Company to continue to run independently, CEO to take seat on Facebook board of directors
Facebook has announced that it will buy cross-platform messaging service WhatsApp for a total of $16 billion, split between cash and stock. The deal was announced today by Facebook as a definitive agreement, with the messaging service receiving $4 billion in cash and aonther $12 billion in Facebook stock, with the option for another $3 billion in restricted stock units also available to be vested in four years. If for some reason the deal is cancelled due to regulatory issues, Facebook will pay a breakup fee of $2 billion split between cash and stock to Whatsapp.
WhatsApp, which has over 450 million monthly active users, is one of the biggest players in the messaging wars today. Facebook quotes some statistics, stating that WhatsApp is adding one million users to its service every day, with a total message volume on the network approaching that of global SMS traffic.
As was the case with Instagram, WhatsApp will continue to operate as a separate company and keep its branding in tact. Co-founder and CEO Jan Koum will remain at the company, but will also take a seat on the Facebook board of directors. In a post on its company blog, WhatsApp reiterates that nothing will change from a user perspective after the buyout, and the word "partnership" is being regularly thrown around from both companies.
At least two popular beta testing platforms still available for all
Not too much to report here, really — app beta testing service TestFlight will shutter Android support on March 21st, 2014. If you're not familiar with TestFlight, it is a free platform for developers and teams to deploy early versions of their apps for testing among users, collect feedback and iterate on apps more fluidly. "No user will be able to upload any Android builds to TestFlight" after that date, but there isn't any indication of how long you'll still receive analytics and feedback from participants of previous builds.
We're not entirely sure if this is a response to Google Play having proper beta testing support or another reason, but the end result is the same. We now have one fewer beta testing platform — alternatives such as HockeyApp and of course Google Play exist, so we expect those to pick up the slack with ease.
The technically astounding streaming video gaming service has now arrived on Android, with an official OnLive app letting Android users play console titles on their phones and tablets via wi-fi. It's best played on devices with big screens, but it'll still run on something as relatively modest as an HTC Desire. On-screen controls are the big trade-off, here - but it will work with OnLive's Bluetooth wireless controller, if you've seriously bought in to the OnLive dream.
42. MailOnline
Quite a few official news apps have launched on Android since we last updated this list. The Guardian has one, The Times has one, Channel 4 News has one and so does the country's guiltiest pleasure, the MailOnline. It features offline caching and lets users specify a time for it to sync pages with the main site, so you're in complete control of how and when you get your faux scandal.
43. Sky+
The Sky+ app has been on Android for quite some time, but it's recently been given a superb visual refresh and a new custom interface for those doing their telly research on an Android tablet. The feature set has been expanding, too, now including a nice Showcase front section, more programme details, plus, of course, the Remote Record features to set your Sky+ box recording through 3G or wi-fi.
44. eBay
Another app that's been out there for a while on Android, the eBay tool has also been updated so much that it's now a credible alternative to the desktop site. A recent update bought the ability to list items direct from the app, while there's a simple PIN system that makes paying for your winnings via PayPal much simpler and less convoluted than it is on the full blown web site.
45. Lovefilm By Post
There's now an official Android Lovefilm app, which lets you manage your account through your phone. You also get all the peripheral nonsense like reviews and trailers, but the key feature is the ability to manage your rental list, shuffling the order of your requests and filtering out categories you never trouble.
46. Tesco Groceries
This isn't an advert or a casual game featuring Jamie Oliver. Tesco Groceries is a fully mobile home delivery shopping experience, covering everything from booking your delivery slot to amending orders already placed. It uses voice input for easily searching for items, plus there's barcode scanner support for identifying and ordering stuff direct from your cupboard. Makes buying toilet rolls fun.
47. Path
Path is an alternate social network, designed to make sharing things with friends easier and more... personal. It does simple stuff like share your music listening history, then it does weird stuff like track how many hours you've slept for. It's also location aware, so if you'd like it to broadcast your every movement, that's possible. And if you can't pull yourself away from Facebook, stuff from here can be posted up there, too, although posts can also be locked so they never leave Path if you'd prefer.
48. Sky Sports Live Football Score Centre
The latest Sky Sports Live Football Score Centre app from BSkyB is an entirely sports-related option, giving access to live scores, league tables, match stats and results, also incorporating the new Sky Sports News Radio service for listening in, live, to the blokes in the studio guffawing away about free kick decisions.
49. Yelp
Yelp gives you a similar option to Google's wide range of social place reviews, only here you also get an augmented reality screen display, so you can point it at the skyline and see what five-star eating establishments are in the area. Places are backed up by user reviews, too, making it easy to get an up to date opinion on how generous a particular cafe is with the chips.
50. Odeon Cinemas
The Odeon Android app is impressive on a couple of levels. Being able to buy tickets through your phone is still quite an exciting thing to do, but this one goes further by including a graphical tool that lets you book your specific seats. Plus you get all the scheduled film showing times and the trailers you'd expect from something that's trying to encourage you to endure another by-the-numbers Hollywood product.
51. Sky Go
Access Sky's sports and film channels (and even Sky Arts if you're trying to impress a date) through wi-fi and 3G with Sky Go, which is free to download and use as long as you're a Sky subscriber. Those with Android phones that have been "rooted" and are running custom software are out of luck, though, with Sky limiting access on hacked models due to "security reasons." Apart from that annoying caveat, it's great.
52. Chrome
Everyone's new favourite browser is now represented on Android, with Google putting a full mobile version of Chrome up on the Play Store. It's a little limited in scope for users of older devices as Android 4.0 or higher is required to run it, but if your phone ticks that box Chrome on Android offers unlimited tabs in a nice pop-up list, desktop bookmark and open tab syncing, offline saving of pages and even that occasionally very useful incognito mode for covering your weirder tracks.
53. Rightmove
After a massive period of iOS exclusivity and the previous disastrous launch of a rubbish web browser wrapper app, there's finally a proper nativeRightmove app for Android. It has a modern, Android 4.0 style layout (but works on anything with Android 2.1 or higher), offering simple property searches, a Google Maps visual results interface and Street View integration. It's fast and lovely to use.
54. TED
The series of tech talks by boffins, in which they try to explain high concepts in a way the likes of us can understand, is now represented on Android. TheTED app lets users browse its database of well over 1000 TED talks, all free to download and try to get through in one go without having your brain explode.
55. ISSLive
Let's be honest - ISSLive looks awful. But beneath the clumsy interface and geeky layout sit all sorts of facts and coverage from the International Space Station, with plenty of live feeds, mission, crew and experiment data and even a 3D recreation of Mission Control down there in Houston to... look at. An oddball collection of the interesting and the mundane, like an episode of The Sky at Night.
56. London Bus Checker
London Bus Checker is a very well designed and attractive app, which pulls in live data for all London bus stop display boards. It's almost certainly of most use to people who live in London, who get full route maps, diversion and cancellation updates, GPS support for finding the nearest stop and an arrivals widget. All the fun of actually hanging out at a bus stop, basically.
57. Met Office Weather Application
Find out where there's likely to be any drinkable water left this summer with this one, the official weather checker from the Met Office. It's about as comprehensive as a weather app can be, offering Home screen widgets, a five-day forecast, severe weather warnings, maps just like on the telly and the "feels like" temperature so you know if a jacket is required.
58. Netflix
As soon as the streaming service hit the UK, so did its accompanying Android app. And the Netflix app does it all, offering access to the full catalogue of digital film and TV rentals, presented in a clean and simple layout. The only fancy features are PC syncing so you can pick up where you left off on mobile if it's getting near bed time, plus Facebook sharing so everyone can keep up on how your Secret Diary of a Call Girl marathon is going.
59. Wikipedia
A new way to look at the pleading face of Jimmy Wales. The officialWikipedia Android app is very nice to use, presenting a simplified version of the desktop site's content, plus an ever-useful offline saving option if you need access to pages when out of reception range. You also get location aware features, making it easy to randomly browse for interesting things in your vicinity.
60. FitBit
If you're still struggling to lose the Christmas weight heading into Easter, you may benefit from having a bit of life coaching on your telephone. FitBit's main feature is a Food Plan that keeps track of how many chocolate Brazil nuts you've had today, plus a logging feature that tracks your claims of exercise and adjusts your eating allowance accordingly. You'll be like the woman off the Special K adverts inside a month.
61. Sky Cloud WiFi
This one's a great way of automating the process of signing into a Sky-managed mobile Wi-Fi spot, minimising stressful time spent NOT being connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot. The Sky Cloud WiFi app senses Sky-friendly hotspots, then signs you in automatically. So no more fiddling about with a crappy 3G signal when out and about or typing in passwords in a hurry to use a bit of internet.
62. Ticketmaster UK
After an age as a US-only exclusive, Ticketmaster UK is now live for Android users in the UK. It does what you might expect, offering a full database of events, complete with simple buying options from within the app. There's even a local search option for accessing a list of what's on near you, should you fancy taking a punt on some random artistic happening or gig.
63. Gumtree
The popular sofa-ditching site has finally joined the mobile age, with a very flashy Gumtree app. It's presented in the Ice Cream Sandwich design style, with a nice tab bar and clever floating and segmented item listings, and it looks even better when used in landscape orientation. Trawling for an executive massage in the local area has never been easier.
64. The Guardian
The Guardian's had an Android app out for a while, but it was significantly "first generation" in look and feel. A recent update took care of that, thankfully, boosting the layout to modern Android standards, adding in support for live blogs, enhanced section navigation, swipe navigation through photo galleries and much more. Nice. And free.
65. HotUKDeals
The amazing bargain portal, which has actually defied its purpose and cost us millions through encouraging unnecessary impulse purchases of discounted gear, is on Android, with a very posh and feature-packedHotUKDeals app now available.
You can search for local deals, submit ones you've spotted yourself, with the app including an easy category view and search facility for finding new ways to buy things you don't really need.
66. Amazon MP3
Amazon's MP3 service is surprisingly clever. Tracks bought from the retail giant are automatically stored within the company's "cloud" servers, from where you can instantly stream them back to your Android device.
Sadly you're a little limited in the number of existing MP3s you can upload from your own collection, but for building, managing and streaming a legit Amazon music catalogue the Amazon MP3 app is a great, stylish option.
67. TVCatchup
For those of you who still pore over listings and watch TV live, as it happens, and at the original time of broadcast, TVCatchup is for you. But it's not a "catch up" service at all. It's a simple re-broadcaster of the terrestrial Freeview channels, letting you watch everything, live, right there on a phone or tablet. A good test of how reliable your mobile data connection is, too.
68. Barclays Mobile Banking
The big banks are gradually moving away from mobile web sites and embracing full power apps, with the Barclays Mobile Banking option a particularly fine example. Logging in is a simpler task than accessing the desktop site, with the app just requiring a PIN number to access your data. It also cleverly works as a PIN Sentry card reader, ideal for managing Barclays services that need its pain-in-the-arse card reader to grant access.
69. Amazon Appstore
There's only one reason to have the Amazon Appstore on your phone or tablet - free stuff. Amazon is enticing users to stick its alternate Android app store on their devices with the promise of a free app every day, with some classics like Sega's ChucChu Rocket and World of Goo featuring as previous daily freebies. The catch is these are unsupported releases, meaning no updates or fixes in the future, but you can't moan too much about getting some ace freebies every day.
70. Flipboard
Flipboard is pretty much just a posh RSS reader, which does a superb job of pulling text and images from pages, sites and social networks, and presenting it in a gloriously sexy magazine-like manner. The Flipboard app has recently been updated with a full tablet interface style, for the ultimate in glossy media consumption.
71. BT Sport
The arrival of a new sporting season always brings with it a collection of new and exciting ways to keep up with action on your phone, with the BT Sport Android app one of the coolest to arrive this year.
It lets BT Internet users watch the company's new, live sport feeds on a phone or tablet. All you need are your BT login details and a bit of fuss to activate your account through the desktop site, and you're ready to go with live video on your mobile device of choice. More Claire Balding and rugby action than you can possibly handle awaits.
72. Google Play Games
Google and its many games developer friends have been adding its backend gaming services to apps for a few months now, meaning many Android games now have a unified, Google-backed method of matchmaking, monitoring achievements and keeping track of play sessions.
The Play Games app is a simple frontend for it all, giving gamers a central hub to keep an eye on their game collections, score leaderboards and lists of friends made through the system.
73. YouView
The new interactive digital TV system has finally launched its YouView controller app on Google Play, letting Android users join their iOS cousins in having fun with their new YouView boxes on phones and tablets.
The app features boring stuff like seven-day programme listings and information, but it's the remote record feature that's the main reason to have it. Once setup via a paired code input system, up to five devices can be granted the power to make the box record shows while you're out.
74. BBC Weather
A substantial percentage of Google's 1,000,000+ Android apps are based around guesstimating what the weather's likely to be a bit like later today or tomorrow. But for a forecast that's perhaps slightly more locally aware and believable than others, head to the BBC.
The BBC Weather Android app's beautiful, featuring hourly breakdowns, a selection of smart Home screen widgets and UV/pollen forecasts thrown in too. Plus it uses the lovely old BBC weather icons, which add a touch of style to any overcast situation.
75. Vine
The madly popular social video phenomenon eventually hit Android earlier this year after an infuriating period of exclusivity on Apple devices, with Android fans now able to see for themselves what all the fuss is about.
Vine is about one thing - a simple interface that lets you start and stop recording by touching the screen, and a six-second time limit. Clips are then reviewed, processed and uploaded to the Vine servers, for others to rate.
You might become star. Or just clog up the world's internet pipes with a trillion clips of your cat not doing anything out of its normal behaviour range.
76. BBC iPlayer Radio
The BBC's iPlayer app was always a little poor when it came to representing the corporation's radio channels, a situation that's been fixed by this stunning little app.
It's designed well, with a strange little wheel system letting users navigate through the available listings, plus the Beeb allows streaming to be conducted over both Wi-Fi and mobile data networks.
There's also a catch-up selection of past shows, plus a nice little clock radio tool to have it wake you up with the station of your choice.
77. Guardian Witness
Witness is the Guardian's attempt at getting its users to generate endless list features on its behalf for free, with the accompanying Android app letting the paper's readers contribute photos and stories through a phone or tablet.
The app lets you sign in with a Guardian, Twitter or Facebook account, although don't go expecting to "troll" the world with your UFO photographs - every submission's vetted before being made live. There are some special missions reserved only for users of the app, so it's worth trying if you're into the whole crowd-sourcing thing.
78. Rando
Rando is sort of a social network, only with the social stuff removed. Its USP is that you share photos, which must be taken live, with random strangers around the world.
You have to take and send one in order to receive one back, making it into a weird form of photo-sharing tennis.
You might get something interesting from Japan, or a boring photo of a man's PC keyboard from closer to home. It's addictive. You can't help pinging them off and wondering what's going to come back in payment.
79. Runkeeper
Offers similar functionality to popular sports tracker Endomondo, only withRunkeeper you get a more Android-like design, integrated support for music playback and audio coaching, a camera option so you can include images with your workout details and much, much more.
There are also goals to set, customisable routes for tracking your favourite runs, plus it's compatible with physical heart-rate monitors if you take it all very, very seriously indeed.
80. DashClock
DashClock is an extremely clever widget that completely replaces the lock screen on any devices running Android 4.2 or higher.
The clever thing about it is its support for additional plugins that are available on Google Play, so you can further adapt your phone or tablet's lock screen to include weather data, a shortcut to a torch, advanced battery data and more. An incredibly versatile system that adds loads more fun toys to Android's standby modes.
81. Delicious
Social bookmarking site Delicious now has its own official app, letting users sign in with their existing account then manage their saved and shared bookmarks on Android. It integrates seamlessly with the Android sharing menu auto-filling submission pages with article headlines, making it super-easy to add stuff and your own comments and tags from a phone or tablet.
82. Snapchat
Snapchat is the messaging app that's taken the world by storm, or at least taken the teen market by storm. The USP is empowering users to send photo messages that "self destruct" after being viewed, leaving no evidence of the crime you may have just committed. Of course, images can be screen-grabbed should someone send you a particularly well-lit image of their little chap, but that's considered cheating and rather poor form.
83. Facebook Messenger
If you take a more old school approach to harassing people over the internet, give this one a whirl. Facebook has busted its messaging tools out into a standalone app - called Facebook Messenger. So if your main use of the social site is chatting with people, this helps avoid the cat and baby photo laden traditional Facebook interface. It also rifles through your contacts too, letting you message people not on Facebook via SMS -- much like popular chat app Whatsapp - while "chat heads" place pervasive icons on the Home screen for instant access to message threads.
84. BBM
The best thing about the old BlackBerry ecosystem has been pulled out and stuck on Android, with BBM providing access to the majority of the chat and messaging tools that BB users have enjoyed for years. The key differentiator here is the use of a PIN system, plus users must pre-approve contacts before receiving their incoming messages. It's a bit more secure, so they say, and it has delivery notifications so people can't lie about not getting your important communiques.
85. VSCO Cam
VSCO Cam is not just a collection of filters, but an entire replacement camera and gallery app for Android. It claims that "innovative processing technology" creates better photographs than the stock imaging systems on other phones, which we've not really noticed, but it does have some clever editing tools and is generally quite a slick experience.
86. uTorrent
If you regularly download entirely legitimate and wholly legal work and learning torrents, then uTorrent is for you. It can open the magnet links provided by some of the internet's largest torrent sites, then away you go, queuing and managing torrents and download/upload speeds just like you might on the desktop client. Ideal for stealing things using other people's connections.
87. PlayStation App
The future is finally taking shape. The official PlayStation App from Sony lets you manage and view your Trophies, chat with friends and so on, but the killer feature is the ability to browse the PlayStation Store on your phone or tablet and initiate game downloads to your PS4 from within the app, so they're all installed and ready to play when you get home.
88. Xbox One SmartGlass
Or, if you do your next-gen gaming through Microsoft's larger box, there's this. The Xbox One SmartGlass app does much the same as the PlayStation App, only it brings in full navigation of the Xbox One dashboard itself, making it function like more of a Wi-Fi media remote. Plus it can work as a browser interface, making it easy to display web pages via the Xbox One on a TV.
89. Tumblr
Tumblr, the next-gen blogging format has arrived on Android, with its custom app coming with support for the multiple blogs of prolific internet kings, built-in messaging, the usual range of text, image and video sharing, plus there's a really nice landscape layout when using it on a tablet. All you need to provide is an idea. Photos of biscuits on cats? Fish fingers on a gerbil? Depressing lines of dialogue from your favorite soap?
90. Bitstrips
The interminably tedious animated image generator Bitstrips has been blowing up big time of late, with the entire world seemingly in love with the concept of cartoon representations of themselves doing mundane things with their friends. If you are yet to experience it, that's probably for the best. And if you really, really must try it, it's available on Android. Just don't overdo it, or everyone will end up hating you.
Now that you're all loaded up with Android apps, why not see which is the best Android phone for you.
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