There’s been a lot of flirting going on in recent months between Apple and Facebook. In February, Apple CEO Tim Cook told a group of investors that Facebook was “the one company that is closest to being like Apple”. Last week, Apple did a big App Store promotion for Facebook’s new Camera app, and clearly knew about it well beforehand. Then, of course, there were Cook’s comments at the D10 conference earlier this week. ”Facebook is a great company.” “And the relationship is solid.” Not to mention the ever-provocative ”stay tuned.”
Now the two sides appear on the brink of formalizing the relationship. After much speculation, Facebook integration will indeed be baked into the latest version of iOS, we’ve learned. → Read More
Google today launched version 2.0 of its search app for iPhone. Google completely overhauled the design of the app, which now looks and feels more like the app’s iPad version the company launched last November. The new version feels significantly faster than the last one and the new design works especially well for image searches. Surprisingly, Google hasn’t officially announced the update yet, but it’s already live in Apple’s App Store. → Read More
Remember address book-gate? Locationgate? I-don’t-know-what-my-apps-are-doing-on-my-phone-gate? (Oh, that last one might not be a real thing.) Regardless, we’re living in age where companies are pushing us to rethink the boundaries between what we consider private, personal information and what should be public. The resulting backlash is an overreaction(-gate) when we discover that some of the data we presumed to be ours alone was actually being stored, accessed and shared by others…in many cases, “others” being mobile app developers.
Well, leave it to a security firm to capitalize on the privacy scare trend. And by capitalize, I mean launch a $4 app that tells you what the apps on your phone are doing. Introducing Bitdefender’s Clueful. → Read More
It’s hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple’s top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is what one of the most important app discovery mechanisms for iOS users. But how many downloads does it take to make it into the top 25? Mobile analytics firm Distimo today published some interesting data that answer just this question. Turns out, in the U.S. store, the answer currently is about 38,400 daily downloads for free apps and 3530 for paid apps. To rank in the top 25 per category, of course, takes significantly fewer downloads, with games unsurprisingly being the most competitive category. It takes 25,300 daily downloads to rank in the gaming top 25 for free apps and 2280 downloads for paid apps. → Read More
For a while now “gamification” has largely existed as a buzz word. It’s felt just as ridiculous to write the word as it is to read it. However, as Tim Chang pointed out this weekend, although it’s important to avoid thinking of “gamification as the panacea,” it’s real, it’s moving beyond media and fitness, and it needs to be taken seriously. When it comes to educational tools, gamification has real value in its ability to make learning more fun and engaging. But as with all emerging trends, it can’t be applied willy-nilly.
BenchPrep, a young edtech startup backed by $2.2 million from Lightbank, launched last year to convert content from big educational publishers, like McGraw-Hill, into interactive web and mobile courses. While the startup expanded beyond college admission test prep in January, today it’s announcing that it is teaming up with Princeton Review to contemporize test prep for students, using game mechanics, leaderboards, and social features to make the tedious and teeth-grinding process of test prep more engaging and, hopefully, more effective. → Read More
For Google Maps, winter is coming. Potentially.
As you’ve undoubtedly seen by now, with the upcoming iOS 6 software, Apple intends to replace the Google Maps aspect of their default Maps application with their own, in-house version. Mark Gurman of 9to5 Mac was the first to report this news, and dives into more of the detail behind it, including the 3D aspect. John Paczkowski of AllThingsD confirmed the change. And after talking to my own source, I can beat the dead horse in confirming the switch.
I’ve also heard a little bit more. First of all, iOS 6, which is expected to be shown off in developer preview form at WWDC in June, is internally codenamed “Sundance”. Second, while Paczkowski’s source said the new maps functionality will “blow your head off”, I’ve been told that’s a bit of hyperbole (you think?). Specifically, while the 3D functionality is cool, it’s also not something people are going to use regularly. Think of it like Google Street View — cool, but how often do you actually use it when compared to the regular Google Maps product? (Having said that, I still expect Apple’s 3D maps to be cooler than Google Street View.) → Read More
Back in July of last year, we wrote about a New York City-based startup, called Consmr, which was attempting to build the Yelp, or Rotten Tomatoes of consumer goods. There’s now more web research on consumer goods than ever before, but few resources that use crowdsourced data and social integration to recommend the right product. There are cool sites like Fixya, but opportunity for a service that provides ratings and reviews of consumer packaged goods.
At the time, Consmr was just starting out and to really up its value proposition, it was focused on becoming a data-vore and growing its user base to increase the quality of its recs before adding a component. Of course, for a service like Consmr, it’s all about the aisle experience — being able to whip out your phone at the point of (in)decision. So, today Consmr added a big piece to the puzzle, launching its iPhone app, which is now powered by over 100K user ratings. → Read More
Plug in your iDevices people, because Apple just released an update.
It’s a minor one, to be sure, but brings about some rather helpful bug fixes. Most notably, you should no longer receive the “Unable To Purchase” message when buying digital content from the iTunes or App Store.
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As a resident of NYC, I find little use for the SF Climates iOS app that all of my San Francisco-based friends (read: social media whores) are boasting over today.
But a lot of you do live there, so you might find it useful. Let’s say you live in the Marina and for some reason need to go to the Dogpatch or vice versa but you’re unsure what the weather is like. Or maybe the grit of the Mission is getting to be a bit much and you want to hang out with a bunch of babies in Noe Valley. Do you pack a sweatshirt or put on shorts? → Read More
More than a few people have been clamoring for Daniel Hooper’s thoughtful iPad text editing concept to become a real thing since his video started making the rounds, and now all you mobile text editors have reason to celebrate.
Thanks to the efforts of an intrepid iOS hacker named Kyle Howells, that awesome vision of quick-and-painless text editing has been realized with a new (and free) iOS tweak called SwipeSelection. → Read More
In September 2010, I wrote a post that ignited an absolute shitstorm around these parts. “Shitstorm” in this case meaning a post with a thousand comments, the majority of which were spewed up by rabid Android fanatics. The title of that post:
Is Android Surging Only Because Apple Is Letting It?
At the time, we were in the midst of a massive Android surge to the top of the smartphone ecosystem food chain. This was happening all around the world, but the focus of this particular post was the U.S. market. Based on some comments made by developer David Beach at the time, I wondered if, as the title suggested, Android was only doing so well in the U.S. because the iPhone was still only available on one carrier, AT&T?
It’s time to revisit that thought because there’s now absolutely no question that this was the case. There’s now data to back it up. What’s more, despite what some surveys suggest, this trend may have fully reversed itself. → Read More
This is so illegal that we can probably expect to see it fold in a matter of hours, but if you’re really hankering for some Russian or German TV right now – or some hott sexxxy Penthouse action – iOSLiveTV has you covered.
The site is formatted for iOS and Android and features a number of live TV channels including some adult selections. → Read More
Independent mobile ad network InMobi released its Q1 2012 Ad Data report for North America this morning, covering the mobile ad landscape for the first part of the year. Not surprisingly, the report found the top two mobile operating systems were, again, iOS and Android, each with a sizeable chunk of market share and growing. RIM, meanwhile, was still clinging to spot #3, but has dropped 4.6% since Q1 2011, the report found, going from a 11.9% share to 7.3%. this past quarter.
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Last December, Google launched Currents, its attempt at challenging mobile apps like Flipboard and Zite. Since then, the company has added about 400 new publishers and over 14,000 self-published editions to its lineup . Until now, though, Currents, which runs on Android and iOS, was only available in the United States. That’s changing today, as Google is taking Currents global. Local publishers can now start adding their content to the app and U.S. publishers can now turn on a translation feature to make their texts available in any of the 44 languages that are supported by Google Translate. → Read More
As you’ve likely heard, the “UDID-calypse” is upon us. Because of mounting privacy concerns (from Congress, etc.), Apple has begun rejecting iOS apps that access UDIDs, and will eventually do away with them altogether. For now, it remains unclear how long that will take, but, in the meantime, developers are scrambling to find alternatives. (Yesterday, Kim-Mai laid out some of the options available to those looking to take preemptive action.)
There’s no question that the UDID issue has big potential ramifications for mobile advertising, as Amit Runchal points out. Developers and mobile ad companies unilaterally need to find a workable solution, and one advertising startup thinks it may have just that. Mobile ad platform AppRedeem is developing an ID scheme it’s calling the “Organizational-Specific Device Identifier” (ODID), which it believes provides a long-term alternative to UDIDs. → 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
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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For all the cool things an iPad can coaxed into doing, I find myself using mine to read more than anything else (rewatching old episodes of Doctor Who on Netflix is a close second). I’ve been begun to use it more than my trusty Kindle, and thanks to the timely 3.0 update for the iOS Kindle app, organizing and managing all of those books I’ve bought feels a lot snappier.
Take navigating your archived books, for example. A quick tap on the Cloud button at the bottom of the screen jumps into a listing of purchased-but-not-yet-downloaded content. Scrolling though all of them seems appreciably quicker, and all it takes to get back to the books saved on the device is a tap on the (what else?) device button next to it. → Read More
Are you having fun yet? We’re in the process of winding down from another Apple Event Day, which means recovering from a day full of iFanpeoples eagerly clicking on every iPad-related article on the Web, a day in which blogs lap up the ad revenue, and trolls eagerly proclaim their indifference to whatever this iHubbub is all about, sneering at the army of iClones marching in lock-step to the nearest Apple Store. Let this wash over you, as it’s clearly a unique display that only the tech industry — and, really Apple — is capable of inspiring.
During the new, new iPad/iPad 3/iPad 2S announcement today, Apple CEO Tim Cook told those gathered that Apple is “redefining the category that [it] created with the original iPad.” Personally, I’ve become a bit wary of Apple’s near-constant claims that it is re-defining itself, or language that implies anything along the lines of “we’ve done it, again,” or “look at this miracle of gadget wizardry and fear our command of your wallets.” → Read More
Today, Apple unleashed the “new new iPad,” or iPad 3, or 2S, or whatever you want to call it. It’ll cost you $499, has a new retina display, with an A5X processor complete with quad-core graphics. The iPad 2 is also getting a price drop, to $399, and Apple announced a slew of new updates to existing products, including movie support for iCloud, iPhoto is coming to iOS, along with an update for iOS 5. Yes, iOS 5.1 will be available for download starting today, according to Apple, with some new updates to Siri. → Read More
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