The importance of updates

By | March 29, 2021
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If you have an Android phone or tablet, you might have had problems with some apps last week.  It seemed to affect different apps for different people – so I couldn’t open my Tesco groceries app without it crashing, and Laura had problems with her banking app.  It was very frustrating.

It should all be sorted now, but if you’re still having problems it might mean that your apps aren’t set to update automatically.  It was actually an issue with one of Google’s own apps, “Android System WebView” – and it was fixed in an update that should have happened automatically by now.

To make sure the apps on an Android device are updating properly:

  1. Open the Play Store and tap on the three lines menu button in the top left. (If you don’t have this button, tap on the coloured circle in the top right instead).
  2. Tap on “My apps & games” – it might have a bit of a think, then if there are any updates available, you’ll see a green “Update all” button.  Tap the button to update your apps.
  3. Tap the back button in the top left to close that screen.
  4. Tap on the menu button again and this time tap “Settings”.
  5. Near the top of the list you should see “Auto-update apps” make sure that’s set to “Over Wi-fi only” (if you have wi-fi) and “Over any network” if you don’t.

Then once the updates have all finished, turn your device all the way off and back on again.

And that should sort it!

Is this the book that’ll turn you into a 17-year-old?
I don’t mean literally… I can’t do that I’m afraid. 

But you know how young people seem to just instinctively know about all the different kinds of technology out there?  It’s like it’s a sort of built-in knowledge.  Give them a new device or a website or some weird confusing gadget or whatever and they just seem to go “flick flick flick, tap tap tap…” and they’ve got it.

They even have a phrase for it: they call them “digital natives”.  People who were born since the technology revolution and find it easy.

Well, as I say, I can’t make you 17 again.  But I might be able to help you find technology easy like they do.  That’s what “Survive and Thrive in the Digital Age” is all about – why not have a look at the full information here.

And would this one keep Arthur Colborne happy?
A year and a half ago when we first brought out Technology Help is at Hand, I told you a story about Arthur Colborne and the Anti-Profanity League.  He went around handing out little pink cards to people he heard swearing, and was convinced that we’d all be perfectly clean-spoken by the end of the 20th century… 

But of course, he’d reckoned without the invention of PCs, Apple Macs, laptops, tablets, smartphones and all the other fancy, beeping gadgets that make our lives… easier… these days. The Anti-Profanity League might have given up the fight, but we haven’t!  So the next time your gadget goes inexplicably, infuriatingly wrong – instead of just cursing the thing, our newly updated version of Technology Help is at Hand will help you get it back on the straight and narrow!  You can read the full information here.

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