This past week has been a big wake-up call for the iOS developer community. The need to move away from UDIDs, or an ID scheme that many developers rely on to power advertising and store data about their users, took on extra urgency after Apple issued a few app rejections related to UDID use over the past week and a half. Even though Apple told developers that it would deprecate UDIDs about six months ago, the community hadn’t yet converged on a good alternative.
There is a lot of misinformation right now. Because Apple often communicates policy changes through one-off app rejections instead of publishing a clear and transparent notice to everyone, developers get aggravated by rumors. While being super secretive stokes consumer appetite for Apple products, it’s a ridiculously awful way to operate a platform that 700,000 apps rely on.
Chartboost, which does direct advertising trades between developers, sent out an e-mail last night saying that the stories about UDID rejections are “completely fabricated.” But another indie developer, TapBots, posted an actual copy of a rejection notice they received this morning (pictured below).
So what is going on? → Read More
The Fair Labor Association has concluded its month-long investigation of Chinese manufacturer Foxconn’s factory conditions, and as they indicated early on, they have encountered “significant issues,” though it’s far from the sub-Dickensian hellhole many perhaps expected. They have focused on a few of the most significant problems and made some suggestions as to how to remedy them.
Ultimately these solutions will need to be monitored by Chinese authorities — the same authorities under which the previous, nominally illegal excesses of Foxconn’s were swept under the rug. But with the eye of the world upon them, it may be that even the most lax of regulators will have to make an effort to keep their industry in line with the laws that ostensibly bind them. → Read More
Our good buddy Farhad Manjoo writes over at Slate that he believes Microsoft has already beaten Apple at the living room game. Why buy an Apple TV – either in its current form or in some sort of Siri-powered large-screen LCD form (which we’ll call ATV) – when your Xbox 360 does everything you want it to right now.
Sadly, he’s wrong. While Microsoft has improved their offering considerably and while voice commands are fun, there is still no compelling reason to buy an Xbox just for its streaming capabilities, nor is there any compelling reason to buy any one streaming system over any other. As they say, all set-top boxes make users unhappy in their own way.
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New numbers out from Nielsen today point to just how close the U.S. is to having more smartphone than feature phone users: analysts say 49.7 percent of cell phone users currently own a smartphone, a big leap on the 36 percent who owned smartphones only a year ago.
What’s increasingly clear in that growth is that, at least in the U.S., no other platform is proving to be a contender against Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.
Currently, Android-based smartphones account for 48 percent of all smartphones owned in the U.S., while Apple’s different versions of the iPhone account for 32 percent. Both of those shares have grown: in September 2011, Nielsen said that Android’s share was 40 percent and Apple’s 28 percent. → Read More
A palate-cleanser for the four course meal that will be your long and fruitful day: Yoni Heisler recounts a talk by Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus in which he describes the naming process. Siri means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory” in Norwegian and Kittlaus owned the siri.com domain. He was planning on naming a child after said beautiful woman but his first child was a boy. Instead, he named his product after her.
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Like that “pull-to-refresh” feature found in many popular iOS apps, including Twitter, Facebook, Tweetbot, Sparrow and others? Been wondering why Apple hasn’t implemented the same thing in its own apps, like Safari or Mail, for example, when such a thing would make for a dramatically improved user experience? As it turns out, the reason why the feature hasn’t made its way into Apple’s core iOS apps may have to do with a patent application titled “User Interface Mechanics” – an application which lists the inventor as Loren Brichter, creator of Tweetie. You know…Tweetie? The app Twitter acquired back in 2010, which later became the official iOS Twitter client?
Yep, Twitter is trying to patent “pull to refresh.” But the patent app doesn’t stop there – it goes after anything that issues a command on pulling down a menu. → Read More
As we reported this weekend, Apple has started ramping up its efforts to deprecate the UDID – the unique identifier that ties a user to a specific device, like an iPhone or iPad. The company originally announced its intentions to phase out the UDID’s use more than six months ago, with the release of iOS 5, but it recently began to reject apps from the App Store which are attempting to access those identifiers.
Today, the makers of a crash-reporting solution for mobile developers, Crashlytics, is launching an open source alternative to the UDID called SecureUDID, which it believes will address the privacy concerns surrounding UDID usage.
→ Read More
A group is asking Change.org to withdraw the petition which asked Apple to protect workers’ rights in China. The petition, which had previously gathered over 255,000 signatures before being delivered in-person to Apple stores in major U.S. cities, including New York, recently made headlines following a New York Times series on the harsh conditions of factory workers in China. The series examined the working lives of those tasked with building our favorite gadgets, like iPhones and iPads.
But one of the critical stories that helped lead the crusade, and therefore the petition, was that of American playwright Mike Daisey, whose one-man show attempted to get his audience to think about the origin of their beloved iGadgets. Unfortunately, his story turned out to be partially false. Now a second group wants the original petition recalled, saying “Apple is already doing more for worker rights in China than just about any other IT company that deals with Chinese suppliers.”
Oops. → Read More
The speculation of what Apple is going to do with all their cash has long been a favorite topic in the tech and financial press.
But the thinking along those lines is often akin to the cognitive dissonance one experiences when seeing a billionaire driving a Honda Civic; What’s the point of having all that money if you’re not going to spend it?
That thinking is what we saw when Apple recently announced their cash plans. Two common reactions went something like this … → Read More
Amid extra scrutiny from Congress around privacy issues, Apple this week has started rejecting apps that access UDIDs, or identification numbers that are unique to every iPhone and iPad.
Apple had already given developers a heads-up about the change more than six months ago when it said in some iOS documentation that it was going to deprecate UDIDs. But it looks like Apple is moving ahead of schedule with pressure from lawmakers and the media. It can take more than a year to deprecate features because developers need time to adjust and change their apps. A few weeks ago, some of the bigger mobile-social developers told me that Apple had reached out and warned them to move away from UDIDs.
But this is the first time they’ve issued outright rejections.
“Everyone’s scrambling to get something into place,” said Victor Rubba, chief executive of Fluik, a Canadian developer that makes games like Office Jerk and Plumber Crack. “We’re trying to be proactive and we’ve already moved to an alternative scheme.” → Read More
It’s a sin I know almost too well as a blogger. It’s slow going for news on a Friday night and the pageview gods send you a reprieve in the form of a tweet.
A former Apple engineer is berating the company’s design ethic in the post-Jobs era in less than 140 characters?
Score! Suddenly one story becomes another story then another story then another story then another story.
Until it’s a crisis! ZOMG! Apple is over! The company is finished!
Interested in the actual story, I talked with former Apple TV engineer Mike Margolis about the tweet that launched a thousand blog posts. → Read More
Apple’s third-generation Apple TV didn’t really enjoy the limelight upon arrival. Something flashier stole the show.
But it’s still an important product, especially considering that the way we consume media is rapidly changing. Matt and I discuss this, and actually end up arguing a little bit more than I expected, in this episode of Fly or Die. → Read More
Alright. So you have your new iPad. You’re breathing easy knowing that the hectic, crazy part is over and you can simply relax and browse the interwebs on that stunning Retina display.
But not so fast. The iPhone rumor mill started picking up the pace before the iPad was even announced, and now that big brother tablet is out and about, speculation is revving up. Today, the rumors include a 4.6-inch Retina display on the next-gen iPhone, as well as 4G LTE connectivity. → Read More
With a metric that’s bound to make mobile app developers jealous, Apple has confirmed that its newly launched iOS-compatible version of iPhoto hit the 1 million user mark, only 10 days after its release. That’s not app downloads, mind you, but unique users. Given the app’s universal nature, it’s likely that many are installing it at least twice – once on the iPhone, or possibly the iPod Touch, and then again on the iPad. But Apple is counting such an installation only once in this metric. The number of actual downloads may be much higher.
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Apple is hot. I’m not talking about the temperature of the new iPads, I’m talking about its stock. At around 3pm ET today, Apple traded at a new all-time intraday high $609.65 a share, up more than 50% for the year. The stock finished 2011 at $405 and closed today at $602.50, up nearly $200 a share (+48.77%) year-to-date. One share is now worth more than a new 32GB iPad. → Read More
iPad, iPad, iPad.
What else is there to say? You already know the Retina display is amazing. You know the camera’s been improved and that that little A5X chip is super snappy. You know that the latest version of iOS supports Japanese Siri and voice transcription. You know three million iPads were sold in the first three days they were available, and that Apple is expected to sell 66 million before the end of 2012.
What you don’t know, however, is what John and I think of the new iPad. → Read More
Attention George Foreman: report to an Apple Store near you immediately. There’s a hot (literally) product, you simply must buy the entire inventory of to keep your grilling empire alive: the new iPad.
Or at least, that’s what the latest nonsense from Consumer Reports would have you believe.
We’ve seen this ridiculousness from Consumer Reports before. In June 2010, at the height of “Antennagate”, Consumer Reports figured out the art of click-bait. If you say something outlandish, even if it directly contradicts something you previously said (and sometimes that’s even better!), you must harp on a story to keep those precious pageviews flowing in. And so harp they did. → Read More
Initial teardowns of the new iPad whetted many a chip nerd’s appetite when they revealed that the A5X chip inside was truly gigantic. At nearly 13x13mm, it is significantly larger than the A5, which was itself already kind of a hefty bugger.
Now some clear images (from Chipworks) have been taken of the die itself (some rather rough ones with initial “floorplans” showed up earlier over the weekend) and it’s becoming more and more clear that the A5X is a stopgap measure: a last-generation product that’s overcompensating, if you will, with a jumbo-sized GPU. → Read More
Rob Schmitz is a reporter and Marketplace Correspondent based in Shanghai, China. He has spent time in many factories – as well as a bit of time outside of the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, the same factory fabulist Mike Daisey interviewed workers he purported were 12 and 13 years old. Schmitz’s findings definitely didn’t jibe with Daisey’s and I decided to sit down for a few minutes to go over his experiences reporting on Chinese manufacturing practices and problems.
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Earlier today, AT&T announced record sales and activation numbers for the new iPad. During the Apple dividend/buyback call, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke of a “record weekend” for the new iPad. Unfortunately, neither had actual numbers to share. And that was odd since normally when Apple has a new record number to crow about, crow they do. This was more of an Amazon maneuver where “records” are set by products selling 4x of another unstated number.
Turns out Tim Cook just didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Apple has just issued a release with their actual sales numbers for the first weekend of the new iPad. And the numbers are big. Very big. Three million iPads sold in the first three days big. → Read More
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