The Top Android Apps on the Google Play Store

This is an updated list of the top Android Apps that have amassed more than 50,000,000 downloads on the official Google Play store. The data has been screen-scraped from Google Web Search and the Google Play store. You can also download the raw data as an Excel sheet.

Legend: The blue bars indicate the average user rating of an app while orange reflects the total number of users that have rated that app on the App Store.

Android App Install Base 500 million to 1 billion Gmail YouTube Google Play services Maps Facebook 100 million – 500 million GO Launcher EX Twitter Viber Facebook Messenger Voice Search Google Play Books Subway Surfers Google Play Music Tiny Flashlight + LED Pandora WhatsApp Messenger Skype Fruit Ninja Free Dropbox Adobe Reader Angry Birds Talking Tom Cat 2 Free Street View on Google Maps Google+ Hangouts (replaces Talk) Google Search Chrome Browser Google Play Movies & TV LINE: Free Calls & Messages

50 million – 100 million GO SMS Pro KakaoTalk: Free Calls & Text Google Translate Temple Run SoundHound Tango Video, Voice & Text Yahoo! Mail Brightest Flashlight Free ® Advanced Task Killer GO Locker Pou Angry Birds Rio Hill Climb Racing Barcode Scanner WeChat TuneIn Radio MX Player PicsArt Shoot Bubble Deluxe Despicable Me Talking Tom Cat Free GROUP PLAY Shazam ChatON Kindle ZEDGE. Jetpack Joyride AntiVirus Security Pool Billiards Pro Opera Mini web browser Google Earth Flipboard: Your News Magazine

Quick highlights:

• Facebook is only non-Google app in the Google Play Store that has been downloaded more than 500 million times. The others are Gmail, YouTube, Google Play and Google Maps that are mostly pre-installed on Android phones.
• The 50m+ list has 65 apps but the one app that enjoys the highest average user rating is Brightest Flashlight, a free app that turns your Android phone into a torch.
• Facebook has been rated by over 8 million users while 4 million Android users have added their ratings for WhatsApps Messenger on the Play Store. No other app comes close.

Create a Public Folder Where Anyone Can Add Files

Dropbox and SkyDrive allow you to have “Shared Folders” where a folder is shared between all members of the group. Any member can contribute files to the shared web folder and such a thing is ideal for collaborative efforts like for sharing photos with guests after an event. People can view photos uploaded by other users as well as upload their own to the shared folder.

A limitation with these “shared folders” is that the folder owner must invite a user before he or she can add files to the folder.

OneTimeBox, a web app that went live at the recently concluded MIT hackathon(coding contest),  takes a different approach to shared folders. The app creates a disposable, public web folder where anyone can add files as long as they know the unique URL of your shared folder.

There’s no registration required and neither do you have to invite anyone as a contributor. Just share the URL of your folder with friends and they’ll have full access – including delete permissions – to the files in that folder.

OneTimeBox is built using Meteor.js and the source code can be found onGithub. Internally it uses the Filepicker API which uses the Amazon S3 service for storing files in the cloud. The app is neatly designed though you cannot add file to the shared folder from your mobile devices.

Find the Date When a Web Page was First Published on the Internet

There are three dates associated with any “public” web page that’s available on the Internet:

#1. The publication date – this is the date when an article or web page is first uploaded on to a public website where humans and search engines can find and access that page.

#2. The indexed date – this is the date when search engine spiders first discover a web page on the Internet. Given the fact that Google has become so good at crawling fresh content, the date of first-crawl is often the same as the actual publication date (#1).

#3. The cache date – this is the date when a web page was last crawled by the Googlebot. Search engines often re-crawl web pages every few days or weeks, sometimes multiple times in a day like for news website, to check if the content has changed.

Find the Publishing Date of Web Pages

In the case of news articles, the publishing date of the web page is included but in situations where the date is not specified (or you think the mentioned date in incorrect), you can use a simple Google hack to know when a web page or web domain was last published on the Internet.

Google can tell the date when a web page was first published on the Web.

Step 1. Go to google.com and copy-paste the full URL of any web page in the search box  with the inurl: operator (e.g. inurl:www.example.com). Hit enter.

google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.techpidea/setup

Step 2. Now go to browser address bar (Ctrl+L in Firefox & Chrome or Alt+D in Internet Explorer) and copy-paste “&as_qdr=y15” at the end of the Google search URL. Press enter again.

google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.Techpidea.com/setup&as_qdr=y15

Step 3. Google will load the search results again but this time, you’ll see theactual publication date of the web page next to the title in Google search results as in the above screenshot.

This trick should help if you citing tweets (MLA or APA style) or citing web pages(MLA style) in your papers.

How old is a web page?

Because Google can crawl the page the moment it is published on the Internet, the indexed date appearing in search results is often accurate. However, if the content of a web page were changed after the first Google crawl, the publishing date may actually represet the date when it was most recently edited and not the date when it was first indexed or published.

How to Easily Find the Biggest Files in your Google Drive

What do you do when your Google Drive is running out of storage space? You either add more storage or the inexpensive option is that you clean up your Drive and delete the large files that are hogging up the bulk of space. But how do know where these big files are hiding in your Drive?

Google Drives lists the file size but without the sort option.

If you switch to the List View in Google Drive (the list icon is near the Settings gear), it will show the sizes of all your files but unfortunately there’s no option to sort that list by their sizes. Also, Google Drive doesn’t support a Gmail-style size search operator so, unlike your emails, you cannot search for big files in Drive.

There’s however an easy workaround. While you are in Google Drive, go to bottom left corner and you’ll see a link that shows how much storage space you have used. Hover your mouse over that link and then choose Google Drive. Voila! The list you now see is sorted by size and the largest are listed at the top.

You can use the URL – drive.google.com/#quota – to directly access the list.

The list only includes non-native file formats since the native Google files – like your Google Documents or Google Spreadsheets – do not count towards the available quota.

How to Let Others Upload Files to your Dropbox Account

A class teacher needs her students to submit homework at the end of the week. A company wants designers to send the mockups and design drafts for review. A news organization is asking public to upload documents to their website. An event organizer is requesting attendees to send any photos or videos that they may have taken at the event.

What do you think is the easiest solution for all these use cases? Yes, e-mail. People can send you files by email and you can then use the Save Attachmentsscript to automatically download these files to your computer. The big problem is that you cannot receive big files via email and second, it does take some work to organize stuff that arrives in email.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could create a public folder on the Internet where anyone could go and simply upload the files instead of sending them to you as file attachments. Students can upload assignments, designers can upload mockups and your friends can upload photographs.

Let Anyone Upload Files to your Dropbox

This is the essence of Dropbox Requests. The requests service would let anyone –  your clients, work colleagues or even anonymous strangers – directly upload files to a designated folder in your Dropbox account easily and quickly.

They do not need a Dropbox account and you’ll get an instant email notification as soon as new files are added to your Dropbox. And you can accept files as big as 2 GB provided you’ve enough free space in your Dropbox.

Such a feature is missing in Google Drive but you can build a form that would letanyone upload files to your Drive with the help of Google Scripts.

Your Dropbox Request link is “unlisted” meaning anyone can access your file upload form if they know the URL. Also, when uploading files, the uploader would have to write their name and email address in the upload form but these are not verified so the upload will happen even if they enter fake information.

Dropbox shares no other details of the file uploader with the folder owner though they should be recording your IP address in their own database. Thus, Dropbox Request may not be an ideal solution if you are operating a Wikileaks like website where you would not like people to leave a digital trail.