Luke Dormehl - page 55

The plan for implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order targeting TikTok reportedly would take a two-pronged approach that could cripple the wildly popular app in the United States.

The executive order could ban TikTok from Apple’s and Google’s app stores, effectively stopping the video-sharing app’s wildfire growth. (The app has “reportedly been downloaded over 175 million times in the United States and over one billion times globally,” according to Trump’s executive order.) The move also could financially strangle the Chinese-owned app by forbidding U.S. companies from buying advertising on it.

These details emerged in a White House document outlining the plan that was seen by Reuters.

Apple manufacturer Foxconn said Wednesday that it plans to split its supply chain in two. One segment will service the China market, while the other will focus on the United States.

Foxconn chairman Young Liu said the manufacturing giant now operates 30% of its capacity outside China, up from 25% last June. In recent years, the company began moving manufacturing to other regions such as Southeast Asia to avoid possible tariffs on Chinese goods headed to the United States.

Paying for your Apple Online Store purchases is easier than ever if you’re an Apple Card user. Starting Tuesday, Apple added the ability the pay for items with a dedicated one-click Apple Card option.

To pay with Apple Card, simply select the Apple Card option when you’re ask to complete your purchase.

Noted Apple fan Kanye West is blaming the iPhone’s clock for his failure to turn in the correct nomination signatures on time in Wisconsin for his U.S. presidential bid.

State laws say the papers had to be filed “not later” than 5 p.m. local time on Monday. Unfortunately, West’s campaign submitted them 14 seconds after the 5 p.m. deadline. West’s lawyer argues that, because it was before 5:01 p.m., the paperwork should still be admitted.

The Apple Sainte-Catherine store in Montreal will be closed “until further notice” due to COVID-19 conditions.

“We take this step with an abundance of caution as we closely monitor the situation and we look forward to having our teams and customers back as soon as possible,” Apple said. The company would not confirm whether there was a positive case of COVID-19 at the store

The EU’s antitrust investigation of Apple is looking into how Cupertino made it tough for fellow tech giants Facebook and Microsoft launching their own streaming gaming platforms on the App Store. These include the Facebook Gaming and Microsoft’s Project xCloud apps.

As the company behind Android, Google is frequently positioned as one of Apple’s biggest enemy when it comes to smartphones. But it’s actually doing incredibly well thanks to iOS — as a new Sensor Tower report makes clear.

Published Monday, the report notes that Google was the no. 1 mobile publisher in the App Store for July 2020, based on total number of installs. Google’s top apps include YouTube, Google Hangouts, Gmail, Google Calendar, and others.

The iPhone 12 isn’t out yet, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has yet to fulfill his ambition of landing on Mars — but Russian luxury firm Caviar is getting ahead of the game.

This week, it announced a new limited series of 19 “Musk Be On Mars” iPhone 12 Pro handsets. Rather than being blinged out with gold and diamonds like previous Caviar iPhones, these special-edition units will feature “a piece from the SpaceX spaceship that was in space,” bas relief of the Dragon spacecraft, and a laser-engraved Musk signature.

All yours for a starting price of $4,990.

A 34-year-old Chinese citizen living in Switzerland has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail for a massive fraud involving Apple’s AppleCare+ warranty system. His 56-year-old mom, who helped him pull off the scam, was given a suspended 18-month jail sentence.

The pair, who have not been named, bought cheap copycat iPhones from China, before swapping them out for 111,000 new authentic iPhones. AppleCare+ allows customers to replace defective devices with new models when they are damaged.

A Chinese company facing U.S. sanctions for using forced labor provided clothing or raw materials to Apple, possibly in the form of uniforms for its retail employees, claims The Guardian.

Changji Esquel Textile is one of a group of 11 companies that reportedly violated human rights in China’s western Xinjiang region. The company denies using forced labor “anywhere” in its business and says it will appeal its inclusion on the sanctions list.

Want to go to Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak’s 70th birthday party? Of course you do — and, thanks to Woz’s wife Janet Hill, you can.

To celebrate her famous husband’s landmark birthday this Tuesday, Hill is throwing Woz a massive online birthday bash, and you can tune in to watch it streaming live at 5 p.m. Pacific time on Wozbday.com and Twitch.tv/inspirehouse. Oh, and there’s a typically Woz-style event you can participate in as well.

Booting WeChat out of the App Store could drive down worldwide iPhone shipments by up to 30%, claims respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

While WeChat’s total removal from the App Store seems an unlikely prospect, it could be the worst-case scenario of President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to stop U.S. transactions with WeChat and parent company Tencent.

Apple is taking aim at a meal planner and grocery list app called Prepear, which it claims bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Apple’s iconic logo.

In an Instagram post by the app’s creators, Prepear’s founders express their shock that the “trillion dollar Apple” has gone after a small business’ trademark. They say that fighting Apple will cost “tens of thousands of dollars,” but that they will fight nonetheless.

Apple reportedly encountered a problem with some of the camera lenses it plans to use for the iPhone 12. Specifically, some of the coatings for the wide-angle lens cracked during a high-pressure, high-humidity stress test, according to TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.

While that might not sound great, there’s actually no reason to panic. And the supply-chain problem might even wind up saving Apple a few bucks.

The Facebook Gaming app finally landed in the App Store on Friday, several months after it made it to Android devices. The delay isn’t the only downside, though. According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, iOS users will get a considerably “inferior experience” due to Apple’s App Store policies.

The app allows users to livestream video games, much like the ultra-popular Twitch app. And the Android version includes mini-games users can play. But not the iOS version. “We had to remove gameplay functionality entirely in order to get Apple’s approval on the standalone Facebook Gaming app,” she said.

Despite the controversy surrounding it, 15-second video creation and sharing app TikTok remained the world’s most downloaded non-gaming app in July, according to a new report by Sensor Tower.

TikTok ranked as the No. 1 app on both iOS and the Google Play app stores, with more than 65.3 million installs in the month. This represents a 21.4% increase from July last year. In the first quarter of 2020, TikTok registered the best three months of any app ever when it comes to downloads.

President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking “transactions” involving Tencent’s WeChat will not hurt games owned, or partially owned, by the company.

That means it would not affect the likes of Riot Games’ League of Legends or Epic Games’ Fortnite, both of which have financial ties to Tencent. Instead, the executive order covers only WeChat transactions.

It’s Friday — which, among other things, means new shows going live on Apple TV+. This week, Apple has posted one new episode each of current series Little Voice and The Oprah Conversation.

The latest update to the Twitter app for iOS allows users to limit who can reply to their tweets. Twitter started testing the feature with a small number of users in May. Thursday’s update rolls it out to everyone.

Update: Twitter admitted Thursday that it got ahead of itself. It announced this feature in the release notes of its latest iOS app, but then told The Verge “the ability to limit replies on tweets is not currently available to everyone.”

Apple is using machine learning technology in more and more of its features, John Giannandrea, the company’s senior vice president for machine learning and AI strategy, reveals in a new interview with Ars Technica.

Giannandrea, who joined Apple from a job at Google, said “there are increasingly fewer and fewer places in iOS where we’re not using machine learning.” This stands in strong contrast to a few years ago — and even the point at which Giannandrea landed his Apple job.

The Trump administration wants to eliminate “untrusted” Chinese apps from the App Store as part of a multiphase “Clean Network” plan to cut down on potential security risks from China.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the United States will crack down on apps with parent companies based in China. The two specific apps mentioned are TikTok and WeChat. However, Pompeo simply used these to illustrate the kinds of apps that could get the boot.

The song “Radio Ga-Ga” gave Lady Gaga her stage name, and now, years later, she has her own radio show. And it’s debuting this week on Apple Music.

Gaga Radio will premiere at 11 a.m. Pacific on Friday, and run every Friday for the whole of August. In a tweet announcing the new show, Gaga invited listeners to hear her and her Chromatica collaborators “talk about the inspirations, making the record & more!”

People who shoot iPhone videos vertically are often mocked for having committed some nigh-unforgivable sin. Well, you count Academy Award-winning director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash, La La Land) among the guilty. And he’s far from embarrassed about it.

Apple Wednesday debuted a short film shot by Chazelle using his iPhone 11 Pro. In the “Vertical Cinema” short, the Oscar-winning filmmaker shows how vertical shooting can be used to breathe new life into existing movie tropes. Lots and lots of movie tropes. Check it out below.

Virginia launched its COVIDWISE contact-tracing app Wednesday, becoming the first state to use Apple and Google’s Exposure Notifications API to fight COVID-19.

The app uses Bluetooth Low Energy to anonymously track people’s interactions. Then it notifies users who have likely been exposed to infected individuals so they can take appropriate precautions, such as isolating themselves.

The new iPhone 12 chassis could include a mysterious circular array of 36 magnets inside its chassis, possibly to help with wireless charging, suggest new images posted to Weibo and shared by the EverythingApplePro Twitter account.

Apple has yet to release a native wireless charger for iPhone. Its most notable move in this direction was the AirPower wireless charging mat, which was announced by Apple and then canceled. Rumors since then suggest that Apple might be continuing work on the project.