Let’s be honest, notification toggles should have been built into Ice Cream Sandwich. Custom ROMs have had them for months, plus OEMs have even started building them into their skins. For whatever reason though, Google left them out and non-rooted users who own stock devices are stuck looking for options. One of those is Power Control Plus, an app that I was a huge fan of pre-ICS. This used to be a go-to app for customizing home screens as it gives you a ton of options for making the ultimate power widget. Once Honeycomb (Ice Cream Sandwich too) was released though, the app was given the ability to dock itself in the notification bar.

You don’t need root or a custom ROM – this can be installed with the tap of a couple of buttons. Colors, toggles and other goodies can be added thereafter.

Market Link ($1.99)

Cheers TheAndroid1!

On Friday, a company called Carrier Coverage reached out to us with a new app that they referred to as being like Carrier-IQ, only it aims to help consumers rather than carriers. Using the term “Carrier-IQ” was an odd way of framing their position, but they had a snazzy video and what seemed like a decent enough idea that we gave it a look.

So what exactly is it? Carrier Coverage wants to have enough data to be able to tell you which carrier and phone is the best in the areas that you visit most frequently. Actually, it goes beyond that. Let’s say you plan to take a vacation or move into a new house – this app will eventually tell you if your particular carrier and phone will be able to perform at the level you need it to. By gathering data through their app (location, carrier, signal strength, and more), they should be able produce some useful info, assuming they get enough users. 

According to the Financial Times, Facebook will begin showing advertising to mobile devices in March as a way to tap into a new revenue stream. The wording on this new news indicates that ads may not be your typical bottom or top locked banner, but may instead be worked in as a “featured story” through your feed. So rather than just seeing your friends’ life story spamming that no one cares about posts, you may also see something labeled “featured” that would essentially be an ad.

We aren’t sure if this will also apply to the Facebook Android app, but you can imagine that it will at some point.

Via:  Reuters

One of our readers discovered yesterday that through a loophole in the Android Market and browser, you could install Google Wallet. After the community got a hold of this method, they quickly realized that this not only works for Wallet, but just about any app that a carrier has blocked from your phone. As you can see in the screenshot above, I was able to download and install both Google’s Car Home app and Wireless Tether.

There is a good chance that this will be patched before too long, so for now, feel free to load up just about any app that you would like. For the most part, this will get you into just about any tethering app you want, but there are bound to be other hidden options. In the comments, feel free to drop as many that you can think of to help out the rest of the community. 

The Dropbox team released a new beta version of their Android app last night, bringing with it a handful of features that you will enjoy. The first and most important is the instant uploading of camera photos. You can set the app up to either upload everything you have taken in the past or just the new stuff going forward. Once you upload your first camera shot though, they’ll tack on another 500MB of storage to your account. They also removed the file limit size for uploads, opening your Dropbox world to all sorts of new possibilities.

The rest of the changes:

• Automatically uploads photos and videos in the background using Wi-Fi or data plan
• 500MB of free space on first photo uploaded automatically
• Upload files of any size (no more 180 MB limit!)
• Support for resuming file uploads when there are network issues
• Various performance improvements & bug fixes

Download Link

Via:  Google+, Dropbox

According to a new mobile app monitoring startup called Crittercism, iOS apps are crashing at a greater rate than your favorite Android apps. For a 2 month period, a ton of data was compiled and broken down by OS version and in some cases by app, and then into quartiles to give a better representation of the crashes. In the end, there was a clear winner (if you want to call it that), but some of the reasoning for this result is what we need to talk about.

Now, not to bring up that whole ridiculous “fragmentation” argument for the 1,010th time, but just take a quick glance at the chart above. As you can see, Android is not the only leading mobile OS on the planet that has its fair share of older builds floating around on devices. In fact, through this study, Crittercism discovered that there were at least 23 different versions of iOS and 33 of Android.

The second note that was discussed was the reasoning behind these crash rates, that seem to get higher as you get to a higher OS build. The obvious reaction is to assume that because the majority of people run the newest OS that the rate would have to be higher. This study doesn’t ignore that idea, but they also want to toss out the fact that many of the apps we use on a daily basis are simply not updated to be compatible with new releases. I would tend to agree that that is probably issue #1. How often do you find yourself on your Galaxy Nexus asking, “When is <insert favorite app> going to get Ice Cream Sandwich support?”

Lastly, the overall numbers that were presented are nothing for anyone to be overly concerned about. Sure, we can brag it up for the next few hours to our iOS counterparts about how their apps are less stable, but the truth is that apps on both platforms are crashing at less than a 1% rate. We aren’t talking about apps crashing 10-20% of the time or anything here. Both operating systems are stable, Android just happens to be slightly more stable.

+1 Android! (Sorry, had to.)

Via:  Forbes

Facebook for Android updated this afternoon, bringing with it bug fixes and some sort of better memory management. We are hearing that it has made the overall experience much faster, but that’s all in the eye of the beholder. Here is the note from Facebook:

We just released Facebook for Android 1.8.2 with better memory management, and all kinds of bug fixes. Please download it and post your feedback!

Go get some!

Market Link

Cheers Bjorn and everyone on Twitter for the changelog!