HTC U11 Custom Kernel Brings Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS)

There’s been a lot of talk about Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) lately and now a new custom kernel brings this to the latest HTC flagship smartphone as well. This HTC U11 custom kernel is available thanks to XDA Senior Member Freak07 and can be flashed via TWRP. The developer does make note about having to move so far away from HTC’s codebase (due to having conflicts with the prebuilt WLAN and texfat modules). You’ll want to have a backup of the wlan module and pnpmgr files or you can dirty flash your original ROM if you want to revert the changes.

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Check out this EAS kernel in our HTC U11 forum

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Google Photos No Longer Limits Shared Albums at 2,000 Pictures

Google made millions of people sigh in relieve when they launched their Google Photos service back at Google I/O 2015. Until then, it was near impossible to find a image hosting service that would store all of your photos indefinitely, for free. Those who didn’t have many photos saved could find plenty of solutions out there, but most always had some sort of storage capacity limit when it came to the free tier account. Thankfully this changed with Google Photos.

Sure, Google won’t sure every image at full resolution without compression (unless you’re uploading it from a Pixel phone), but so far the compression they’re using is so minimal that it is hard to distinguish the difference in quality. Not only did Google Photos offer image hosting for all of your photographs, but they have also integrated a number of popular features with album sharing sitting close to the top as a favorite among the community.

The company even expanded upon its sharing features this year at Google I/O with what they call smarter sharing. These sharing features are great for average use cases, but big events such as a vacation can push them to their limits. This is what many people noticed with album sharing in Google Photos as it was limited to 2,000 photos. So while this was fine for most, it was definitely a limitation for some anytime they wanted to share a ton of photos.

This seems to have changed over the last couple of weeks though. /u/Chaosblast in the /r/Android subreddit noticed that they were allowed to add more than 2,000 photos to a shared album, and XDA Portal Editor Steven Zimmerman was able to confirm for us as well. At this time, it’s unclear if the limit has just been increased (to something like 5,000), or if the limit has been removed entirely. For this to work though, you have to go inside the album and then add the images from there. If you try to do it outside the album then it looks like you’ll still be hitting that 2,000 limit.

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Source: /r/Android

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WhatsApp Reaches 1 Billion Active Users Per Day Milestone

Social media and communication platforms are serious business, with every big company trying or having tried in the past to get a piece of this giant pie. But sadly and ironically, such platforms can only become very successful once they have become successful, as they feed on their existing popularity to draw in more and more users. WhatsApp is a prime example.

The application was incorporated in 2009, starting off as an app that displayed status updates. Over the course of months and years, the app added a messaging system and more features, trying to rope in users that could not be satiated by SMS and desktop based IMs and those who could not use BlackBerry’s proprietary and hardware-locked Messenger service. By April 2014, it boasted of over 500 million monthly active users, sending and receiving over 10 billion messages per day. When Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 Billion, one of WhatsApp’s early investors received an approximate 50 times the return on their investment!

In February 2016, WhatsApp announced that it had crossed the 1 billion milestone in monthly active users. This meant that about 1 in 7 people on the Earth utilized WhatsApp at least once a month, signalling a major milestone in the app’s popularity. And today, they has announced that it is even bigger than before, boasting of 1 billion daily active users!

The 1 billion daily active users figure sits alongside 1.3 billion monthly active users, indicating a slight slow down at the rate at which new users are added. Engagement rates within WhatsApp remain as high as ever though, as users send over 55 billion messages per day, share 4.5 billion photos and 1 billion videos per day. Figures like these can only be imagined by many, as they stand testament to the app’s current popularity all over the world despite its shortcomings.

What are your thoughts on WhatsApp’s latest milestone? Let us know in the comments below!

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Source: WhatsApp Blog

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Skip Songs in Spotify using Custom Rules with Skipify

Spotify took the music streaming industry by storm with its paid and free service over the years. The features offered combined with the collection of music available make it very hard to compete with. Still, no service is perfect for everyone. Features like Spotify Radio and the shared playlists are great ways to discover new music, but some people just loathe certain songs and/or artists. Wouldn’t it be better if there was a way to automatically skip songs in Spotify by certain artists or from certain albums? Thankfully, there is a way to skip Spotify tracks with custom filters and it’s possible thanks to a free application called Skipify.

With this application installed, you can go in and create custom rules including an artist, an album, or even a specific song. Once Skipify detects that Spotify is going to play something included in your custom set of rules, then it will skip songs for you. While it’s certainly not the end of the world to have to manually skip songs, it definitely enhances the user experience to have them skipped for you automatically without your intervention.

Since the user has to enable the “Device Broadcast Status” option in the settings of Spotify for this to work, we have an educated guess as to how Skipify actually works. Once that feature has been enabled, it’s likely that Skipify listens for the broadcast intent com.spotify.music.metadatachanged, via a manifest-registered implicit broadcast receiver. When the metadata of the track changes (ie. the next or previous song plays), then Spotify broadcasts the intent to any broadcast receivers listening for this intent (such as Skipify). This allows Skipify to pull the track data from the intent extras that Spotify broadcasts and checks it against your filter rules. If the track data matches one of your filter rules, then Skipify issues a media next intent directed at the Spotify application.

You can learn more about Spotify’s Android Media Notification details here.

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Download Skipify from the Play Store

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Seven Years Later, Google Instant is Shutting Down

Back in 2010 with Marissa Mayer at the helm of Google Search Products and User Experience, she decided to launch a feature called Google Instant for Android. This is a feature that would instantly give you search results as you typed in a Google search box, allowing you to preview queries in real time. It was definitely jarring at first, but the company says the goal was to deliver information to you as quickly as you could search for it. Since they were returning search results with each new letter, it was as if the search results were being narrowed down until you typed everything you wanted to.

Since then though, Google has seen a major shift in how people are using their services. The company has started seeing more people using mobile devices so they quickly shifted to a mobile-first strategy. Granted, they did launch Google Instant on mobile as well, but the feature itself can load a dozen or so search results by the time you finish typing what you want. This eats up processing power on mobile devices, which uses more battery life, and uses up mobile data as well.

We launched Google Instant back in 2010 with the goal to provide users with the information they need as quickly as possible, even as they typed their searches on desktop devices. Since then, many more of our searches happen on mobile, with very different input and interaction and screen constraints. With this in mind, we have decided to remove Google Instant, so we can focus on ways to make Search even faster and more fluid on all devices. – Google Spokesman

With projects like Android Go, it’s clear that Google wants to deliver their services quickly to people no matter how low-end their device. So starting yesterday, the company has decided to kill off Google Instant. So while they didn’t mind the feature being implemented when the majority of their web searches came from a PC with more power and a bigger battery, they are trying to help improve the user experience for all mobile users around the world.

It makes sense for a mobile-first company to shift away from Google Instant as a feature for its web search engine. The company says they are continuing to focus on ways to make Google search even faster and more fluid no matter what type of device you are using.

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Source: Search Engine Land

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Release 812 of Substratum Adds System Crash Detection, Deprecates Masquerade and More

The latest Substratum update was only a couple of weeks ago and the team already has a new version to push to the public. The previous update added changes to the LogChar, changes to the Overlays, and a number of bug fixes to help make the software more stable. Now, the team has released version 812 of Substratum and this update focuses on SystemUI and Android System crash detection, a background services fix, full deprecation of Masquerade and more.

So the highlight feature of this new update is an automated way of dealing with both SystemUI as well as Android System crashes. Previously, when a Substratum overlay would cause a SystemUI or Android System crash then it would just continue with the overlay enabled indefinitely. However, a new feature from +Harsh Shandilya will look for these crashes and if it detects 3 crashes of SystemUI or Android Systemthen Substratum will automatically disable the offending overlay.

Release 812 of Substratum also comes with a background services fix to try and prevent a noticeable asset refresh the next time you launched an application. Samsung users will still notice this issue because of how Substratum works on those devices, but this fix should help others. From this version forward, Masquerade is now fully deprecated and the developers request that you move to a Theme Interfacer build to continue using Substratum.

There was another bug fixed in this release that prevented people from uninstalling an overlay from inside the theme. This bug prevented it from being uninstalled properly and that should no longer be an issue fro here on out. The last little bit from this new update is directed at themers and says users who are using Xposed on Android Nougat will now start showing up in logs. It will be up to the themers to choose whether or not they want to support those reports or not.

That’s it for this update to Substratum, but you can find the full changelog listed below. . .

Substratum Release 812 Changelog

Public release 812
SettingsFragment: Hide Samsung Dangerous overlay option on legacy
Clean up all of the XML files
MainActivity: Fix String build after translation refresh
ProfileFragment: Fix String build after translation refresh
Clean up and reformat after fast forward
ProfileFragment: Fix missing String pointer from consolidation commit
Update Gradle dependency for Android Studio Canary 8
Full translation import
Overlays: Only kill background packages on Samsung devices
ShowcaseActivity: Change search URL to samsung themes on samsung devices.
MainActivity: Hide the button to sungstratum play store by default
Overlays: Fix overlays with type3 isn’t removed properly
AppCrashReceiver: Simplify switch logic a bit more
AppCrashReceiver: Remove the SystemUI crash count pref earlier
AppCrashReceiver: Change the if-elif-else ladder to switch
AppCrashReceiver: Handle SystemUI crashes properly
TeamFragment: Add LunchBar to all exception catch branches
AppCrashReceiver: Fix Harsh’s derp – variable not declared before usage
Refactor and format after cherry pick
References: Slightly tweak LogChar file names
AppCrashReciever: Only log overlays to be disabled if there are any.
References: Slightly change up how checkPackageSupport works
Substratum: Sync down blacklisted packages at boot time
ManagerFragment: Add dismiss button on reboot dialog
OverlayFunctions: Don’t restart SystemUI on legacy
BootCompletedReciever: Fix lint warning for clearSubstratumCompileFolder
RescueActivity: Also disable SystemUI overlays
AppCrashReciever: Improve logging
MainActivity: Don’t create CountdownTimer object
Substratum: Cleanup LunchBar classes
Long live masquerade
ThemeManager: Don’t restart SystemUI on framework overlay change
SamsungIntegration: Allow for devs to toggle whether to hide overlay
MainActivity: Show a toast when LogChar reports are cleared
References: Clear the logchar auto cleanup prefs on reset
Substratum: Add preference to auto clean saved LogChar reports
OverlaysItem: Remove unused method
References: Fix logspam in isAuthorizedDebugger
SubstratumRebase: Rebase on lint from Android Studio Canary 7
Substratum: Add a few null asserts
References: Clean up lint again
References: Surround dynamic shortcuts assignation with null checks
References: It is no longer a safe, peaceful world…
SplashScreenActivity: Apply the SharedPrefs following completion
Update gradle
References: Lint cleanup
References: Clear the restore warning pref on configuration reset
ManageSpaceActivity: Remove unused Context variable
RecoveryFragment: Make sure the restore info dialog gets seen
Substratum: De-duplicate dialog okay/cancel strings
MainActivity: Change FloatUI permissions toasts to AlertDialogs

Source: +NicholasChumCDT

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Xiaomi Launches Mi 5X with 5.5-inch Full HD Display, Snapdragon 625 SoC, and Dual-cameras

In its launch event in China yesterday, Xiaomi officially launched a new mid-range smartphone, their latest Xiaomi Mi 5X.

The Mi 5X sports a metal unibody design with an anti-fingerprint coating and features rounded corners to make for a comfortable hand grip.

On the front, it has a 5.5-inch Full HD screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 along with capacitive navigation buttons that we have come to expect from Xiaomi devices.

The Mi 5X is fueled by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 octa-core SoC coupled with Adreno 506 GPU.

In the camera department, the Mi 5X houses a dual-camera setup on the back, comprising of one 12MP (f/2.2) wide-angle lens and a 12MP (f/2.6) telephoto lens with a dual-tone flash and PDFA. Xiaomi says the dual-camera setup on the Mi 5X is the same as the one used on the Mi 6. Meanwhile, the front camera is a 5MP shooter for selfies.

The Mi 5X comes with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage and supports microSD cards for further storage expansion.

On the software side of things, the Mi 5X comes running Android 7.1 Nougat with Xiaomi’s MIUI 9 on top — in fact, the Mi 5X is the first device to ship with MIUI 9 pre-installed.

Additionally, the Mi 5X packs in a 3,080 mAh non-removable battery, a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, a USB Type-C port, an IR blaster and a dedicated audio amplifier for an improved audio experience.

Available in three color variants — black, rose gold, and gold, the Mi 5X will go on sale in China starting 1st August for a price of 1,499 yuan ($222). It’s not clear at this point exactly when, if ever, the Mi 5X will make its way outside its home country.

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Source: Xiaomi

What do you think of the Xiaomi MI 5X? Let us know in the comments!

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