Skype remembers your password again, transfers files, movies, pictures, and still makes annoying noises

If you make VoIP calls through standard SIP servers you have plenty of Android apps to choose from, but for Skype you're stuck with the official client.

And that client sucks.

Noise, ads, death of tabs

There's no way to switch off the dialpad tones (loud annoying beeps), and if you're just connecting for a quiet text chat Skype insists on sounding its startup and shutdown sounds at deafening volume unless you downgrade to a very old version.

The old Skype lets you set your own call ringtone, the new Skype only plays the default Skype tone. Another benefit of vintage Skype is its tabbed interface, which is way better than the new layout that requires detours through the start screen.

One more reason to be old skool: the ancient versions are free of ads. The ads don't matter much yet because they only invade your phone if you're in the USA, UK, or Germany, but other countries will get them later. You won't see the ads if you have Skype credit or any other paid service active, so keeping a balance of a few pennies may be worth the trouble even if you only use Skypes free features. And there's no reason to pay for Skype, because there are plenty of SIP VoIP operators that offer better rates and better sound quality than the overpriced SkypeOut.

Minor improvements

If you keep the old tabbed version you won't get video calls. Not a big deal, because video calling gets old real quick unless you're hooked on cyber sex. Unfortunately you'll also miss out on the new features in the latest update: file transfers. Not just pictures and movies, but any file you want. Of course there's email, but sending pictures straight from a chat screen is a nice touch.

The old Skype remembered your password. Later versions forgot and made you retype your password everytime you'd log in. But the latest edition remembers your password again.

Sometime during the series of updates the background service that persisted after closing the app went away too. If you go to the settings and disable the Skype status notification the background proces called "MainService" won't even show up in your list of running services, but then your notification bar won't tell you if you're signed in or not.

Future?

After a bad start and slipping downhill Skype for Android took a small step up from downright horrible to simply mediocre. It's not enough to make me ditch the old ad-free tabbed version yet, but future versions might change that.

I wonder what's gonna happen first: Skype cleaning up their act or someone coding an alternative Skype client or a real Skype plugin for CSipSimple? Maybe Skype will return to Nimbuzz and fring someday? This would help fight the chat and VoIP fragmentation that's pushing us back to the dark ages.

• Skype (Android Market)
• skype.com
• Skype 1.0.0.983 (Google) (last tabbed ad-free version)

Alternative Grooveshark app shootout: Dood's Music Streamer versus TinyShark

Want to stream songs from Grooveshark to your phone or tablet for free? Without signing up for an account? With Android you can!

Dood's Music Streamer

Dood's Music Streamer pulls songs from Grooveshark. It's playlist and radio support, buffering, and widget are done pretty well. If you copy the buffered tracks from Dood's SD card folder you can even use it as an mp3 downloader, although it only grabs tracks at the 128 kbps bitrate set by Grooveshark. It can scrobble your tracks to last.fm too.

Unfortunately today's update to version 1.2.3 is a big step in the wrong direction. The shuffle and repeat buttons were set nicely apart until v1.2.2, but now they're way too close to the previous/play/pause/next buttons. The elapsed time and song duration moved to a new place on top of the album art instead of near the time bar were they should have stayed. You can switch back to the old layout in the settings menu, but on my phone switching to the old layout gives me white text on a light grey background so I'm stuck with the new interface.

The worst new "feature" is a very annoying and ugly ad banner that sits so close to the tabs that its maker must be hoping for accidental clicks on his ads when you're trying to switch from your playqueue to the search tab or "now playing" screen. Yep, I'm sure the Grooveshark audience really wants to click on bingo advertisements! AdAway doesn't block these ads, but maybe it will when the filter lists get updated?

Updates are meant to improve things, but the switch from version 1.2.2 to 1.2.3 does the opposite.

Update 1: Dood's latest edition removes the ads from the now playing screen, but they still pollute the rest of the app in a way that makes it much too easy to click by accident. It would be better if the ad banner would move to the bottom of the screen, away from the tabs.

Update 2: AdAway now blocks the ads in Dood's Music Streamer. The cat and mouse game goes on!

TinyShark

Dood's step back made me try TinyShark.

TinyShark is good for playing the tracks you searched for, but forget about Grooveshark radio stations. It won't scrobble to last.fm either. And it requires Adobe Flash, which is no big deal unless you're stuck on an old version of Android. Update: new versions of TinyShark scrobble too, and it doesn't require Flash anymore. There are gaps between tracks (TinyShark doesn't precache), and tapping a song in the search results doesn't do anything. You'll have to pick an option from the long-tap menu, because you can't set "add to queue" or "play now" as the default short-tap behaviour. Maybe in the next version?

TinyShark comes with a music downloader add-on which you'll have to download separately. On the bright side, this beats pulling cryptically numbered tracks out of Dood's cache folder.

The verdict: Dood's Music Streamer versus TinyShark

Dood's beats TinyShark at most things, except track downloading. If you don't use an ad blocker Dood's update is so annoying that it makes TinyShark an attractive option, but you're better off if you just keep your old (v1.2.2) copy of Dood's Music Streamer. You can grab the old version from the developers website. Update: Grooveshark changed, old versions of Dood's no longer work.

• TinyShark (Exigo Software)
• Dood's Music Streamer (Android Market) No longer available in the Google Play Store
• Dood's Music Streamer straight from its maker

• Dood's Music Streamer (including v1.2.2 and other old versions) at the dev's site

Update: Grooveshark changed, old versions of Dood's no longer work.

Flash updated, check your privacy and security settings again

iPhoners may believe that Flash is dead, but if you ever tried to book a table from a restaurant homepage or watch video on non-YouTube sites you know better. Without Flash you'll stay hungry and miss out on lots of content. Flash for mobile is slowly dying, but it's gonna stay a necessary evil for years to come.

Adobe released yet another update to squash bugs and patch security holes. Unfortunately you have to reapply privacy and security settings that you may have set before.

Since early October Flash adds an icon in your app drawer that takes you to its Flash player settings page. There are two things to play with: "Local Storage" lets you block Flash supercookies that are usually set by annoying advertisers to follow you around on the web. The "Peer-Assisted Networking" page lets you save mobile data by switching peer-assisted networking off.

If you disabled local storage and peer-assisted networking before you better hit the Flash settings again. When I updated Flash both features were automatically reset to allow all, so I had to tame Flash again.

Don't forget to fire up the settings manager in all your Flash-enabled browsers, because your Flash settings for the stock browser don't carry over to Dolphin or Skyfire, and vice versa.

A security update that undoes your security settings... don't do this again, Adobe. Next update I expect my settings to stay.

• Flash (Android Market)

Adobe pulled Flash out of the Android Market Google Play Store and doesn't maintain Flash for Android anymore. If your Flashless phone stumbles upon a website that requires Flash (plenty of them still do) you can install and run an archived copy of Flash.

DroidWall back up to speed

Plenty of apps ask for internet permission to phone home, download ads, or for no apparent reason at all. Android won't let you keep apps offline through its settings (it should have a built-in permissions manager!), but if your phone is rooted you can tell your apps who's boss.

DroidWall is an outgoing firewall that lets you deny internet permissions. You can tell apps not to use WiFi, to stay away from cellular data, or both. It comes with a blacklist, a whitelist, and a widget to quickly toggle the firewall on and off

The previous update added app icons to the application list (which slowed down loading a lot), but stopped displaying the UIDs.

The latest update (to version 1.5.6) shows the UIDs again. It keeps showing app icons, but now it loads them in a background process so you can start editing online permissions before DroidWall is done grabbing the icons. This speeds things up to the pre-icon levels.

Keep in mind that DroidWall is not totally waterproof. When you boot your phone there's a brief period in which other apps may start before DroidWall does. If you don't want DroidWall to leak in the seconds after booting your phone, switch off WiFi and mobile data before you shut your phone down.

• DroidWall (Google code)
• DroidWall (Android Market)

Update: DroidWall out, AFWall+ in. It's better than DroidWall, and AFWall+ doesn't leak when you boot your phone.