WhatsApp has denied that it is holding sales talks with Google following reports that the company is on the verge of a $1 billion buyout. One source claimed last week that the hugely popular cross-platform messaging service has been in talks with Google for the last 4-5 weeks, but WhatsApp’s business development lead, Neeraj Arora, denies any discussions.

The iPhone 5 is set to launch on T-Mobile this Friday along side T-Mobile’s new “uncarrier” no contract strategy. Not wanting to get left behind, Virgin Mobile is planning to win over T-Mobile’s pre-paid customers by offering them $100 to switch sides.

In a new ad campaign called “Retain Your Brain” Virgin is offering $100 to T-Mobile customers to move their number over to one of its unlimited plans that start at $35 a month and could result in $334 of savings over two years.

There are a couple of cross-platform messaging apps that will help you bridge the divide between your friends on iOS and Android, but over the last year, WhatsApp has become the most popular option, and it’s caught the attention of Google.

A new report claims that Google is in talks to buy WhatsApp for $1 billion, but the talks have been going on for four or five weeks and haven’t been finalized yet.

The App Store and Google Play continued to drive mobile app downloads during the first quarter of 2013, while BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain “distant challengers.”

That’s according to the latest figures from Canalys, which say a whopping 13.4 billion apps were downloaded across these four stores over the last three months, raking in $2.2 billion in app sales, in-app purchases, and subscriptions.

Google’s got an Android problem, and a big one. And it’s a problem Google shares with us fans of Google content-delivering services, such as Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google+ and others.

That problems is that companies like Amazon and Facebook increasingly hijack Android to divert user attention away from Google services and toward their own or their partners’.

This post isn’t about the problem, which I’ve written about extensively here, here and here. It’s about the solution.

Still, let’s understand both the problem and the solution.