Android apps

The five best to-do apps and services for the Android user who has way too many things to do.

Both paid and free apps in the Google Play store harvest the same amount of private information from Android phones, a researcher discovered.

One of the highlights of the Document Foundation's LibreOffice 4.0 release last month was the addition of Impress Remote, a mobile app that lets users control LibreOffice presentations from their Android phone.

Canonical made quite a splash at the start of this year when it announced Ubuntu for phones, but--apart from what it demonstrated at the time--we're still waiting both for the downloadable image it promised to provide for the Galaxy Nexus and for specifics on actual devices.

When you wipe, upgrade, or lose your Android phone, re-installing and configuring all your apps again is a time-wasting pain. Unless you have them properly backed up.

Cloud storage provider Carbonite released a mobile app for Android with a new Capture feature that lets a user remotely activate the phones camera to take a picture of the person using the device or its location.

Google has updated its Search app for Android with functionality that rivals Apple’s Passbook app, the iOS 6 program that pulls your boarding passes and store cards into one convenient place.

An innovative new type of mobile advertising is being used to funnel money to support hunger relief efforts. Dubbed GetCharitable, the new Android app replaces the background image on a phone with a periodically updated ad, revenue from which is then directed to an international anti-famine group -- offering users a way to help combat famine for free.

If you want to cheer or jeer for an app in the Google Play store, you'll have to do it with your real name from now on.

According to a new report from Bit9--a security vendor with a focus on defending against advanced persistent threats (APT)--there is a one in four chance that downloading an Android app from the official Google Play market could put you at risk. Bit9 analyzed 400,000 or so apps in Google Play, and found over 100,000 it considers to be on the shady side.

One-quarter of more than 400,000 Android apps examined in the Google Play store pose security risks to mobile-device users, according to new research.

The console provides developers with stats about how well their apps are doing in the Play online store