AfterDawn

Sure, there were digital music players well before Apple introduced its first iPod back in 2001. But iPod was the device that made digital music a mainstream reality.

It also paved a way for new music industry revenue models by introducing legal and easy-to-use ways to purchase digital music. Since then, the digital music purchase model has died and been replaced by a streaming services, such as Spotify. But it was the iPod and Apple's music store that acted as catalysts for that transition.

After the initial developer edition, Google has now launched the first official beta version of Android 13 operating system.

While the developer edition, launched back in February, was meant for .. well, developers, the new beta version is meant for all Android enthusiasts. Obviously, those willing to test the new OS are supposed to be users that can tolerate inevitable bugs, missing features and even data loss. But also for those who are willing to sacrifice such minor things in order to get a

Sometimes history is shaped by small steps, leading into giant leaps. Those steps were taken in late 1990s by several tech companies - and as the result, the entire music business industry went through a shock that changed it permanently. One of those catalysts was a small Windows music player.

Legendary Winamp was arguably the first user-friendly audio player capable to play MP3 audio files. The very first version of Winamp was released back in 21st of April, 1997. So, it has been now 25 years

Google introduced a new measure for Android phones with its Android 12 operating system. The new measure, dubbed as Performance class indicates to app developers how good the phone is, performance-wise.

Previously, game and app developers had to to guessing on whether the phone user is using, is capable of running games in full detail or to have enough oomph for certain heavy-weight app features.

With the introduction of Performance class inside Android itself, app developers can simply check

Since late 2020, OnePlus has been struggling to push out its Android updates in timely manner, which has frustrated its loyal fans quite a lot. But finally, some relief is coming: Android 12 goodness arrives to its year 2020 high-end line of phones.

OnePlus 8, OnePlus 8 Pro and OnePlus 8T started receiving Android 12 update as of yesterday.

According to OnePlus, the launch is phased, meaning that the full rollout of the OTA updates will happen in upcoming weeks, depending on region, model and

For recent years, Sony, has had a very limited selection of phones available globally. But even with a limited selection, company's track record for delivering Android updates hasn't been exactly a top notch. This seems to be changing.

Sure enough, Sony has been quite fast with providing Android 12 updates to its two hign-end phone series: Xperia 5 and Xperia 1 series. As per current Sony's Android 12 update status, Android 12 has been already released to year 2020 and year 2021 high-end models

Alternative YouTube player for Android, YT Vanced, is being discontinued. The app has been loved by its users and is probably one of the most downloaded Android apps that cannot be found from official Google Play store.

As YT Vanced app offers pretty much everything you could wish for for a YouTube app, it is also truly hated by Google. YT Vanced removed all the video ads from the player, but also uses crowdsourcing to detect sponsored messages by YouTubers - and allows skipping those, too.

As Russia has been pushed to isolation after it attacked Ukraine and country is now considering ways how to deal with the new situation. As Russian society is heavily relying on Western technology, country has to decide how to overcome the situation where it doesn't have access to Western software, chips and more.

Even Russian heavy industry and many critical civilian corporations rely on Western software like databases, CRM systems and, obviously, Windows operating system. Some of those have

Today, at around 18:00 UTC, Spotify went burning down - globally. Users haven't been able to log in to the streaming service since the service interruption began.

According the DownDetector, a service that monitors thousands of websites and services, the problems started immediately at around 18:00 UTC and have been on-going since then.

Spotify status, according to DownDetector service

Problem has been noticed at Spotify, too, as they've tweeted about the issue on their official account:

So