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Android App Updates Jan 23rd, 2015: LIbreOffice, Whatsapp, and More!

LibreOffice Viewer Beta hits Android

This week, LibreOffice Viewer Beta landed in the Google Play store for everyone to use. It’s a pretty standard document viewing app with a few cool features:

  • Open Document Format (.odt, .odp, .ods, .ots, .ott, .otp)
  • Microsoft Office 2007/2010/2013 (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .dotx, .xltx, .ppsx)
  • Microsoft Office 97/2000/XP/2003 (.doc, .ppt, .xls, .dot, .xlt, .pps)
  • Interactive document elements (e.g. URLs) and support for browsing external SD storage would release in future

WhatsApp now Respects Priority Notifications in Lollipop

It’s nice to see apps update to use features in a new version of the OS. This time it was Whatsapp. They updated their Android app to play nicely with priority notifications in lollipop. Which is going to be a pretty big deal for a lot of people. Additionally, they’ve put out their own Chrome extension this week and the WhatSIM which allows you to use WhatsApp in any country in the world, for free. Which is pretty amazing itself.

Facebook Messenger gets Voice transcription

So with Facebook Messenger, you’ve been able to send sound clips to other users. Well now, Facebook is testing out transcription of those sound clips. So you don’t have to listen to them. They are still testing it out, so it’s not completely done. They are testing it out on a rather limited basis as well:

“Our plan is to test this feature at a tiny scale for now and we’re looking forward to seeing what you think of it before making the experience more widely available.”

Twitter Brings Tweet Translations to Mobile

For a while, Twitter has had the ability – through Bing – to translate Tweets on the web. But now they’ve finally brought that functionality over to their apps. Yesterday, Twitter announced that you can now translate tweets in the Android and iOS apps. Which is especially helpful if you follow users that don’t have english as their first language.