Welcome to the 439th edition of Android Apps Weekly. Here are the big headlines from last week:
- Instagram is testing a new age verification process in the US. It uses AI to examine a person’s face to see if they are really the age they claim to be. This is a measure to prevent children from creating accounts before they are old enough to do so. It’s buggy, especially for women and people with darker skin, but we assume those wrinkles will go away with time.
- The free version of Google Hangouts started its transition to Google Chat this week. Many people stay on Google Hangouts as long as they can. However, they would not be able to last much longer. None of this is a surprise. Google announced the end of Hangouts last year. Hit the link for more details.
- Google is reportedly working on a new feature for Google TV devices. The feature will use your phone credentials to automatically sign in to apps on Google TV devices. For example, you’ll download Crunchyroll and Google TV will borrow the credentials from your phone so you don’t have to sign in again. This is just some of the code in the Google TV Setup app. We’re not sure if this will be feature complete.
- Netflix Co-Chief Exec Ted Sarandos has officially confirmed that Netflix is working on an ad-based tier. He didn’t reveal much more than that, but it did provide some confirmation on the matter. It will be cheaper than the ad-free plan and that’s all we know about it at this point. Hit the link to learn more.
- Arm made several announcements this week, including several new CPUs and a new GPU. You can read more about CPUs at the link, but GPUs are of more interest for the purposes of this discussion. The Arm Immortalis is the first Arm GPU with ray tracing support. It boasts a 300% performance increase over software ray tracing. Again, hit the link to learn more, but with more Android game consoles in the works, a new GPU could be a big pain.
Three Kingdoms: Hero Wars
Price: Free to play
Three Kingdoms: Hero Wars is a mobile gacha. The player builds a team of heroes across different classes and the game offers a roster of more than 100 heroes at launch. The combat is pretty standard gacha fair where you place your heroes, use their abilities, and defeat the bad guys. There’s a story to play through, alliances to join friends with, and the artwork is pretty good. It relies heavily on the usual gacha formula, but luckily it works great. The tutorial sucks, but after that, the game is pretty cool.
Qlate
Price: Free / $2.49
Qlate is a combination of notepad and calculator. The notepad side is pretty simple. You can take notes, jot down ideas, or even make lists. The calculator side is a bit trickier. You can do so much with this from academic stuff to calculating anything else. It’s definitely not your average calculator app in that respect. This app is free with ads or you can buy the premium version for $2.49. That’s definitely an interesting idea.
My cat
Price: Free to play
My Cat is a pet simulator game where you raise a cat. You get a cat as a kitten and then raise it. There are more than 40 cat breeds to choose from. It mainly consists of mini-games where you play with kittens and just hang out. Players can even take AR selfies with their kitten in them. There are some social elements too. You can visit your friends and play with your animals together. This is a cute and family friendly game. Make sure to password protect your Google Play account before letting your kids play as there are in-app purchases.
Plum RSS reader
Price: Free / $2.99 / $2.49 per month / $39.99
Pluma RSS Reader is a clean and minimal RSS reader. It works like many other RSS readers except this one packs a few extra features. You can get alerts based on keywords, read-later lists so you can stay up to date with things that interest you, and it supports Pocket and Instapaper. There really isn’t much to say about that. It’s not necessarily mediocre, but it’s also an RSS reader and we all know how it works. You can pay $2.99 to remove ads and get some features or subscribe to get things like account sync. The $39.99 price level unlocks all features forever.
Operation Primal Jurassic World
Price: Free to play
Jurassic World Primal Ops is a top-down action-adventure game. Players are tasked with traveling around the game world while saving dinosaurs. You are trained as a dinosaur handler so that the captured dinosaurs also become your companions in battle. It’s basically a gameplay loop. You fight hunters and other bad guys, catch dinosaurs and explore the world. The release is a bit rough. Controls are a bit clunky and some buttons react very slowly. It definitely has the potential to be good, but we’ll have to wait and see if the developers can straighten things out a bit.
If we missed any major Android app or game release, let us know in the comments or my tweet on ThatJoeHindy.
Thank you for reading. Try this here:
