📲 Sign up for Weekly Newsletter Showcasing Android Beta Apps and Unreleased Features

The Chrome browser, entirely built by Google, is maybe one of the fastest, if not the fastest web browser as of today, available on many mobile and desktop platforms. With that said, this year Google is working even harder to improve the user experience that their product offers, cut down on waiting times, and a lot more.

Faster and smoother operations

As we mention, speed in web browsing is one of the key factors when choosing a web browser. Based on data that has been shared on the Chromium Blog, which we will also link below, sites nowadays are using on an average eight times more JavaScript code in comparison to 2011. Imagine trying to run the same large code on an underpowered device, such as a smartphone.

Instagram has a new alpha update on the Play Store with version number 74.0.0.0.63 that has been released on November 30, 2018. Below is the changelog for it.

Changelog

We have new features and improvements!

Close Friends List: Now, you can make a close friends list and share stories with just those people. To add friends to your list, go to your profile and tap on “Close Friends” in the side menu.

The recent reverse-engineering session by @wongmjane revealed new features for the Spotify app for Android. We don't know which app version was used for that but we can assume that it was the recent version 8.4.81.554 from 21 of November.

None of these changes is available yet to the public (unless Spotify triggered a new A/B testing wave for the limited amount of users).

Let's check these changes from the UX and product perspectives!

Here is the full list of newly revealed changes:

[Podcasts] Spotify is testing "Saved for later" for Podcast episodes.

Similar to text articles, users should be able to listen to podcasts later too.

Enpass is a popular app with a secure vault for storing passwords and other sensitive information. The application is free and has a full-featured desktop version for Mac, Windows And Linux.

The beta version number 6 is a major update which brings many new features along with UI improvements.

Important notes for existing Enpass users.

The important note for existing Enpass users will be the fact that it has some incompatibilities with previous versions of Enpass v5 and Enpass beta v6.

Sync in Enpass v6 works entirely in new, efficient way and syncs to the different location than the previous versions released so far.

Discovered by @WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is indeed in a testing phase for two new features in the latest beta versions of their Android app. The corresponding updates have build numbers 2.18.362 and 2.18.363, with the most up-to-date one at the time of writing being v2.18.364, which has not introduced any notable changes that we are certainly aware of.

Consecutive voice messages

Let's say that someone has sent you two or more voice messages in a row. Whenever you hit the play button to start listening to the first one, with this feature set in place, the WhatsApp app will go ahead and play all of the other voice messages in the particular chat that are consecutive, without you needing to start each and all of them manually. Other than that, it will give a short audio signal to notify you when a voice message has ended, before switching to the next one in the queue.