The Internet giant Google on Tuesday released a major refresh of its mobile Gmail app, which has now adopted the company's Material Design guidelines as part of a larger effort to make G Suite look and act like a family of tightly integrated products.
Fortnite hit App Store in April 2018 and now this tremendously popular free-to-play battle royale title can be played with any MFi-certified controller.
If you’ve ever used Apple’s AirPods with your iPhone or iPad before, then you already know about the seamless pairing experience that's made possible by the Apple-exclusive W1 chip. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t polished this experience on macOS just yet, and the AirPods experience on the Mac feels the same as any other Bluetooth-enabled device.
To say Apple left Mac users hanging in this respect would be an understatement, but third-party app developers have taken notice of this macOS-centric niche and now appear to be coming to our rescue.
Maintaining positive habits is hard, whether it be your daily yoga meditation, remembering to drink more water, reading at least a book per month or not using technology before nap time.
Thankfully, App Store has many apps that help you become a better version of yourself, and today we're spotlighting a free habit tracker for iPhone.
Announced at the end of November 2018, Apple's Entrepreneur Camp initiative for female coders and entrepreneurs has launched today.
App Store was opened on July 10, 2008, with an initial 500 apps available. Between its launch more than a decade ago and today, it's earned Apple's developers an unbelievable $120 billion in revenue, the Cupertino giant revealed in a press release Monday.
This week's edition of our Apps of the Week roundup includes a glitchy photo editor, a healthy habit-forming coach and a video clip curator. And as always, we've selected two great new games for you to check out.
Apple designed the iOS Home screen such that you could scroll through pages of app icons, but there’s always been a single row of non-scrollable, static app icons near the bottom of the display, more commonly referred to as the Dock.
Love it or hate it, the Dock is a staple in Apple’s desktop and mobile operating systems, but a new free jailbreak tweak called Fullboard by iOS developer Heft Johnson lets you nix it entirely, instead transforming the full height of the Home screen into a scrollable interface.
There are GIFs everywhere. We see them, save them, and share them from Facebook, Twitter, and even those we receive in Messages or Mail. So, if you want to have some fun, make something memorable, or just get creative with your photos and videos, why not make a GIF of your own?
These are the best free apps for creating animated GIFs on iPhone.
Facebook is reportedly planning to integrate chats from its three major properties: WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger.
This was reported Friday by The New York Times. A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed the report's findings via a written statement to the newspaper.
The different chats should be merged sometime in 2020.
According to sources, Facebook's boss and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg recently summoned WhatsApp employees to announce the merging of the company's messagings services.
They balked at the plan, the article reads:
On December 7, employees gathered around microphones at WhatsApp’s offices to ask Mr. Zuckerberg why he was so invested in merging the services. Some said his answers were vague and meandering. Several WhatsApp employees have left or plan to leave because of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plans, the people said.
If Facebook proceeds with the plan, customers will be able to start a chat with another user irrespective of whether they're on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Instagram. As an example, a Messenger user could start chatting with a friend of Instagram, or vice versa. In another instance, a WhatsApp user would be able to chat directly with a contact on Instagram.
From the article:
By stitching the apps’ infrastructure together, Mr. Zuckerberg wants to increase the utility of the social network, keeping its billions of users highly engaged inside its ecosystem. If people turn more regularly to Facebook-owned properties for texting, they may forgo rival messaging services, such as those from Apple and Google, said the people, who declined to be identified because the moves are confidential.
Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp will remain separate apps: the company will not merge them into a unified mega-app for chatting.
This integration would include end-to-end encryption to protect communications as the messages are transmitted between the three different chat services.
It was however unclear at post time how this would work in practice considering that people go by their real name on Facebook versus the anonymity that Instagram and WhatsApp provide.
Today, WhatsApp requires people to register only a phone number to sign up for the service. By contrast, Facebook and Facebook Messenger ask users to provide their real identities. Matching Facebook and Instagram users to their WhatsApp handles could give pause to those who prefer keeping their use of each app compartmentalized.
Is this a good idea, do you think?
Let us know in the comments!
In another attempt to nuke fake news out of orbit and help you distinguish the real Elon Musk or Donald Trump from their false copies, Twitter is testing a new "Original Tweeter" tag.
The company yesterday confirmed the test to TechCrunch, saying that the new label has rolled out to a “small percentage” of iOS and Android users across multiple markets.
Sara Haider, Twitter’s Director of Product Management, said:
Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation. As part of this work, we’re exploring adding more context to discussions by highlighting relevant replies—like those from the original tweeter.
Not only does this new feature make it easier to distinguish the person who started a thread, it also helps curb certain types of abuse on the platform.
Accounts masquerading as other Twitter users has been an annoying problem for sure. That being said, any effort to curb this kind of behavior deserves a thumbs-up, wouldn't you agree?
Just be careful not to confuse the new "Original Tweeter" tag with Twitter's existing blue verified badge which lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic.
As you probably know, Twitter's somehow managed to botch the roll-out of verified badges.
At first, the little blue badge was exclusive to celebrities and well-known users with millions of followers. But when the company expanded the program beyond public figures, it found itself in trouble after it verified accounts belonging to conspiracy theorists and Neo nazi groups.
Because of those woes and missteps, the company's verified account program is currently on hold and not accepting any new requests at this time.
On a related noted, we reported yesterday that Twitter's Night Mode, which enables a darkened interface, might soon introduce a pure black setting following user complaints that the app's Night Mode theme was too blue-ish and not dark or black enough.
So, has this new "Original Tweeter" tag appeared for you yet?
Let us know by leaving a comment down below.
The Iconfactory, the brains behind Twitterrific, the elegant Twitter client for iPhone, iPad and Mac, has created their own advertising service which lets other developers promote their warez directly on Twitterrific for just $100 a month.
The ad impression alone is misleading as it doesn't tell you anything beyond the number of times an ad was shown to the user. That's why they've embraced a fairer business model.
Twitterrific's co-creator Gedeon Maheux announced the news yesterday:
Now you can advertise your app, website, product or service on Twitterrific’s expansive network of tech-savvy users for just $100 a month. For that price we guarantee 1,000 tap-throughs—not impressions but actual visits—to your App Store page or website.
What’s more, we take care of creating the ad for you ourselves and even provide App Analytics for iOS or Google Analytics for websites.
That's just $0.10 per tap, which is a fantastic value.
We prefer to serve smaller developers with great products instead of big brands that are just trying to get bigger. We know that margins are tight on iOS and that there's often not a lot of money available to market your product.
The ad is displayed for 50 seconds at a time and each ad runs for a month. There's an 80-character limit per ad. The solution is free of invasive user tracking and, most importantly, ads are seen by people who appreciate good design in iPhone and iPad apps (by the way, 85 percent of Twitterrific's iOS user base is on iPhone and 15 percent uses the app on iPad).
Anyone who wants to advertise on the Twitterrific network can pay for their campaign via PayPal. The Iconfactory takes care of ad design based on a client's input and rest assured they take special care to ensure every ad works well in both the dark and light theme.
They have a paper that provides detailed ad metrics and information.
Ads are shown prominently at the top of the timeline.For comparison's sake, Apple's own estimate for cost-per-tap with Search Ads is $0.50. In contrast to Search Ads on App Store, The Iconfactory's recent campaign for its excellent sketching app Linea cost about $0.21 per tap.
You can even see their ad server in action on The Iconfactory website and see relevant details like current campaigns, advertisers, impressions and taps, device taps and more.
"As we move forward, we'd like to maintain this transparency," The Iconfactory said. "There are too many hidden things in the mobile ad business. Trackers try to follow your movement without you knowing. We think this needs to change."We normally don't post news like this but Twitterrific is an award-winning, gorgeously designed app and one of the best Twitter clients out there, if not the best.
For years, The Iconfactory has used the Deck Network to provide ads for Twitterrific before the network shut down in March 2017. So, why not use AdMob as a new provider then?
AdMob was disappointing.
The ads were ugly, poorly targeted and click through rates were about 0.05% (or 5 taps for every 10,000 impressions.) We work hard to make a great looking app and these mobile ads just crapped things up for very little financial gain.
After about a month of running these ads, we realized that it made more sense to pitch our own products and forego a few hundred dollars of ad revenue every month. Our ad income became our ad budget.
We also contacted some developer friends and past clients to see if they wanted to be a part of our experiment. It added some variety and let us share the love.
Twitterrific used to be a paid iOS app. In the past few years, they've been offering it at no charge whatsoever. Which begs the question: how are they making money?
With paid upgrades to a Pro edition for those wishing to unlock a few features and, yes, remove all in-app advertising!
Twitterrific's own ads (to get rid of the banner) generated a lot of taps. To be completely transparent here, that's one of the features of these ads for us—it's an incentive for people to upgrade. It's also one of the reasons we can offer these ads at such an attractive rate: ad revenue is not our primary source of product income.
At just hundred bucks per month for 1,000 tap-throughs, small developers who don't have a marketing budget can run an ad in one of the most popular apps on App Store, and they're paying for actual click-throughs rather than ad impressions.
So there you go, girls and boys. We though you might care about how a popular app you might be using is going about generating money. No question about it, The Iconfactory has come up with an interesting idea that's similar to what Overcast does.
Do you use Twitterrific and have you seen ads at the top of your timeline yet? If not, how do you feel about their pricing scheme for Twitterrific ads and the whole idea behind this service?
Let us know by posting your thoughts in the comments!
Twitterrific for Mac is a $7.99 download from Mac App Store.
Twitterrific for iPhone and iPad is available free on App Store.