Welcome to the 164th episode of Android Apps Weekly! Here are the headlines from the last week:
- A report released this week indicated that YouTube Red only has 1.5 million subscribers. Several things have contributed to this number. For starters, YouTube Red doesn’t have a ton of original content and no really big hits yet. They also don’t advertise it often. Despite the low numbers, YouTube is fairly happy with their growth and have decided to move forward with creating more original content.
- Giphy offered up its services to beleaguered Vine users this last week. The service expressed that it wants to turn all of those seven second vines into gifs and give them a permanent home on Giphy’s website. It will be launching a tool that will not only turn those videos into gifs, but also host the videos themselves. It could be a big move for Giphy as they are the most popular gif providers out there right now.
- Google Play is going to be cracking down on apps that try to use devious means to improve their rankings. For years now, apps have been able to get fake reviewers to leave tons of positive reviews to give them a better ranking than they deserve. A new backend feature is going to try to stop that from happening. Developers that engage with it will have their efforts thwarted and repeat offenders will simply have their apps taken down. This is good news.
- IFTTT made some big decisions this week. It has ditched the “recipes” moniker in exchange for “applets”. They have also added new functionality into applets to make them more powerful. On top of that, they have merged all of their mobile apps into one. That’s also after IFTTT was added to Google Assistant. Big things are happening with this app and it’s fun to watch.
- The latest Google Play Newsletter arrived at our doorsteps to tell us about the top trending apps from October 2016. They were Flipp, ShareTheMeal, Anchor, LinkedIn Learning, and CNN Mobile. On the games side, PewDiePie’s Tuber Simulator, FIFA Mobile Soccer, Frozen Free Fall Icy Shot, Dan The Man, and Shuffle Cats were the top trending games. If you downloaded any of those, congrats, you were part of the statistics!
For even more Android apps and games news, releases, and updates, check out this week’s newsletter by clicking here! There, you’ll find all of the stuff we didn’t have space for here. You can sign up for the newsletter and get it sent straight to your inbox every Sunday using the form below! Don’t forget to also check out the Android Authority app for even faster updates!
[Source:-Android Authority]
