5 Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week – Android Apps Weekly!

Welcome to the 176th episode of Android Apps Weekly! Here are the headlines from the last week:
  • It was announced this week that the team behind the intensely popularAlto’s Adventure is coming out with a skateboarding game called Skate City. Based on the footage, it’ll be a 2D runner with 3D graphics. It also appears as though you’ll be able to perform tricks. The game should be out sometime in 2017 and it’ll be one of the better free-to-play games if Alto’s Adventure was any indication.
  • Google is currently fighting a new set of ads that automatically download apps. Google removed a few thousand of these “self-clicking” ads in 2015, and then had to remove over 23,000 in 2016. That’s a pretty clear indication that the problem is getting worse. The report went on to show that Google removed 1.7 billion bad ads in 2016. It’s a fight that’ll take some time to fix, but at least we know about it.
  • An interesting piece of ransomware made its way to the Play Store. The app would open, ask for permissions to your contacts and SMS messages, and then give you a message that the info was up for ransom. As you can imagine, it wasn’t a great experience. Thankfully, the app is no longer available. It goes to show that some trouble can still appear in the Play Store. However, these occurrences are still exceedingly rare.
  • As it turns out, VPNs on Android really need to step up their game. A research study came out this week that shows a lot of VPNs aren’t doing a great job. To give you an idea of how bad it is, 18% of VPNs don’t encrypt traffic whatsoever, 84% leak traffic, and most of them use third-party tracking. Considering that people use VPNs to avoid literally all of those things, this is highly disappointing.
  • Google’s Daydream platform is now open season for app developers. That means it won’t just be the select partners that can release apps anymore. There will be an approval process for Daydream apps to make sure they are up to Google’s standards. That should help keep the experience consistent between apps. This should also increase the overall selection quite a bit.
For even more Android apps and games news, updates, and releases, check out this week’s newsletter by clicking here! There you can find even more stuff that we didn’t have the space for here. You can sign up for the newsletter by using the form below and we’ll send it to you every Sunday! Don’t forget to check out the Android Authority app for faster updates!

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