App

Apple Pay has been available to use in stores, as well as in select apps and websites, ever since its first appearance in iOS 8.1. Now, with iOS 12, there are currently 13 different iPhone models that support Apple Pay functionality without the use of an Apple Watch, and the l ...more

If you're anything like me, you'd like the ability to fully exit your iPhone apps to help free up memory, improve battery life, stop background processes, and fix unresponsive apps. The thing is, you can, with the help of the app switcher. Force-closing apps also helps keep yo ...more

I hate to break it to you, but you're probably here because you were trolled. Thanks to a Photoshopped image making rounds across Twitter, Apple fans were tricked into believing that iOS 8 allowed them to lock individual apps, accessible only through a passcode or fingerprint ...more

While fully closing apps on your iPhone can keep it running at peak efficiency since it frees up memory and stops background refreshing, it's most critical when dealing with unresponsive apps. If you have an issue with a certain app, you can just force-close it instead of rebo ...more

If you're in the market for a non-root ad-blocker, developer Julian Klode has an app that you'll definitely want to check out. It uses Android's VPN system in a similar manner to alternative apps like NetGuard and AdGuard, but it's got a new twist that should save lots of batt ...more

Caller ID is great to have, but there are certain situations where you don't want the person you're calling to have your number. People who sometimes use their personal phones for work may not want clients knowing where to reach them outside of work, and anytime you're dealing ...more

Whether you drop your iPhone into a toilet or your dog's water bowl or regularly take it into the shower or pool, water will likely become nestled inside its speaker grilles. Water exposure causes audio playback through the speakers to soften and sound muffled, and getting tha ...more

You can now access Google's slick Weather app without having to first open the Google or News & Weather apps. However, you will have to use Google to access the weather the old-fashioned way one more time, but you'll have the option to place a shortcut on your home screen to a ...more

As respectful as you may be, it's hard to resist looking through someone's iPhone when given the chance. You're not trying to snoop around, but it's just too easy to open up apps and read embarrassing emails or find scandalous Instagram follows. It's like looking through a dig ...more

The most significant customization aspect of the iPhone is most definitely the home screen. Before iOS 14, Apple only threw in a feature here and there to appease those who like a more personal touch on the most visible part of the operating system. Now, there are great custom ...more

A picture is worth a thousand words, and depending on what you're taking a picture of, it could be worth a lot more. Our phone's camera can easily capture high quality photos, scan barcodes, and make us Instagram famous. You can compare prices of items and download application ...more

Throwaway phones aren't just for seedy criminals and spies—they can be useful for many everyday situations. For example, you don't necessarily want to give your real phone number out to strangers when you're buying or selling something on Craigslist, managing an Airbnb listin ...more

Apple's Wallet app lets you store boarding passes, concert tickets, gym memberships, vaccination cards, movie stubs, rewards cards, insurance info, student IDs, and more in one place on your iPhone, and you just double-click the Home or Side button to access them. Unfortunatel ...more

Apple introduced recent contacts for the app switcher (aka multitasking menu) in iOS 8, useful for quickly calling and texting your most-contacted friends and family. Just tap on one of the contact bubbles and an assortment of options appear—call, message, or FaceTime. While t ...more

Apple gave us the ability to invert colors on the screen a very long time ago. Then they gave us grayscale mode in iOS 8, Night Shift in iOS 9, and the red screen filter in iOS 10. While the long-awaited "Dark Mode" finally appeared in iOS 13, iOS 11 and iOS 12 both have a dec ...more

Traditional root ad-blockers like AdAway and AdBlock Plus have no effect on YouTube anymore. Until now, if you wanted to get rid of the commercials that play before your favorite videos, there have only been two ways—either by paying for a YouTube Red subscription, or by using ...more

Have you ever seen those super-expensive universal remote controls like the Logitech Harmony and thought to yourself, "Man, I really want one of those, but that's just too much money"? You're not alone. Luckily, if you're an owner of an Android device with an infrared (IR) bl ...more

With all the little improvements that Apple made to iOS 7, some older features have been changed or moved (and sometimes, it's not obvious). Just yesterday, I was at the Apple store speaking with an employee about iOS 7 when he said: "It sucks that the new iOS 7 doesn't have ...more

Remember the live fish wallpapers from iOS 9? They may be a fading memory at this point since Apple removed them all from the iPhone in iOS 11, but there is a way to get those fishies animated on your device again. They'll be live photos for your lock screen, which is as good ...more

Ever since iOS 11, there's been a little drawer at the bottom of conversation threads in the Messages app. That drawer houses what Apple calls "iMessage apps," even though they also work in regular text messages. These apps are convenient for various reasons, but if you don't ...more

One of Android's biggest strengths relative to iOS is how simple it is to sideload apps that aren't on the official app store. Rather than having to sign IPA files or tell your phone you trust a developer every two weeks, you can just enable a setting and be done with it. Jum ...more

Before many games make it to the US-based iOS App Store, they get "soft launched" in a smaller country to get real-world testing for bugs. It's a pilot program, so to speak, as countries like Vietnam or the Philippines have far fewer iPhone users than the US, thus offer a more ...more

If you tend to use the app switcher a lot to open recent apps, then all of the apps you accessed months ago are just sitting there cluttering things up. While force-closing all of the recent apps on your iPhone isn't really necessary, it's sometimes nice to wipe the slate clea ...more

If you updated to iOS 8.4 already to try out the new Apple Music service, there's one important change you need to know about—there's no longer a "Shuffle" option for all songs in your library. Don't Miss: 24 Things You Need to Know About Apple Music Don't Miss: How to Remove ...more

Uninstalling an app on your Mac isn't as straightforward as you would think. When you drag and drop an app into the Trash, then empty it, the main app itself may be gone, but many associated files and folders are left behind. So how do you get rid of them? There are a couple o ...more

You know that you have the Gmail app on your iPhone. After all, you get Gmail notifications, you see it in the app switcher, it's in the Settings app, and there's an "Open" button in the App Store instead of "Get" or a download icon. But you cannot find the app on your Home Sc ...more

As people continue to upgrade their PCs to Microsoft Windows 8, more and more developers are adding content to the Windows Store. While the offerings are not as vast as Google Play or the iTunes App Store, it does have some solid apps for both productive users and those lookin ...more

Dark mode is simply a way of life these days now that both Android and iOS officially support it. Most major apps now use the system-wide setting on Android and iOS, and many had their own dark themes in-app before Google and Apple got with the program. But the social media gi ...more

If you used Touch ID on an iPhone before, all you had to do to install apps and games from the App Store was rest your fingertip on the Home button. On the iPhone X, there's Face ID instead, and Apple has included on-screen instructions to help everyone adjust to the lack of H ...more

What you see when you open the Play Store is completely dependent on your country settings. Search results and top charts are specific to each region and there are lots of popular apps and games that simply won't show up unless your Play Store country matches up. Until recent ...more

When it comes to app permissions, Android takes an "all or nothing" approach. You have no granular control over what data apps can access, so the only way to prevent an app from seeing your location or starting up on boot, for instance, is to not install the app in the first p ...more

One of the most exciting additions to iOS 12 for iPhones is called Shortcuts, a tool integrated with Siri to help you get things done faster. While there are a few recommended shortcuts available to you in Siri's settings in iOS 12, the Shortcuts app brings the functionality o ...more

If your iPhone is rebooting or your Messages app is constantly crashing, you might be the victim of an iOS exploit or just a buggy software update. While one problem sounds worse than the other, they both can get annoying real quick when you can't send any messages or even rea ...more

The Pixel is the phone to beat when it comes to cameras, and it's largely due to software. While its hardware is solid, Google's machine learning prowess and general coding wizardry are the biggest reasons the Pixel is so good with taking photos and recording video. What this ...more

Trust can be a touchy subject in general, and is often required when sharing personal information—especially so when handing our phones over to others. You may not have a ton of secret or nefarious information on your device, but that doesn't mean you want your mom or snoopy c ...more

Apple Watch owners know the struggle — it's the end of the day, and those rings aren't met. Whether you forgot your watch before hitting the gym, let the battery run out, or just didn't move enough, you could feel the sting of fitness failure. But it doesn't have to be this wa ...more

If you transition to an Apple Watch from another wearable like Fitbit, you might be a bit confused by the new calorie burn counter. Instead of ending your day with thousands of calories burned, your watch says you've burned just hundreds. Could it be you're less active with yo ...more

One subtle change that Samsung made with the Galaxy S5 is their replacement of the Menu softkey with one for recent applications. Instead of holding down on the Home button, we now have the Recents button, which is used for easy access to multitasking. From the multitasking s ...more

Deleting emails can be a tedious process on the iPhone, especially since the "Trash All" options have been removed ever since iOS 10 first came out. Though likely well-intentioned, this change places an undue burden on all of us iPhone owners who now have to erase emails indiv ...more

Google Play Music is one of the best cloud music services out there. Without ever paying a dime, you can upload as many as 20,000 songs to Google's servers, then use the app on your smartphone to stream these songs without taking up any of your storage space. And if you're wil ...more

One of the few areas where Android lags behind iOS is a comprehensive backup solution for apps. Root tools, such as the popular Titanium Backup, are capable of backing up all of your apps and their data, but not everyone wants to root their device and potentially run into issu ...more

Every now and then, an iOS secret surfaces that makes me wonder, "How am I just learning about this?" I remember the first time I found out how to delete numbers in the Calculator app, and when I discovered you could bulk-move apps around the Home screen. Now, there's another ...more

If you've ever wondered why the pictures and videos you share with Snapchat on your Android device seem to look grainy with low resolution, you're not alone. We all know it, and we've come to accept it as a plain fact: Snapchat image quality sucks on Android. The reason behin ...more

Recent launches of YouTube TV and YouTube Go created a bit of excitement on the web. Though the latter allows downloading, it doesn't allow background playback, as that would require a YouTube Red subscription for $10 a month. However, there's still a way to get both of these ...more

Jailbreaking gives iPhone users almost unfettered access to their devices, offering a slew of customizations, new features, and improved apps that you just can't get elsewise. Unfortunately, Apple has clamped down hard on the latest iterations of iOS, making jailbreaking extre ...more

Samsung has a cool security feature built into One UI that has an interesting side effect, one that lets you have two separate copies of any Android app on your Galaxy phone. And that's not the only integrated Samsung tool for cloning apps. Some mobile apps have built-in acco ...more

Your iPhone's home screen is a tricky thing. You can sort your collection of apps in any order you'd like, but where you place those apps is a totally different story. App and folder placement follows a strict grid on iOS from left to right, top to bottom. No exceptions, and t ...more

Realizing there's no voice to guide you while using your iPhone to navigate can be problematic, causing serious headaches from getting lost to unscheduled pit stops or worse. And while this problem can hit Apple Maps like other navigation apps out there, there are a number of ...more

A burner number isn't just for criminals and cheating spouses. In this digital world, with many of our interactions being conducted online, a throwaway phone number acts as a buffer — it lets you enjoy the web without having to give out your personal information, such as real ...more

You wouldn't send your GPS coordinates to a completely random stranger just because he or she asked you for it, right? So why are you constantly sharing your location (and other data) to apps on a daily basis? While there are many apps that need your location in order to func ...more

Smartphone users often wish for a privacy, where no one is able to poke his/her nose in their personal stuff. Unfortunately, none of the smartphones have been able to guard their privacy in this fashion. Smartphones usually come up with none or almost negligible built-in secur ...more

Apple released iOS 8.2 on March 9th for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, which contains bug fixes and stability enhancements for certain stock features. If you've updated your device already, you've probably already noticed that you get the new Apple Watch app, too—no matter if y ...more

This past year, Facebook spent $19 billion purchasing the popular messaging app WhatsApp, and for good reason. Mark Zuckerberg isn't going to spend that type of money on just any application. WhatsApp is widely popular and frequently used by more than 500 million users worldwi ...more

As Android owners, we ultimately have to look at our device and ask the difficult question: "Where the hell did all these applications come from?" We're all guilty of installing the latest and greatest app or game, but at some point we come to the realization that we're digit ...more

If imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery, then Snapchat must be blushing profusely as Instagram continues to shamelessly copy its features and dig into its wallet. Instagram has also managed to copy some of the security aspects — or lack thereof — of one of Snapcha ...more

Streaming movies and TV shows on phones is more popular today than ever, but what about when you're on a plane, have a limited data plan, or will be in a no-service area? You'll want to download your movies and TV shows instead. While Netflix is excellent, you can't rent or do ...more

When you tap on a URL link in a text, email, or wherever, your iPhone's default reaction will be to open it up in Safari, and there's no way to change this in the settings. However, there is a way you can work around this to open up links in Chrome instead. Even if you acciden ...more

As mentioned before, the Home button is one of the most important keys on your Samsung Galaxy S3, and pretty much all Android devices for that matter. However, when it comes to customization, it's rather tame. If you've ever used Activator on a jailbroken iPhone, you know the ...more

A few days ago, Russian hacker Alexy Borodin found a way to get free in-app purchases on an iPhone or iPad. In-app purchases include things like items and power-ups for iOS games, as well as subscriptions and "premium" memberships for certain apps. The method is novel, not fo ...more