Microsoft will be shutting down the Microsoft Lens app next month, reports Neowin. The app debuted back in 2014 as Office Lens, which was later renamed as Microsoft Lens in 2021. Microsoft Lens is a free app, available on both Android and iOS devices, that lets you do things like scan documents, convert images to PDF/Word/Excel/PowerPoint files, digitize handwritten text, save to OneNote and OneDrive, and more. It's one of Microsoft's most highly rated apps, with 4.8 stars and 50M downloads on the Play Store. Unfortunately, Microsoft Lens will begin its phase out in mid-September.

Apple's iPads get all the headlines, and with good reason: They've long been considered the best tablets for most people. But none of them come cheap. For folks on a tighter budget, I've spent the last few weeks testing a couple of 8-inch slates on the dirt-cheap end of the price spectrum: the 100 (but frequently discounted) Amazon Fire HD 8 and the 79 Walmart Onn 8". They aren't the only tablets available in this price range, but they're pushed directly by the world's two largest retailers, so there's a good chance casual shoppers may buy them without knowing exactly what they're getting. We pitted the two slates head-to-head not only to figure out which one is better, but also to diagnose the state of ultra-budget tablets as a whole. You'll never get truly "premium" hardware when you shop in this price range, but the Onn makes a nicer first impression than Amazon's Fire tab.

Despite regulatory efforts to establish reliable content-rating guidelines for mobile apps, the process of assigning content ratings in the Google Play Store remains self-regulated by the app developers. There is no straightforward method of verifying developer-assigned content ratings manually due to the overwhelming scale or automatically due to the challenging problem of interpreting textual and visual data and correlating them with content ratings. We propose and evaluate a visionlanguage approach to predict the content ratings of mobile game applications and detect content rating violations, using a dataset of metadata of popular Android games. Our method achieves ~6% better relative accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art CLIP-fine-tuned model in a multi-modal setting. Applying our classifier in the wild, we detected more than 70 possible cases of content rating violations, including nine instances with the 'Teacher Approved' badge. Additionally, our findings indicate that 34.5% of the apps identified by our classifier as violating content ratings were removed from the Play Store. In contrast, the removal rate for correctly classified apps was only 27%. This discrepancy highlights the practical effectiveness of our classifier in identifying apps that are likely to be removed based on user complaints.

As the US speeds toward one of the most consequential elections in its 248-year history, Google is rolling out safeguards to ensure users get reliable information. In addition to the measures it announced late last year, the company said on Friday that it's adding election-related guardrails to YouTube, Search, Google Play and AI products. YouTube will add information panels above the search results for at least some federal election candidates. The modules, likely similar to those you see when searching the web for prominent figures, will include the candidates' basic details like their political party and a link to Google Search for more info. The company says the panels may also include a link to the person's official website (or other channel).

Google just announced a suite of updates to the Play Store in an attempt to make it more fun to use. This is part of a larger move by the company to turn its online marketplace into "an end-to-end experience that's more than a store." They want us to hang out on Google Play. Here's what the company has planned. The update brings AI-generated review summaries that pull from user reviews to develop a consensus.

App markets have evolved into highly competitive and dynamic environments for developers. While the traditional app life cycle involves incremental updates for feature enhancements and issue resolution, some apps deviate from this norm by undergoing significant transformations in their use cases or market positioning. We define this previously unstudied phenomenon as 'app metamorphosis'. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient multi-modal search methodology to identify apps undergoing metamorphosis and apply it to analyse two snapshots of the Google Play Store taken five years apart. Our methodology uncovers various metamorphosis scenarios, including re-births, re-branding, re-purposing, and others, enabling comprehensive characterisation. Although these transformations may register as successful for app developers based on our defined success score metric (e.g., re-branded apps performing approximately 11.3% better than an average top app), we shed light on the concealed security and privacy risks that lurk within, potentially impacting even tech-savvy end-users.

Microsoft's Copilot tool, the company's AI chatbot that can do everything from help you write code to draft a marketing email, has made its way onto Android mobile devices. Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI's latest models GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, can also be used to generate images from simple text descriptions and requests. The app is available on the Google Play Store, is free to download and does not require a Microsoft account to sign in. The rollout of a mobile version of Microsoft's Copilot ( formerly Bing Chat) was quiet -- with little buzz and no formal announcements, unlike what we saw with the release of Bing Chat on mobile devices. The new Copilot app was released earlier this month and was initially spotted by Neowin when X users noticed it in the Play Store.

Difficult to do without Google Translate. Whether it is to translate a word, a sentence or an entire text, the tool developed by the American firm and launched in 2006 quickly became essential and one of Google's most used tools. But did you know that it is no longer necessary to type anything in the search bar or in the tool directly? Indeed, thanks to its numerous technological advances, Google now allows us to simply draw the camera of our smartphone. We don't want to offend you by explaining what Google Translate is, its usefulness is directly stated in its name.

Google has banned "sugar dating" apps as part of a broad range of changes to its Play Store rules. Such apps allow people to find others to engage in "compensated sexual relationships", as Google puts it, wherein one party will pay someone to date them. Such apps and sites have become popular across the internet. There are a host of apps on the store with the name "Sugar Daddy", for instnace, and many more with more specific names. Many of them are explicit about what they are aiming to do, with one named Spoil offering to help people "find other wealthy sugar daddies who are looking for a discreet arrangement, and you can also meet other attractive girls who are looking for generous men", as PhoneArena notes.

Samsung's phones may be the among the most popular Android handsets, but they're also the furthest from Google's vision, with their own app store, UI, and digital assistant. But with the launch of the Galaxy Note 20 just a week away, a new report from Bloomberg suggests that Google is looking to rein in some of Samsung's freedom. According to correspondence between the two companies, Google is looking to take back search on Samsung's handsets, the foundation for everything Android does. The two companies are discussing a deal that would "promote Google's digital assistant and Play Store for apps" on Galaxy devices. That would be a major change over the current system.