MAY 2020 PCWorld 37Shazam is still available in the Play Store.available on iOS
devices. But that’s
OK, because we
hear it’s not very
good anyway (go.
pcworld.com/ntgd).
XNOR.AI
OK, so this isn’t
actually an app, but
Apple’s acquisition of
Xnor.ai did mess up
one of our favorite
Android smart home
apps, so it counts.
Xnor.ai was the smarts
behind the insanely cheap Wyze Cam’s
awesome people detection feature that was
able to distinguish faces from pets so you
weren’t bombarded with alert notifications.
That went away in January when Apple
bought the company (go.pcworld.com/xnor)
and terminated its contract with Wyze. We still
love the tiny and versatile (go.pcworld.com/
vers) $20 camera that works with Google
Assistant but ahem, not with Siri, but we
sorely miss the features Apple stole from us.
SHAZAM
It’s been about 18 months since Apple
acquired the music discovery service Shazam
(go.pcworld.com/shby), and surprise! It’s still
available in the Play Store. It’s even ad-free.
But we can’t help but think that’s only
because Apple hasn’t actually done anything
with it. Once Shazam is built into iOS on the
iPhone à la the Now Playing feature on Pixel
phones, we’re afraid it’s going to disappear
from our Android phones forever too.Wyze’s people detection ran completely on the device, so there was no fear
of video being hacked.