iOS/Android: Spotify works great for music sharing and third-party plugins. Apple Music works great for offline play. So I juggle both. It feels a bit like shared custody, but it’s a lot easier thanks to the mobile apps SongShift and Stamp, which efficiently move playlists from one service to the other.
This month Google finally made it possible for Android users to send text messages from their computer, a feature that iPhone/iMessage users have had for… forever.
Android/iOS: WhoSampled, the service that identifies music samples, recently updated their iOS/Android app to include Shazam-style music recognition. Now when you hear a song playing in a bar or a store, you can look up not just the song, but what other music it samples or is sampled in.
Animated lock screens are a cute gimmick. Your phone comes loaded with a few default options. But if you want to make your own on Android or iOS, you'll need a third-party app.
Android P has a brand new app switcher that changes things up from the traditional vertical view to a more intuitive horizontal layout. While most Android users will have to wait until Android P comes to their device to get the new look, Samsung has made it available for Galaxy S7, S8, S9, and Note 8 owners now through its Good Lock app.
Android/iOS: Podcasting should be stupid easy. The underlying technology isn't much more complicated than blogging. But so far, there's no Blogger or Tumblr of podcasting, to make podcast recording accessible to anyone with a phone. Until last week's release of Anchor 3.0 for iOS and Android.
With everyone from local scammers to government agencies trying to get hands on your data, there's never been a better time to beef up your privacy game. Fortunately, there are a ton of options out there to keep your messages, files and phone safe on Android.
Inspired by games from the 2016 Self-Care Jam (which Kotaku mined for favourites), MetaFilter users recently named their favourite calming video games. Some will be familiar, but others are deep cuts by independent developers. Most aren't for winning or losing, just exploring, interacting and existing. None of them force you to battle other players in a tense show-down. Try these out if you're too stressed out for Overwatch or Plague Inc.
iOS/Android: If you're worried about apps tracking your location, it's not enough to limit your location sharing. You need to limit camera-roll sharing too. If you've ever given an app access to your camera roll - to take photos, or store screenshots, or any given reason - you've also let it see where all those photos were taken. Felix Krause, an iOS developer and security writer, built an app to demonstrate this back door.
Be My Eyes, an app that lets sighted people remotely help blind people with visual tasks, is now available on Android, after two years on iOS.
Android: This week Google started rolling out Android Oreo to devices. It's been available as a public beta for some of the company's more recent Pixel and Nexus devices since May, but now carrier testing is underway for some of those models, so the official version is likely headed to devices sooner rather than later.
Android/iOS: Foursquare's Swarm 5.0, released earlier this week on iOS and Android, has a cleaner look and better venue categorisation. Most importantly, it downplays most of the social check-in app's social elements and strengthens its solo benefits. That's great news, because Swarm might be more useful if you use it alone.
Fascinated by the sound of your own voice? Wish you could hear your significant other whisper sweet "turn left here" into your ear while on the road? Well, now you can with Waze on Android.
Using a password manager is basically internet security 101 these days, but that doesn't make them any less intimidating. If you've never used a password manager, they're annoying, cumbersome to use, and baffling at a glance. 1Password is one of the easiest to use options around, but that doesn't mean you don't need some help setting it up.
Windows/Web/iOS/Android: Microsoft has released a public preview for its new to-do app, aptly called To-Do. This is ostensibly Microsoft's version of Wunderlist, which the company acquired back in 2015.
Android/iOS: If you save a lot of posts using Instagram's bookmarking feature you've probably lamented the fact that those bookmarked posts just pile up into an unorganised list. Today, Instagram announced that it's rolling out a means to actually organise those posts.
Android: Do you ever feel like the person next to you on the train is staring at your phone and reading your texts? Of course you do, because we all glance at other people's phones and tablets during our boring commutes. I do, anyway. BlackBerry has a solution.
Android/iOS: One of the best little features in Waze is the ability to share your location and ETA with a contact. This way, you can answer the "when will you get here?" question before it's even asked. Now, you can do that in Google Maps too.
Android: If you're one of the millions of people who pick up their phone every few minutes, SaveMyTime wants to hijack that habit. It replaces your lock screen to ask how you've spent your time since the last time you used your phone.
