Facebook has just released yet another in its seeming interminable series of single serving apps of dubious utility. It’s called Stickers for Messenger, and surprise! It lets you slap virtual stickers on your photos before sending them to your friends through Messenger.
Read receipts. They’re the first thing I turn off when I get a new messaging app or iOS device. But Facebook is doubling down on read receipts in the new Facebook Messenger, which has new, blisteringly fast notifications showing you exactly what’s going on with your message after you send it.
The minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China got a sneak peek at the Apple Watch during a recent visit to Apple’s Cupertino headquarters. Photos published by a state-owned website show Apple CEO Tim Cook demonstrating the device to Lu Wei, who also stopped by Facebook’s campus to meet Mark Zuckerberg.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has lashed out at Tim Cook’s privacy policy, calling it “ridiculous,” and knocking Apple for pricing its products as highly as it does.
Zuckerberg’s rebuttal follows comments made by Cook in September, in which he noted that, “When an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.” While the message was most likely meant for long-time rival Google, Facebook’s head honcho definitely took it personally.
Read Zuckerberg’s impassioned response after the jump:
Another day, another app from Facebook.
That seems to be the trend lately for the social networking giant, as seemingly every aspect of its service has been siloed into its own app. The latest is Facebook Groups for, you guessed it, managing and interacting with different groups.
From answering trolls online to busting out near-fluent Mandarin in front of a surprised audience, Mark Zuckerberg’s all about defying expectations these days. That trend continued yesterday, as he gave a reasonable (and even Steve Jobsian) answer about why Facebook moved messaging out of its main app and into a standalone Messenger one.
Telling the audience at his first public Q&A that, “I’m grateful for hard questions” and “it keeps us honest,” Zuck noted how:
Facebook apps for the Mac have come and gone over the years, but none have managed to capture much attention. A new contender has the goods to stick around.
After working at Apple as an engineer on WebKit and iAd, Scott Kyle decided to get into indie app development. His first stab at it is Current, a new Facebook app for OS X that lives primarily in the menubar. With quality design, notifications, a classic chat interface, and some other tricks up its sleeve, Current makes Facebook feel at home on the Mac.
WhatsApp, one of the most popular messaging services on mobile, has long had plans to step up its assault against the likes of Skype and Viber with a free voice calling feature that was initially promised for the second quarter of 2014. Now the company’s CEO has confirmed that the launch is planned for early 2015 instead.
Do you take pictures of all your meals to share with your friends on Facebook and Instagram? Wish there was a way to share even more of it with your FOMO-ing virtual friends?
Well, you can’t share the taste, or the smell, but 3DAround is an upcoming iOS app that lets you share the food you’re eating in all of its three-dimensional glory. And you can do it with other things too.
It turns out that the rumored app that Facebook has been working on isn’t an anonymous chat app, but rather a platform that lets you create your own chat room right on your iPhone.
Basically, Rooms is an iPhone app — soon coming to Android — that lets you make tiny message boards to post photos, videos, and text to. You’ll create a different username and identity for each Room you create or visit, and you’ll let other people join via a QR code you can generate and share via the internet or in real life.
Head developer Josh Miller told The Verge, “We’re not trying to build the next Snapchat — we’re trying to build the next WordPress.”
Designed to help friends and family check on their nearest and dearest during natural disasters, Facebook is introducing a new Safety Check feature for its mobile app.
The tool works by sending a push notification to devices that are near to an affected area. Locations are determined by looking at the places listed in profiles, previous locations from the Nearby Friends feature, and the city from which you’re connecting to the Internet.
All a Facebook user needs to do in the event of an emergency is hit an “I’m safe” button and a news notification will be generated automatically on the Timeline.
It’s not just Apple Pay that’s going to let you transfer funds using your iPhone. According to hidden code discovered in Facebook Messenger’s iOS app by Stanford student Andrew Aude, Facebook is also exploring the area — with a forthcoming feature that lets you send money as easily as you would “like” or share a photo.
Facebook is set to follow Apple into the mobile health field according to a new report from Reuters.
Citing three people familiar with the matter, the report states that Facebook has been discussing the move with medical industry experts, and is currently in the early stages of assembling an R&D team for the creation of health-related mobile apps.
Although the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus chalked up record-breaking sales, Apple’s week has been far from a celebration. A YouTube video showing the iPhone 6 Plus bending under seemingly normal amounts of pressure sent the Internet to crazyville, and Bendgate was born.
Watch Cult of Mac’s news roundup to see the latest regarding the Bendgate frenzy, why some iPads are being banned, and how one person surprised the world with her iPhone 6 impressions more than others.
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Widget, widgets, widgets. Boy, have we got some widgets for you. And text. Plain text. Plain old text, turned into a calculator. And widgets. Did I mention those? Weather widgets. Battery widgets. And yes, text widgets.
Read all about these new widgets and other new apps in this week's App Watch.
As more and more of our lives are lived on social media, the importance of being able to efficiently search through content is greater than ever.
With that in mind, Facebook is currently user-testing a new feature letting mobile users sift through old posts by friends using keywords — allowing them to more easily find content that would otherwise be lost.
The feature, which only counts for posts you’re allowed to see (meaning that private posts won’t show up) has currently only been rolled out to a select few, but will likely be officially added into an update of the Facebook iOS app in the near future.
Do you hate the fact that Facebook is forcing you to install the Facebook Messenger app if you want to send or access messages on your iPhone or iPad?
We do too. But luckily, it turns out that right now, there’s an easy way to get around the restrictions and access your Facebook Messages through the vanilla Facebook app again. But better move on it: Facebook’s not likely to let this loophole stay open for long.
It’s hard to know what to make of an app update that promises to “cut crash rates in half.” If you’re a glass-half-full kind of guy, you’re happy with the increased stability. If you’re a glass-half-empty guy, though, you wonder why the hell they can’t get around to fixing the other 50 percent of unexpected software crashes.
I’m sort of a glass-half-empty kind of guy, at least when it comes to Facebook. So when they announce that their latest update to the Facebook for iPhone and iPad app has “solved a long-term mobile debugging problem and reduced the crash rate for people using the Facebook for iOS app by more than 50%,” I wonder why the hell a multibillion dollar corporation can’t fix the other half.
For at least the last year, rumor has had it that Facebook would soon require anyone who wished to message a friend through its official iPhone app to install a tertiary app, Facebook Messenger, instead.
Up until now, Facebook has held off on that threat. But as the social networking giant tries to spread its services across an entire ecosystem of apps, it looks like the House that Zuckerberg built might finally make good.
Instagram has accidentally leaked that it’s planning to launch a thunder strike against Snapchat with a new “one tap photo messaging” app of its own called Bolt.
A banner announcing the new messaging app was accidentally posted for some users on Android to see last night, but was taken down about 15 minutes after it appeared. The Free link button on the banner directed users to the Google Play Store, but the page was not available.
Facebook is rolling out a new feature that will allow you save just about anything you come across on the social network for later.
Similar to the way services like Pocket and Instapaper save links on the web, Facebook’s Save will make it easy to bookmark articles, places, and other pages.
Long-time rivals Apple and IBM partnered up this week to work together on enterprise software, but what does this mean for Siri? If Apple’s trusty voice assistant gets together with IBM’s extremely intelligent A.I. Watson, it could be a beautiful “relationship.”
Watch today’s Cult of Mac news roundup to hear all the latest news and rumors about this potential Apple-IBM hookup, possible trouble in the iPhone 6 sapphire glass pipeline, a toaster that burns your selfies into bread and the rest of the week’s biggest stories.
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Facebook’s ‘make a bunch of apps and see which ones stick’ strategy for mobile has unleashed a new app for the iPhone this morning, and it’s supposed to make interacting with famous people on Mark Zuckerburg’s social network easier than ever, but you’re probably not cool enough to use it.
Apple and Google may reign supreme as the top two tech companies in the U.S., but when it comes to attractiveness, Amazon and Microsoft employees are absolutely slaying them.
After crunching the numbers from its social-networking app for professionals, Hinge found that employees from Amazon are the most sought-after on network, topping both Google, Facebook and Microsoft, with Apple’s young professionals coming in dead last.
Facebook’s new Slingshot app takes aim at Snapchat by putting a new spin on photo-messaging. Instead of simply relying on disappearing pictures and videos, Slingshot promotes back-and-forth conversations.
How does it work? You must unlock “slings” you receive before you can look at them. You do this by sending your own sling to the sender. See how the just-released Slingshot app works in today’s quick-look video.
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