There are now over 500,000 iPhone apps and 170,000 iPad apps available on Apple’s App Store and that number will surely continue to increase as new app developers enter the foray. In March 2012 Apple’s App Store surpassed its 25 billionth download. If you’re not already buying apps regularly, you probably will be soon. Here are some tips that may help you save some money on your App Store purchases.
The new American Pie film American Reunion is set to open in theaters this Friday, April 6th. To help promote the movie, Universal Pictures thought it’d be a great idea to release an app called Stifler’s App Suite featuring a soundboard of all the various raunchy sayings of the series’ infamous support character, Stifler.
Looks like Stifler was too hot for the App Store to handle, though. An anonymous source has exclusively told Cult of Mac that Apple’s App Store review team has rejected the app due to foul language. The rejection has forced the Universal team to resubmit a watered-down version of the app. Stifler’s hardly even himself anymore.
When we broke the story on Friday about Girls Around Me — an iOS app by Russian-based app developer i-Free that allowed users to stalk women in thee neighborhood without those women’s knowledge, right down to their most personal details — Foursquare was quick to respond within hours, cutting off the API access that the app relied upon to function.
Foursquare’s swift response to the issue effectively killed Girls Around Me, and i-Free quickly yanked the app from the App Store in the aftermath until they could figure out a way to restore service. And for a lot of people, the story ended there. The app’s gone. Why keep talking about it?
That’s exactly the way Foursquare (and Facebook) wants things.
When the creepy girl stalking app Girls Around Me went missing from the iTunes App Store last night, it wasn’t immediately clear who had pulled it: Russia-based i-Free, the developer behind the app, or Apple itself.
Now i-Free has clarified matters. They pulled the app themselves… but not because they think they did anything wrong. In fact, they’ve gone as far as to say that it is “unethical to pick a scapegoat to talk about the privacy concerns. We see this wave of negative as a serious misunderstanding of the app’s goals, purpose, abilities and restrictions.”
Oh really?
Girls Around Me — the creepy geo-location app that allowed you to stalk and find personal information about girls in your neighborhood without their knowledge — has been pulled from the iOS App Store.
In direct response to our story from earlier today about Girls Around Me, an iOS app by Russian-based app developer i-Free that tracks and gives personal information about women without their knowledge, Foursquare has released a statement announcing that they have officially killed Girls Around Me’s access to their public API.
Note: Title has been changed to reflect “in-app” revenue
You may have seen this report around the web about the Amazon Appstore generating more in-app revenue than the Google Play Store. While that in itself it impressive, everyone seems to be missing the most important detail of the report: Android is generating more in-app revenue than iOS. At least that’s what this report is claiming.
Apple introduced Find My Friends ahead of iOS 5 last year. The iOS app allows you to see where your friends and family are located around you. Apple pitched the service as something for a family to use at Disneyland, but honestly, it feels more like a tool for digital stalking.
My colleague John Brownlee highlighted a major issue with Facebook privacy earlier today, so it’s only fitting that we take a look at another app from the same vein. Although you won’t be able to stalk random women with Find My Facebook Friends, you will be able to see your friends on a map. The only difference is that Find My Facebook Friends takes user privacy pretty seriously. If only the app was less buggy.
Just six months after announcing that developers must stop accessing a device’s unique device identifier (UDID) within their iOS apps, Apple put its rule into practice last week amid increasing privacy concerns surrounding mobile apps. Any app submitted for App Store approval will soon be rejected if its attempts to access a UDID, and developers need an alternative.
That alternative could come from AppRedeem, a mobile advertising platform for app discovery, branding and monetization, which has developed a system called Organizational Specific Device Identifier, or “ODID,” already being used by Groupon.
Most presentations are boring.
Whether it’s because the slides themselves are not exactly inspiring or the person delivering them isn’t exactly…well…inspiring, you’re bound to run into more mediocre ones than excellent ones. Now what if you have to give one? Are you prepared? Do you have the tools on hand to make the process as painless and powerful as possible? Well, with Slidevana you will — and you’ll save time in the process.
But this Cult of Mac Deals offer is almost done. And when it does go, so do the 50% savings!
Have you ever wished that Apple would let you see App Store updates in the iOS Notification Center? Instead of having to open the App Store app to check for updates, you would be able to see new updates next to your other iOS notifications as they become available.
Thanks to a new tweak called AppUpdateNotifer, you can see App Store updates in the Notification Center drop down window on a jailbroken iOS device.
The first iPad was debuted by Steve Jobs to thunderous applause on March 12, 2010. Many media pundits criticized the tablet for its ridiculous name and called it a huge flop. Fast forward two years later, and we couldn’t imagine a world without the iPad. It has shaped what Apple has dubbed the “post-PC era.”
Over 50 million iPads have been sold to date, and Apple just sold 3 million third-generation iPads over launch weekend. Most tablet manufacturers dream of selling 3 million units in a year, but analysts estimate that Apple will sell an upwards of 66 million iPads in 2012 alone. That is an absolutely astounding figure.
A new report from app analytics firm Distimo takes a look at the iPad and its App Store footprint two years later. Let’s take a closer look:
The enterprise app store is becoming a reality in many companies. Initially envisioned as a way to make internal apps available to employees, the concept has quickly grown to include public apps available in Apple’s iOS App Store. This allows businesses to offer employees a curated list of apps that relate to specific fields or job functions.
A curated list of public apps is a great idea and it can save employees both time and effort in selecting apps that can help them work more efficiently and effectively. The challenging part, however, is choosing which of the hundreds of thousands of iOS apps to include in your company’s app store.
Do you like the pull-to-refresh feature found in many popular iOS apps? Well, you might want to prepare to see it go the way of the dodo, as Twitter is now trying to patent it.
Apple recently announced the winner of its 25 billionth App Store download contest. Fu Chunli from Qingdao, China won a $10,000 iTunes gift card for downloading the free Where’s My Water? iPhone game.
After she won, Apple flew her to the Beijing to accept her award. Chunli was escorted to Apple’s Chinese corporate headquarters and then taken to the Sanlitun Apple store to accept her gift card and talk to the press.
Earlier this year Apple announced iTunes U, making it clear that Apple intends to make the iPad ubiquitous in academia. The iPad is truly coming into its own as a legitimate alternative to the PC. For students, this means that the iPad is quickly becoming a powerful learning tool, which is good for a lot more than reading.
I sat down with a Boston-based PhD student who, for the past year, has been using her iPad nearly exclusively for her studies. Here are the core peripherals and apps that she recommends in order to supercharge your iPad for use in the academic setting.
Apple warned the iOS development community last August that it would start rejecting applications submitted to the App Store for accessing a user’s unique identifier (UDID). In case you didn’t know, every iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad possesses a unique alphanumeric string used for registration and tracking.
Amid privacy concerns from the U.S. Congress and other groups regarding how apps use an iOS device’s personal info, Apple has decided to start enforcing its new policy in the App Store.
The app privacy scandal caused by Path’s iPhone app is still leaving its mark, as members of the U.S. Congress have sent out letters to 33 prominent App Store developers to better understand the issue. “We want to better understand the information collection and use policies and practices of apps for Apple’s mobile devices with a social element.”
Apps like the official Facebook and Twitter clients are among the list. Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Henry A. Waxman and Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee Ranking Member G. K. Butterfield have requested that the developers behind such apps reveal how Apple imposes its privacy standards and how the standards are implemented.
Back in October, we highlighted one of the new features in iOS 5 that allows you to hide previous App Store purchases from your ‘Purchased’ list. It’s great for removing all those apps and games that you may be ashamed of, such as Hello Kitty Parachute Paradise. But what happens if you want to reveal those purchases again?
Well, thankfully it’s easy to unhide them.
It’s rare to see government agencies at the front of the technology curve, but it’s becoming more common with U.S. federal agencies after U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel declared at CES that 2012 the year of mobile for the federal government. While most agencies have pushed to reevaluate their mobile technology option during the past few months, the Environmental Protection Agency seems to leading the government charge to mobile.
The EPA announced earlier this week that the agency has adopted a new “mobile first” policy. Under the policy, it is a setting forward-thinking IT mandate than even the most tech-savvy companies have yet to consider or embrace: develop solutions for mobile devices first and then re-work those solutions to function on the desktop.
Music streaming services like Spotify, Rhapsody, and Rdio are set to face yet another competitor on iOS, as Sony prepares to make its own service available to the iPhone and iPad. The company’s COO, Shawn Layden, has confirmed that Music Unlimited will be making its way to the App Store “in the next few weeks.”
Since the new iPad made its debut in the U.S. and nine other countries last week, iOS developers have been working hard to optimize their titles for the device’s Retina display. There are already some fantastic games on offer that are Retina-ready, so we’ve compiled a list of the best so that you can get you game on in stunning high-definition, and compared them to their iPad 2 counterparts so you can see how nice the new graphics look.
Rhombi, triangles, and rectangles probably don’t elicit a sexual response from you most times, but Apple thinks those beautiful shapes can be a little bit too orgasmic when combined in different configurations. Artist Luciano Foglia’s app of geometric shapes was recently rejected by Apple because they claimed it contained “excessively objectionable or crude content.” But it’s just a bunch of geometric shapes, so why did Apple label it as pornographic? Take a look and judge for yourself:
Before Apple released its iOS 5.1 update to the public earlier this month, clicking on a Yelp link after performing a search with Siri did absolutely nothing. Now, however, it’ll take you straight to Yelp’s iOS app — or the App Store if you don’t already have it installed.
Telltale Games, the studio behind popular iOS games like Back to the Future and Monkey Island, is developing a new series based on the hit TV show The Walking Dead. If that news alone doesn’t get you excited, then check out this incredible teaser trailer.