Wednesday 16 November 2011

Updating update

A few weeks ago I had a bit of a rant about the Android Market. Further investigation has shown that I was probably a bit unfair in pinning the blame on Google and it is probably T-Mobile's fault, although I haven't tried following this up yet.

However, the 'package file is invalid' problem was not the only thing I ranted about and when I posted a link on Google+ I got a comment from a friend who works for The Chocolate Factory thanking me for my feedback and saying that he would pass it on to the relevant person. I thought little more about it until this morning when I tried the Market again, as I do from time to time naively hoping that one of the growing number of updates might get through, and I found a request to accept the license agreement. This usually means that it has been updated to a newer version and searching t'Interwebs shows that, sure enough, version 3.3.11 was released on 1 November. Among the list of updates, in direct response to my blog post (well, I would like to think so), are the following new settings:

  • Update over Wi-Fi only - Conserve data usage by auto-updating apps over Wi-Fi only
  • Auto-update apps - Allow apps to auto-update by default

At the end of that post on Android Police it says "Thanks, Joseph!" Is that me? I doubt it but I cannot see who else it is addressed to.

I also saw that, when I tried to update something and it showed me the list of permissions it requires, one was marked as 'New'. I don't remember seeing this being highlighted before but perhaps it has always been there and I've just not noticed it. Whatever is the case, this is a good feature as you should be aware of the permissions the apps you use want and don't want things to slip in during an update. Does the new version of that really cool game a friend told you about 6 months ago and you forgot you still have really need to be able to access your contact details and send text messages on your behalf?

Having said all this, the updates still failed for me so at some point I will probably have to contact T-Mobile to be told that I have broken something myself and it is not their fault at all.

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