If you’re still thinking of trying to make your fortune on the App Store, it’s time to think again. While App Store developers made more than Hollywood studios did in combined box office revenue in 2014, a new report suggests it will be almost impossible for new developers to break into the App Store in 2015. Why? Because of zombies. Or zombie apps, at least.
When the first iPhone came out in 2007, third-party apps were limited affairs: glorified web apps without a lot of access to the iPhone’s more advanced functionality. According to a new blog post from Eleks Labs, a developer working on an Apple Wacth Tesla app, the same could be true of third-party Apple Watch apps when the wearable launches in April.
Facebook has been trying to go after Foursquare’s slice of the geolocation pie for a while now, and a new update to Facebook’s iOS app doubles down on that policy, providing Foursquare-style recommendations for places to visit in your area, based upon the suggestion of friends.
I’ll admit it: I don’t think I want an Apple Watch. I don’t need another screen to notify me about what’s happening on another screen.
That’s what I think now. But I’m not arrogant enough to believe Apple might not prove me wrong. They’ve certainly proven me wrong before.
Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you think the Apple Watch isn’t something you want, but you’re worried that the second you see one, you’ll want one. You’re right to be worried. Apple Watches are starting to be spotted in the wild. And the people who see them are immediately turning into believers.
I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you don’t even like Batman. This beautiful, remote-controlled, iPhone-compatible Batmobile? It’s the toy that Gotham — hell, everybody! — deserves.
It’s been six months since Apple unveiled iTunes 12, the latest version of its multimedia mega-app. Updates since then have been few and far between, but today Apple released the first big one: iTunes 12.1, which introduced a swank new media control widget for Notification Center.
Apple just had a killer quarter. In fact, it was the most profitable quarter for any company in history. As such, Apple stock is up 5 percent since Wednesday trading.
But has Apple peaked? Not according to legendary investor Carl Icahn, who recently told CNBC that he was not only raising his own Apple stock price target, but called buying AAPL a “no-brainer.”
Although unlimited data was a promise carriers like AT&T once used to lure potential customers to their network, it doesn’t really exist anymore. Even if you have an unlimited data contract, carriers will throttle your connection once you push a certain data allowance every month.
Yet it’s starting to look like the Federal Trade Commission might be moving against carriers that throttle so-called “unlimited” connections. The FTC just smashed TracFone with a $40 million fine for throttling customers of its unlimited data service.
Yesterday, Apple announced that it had a monster quarter. In Q4, it sold 74.5 million iPhone sales to go along with $74.6 billion in revenue and $18 billion in profits. Not only that, but it broke the record for the most money made by any corporation in history.
Having a hard time figuring out how to quantify numbers like that? Check out this incredible visualizer.
At least one of the big boys is planning on developing an app for the Apple Watch. eBay has posted an ad listing, looking for a developer to help them come up with a bidding app for Cupertino’s new smartwatch.
Let’s face it: iPhoto sucks. It’s slow. It’s buggy. It’s hopelessly burdened by skeuomorphic elements. It’s just behind the times.
That’s why we were excited when Apple said last year it would phase out iPhoto for a brand new app with a feature set somewhere between iPhoto and Aperture. The successor app was supposed to be available in early 2015, but it appears that Photos for Mac has been delayed.
Let’s flash back to April 2010.
That was the month that Steve Jobs penned his famous “Thoughts on Flash” memo, in which he soundly rejected any and all reasons for Apple to adopt Flash on the iOS operating system.
Jobs famously said that Flash was too battery-hungry, too unreliable, too insecure, too slow and too closed to be a wise platform for the mobile-first developers of then-tomorrow. And people scoffed at the time.
But who’s laughing now?
When Apple releases a major update like yesterday’s iOS 8.1.3, it’s usual for the company’s coders to fix (or, in other words, break) all known jailbreak exploits.
Not so surprisingly, the latest update is no different. It fixes several exploits that are necessary to run the iOS 8.1.2 jailbreak. But in a classy move, at least Apple gave a hat tip to the jailbreak team for calling their attention to the exploits.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is the anti-Apple. He’s square where Apple is cool, he’s a sputtering doofus where Apple is collected, and he’s prone to hyperbole whereas Apple tends to undersell its products. For example, Schmidt said in 2013 that Android was more secure than the iPhone (LOL).
Given all that, who do you think Schmidt’s personal hero is? Boutros Boutros-Ghali? Shocker! Wrong. It’s Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, naturally. Not that many of those lessons have rubbed off on him, mind you.
Over the weekend, we showed you sexy new renders that showed the rumored new 12-inch MacBook Air and iPad Pro side-by-side. Designed by render artist extraordinaire Martin Hajek, it gave us our best look yet at what Apple’s next big products could look like.
But in the renders we saw, Hajek’s iPad Pro was missing at least one critical ingredient: the plus-size tablet’s rumored stylus accessory. Now Hajek’s back, giving us his notion of what a Jony Ive-designed stylus could look like.
In 2013, Twitter introduced a new policy that was designed to prevent third-party Twitter clients from gaining too much popularity. The design to the Twitter API basically capped the number of API “tokens” a third-party developer have. Each token is tied to a user, so the effect is that if a third-party Twitter client gets too popular, Twitter will stop allowing new users of that app into the service.
Over the weekend, it appears that Tapbot’s third-party Twitter app, Tweetbot for Mac, finally ran up against its token limit… and as of right now, has been pulled from the Mac App Store.
Although it’s a Windows game, I’ve never met anyone without a sweet spot for Minesweeper, the addictive little puzzle game that Microsoft debuted in Windows 3.1. Sadly, though, it never came to the Mac.
But if you love a good game of Minesweeper, we’ve got some great news. You can now play it right within Notification Center. Better act on it soon, though: Apple has a tendency to pull interesting iOS 8 widgets like this one.
The Apple Watch might be Cupertino’s most hotly anticipated product, but for my money, the two releases I’m most excited about this year are the 12-inch MacBook Air and the 12-inch iPad Pro. Outside of a few leaked images, though, we still have not seen either of these rumored devices in the flash.
Conceptual designer Martin Hajek is no stranger to turning rumors of upcoming Apple products into blisteringly sexy 3-D renders, and now he’s done it again with a series of renders showing the iPad Pro and 12-inch MacBook Air going head to head. Call it the battle of the 12-inchers, if you will!
Not all of us work 9 to 5’s. My wife, for example, works all sorts of shifts, working around her school schedule: 8:30 – 5:30 one day, then 1:30 to 9:30 the next. And as a guy who spends the better part of each day glued to a computer just two rooms away from his bed, it can be pretty hard to keep track just when she’s working, and when I can next expect to see her.
Shifts is an app that solves all that. A calendar app specifically designed for people who either work retail jobs, or otherwise have constantly shifting work schedules, it’s an ingenious little app that makes managing your weekly shifts -— and keeping your partner informed of them — a snap.
You may may never be able to listen to Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes live in the Star Wars cantina for yourself, but here’s the next best thing: a turntable modeled after Han Solo’s famous parsec-shattering ship, the Millennium Falcon.
Popcorn Time, the app for Mac and jailbroken iOS devices that allows you to stream movie and television torrents from the cloud, has often been heralded as “Netflix for pirates,” thanks to its easy-to-use interface and huge selection of content. Turns out that’s enough for Netflix to consider Popcorn Time a direct competitor.
A year and a half after Logic Pro X hit shelves, Apple has released the biggest update to its pro music software yet. The 10.1 update focuses on electronic dance music and hip-hop, adding new tools, drummers and more for the would-be Kanyes and Skrillexes out there.
Rdio may be the underdog in the streaming media wars when compared to Spotify, but for my money, they still have the best software around. And it’s just gotten even better.
Today, Rdio for iOS was updated to version 3.1, bringing a new station for just-released music, enhanced sharing abilities and a load of other features and bug fixes.
WhatsApp is a great alternative to iMessage, except in one regard: iMessage lets you send messages from your Mac. That means if you hate tapping in text messages on a touchscreen, you can use your keyboard instead.
But that’s changed. The long-awaited ability to use WhatsApp on your Mac has finally arrived. But there’s a caveat: It only works if you don’t have an iPhone.
Apple’s refusal to upgrade the cheapest iPhone to 16GB could be leading to a crisis, and these stats just might prove it.
When the iPhone 6 came out, Apple (un)pleasantly surprised everyone by only upgrading two of the three storage options: While the baseline iPhone 6 stayed at a meager 16GB of storage, the middle and high-end storage options were upgraded to 64GB and 128GB respectively.