 2.0 update promises long battery life, among other things for the VR headset Intel unveils the first 3D Logic Chip packaging technology, ‘Foveros’, powering its new 10nm chips, ‘Sunny Cove’

After announcing their plans of introducing a web browser for virtual and augmented reality headsets earlier this year, Mozilla launched Firefox Reality 1.0 yesterday. The browser will be available in the Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream app stores. What features will you find in Firefox Reality? The browser is built from the ground up to work on mixed reality headsets with the following features: Voice search Typing a search query when you are wearing a VR headset is not a pleasant experience. Using Firefox Reality you can search the web using your voice. Smooth and fast performance Firefox Reality uses Quantum engine, which Mozilla calls "the next-generation web engine for Firefox users". With the help of this engine, it provides a smooth, fast, and secure user experience. Switch between 2D and 3D mode Firefox Reality supports both 2D and 3D mode for web search. You can seamlessly switch between these two modes according to your preference. The home screen becomes your entertainment hub You can find games, videos, stories, and other entertainment content directly on the home screen. The mixed reality team is working with more creators around the world to bring more engaging content to the browser. What’s in the future? In the announcement, they have mentioned that they will soon be launching Firefox Reality 1.1. We can expect more features in the coming release such as support for bookmarks, 360 videos, accounts, and more. Mozilla has actively been contributing in the mixed reality world by introducing WebVR, WebAR, and A-Frame. With the release of Firefox Reality they have taken the next step to make it the best browser for mixed reality: “We are in this for the long haul. This is version 1.0 of Firefox Reality and version 1.1 is right around the corner. We have an always-growing list of ideas and features that we are working to add to make this the best browser for mixed reality. We will also be listening and react quickly when we need to provide bug fixes and other minor updates.” To see read more about Firefox Reality, check out Mozilla’s official announcement. Mozilla releases Firefox 62.0 with better scrolling on Android, a dark theme on macOS, and more Firefox Nightly browser: Debugging your app is now fun with Mozilla’s new ‘time travel’ feature Mozilla is building a bridge between Rust and JavaScript

On Tuesday, Apple released iOS 13 beta 3, which came with an interesting feature called FaceTime Attention Correction. This feature aims to fix a long-standing issue of maintaining eye contact in FaceTime calls with the help of augmented reality. Mike Rundle, an app designer was the first to spot the feature while testing the latest iOS 13.  https://twitter.com/flyosity/status/1146136279647772673 Back in 2017, he predicted that this feature will be a reality in “years to come.” https://twitter.com/flyosity/status/1146136649883107328 While FaceTiming, users naturally tend to look at the person they are talking to instead of looking at the camera. As a result, to the person who is on the other side, it will appear as if you are not maintaining eye contact. This feature, when enabled, adjusts your gaze so that it appears to be on camera. This helps you maintain eye contact while still letting you keep your gaze on the person you are talking to.  Many Twitter users speculated that the FaceTime Attention Correction feature is powered by Apple's ARKit framework. It creates a 3D face map and depth map of the user through the front-facing TrueDepth camera. It then determines where the eyes are and adjusts them accordingly. The TrueDepth camera system is the same camera system used for Animoji, unlocking the phone, and even the augmented reality features we see in FaceTime. https://twitter.com/schukin/status/1146359923158089728 To enable this feature, one can go to Settings > FaceTime after installing the latest iOS 13 developer beta 3. On Twitter, people also speculated that it is only available on iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhoneXR devices for now. It is unclear whether Apple plans to roll out the feature more broadly in the future. It would be interesting to see whether this feature works when there are multiple people in the frame.  https://twitter.com/WSig/status/1146149222665900033 Users have mixed feelings for this feature. While some developers who tested this out felt that it is a little creepy, others thought that this is a remarkable solution for the eye contact problem.  A Hacker News user expressed his concern, “I can't help but think all this image recognition/manipulation tech being silently applied is a tad creepy. IMHO going beyond things like automatic focus/white balance or colour adjustments, and identifying more specific things to modify, crosses the line from useful to creepy.” Another Hacker News user said in support of the feature, “I fail to see how this is creepy (outside of potential uncanny valley issues in edge cases). There is a toggle to disable it, and this is something that most average non-savvy users would either want by default or wouldn't even notice happening (because the end result will look natural to most).”  OpenID Foundation questions Apple’s Sign In feature, says it has security and privacy risks Apple gets into chip development and self-driving autonomous tech business Declarative UI programming faceoff: Apple’s SwiftUI vs Google’s Flutter

Magic Leap, a million dollar augmented reality company, released its first mixed reality headset, earlier this month, called the “Magic Leap One - Creator Edition”. Magic Leap One is a three-part system which includes a "Lightwear" headset, a handheld controller, and a “lightpack” i.e. a wearable computer that goes in your pocket. The headset system is now available for purchase at $2295, and you can add a professional developer package for an extra $495. This Professional Developer Package provides a hub that enables you to connect the headset to a computer. The company also offers a 24-hour replacement for Magic Leap One in case of breakage. Magic Leap One features three components: Lightwear Headset Magic Leap One comes with a “lightwear” headset that includes cameras, sensors, speakers and optical relay that work in conjunction with the processor in the Lightpack. It has a spatial audio system which includes onboard speakers and 3.5 mm jack. This audio system blends and co-ordinates with the virtual objects. It also maintains the balance between the distance and intensity of the sound with great accuracy and control. One more feature that will be available soon in Magic Leap One headsets is an option for inserting a lens based on your personalized eyeglasses. Superpowered Lightpack processor What’s different in this new headset system is that the processor of this system resides in a small, wearable and portable Lightpack, which can be clipped onto your pocket. The processor consists of an integrated GPU and CPU with an 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage capacity. It has a built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery which can be used for upto 3 hours. It also comes with a 45-watt USB-C Power Delivery (PD) charger. Handheld Controller Magic Leap One does not require additional external sensors to deliver six degrees of freedom, also known as 6DoF. It consists of a touch-sensitive trackpad, 8-bit resolution Trigger button, Digital Bumper button, and a digital home button. For more information on Magic Leap One, check out its official website. Magic Leap’s first augmented reality headset, powered by Nvidia Tegra X2, is coming this Summer Google’s Daydream VR SDK finally adds support for two controllers Unreal Engine 4.20 released with focus on mobile and immersive (AR/VR/MR) devices  

Huawei has debuted a new Artificial Intelligence chip, the Kirin 980, which boasts a number of world firsts. According to Huawei, the Kirin 980 is the world's first: 7nm process mobile phone SoC chipset Cortex-A76 architecture chipset Dual NPU design Chipset to support LTE Cat.21 with speeds up to 1.4Gbps. The Kirin 980 is less than 1 square centimeter and integrates 6.9 billion transistors. The architecture of the Kirin 980 has eight cores: two are for turbo performance, two are for long-term performance, and the last and smallest four are used to maximize power efficiency. It uses Flex-Scheduling intelligence mechanism to allow the CPU to adapt in heavy, medium and light-load scenarios by reducing its power consumption and giving users a longer battery life. The Kirin 980's performance and efficiency improvements The Kirin 980 uses Mali-G76 GPU improving performance by 46%. The fourth-generation ISP utilises a multi-pass noise reduction to capture quality images and preserve important details. This ISP also has a dedicated video pipeline to effectively improve video clarity and reduce shooting delays by 33%. The Kirin 980 7nm compared with the 10nm process, improves performance by 20%, power efficiency by 40% and the overall energy efficiency of the Kirin 980 by 58%. Huawei has doubled down on its AI processing, adding a dual NPU to the Kirin 980, which performs AI-assisted image recognition tasks at a rate of 4,500 images per minute. The NPU is optimized for vector math that powers machine learning frameworks like Facebook’s Caffe2 and Google’s TensorFlow. Huawei says its heterogeneous computing structure — HiAI — automatically distributes voice recognition, natural language processing, and computer vision workloads across it dynamically. The Kirin 980 will also offer the world’s fastest smartphone Wi-Fi speed, clocking in at 1,732Mbps. Huawei's bid to defeat Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 The performance improvements you can see in the Kirin 980 are all key to Huawei's plan to oust Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 as the top mobile AI chip. At the moment, the Snapdragon 845 is the chip that features in Android phones not produced by Huawei. Huawei believes the advantages are significant, claiming its chip has "20 percent better bandwidth and 22 percent lower latency than the Snapdragon 845," while "in gaming applications, the 980 has been shown to produce 22 percent higher frame rates than the 845, and its power consumption when gaming is said to be 32 percent lower" (The Verge). Android Authority have done a detailed fact check looking at the reality of Huawei's claims - it's well worth reading. For a list of other technical specifications, read the Huawei blog. Read next Qualcomm announces a new chipset for standalone AR/VR headsets at Augmented World Expo Tesla is building its own AI hardware for self-driving cars Baidu releases Kunlun AI chip, China’s first cloud-to-edge AI chip

Since its launch Magic Leap has always been in the limelight for its unique AR experiences. To take it one step further, Magic Leap has announced a tie-up with motion capture actor Andy Serkis and his UK-based The Imaginarium Studios. Source: Twitter Andy Serkis and his Imaginarium Studios are best known for innovative motion capture and performance capture roles such as Gollum, King Kong, Caesar, Captain Haddock and Supreme Leader Snoke. Magic Leap and Serkis’ The Imaginarium plan to create additional content for the Magic Leap platform, and support third-party developers with its production resources, including the motion capture stage at its London studio. Matthew Brown, CEO of The Imaginarium Studios, quotes, “In using performance capture, we have the opportunity to authentically portray the intent of the actor. With Magic Leap’s technology, that performance is pulled off the screen and into the world of the viewer. This is storytelling as it should be: immersive, personal, and integrated into our world.” As the first product of this partnership, Andy has created a performance-captured character for the Magic Leap One Creator Edition mixed reality headset. This character named Grishneck, is the first Magic Leap character played by Serkis. Grishneck is described as a 3D Orc-like creature that interacts with the viewer when wearing the Magic Leap One Goggles in their controlled environment. In the story, Grishneck is a character who was rejected from a project because he wasn't scary enough. Andy has expressed enthusiasm for the potential of augmented reality. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he said, “We now have a new way of experiencing story. What is thrilling is that with Magic Leap, the relationship of the performances to the real world can change hugely and they can be placed and manifested in countless ways.” Magic Leap’s executive creative director Andy Lanning confirmed that Imaginarium and Magic Leap have been in conversations for at least five years. Imaginarium is currently working on several Magic Leap projects. Magic Leap One, the first mixed reality headsets by Magic Leap, is now available at $2295. Magic Leap’s first augmented reality headset, powered by Nvidia Tegra X2, is coming this Summer. Understanding the hype behind Magic Leap’s New Augmented Reality Headsets.

RxAndroid 2.1.0, the latest version of RxAndroid, has an option to post async messages. The async parameter affects Android APIs 16 and newer. It allows one to avoid VSYNC locking that pushes every post to the next frame. RxAndroid adds minimum classes to RxJava to make reactive programming in Android applications easy and hassle-free. Why this change is introduced? The main thread has historically used Handler#post() to schedule new Messages. This follows the VSYNC locking and results in waiting until the next frame to run. Use of Handler#post() causes a delay of up to 16ms for every emission to go through the post(). This delay happens even if you’re already on the main thread. The Async API aims to bypass VSYNC locking while still letting the framework handle all the scheduling safely in its looper. How you can install the Async API? With the help of RxAndroidPlugins you can set async as the custom scheduler. In Kotlin: val asyncMainThreadScheduler = AndroidSchedulers.from(Looper.getMainLooper(), true) RxAndroidPlugins.setInitMainThreadSchedulerHandler { asyncMainThreadScheduler } // Or if the default scheduler is already initialiazedRxAndroidPlugins.setMainThreadSchedulerHandler { asyncMainThreadScheduler } In Java: Scheduler asyncMainThreadScheduler = AndroidSchedulers.from(Looper.getMainLooper(), true); RxAndroidPlugins.setInitMainThreadSchedulerHandler(callable -> asyncMainThreadScheduler); // Or if the default scheduler is already initialiazed RxAndroidPlugins.setMainThreadSchedulerHandler(scheduler -> asyncMainThreadScheduler); How asynchronous is enabled in the different Android APIs? The Async API works by relying on the new Handler.createAsync factory in API 28, and on pre-28 it will reflectively fall back to a private constructor of Handler to enable this. API 28: The Handler.createAsync() factory API is used. It sets all Messages it handles to be asynchronous by default. API 22+: The public setAsynchronous() method is used. API [16–21]: The setAsynchronous() method is still used but the lint error that says it’s only 22+ is suppressed. To avoid any OEM situations of deleted/changed internal APIs, the Message#setAsynchronous() method call is handled using try/catch in the from() Scheduler factory to ensure it’s there at runtime. This catches the NoSuchMethodError if it is missing and falls back to the standard non-async messaging. API <16: There is no behavior change and the standard non-async messaging is used since the asynchronous APIs didn’t exist. To know more about the Async API head over to Zac Sweers announcement on Medium. Entry level phones to taste the Go edition of the Android 9.0 Pie version Android 9 pie’s Smart Linkify: How Android’s new machine learning based feature works Dagger 2.17, a dependency injection framework for Java and Android, is now out!

Google has open sourced Seurat, their VR positional-tracking tool. Google Seurat was first announced at their 2017 I/O conference to help developers bring high-precision graphics to standalone virtual reality headsets. Now, Google has open sourced Seurat to the developer community. Developers can now bring visually stunning scenes to their own VR applications while having the flexibility to customize the tool for their own workflows. Seurat can process complex 3D scenes, that couldn’t be run in real-time even on the highest performance desktop hardware, into a representation that renders efficiently on mobile hardware. How Google Seurat works Polygons are generally used to compose 3D images in computer graphics. The Polygon count refers to the number of polygons being rendered per frame. Google Seurat reduces the overall polygon count that is displayed at any given time and therefore lowers the required processing power and resources. It takes advantage of the limited viewing region, available in a mobile VR, to optimize the geometry and textures in a scene. What this means is, that Seurat takes all of the possible viewpoints that a VR user may see and removes the area of the 3D environment that they’d never be able to see. By utilizing the limited range of movement to their advantage, Seurat removes object permanence from the equation. So if users can’t see something in virtual reality, chances are it doesn’t actually exist.   On a more technical level, Google Seurat takes RGBD images (color and depth) as input and generates a textured mesh to simplify scenes. It targets a configurable number of triangles, texture size, and fill rate, to achieve this simplification process. Thus delivering immersive VR experiences on standalone headsets. This scene simplification technology was used to bring a 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' scene to a standalone VR experience. Developers can start working with Seurat right away with the GitHub page, containing the documentation and source code required to implement it into their projects. Alongside Seurat, Google also released Mirage Solo, the first headset on the Daydream VR platform. Top 7 modern Virtual Reality hardware systems Oculus Go, the first stand-alone VR headset arrives! Leap Motion open sources its $100 augmented reality headset, North Star  

Apple has asked Facebook to take down its app, Onavo Protect from App Store as it violates Apple’s new rules on data collection. Onavo is an Israeli analytics company, which was founded in 2010 and then acquired by Facebook in 2013. Apple revised their data collection policies in May this year to prevent app developers from engaging in certain app data collection activities in the future. One of their spokesperson told CNBC: "We work hard to protect user privacy and data security throughout the Apple ecosystem. With the latest update to our guidelines, we made it explicitly clear that apps should not collect information about which other apps are installed on a user's device for the purposes of analytics or advertising/marketing and must make it clear what user data will be collected and how it will be used." What Onavo Protect does? Onavo Protect is a VPN and data manager, which provides security and data encryption.  It comes with functionalities like: Limiting apps from using data in the background Setting data alerts when apps use too much data A report on how much data is consumed by each app on your phone A VPN network that helps in keeping your personal info protected, Onavo in their app description have mentioned that they may collect your mobile data traffic to analyze your use of websites, apps, and data. They have further mentioned that, being a part of Facebook, they also use this info to gain insights in order to improve Facebook products and services. A Facebook spokesperson said,  "We've always been clear when people download Onavo about the information that is collected and how it is used. As a developer on Apple's platform we follow the rules they've put in place." Though, it is mentioned in the app’s description that the information will be used by Facebook, you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to see that disclosure; something not every new user may do. This story was first reported on the Wall Street Journal. Earlier, they had also reported that the app has helped Facebook by monitoring usage of competing apps like Snapchat. After this Facebook added the Stories feature in their Instagram app, which is similar to that of Snapchat. The VPN app is now removed from App Store but is currently available on Google Play Store for the Android device users. 16 year old hacked into Apple’s servers, accessed ‘extremely secure’ customer accounts for over a year undetected Apple joins the Thread Group, signaling its Smart Home ambitions with HomeKit, Siri and other IoT products ‘Think different’ makes Apple the world’s most valuable company, crossing $1 Trillion market cap

Progressive web apps are now available on the Microsoft store. But just when you thought Microsoft was taking a step to plug the 'app gap' and catch up with the competition... This first wave of progressive web apps won't actually work on Windows mobile. One of the central problems with the new Windows progressive web apps is that they do not have service workers implemented for Edge mobile - that means they aren't able to send push notifications. This is bad news generally for the Windows 10 mobile platform. It's possible that Microsoft might add further updates for progressive web apps on mobile, but it nevertheless sends signals that Microsoft just doesn't have the hunger to commit to their mobile project. As we've seen just a few days ago, the company more broadly appears to be moving towards infrastructure and cloud projects. The issues around progressive web apps might well just be symptomatic of this broader organizational shift. For TechRadar, this is a misstep by Microsoft. "There’s very little evidence out there that Microsoft is willing to put in the massive effort needed to get back on terms with iOS and Android devices, even in the enterprise sector, so the future doesn’t look too rosy at the moment." However, while disappointment is understandable, there's a chance that these issues will be corrected. It wouldn't actually take that much for Microsoft to fix the problem. Development teams could then deploy updates to their respective applications pretty easily, without having to go through the rigmarole of submitting to the app store once again. The list of companies who have PWAs available are, we should note, pretty impressive. It's clear that some big players in a number of different fields want to get involved: Skyscanner Asos Ziprecruiter Oyster StudentDoctorNetwork What this means for the future of Windows mobile isn't clear. It certainly doesn't look great from Microsoft's perspective, and you could say this has been a bit of a missed opportunity. But all is not lost, and they could quickly recover to use PWAs to redefine the future of its mobile offering. Check out other latest news: Verizon launches AR Designer, a new tool for developers Leap Motion open sources its $100 augmented reality headset, North Star