With 2016 coming to a close, Nielsen has ranked the year’s most popular mobile apps in the U.S. and — wouldn’t you know it! — Facebook takes the top two spots with its Facebook and Facebook Messenger apps.
Despite the growth of other social media services, Facebook saw growth of 14 percent from last year, with more than 146 million average unique users each month. Facebook Messenger also picked up over 129 million unique users every month.
More iPhones and iPads were activated over the festive season than any other company’s handsets and tablets, according to data published by analytics firm Flurry.
Analyzing data about phone and app activation throughout the week leading up to Christmas day and the start of Chanukah, Flurry found that 44 percent of all new activations were for Apple devices — more than twice the number of nearest rival, Samsung.
Instagram’s move to adopt features similar to SnapChat seems to have paid off for the globally popular photo-sharing network.
On its blog Thursday, Instagram sent a thank you note to its community, a number that surpassed 600 million users since it was founded in October of 2010.
A Canadian man says he’s lucky to still have his eyes after a Samsung Galaxy S7 exploded in his hands.
Amarjit Mann told a local news station that he felt something in his pocket getting warm while he was driving. He pulled out his Galaxy S7 and says it exploded immediately. Sparks from the blast hit him in the cheek.
iPhones fell to just 12 percent of worldwide marketshare in Q3, claims a new report from Strategy Analytics — totting up the figures for what it claims was the fastest growth period for smartphones in one year.
Android phones, on the other hand, captured a record 88 percent of global smartphones shipments during the three month period. As for BlackBerry and Microsoft Windows Phone? Best not to ask, really!
Apple has been opening plenty of Apple stores in China, but it could go even further into East Asia with a brand new retail store — based directly across the street from Samsung’s headquarters in Seoul, South Korea.
We guess Tim Cook’s been taking trolling notes again!
An exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone has reportedly totaled the Jeep Grand Cherokee of a family in St. Petersburg, just days after Samsung issued a worldwide recall for its hottest new smartphone.
Owner Nathan Dornacher said that he and his wife went to a yard sale over Labor Day weekend. While unloading a desk they’d bought for their daughter, Nathan left his new Note 7 to charge in his vehicle.
Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 7 smartphones have barely made it into the wild, but early reports of the devices exploding in customers’ homes may have caused the company to delay shipments.
In a statement to news outlets today, Samsung said it delayed shipments to do product-quality tests, however, local reports from South Korea reveal the company may be investigating whether the device is prone to spontaneously burst into flames.
T-Mobile has declared “the era of the data plan is over,” and that it is offering all users unlimited data from this point on.
Called T-Mobile ONE, the new setup announced by CEO John Legere offers customers a way to get rid of pesky data plans — with unlimited talk, text and 4G LTE smartphone data, all for the impressively low cost of $40 per line if you’re a family of (at least) four.
Netflix has created an all-new app for iPhone and Android users, only instead of letting you binge on all the video content you want, the new app simply checks if your Internet connection is up for the challenge.
The first major Android app made by Apple engineers is finally ready for primetime.
Coming over a year after the launch of Apple Music on iOS, Apple released the first non-beta version of Apple Music on the Google Play Store today and it comes with a couple new features.
Pokémon Go just keeps on, well, going — with the latest figures from App Annie claiming that it has been installed upwards of 100 million times, and that the game is currently raking in more than $10 million per day.
As part of Apple’s two-step authentication service it’s possible for users to confirm their identity via an SMS sent to a trusted phone number.
That is about to change, however, according to the latest draft of the Digital Authentication Guideline, which reveals that the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology is set to ban all SMS-based two-factor authentication systems.
Fitness trackers are a leaky haven of data for hackers, according to a new study that found if you want a device with a high security rating, you better buy an Apple Watch.
The U.S. Army Special Operations Command is planning to tell Android to stand down.
Charged with overseeing the Army’s elite special forces operations, the command is reportedly making a switch to iPhone because Android is unstable compared to iOS.
Glowing reviews for the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge have been translated into stellar sales for Samsung.
The South Korean company’s latest handsets have been so successful this year that they’ve helped it overtake Apple to become number one smartphone maker in the U.S.
As the technology around us gets smarter, many fear it will turn against us. That nightmare comes true in this parody ad for Google’s self-driving car, which mows down poor pedestrians as it tears down the streets of Los Santos.
A 10-year-old with insane hacking skills just scored a $10,000 payout from Facebook for uncovering a serious flaw in Instagram.
The Helsinki-based boy, who can’t even open a Facebook account for another three years, found he was able to alter code on Instagram’s servers to delete comments posted by any account.
Google’s autonomous cars have taken to the road with the rest of us normals in our comparatively Flintstones-esque, human-directed rides. And the very small brush-ups are starting to come in.
In fact, the California DMV has created a form just for reporting accidents involving at least one self-driving vehicle, and it publishes these reports on its website. And while the doomsayers and doubters have wrung their hands about cars plowing into trucks filled with baby penguins, the truth is that the dozen or so accidents on the list are so hilariously small that they hardly seem worth the paperwork at all.
They should definitely file the reports; don’t get us wrong. But we imagine an eye-roll or two while it happens.
Apple’s encryption showdown with the U.S. government may be more or less dormant for now, but Facebook-owned WhatsApp has its own courtroom drama happening in Brazil. It scored a slight win today, however, as a judge overturned a decision yesterday that would have shut the whole thing down across the country for several days.
The controversy surrounds the messaging app’s end-to-end encryption. Specifically, the developer’s inability (and/or unwillingness) to crack it to comply with law enforcement requests.
Everyone knows you shouldn’t say “bomb” on an airplane — and it should be just as obvious that you shouldn’t name your wireless gadgets ridiculous things, either.
A simple Wi-Fi hotspot sparked terrorism fears on a recent Australia-bound Qantas plane because someone thought it would be a good idea to name it “mobile detonation device.”
Google is on the verge of signing a new deal with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to build “several dozen” self-driving minivans, according to a new report.
The first models could be on the road sometime this year for the first phase of the self-driving vehicle partnership, but it’s not yet clear what the main objective is.
Silicon Valley campaign donations have poured way more money into the presidential bids of Democrats than Republicans, surprising nobody, ever.
This shocking revelation comes from a report from CrowdPAC, a non-partisan, political crowdfunding organization that has discovered that the companies most likely to donate to campaigns are Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon. And while the findings don’t include fine-grain data like individual amounts or the actual numbers of employees, they do make one overwhelming conclusion:
Techies don’t like Donald Trump.
Google is working on a new app called Trips that will help users plan their next vacation by automatically pulling information from their emails. The app will also help travelers find things to do while they’re away, and offer reviews from locals.
While we’ve heard reports of smartphones catching fire before, usually this is the result of dodgy third-party charging cables being used.
Not so with a new report claiming that one user’s Samsung’s Galaxy S6 edge+ suffered a similar fate — while being plugged into an official Samsung charger!
