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A total of 14 HTC apps have been removed from the Play Store in the last three months. "Looking at the latest HTC Corporation activity in App Brain, we can see that the Sense Home launcher and contacts app People were unpublished just this month," reports Android Police. "12 more apps, including Calendar, Dot View, and Speak suffered a similar fate in February, while the Mail app that went and then returned is once again conspicuous by its absence." From the report: A few of the unpublished apps hadn't been updated in months, so it's likely they simply weren't being used or supported any longer and therefore had no reason to still be on the Play Store. However, apps like Mail, Contacts, and People are supposedly key alternative apps that come preinstalled on HTC devices, so it's a little strange to see those removed.

It's not clear exactly why this is happening, but there are a few possible reasons. HTC's smartphone business hasn't been doing all that well in recent years, and supporting a bunch of apps that few people are using doesn't make much sense. That said, there are still plenty more apps from the Taiwanese company still live on the Play Store. Perhaps the new phones HTC plans to launch in 2019 will ship with Android One, thus eliminating the need for its own stock apps altogether.

While Google has yet to release official sales numbers for its flagship Google Pixel smartphone, a Play Store app may shed some light on roughly how many units are in circulation. The Pixel Launcher, which is installed by default on the Pixel and Pixel XL, just crossed into the "1,000,000-5,000,000" install tier, leading us to assume that Google has finally sold 1,000,000 Google Pixel units. Ars Technica notes that "the Pixel is seen as Google's answer to the iPhone, but considering Apple sells 40 to 50 million iPhones in a quarter, Google has some catching up to do." From the report: This calculation is complicated by the fact that Google Play doesn't show exact install numbers; it shows installs in "tiers" like "100,000-500,000." So most of the time, we won't have an exact Pixel sales number -- except when the Pixel Launcher crosses from one download tier to another. So guess what just happened? The Pixel Launcher just crossed into the "1,000,000-5,000,000" install tier (you can see some third-party tracking sites, like AppBrain, still have it listed at 500,000). So for this one moment in history, eight months after launch, we can say Google finally sold a million Pixel phones. The Play Store device targeting ensures no one other than Pixel owners can download the Pixel Launcher, and the install count doesn't include sideloading. The most popular sideloading site, APKMirror, has more than 1.3 million downloads on just a single version of the Pixel Launcher, so we know that sideloaders actually outnumber legitimate Pixel Launcher users. There are some statistically insignificant root shenanigans you could pull to download the Pixel Launcher from the Play Store on a non-Pixel device, but there is no way the number of sold Pixels is higher than 1 million units at this point in time.

phmadore writes "Windows Phone has been struggling for market share, largely due to a serious lack of developers willing to invest their time in what one might consider a niche market. Statistically speaking, Android has more than 1.1M apps to Windows Phone's 200,000+. Well, according to unnamed sources informing the Verge, Microsoft may soon integrate/allow Android applications into both Windows and Windows Phone." This follows the recent debate over whether Microsoft should try to fork Android. Peter Bright made the point that doing so would be extremely difficult, and probably not worth Microsoft's time. Ben Thompson has an insightful post about how Microsoft's real decision is whether to focus on devices or services.