After a long hard fought year, Apple plans to let employees take some extra time off for Thanksgiving, and just like last year, they plan to close iTunes Connect for a week during Christmas, meaning developers won’t be able to push out app updates from December 21st till December 28th.
Apple sent an email to developers earlier today confirming that iTunes Connect will be closed for the holidays. iTunes Connect is the developer portal used to manage applications to sell in the App Store, meaning developers won’t be able to submit new apps or app updates during that time.
In addition to pushing iOS 6.0.1 to users earlier today, Apple has just pushed the first beta of iOS 6.1 for the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad 2, third- and fourth-gen iPads, and fourth- and fifth-gen iPod touch to registered developers. Curiously, however, it does not yet seem to be available for the iPad mini.
Since its debut back in 2008, Apple’s iOS App Store has held the crown for the largest library of mobile apps and games available. That’s no longer the case, however, as its biggest rival, the Google Play store, has now caught up. Today Google announced that it now offers over 700,000 Android titles.
Apple’s much-maligned Maps app, released along with iOS 6, is an easy target, what with mixed up locations, cloud-obscured satellite images, and the infamous melting bridges. However, several developers have come forth to say that they had been warning Apple via reports on developer-only forums since the first beta came out at the beginning of June, 2012.
Some of these developers filed bug reports and sent e-mails to Apple employees as well, all about the poor performance of the upcoming Maps app in iOS 6.
“I posted at least one doomsayer rant after each (developer) beta, and I wasn’t alone,” one developer told CNET. “The mood amongst the developers seemed to be that the maps were so shockingly bad that reporting individual problems was futile. What was needed wasn’t so much an interface for reporting a single point as incorrect, but for selecting an entire region and saying ‘all of this — it’s wrong.’”
Apple’s developer guidelines have always had weird caveats that Apple uses to protect the quality fo their own products first. Their newest strategy is to protect the App Store by putting in place a new guideline that might kill any app that promotes other apps. App recommendation apps, like FreeAppADay, and Daily App Dream might soon find themselves banned from the App Store if Apple begins to enforce the new guideline.
After a lot of confusion and denials from the FBI and Apple, the real source of the 1 million hacked UDIDs that Anonymous leaked last week has finally been found, and aswas theorized last week, it was just an app publisher.
Blue Toad, an app publishing company in Florida, revealed to NBC News that they’re 100 percent confident that Anonymous hacked their databases and stole the UDIDs from them.
There are about fifty hundred billion apps in the App Store. Some of them are really amazing, while others are just shoddy ripoffs of other successful apps.
Getting an app removed from the App Store because it copies some key parts of your app has been a hassle for developers, but Apple just released a new tool that streamlines the process to dispute apps that may be guilty of copyright or trademark infringement.
Apple has seeded a new OS X Lion build to registered developers this morning, less than two weeks after the previous build was seeded through the Apple Dev Center. This one comes with build number 11G45.
What lessons can businesses and app developers learn from the federal government?
The U.S. federal government may not be where you’d expect to see mobile innovation or find good app development suggestions. While there’s still a public sector bureaucracy in government, a number of government agencies are beginning to develop new ways to connect with citizens and invest in mobile technologies for internal use.
Granted, most agencies are doing so because of requirements under the Obama administration’s 21st Century Digital Government Strategy. One of which is that every federal agency must make two high-value, customer-facing services available via mobile devices over the next year. Still, the innovation is happening and the agencies that have already taken up the challenge are good models for agencies that have yet to do so.
They’re also good sources of advice for any organization that is beginning to develop an iOS or mobile app strategy.
Twitter has announced some new changes that make it significantly more difficult and tedious to develop third-party software around the social network. We’ve known that Twitter was evolving its business model and changing its attitude towards developers for quite some time, but this recent announcement marks the first major shift towards a closed Twitter. To put it plainly, many developers probably won’t be looking at Twitter as a potential platform to build on anymore.
What’s changed? Along with a host of new rules and restrictions that limit how apps like Flipboard interact with Twitter, developers are now being told to basically stop developing traditional clients like Twitterrific and Tweetbot. The golden age of Twitter is over.
