Tech News - Mobile

Yesterday, the team behind Ionic announced the beta release of Ionic React. Developers can now make use of all the Ionic components in their React application. Ionic React ships with almost 70 components including buttons, cards, menus, tabs, alerts, modals, and much more. It also supports TypeScript type definitions. Ionic is an open source framework that consists of UI components for building cross-platform applications. These components are written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and can easily be deployed natively to iOS and Android devices, desktop with Electron, or to the web as a progressive web app. Historically, Ionic has been associated with Angular, but this changed with its recent release, Ionic 4. Now, developers can use the Ionic app development framework alongside any frontend framework. The Ionic team has been working towards making Ionic work with React and Vue for a long time. React developers already have React Native to make native apps for iOS and Android, but with Ionic React they will also be able to create hybrid mobile, desktop, and progressive web apps. In the future, the team is also planning to make React Native and Ionic work together. You can easily get started with Ionic React with the create-react-app tool. The Ionic team also recommends users to TypeScript in their apps to get a better developer experience. As Ionic React is still in its early days, it is advised not to use it in production. To read the full announcement, visit Ionic’s official website. Ionic Framework 4.0 has just been released, now backed by Web Components, not Angular Ionic v4 RC released with improved performance, UI Library distribution and more Ionic framework announces Ionic 4 Beta

Yesterday, KDE announced that it is officially adopting Matrix as a primary chat platform and the kde.org has an official Matrix homeserver. According to KDE, Matrix will provide the correct footing for an improved way of chatting and live-sharing information and provide features that users expect from more modern IM services. This will include infinite scrollback, file transfer, typing notifications, read receipts, presence, search, conferencing, end-to-end encryption and much more. Other alternatives like Telegram, Slack and Discord, although feature-rich, did not make the cut as “they are centralized and built around closed-source technologies and offer even less control than IRC”, which was used by the team as a solution for a long time. Matrix supports decentralized communication through its open protocol and network and is making its mark in instant messaging as well as other fields such as IoT communication. It supports end-to-end encryption while being self-hosted and open sourced. KDE will be adopting Matrix as an open protocol, open network, and FOSS project. Matrix blog states that “There’s now a shiny new homeserver (powered by Modular.im) on which KDE folk are welcome to grab an account if they want, rather than sharing the rather overloaded public matrix.org homeserver. The rooms have been set up on the server to match their equivalent IRC channels. The rooms continue to retain their other aliases (#kde:matrix.org, #freenode_#kde:matrix.org etc) as before.” Head over to KDE’s official blog to know more about this announcement. How to create a native mobile app with React Native [Tutorial] 250 bounty hunters had access to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint customer location data, Motherboard reports Wells Fargo’s online and mobile banking operations suffer a major outage  

Apple is planning on merging the apps made for iPhone, iPad, and Mac by 2021, as a part of its project, codenamed Marzipan. Apple revealed details related to the project at the 2018 Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), reports Bloomberg. Bloomberg notes that this move by Apple will make it easier for the software developers to build tools and apps since they’ll only have to build an app once and then have it work on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers. It will also boost the overall revenue of the firm as it takes a cut of various app-related purchases and subscriptions. Moreover, Apple is going to be launching a software development kit this June at WWDC, to allow developers to port their iPad apps to Mac computers. The software development kit will prevent the developers from writing the software code twice, however, they will have to submit separate versions of the app to Apple’s iOS and Mac App Stores. As reported by Bloomberg, Apple will expand the kit so that iPhone applications can be converted into Mac apps in 2020. Finally, by 2021, developers will be able to merge iPhone, iPad, and Mac applications into one app. Following this, developers will no longer need to submit separate versions of the app to different Apple App Stores and will allow iOS apps to be downloaded directly from Mac computers. “The most direct benefit of the Marzipan project will be to make life easier for the millions of developers who write software for Apple’s devices. For example, later this year Netflix Inc. would be able to more easily offer a Mac app for watching the video by converting its iPad app”, states Bloomberg. Also, Twitter could publish a single app for all its Apple customers by 2021. Apple acquires Pullstring to possibly help Apple improve Siri and other IoT-enabled gadgets Apple and Google slammed by Human Rights groups for hosting Absher, a Saudi app that tracks women Apple revoked Facebook developer certificates due to misuse of Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program; Google also disabled its iOS research app

Last week, the team at WireGuard announced an initial version of WireGuard for macOS and have also launched the app in the Mac App Store. The app makes use of Apple’s Network Extension API to provide native integration into the operating system's networking stack. WireGuard is a fast, modern, and secure VPN tunnel. The new app can import new tunnels from archives and files, or you can create one from scratch. Developers said that it is currently undergoing rapid development, and taking feedback from users in implementing new and exciting features. According to TechCrunch, “The app is a drop-down menu in the menu bar. You can manage your tunnel and activate on-demand connections for some scenarios. For instance, you could choose to activate your VPN exclusively if you’re connected to the internet using Wi-Fi, and not Ethernet.” Source: TechCrunch Developers say “because the app uses these deep integration APIs, we're only allowed to distribute the application using the macOS App Store (whose rejections, appeals, and eventual acceptance made for quite the stressful saga over the last week and a half).” To know more about this announcement, read WireGuard’s email thread. Mozilla releases Firefox 62.0 with better scrolling on Android, a dark theme on macOS, and more Undetected Linux Backdoor ‘SpeakUp’ infects Linux, MacOS with cryptominers Final release for macOS Mojave is here with new features, security changes and a privacy flaw

Last week, Dan Abramov, one of the React developers, while announcing the release of React 16.8, shared that React Native 0.59 will be released with Hooks. The team was waiting for Hooks to land in React’s stable version before they support it in the next release of React Native. Today, they have released React Native 0.59 RC0, which along with React Hooks, ships with extracted React Native CLI, major QoL improvements, and more. Here are some of the major changes this version will come with: As mentioned earlier, React Native 0.59 will come with React Hooks. This feature allows you to “hook into” or use React state and other lifecycle features via function components. The React Native GitHub repo was quite big, and that is why the team decided to move some of the components to separate repos. As a result, the React Native CLI now has a separate repository. The team has also removed WebView from the React Native code. Now developers need to use its extracted version. Though the team has not shared which exact components will be deprecated in the release notes, this version will surely deprecate quite a few components. Along with these changes, many QoL improvements have been made on the native Android side such as 64 bits support via a new JSC, AppCompatActivity, etc. As this is not a stable release, developers are recommended not to upgrade to React Native 0.59 unless they want to collaborate in testing. To know more in detail, check out React Native’s release notes. The React Native team shares their open source roadmap, React Suite hits 3.4.0 React Native 0.57 released with major improvements in accessibility APIs, WKWebView-backed implementation, and more! JavaScript mobile frameworks comparison: React Native vs Ionic vs NativeScript

Just a month after Homebrew 1.9.0 was released, Homebrew 2.0.0 was released last week with official support for Linux and Windows 10 (with Windows Subsystem for Linux), an automatic running of brew cleanup, removal of support for OS X Mountain Lion ( for versions10.8 and below), and much more. Features of Homebrew 2.0.0 Homebrew now offers official support for Linux and Windows 10 with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). brew cleanup runs periodically (every 30 days) and is triggered automatically for individual formula cleanup on reinstall, install or upgrade. Homebrew has dropped its support for OS X Mountain Lion (10.8 and below). With this new version, Homebrew will now offer better performance, as its portable Ruby is now built on OS X Mavericks (10.9). Debugging git issues is now easier as brew update-reset resets all repositories and taps to their upstream versions. Homebrew reduces errors when formulae are built from source and also allows the removal of many workarounds for niche issues by filtering all user environment variables. The team is now attempting to migrate away from Jenkins to a suitable hosted CI provider after a security researcher, Eric Holmes,  identified a GitHub personal access token leak from Homebrew’s Jenkins in 2018. Homebrew Cask’s downloads are quarantined to provide the same level of security while manually downloading these tools. Homebrew uses a proper option parser so as to generate the man brew and --help. Users can now expect better feedback on inputting invalid options to formulae or commands. Thus making argument handling more simple and robust. To know about the other features in detail, head over to Hombrew’s official page. Conda 4.6.0 released with support for more shells, better interoperability among others Mozilla releases Firefox 65 with support for AV1, enhanced tracking protection, and more! Typescript 3.3 is finally released!  

Chrome 72 for Android now comes with the Trusted Web Activity feature. This means that PWAs can now be distributed in the Google Play Store. The Trusted Web Activity feature is a way to open Chrome in standalone mode (without any toolbar or Chrome UI) within the scope of our Google’s native Android package. This will allow publishing your PWA in the Google Play store, and from the browser. PWA in Google Play Store offers the following features: Home Screen Widget Wear OS companion app or Android Auto extension Background services accessing native features Limited monetization of the App The possibility of having some native screens mixed with PWA content Distribute more than one PWA icon in the Launcher and/or home screen pointing to different URLs (within the same host) Better internationalization support However, PWA in the store is an opt-in operation. The PWA won’t be listed in the store if users don’t compile their own APK, and publish it. Maximiliano Firtman, a mobile and web developer has written a tutorial showing how users can create an Android Package using TWA, the limitations of using this platform, and how to create a PWApk. He talks about the publishing process saying that it is not straightforward. For publishing, you use a Java API that communicates through services with Chrome which requires manual work. He has shared his experiences trying to make it work in his blog post. Overall he says that “The idea that we can now publish PWAs in the Google Play Store is really a game changer. It seems we are in the early stages of the API right now and we definitely need a higher level solution for this. I really want to see a tool to enter our PWA’s URL and get an APK from it.” Top frameworks for building your Progressive Web Apps (PWA) 5 reasons why your next app should be a PWA (progressive web app) Build powerful progressive web apps with Firebase

Yesterday, social media was all abuzz about a bug in Apple’s Group FaceTime video calling service. This bug allowed callers to listen in on people they were calling and also send a video to the caller, even if they haven’t picked up their phone. Apple said this issue will be addressed in a software update later this week. Currently, they have disabled Group FaceTime in iOS and MacOS. In a statement to news reporting sites, an Apple spokesperson said, "We are aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week." According to 9To5Mac, this bug affects iOS devices which are running on iOS 12.1 or later. In their report published yesterday, 9To5Mac shared how this bug works: Initiate a FaceTime Video call with an iPhone contact. Add another person to the call, while the call is still dialing. Then add your own phone number in the Add Person screen. This will start a group FaceTime call including yourself and the audio of the person you originally called, even if they haven’t accepted the call yet. This is not the first time a bug has been reported regarding Group FaceTime, which was first introduced in October last year. In November, a lock screen security flaw was discovered that provided access to all contact information and allows activating a FaceTime call. You can read the full story on 9To5Mac’s website. Apple is patenting Swift features like optional chaining Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook calls for new federal privacy law while attacking the ‘shadow economy’ in an interview with TIME Project Erasmus: Former Apple engineer builds a user interface that responds to environment light

Apple’s application for patenting some of the Swift features has successfully reached the “Grant” stage. Swift is the Objective-C based programming language that Apple introduced in 2014 and open sourced in 2015 under the Apache License 2.0. By licensing its contributions under the Apache license, Apple grants developers a perpetual, royalty-free license to use all of its patents that are necessary in order to use Swift. Apple submitted two patents 9,329,844 in 2016 and 9,952,841 in 2018. Under the 9,952,841 patent, the company has made 23 claims and 22 claims under the 9,329,844 patent. These patents are mainly about supporting multiple languages in the same compiler, with various specific limitations. These patents will be infringed if you are implementing a Swift compiler, assuming it included Objective-C compatibility and also if another language wanted to add a similar built-in compatibility layer. What could be the consequences of Apple’s patents? These patents caused a huge discussion among the Swift developers. They feel that software patents are silly and should not exist. They believe that we can find prior art for many of the features mentioned in these patents, for instance, optional chaining. One of the Swift developer discussing the consequences of these patents said, “The big problem here is not only ongoing lawsuits but projects that won't ever be started because of the risk of lawsuits. A great example here is that Clang and LLVM (and Swift probably too as directly based on Clang and LLVM) wouldn't be as easy to start or to develop at all if C and C++ were patented.” This could also lead to cases that we are seeing today, for instance, the ongoing Oracle’s copyright and patent claims on Google’s Android operating system, which is built on top of Oracle’s owned Java language. Another example is problems that Mono and other alternative implementations of .NET faced because of Microsoft’s patents. In the future, Apple could also transfer these patents to an independent non-profit organization similar to Linux. One of the developers mentioned his concern on the discussion forum, “But as a contributor to Swift's ecosystem, I feel unsafe now as we have a precedent of Oracle ruining Java's ecosystem 50 with its patents. Can we be sure that Apple never ever does this to any 3rd-party open-source project related to Swift as a "business decision"?”. While some developers are worried, some feel that it is just a countermeasure against patent trolls, “I wouldn’t worry. Apple uses patents as a way to fight trolls and counterclaims. It’s also full of prior art.” You can read the full discussion on Swift discussion forum. Swift 5 for Xcode 10.2 beta is here with stable ABI Swift is now available on Fedora 28 ABI stability may finally come in Swift 5.0

Apple released the next major iOS update, iOS 12.2 beta 1 to developers on January 24, 2019. This update boasts of features like custom downtime scheduling, as well as major updates to PWA. Custom screen time scheduling According to a report by 9to5Mac, iOS users will be offered a custom downtime scheduler in the latest iOS update. Users will now be able to adjust the Screen Time feature per the days of the week. Although previous iOS versions had a similar downtime scheduler, it was limited to be applied every day. With iOS 12.2 beta 1, users can either choose to use the same schedule everyday, or customize it depending on which day of that week it is. You can use it by navigating to Settings > Screen Time > Downtime. https://twitter.com/Mr_SamSpencer/status/1089161676983844865 PWA improvements Apple has made major improvements to Progressive web apps by introducing new features for developers. Mike Hartington, developer advocate for Ionic framework gives us a glimpse of new improvements in a tweet. New experimental features include Web Auth, Web Animations, WebMeta, pointer events, intersection observer etc. Service workers are removed from the experiments list and are enabled by default. External sites are loaded via SFViewController. This means authentication flows and still work without leaving the PWA. The current state of any app is maintained, even if the app goes in the background. You can view the native app as well as the PWA of the same app in the search. Users are generally excited for Apple making improvements to its PWA. A comment on Hacker news reads, “This is great for user rights and moves the needle more towards a decentralized and open ecosystem, while maintaining strong security guarantees to the end-user.” However, users also want Apple to consider supporting Push Notifications for PWAs. Other UI features 9to5Mac notes the following new UI updates made to Apple iOS 12.2 beta 1. New Screen Mirroring icon in Control Center New full screen Apple TV Remote Control Center interface New “Speakers & TVS” in Home app settings More detailed Apple Wallet UI for Recent Transactions Updated details button in Wallet card UI Tap a transaction for more detail Card details feature bubbly inset rectangles rows Motion & Orientation Data is new Safari toggle in iOS Settings Air Quality Index reading in Maps Safari warns about websites not supporting HTTPS Fill in a search suggestion without submitting the search Keyboard color picker Inline Safari music playback Album name full song search results in Music app iOS 12.2 will bring Apple News to Canada Developers can head to Settings > General > Software Updates to start downloading iOS 12.2 beta 1, if they have a previous iOS 12 beta installed. Non-developers can enter the public beta program by visiting beta.apple.com on the device they wish to enroll in the beta.  Currently, there is no public beta release. Apple has introduced Shortcuts for iOS 12 to automate your everyday tasks Microsoft Office 365 now available on the Mac App Store Tim Cook cites supply constraints and economic deceleration as the major reason for Apple missing it’s earnings target

Yesterday, the team at Microsoft announced that Office 365 is available on the Mac App Store for the first time. Mac users can now download Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote and the whole suite of Microsoft’s popular apps. It is also possible to purchase a subscription for Office 365 from within the apps. With Office 365 on the Mac App Store, these apps can be easily distributed to the employees using Apple Business Manager, a central dashboard where IT can deploy devices, apps and licenses. Users can now work with their Office tools across Mac, iPad and iPhone. Also, few new features are designed specifically for Apple devices. Jared Spataro, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said, “We are excited to announce that today Office 365 is arriving in the Mac App Store. We have worked closely with Apple to provide Mac users with the very best productivity experience — one that offers everything they know and love about Office through an experience uniquely designed for the Mac.” Office 365 for Mac has been designed for supporting features such as Dark Mode and Continuity Camera in macOS and MacBook Pro Touch Bar and Mac’s industry-leading Trackpad. Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple, said, “We are excited to welcome Microsoft Office 365 to the all-new Mac App Store in macOS Mojave. Apple and Microsoft have worked together to bring great Office productivity to Mac users from the very beginning. Now, with Office 365 on the Mac App Store, it's easier than ever to get the latest and best version of Office 365 for Mac, iPad and, iPhone.” Users have given mixed reactions to this news. Some of the users are happy with this news. One of the users commented on HackerNews, “I use both Office for Mac and Windows all the time and Office for Mac is pretty reliable IMO.” This also looks like a big move for both the companies. Users are now looking at this bigger picture where both Mac and iOS app stores will be integrated together. This could possibly be a step closer to a better UX (for Microsoft). Another comment reads, “Have you tried to download Office from their website? It's a horrible, braindead experience. You have to log in to your Live account, then go to a particular page to manage your existing Office installs that is super confusing.” There is also a discussion going on with regards to App store updates and Microsoft autoupdate. A comment on HackerNews reads, “If it uses the App Store update mechanism instead of Microsoft Autoupdate I would prefer it.”  Another comment reads, “Right now Microsoft's autoupdate UX is pretty terrible at keeping things up to date.  They have automated updates but it's hard to trust that process won't result in issues when documents are open, and it presents a lot of cognitive load to users on top of the OS & App Store updates.” Few of the users are wondering if Apple will get its share from the subscription fee of the Office 365. But on the whole, users are on the go that there is some mechanism via which both the companies will benefit. One of the users commented, “But this is a massive deal between two of the ecosystem's biggest fish, and I'm sure an arrangement has been made to give Apple a piece of the pie somehow.” Users’ biggest question is if Microsoft has changed Office 365 in order to get in the Mac App Store rules or has Apple changed its rules to get Office in? Or is it very well sandboxed? Well, only time will answer these questions! To know more about this news, check out the official announcement on Apple’s newsroom. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook calls for new federal privacy law while attacking the ‘shadow economy’ in an interview with TIME China blocks Microsoft’s Bing search engine Microsoft Edge mobile browser now shows warnings against fake news using NewsGuard

Ionic Framework today released Ionic Framework 4.0. The release is a complete rebuild of the popular JavaScript framework for developing mobile and desktop apps. Although Ionic has, up until now, Ionic was built using Angular components, this new version has instead been built using Web Components. This is significant, as it changes the whole ball game for the project. It means Ionic Framework is now an app development framework that can be used alongside any front end frameworks, not just Angular. The shift away from Angular makes a lot of sense for the project. It now has the chance to grow adoption beyond the estimated five million developers around the world already using the framework. While in the past Ionic could only be used by Angular developers, it now opens up new options for development teams - so, rather than exacerbating a talent gap in many organizations, it could instead help ease it. However, although it looks like Ionic is taking a significant step away from Angular, it's important to note that, at the moment, Ionic Framework 4.0 is only out on general availability for Angular - it's still only in Alpha for Vue.js and React. Ionic Framework 4.0 and open web standards Although the move to Web Components is the stand-out change in Ionic Framework 4.0, it's also worth noting that the release has been developed in accordance with open web standards. This has been done, according to the team, to help organizations develop Design Systems (something the Ionic team wrote about just a few days ago) - essentially, using a set of guidelines and components that can be reused across multiple platforms and products to maintain consistency across various user experience touch points. Why did the team make the changes to Ionic Framework 4.0 that they did? According to Max Lynch, Ionic Framework co-founder and CEO, the changes present in Ionic Framework 4.0 should help organizations achieve brand consistency quickly, and to give development teams the option of using Ionic with their JavaScript framework of choice. Lynch explains: "When we look at what’s happening in the world of front-end development, we see two major industry shifts... First, there’s a recognition that the proliferation of proprietary components has slowed down development and created design inconsistencies that hurt users and brands alike. More and more enterprises are recognizing the need to adopt a design system: a single design spec, or library of reusable components, that can be shared across a team or company. Second, with the constantly evolving development ecosystem, we recognized the need to make Ionic compatible with whatever framework developers wanted to use—now and in the future. Rebuilding our Framework on Web Components was a way to address both of these challenges and future-proof our technology in a truly unique way." What does Ionic Framework 4.0 tell us about the future of web and app development? Ionic Framework 4.0 is a really interesting release as it tells us a lot about where web and app development is today. It confirms to us, for example, that Angular's popularity is waning. It also suggests that Web Components are going to be the building blocks of the web for years to come - regardless of how frameworks evolve. As Lynch writes in a blog post introducing Ionic Framework 4.0, "in our minds, it was clear Web Components would be the way UI libraries, like Ionic, would be distributed in the future. So, we took a big bet and started porting all 100 of our components over." Ionic Framework 4.0 also suggests that Progressive Web Apps are here to stay too. Lynch writes in the blog post linked to above that "for Ionic to reach performance standards set by Google, new approaches for asynchronous loading and delivery were needed." To do this, he explains, the team "spent a year building out a web component pipeline using Stencil to generate Ionic’s components, ensuring they were tightly packed, lazy loaded, and delivered in smart collections consisting of components you’re actually using." The time taken to ensure that the framework could meet those standards - essentially, that it could support high performance PWAs - underscores that this will be one of the key use cases for Ionic in the years to come.  

Recently, four commits were made in Android’s Gerrit source code management, under the title “Carrier restriction enhancements for Android Q.” These new commits specify that Android Q (the next in line Android OS) powered devices will give more control to network carriers to specify which networks devices will and will not work on. What this means is that Android Q will consist of blacklist and whitelist carriers called “allowed” and “excluded” to specify carriers, what will and won’t work on a particular phone. According to a report by 9to5 Google, “this can be done with a fine-grained detail to even allow blocking virtual carrier networks that run on the same towers as your main carrier.” This will also eliminate allowing carriers to set individual restrictions for each SIM slot. WIth Android Q, writes 9to5 Google, “carriers will be able to lock out the second slot unless there’s an approved SIM card in the first slot. This SIM lock restriction is applied immediately and will persist through restarting the phone and even doing a factory reset.” Emergency phone calls will still work the same. Last week, XDA confirmed that Android Q will feature a system-level “Dark mode” that can be enabled in Display settings and features an “Automatic (based on time of day)” option. 7 Android Predictions for 2019 Implementing a home screen widget and search bar on Android [Tutorial] Android Studio 3.3 released with support for Navigation Editor, C++ code lint inspections, and more.

Yesterday, Facebook open-sourced Spectrum 1.0.0, a cross-platform image transcoding library for Android and iOS that makes uploading larger images easier. Spectrum has also improved the reliability and quality of image uploads across all Facebook apps. With Spectrum now open source, users can fully debug it and add support for new codecs using its plugin architecture. Facebook uses Spectrum in-house across all of its mobile apps. It is an all in one package for performing image-manipulation tasks for lowering file-sizes and improving resizing, cropping, and transcoding. Features of Spectrum 1.0.0 High-quality output Spectrum uses Mozjpeg to achieve higher quality file size ratio. Spectrum makes image operations easier by cropping and rotating lossless. It focuses on increasing the quality for graphical content with operations like disabling chroma sampling. Prevents common missteps Since Spectrum's API is declarative, it helps in preventing common missteps such as incomplete handling of EXIF metadata. Written in C/C++ It is written in portable C/C++ so users can adopt it to their environment. Java and Objective-C APIs are thin wrappers around the C++ core that makes development easier. C++ core allows higher execution speed for computational operations and provides control over allocations. This core allows sharing between apps on Android and iOS which makes outputs more consistent. Automatic behavior definition using Recipes Spectrum is unique because it does not require developers to manually, step-by-step define all behaviors. Instead, the developers just state what the desired outcome is, and the library takes it from there. Spectrum makes this possible by using ‘recipes’, that are bundled with the plugins used by the library and sorted by Facebook. Recipes help developers in choosing the optimal execution sequence for individual requests. For example, the JPEG plugin will provide recipes for the lossless cropping and rotation of JPEG images. Integration with Mozilla JPEG Integration with MozJpeg, a native library, helps Spectrum to control encoding parameters beyond the general purpose platform APIs. It helps developers to utilize intensive encoding, which requires more time for processing but significantly reduces the file size. Other minor features Spectrum 1.0.0 can write interlaced PNG files. This release supports consuming JPEG images with 4:1:1 and 4:4:0 chroma subsampling. For iOS bitmaps, Spectrum 1.0.0 will default to 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. This release is built with proper SIMD support for mozjpeg on Android ARMv7. It optimizes the interplay between pixel-perfect resizing and decoder sampling. Hacker news users are excited about this news and are relieved that they don’t have to recreate a bunch of scaffolding around image encoders. Users are also comparing this library with other apps like ImageOptim, a free Mac app that can handle JPEG, GIF and PNG and Google's Guetlzi that can reach 20-40% compression without any loss of quality. All is not bright, however. Users have also expressed concerns with using Spectrum saying that Facebook provides the worst image compression. One user commented on HackerNews, “Facebook photos are compressed to a point where they look horrible. Why would anyone want to use this? I do not see what this benefits any developer over just using mozjpeg with better settings.” Some users are unhappy with Messenger videos too. Another user commented, “If any Facebook compression engineer reads this, please fix the sound in Messenger videos! The sound bitrate is absolutely terrible, only for ridiculous bandwidth savings.” Also, there are issues with the name as there are other products with the same name. A comment reads, “I like how there are 2 products called Spectrum on the front page and they are completely unrelated. Anyway, this lib looks pretty ok for its purpose.” Another comment reads, “There's also the article that wants to sell you a spectrum analyzer to search your hotel room for bugs.” 3 out of 4 users don’t know Facebook categorizes them for ad targeting; with political and racial affinity being some labels: Pew Research A new privacy bill was introduced for creating federal standards for privacy protection aimed at big tech firms like Facebook, Google and Amazon Facebook plans to invest $300 million to support local journalism

Android Studio 3.3 has been released, earlier this week with official support for Navigation Editor, Project Marble, improved incremental Java compilation when using annotation processors, C++ code lint inspections etc. Other features include an updated new project wizard and usability fixes for each of the performance profilers. Overall, this release addresses over 200 users reported bugs. This release includes support for navigation editor, a visual editor for constructing XML resources using the Jetpack Navigation Component. Developers can build predictable interactions between the screens and content areas of an app with the Navigation Editor and the Navigation Component. The Network profiler in Android Studio 3.3 now formats common text types found in network payloads by default, including HTML, XML and JSON.   New Project Wizard for Android Studio has been updated to support the range of device types, programming languages, and new frameworks in a streamlined manner. Android Studio 3.3 includes Intellij 2018.2.2 and also bundles Kotlin 1.3.11. It also supports Clang-Tidy for C++ static code analysis. Android Studio 3.3 decreases build time by improving support for incremental Java compilation when using annotation processors. This release comes with a new feature to help clean up unused settings & cache directories. For better user feedback, it includes in-product sentiment buttons for quick feedback. The plugin uses Gradle's new task creation API to avoid initializing and configuring tasks that are not required to complete the current build. Android Studio 3.3 supports Android app bundle to build and deploy Google Play Instant experiences from a single Android Studio project. Android Emulator 28.0 now supports the ability to launch multiple instances of the same Android Virtual Device (AVD). The default Memory Profiler capture mode on Android 8.0 Oreo (API level 26) and higher devices are changed to sample for allocations periodically. You may check out the Android Studio release notes, Android Gradle plugin release notes, and the Android Emulator release notes for more details. Android Studio 3.2 releases with Android App Bundle, Energy Profiler, and more! Android Studio 3.2 Beta 5 out, with updated Protobuf Gradle plugin What is Android Studio and how does it differ from other IDEs?