Latest Update to Pokémon GO Blocks Rooted Devices from Entering the Game

If the streets around me, you and everywhere else are any indication, the strongest points of the Pokémon GO fad have already passed us. While everyone and their dog were excited about trying out what it feels like to be a Pokémon trainer in real life, the actual game and its mechanics left a lot of people frustrated.

Coupled with the tracker removal, the game essentially became Paper Toss with Pokémon, and eventually, people got bored and gave up enjoying it.

The latest update tries to bring back some of the lost crowd, but in typical Niantic fashion, it goes one step forward and two steps back. This release brings a new feature in the form of "Pokémon Buddy", a virtual mon that appears on your profile page and gives out candy rewards for its species if you walk a certain threshold distance with the mon activated as a "buddy".

Screenshots courtesy of reddit user Mich4x.

So, where's the catch? The catch, for rooted users, is in the announcement post:

Trainers,

Pokémon GO is in the process of being updated to version 0.37.0 for Android and 1.7.0 for iOS devices. Below are some release notes and comments from our development team:

• Implemented Buddy Pokémon: Trainers will now be able to choose one of their Pokémon to be their buddy. A Trainer can earn Candy for their Buddy Pokémon by walking a certain distance.
• Made it easier to select smaller Pokémon on the screen.
• Fixed an issue where Eggs would sometimes hatch without displaying the animation.
• Improved performance reliability when a device switches networks to no longer cause the application to hang or stop updating.
• Pokémon GO Plus support
• Minor text fixes.

We continue to focus on eliminating bots and scrapers from Pokémon GO. Rooted or jailbroken devices are not supported by Pokémon GO. Remember to download Pokémon GO from the official Google Play Store or iTunes App Store only.

This update, version 0.37.0, essentially blocks out rooted users. If you have a rooted device, this is the screen you will encounter if you try to login:

With the update, Niantic has officially taken a stance against all users who are rooted, or jailbroken if you are an iOS user. We'd like to speculate that this move is directed towards the GPS spoofers that are seen aplenty, capturing gyms by appearing out of thin air. A lot of the basic GPS spoofing apps need root to work, so locking out root users makes sense, right?

No, not exactly.

The most basic forms of Pokémon GO cheats involve simple root, and these are often hit or miss. The cheats that work, often flawlessly, make use of the Xposed framework on Android. If you have the Xposed framework installed, and you were intent on cheating, you could as easily find ways to hide root from the application. There are already modules that do this for banking apps, so it is really trivial to blacklist Pokémon GO in there too. Heck, if you can run Android Pay with root and Xposed, there is nothing to say that Pokémon GO is any more difficult than this. Similarly, there are tweaks for jailbroken iOS devices too that mask jailbreak from apps, and several of these exist and work for Pokémon GO too.

What Niantic has managed to do with the update is kill off the enthusiasm in users who had root but were not cheating. Root is used for many more things outside of cheating in a game, and to assume that all rooted users are cheaters is just silly. The cheaters who are motivated enough to cheat will have no trouble jumping one more hoop in getting the game to work as it was before the update. But for the casual player who was already losing interest in the game, Niantic did make it one more hoop to jump through to play the game. And a lot of these casuals will not bother.

The newest apk for Pokémon GO can be found here. Rooted users would need the Xposed framework and possibly the RootCloak module to get the game working again.

What are your thoughts on Pokémon GO locking out rooted users? Let us know in the comments below!

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Homescreen Critique 02

Last week we asked people to submit their homescreens to be critiqued in the next Homescreen Critique video. The results were awesome! So many of you submitted your setup to be featured and Taylor went through some of the best to share with you in this new video.

"It took me a second to realize it, but there are at least two exposed butts in the wallpaper."

"I absolutely love this homescreen layout. Just for the appearance alone and the quote that is featured."

"For whatever reason, there's no status bar. I'd like to see my notifications but I guess hiding it does keep it pretty neat."

Thanks a lot to everyone for your submission! Submit your own homescreen for a chance to be featured in the next video, here.

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As the Note 7 Battery Saga Escalates, Samsung Prompts Users to Power Down Devices

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 drama is reaching new proportions ever since Samsung came clean on the defect of the device. Even though the company did the right thing by recalling all devices sold up to that point, along with an inventory clean up of devices unsold, the market is still witnessing the repercussions of the potentially lethal flaw of a device that was destined to be amongst one of the most popular Android devices around.

The list of incidents which involved the Note 7 have been increasing with every passing day. At first, there were reports of devices exploding. Then Samsung confirmed that the phones released so far had a defect, a news which opened the floodgates and brought into public scrutiny every incident involving a hot phone. As rightful precaution, the phone is being banned from carrying with check-in baggage during air travel by the US FAA and Indian DGCA and several major airlines.

Reportedly, and which likely wouldn't come as surprise right now, the battery of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 also gets hot. Very hot. A user on reddit claimed that his device got to 106° F (41° C) during usage. He did admit to using the Battery Case for the device, which puts the phone in a state of battery charge whilst choking ventilation. And if your phone did reach high temperatures, AND the OEM is issuing warnings to shut down the phone and hand it over for replacement, it probably isn't the best idea to push your luck. Pressing that Switch Off button (Ampere) doesn't sound like a terrible idea.

Precautions are good, and Samsung's measures definitely invoke good will. Even though the mass recall seems more like a decision taken by a lawyer than a manager, it ultimately is in the best interests of the consumer and his health and safety. Samsung is also offering users who wish to stick with the Note 7 a loaner J series device, which will have to be returned once the replacement Note 7 is received. Considering the gravity of the situation, we urge all readers to turn in their Note 7 devices at the earliest.

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Security-Centric Copperhead OS Receives Android 6.0 Nougat update for the Nexus 6P

The security-centric CopperheadOS has received its initial release of Android 6.0 Nougat for the Nexus 6P, Nexus 5X and the Nexus 9 WiFi. The update is being pushed over-the-air, but users can also flash the update separately as the files are made available for download.

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A Look Back at AMD’s History and Future in the Mobile Market

Ten years ago, AMD bought Canadian GPU manufacturer ATI Technologies, in an attempt to expand their portfolio, and to work towards integrated systems like we are seeing with their Fusion APUs (not to be confused with the other just announced Fusion chip), and with mobile SoCs today. Shortly after the acquisition, they sold off some of their non-core business units in order to focus on CPUs and GPUs for desktops and laptops.

In 2008 and 2009, AMD sold off their fabrication division (GlobalFoundries), their set-top box SoC division (Xilleon), and their mobile GPU division (then known as Imageon, and now known as Qualcomm Adreno). While they sold Imageon to Qualcomm for relatively little, just $65 million as it was underperforming in the mobile market that was dominated by feature phones and PDAs at the time, they did see the potential to re-enter the market in the future, and decided to keep the Imageon brand name (something that they didn't do for Xilleon). That short period between AMD purchasing ATI and selling off Imageon resulted in some interesting combinations like the HTC Advantage, a 5" touchscreen phone in early 2007 with an ARM Intel CPU and AMD graphics.

AMD kept the Imageon brand name because even at that point in time, the convergence of phones, laptops, and desktops was already starting to become apparent, although few predicted just how quickly it is happening. As processors get faster, we're hitting a point where we no longer need more processing power in laptops to complete the tasks that most people use their computers for, so instead we're seeing a focus on power efficiency and battery life.

"With AMD's Zen processor coming up, the time may be ripe for AMD to re-enter the tablet market"

As CPU and GPU power usage in laptops drops, we're beginning to see smaller and smaller gaps, with some laptops even running on what are essentially tablet chips. Small little 4.5 W TDP SoCs that don't need a cooling fan, with an integrated GPU and CPU, just like what you're seeing in phones.

With AMD's Zen processor coming up, the time may be ripe for AMD to re-enter the tablet market. Unfortunately, their lack of LTE radios would prevent them from directly entering the phone market (and is the same reason why Nvidia and Intel ran into trouble), however it doesn't prevent them from licensing their technology out to other manufacturers that are looking for something beyond ARM's Mali GPUs.

AMD is no stranger to licensing out their GPU technology, having licensed it to STMicroelectronics back in 2007, and reportedly being in talks to license it to MediaTek last year. To see rumors that Samsung is attempting to license either Nvidia or AMD's GPU designs really shouldn't come as a surprise. Nvidia seems a bit unlikely, especially seeing how they directly compete with Samsung in the tablet market and are investing substantial amounts of money into their dynamic binary translation based Denver CPU cores that are only used in their Tegra chips, but AMD could be an interesting fit.

AMD is looking for additional revenue streams to help fund their two-pronged fight against Nvidia in the GPU market (where Graphics Core Next is showing strong Vulkan performance), and Intel in the CPU market (where their Zen CPUs appear to be a return to competitiveness, after years of struggling with the failure of Bulldozer). The extra bit of revenue from licensing their GPU technology for phone and tablet chips could help them fund the substantial R&D spending required to keep up with Nvidia and Intel, but more importantly, it would help pave the route for future attempts at entering the mobile sector. It would get a lot of the smaller issues of Android support for AMD GPUs out of the way.

And that is the key. Support. Software support. If AMD wants to enter the tablet SoC and fanless laptop market, they need to have software support for the OSes that run on those platforms. AMD has been making a massive push to improve their Linux support, open sourcing a large part of their GPU stack over the past two years (and peripheral tools like GPUOpen), and a substantial portion of that carries over to Android (and that open source code is especially helpful with facilitating aftermarket dev support). Getting their GPUs into a couple third party SoCs would give them time to really iron out the bugs and improve their support for Android (and Linux) before launching a tablet SoC of their own.

Can AMD leverage their Heterogeneous Systems Architecture to successfully enter the tablet market? Should AMD try to get their GPUs into third party SoCs like Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), ARM, and Vivante do? Let us know in the comments below!

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LG V20 Launched, Nexus 7 and HP Touchpad get Nougat

This was a pretty slow week for Android news but there's still some stuff worth talking about. Android Nougat ROMs have been released for two older tablets. LG launched their V20 phone and it looks like an amazing device. Check out these articles below to catch up on all the news.

Get Android Nougat on the Nexus 7

Miles is back with another awesome video for XDA TV. This time we are looking at how you can get Android Nougat on your 2013 Nexus 7. Google dropped support for the device so it has been left up to the developer community to take it from here. An AOSP ROM has been put together to get Android 7 on the device. So if you're looking for something like that, then this is a solution for you.

Read more

LG V20 Goes Official with Dual Displays, Dual Rear Cameras and Quad DACs

Right before a certain company with a shiny logo unveils their next product, LG has tried stealing the thunder with the launch of its new flagship device for the second quarter of 2016. Meet the LG V20, the smartphone with a renewed focus towards multimedia creation and consumption.

Read more

HP TouchPad, Launched in 2011 with WebOS, Gets Unofficial Android 7.0 Nougat

The HP TouchPad, launched in 2011 with WebOS, has become the envy of recent flagship owners after the tablet has received a build of Android 7.0 Nougat.

Read more

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Samsung Allegedly Attempting to License Nvidia and AMD GPU Technology

Samsung has been rumored to be working on developing their own GPUs to go along with their custom M1 ARM CPU cores. New reports would indicate that they are in talks with AMD and Nvidia about the possibility of licensing one of their GPU designs for use in upcoming Exynos processors, in an attempt to outpace Qualcomm's Adreno GPU line.

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