App Store - page 77

Popular online streaming music service Pandora started it all. They grew out of the Music Genome Project in January of 2000 and haven’t looked back. Pandora has a web streaming option, is built into many home and car audio products, and, of course, can be found on iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad. While their algorithms can be hit and miss in my experience, they’re still the go-to app when Spotify, Grooveshark, or Rdio don’t quite cut it.

Today, Pandora updated its iPhone app with several new features and a nice face lift to boot.

If rumor serves right, Rovio may soon be expanding their popular Angry Birds series. According to Pocket-lint, the popular mobile gaming company may introduce a new game later this year that switches the classic gameplay around.

U.K. Interactive Entertainment (UKIE) chairman Andy Payne has revealed that Activision’s new studio in Leeds is working to bring a new Call of Duty game to iOS. The hugely successful first-person shooter already has its name in the App Store, but the existing titles only provide access to the game’s “Zombies” element.

Apple has just reported that it has fixed a glitch that’s been plaguing app developers and downloaders today, rendering app updates downloaded today or late yesterday useless. The apps refused to launch, and no amount of re-installation would fix the issue.

Apple just issued a statement to All Things D that calls the all clear. The initial corruption was linked to Apple’s Fairplay digital rights management (DRM), and Apple said it only affected a small number of users.

It appears that Apple has finally acknowledged the app crashing issue that has been plaguing many apps on the iOS App Store in the last day or so. Originally highlighted by Instapaper creator Marco Arment here, apparently some newly updated apps were crashing on launch. The issues stem from corrupted app binaries that were being distributed on the App Store, and may be related to Apple’s FairPlay DRM.

In what appears to be a strange slip on Apple’s part, Securelist is reporting that a Trojan Horse made its way into the iOS App Store this morning. The app, known as “Find and Call”, was available on both the iOS App Store and Google Play, and received a flood of bad reviews before being pulled from both stores.

An issue with Apple’s App Store and Mac App Store is causing newly-updated Mac and iOS apps to become nonfunctional. Users are reporting that after updating certain apps, they no longer load, but simply crash at the startup screen. It is advised that users avoid updating any of their software until the issue is fixed.

Following the start of EA’s iOS sale yesterday, which has seen popular titles like FIFA 12, Dead Space, and Need for Speed reduced to just $0.99, other iOS developers are now throwing their hats into the ring. We got a list of titles from Sega, Capcom, Warner Bros. and more that are now on sale for July 4. Come and get ’em while they’re cheap.

You may occasionally wonder why Apple allows so much crap into the App Store. Despite there being thousands of excellent apps, hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store’s 600,000+ catalog are worthless pieces or junk and/or knockoffs. Apps often slip into the store that should have never been allowed in the first place, and Apple has to pull the offending app after everyone else takes notice.

Apple employs a small group of people to approve each app that is submitted to the App Store. Mike Lee, a former senior engineer at Apple, has shed some light on what life is like for the people who guard the gateway to the largest and most vibrant app ecosystem in existence.

Apple has announced a long-overdue App Store category addition today to developers. A dedicated “Food & Drink” category will be added to the iOS App Store “in the next few weeks,” according to Apple. A category for cooking apps already exists, but related apps like OpenTable will be included in this new category.

As Apple continues to enhance the App Store with new improvements and curated series like Editor’s Choice, this new “Food & Drink” section will surely be a welcome addition when it goes live.

When Apple announced the terms for Newsstand and digital subscriptions, many publications felt that the company was being too hard on them. Apple’s requirement that publishers offer the same deals through the App Store that they do elsewhere while still taking its typical 30% cut of the income ruffled a lot of feathers in the publishing world. While there was a lot of angry discussion about the policy when Apple announced and implemented it, many publications decided to accept the policy – at least initially.

Since then, however, a handful of publications have decided to abandon their presence on iOS devices. Some are planning to build a web app as their only iOS or mobile presence. Others are looking to create deals with various news aggregators. Regardless of their plans, Apple’s terms are one of the key reasons that publishers are getting out of the App Store.

There’s no point in exercising if you can’t tell your friends all about it afterwards, right? Well, if you’re a Nike+ FuelBand user, you now have yet another outlet through which to broadcast your latest jog. Version 1.2 of Nike+ FuelBand for iPhone introduces Path integration, background syncing, offline browsing, and more.

Sometime last week, it became apparent that Apple had tweaked its App Store search algorithm to display results in order of their user rankings and descriptions, rather than the names of the apps themselves. The change brought some confusion, not only to App Store customers, but also to developers, who found that their apps were no longer appearing under certain searches as they had been.

It now appears that Apple has backtracked on that change, however.

If you live overseas, you can now download Google Chrome for the iPhone and iPad at the link below. It’s on the Danish store only right now, but it’s obviously in the process of rolling out, so keep on refreshing, and watch for our early look and video tour of Chrome shortly after it hits the US App Store.

Update: It’s now available in the U.S. Store! Get downloading!

Source: iTunes

If you’re a New York Times subscriber, you’ll be pleased to know that you can now enjoy full access your favorite content via Flipboard, one of the best news readers available on iOS. Even those who don’t subscribe still get a little treat: free access to the publication’s “Top News” section.

We got all excited about The Amazing Spider-Man earlier this month when developers Gameloft released the title’s first teaser trailer. And today the official game of the 2012 blockbuster has hit the App Store. As you’d expect from Gameloft, the 3D visuals look terrific, and they promise to “make Spider-Man more realistic than ever before!”

As more and more companies move forward with BYOD programs and/or mobile strategies centered around streamlining workflows for mobile professionals, the idea of the enterprise app store has gone from being a nice add-on feature to being seen as necessity for businesses, schools, and government agencies.

Developing a strategy around mobile apps is seen as a core need by a solid majority of companies – 66% of organization are considering or implementing internal app stores according to a Sourcebits survey of over 6,000 enterprises. That doesn’t mean that actually pursuing an enterprise app store strategy is an easy prospect.

Despite some advances in volume purchasing by Apple, many companies feel that mobile app options are still sub-par for their needs, particularly when it comes to the purchasing process and volume licensing.

Ever wondered why Facebook’s iOS app is so slow? We’ve explained it all before, but what it comes down to is that the app is an Objective C wrapper around a UIWebView component loading Facebook’s raw HTML data.

Why’s that so slow? Well, UIWebview isn’t very fast, and it has terrible caching, which requires the Facebook app to redownload your entire wall every time it needs to do an update, instead of the chunks it needs.

According to The New York Times, though, that could soon change, and Facebook could ditch the UIWebview bottleneck once and for all.

Just days after opening the App Store to 32 additional countries, Apple released a press release this morning to announce that the iTunes Store is also extending its reach to another nine countries in Asia today, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.

If you’ve ever jailbroken an iPhone, you should be familiar with BiteSMS, the built-in Messages replacement that delivers almost every feature you could ever want in a messages app. One of its highlights is a feature called Quick Reply, which allows you to respond to incoming messages from the home screen, the lock screen, or from within other apps using a handy popup window.

The developer behind this awesome app has now brought Quick Reply to the hugely popular WhatsApp messenger, using a new tweak that’s available now from Cydia.

It’s taken a good three months, but Words With Friends HD has finally gained support for the new iPad. The version 5.0 update, which just hit the App Store this morning — now comes with high-resolution artwork optimized for the Retina display, and support for landscape orientation.

Some iOS developers are noticing a change for the better in their app store search results, and it may in fact be due to Chomp, the app search company that made headlines this past February when it was announced that Apple had acquired it.

When you think of calculator apps, great innovations don’t usually come to mind. Most calculators function the same way, by punching in numbers on little keys. Rechner Calculator (Rechner meaning calculator in German) hopes to change that. This new application, available for $0.99 on the App Store, is the first of its kind to use gestures for operation.

The Notes app bundled with the iPhone is great for quick little notes, but it hasn’t really changed since the original iPhone, and offers very few options other than a selection of three fonts. For those that want an app more powerful than Notes, but not as advanced as something like Pages for the iPhone, Just Type by Shubham Kedia might just be the perfect notes app.

Enterprise app stores are becoming a common feature in many business that have embraced BYOD and mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad. An enterprise app store offers two core advantages: it allows users to easily install apps developed internally and it allows IT managers and others to offer a set of recommended apps from public sources like Apple’s iOS App Store.

Given the thousands of business and productivity apps available for iOS devices (not to mention profession-specific apps in other categories), providing guidance to users can help get them started with the best tools quickly and easily. The tricky part, however, is deciding which public apps to include in an enterprise app store.