Following the release of iOS 9 beta 3 for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad two weeks ago which gave developers access to Apple Music on their development devices while bringing out the News app and a host of refinements, Apple today released iOS 9 beta 4 (build 13A4305g) to registered members of the Apple Developer Program.
A recent report by DigiTimes, a somewhat accurate Taiwanese trade publication, contended that Apple has developed in-house technology for embedding Touch ID sensors into the screen, potentially eliminating the need for the physical Home button.
Tuesday, a security technology firm called Sonavation provided a glimpse into how Home button-free iPhones could be engineered as it announced a breakthrough 3D fingerprint scanning technology embeddable under the Corning Gorilla Glass which Apple uses to protect iPhone displays.
In what's become a norm for the company these days, another outage has hit a number of cloud-based services as users around the world report issues accessing Apple's content stores: the App Store, the Mac App Store and the iTunes Store.
We're also tracking issues with Apple Music and Beats 1.
Indeed, I'm currently struggling to stream my Apple Music songs and Beats 1 radio.
UPDATE 1: Apple has now acknowledged the outage on the iCloud status page. “Users are experiencing a problem with the services listed above,” reads the notice. “We are investigating and will update the status as more information becomes available.”
UPDATE 2: The iCloud dashboard says all services have been restored after three and a half hours of downtime.
Google on Tuesday issued an update to its Play Books application in the App Store, adding a few new features and enhancements designed to elevate your reading experience on the iPhone and iPad.
The new Google Play Books 2.5 for iOS now features a revamped Read Now view, a new default font, the ability to sync notes and highlights to Google Drive and more.
Apple on Tuesday announced a fourth wave of Apple Watch expansion as the device is scheduled to launch in New Zealand, Russia and Turkey on Friday, July 31. The wrist-worn gizmo will be available in these countries from 7:01am local time via the Apple Online Store.
Customers in Turkey will also have the option of picking up their watch in one of Apple's brick-and-mortar stores at the Zorlu Center and Akasya Shopping Center in Istanbul, as first noted by MacRumors.
It was uncovered on Monday that Apple recently hired high profile auto executive Doug Betts, reigniting rumors that the company is building an electric car. As noted by The Wall Street Journal, Betts' LinkedIn profile says that he joined the Cupertino firm's "Operations" team this month.
It's not clear what he will be working on at Apple, but it's hard to imagine it's anything but a car. Betts was Head of Quality at the Chrysler Group, now Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, for 7 years before leaving in 2014 to "pursue other interests." Prior to that he worked at both Toyota and Nissan.
Lots of ink was used in the run-up to Apple Music introduction regarding exclusive music deals that Apple has managed to negotiate with its favorite artists. And in addition to album exclusives, Apple's Beats 1 global radio is hosted by celebrity DJs and has already aired a few exclusive interviews.
And now, the 24/7 live-streaming radio station has partnered with Viacom-owned MTV to exclusively reveal nominees for the upcoming Video Music Awards (VMA), a move which suggests Apple's desire to position Beats 1 as the de facto source of both new music and industry events.
Following an update last month that added expanded search options to its mobile app, Facebook-owned Instagram has now started rolling out place search and other search-related enhancements for its web version, the company announced Monday.
The new search features are currently rolling out to a subset of Instagram's installed base before going live for everyone so they may not be available to you just yet.
For the first time ever, the National Football League (NFL) will offer its Game Pass service to U.S. users on the Apple TV with on-demand broadcasting of games, according to an update on the Game Pass micro-site Monday.
Regular season, playoff and Super Bowl game broadcasts won't be available as live streams but rather after they air on television. In addition, the organization will retire its existing Game Rewind service on July 31. Available to iOS, Android and Windows users in the United States, Game Rewind provides access to on-demand games after they air on television.
Following Apple Music introduction, Spotify has doubled down on music discovery and third-party integration, the two areas where it hopes to outsmart competition, with Monday's announcement of a Discover Weekly feature and deep integration with the Nike+ Running mobile app.
Unlike Apple's human-curated playlists for various activity types, Spotify's Discover Weekly playlists are entirely driven by algorithms and personalized to each user's listening habits, as per Re/code on Monday.
Samsung on Monday announced a next-generation Galaxy tablet to take on Apple's iPad Air 2. The Galaxy Tab S2, driven by Android 5.0 Lollipop, is even thinner than Apple's device: it measures an impressive 5.6mm thin and includes Samsung's exceptionally bright and vivid Super AMOLED display in 7.9 and eight-inch flavors.
Regardless of the screen size, the new Tab S matches the resolution of full-size iPads at 2,048-by-1,536 pixels though last year's Tab S came outfitted with a sharper 2,560-by-1,600 pixel resolution displays.
It'd be a move that'd be praised by everyone, and for good reason. Not only is 16GB too small a storage tier for a device with no ability to bolt on additional storage, but in 2015, it's becoming a real problem.
Updates are bigger, apps are bigger and the entry-level iPhone size hasn't changed since 2012's iPhone 5. But now a sketchy rumor, posted yesterday by MIC Gadget, suggests that Apple could at last retire the 16GB storage tier on new iPhones.
If the rumor is true, the baseline edition of an upcoming 'iPhone 6s' refresh will apparently start at thirty-two gigabytes of storage.