Joe Hindy / Android Authority
Welcome to the 422nd edition of Android Apps Weekly. Here are the headlines from the last week:
- Members of the Android Authority team sat down this week and talked about some of their favorite things from Android 13. Some of the stuff we really liked include app installation on guest mode, improvements to Material You, the QR code scanner toggle, and the ability to tap to transfer media. Hit the link to read everything.
- AT&T is hijacking RCS support on mobile phones and people aren’t happy about it. Basically, AT&T’s solution overrides other solutions and it forces AT&T customers to use regular SMS when contacting non-AT&T customers. So far, support responses haven’t been very reassuring and this could get nasty for RCS fans on AT&T.
- Rumors circulated this week about Signal Private Messenger being hacked. Thankfully, those rumors turned out to be false. Signal noted that it saw increased usage in Eastern Europe right around when Russia declared war and believed the rumor was meant as a misinformation campaign to encourage people to use less secure alternatives. Hit the link to learn more.
- Last year, Crunchyroll and Funimation became a part of the same company. Starting this week, Crunchyroll is absorbing Funimation, Wakanim, and VRV content to become one big streaming service on its own. Overall, Crunchyroll is getting about 80% of Funimation’s library before the end of March 2022. This is a huge deal and great news for anime fans as they can now see almost everything under one roof.
- Samsung is in trouble this week. The company apparently throttled the performance of thousands of applications across several generations of devices. It uses the Game Optimizing Service to do so, and we found that it was on phones as new as the S22 lineup. Samsung allegedly started an internal investigation to put a stop to this. We’ll let you know more about it as more things happen.
Hyde and Seek
Price: Free / Up to $20.99
Hyde and Seek is a narrative game that plays a bit like a mobile board game. It revolves around Kate, a woman who disguises herself as a man to escape a group of gangsters. It’s now up to her to unravel the secrets. Players engage in the story, make decisions, and shape the outcome of the game. There is a combat element as well as a card-based movement mechanic as well. It’s a decent overall game for the most part. The only issue is the ticket-style energy system. It takes way too long to regenerate, leaving players on hold for quite a bit of time unless they pay real money.
Zenforms is a new app from Zenkit. The app works similarly to Google Forms. You create a form, share it, and people fill it out. You get a record of the data obtained from the form to do with as you please. The app conforms to GDPR standards and integrates into Zenkit’s existing suite the same way Google Forms integrates into Google Drive. It certainly isn’t the most exciting release. However, it’s nice to see some competition in the form creation space since most people just use Google Forms anyway.
Puzzle Quest 3
Price: Free to play
Puzzle Quest 3 is the latest release in the once-popular series of games. It was one of the original games to use match-three mechanics as combat mechanics in an RPG-style game. This one iterates on the premise with more refined mechanics. You match three shapes and your hero performs an attack on an enemy. You progress through the game by beating enemies. There is also a PvP element as well as various rewards for completing stuff. Unfortunately, the developers opened things up with a rather aggressive monetization strategy mixed with slow progression. We hope the developers fix things up eventually, because the game is otherwise solid for its genre.
F-Secure free password generator
Price: Free
A lot of people have awful passwords and F-Secure is one of many companies trying to help rectify it. One way is with this new web-based tool that generates random passwords for you. You can choose passwords up to 32 characters in length with a mixture of lower case and upper case letters, numbers, and symbols. You don’t need an account to use it, and it should work fine in any password management you use. Of course, F-Secure uses the page to promote its own services, but you don’t have to use them to use the password generator.
Hitman Sniper: The Shadows
Price: Free to play
Hitman Sniper: The Shadows is the next game one of the better mobile shooter franchises from yesteryear. Players perch themselves in a sniper spot and shoot targets based on the mission parameters. Players have a choice between multiple snipers, multiple vantage points, and multiple missions on the same maps. It should go down as one of the better strategy shooters in recent years. However, Square Enix shipped the game with a few major bugs that they definitely need to fix. Keep an eye on this one over the next few weeks to see if the fixes come sooner rather than later.
If we missed any big Android apps or games releases, tell us about it in the comments.
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