Thursday 20 October 2016

WhatsApp tips and tricks: master messaging

WhatsApp tips and tricks: master messaging

WhatsApp needs no introduction. It's the world's most popular instant messaging service, and we love it. As a show of appreciation for WhatsApp, we've decided to chalk up a list of WhatsApp tips and tricks to help AndroidPIT readers get the most out of it.

1. Stop WhatsApp images appearing in your camera roll

If your friends send you loads of stupid pictures on WhatsApp, and you don't want them mixed in with all your amazing photos, it is possible to keep WhatsApp images separate so they don't appear in your camera roll.

Download a file explorer, such as ES File Explorer
Navigate to sdcard/WhatsApp/Media
Enter the folder you don't want shared (in this case, WhatsApp Images)
Tap the plus button at the bottom of the screen
Name the new folder .nomedia

That should stop any media in that folder from showing up in your camera roll.

2. Lock WhatsApp

If you're keen to keep your WhatsApp private, you can use any number of security apps to set a passcode for the app. AppLock is a popular choice.

3. Disable media auto-download

If you're running low on mobile data, it might be worth turning of the automatic download of media in WhatsApp, at least until you hit the monthly reset.

To do this, head to Settings > Data usage. In this menu, ensure you untick the boxes in both When using mobile data and When roaming

4. Switch your WhatsApp chat history between phones

An update that allows Google Drive backups should now have rolled out to all users. This is far and away the easiest method of moving your chat and media history between devices.
However, if for any reason you need to move your WhatsApp history over to a new device without using Google Drive, it's still a pretty painless procedure. All you need is a microSD card and a few minutes to spare.

Insert the microSD card into the device that has WhatsApp on it
In WhatsApp, go to Settings > Chats > Chat backup
Remove the SD card and place it into your other device
Install WhatsApp on the other device
WhatsApp should detect the backup and prompt you to restore it, which you should do

If you need to move the backup, use a file explorer to find '/sdcard/WhatsApp' and move it to the correct folder.

5. How to get WhatsApp on your tablet

If you're looking to get the WhatsApp experience on a larger screen, you can follow our useful guide on how to get WhatsApp on tablet.

6. How to get WhatsApp on your PC

By far the most convenient way to get WhatsApp access on your PC is to simply use the official web client. Open it up, and then you will be prompted to scan a QR code. To do this, open WhatsApp on your smartphone, hit the trio of dots in the upper-right corner, and select WhatsApp Web.
The WhatsApp web client acts as a mirror of your device, meaning you will only receive messages so long as your smartphone is switched on and connected to the internet.

Screenshot

7. Download and install the latest WhatsApp APK

First, head to Settings > Security > Unknown sources and ensure the box is checked.
The, on your smartphone browser either head to the WhatsApp website or APK Mirror and download the latest APK (APK Mirror is usually ahead of the WhatsApp website). Once the file's downloaded, open it to install the latest WhatsApp APK.

8. How to make WhatsApp video calls

The addition of voice calls to WhatsApp is highly anticipated and looks likely to arrive very, very soon. You can follow our updates on this and alternative solutions you can try in the meantime here:

How to make WhatsApp video calls

9. Use WhatsApp on two devices at once

You can easily use WhatsApp without a SIM card or on two devices at the same time simply by using the web client. But this means you have to remain connected to the internet on your primary device, and connection issues are not uncommon.
The second method is more laborious but also better in the long run.
To do this, both the devices you want to use will need to be rooted. Download and install Titanium Backup root and use it to perform a full backup of WhatsApp, including root permissions. Once this is done, use a file manager to navigate to the folder that Titanium Backup created containing the three files starting with com.whatsapp. Copy this folder onto the internal memory of your second device.

Now, on the second device, where you just copied the files to, download and install WhatsApp. Do not open WhatsApp yet. First, download and install Titanium Backup root again. Open Titanium Backup and grant it root permission. Close the warning and select Backup / restore. Restore using the WhatsApp folder that you copied to the device earlier.
Your second device is now set up with a clone of the original app, so it is already verified. The only downside is that only one of the devices will receive notifications, the one from which you sent the last message.

10. Get desktop notifications for WhatsApp chats

You'll need the WhatsApp Web Chrome extension to get WhatsApp desktop notifications. Then, all you need to do is install a simple add-on called WAToolkit.
After installing it, you will see a new icon in your browser toolbar. Hover your cursor over it to see the most recently received message, or right click for more options. You'll also notice the WAToolkit options button in your WhatsApp Web tab. The best part? WAToolkit will notify you of messages on your desktop even when Chrome itself isn’t running.

Install WhatsApp Web on PC
In the WhatsApp Web browser window, go to Options > Notifications and ensure that Desktop Alerts is ticked
Install the Chrome browser extension WAToolkit
Make sure the background notifications box is ticked, like in the image below

11. Recover deleted WhatsApp messages

By default, WhatsApp backs up your messages every day at 4am. This means that if you've deleted any messages since then, but before the next auto-backup, you can recover them. To do this:

Uninstall WhatsApp from your device (Settings > Apps > WhatsApp > Uninstall)
Reinstall WhatsApp.
Type your phone number into WhatsApp, then it should notify you that it's found a backup of your chats
Tap Restore to get your deleted messages back

If you want to know how to recover other deleted messages on your phone, hit the link.

12. Hide 'Last seen', profile photo and status

Getting thrown into a big group chat filled with party guests and people you don't know can be bewildering. Suddenly, your profile picture is staring back at a chatroom full of strangers, who can also see your status and when you're reading messages. If I wanted a whole flock of strangers ogling and judging a photo of me, I'd have gone on Tinder.
Here's how to have better control over who sees this information on WhatsApp:

Tap the Options icon at the top right of WhatsApp
Go to Settings > Account > Privacy
Go through the Last seen, Profile photo, and Status options, then set their visibility to 'Everyone', 'My contacts' or 'Nobody', depending on how much privacy you want

13. Know when you've been blocked

There are four ways to suss out whether someone has blocked you on WhatsApp. Each sign is largely meaningless by itself, but together they form a solid reason to believe that your friend doesn't want to be your friend.
Take note that WhatsApp has deliberately made it difficult to tell whether someone has blocked you or not, in order to maintain users' privacy. There's always an outlying chance that you're just being paranoid, even when all four of the below points apply.

Check the 'last seen' time

A contact's 'last seen' time appears in the top bar right under their name. If there's no information about when they were last online, this could be a bad sign. It doesn't necessarily mean that they've blocked you – it is possible to stop this information appearing without blocking someone. Your friend might just value their privacy, so don't go burning bridges just yet. Read on.

Check the double check

Check marks are WhatsApp's way of compounding your obsessive streak by ensuring that you know what's going on on the other end of the line.
The first check mark means that your message has been sent. When the second one appears, your message has been received by the recipient's phone. This doesn’t mean that the person has read your message, just that it is on their phone; when those check marks turn blue, that's when they have seen the message. If you see the check marks turn blue, they haven't blocked you, and everything is fine. Take a deep breath.
If your messages never get beyond that single, sad gray tick, you might have been blocked.
There's a vague chance they still love you, though, surely? Time to keep digging.

Do your calls go through?

Another indicator that your friend hates you is that all those desperate WhatsApp calls you make never go through.
Again, maybe their phone is broken, maybe they've changed their number, etc, etc, but if this one is true and the two signs above it are, too – well, thing's aren't looking good, are they?

whats app voice call

Has their picture or profile changed?

If you notice that a contact hasn’t updated or changed their profile in a while, or they've had the same picture for months, this could mean that they’ve blocked you. Or that they just never update their profile. Maybe everything is fine.
Let's go a step further and check from a different account, meaning from a mutual friend’s smartphone. If you see here that your estranged friend's profile information and picture have changed, then we're sorry to break it you, but your friend has blocked you and, given how strangely you've been acting, with good reason.

Bonus method: Ask them

The final, and ultimate, way of knowing is to ask them. If they say yes, then they have blocked you. If they make up a terrible excuse, they have blocked you. But if the reason why they never respond to you seems plausible and they invite you to hang out, everything is OK. For now.

14. Mute annoying WhatsApp group chats

We've all been in that position where we've somehow been dragged into a group chat that we either didn't really want to be in in the first place or just don't want to receive notifications from every couple of minutes.
Rather than just leave the chat, which may offend some people, you can simply mute the chat so you stop receiving notifications from it.

In WhatsApp, tap the Chats tab
Tap the group you want to mute
With the group open, tap the Options icon at the top right
Tap Mute, then select the amount of time you want to mute the group for. You can also untick the Show notifications box so that you never hear from the group again until you decide otherwise

15. Create a home screen shortcut for your favorite chats

Do you have certain friends with whom you have constant stream-of-consciousness conversations, where you're non-stop WhatsApp'ing all day, every day?
If so, then you can create a shortcut icon to those conversations, which will appear on your Android home screen. This means you can jump straight into chats with your BFFs and important groups.

In WhatsApp, tap the Chats tab.
Tap and hold the conversation you want to create a shortcut for.
When the list of options appears, tap Add conversation shortcut
A shortcut displaying your contact's profile picture will now appear on your home screen. Tap it to jump straight in and start chatting to them.

16. Add a widget to your lock screen

WhatsApp widget on stock Android

If your device is running Android 4.2-4.4 KitKat or a custom ROM that supports lock screen widgets, you can quickly and easily add a custom WhatsApp widget to your lock screen.
Unfortunately, Android 5.0 Lollipop killed lock screen widgets and replaced them with heads up notifications that also work on the lock screen.

AndroidPIT Nexus 5 Lollipop lock screen widget

Earn Money Best apps for making money on Android

Best apps for making money on Android

When you look at your phone, you probably think about spending money rather than making it. Your handset almost certainly cost you a pretty penny, whether in up-front cost or on-going monthly payments. Thankfully there are plenty of apps to be found in the Google Play store which can help you recoup some of the costs. This is how to make money with Android apps.

Google Opinion Rewards

It may come as little surprise to learn that Google has an app of its own that you can use to make money. With Google Opinion Rewards you earn Google Play credit by completing surveys. You'll receive a notification whenever a new survey is available, and you just need to spend a few moments answering a series of questions – nothing too taxing.
Once you've completed a survey, you earn Google Play Store credit that you can use to buy apps, music and other things. Many of the surveys have a deadline for completion, so make sure you don’t wait too long to complete them.

How to get Android 6.0 Marshmallow on a All Android Mobiles

How to get Android 6.0 Marshmallow on All Android Mobiles

For the Samsung Galaxy , you can update the operating system to Android 6.0 Marshmallow. In this article, we’ll let you into the secret of how to do this.

Preparation steps

Thanks to a whole range of alternative firmware, you can still upgrade your Samsung Galaxy S4 with software updates that Samsung no longer supplies. However, please note that doing so will mean exclusion from your guarantee and you will do so at your own risk.
First of all, you will need the Samsung driver for Windows PC, Odin 3.10.7 and Heimdall. After downloading these, you need to install the Samsung driver. Linux and Mac users can skip this step. Next, you need to unpack Heimdall and open its directory.
Turn your Galaxy S4 on in download mode. To do this, turn the phone off and when you switch it back on again, press and hold the volume down, home and power buttons simultaneously. Next, press the volume up button to confirm that you wish to enter download mode.
Check whether your computer can communicate with Heimdall. Open the Heimdall front end, go into the Rider Utilities and click on Detect. When the detected output device appears, you can continue. If problems arise here, you might have to switch to the ADB Driver Installer and follow the given prompts.

root s5

Installing Recovery

The next step is to change over Recovery. This system allows you to interact with the partitions of your smartphone. This is essential in order to change the firmware and install system apps such as Google Apps.

Download the latest .img file of TeamWin Recovery Project (TWRP Recovery). This Recovery version has the best support. Now go to the display. Move the file to the Heimdall directory. Right click in the folder window and open up the command prompt. Type the following in:

heimdall flash –RECOVERY recovery.img –no-reboot

Instead of recovery.img, type tw and then press the tab key. The corresponding name of your recovery file should then be automatically completed. If you get the message: libusb error: -12, you must also replace the Samsung USB driver. To do so, open the device manager in Windows, search for other devices and uninstall the MSM8960 driver. Unplug the USB from the phone, install the driver and plug the cable back in again. Then repeat the steps for Flash. If successful, you must reboot the Galaxy S4 in Recovery mode. Hold down the power and home and volume down buttons to do this.

AndroidPIT Nexus 6 TWRP recovery install 2

AndroidPIT Nexus 6 TWRP recovery install 2

Download and install firmware

After installing Recovery, we can finally begin the main part of the process and install Marshmallow on your Galaxy S4. You can find the corresponding firmware on the CyanogenMod download page. In the column CyanogenMod Build, you can get ZIP files with the so-called Snapshots of CM 12.1 or Nightly Builds of CM 13. The former are based on Android 5.1 Lollipop and are less up-to-date but therefore stable. The latter are based on Android 6.0 Marshmallow and are updated almost daily but not yet fully developed. Choose which one you want and download the ZIP file.
If you don’t want to miss out on using the Play Store as your App source, you will need an extra ZIP file that contains Google-Apps. The easiest place to get this is Opengapps.org. Download the ARM variant for your Android version. We recommend the Micro Package for a better calendar and Gmail.
Copy the ZIP file to your Galaxy S4. Change in TWRP Recovery to Wipe and then to Advanced Wipe. There, select Partition Data and System in order to delete the Samsung Android version from your Galaxy S4. Your App settings will be lost but your files and photos will be untouched.

twrp wipe

Next, go into the TWRP Recovery startup screen and click on Install. Go to the directory with CyanogenMod and select Per Select ZIP. With Per Add more ZIPs, you can install the Google Apps afterwards. Swipe the lower edge to start the Flash process. The contents of the ZIP file will then be unzipped in the previously emptied partition.

twrp flash

After the flash process, you will see the suggestion: Wipe Cache/Dalvik. Click on this in order to avoid errors in the startup process. The system will reboot itself. The first time it restarts can take a while, so you'll need to be patient

HOW TO SECURELY HIDE YOUR FILES AND APPS ON ANDROID

How to securely hide your files and apps on Android

If you frequently suffer the minor pang of a panic attack when you hand your phone to someone and realize you have sensitive emails/documents/images or other files on your device, then you need a way of hiding those files from prying eyes. Or perhaps you have apps installed that you'd rather keep for just your own eyes. No one needs to know about that Farming Sim app you play. Either way, we've put together a list of different ways you can keep your personal files and apps secure.

If you really want to have the most granular control possible over what appears on your phone, you may well need to root it but if you'd rather not do that, we've included some non-root options too. Plus, Android has a few built-in features you can make use of to keep your secret things secret.

The basics of hiding your files and apps

While some manufacturers have added 'vault' features to provide a secure space on handsets (Samsung, for example), stock Android hasn't been very good at dealing with the need to selectively show files and folders by default, and from what we've seen of Nougat so far, it hasn't made great leaps in this area just yet.
What users with any version of Android can do for a really basic privacy fix is alter the names of the folders holding the content you want to hide. So if you want to hide your images, open up a file explorer (there's a basic one built into Android Marshmallow and Nougat), select the folder with the images you want to hide and alter its name. Now, it won't show your images in your gallery or files in folders.
Of course, it's not really very hidden though - Android isn't automatically pulling the information onto your display anymore but if you lose your phone the files are still fully accessible.
Similarly, you can hide those annoying pre-installed apps that arrive with your phone but don't allow uninstallation without using a third-party app. To do so, you need to navigate to Settings > Apps and then choose the app you want to hide. If you can't uninstall them, you can usually disable them. If you need to learn how to stop apps from running in the background, you can do that first.

Outside help

Unless you want the most basic of hiding and 'protection' from prying eyes, you'll probably want to turn to third-party help in getting better control of your data, files and apps. Luckily, there are a whole load of apps to help you achieve your goal.
Hide your apps
If you just want to hide, rather than secure, your apps, one of the easiest ways to do this is by installing a non-stock launcher (assuming your manufacturer hasn't provided a native option for hiding apps). There are a whole lot to choose from that let you hide apps, but among the most popular on the Play Store is the ever-present Nova Launcher.
While there's a free version of Nova Launcher, you'll need the paid Prime upgrade to unlock the option to hide apps. If you purchase that, you'll need to navigate to Nova Launcher > Nova settings >App & Widget drawers and then scroll down to the Drawer groups > Hide apps option.

Apex Launcher is another popular option that includes the ability to hide apps, except that it doesn't require a paid upgrade to access the feature. Just open Settings > Drawer Settings > Hidden apps to control which are visible in your app drawer
androidpit hide it pro

Lock your apps
OK, so perhaps you've hidden your apps using the options above but know deep down that what you want is security, not obfuscation. To stop people opening your apps at all, hidden or otherwise, you have several third-party options available. You'll probably want to try and couple to find one you like most.
One of the most popular free options on the Play Store to add a lock to your apps is AppLock; it works for videos and images too, but we've got more suggestions to lock those items later.
As well as allowing you to lock apps and other items, it's also got a useful feature that allows you to prevent the app being uninstalled. Once this Advanced Protection is activated, you'll need to use the password that you set to uninstall the app. You can also disable the Advanced Protection when you don't need to use it.

One thing that's worth keeping in mind is that there's another version called 'AppLock Fingerprint,' even though both apps now support fingerprint unlocking. It also brings other options, like a selfie snapshot of anyone trying to access your phone without authorization and the ability to lock your phone remotely. Both offer paid in-app upgrades too.
Once installed, you just need to scroll through a list of your installed apps and select which ones you want to protect. Then, each time you open one of those apps, you'll be asked for a password or fingerprint to unlock them.
Oh, and if the ads are too annoying you can pay for a premium version that removes them.

Go incognito

Until now, all the apps in this list do exactly what you'd expect them to do, but there are other covert options available that put a bit more effort into hiding the fact that you're withholding files and apps from being displayed.
For example, Hide It Pro uses an icon that describes it as an 'audio manager' and when you first open the app, what you see are some audio settings. Press and hold the logo and you can access the secure section of your phone where all your hidden files, apps and other content can be found.
There are also other features baked in to Hide It Pro, like file encryption on a case-by-case basis, but for some aspects (like secure messaging or browsing) you'll need to install the add-ons separately.
Another option you have is Smart Hide Calculator, which is a fully-functional calculator and a way of hiding files, apps, images, videos and anything else you want to keep password-locked. It's not quite as fully-featured as Hide It Pro, but it does offer a simple way of making files invisible to anyone else that uses your phone.
To access your vault of content, you need to enter the password you set-up when you first opened the app and hit the equals key. If you want to use Smart Hide Calculator to conceal your apps too, you'll need a rooted Android smartphone.

Remember

Which app you use to hide or protect your files and other bits will depend on what you want to achieve. If you simply want to hide the files from showing up at all, you can do that without installing anything, but it isn't going to offer much protection if you have data on there that someone wants (and has the opportunity) to access.
With so many apps to choose from on the Play Store,