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Living in Southern California means I don't really have a need to check the weather all that often. But every now and then, I'm caught off guard by a particularly chilly or hot day—no one wants to be the only person walking around with a T-shirt and sandals on a rainy, 50-degr ...more

If you're a rooted user, you've probably heard the term "BusyBox" by now. Many mods require these powerful root commands, but the process of installing BusyBox can be a bit confusing for the uninitiated. To clarify things a bit, BusyBox is both an app and a set of specialized ...more

As with any software, Android apps can occasionally suffer from bugs. But finding the root cause of such issues can often be difficult, and reporting bugs is a cumbersome experience. A new app from developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson is looking to help solve some of your ...more

Some variants of the Galaxy S6 will allow you to silence the camera shutter sound with an option in the app's settings menu. But this is not true of all models, plus there's an additional annoyance—when you're filming video and you get a notification, you'll actually hear this ...more

Whether it's for handling your business's social media account or just for personal reasons, like trolling an ex-girlfriend's page (not that I've ever done that) or posting on behalf of your pup, there are instances where having two different Facebook accounts on one device is ...more

CyanogenMod has been building upon open-source AOSP apps for many years now. They've made improvements to apps like the stock SMS client, the stock Audio Mixer, and a whole slew of others. Recently, with the release of CyanogenMod 12, they've given the AOSP Gallery app a nice ...more

Serving as the primary tool of distribution for many websites, social media is how most of us catch up what's going on around the world. While there is a bunch of clickbait going around on Facebook and Twitter, there are plenty of genuinely interesting articles being shared. ...more

Not too long ago I showcased ReCam, a free app that lets you schedule recordings and use your Android device as a security or spy camera of sorts. While useful, this app required you to schedule when to record in advance, resulting in you possibly missing the footage you inten ...more

Even though my high school days are long behind me, I still find myself waking up in a cold sweat worrying about what my GPA is and what college I'm going to be able to get into. During those days I had to rely on coming up with my own equations to figure out my GPA between gr ...more

I'm not a fan of this practice, but many developers release their wares on iOS before eventually porting their apps to Android. This was the case for PhotoMath, a popular and very useful app that can solve math problems with your smartphone's camera. The app is incredibly int ...more

Live wallpapers, like the classic Mario-themed one we previously covered, is a great way to spruce up your device and get some simple amusement. Unfortunately, they also drain more battery than conventional wallpapers. Which brings me to ASUS LiveOcean. With their ocean-theme ...more

HTC's fitness-tracking application, Fun Fit, has made its way to the Google Play Store for all to enjoy. And while fitness apps are a dime a dozen, Fun Fit offers what its name implies—fun. Like plenty of other fitness apps, Fun Fit is able to track calories burned, steps, dis ...more

Using a timer to take a photo is great if you're looking for a quick workout. You have to prop up your phone, frame your shot, set the timer, and sprint to get into the frame. Then when you realize your position was a little bit off, you have to reset the timer and jump back i ...more

With intelligent grammar check, accurate predictive text, swipe gestures, and plenty of themes, it makes sense that Ginger Keyboard has well over a million downloads on the Google Play Store, making it one of the more popular keyboards available for Android users. GingerSoftw ...more

When opening a link or sharing a photo, your Android device will bring up a list of possible applications that you can complete the action with. However, some of the apps included you never use or didn't even know existed, and this leads to unnecessary clutter. Fortunately, if ...more

The more we use our smartphones, the more storage space becomes occupied—it's an inescapable fact. But as the data accumulates and chokes off our storage, it can become difficult to identify exactly which files are occupying the most space. So the development team at Nexrad S ...more

When you press the "Call" button on most Bluetooth headsets, the majority of Android devices will launch a built-in Voice Dialer app. This app has been around since the dawn of Android, and has received very few interface or functionality updates. So the development team at V ...more

Purchasing an actual book from a brick-and-mortar store is becoming increasingly less common for people to do, but it hasn't completely gone out of style just yet. There's something about entering a bookstore and viewing all the potential great stories and epic tales just sitt ...more

Using my Nexus 7 tablet as a flashlight to light my path on the way to my room late at night is difficult, and honestly, useless. It doesn't have an LED flash for pictures, so using it as a flashlight is essentially just me brightening the display as high as it can go. If you ...more

In the wake of a horrific attack on its Paris headquarters, satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has responded by upping its print run from a typical 60,000 to upwards of 3 million. This commemorative issue, Tout est pardonné ("All is forgiven"), has been met by such demand that ...more

A highly useful, yet unrecognized and under-appreciated feature in Apple's iOS 8 is the ability to seamlessly convert incoming texts regarding future dates into calendar events. Messages like "Let's chill tomorrow" can be tapped on and quickly added to the calendar. It's conve ...more

Whether it's heated competition during trivia night at the bar, board game night with the family, or just another weekday in front of the TV watching Jeopardy, it seems like a natural human condition to want to test our intelligence. Measures of intelligence are a constant pa ...more

Adjusting the brightness on your Android device is a simple but highly utilized action. For the most part, aside from the Sprint LG G3 variant, the brightness slider can be conveniently found nestled in your notification panel. And though it is easy to access, there is a small ...more

During initial reviews of the Nexus 6, the "double tap to wake" feature was something originally slated to be present on the device, since Motorola built it and it's been a key feature of the Moto X. However, the feature was scrapped for Ambient Display, which wakes up the scr ...more

Guardians of the Galaxy was one of 2014's biggest box office hits, and it's thanks to a great cast of characters and some awesome music. Star-Lord's mixtape was given to him by his mother, and it provided the basis for the great movie soundtrack and hilarious plot points. So, ...more

While chatting in Hangouts on Android, inserting an emoji or animated sticker can instantly make the conversation more fun, but they'll eventually lose their charm, as most things do. Even if you add GIFs to your texting arsenal, things could get stale. That is, unless they're ...more

Not every mod you add to your Android will revolutionize the way you use it, but many of them can make things a little more simple and convenient for you on a regular basis, like sliding across the status bar to adjust brightness or swiping the screen to put your display to sl ...more

While the new Lollipop wallpapers are great, they'll eventually get stale like all of the others. I've covered a bunch of cool Android wallpaper apps previously, including ones that give you psychedelic and shake-to-change options, but this time I was on the hunt for some geom ...more

Keeping a close eye on your device storage can be a 24/7 job, especially if you're space is filling up and your device doesn't have SD card support. No matter how close of an eye you keep on it, there are always going to be apps updating databases, adding to their cache, and d ...more

Many reminder apps offer various bells and whistles that make them overly complicated to use when all you want to do is one or two things. If the only things you care about doing are setting quick reminders and adding timers, you probably don't care about cloud syncing or cale ...more

Lending someone your phone to make a call is always an awkward situation, as you closely monitor them to make sure they stick to a phone call rather than wandering off into private applications like your photo or messaging apps. You don't necessarily want to eavesdrop on their ...more

Google makes backing up your contacts, messages, and Wi-Fi passwords extremely easy, but leaves you out in the cold when it comes the data on your internal storage. With most Android devices now lacking SD card support, when you unlock your bootloader or do a factory reset, yo ...more

I may not be a well-traveled man, but one thing I've learned from my few excursions across the world is that currency exchange rates are a serious pain to keep up with. With global markets seemingly in a continuous flux, I started looking for anything to make staying on top of ...more

Google's Chromecast streaming device is a marvel of functionality and form. Even with powerful features such as screen mirroring and collaborative party playlists, it's the device's idle screen that first catches the eyes of most folks. Breathtaking photos of nature and citys ...more

While texting and driving may get you a ticket, there are still a ton of uses for your phone in your car, music and navigation just to name a couple. Every Android device comes with access to GPS and traffic updates, but none of those apps really have your back in real-time. ...more

As much as it pains me to say it, without my phone, I would pretty much be useless. I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday, let alone all of the hundreds of numbers in my contact list. That's why whenever I forget my phone at home, I am pretty much stuck having t ...more

Whether you are just starting or returning to college, or have already been out in the real world for some time, it's always a good idea to stay on top of your game by keeping your intellect sharp. While it may be easy to just sit in front of your TV, watching reruns of The Bi ...more

This year's Google I/O brought the announcement of Android L, as well as the Preview builds of L for the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 (2013), installed using either ADB on Windows or fastboot on any computer. Unfortunately, those of us without a Nexus device are out of luck—but not ent ...more

These days, phones are more like portable entertainment systems. It's a hybrid mobile device for gaming, texting, watching movies, and listening to music more than it is an actual "phone" that you talk on. While the person who is calling you may not be all that annoying, the ...more

The idle screen for the Chromecast is certainly beautiful. Full of many high-definition pictures taken of various parts of the world, it's almost a shame that we have to dismiss this screen in order to cast content. The folks over at RiR Software love this idle screen, too. S ...more

Trying to remember if it's "beer before liquor or liquor before beer" can be too much of a hassle, especially if you've already have had a few too many. While it would be great if one rhyme could determine the amount of pain you will feel the next morning, we must accept that ...more

Maybe it is narcissistic to take selfies, but it has become a socially accepted norm, no matter how stupid you might look doing it. Since so many people are seemingly in love with themselves and mobile photography, I thought it was about time to show you how to step up your se ...more

Podcasts have been around and popular for close to a decade now. For the uninitiated, podcasts are like radio shows that can be downloaded directly from the web and listened to on any device. Up until now, only paid apps allowed podcasts to be casted via Chromecast, but with t ...more

Using Facebook and Twitter as a news source can be frustrating at times, mainly because opening links will divert you away from your current application. Instead of a smooth process, you find yourself going back and forth from app to browser, over and over again. Flynx, from ...more

Love or hate them, selfies are here to stay, and because of their rise in popularity, developers are clamoring to jump on the bandwagon. Most companies offer ways to add filters and share them, but few aim at changing the way the are taken. Whistle Camera, developed by DreamB ...more

With Google's latest version of their mobile OS, Android L, the most notable aesthetic difference is the newly introduced Material Design concept that will soon be ever-present through the interface. The objective of this bold design is to create "hierarchy, meaning, and focus ...more

Screen timeouts serve mostly as security measures and energy savers, but they can also interrupt you when you're reading a book or editing a document. There is no built-in way to manage screen timeouts on a per-app basis, but if you've got root access, you can do just that usi ...more

The official Google Hangouts app has been around for a while, and is the standard messaging app on Nexus devices, but Google didn't make each version equal. On the iOS version, you get the feature of adding "stickers"—GIF emoticons—but Google left that out of the Android versi ...more

HTC introduced their version of gesture controls to the masses when they launched the HTC One M8, and while the feature includes gestures to open the camera, start voice dialing, and unlock the device, it does not include one to lock it. Sure, you can "knock" your screen off, ...more

Keeping track of your phone's battery life can quickly become a chore. Since no one wants to get stuck without a charge, we constantly find ourselves checking to see exactly what percentage remains. But developer Chris Kröger has an app that will make this task a bit less ted ...more

When I'm not actively using my Samsung Galaxy S4, I typically crank the volume up all the way so I can hear it in my pocket or if I'm in another room. But when it's in my hands and I'm using it, I don't want the ringer to blast at full volume, or any volume at all. Either I'll ...more

Lock screen security provides a means of safety when it comes to keeping others from breaking into our smartphones and snooping around on or stealing private information like documents, emails, photos, and videos. While pattern locks are definitely useful, they can become a n ...more

John Frusciante, of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame, has just launched a new album, literally. His latest work, Enclosure, was loaded up on Sat-JF14 satellite inside the payload bay of the Interorbital Neptune Rocket on March 29th and launched into orbit. Video: . Beginning today, ...more

The little black status bar at the top of your screen is great for at-a-glance info, but let's face it—it's pretty ugly. If you want to hide it completely, only showing it when you need it, check out our guide on using Immersive Mode in KitKat. However, if you want to keep the ...more

Starting today, you can experience all the unique feature of Samsung's next flagship device, the Samsung Galaxy S5, right on your Galaxy S3 or other Android device. Grab the Galaxy S5 Experience app for free from Google Play, open it up, and let's dive right in. Of course, yo ...more

I can't begin to tell you of the many times my friends and I get into arguments that eventually lose any semblance of structure, becoming shouting matches where we just lob the stupidest, meanest insults we can fathom. You could call it a unique art form, but honestly, being ...more

With Chromecast-capable applications slowly seeping into the market, it's difficult to find useful ones that we might use on a daily basis. Class6ix, from developer Class6ix LLC, is a news aggregator that gathers videos from both local and national sources in order to provide ...more

After months of waiting, Google has released the SDK (Software Development Kit) for their Gadget of the Year, the Chromecast. As announced on their blog, the release of the SDK means that any app developer, whether for Android, Chrome, or iOS, can now add Chromecast functional ...more

Much like the Pen Window feature in Air Command, Multi Window is extremely useful in its functionality, but bogged down by serious restrictions. While you can open and use two apps at the same time, you're limited to only a handful of apps that can utilize the feature, leaving ...more

We softModders come from all walks of life, and sooner or later, our devices begin to reflect who we are. Maybe you've followed one of our guides on customizing your Nexus 7, such as getting the exclusive Google Experience Launcher or hiding the navigation buttons for more scr ...more