Lawmakers from the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Reform want Apple and Google to investigate where third-party apps are storing their data.
In two letters sent Tuesday, Stephen Lynch, chairman of the National Security Subcommittee, wrote to Apple and Google that certain non-U.S. apps could pose securities risks.
Update: Layton: Lost Future HD is now available for $13.99 in the App Store. A discounted bundle ($10 off!) of all three games is also available.
Classic Nintendo DS puzzle game series Professor Layton continues to make its way to iOS slowly but surely.
Professor Layton and the Unwound Future, the last installment in the original trilogy, which launched on DS a decade ago, is coming to the App Store July 13. Complete with some swanky updated HD graphics for your troubles!
Today, the App Store is a part of every iPhone owner’s life — but it almost didn’t happen. Get the story behind that near-miss, plus some other fascinating App Store factoids, in this week’s issue of Cult of Mac Magazine.
It’s free, and it also packs the latest Apple news and how-tos. Plus, this week we’ve got reviews of three new Apple TV+ offerings, including Tom Hanks’ World War II movie, Greyhound.
Download it now and enjoy it on your favorite iOS device. (Or use the links below to read in your browser.)
Do you remember the world of software distribution before the App Store? It was a fragmented nightmare that made it very difficult for many companies, particularly smaller ones, to get their products out. The App Store changed all that, while also showing the world that the iPhone could have a different “killer app” depending on the user.
With today marking the App Store’s birthday, here are 10 factoids you (probably) didn’t know about Apple’s mobile app marketplace.
TikTok enjoyed another month at the top of the App Store charts in June, becoming the most downloaded non-gaming iOS app, according to a new report from Sensor Tower.
The leading app analytics firm says the Chinese social video app was installed more than 87 million times last month on iOS and Android. That represents an impressive 52.7% increase from June 2019.
Reddit is fixing its iOS app after an iOS 14 beta tester discovered that the app was copying the contents from users’ clipboards.
The clipboard copying appears to have been an accident. In a statement to The Verge, a Reddit spokesperson blamed the problem on a dodgy line of code:
Total App Store spending surged to a massive $32.8 billion in the first half of 2020, combining money spent on premium downloads, subscriptions, and in-app purchases, a recent blog post from app analytics firm Sensor Tower suggests.
Not only is that an enormous amount of cash, but it’s also close to double the estimated gross revenue spent in the Google Play store, despite the bigger market share enjoyed by Android. User spending on Google Play reportedly hit $17.3 billion in the first half of the year.
Another developer is speaking out about Apple’s controlling behavior in the App Store by saying it had an app update rejected because it refused to auto-charge users for its service following a free trial.
“[Apple] can choose to steal from their customers who forget to cancel, but we won’t do the same to ours,” yoga app Down Dog wrote in a recent tweet, saying that this is a line it would not cross.
Apple is running another awesome promotion that offers shoppers free money when they top up their Apple ID. Simply add funds to your account before July 10 and you’ll get 10% extra. Here’s how.
The Department of Justice is considering a possible antitrust probe of Apple, according to three sources who spoke with Politico, the publication notes in a report published Wednesday.
Like the European Union, which recently launched an antitrust investigation of Apple, the DoJ is reportedly focused on Apple’s control of the App Store. Multiple companies have complained that the App Store raises prices and reduces options for customers.
Apple will allow developers to challenge its app review process, and also end its current practice of blocking bug fixes due to minor violations of its rules, Reuters reported Monday.
Apple has not yet revealed the details of the mechanism devs can use to appeal rulings, and an Apple spokesperson declined to comment. However, the feature is supposedly on the way.
Apple is set to begin a deep clean of the App Store in China, removing “thousands” of games that don’t have the proper government approvals, a report by Bloomberg claims.
Developers and publishers have reportedly been told that they will need to secure licenses to continue selling their games starting next month. While regulators have been promising such a crackdown since 2016, they have been slow to push through rules. As a result, unlicensed games were still being published in the interim.
Microsoft’s president Brad Smith has seemingly joined the number of voices criticizing Apple for taking a 30% cut of app revenue.
The Microsoft executive said that the policy is far more anti-competitive than the complaints that led to the Microsoft antitrust case of the early 2000s. The antitrust case against Microsoft helped reshape the tech landscape 20 years ago.
There are no plans to modify the rules of the iOS App Store that would allow Basecamp’s Hey mail app to avoid paying to be listed, according to Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of marketing.
The creators of Hey made news recently by calling Apple “gangsters” for requiring companies to pay 30% of their revenue to have software appear in the App Store.
U.S. lawmakers want to talk to the CEOs of the biggest tech firms. And the heads of Amazon, Facebook and Google said they‘re willing to testify in the House of Representatives’s probe into antitrust activities. Apple, on the other hand, reportedly told Congress that it’s willing to send a senior executive, but stopped short of promising that would be CEO Tim Cook.
One of the creators of newly launched email service Hey accuses Apple of behaving like gangsters by allegedly threatening to remove the app from the App Store if it did not start selling its premium subscription through Apple’s platform — thereby giving Apple a cut of the profits.
“Like any good mafioso, they paid us a visit by phone,” Basecamp CTO David Heinemeier Hansson wrote in a long Twitter thread. “…[W]ithout even as much of a curtesy euphemism, [Apple said] they’d burn down our store (remove our app!), lest we paid up.”
A Chinese video sharing app which ripped off was heavily inspired by TikTok in its design has been booted out of the App Store, shortly after it was removed from the Google Play Store due to reports of plagiarism.
Zynn not only closely resembled TikTok in its design, but also in much of its content. A previous report from Wired claimed that many popular TikTok users have had their content (and even knockoff user profiles) shared on the rival app. That didn’t go over well!
The Apple App Store ecosystem contributed over half a trillion dollars to the global economy in 2019, according to a study commissioned by Apple.
This total encompasses far more than just what iPhone or Mac users pay for software. It includes transactions done through these apps, from grocery deliveries to streaming services.
We already know that video conferencing apps like Zoom are booming as people work from home. But did you know that fitness apps are experiencing a similar golden age while people try and stay in shape (or get into shape for the first time) during lockdown while gyms are closed?
According to app analytics platform Sensor Tower, global downloads of health and fitness apps are already up a massive 47% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2020. And there’s still one month (or a third of the quarter) left on the clock.
Zoom had another stellar month in the App Store as people worked from home during the coronavirus pandemic. According to a new report by Sensor Tower, published Thursday, Zoom received 94.6 million installs on iOS and Android last month. That is up a massive 43x compared to May 2019.
Few areas are booming right now like mobile apps, which have experienced massive growth during coronavirus lockdown. According to a new report from app analytics platform Sensor Tower, data used by mobile app downloads has surged during lockdown.
In a post published Wednesday, the firm said data usage for first-time installs of the top 250 mobile apps worldwide was up 34% from the same quarter last year. Based on an average of the last three years, it is up a whopping 52% — hitting an unfathomable 391 petabytes in Q1 2020. (A petabyte equals roughly 1,000 terabytes.)
Short-form video app Quibi has had a rough start since launching in April, and co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg says there’s only one thing he blames: COVID-19.
“I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” Katzenberg told the New York Times in a report published late Monday. Katzenberg said that the initial app downloads have not been “close to what we wanted.” Now Quibi is going to let iPhone users watch it on their TVs to try and make up some of the lost ground.
TikTok had another massively successful month on mobile in April, a Tuesday report by leading app analytics platform Sensor Tower claims.
According to the report, users spent more than $78 million, across both iOS and Android, on TikTok last month. TikTok ranked number one on the App Store’s list of Top Grossing apps for the month, followed by YouTube, and then Tinder. This list does not include games. TikTok’s user spending is up by 10x compared to April last year.
Microsoft Outlook for iPad and iPhone now makes it easier to stop your inbox getting clogged up with massive multi-reply email threads copying in large numbers of people.
The “Ignore Conversation” feature is a handy new feature added for version 4.36.0 of the app. Here’s what you need to know.
iPad app downloads had their first positive quarterly growth in four years during the first three months of 2020, app analytics platform Sensor Tower claims.
In a new report, the firm says that quarterly downloads of apps for the iPad surpassed 1.1 billion worldwide in Q1. Meanwhile, consumer spending in iPad apps crossed $2 billion for the first time ever. Not bad for a time when the world is in the midst of coronavirus lockdown.