Weekend Wrap-Up: Amazon Launches Prime Music; New 'Quantum Paper' Android Redesign is Coming

Happy Sunday, everyone! It’s time once again for the Weekend Wrap-Up, where we gather the top stories in tech from the past week and summarize them for your reading pleasure. If you’ve been out of the loop the last couple of days, keep on reading to get caught up. We’ve got stories from Amazon, Google, Apple and Comcast — let’s get to it.

Amazon Launches Prime Music

It was rumored for quite a while, and this week, it finally appeared — Amazon Prime Music, a streaming service for Prime subscribers. The library won’t be quite as large as those on competing services; Amazon only has deals with Sony and Warner, for example, so no tracks from Warner will be present. Some songs also won’t be available for streaming on release day — customers could wait as long as six months for a track to hit Prime Music. Still, it’s a value add for Prime subscribers who would be paying $99 regardless of whether or not the service existed.

Android Redesign ‘Quantum Paper’ is On the Way

While Apple’s iOS has had user interface guidelines for years, Google’s Android OS has been more of a free for all. It’s Android’s nature, really — Google made the operating system more open on purpose, and to this point, it’s given developers the freedom to design as they please. We may be seeing a shift in that approach, as Google looks poised to push out an Android redesign called “Quantum Paper” to help Android apps look and operate more consistently. On top of that, Google is also developing tools and guidelines for developers to use so that their apps better match the new design. How will all this go over? We’ll likely find out in the next few months.

Apple’s OS X Yosemite Puts Your iPhone Apps in the Dock

Here’s an interesting little tidbit about OS X Yosemite on the Mac: the operating system can apparently recognize some of the apps you have open on your iPhone and can then put them in the OS X dock. Our own Jeff Weisbein discovered it while using both the OS X Yosemite beta and the iOS 8 beta, and deemed it “hit and miss” in terms of how consistently it worked. This feature could be part of the “Hand-off” feature set that promotes continuity between OS X and iOS, but at this point, we just aren’t sure.

Comcast Turning Customer Routers into Public Wi-Fi Hotspots

Comcast subscribers in Houston are getting quite the surprise this week from their ISP. It seems that Comcast is activating public Wi-Fi hotspots on routers that are rented by customers — hotspots that can then be used by other Comcast subscribers to access the Internet. The company claims that there are no security issues with the hotspots, and that customer speeds won’t be affected. However, Comcast has made the program “opt-out,” which means customers have to log into their Comcast accounts and disable the public Wi-Fi hotspot if they’d rather not take part.