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Directive Blogs

Directive has been serving the Oneonta area since 1993, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

XLoader Android Malware Runs in the Background and Steals Your Data

Mobile malware isn’t common, but it’s growing increasingly more so. You may have heard of a malware called XLoader, which has been used to victimize people in over seven countries. This mobile threat has seen various iterations over the past several years, but you should be especially concerned these days.

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Tip of the Week: Archiving Android Apps to Save Space

Back in April of this year, Google announced that the Android platform would be given the capability to archive unused applications to help preserve the precious storage space on the devices…provided that the device was almost out of available space. This auto-archive feature is now available to all users, regardless of the storage left on their device.

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Tip of the Week: How an Android User Can FaceTime, Sort Of

When it comes to exclusive user features, one of the better-known ones on the Apple side of the house is FaceTime, a video chat platform. Apple has however made certain features of FaceTime available to Android users, but they come with a catch. Let’s go over how an iPhone user can FaceTime with an Android user, even if some of the features are not quite there.

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Upcoming App Archiving Option for Android Devices Might Help You Save Storage Space

Have you ever struggled with storage space on your Android device? For individuals who have, we bet that downloading applications that you ultimately don’t end up using very often is a major culprit here. To help you clear up storage space on your device, Android will receive an auto-archiving feature that can save you significant amounts of storage space by archiving your unused applications.

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Tip of the Week: How to Clear Your Browser Cache in Android OS

Anyone who wants to prioritize their privacy should be aware of the role the cache plays in such a thing. Your Google web browser—even on your smartphone—will store information about what you search so it can personalize your ads and recommendations, but if you would rather not have it do this all the time, you can clear your Android device’s Google search cache and set it up to auto-delete after a set amount of time has passed.

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How to Go Back and Look at Your Android Notifications

Have you ever cleared a notification on your phone, then gotten a sinking feeling a couple hours later, like you’ve missed something important? Well, worry no longer, for we will show you how to turn on your Android smartphone’s notification history feature. This should alleviate at least some of the stress you might experience about clearing notifications.

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Tip of the Week: Keep Your Android Device Updated

If you use Android mobile devices, then you’ll know that updating your device is routine maintenance to keep it safe from threats and security breaches. Not only that, but updating your device can resolve various bugs which impact functionality. Let’s go over how you can update your device to the latest version of its operating system.

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Tip of the Week: How to Manage App Permissions in Android

Modern mobile devices are a bit of a double-edged sword for today’s businesses: on the one hand, they are critical for the productivity that is required of today’s organizations, but on the other, they also come with the very real chance of security issues. The permissions you give (or don’t) to these applications can have an impact on this risk.

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Tip of the Week: Retrieving Dismissed Android Notifications

We’ve all accidentally swiped away an important notification on our mobile devices, but not all of us know that Android devices give us the opportunity to go back and check them. For this week’s tip, we’re going to go over the process of how you can retrieve these notifications.

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New Android Malware Wants to Spend Your Money

“Wait, I didn’t buy that!”

That’s what many smartphone users have been saying lately, as a prevalent strain of malware has been infecting Android devices. The malware is called “toll fraud malware” and it’s been signing users up to services they don’t want.

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Malware That Targets Android Can Cause Major Problems

You often hear about malware that infects desktop PCs, laptops, or servers, but other types of malware that infect mobile devices also exist. One such malware, a threat called TangleBot, has been discovered, and it can become seriously problematic for both workers and consumers utilizing Android devices—especially in today’s mobile-centric workplace.

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Steps to Take When You’ve Lost Your Phone

If you’ve lost or misplaced your smartphone (or tablet), it’s critical that you act quickly. Every second counts, especially if you suspect that your device was stolen. Here are the steps you need to follow immediately, even if you think you simply left it at a restaurant or in the backseat of a taxi.

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Dangerous Android App Masquerading as System Update

Let’s face it, most people are glued to their phones when they have downtime. Many don’t look up to cross the street. With this much dedication to their individual mobile devices you’d think that people would be more careful about what they download.

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Android Apps Suddenly Crashing? You May Have Had a Bad Update

Google’s Android operating system has about a 71.9 percent global market share, making it the most used smartphone operating system in the world. It’s well-trusted, and although the experience differs since phone manufacturers customize Android to fit their device, generally the operating system is pretty stable. This wasn’t the case for a massive number of users around March 22nd, 2021.

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Tip of the Week: Lesser-Known Google Play Features

Android device users rely on the Google Play Store to source applications, but many may not be aware of the controls and features that the Play Store has to offer. Let’s go over some of these features that could prove useful.

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Steps to Take Before You Accidentally Lose Your Phone

Nobody intends to lose their smartphone. For some of us, our mobile device is glued to our hands for a good portion of the day—it’s hard to imagine simply leaving it somewhere, right?

Mistakes happen. It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to set your smartphone up so you can track it down easily if you lose it. 

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Tip of the Week: Using Your Android Device from Your Desktop

Windows 10 has long played nice with the Android platform, but did you know that there is a way that you can actually use the same apps you would find on your mobile device on your PC? For this week's tip, we'll go over how you can enable this capability.

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Tip of the Week: How to Alter the Android 11 Power Menu

If you need a reason to upgrade to Android 11, it comes with a highly useful selection of options when you access the menu that appears when you hold down the power button on your device. However, you have the option to add much more value to this menu. To do this, you’ll need to make a small investment in an automation-driven third-party application known as Tasker. 

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Tip of the Week: Activating Android Guest Mode

While you probably aren’t super enthusiastic about loaning out your mobile device right now, you may not have ever been. After all, you’re effectively handing over a bunch of personal data bundled into a convenient package. However, Android has had a feature that makes it substantially more secure to share your device for some time now.

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Tip of the Week: Simple Fixes to Common Android Issues

As capable as the Android platform is, there are a few significant shortcomings that can negatively influence the user’s experience. Here, we wanted to offer a few tips to help you eliminate or avoid these shortcomings as you work with your mobile device.

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When Securing Your Smartphone, Some Options are Better Than Others

Today’s smartphones are equipped with assorted ways that users can authenticate their identity, from the now old-fashioned PIN to basic biometrics. However, while these options are available on a wide range of phones, not all of them are equally secure. Let’s look a bit closer at these authentication measures to find out which is most effective.

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Let’s Take a Look Around Android 11

There may not be any “official” date set for the release of Android 11, we have gotten a glimpse of it through beta testing. Let’s take a look at some of the features you might see when the OS officially launches.

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Tip of the Week: Altering Your Android Device’s Power Settings

As a smartphone gets older, it’s battery will start to degrade. For years it was as simple as replacing the battery on the device, but over the past several years, no major smartphone manufacturer builds devices with removable batteries. Fortunately for users, the Android OS has made it a point to build power settings into the software that provides them the ability to manipulate how power is used on the phone. Today, we will take a look at some of the settings you can use to keep your device running longer.

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Tip of the Week: Avoid These Types of Android Apps

The Google Play Store has a massive selection of applications available for users to download. Unfortunately, just because they’re available to be downloaded, doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be downloaded. In fact, many of these apps should be avoided. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over a few categories of application that you shouldn’t download in the first place.

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Google is Introducing Verified Business SMS to Android

How often do you find a message in your SMS inbox that has clearly come from a business, but you almost have to wonder, simply because the incoming number seems to be randomized? Google has taken notice of this challenge, and so has rolled out a means for businesses to confirm that they are in fact the ones sending a particular message. 

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Tip of the Week: Restoring Your Android Applications

While there aren’t many reasons that you would want to restore your existing Android applications, the ones that do factor in are pretty compelling. Here, we’ll take you through the process of doing just that.

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Android Work Profiles Enable Productivity

Many users want to use personal devices in a business setting, but some businesses do not support Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) due to fear of data loss. There are a few options to separate work data, but not restrict users from their own personal apps or data. Today we will look at how your business can take advantage of employees that already having a capable device, and how you can keep them from compromising security.

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Tip of the Week: Android Makes it Easy to Block Telemarketers

b2ap3_thumbnail_block_calls_400.jpgEveryone gets unwanted calls from unsolicited numbers on their smartphone. It’s a part of life. What matters, though, is how you deal with these callers. While a pretty comprehensive solution to this problem can be contacting your provider, some more recent models of Android smartphones have the ability to blacklist phone numbers built right into the device.

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Tip of the Week: Five Deliciously Useful Tips for Android Pie

Although Android Q is on its way, Android Pie still has a lot to offer a user - a lot of which many users may not be aware of. For this week’s tip, we’ve compiled a few ways that Android Pie allows you to customize your phone to be the productivity machine you want at your side.

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Tip of the Week: Where to Find Your Android Downloads

Our smartphones have become an indispensable part of our personal and professional lives. As such, we often download various media to them that we want to find again later… unfortunately, this isn’t always so easy. For this week’s tip, we’ll go over where to find those files that you have downloaded.

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Tip of the Week: Android Pie Tips and Tricks

There are over two billion active devices currently using Android. Most of them that have been purchased in the past year or so have come with, or have been subsequently updated to, Android 9.0 Pie. With the introduction of their newest mobile OS, Google has ensured that their software powers more mobile phones than any other software in the world. Today, we’ll take a look at some handy tips you can use to get the most out of your Android Pie experience.

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Tip of the Week: Easy Android Use Tricks

Android devices are known for being customizable, which doesn’t always translate well to user-friendliness. However, if configured properly, these devices feature some nifty shortcuts to just about any function you might require from your device. Here are just four easy ones:

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Setting Android’s Security Options

You might be shocked to find out that your mobile device holds a considerable amount of personally identifiable information on it. This has prompted many users to secure their phones at all times, but others simply ignore the threat and brush it aside. Since Google makes it so easy, there’s no excuse for Android users not to secure their devices. Here’s how you can do it.

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Tip of the Week: Take Back Your Smartphone By Blocking Problem Numbers

Have you ever received unsolicited calls from unknown numbers? Sometimes you might receive them at incredibly inconvenient times, such as while you’re home and trying to wind down after a long day’s work. While Caller ID and voicemail have allowed users to keep unwanted calls to a minimum, there are other ways that you can block a caller entirely from reaching your smartphone.

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Tip of the Week: Mirroring Your Android’s Screen, Made Easy

Have you ever gotten the feeling that your mobile device’s screen is just too small to be used effectively, despite the fact that smartphone screens are bigger than ever before? Well, there is a way to mirror your phone’s screen to a larger screen, like your PC monitor. Here’s how you can do this with your Android device.

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Tip of the Week: You Can Use Your Android Device As An External Hard Drive

Does your business have trouble keeping data on the company network? This can be an issue if your employees use their mobile devices to do work while on the go. In order to keep this from becoming an issue, you should encourage your employees to not keep sensitive data on their mobile devices, and establish policies that give you control over your data and email on personal devices. That said, let’s show you how to get your data off of your Android device and back on your network where it belongs.

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Tip of the Week: The Only Feature Android Oreo Is Missing Is the Cream Filling

The latest version of Android, Oreo (version 8.0), was released earlier this year. Has your phone received the update to it yet? Either way, you’ll want to know what features it has, including how it can help you get more done. Here are five of the many new additions offered by this update to Android Oreo operating system.

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Tip of the Week: Do You Know What Your Android Permissions Actually Mean?

Downloading an application on an Android device is fairly simple: access the Google Play store, find the app you want to download, and press the button that says install. However, it is also too easy to simply hit ‘Allow’ once the app starts asking for ambiguously-worded permissions. Today, we’ll examine what these permissions actually mean.

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Tip of the Week: Putting Your Old Android Device to Good Use

Considering how often smartphones are replaced, you’re bound to have a couple of them stashed away for a rainy day. These devices are particularly helpful in the event that your smartphone breaks unexpectedly, but there are other purposes that you might want to keep in mind. Here are three ways you might be able to use your old mobile devices around the office.

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Apple vs Samsung: Who Makes Better Tablets?

In today’s mobile-centric world, portability is becoming more and more crucial to success in business affairs. This phenomenon can easily explain why tablets are commonplace in boardrooms and briefcases. With Apple and Samsung offering two heavy-hitting tablets (the Galaxy Tab S3 and the iPad Pro), we’ve decided to analyze their features head-to-head to find out which is the supreme option for your business needs.

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Lessons Your Business Can Learn From the Galaxy Note 7 and 8

Samsung fans are getting geared up for the release of their new smartphone, the Galaxy Note 8. Even though it might seem as though the technology world has moved on from the exploding Note 7, you can be sure that Samsung is still feeling the reverberations from last year’s debacle that resulted from the now-infamous exploding of their much-anticipated Galaxy Note 7.

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Have You Tried Google’s Cloud Printing?

Most people don’t think to try and print something out from their smartphone--particularly because it’s such a new concept. With smartphones quickly becoming just as fast as desktops from just ten years ago, it shouldn’t be such a stretch to suggest printing from them. Thanks to the cloud, you can use your Android smartphone to print something directly from the device.

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Secure Your Android During the Holiday Season

Android is a very common operating system on mobile devices around the world, and because of this, you won’t be surprised to hear that hackers are always trying to one-up security developers. If your business takes advantage of Android devices like smartphones or tablets, you’ll want to consider these 11 security tips that will help keep your organization safe.

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Ditching the iPhone for an Android Phone Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated

Learning how to use a new technology can sometimes be troubling. If you’ve been a dedicated Apple customer throughout the years, but are considering switching allegiances to Android, you should know that simple differences between the two platforms can end up disorienting. Here are a few things you have to know when switching away from the iPhone.

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Tip of the Week: Easily Add a New Gmail Account to Your Android Device

b2ap3_thumbnail_email_android_400.jpgAndroid smartphones are well known for taking advantage of the plethora of applications developed by Google, like your calendar and Google Drive. One of the best ways you can get the most out of your Android device is by using its Gmail application. We’ll walk you through how to add a new Gmail account to your device, and how to switch between your multiple Gmail accounts.

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Tip of the Week: 7 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your Android Battery

b2ap3_thumbnail_smartphone_battery_400.jpgVirtually every tech user wishes their mobile device battery would last longer, yet not every user understands that they can achieve this simply by adjusting their device settings. Here are seven simple adjustments you can make to your Android device in order to get its battery power to last longer.

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Warning: Malicious Adware Finds New Way to Spread on Android Devices

b2ap3_thumbnail_security_for_your_it_400.jpgWith many organizations heavily relying on mobile computing, malicious operators have begun targeting the “low-lying fruit” of a business’ IT infrastructure, which is often a company’s mobile devices. Kemoge, a malicious adware strain designed to corrupt Android mobile operating systems, is the latest mobile threat that your business needs to protect itself against.

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Tip of the Week: How to Remove Excessive Bloatware on Your Android Device


b2ap3_thumbnail_software_bloatware_400.jpgSmartphones are filled with all sorts of nifty apps. In fact, some of the most useful applications come pre installed on the device. However, not all apps are worth your time. These unwanted applications are called “bloatware,” and can impede the device’s ability to perform to your specifications.

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Tip of the Week: Don’t Lose Sleep Over Lollipop’s Alarm Clock Bug

b2ap3_thumbnail_android_alarm_clock_400.jpgIf you’re an Android enthusiast, you’re aware that Google issued an upgrade to the operating system known as Android 5.0, Lollipop. In addition to a significant graphics overhaul and some functionality changes, one potential issue might have flown under your radar in the form of your Android’s alarm clock application.

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Tip of the Week: 3 Ways to Improve Your Android’s Battery Life

b2ap3_thumbnail_android_battery_400.jpgWe all know how useful smartphones are, especially when you’re in a pinch and need to access the Internet. However, you can’t take advantage of any of these sweet features if your battery dies out within four hours of a full charge. This might be an extreme case, but the point stands that there’s a ton of stuff draining your battery when you don’t want it to.

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Tip of the Week: A Step-By-Step Guide to Broadcasting WiFi From Your Android Device

b2ap3_thumbnail_android_wifi_hot_spot_400.jpgWe all know how touchy WiFi can be, especially when you need it most. A shoddy wireless signal can be especially troublesome if you have tasks that need to be completed, and you need a WiFi connection to complete them. Instead of getting all flustered and calling your ISP, try using your Android smartphone as a mobile hotspot.

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Tip of the Week: How to Sync Media From PC to Android Using Windows Media Player

b2ap3_thumbnail_windows_media_player_400.jpgWhat’s the best way to transfer your media files from your Windows PC to your Android mobile device? There are many different ways to go about this. One of the most-efficient-yet-often-neglected ways to sync your music is Windows Media Player.

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Tip of the Week: 4 Android Device Lock Settings

b2ap3_thumbnail_android_security_400.jpgThe busy business owner keeps sensitive work-related information stored on their mobile device. If he lost the device, it could have disastrous results, especially if the device were to fall into the hands of an experienced hacker or competitor. Just in case, it’s a best practice to always lock your mobile devices. How do you choose the Android lock feature which is right for your unique needs?

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Tip of the Week: Recover Deleted Files on an Android Device with the Dumpster App

b2ap3_thumbnail_the_dumpster_app_400.jpgIt’s no secret that Android devices are omnipresent in the mobile market. However, they have a flaw which some people might not even have realized is there: The lack of a recycle bin for deleted files. Because of this, any files you want to delete from your device will be lost forever upon deletion (though you might be able to ask the NSA for a hand finding them). Thankfully, there’s a fix to this issue with an application called Dumpster.

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Tip of the Week: How to Remotely Wipe Your Android Device Clean

b2ap3_thumbnail_wipe_your_android_device_400.jpgMobile technology has invaded our very way of life. We don’t leave the house without our mobile phones, and many business owners have their phones integrated to connect with their company’s network. The average user has many different social media applications and others that utilize personal information. What would happen if you lost it?

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iOS vs Android: Who Won in 2013?

b2ap3_thumbnail_android_or_ios_400.jpgIt's a classic battle. Android versus iOS, a technological battle royale for our portable device hearts. It was a very interesting year for both platforms as iOS launched the largest revamp of its software to date with iOS7, and it seemed like every budget device out there was running some sort of Android software. Apple critics were quick to point out that their new software had astonishing similarities in both looks and feel to Android, while Android critics were quick to point out Apple devices with the new A7 chip were faster and more powerful than anything else on the market. So, who won out in 2013? The numbers may surprise you.

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