Gemini in Google Drive on the web can help you summarize files and folders, discuss topics based on information from files in your Drive, retrieve quick facts from documents, and even create images or new Google files and folders. However, you currently can’t use these Gemini integrations in the Google Drive app for Android. That’s set to change soon.

One of the best uses for a smartphone camera is scanning documents, and Google lets you do this on Android via its various apps. Now, it looks like this functionality has received a useful, time-saving improvement.

Google has quietly introduced an improvement to the MLKit document scanner, which is used in apps like Google Drive, Files by Google, the Pixel Camera app, and a few other apps. Documents will now be automatically enhanced immediately after you’ve scanned them. You’ll also see a button in the top right corner after you’ve just scanned a document, allowing you to remove said enhancement. Check out the images below, showing the button and a before/after comparison.

Google offers 15GB of free cloud storage, which must be shared between Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, and other Google services. Otherwise, you’ll need to splash out for cloud storage via the company’s Google One service.

We recently posted an article detailing what happens to your data if you stop paying for Google One. We also posted a poll inside the article asking readers whether they paid for Google One cloud storage. Here’s how you answered it.

Over the past year, Gemini has slowly become a familiar presence in Google’s ecosystem of apps, where it helps users draft emails, summarize content, and generate data insights. In Google Drive, Gemini already offers the ability to summarize one or multiple documents, extract facts from files, interact with PDFs, and even carry out contextual chats based on Drive folders.

Now, Google is introducing a new feature designed to make Gemini even more accessible in Drive. Starting March 24, the company started rolling out clickable “nudges” that appear at the top of the Drive homepage and inside folders. These nudges aim to guide users toward using Gemini’s tools more often, especially those who may not have explored its capabilities yet.

Google made several improvements to the video playback experience in Google Drive last year. In addition to reducing startup times and buffering, the company rolled out an upgraded video player for Drive on desktop featuring a refreshed UI and more intuitive controls. Google now seems to be preparing to bring this upgraded video player to the Drive app for Android.

Working a desk job in 2025 looks a whole lot different than it did just a couple decades prior, and for many of us, that’s meant trading the corporate office for a home office. Cloud-based tools like Slack and Google Drive have helped teams communicate and share resources as easily across the hall as across the country, but just because all the resources you’ll need to get the job done are saved to shared folders or pinned to Slack channels doesn’t mean that they’re all equally accessible. This week, we’re hearing about OpenAI’s work on a new development that could do something about just that, linking Drive and Slack to ChatGPT.

The company is working on a feature dubbed ChatGPT Connectors, according to a report from TechCrunch. This would allow the chatbot to tap into shared work resources to address user queries. The system shares relevant data with ChatGPT over an encrypted connection, hopefully satisfying firms that might be a little nervous about letting an AI engine loose in an archive of company secrets, and will respect user permissions, so when you ask ChatGPT something it will only rely upon info in folders and channels you have access to for its response.

A little less than a year ago, Google rolled out automatically generated captions for videos uploaded to Google Drive. This is a feature that’s available to both business and personal Google accounts alike. It is now expanding on this idea by launching a new Drive video feature.

Starting today, Google is introducing transcripts to videos uploaded to Drive. You’ll find the feature by clicking on Settings in the video player and selecting Transcript. Clicking on Transcript will open up a sidebar next to the video. That sidebar contains spoken text, time stamps, and a search field for you to view or search for specific moments in a video.

Google introduced a new Google Drive feature last year that lets shared drive managers restrict access to certain folders within a shared drive. So far, this feature has been limited to select beta testers, but the company is now expanding availability to all users.

In a recent Workspace Updates blog, the company says that the option to restrict folders to specific users is rolling out in shared drivers and My Drive to all users. It highlights that shared drive managers and My Drive owners can now restrict file and folder access using one of two ways. They can either limit users from accessing individual files or folders by changing the role of that specific user with the “Update item only” option or restrict access to an entire folder by changing its share settings. However, Google plans to remove support for the first method by next year.

Cloud storage, like the kind you get from Google Drive, can get away with being pretty bare-bones; at the minimum, it just needs to provide a way to upload files, and a way to later retrieve them. Of course, competition drives innovation, so it’s little surprise that most of the major cloud players offer much richer experiences than just that, with everything from automated backup tools to advanced sharing options. And today we’re hearing about a new addition that makes using Google Drive with video files quite a bit nicer.

Google’s been on a bit of a kick lately bringing new functionality to Drive, like the greatly enhanced document scanner we talked about just last week. Over the course of the year, we’ve also seen a number of improvements to Drive’s video player — that’s right, if you haven’t tried it yet, you can stream videos that you’ve uploaded right from Drive. Back in October, Google gave the video player a major overhaul with a refreshed UI and new playback controls. Now for its next trick, Google shares that Drive is able to begin playing your videos as soon as they’re uploaded.

Google Drive has been actively upgrading its document scanner on Android phones. Last year, the service started offering black-and-white filters and output format options. To increase the utility’s reliability, the company is now introducing a feature that automatically enhances outputted scans.

Google has been steadily weaving its Gemini assistant into its apps and services, and the updates just keep coming. This time, it’s Google Drive‘s turn to get a boost with a fresh feature that uses Gemini to summarize the contents of entire folders.

Gemini can already help summarize documents, extract quick facts, and even analyze PDFs. Now, it can extend convenience to entire folders, adding another layer of efficiency for users juggling multiple files and projects. The newly announced folder-summarization feature enables users to gain quick insights into a folder’s contents through the Gemini side panel.

Google has already released an Arm version of the Chrome browser for Windows on Arm PCs. The company isn’t stopping here, though, as it’s recently launched another app for Arm-powered PCs.

Google announced the launch of a native Google Drive for Desktop app for Windows on Arm machines this week. This is just a beta release for now, so don’t be surprised if you encounter any bugs. The search giant also cautions people using this app to use “non-production data” or to back up their data separately given the beta nature of this software.

Google Drive on desktop received a homepage redesign last year to help users quickly find important files and folders. The new design offered personalized file and folder suggestions based on recent activity, sharing patterns, and connected Google Calendar events, and organized them in separate Files and Folders tabs. Google is now rolling out an update for this homepage view that unifies the file and folder suggestions for easier access.

In a recent Workspace Updates blog, Google notes that the updated homepage will now show up to 6 suggested folders at the top with a “View more” button that will reveal a total of 12 suggestions. Users will also see up to 10 suggested files right below the folder suggestions, and up to 30 suggestions in the expanded view.

IFA 2024 is underway and the event is starting with some big news. Windows on Arm is about to finally get a long-awaited, highly requested app.

One of the big barriers to adopting Windows on Arm is a lack of support for some crucial apps. Google Drive happens to be one of these holdouts. While it can be accessed through a web browser, users have been unable to install the desktop version of the app, which is a pain in the neck for heavy users.

When you’re looking to move files on or off your phone, you’ve got plenty of options, from Quick Share, to just using pulling out a USB cable. But Google Drive has got to be one of the most convenient solutions for Android users, easily handling large files, and making it a snap to share them with others. While there’s a lot to like there already, Google’s been working on some tweaks that promise to make using Drive even better, by means of a totally overhauled upload experience.

Right now, uploading files from your phone to Drive is a little bare-bones. You browse your device, choose your file, and watch the indicator spin as it uploads to Google’s cloud. While that gets the job done, Drive could soon be getting some much more fleshed-out uploading tools.

Update 2, July 28, 2024 (11:07 PM ET): We have spotted the feature on our device with Google Drive v2.24.297.0, which indicates that it is rolling out publicly. Have you received this functionality on your device? Let us know in the comments below!

Update, July 15, 2024 (01:25 PM ET): We have managed to activate the feature, and here are two screenshots showing the ability to save in JPEG and PDF.

Search engine giant Google is pulling the plug on yet another consumer-facing Android app. While it already shut down services like Google One VPN, this time it’s a document scanner app, Stack: PDF Scanner by Google Area 120, that bites the dust (via 9to5Google).

The document scanner was one of the many projects that originated from Google’s Area 120 project incubator. Other projects developed by Area 120 include Gmail, Google News, and Adsense. While these are some of its success stories, experimental projects developed by Area 120 are shut down if they fail to meet performance expectations or user adoption benchmarks.

Google Drive offers a few options, like creating folders, for keeping all your files in order. However, it can still sometimes be difficult to find exactly the file you’re looking for. New code in the Google Drive app suggests Google is working on a way to make file discovery a little easier.

Code within the Google Drive app shows that Google could soon expand file organization further with the addition of a “Categories” feature. Discovered by TheSpAndroid, the feature would come with 12 predefined categories the user could apply to their files. These groups include:

The Google Pixel 8 might have won the best smartphone award at this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC), but Google’s latest announcement could be the real one winning everyone’s hearts — a much-needed upgrade to video playback within Google Drive.

Anyone who’s ever used Google Drive for videos knows the pain. The experience is far from smooth, videos take forever to start, and buffering throws you back to the era of dial-up internet.

Google recently went on a rebranding blitzkrieg, renaming all of its products with AI to Gemini. This includes renaming Google Bard and Duet AI for Workspace into Google Gemini. While the rebranding has been announced, the branding continues to exist in odd places here and there while Google works on a transition. For some users, the previously announced Duet AI side panel has begun appearing in Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Sheets, and more.

As 9to5Google reports, the Duet AI panel has begun entering wider testing for free accounts via the Workspace Labs program. The AI tool appears next to your profile image, and clicking on it opens a side panel that lets you chat with Duet AI. For personal Google accounts, Duet AI will be part of the Google One AI Premium plan.

Google Drive users lost files randomly due to a bug back in November. According to Google, the issue affected a limited subset of Google Drive desktop app users. If you were one of the affected users, Google now has a way to recover your missing Drive files.

If you noticed some of your Google Drive files have gone missing, you’re not alone. Yesterday, we reported on Google Drive customers claiming their files have disappeared. But now Google has pinpointed the issue and is offering recommendations on what to do until the problem is fixed.

After acknowledging a missing file issue with Google Drive, the company announced it would investigate the problem. The Mountain View firm has now confirmed that the issue is linked specifically to the Google Drive for Desktop app.

Cloud storage is incredibly convenient, and Google Drive is undoubtedly the top dog in this regard. Unfortunately, it looks like some Google Drive customers are reporting a major issue with the platform.

Several Google Drive customers reported on the company’s support forum (h/t: Android Police) that a host of their files disappeared without warning. The issue seems to affect customers using the Google Drive for Desktop computer app.

Opinion post by

Hadlee Simons

I’ve been a Google One subscriber for a while now, opting for the 100GB plan after Google stopped unlimited high-quality backups in Photos. But between my personal usage, photos/videos from review units, and family members on my plan, I realized that 100GB wouldn’t be enough.

Upgrading to 200GB or more seemed like the obvious next step. But I’ve opted against an upgrade in favor of a different cloud backup and storage solution altogether. Here’s why I chose pCloud lifetime storage and how it’s worked for me.

If you use Google Drive (and really, who doesn’t?), you’ve no doubt been hit with spam shares from people you don’t know. Right now, I have hundreds of shares from users like “Baby69” and “SeCret ParTner NeeDed,” all of which are likely scams. To make this matter worse, Drive, by default, notifies users of each new share, which forced me to simply shut off all share notifications from the app.

Now, finally, there is a Google Drive spam folder to catch this garbage. Google announced this new feature pretty quietly via a blog post during Google I/O, so you might have missed it. Regardless, I now have the feature live in my Drive app, so it’s clearly rolling out at a solid clip.

Update: April 3, 2023 (11:28 PM ET): Google is removing the file limit it recently and unexpectedly imposed in Google Drive. In a Twitter thread, the official Drive account stated that the limit was rolled out to preserve system stability and optimize performance. While only a small number of users were affected by the change, Google is now rolling it back. The company also promised it’ll do a better job of communicating future changes to its users.

We recently rolled out a system update to Drive item limits to preserve stability and optimize performance. While this impacted only a small number of people, we are rolling back this change as we explore alternate approaches to ensure a great experience for all.

Google Drive has finally added support for two basic features, features it arguably should have had from the beginning.

The first major addition is multi-text selection, much like Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, unlike Word, Google Drive requires a total of four keyboard shortcuts to select multiple sections of text. Those shortcuts are:

Keep track of your files by sorting them into folders. Thankfully, these kinds are paperless. Here’s how to create and organize your folders in Google Drive.

Read more: How to create folders and labels in Gmail

Looking for a specific word, phrase, or passage in a long piece of text is a cumbersome task. For example, as someone who doesn’t use Apple products very often, I often forget there isn’t a Control key on Mac keyboards, and I end up writing ‘Control’ when I should be writing ‘Command.’ I will end up drafting an entire piece in Google Docs, and, at the last second, remember that Macs have Command keys instead of Control keys. In situations like this, it’s very helpful to know how to search in Google Docs, using Find and replace.

Read more: How to upload files to Google Drive

Business apps are a tough subject. There are a variety of variables to consider. That may include team size, business size, how well the app scales to demand, and tons of other stuff. Some apps are great for huge teams while others do better for business people individually. Some businesses are always in the market for better stuff while others opt to make their own solutions. Native solutions make lists like this difficult because usually a company already has software suites for employees.

There are some great all-around options, though, and we think we’ve found them. Here are the best business apps for Android! These apps work best for smaller or medium-sized businesses. Larger businesses probably need more customized enterprise solutions and that’s an entirely different conversation.

Google ruffled feathers last year when it ditched free unlimited Google Photos backups, forcing people to buy Google One storage if they’ve exceeded their free 15GB plan.

It’s been half a year since Google first instituted this change and we want to know whether you’ve actually bought Google One storage since then. You can give us your answer by taking the poll below.

Being a teacher is rough. They are responsible for the education of our young ones. They often don’t get all the tools they need to be successful. Additionally, with the pandemic, teachers face more now than ever before. Thankfully, technology can help a little bit. There are apps around now that can make some of the process a little easier. Some of them help keep track of student grades and things like attendance. Others let you communicate better with both kids and parents. Some are just flat educational and fun. Here are the best teacher apps.

This list is a little difficult because many schools have programs in place that provide many of these tools, so we focused a little more on additional tools teachers might be able to use on their own.

Use Google Drive for long enough and you’ll invariably get spam, whether it’s a phishing scam or a not-so-subtle ‘adult’ ad — and without basic measures to stop offenders, you might even get the same junk over and over again. The company is finally dealing with the issue, however, as Android Police notes that Google is adding some vital block tools to Drive.

Google Drive will soon let you block users from sharing any content, helping you thwart users with a history of spam. You can also revoke someone’s access, even if you’ve shared it before. And if you have a glut of spammed material, you can remove all the files and folders a given user has shared.

If you use both Google Photos and Google Drive, you likely know that the two services are linked together. There’s a Google Photos folder within Drive that acts almost like a bridge between the two.

The idea is that your Drive folder called Google Photos automatically syncs to the service with the same name. However, this syncing process can cause unexpected file deletion and the fact that the folder and the Google Photos service have the same name makes things even more confusing.

Update, March 13, 2019: Google Drive’s Material Design refresh has begun rolling out to iOS devices, so iPhone users can expect the update to hit in the next 15 days. As mentioned in the original article below, it features a number of visual and navigational changes that bring the cloud storage service more in line with other G Suite apps like Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets, and so on.

The app now opens to a home screen that displays important documents, as determined by Google’s machine learning algorithms. The other sections, which contain starred files, shared files, and all files respectively, are accessible via the icons at the bottom of the screen.

Google has allowed users to backup their phones to Google Drive since Android Marshmallow. Although the process typically happens in the background, sometimes users need to start a backup manually for whatever reason. Unfortunately, this is no longer an option in Android 9.0 Pie, but it will be added in a future version of the operating system.

A user on Reddit (via 9to5Google) first spotted a Google issue tracker thread in which an Android user requested that manual backups be added to Android Pie.

WhatsApp, one of the most popular instant messaging apps, allows you to back up your chats and media to Google Drive on Android. This allows you to carry your chats and media if you change to another Android smartphone or reset your device.

The company has now announced that it has signed up a new agreement with Google as a result of which WhatsApp backups will no longer count against a user’s Google Drive storage quota. This policy will come into effect for all users on November 12, 2018.

Google introduced Google One back in May as a way to replace Drive storage plans and to make it easier for customers to buy online storage. After a slow rollout to paid Drive subscribers over the last several months, Google One plans are now available for everyone in the U.S.

Google One plans start off pretty inexpensive and increase with higher tiers of storage. The cheapest model gives users 100GB of cloud storage for $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. If that fills up, they can upgrade to 200GB for $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. This scale quickly escalates up to 2TB for $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. The highest tear offers 30TB for $299.99 a month.

In this day and age, almost every application — whether on a phone or a computer — will let users know if they misspelled something. But, unless you have a third-party extension or keyboard installed, such as Grammarly, grammar mistakes will not be automatically caught.

That’s all about to change for Google Docs users as the search giant has announced the availability of a new grammar suggestions feature for its web-based word processor. With it enabled, the application will use a unique machine-translation technique to help identify problems within a written piece of work.

Last month’s Gmail revamp was a much-needed visual overhaul to Google’s email service. The search giant does not plan to stop there, however, as it announced a similar revamp to Google Drive on the web.

Similar to Gmail’s new looks, Drive goes for a brighter interface with rounded elements. The shadows prevalent in the current Drive design were not entirely eliminated, but there are fewer of them. Instead, there is a combination of lines and subtler shadows that help elements stand out from the brighter interface.

Google Keyword blog

Google released Backup and Sync last year, a service that allowed users to save their computer’s files to Google Drive. The app was meant to replace the Google Photos Backup desktop app, though the two have happily coexisted for the last 9 months.

Google is on a quest to make email and productivity even smarter, rolling out functions like Smart Reply, for one. But the Mountain View company is applying the same smarts to Google Drive, as evident by the latest update.

Read Next: How to use Google Drive?

Getting a new Android smartphone or tablet is exciting, but it’s also a risky time for application developers. It’s easy to lose your audience when they switch to a new device.

Wherever possible, the Android system automatically downloads the user’s previously-installed applications during device setup, so your app will typically follow the user to their new device. But what about all the data the user has amassed in your application?

Google has announced a new interface that uses artificial intelligence to improve the way users find files in Google Drive.

If you use G Suite, whether at home or at work, you likely have access to a ton of files with multiple owners. Thankfully, Google has announced that Drive will now start intelligently organizing the “Shared With Me” section using AI so that file owners will be listed alongside the files they have shared.

Android backups are something that no one really seems to be happy with. Countless threads on Reddit and other forums routinely state that the a more powerful backup system is something people want to see in the next version of Android. Currently, phones with Android 6.0 and above will backup things like Wi-Fi passwords, some app data, call history, device settings and more. But, if you let your phone sit idle, Google is eventually going to blow out your unused backups.

Reddit user Tanglebrook took to the Android subreddit to let others know about his painful situation. Due to a faulty battery, Tanglebrook was unable to use his Nexus 6P for a few months. With only an iPhone to use in the meantime, their backups expired. Now they’re left to start from scratch on their next Android device.

You can now assign custom names to previous versions of your document and suggest changes even on a mobile device, but how does it fare against Microsoft Office?

Before cloud computing, Microsoft’s Office products were the norm; however, with Google’s introduction of Docs, Slides, and Sheets, the way we create, edit, and share documents has drastically changed. Although Google’s cloud-based productivity services may not be the right option for everyone, the search giant is making them better and richer every day. The latest update not only brings more customization and brand-new templates, but it also brings a bunch of useful editing features:

Google’s new Backup and Sync app was initially set to launch on June 28 but was delayed for some last-minute improvements. Now it’s finally available.

Back in early June, the search giant unveiled the new Backup and Sync app for Mac and PC which would replace the old Google Drive uploader client as well as the Google Photos desktop uploader. The new app is essentially Google’s answer to iCloud, letting users choose which folders they want to back up and sync, and making sure that any change is saved across all platforms. The new service was set to be launched on June 28; however, based on “valuable feedback” from early testers, Google decided to delay it without specifying until when.

“Based on your valuable feedback, we’ve decided to delay the launch of Backup and Sync while we make improvements to the product,” wrote Google in the post. “We’re planning to launch in the next several weeks, but please monitor the G Suite Release Calendar for the specific date.”

We’ll let you know when we learn more about the product rollout. Head below for the original coverage.

Welcome to the 196th edition of Android Apps Weekly! Here are your headlines from the last week:

• Sony announced a new thing called PlayLink at E3 2017. The idea is that some PlayStation 4 games will be partially controllable using companion apps on mobile. It’ll let people connect with the game through the app. They can then control elements on the screen as though they were using a controller. This actually isn’t new technology. The Jackbox Party Pack on PC allows much the same functionality. In any case, that should be a lot of fun for PS4 owners.
• Google Drive will soon back up your entire computer. They’re launching a whole new uploader. When it goes live, people will be able to backup specific folders on their computer. It’ll then keep those folders in sync on Google Drive. You could conceivably backup your entire computer to the cloud. However, that’ll also likely use up all of the 15GB of storage that Google offers for free.
• Supercell announced a new game called Brawl Stars. It’s a third person shooter with some MOBA elements. You and your team face off against another team. There are four game modes. One has you rushing a central point to collect gems. Another is to successfully attack a safe full of loot. We don’t know when it’s coming out. However, the live stream looked pretty good. We can’t imagine it’ll take them too long.
• A new batch of Chromebooks now have Google Play Support. Some of them include the R13, 11 N7, Chromebook 15, Chromebook Flip C213, and about a dozen others. You can check out the Chromebook Wiki to see all of the new ones. The ones with the Beta Channel label are the ones getting support. There aren’t a ton comparatively speaking. However, it’s more than there were last week.
• Telltale Games announced plans to make an original game. Typically, they build games around popular IPs like Batman, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and Minecraft. However, during an interview at E3, Job Stauffer of the company stated that it’s working on its own thing. It won’t be out for a long time. However, it should follow many of the same mechanics as its prior titles.

For even more Android apps and games news, updates, and releases, check out this week’s newsletter by clicking here. There you can find a bunch of stuff that we didn’t have space for here. That includes more E3 announcements, some big updates to Instagram and Facebook, and more. You can also sign up for the newsletter using the form below and we’ll ship it to you every Sunday evening. You can also click here to download the official Android Authority app for faster updates!

Plex is one of the most popular media servers, allowing people to store images, video and audio on their PC and then remotely stream their content to a ton of different clients, including Android smartphones and tablets. However, this functionality requires that the local PC always be up and running. Today, Plex officially launched a new solution, Plex Cloud, that gets rid of the need for a PC media server. However, it comes with its own limitations.

Plex Cloud was first announced in September, via an invite-only beta, and in December it added support for using Google Drive, OneDrive and Dropbox. Today, that beta time period is done and over with. Now, Plex users can store their media in one or more of these cloud services and stream their content to their preferred client, without having to worry about their PC server getting shut down by a power or hardware failure.

If you are a frequent user of the Google Drive cloud-based file storage service, you likely have a ton of different files and folders stored up in your account. But what if you can’t remember the exact name of the file or folder you need to access right this very second? Thankfully, if you own an Android phone, that task of finding it should be a lot easier from now on.

Update: Once again things up are up and running. Let us know if you are having any further issues in the comments.

If you’ve tried to access Google Drive at any point today, you may have noticed that the service seems to be unresponsive. The company’s cloud-based service is currently experiencing issues that are affecting many people who depend on it to get their work done.

Sometimes you know you want to keep a lot of cloud storage on hand, but don’t want to fool around with paying for it month to month. Thankfully, Google is adding new payment options to two of its Google Drive storage tiers that will allow users to pay with one annual fee.

The new annual payment options are only available, at least for now, for the 100GB and 1TB tiers in Google Drive. You can pay just $19.99 a year for the 100GB tier, which saves you 16 percent versus paying at $1.99 a month. The 1TB option is also available for $99.99 a year, a 17-percent savings compared to its normal $9.99 a month plan.

Google has rolled out new features to its cloud storage service, Google Drive, to help transfer content from iOS devices to Android. Google announced on Twitter yesterday that Drive now supports photo, video, contact and calendar event transfers, enabled through the iOS Drive app.

To make use of the service, iOS users must first install Google Drive to their iPhone and navigate to the Backup page in the Settings menu. After selecting the content they want to keep, hitting Start Backup will begin the sync process to the Cloud. Once it’s complete, users can open Drive on their new Android handset and their files will appear there.

Using Google Drive to back up your data makes a lot of sense. You can save game progress without signing in to Google Play Games, keep a device backup handy in case of accidents and create an easily transportable copy of your WhatsApp chats. Fortunately, the Google Drive app on Android has now added a dedicated Backups sections for keeping track of all your app and device backups.

While workarounds were previously available, the latest version of Drive available in Google Play now includes a more user-friendly way of managing your various backups (the web client already has this function). In the navigation drawer of Google Drive you’ll now see a cloud icon labelled Backups; tap this and you’ll be taken to a summary page of all your cloud-stored backups.

Google Drive users with a vast document library will be able to find what they’re looking for much more easily from today. Google has just integrated its cutting edge search technology into the platform, so finding specific files and types of documents should be easier and faster than ever before.

Google says that this search technology is based on Natural Language Processing (NLP), so users can search for documents by typing how they’d speak, such as “find my budget spreadsheet from last December”. Drive’s NLP algorithm also learns from how you search to improve its results over time. Drive’s search feature now also boasts spelling auto-correct capabilities, so you can type in a search quickly without having to worry too much about what your fingers are doing.

It’s not just you! Users of Google Drive have been complaining all morning and afternoon that the cloud storage service hasn’t been working for them. Google has acknowledged the problem and is investigating the matter.

Users encountering this problem are receiving a message saying, “The server encountered an error. Please try again later.” As of a report issued at 1:55 PM (PST), Google still isn’t quite sure what’s going wrong.

Google has just unleashed an update to their Drive app that has rocked the world and changed everything. Okay, so it hasn’t really done that, but it’s still pretty nice. Previously when you uploaded anything from your smartphone or tablet to Google Drive, it would be consigned to an “uploads” folder until you deliberately moved it. Now, thanks to inline uploading, you can upload files directly to whatever folder you choose.

That’s essentially all there is to this update. Google is stating that the rollout should last a little over three days, so you should see it hitting your device soon. If you’re not already using Google Drive, then I don’t really know how to engage you as a human being because you must be some kind of time traveler from the Early Modern Period. However, if that’s the case, you can get started with getting all your most important files cloud-secured and accessible by clicking the button below to get the app from the Play Store.

For a long time, Moleskine notebooks have been the guilty pleasure of artists, writers, and academics alike. Now tech geeks can be included in the Moleskine fandom, because the company has just launched a new product that automatically digitizes everything you scribble in the notebook by syncing up with your phone.

The downside to long-hand note taking has always been that if you lose your notebook, you lose your notes. Ever since everybody hopped onto the cloud, the idea of keeping information in a single, easily misplaced location is a bit harrowing. However, there are many who long for a simpler time in which a single hand scratched ink marks on paper instead of both hands scrambling away at plastic keys. Thanks to a co-branding between Moleskine, Adobe, Livescribe, and Evernote, these forlorn luddites get a chance to take notes their way with the Smart Writing Set.

dennizn / Shutterstock.com

Things have been a little quiet at the Google Docs blog today, but the team is definitely not taking a break. In fact, a new Google Docs feature has just been released, and though it is not huge, some of you will really appreciate.

Update, February 8, 2016: For Safer Internet Day 2016, Google is giving away another 2GB of free storage for your Drive, Gmail, and Photos. Just head over to this link and go through the quick checklist to take advantage of this win-win offer. You get additional storage (that does not expire) and you make sure your security is up to notch.

While we can all agree that Google Drive is a magical future box made of angel feathers and maple syrup bacon that has changed all of our lives for the better (Christ, do you remember emailing documents to yourself?), it’s never exactly had the most intuitive organization interface. Most people’s main Drive folder looks like a whole creative suite stepped on a landmine and got splattered across the walls, ceiling, and carpet. Now Google is looking to change that by streamlining a number of organization features in their newest update to the web interface.

So what all is Google tweaking here? First of all, clicking a file in the main window will display a “Move” button, allowing you to quickly relocate misplaced documents. If the file isn’t in your Drive, this button will be an “Add to My Drive” icon instead. This same “Add to My Drive” will appear when you’re previewing files.

Google Drive is trying to make it easier than ever to share files by cutting out the email step. Moreover, they’ve improved access-granting functionality and made files previewable on Android even without a Google account.

Remember USB drives? Remember emailing files to yourself so you could access them on another computer? Remember when a hard drive failure meant you lost all of your work? Cloud storage has revolutionized the way we save and exchange data, but as Group Project Manager Alex Vogenthaler points out in his blog post regarding this most recent update, it’s absolutely essential that cloud storage be secure as well as shareable.

With nearly one billion monthly users, WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging services available on Android. And to make the service even more feature-rich than ever before, WhatsApp is teaming up with Google Drive to bring native cloud storage to the messaging platform. With Google Drive integration, WhatsApp for Android will let you create a private backup of your chat history, voice messages, photos and videos in Google Drive. Once your history is backed up, you can easily restore everything on a new device with just a few taps.

Once you enable this new backup feature, you’ll be able to tell WhatsApp to create daily, weekly or monthly backups of your messaging history. You’ll also be able to specify whether or not WhatsApp will backup your videos, too.

Still on the search for the perfect cloud music streaming service? The new DoubleTwist app CloudPlayer may be the right one for many of you. At least I know I fell in love with it right away, as it’s not really a cloud service in and of itself. It harnesses the power of other cloud storage services like Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive to bring one of the most flexible and full-featured music apps around.

As its name entails, CloudPlayer allows you to play music straight from the cloud. It just needs to access one or more of the services mentioned above and scan your library. I downloaded it and it’s crazy easy. I was literally up and running in like a minute, with all my music ready to play.

Another new update has appeared for Google Drive for Android, bringing with it simple one touch file sharing from your notifications menu and support for 23 new languages.

From now on, if you want to quickly share your most recent Drive upload with a contact, you can simply add that person to the file directly from the notification that appears when the upload has finished. So you don’t have to go back into the app to share your file.

If you use Google+ and Google Drive, you’d know that the two are oddly disconnected when it comes to photo and video sharing. But starting today, that experience is about to get much more refined. Google has just announced that the photos and videos you have uploaded to your Google+ account will soon begin to show up in Google Drive. As long as you have auto backup turned on in your Google+ settings, you’ll immediately begin to see new photos appear in your Drive account. Existing photos and videos will start to show up in your account over the next few weeks.

Google is pushing out yet another update to an app, and this time it’s Google Drive’s turn. The update to version 2.2 brings some basic drag and drop functionality to the app, along with a slight change to the navigation menu.

Up until now, moving files around in Google Drive was sort of a hassle. In previous versions, you’d need to select a drop down menu and choose the location to where you wanted to move your file. But in the update to version 2.2, you can now drag and drop files wherever you’d like. After you receive the update, Google will show a brief tutorial card towards the top of the app, explaining how to do so. To move files, simply hold down on an item, then drag it to your desired location. Before you move the file, Drive will let you know how many files you have selected towards the bottom of the screen, which will prevent you from moving more files than you’d like.

Sponsor: Tiddalick [Price: Free] Our sponsor this week is Tiddalick. This game has you feeding a hungry frog using quick reflexes. It’s fast paced and addicting and the premise is great for both adults and kids. It’s also free with no in app purchases so there’s literally no harm in trying it out plus there is Google Play Games support! We’d like to thank developers Good Game Group for their support of Android Apps Weekly!

Welcome back to Android Apps Weekly! Here are your headlines this week:

Google Drive and Docs have come a long ways over the years, and in 2014 Google even unbundled its Drive apps for Android, allowing folks to grab only the apps they actually plan on using. Now with the latest update to Google Doc Suite updates rolling out today, the experience is getting even better.

The latest versions of Docs, Sheets and Slides now support more advanced features including real-time spell checking for Docs, the ability to hide rows and columns in spreadsheets, and the grouping of shapes in presentations for Slides.Google is also pushing improved security with Touch ID support for our iOS-using friends, and better support for screen-reading services like TalkBack for those with low vision.

The year 2014 was full of fun and amazing apps. There were old apps redefining themselves and new apps that stormed into the Play Store with something to say. In this roundup, we’ll take a look at the best Android apps released in 2014.

Action Launcher 3 [Price: Free / $4.99 (donate option for $9.99)] Action Launcher 3 was a complete step forward from Action Launcher 2. It was completely rewritten from scratch and included so many redesigns and fixes that it was released as a brand new app as opposed to an update. It features some unique functionality like the quickdrawer and shutters and we have it on good authority that some old favorites from Action Launcher 2 will resurface. It’s free to try and $4.99 to unlock the full version.

Welcome back to Google Play Weekly! Here are the headlines this week!

• Plex released a huge update with a bunch of new features.
• NVIDIA released Half-Life 2: Episode 1 for NVIDIA Shield Tablets.
• Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides all received big updates this week.
• Google Now is going everywhere including Nest and Google Drive.
• Blizzard has finally released Hearthstone to Android.

And now here are five Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week!

Google has been hard at work the past few weeks, updating all of their apps to Material Design and adding new features to most of their apps. They’re not done with updates quite yet, as the company is beginning to push out a new update to Google Drive. In hopes to make searching for documents a bit easier, Google is adding “OK, Google” hotword support from the Google app on your phone.

Announced on their Google+ page earlier today, the update will let users search for files in the Drive app through a simple voice search using the Google app. For example, say, “OK, Google, search for holiday letter on Drive.” The Google search app will seek out your desired file and open it once it’s found. Searching by voice is definitely something Google doesn’t want to give up on, and it’s even more apparent now that they’re adding the functionality to more apps. Just last month, the search giant added third party app support to work with “OK, Google” functionality, so it’s nice to see this feature make its way to their own apps.

Don’t you love it when companies throw in free stuff with their products? One minute you’re on the fence, trying to decide if the product is worth the money or not. Then you hear about a special offer included in the purchase, and suddenly you’re all in. Google is doing something of the sorts this holiday season, offering 1TB of Google Drive storage space for 2 years with the purchase of a new Chromebook.

What’s usually a $240 value, the 1TB Drive storage comes completely free with the device. Chromebooks usually ship with 100GB of Drive space free for two years, but a full terabyte is just an awesome deal. The deal is being offered for any Chromebook on the Play Store or on the official site. If you’re interested in pricing, the base model Acer C720 Chromebook is being offered for $199, and they range all the way up to $1,299 for the Pixel. Thinking about the super cheap price of these computers (except in the case of the Pixel), this is one heck of a deal.

Welcome back to Google Play Weekly! Here are the headlines this week:

• Titanium Backup got updated to support Android Lollipop.
• Google Play Services received an update that affects Google Maps, Google Drive, Google Wallet, and Google Fit.
• Ingress celebrated its second birthday by releasing an infographic with some pretty impressive stats.
• Google has purchased RelativeWave which may eventually help developers design better apps.
• There are new rumors floating around about Google Play showing up in China. Chinese developers can also now sell apps in the Google Play Store.

And now here are five Android apps you shouldn’t miss this week.

Microsoft just made Office Mobile for Android free for home use. The app itself, available on Android since July of 2013, was always free, but it previously required a subscription to Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of cloud-based productivity tools. Now Microsoft waived that requirement, bringing its powerful tools to all mobile workers using Android and the iPhone. The announcement was made today along with the introduction of an Office version for the iPad.

Two important Google apps are in the process of receiving updates, with rollouts going out now to Google Drive and Google Translate.

So you’ve got a new Android device! Congratulations, and welcome to the Android world! Now you need some good apps to put on that bad boy, and we’ve got a list of the 10 ten best apps you should be installing on your Android device first. As per the norm, if you’d rather watch the video just head to the bottom of the article.

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Google has made a change to its Google Drive service that allows the content of HTML, JavaScript and CSS files to be shared to the public. It has always been possible to actually store web related files on Google Drive but you couldn’t actually share their contents (as a website) with others. Now thanks to the new “Public on the web” setting, HTML and CSS files and folders can be hosted on Google Drive as web sites.

To get it working is really very simple. First create a folder and share it as “Public on the web” and then upload your HTML, JS and CSS files. To find out the URL just open the HTML file you want to share and click the “Preview” button. A new window will open and its URL, which starts with “https://googledrive.com/host/…”, is the public URL that you can pass on to others. Anyone can access the hosted webpages, with or without a Google account.

It’s time, friend. It’s time to drop that Blackberry you’ve got duct-taped together and move up in the world. Android is waiting with open arms, and a plethora of great devices. I’m sure you were with that Blackberry for quite some time, so let’s discuss how you’re going to get acquainted to your new life with Android. It won’t be hard, I promise.