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YouMap, Purp To-Do List, RecordBird, and other apps to check out this weekend

Cody Lee ∙ Updated October 17, 2018

This week's edition of our App of the Week roundup features a new map-based social app, a to-do list with a twist, and a new app that keeps you informed on new music releases from your favorite artists. And as usual, we've selected two great new games for you to check out.

YouMap

Events are constantly shaping the way we interact with each other and helping us decide where we go on any given day. With YouMap, you can let the world know what you’re thinking, seeing and feeling, while getting the latest updates at a moment’s notice. Obviously we're skeptical anytime a new social network comes on the scene, but YouMap seems to have the UI and user engagement needed to gain some traction. The early reviews are glowing, with one user saying this is the first social app to "get the map thing right." So if you're feeling adventurous this weekend, see what's going on around you with YouMap. It's available for free.

Purp To-Do List & Goal Tracker

Purp is a well-organized helper, to-do list and task manager app that allows you to achieve your goals and complete your daily tasks. Whatever your goals are—like completing projects, managing daily tasks, work todos, learning languages, mastering skills, sports or travel—Purp will help you to collect, keep, organize and track them, so you can reach them. Features include iCloud sync, task timer, progress dash board, and much more. The first reviews on iTunes are pretty rough, but the UI are feature set are unique enough that I think it's worth checking out. Purp To-Do List & Goal Tracker is available for free.

RecordBird

Record Bird informs you about new and upcoming music releases of your favorite artists and genres. Be the first to know of a new album or single by your favorite bands and musicians and share the news directly with your friends. With Record Bird, you will never miss a new release again. There have been more than a few apps that have tried a similar strategy, that didn't gain much traction. But the early user feedback (4.5 stars on 90 ratings in iTunes) suggest this one might have finally gotten it right. RecordBird is available for free.

Mini DAYZ - Survival Game

How long can you survive in a post-apocalyptic world? Find out in Mini DAYZ—an official pixel art rendition of the massively successful PC survival game (played by over 3 million fans). It's you against the world in Mini DAYZ: explore a randomly generated map and scavenge for food, ammo and supplies. Use anything you find to craft advanced items. Protect yourself against aggressive infected and ferocious wolves. But most important of all: make sure to stay dry, warm and well fed at all times. The weather out there can quickly get under your skin and your wounds will not heal without you treating them. Mini DAYZ - Survival Game is available for free.

Flippy Hills

Flippy Hills is an original arcade game with cool physics that will give you plenty of thrills, spills, epic wins, fails and tricks in two modes of your choice: campaign or arcade. Campaign mode features an adventure spanning over dozens of levels that get progressively harder, and arcade mode puts you in an endless barrage of assault courses to compete with your friends and gain records. The gameplay is surprisingly addictive, but you are going to have to put up with some annoying ads unless you're willing to fork over a few bucks via an in-app purchase. Flippy Hills is available for free (with some IAPs).

More apps to check out Apple’s free app of the week: Ridge Racer Slipstream You can now reply to Instagram Stories with photos and videos

Give your power down menu an iOS 7-inspired makeover with StyloPowerDown

Anthony Bouchard ∙ July 8, 2017

When you press and hold the power button on your iPhone or iPad, you’re presented with a switch for powering down your device.

This switch has undergone a host of cosmetic changes throughout previous iterations of iOS, and if you’re nostalgic of how it used to look in earlier versions, or you're just looking for a totally new look and feel altogether, then you might want to try a new jailbreak tweak dubbed StyloPowerDown by iOS developer iKilledAppl3.

Differential Privacy sees wider adoption since Apple first embraced it

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 7, 2017

Differential Privacy technology is about a decade old, but major tech players had shied away from embracing it until Apple rolled it out across iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS in September of last year. Today, major Silicon Valley giants like Microsoft, Uber and Google are readily experimenting with the technology, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Uber uses it to improve services without being overexposed to user data. Microsoft uses it in a pilot project to make smart-meter data available to researchers and government agencies for analysis, while making sure “any data set cannot be tied back to our customers”. Even Google, one of the Differential Privacy's earliest adopters, uses it to a certain extent.

Apple has now expanded its use of Differential Privacy to cover its collection and analysis of web browsing and Health-related data, as first announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June. According to the report, the Cupertino technology giant is currently receiving millions of pieces of information on a daily basis from iPhones, iPads and Macs.

All those items are protected by Differential Privacy, which blurs the data being analyzed by adding a measurable amount of statistical noise. This allows Apple to analyze sensitive data like your Health-related information without being able to tie the data back to specific people.

Plus, data-analysis apps are unable to find usable links between large data sets protected with Differential Privacy, making it virtually impossible to de-anonymize such data.

Differential Privacy is key to Apple’s artificial intelligence efforts for it lets the firm advance Siri and other products by analyzing user data without learning too much about users.

According to some people, Differential Privacy can be a double-edged sword and many folks were quick to point out that Apple's refusal to collect huge amounts of data on users, like Google is doing, is hurting its ability to compete in the AI space.

To that extend, a company spokesman told the Wall Street Journal via email that “Apple believes that great features and privacy go hand in hand.”

So, what's this stuff about blurring the data and statistical noise?

Differential Privacy is best explained with real-world examples.

In one particular example, Differential Privacy techniques swap out the answer to one question (“Have you ever committed a violent crime?”) with a question that has a statistically known response rate (“Were you born in February?”).

“Someone trying to find links in the data would never be sure which question a particular person was asked,” the article explains. “That lets researchers analyze sensitive data such as medical records without being able to tie the data back to specific people.”

To learn more about how Differential Privacy works and why it's important and key to Apple's mission of protecting the privacy of its users, check out our previous write-up on the topic.

Keep in mind there's isn't an explicit setting that would let you turn differentially private data collection on or off on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch or Apple TV.

Instead, your device automatically uses Differential Privacy when you opt-in to sending diagnostics and usage data to Apple or app developers. In other words, you must specifically elect to share analytics data with Apple (or developers) before Differential Privacy is used.

According to the descriptions in the “About Diagnostics & Privacy”, “About App Analytics & Privacy” and “About iCloud Analytics & Privacy” links found in Settings → Privacy → Analytics, your personal data is either not logged at all, is subject to privacy preserving techniques such as Differential Privacy or is removed from any reports before they’re sent to Apple.

“Analysis of data is undertaken only after the data has undergone privacy preserving techniques such as Differential Privacy,” notes Apple. “Analysis of such data will allow Apple to improve intelligent features and services such as Siri and other similar or related services.”

You can review diagnostics/analytics data and other information being sent to Apple at any time by going to Settings → Privacy → Analytics and looking under Analytics Data.

Apple’s iCloud trademark now covers smart glasses and headset accessory

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 7, 2017

Apple has updated its figurative trademark for “iCloud”, filed with the Hong Kong Trademark Office, to include smart glasses and even a headset peripheral device. As you know, the Cupertino company is rumored to be working on a dedicated augmented reality headset or a smart glasses product with Carl Zeiss optics.

As first noted by PatentlyApple, since April of this year Apple has begun to include specific types of products to its trademarks covering the Mac Pro/iMac Pro computers and the ARKit framework for building augmented reality apps, including devices like smart glasses, head mounted displays, virtual and augmented reality displays and the like.

The iCloud trademark's international class 09 verbiage defines the headsets as falling under the context of “wearable digital electronic devices capable of providing access to the Internet” or “computer software for setting up, configuring, operating and controlling” these systems.

Likewise, the trademark meticulously lists the real-world applications for “smart glasses,” also covering things like “virtual and augmented reality displays, goggles, controllers, and headsets, 3D spectacles, eyeglasses, sunglasses, spectacle lenses, optical glass and optical goods”.

Apple calls shenanigans on former GPU supplier’s “inaccurate and misleading” statements

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 7, 2017

Apple has hit hard at the accusations that its former mobile GPU supplier Imagination Technologies leveled at the Cupertino tech giant. According to the iPhone maker, Imagination's “unsubstantiated allegations” made recently in their annual report to investors are “inaccurate and misleading,” Bloomberg reported Friday.

Apple is adamant that Imagination had known for much longer that their business relationship was ending, explaining it started working with the British firm since the first iPhone was released in 2007 and stopped accepting new intellectual property from them in 2015.

An excerpt from the article:

By 2016, Apple said it told Imagination it was further diminishing the relationship by initiating a clause in its contact that allows Apple to pay a lower royalty rate for using a smaller amount of intellectual property.

By February of this year, Apple said it told Imagination it was ending the relationship altogether and would no longer be making any royalty payments as early as 2018.

Basically, Imagination'd known for two years of Apple's plans to drop its GPU blueprints.

The statement contradicts Imagination CEO Andrew Heath who told investors on a conference call this week that Apple had informed Imagination at the end of March “that they were certain” that iOS devices released in 2018 or early 2019 would no longer use Imagination's GPU designs.

He added that “we don’t accept Apple’s position” that it could build its own system and called Apple’s decision to stop making royalty payments to Imagination “unsubstantiated.”

Apple said in a statement to Bloomberg:

We began working with Imagination in 2007 and stopped accepting new IP from them in 2015. After lengthy discussions we advised them on February 9 that we expected to wind down our licensing agreement since we need unique and differentiating IP for our products. We valued our past relationship and wanted to give them as much notice as possible to adapt their future plans.

At the heart of the dispute: Apple's April 2017 decision to drop Imagination's proprietary GPU blueprints in favor of in-house designed GPUs for iPhones and iPads. The announcement shocked Imagination's investors and caused its stock to collapse more than sixty percent.

Imagination eventually put itself up for sale.

Apple, which owns a stake in Imagination, is unlikely to make an offer, according to Bloomberg.

Imagination has been arguing ever since that it would be impossible for the Cupertino firm to design its own mobile GPUs without infringing Imagination's proprietary technology.

The Cupertino firm is said to have already cut payments for licensed Imagination GPU designs from 30 cents to just 10 cents per iPhone. Analyst think Imagination will struggle to stay in business as an independent company without Apple as its key customer.

Apple isn’t paying bug hunters nearly enough for iPhone exploits

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 7, 2017

According to a report from Motherboard, iPhone, iPad and Mac bugs are too valuable to report to Apple, which leads to sky-high prices for iOS and macOS exploits on the grey market.

“For now, security researchers who have been invited by Apple to submit high-value bugs through the program prefer to keep the bugs for themselves,” reads the article. All of the eight bug hunters that the publication interviewed said they have yet to report a bug to Apple.

According to Nikias Bassen, a security researcher for the company Zimperium, and who joined Apple's program last year:

People can get more cash if they sell their bugs to others. If you're just doing it for the money, you're not going to give bugs to Apple directly.

Apple's bug-bounty initiative debuted at the Black Hat conference in August 2016.

The program offers between $25,000 and $200,000 for an iOS or macOS exploit, depending on where it is and what it does. For now, the initiative is invite-only.

As The Loop's Dave Mark put it, the question here is, are the bugs valuable enough for Apple to raise their bounties to compete with the grey market?

Manually designate your favorite Emojis with Selectmoji

Anthony Bouchard ∙ July 7, 2017

Emojis are one of the joys of texting and instant messaging, and iOS integrates them right into the keyboard for your convenience. A feature embedded within the Emoji selector keeps track of the Emojis you use the most often and puts them in a category called “Frequently Used.”

Since you might prefer to manually designate your favorite Emojis for this section, a jailbreak tweak called FavoriteEmojis was recently released for this purpose, but a new competing tweak called Selectmoji by iOS developer Cole Cabral is now available that is said to address some of the shortcomings of the former tweak.

Apple seeds tvOS 10.2.2 beta 5 to developers

Cody Lee ∙ July 6, 2017

Apple on Thursday seeded the fifth beta of tvOS 10.2.2 to developers. The update comes just a little over two weeks after beta 4, and registered developers with the appropriate profile installed on their fourth-gen Apple TV can apply it via the over-the air mechanism.

From what we've seen in the betas thus far, tvOS 10.2.2 doesn't include many significant user-facing changes. Instead, as with iOS 10.3.3 and macOS Sierra 10.12.6, the update appears to be more focused on under-the-hood performance improvements and bug fixes.

tvOS 10.2.2 is expected to be released to the public within the next few weeks, and it should be one of the final tvOS 10.x.x releases as Apple has already begun seeing betas of tvOS 11, the next major revision of its set-top box operating system.

Samsung delays Bixby’s English rollout over lack of big data

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 6, 2017

Samsung's personal digital assistant Bixby is currently available in Korean, but its English version won't launch by the end of this month as company executives originally promised.

As The Korea Herald reported Thursday (via The Loop), Bixby's English version has been delayed because Samsung lacks big data needed to train Bixby to speak English fluently.

“Developing Bixby in other languages is taking more time than we expected mainly because of the lack of the accumulation of big data,” said a Samsung spokesperson.

Samsung’s mobile chief, Koh Dong-jin, promised in April that Bixby’s English and Chinese versions would be unveiled in May and in June of this year, respectively.

Even though Samsung launched a beta of Bixby for some US consumers last month, it was met with mixed responses due to what Samsung described as “unsatisfactory results in terms of responding to requests and questions”.

Difficult communication between the engineers located at Samsung Research America in California and the headquarters in Korea is also blamed for Bixby's English delay.

According to a source cited in the report:

Many engineers in the United States are making full efforts to develop the English version of Bixby. But, due to geographical and language barriers their frequent reports to and communication with the management located in Korea makes the progress much slower than developing the Korean version here.

This can't be good news for Samsung, which debuted its latest Galaxy S8 lineup in March with Bixby as one of its headlining features. The new handsets feature a dedicated button on the side for quickly summoning Bixby. The South Korean company even issued a software update to stop third-party apps from changing the button's function.

Although Samsung last year snapped up Viv Labs, the developer behind Apple’s Siri, their AI technology won't be used in Bixby before the personal assistant becomes more complete.

The Wall Street Journal reported two days ago that Samsung is building a Bixby-powered smart speaker, joining a proliferating arms race in tabletop devices against the likes of Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft.

Xiaomi acquires swathe of patents from Nokia

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 6, 2017

Chinese consumer electronics and smartphone maker Xiaomi has acquired a swathe of patents from Nokia. According to an announcement yesterday, the multi-year patent agreement includes a cross license to each company's cellular standard essential patents.

Xiaomi also acquired patent assets from Nokia for an undisclosed sum as part of the transaction. Since its inception seven years ago, the Chinese firm has applied for over 16,000 patents, of which about 4,000 have been granted to them.

“Our win-win patent agreement with Nokia after months of negotiations is a significant milestone for Xiaomi,” Wang Xian, Xiaomi's Senior Vice President, wrote on Twitter.

The two firms will also co-operate on a wide range of strategic projects, including network infrastructure, optical transport solutions for datacenter interconnect, IP routing based on Nokia's newly announced FP4 network processor and a data center fabric solution.

The companies will join forces to “explore” VR and AI technologies, too.

The latest move gives the Chinese startup access to some cool Nokia technologies while providing legal shelter from possible lawsuits as Xiaomi looks to expand internationally.

The company's smartphone shipments declined 15.6 percent to 61 million units in 2016, down from a peak of 70 million units in 2015. Xiaomi has pledged to build a thousand retail stores in China by 2019 to ramp up sales.

In May, Nokia signed a similar deal with Apple following licensing disputes in the US and Europe which eventually led to the removal of Nokia's Withings-branded products from Apple Stores. Putting an end to all litigation, the Apple-Nokia multi-year patent license also entails providing “certain network infrastructure products and services" to Apple.

Analyst says Tesla Model 3 launch could be as big as 2007 iPhone introduction

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 6, 2017

Gene Munster, a longtime Apple analyst who had been calling for an HD TV set from Apple for years before eventually giving up on that pipe dream, said today that the upcoming release of Tesla's Model 3 sedan would be as big a launch as the 2007 introduction of the original iPhone.

In a blog post on the Loup Ventures website, Munster writes that the combination of the Model 3’s value and technology has the potential to change the world and accelerate the adoption of electric and autonomous vehicles in the next decade.

“We believe we will eventually look back at the launch of the Model 3 and compare it to the iPhone, which proved to be the catalyst for the shift to mobile computing,” he wrote.

The launch of the vehicle is viewed as Tesla's make or break moment because Model 3 is the company's first truly mass-market electric car priced at the sweet spot of $35,000 before federal and state tax incentives.

According to Elon Musk, Tesla is poised to ship about thirty units of the Model 3 sedans on July 28 and ramp up production to 20,000 Model 3 units per month by December of this year.

Chart via Bloomberg

Imagining that Tesla could produce an estimated 2.5 million cars by 2025 may seem hard to believe given it only delivered about 100,000 cars in the past year. But as Munster says, car hardware does not scale as easy as software, but it can scale.

“Looking back at the iPhone in 2007 it was a stretch to envision the company producing 50 million phones a year, but in 2015, the company sold 232 million units,” he wrote. Owning a Model 3 is only thirteen percent more expensive than owning a Toyota Camry over a five-year period, estimated the analyst.

It's important to note that this figure assumes no state or federal tax credits for electric vehicles as the analyst expect those incentives to end before December 2020.

Loup Ventures is a VC fund focused on augmented reality, artificial intelligence and robotics which Munster founded following his exit from investment firm Piper Jaffray in December of last year, putting an end to Munster's 21-year career as Piper's senior Apple analyst.

SoundCloud to cut staff amid rivalry with Apple Music and Spotify

Christian Zibreg ∙ July 6, 2017

Music platform SoundCloud said today it would cut about forty percent of its workforce, or 173 staffers, a move that highlighted the German company's inability to create a stable business model on top of its large audience of 175 million listeners.

In January, SoundCloud said it was at risk of running out of money while a subscription tier launched last year hasn’t been as successful as the company's executives hoped.

Offices in San Francisco and London will be shut as SoundCloud will consolidate operations at its headquarters in Berlin and another office in New York. The cost-cutting move should put it on a path to profitability and allow it to better compete against larger rivals Apple and Spotify.

“We need to ensure our path to long-term, independent success,” said SoundCloud co-founder and CEO Alex Ljung. “And in order to do this, it requires cost cutting, continued growth of our existing advertising and subscription revenue streams and a relentless focus on our unique competitive advantage—artists and creators.”

He said SoundCloud has doubled its revenue over the past 12 months.

SoundCloud is the popular destination for sharing independent recordings, mixes, podcasts and other user-generated audio content. Even established stars post material to the site before it’s released elsewhere while record labels use it to scout new talent.

SoundCloud is available in 190+ countries and has an excellent iPhone and iPad app. A recent report in the New York Post alleged that Apple was among those looking to acquire the firm.

Apple said at the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 5 that its music-streaming service had 27 million paying customers. Spotify announced around the same time that it had a total of 140 million users, of which 50 million were paid subscribers.