Twitter's push to take more and more control of its own service culminated a few weeks ago with the unwelcome closure of several APIs, partly reported on here. The changes have yet to be fully addressed by third party clients, but the news isn't good. Tweetium is the first client to respond, with an update that references the changes, but which also explicitly gets rid of push notifications, even for Direct Messages. Given that the official Twitter client on Windows 10 Mobile is a PWA which also can't deliver notifications, AAWP readers are somewhat screwed by Twitter here.
People think of Windows 10 Mobile being dead. Not quite. Not yet. We're still looking at over a year of support in terms of monthly patches and fixes for Windows 10 Mobile 'Fall Creators Update'. And build 15254.527 (from .490) is fresh out today, so go grab it for all phones currently on the 'Fall Creators Update'. And with similar patches and fixes for other Windows 10 Mobile branches.
AAWP's very own Universal Windows Platform app, 'AAWP Universal', has been updated again, with attention paid to formatting and reliability. In fairness to Joe, the developer, much of this has been driven by past downtime and link errors on AAWP itself, i.e. it wan't the application's fault. So, to go along with the app update, we've done a few improvements to AAWP itself. Hooray!
The story so far. Microsoft's Maps product, built into all Windows 10 devices (including phones), had been using out of date (2016) maps from HERE, pending a major platform update in terms of how Microsoft massage and process the raw map data. Prompting complaints from users and a response from the Bing Maps team. Happily, I can reveal that the new data went live overnight for much of the world, with my 'canary roads' in the UK now present and correct. Phew!
People think of Windows 10 Mobile being dead. Not quite. Not yet. We're still looking at over a year of support in terms of monthly patches and fixes for Windows 10 Mobile 'Fall Creators Update'. And build 15254.490 (from .489) is fresh out today, so go grab it for all phones currently on the 'Fall Creators Update'. And with similar patches and fixes for other Windows 10 Mobile branches.
Overnight (UK time), Microsoft took the wraps off the Surface Go - not strictly a phone, so not AAWP's core focus, but it has LTE and is definitely of interest as another addition to the growing Surface hardware line-up. And who knows, maybe a Surface Mobile late this year or early in 2019? Surface Go is a low cost, smaller Windows 10 hybrid and will be of special interest in education and around the home.
After my story a fortnight ago on why it didn't need updating to match the iOS and Android versions because they were just playing catch-up, effectively, it turns out there was an update coming to the News UWP app for Windows 10 Mobile, but it's out now and it's fairly minor. But worth screenshotting.
This is news from Microsoft itself, though it's a bit of stuff and nonsense in terms of branding and partnerships at the end of the day. Still, with all the 'iOS & Android' prose in the original story, I wanted to emphasise that the 'new' Microsoft News is also just as much part of Windows 10 Mobile, even if it's not called out explicitly. Because... of course. It's Windows 10.
This won't be news to most AAWP readers, since we've been tracking the beta versions of the UWP implementation of Podcast Lounge for a while, with numerous Flow updates. But today the commercial app Podcast Lounge 2 is formally launched for all Windows 10 users, on phone, tablet, desktop, etc. I've never seen a beta testing period as extended and as in depth, but the winners are its users, as it arrives fully rounded, with depth in terms of functions and podcast discovery.
Last featured here back in November 2017, Whatsapp is a stalwart Windows Phone 8.1 application that has been continually updated month after month, year after year. And, on the whole, keeping parity with the versions of this messaging tool on iOS and Android. Below, I attempt a changelog summary of everything added so far in 2018.
