With one in two in the United States now owning a smartphone (was 40 percent of mobile subscribers in 2011), app downloads are on the rise, too.
Compared to last year, the average smartphone consumer in the U.S. now has 41 apps on their home screen, a 28 percent increase from 32 apps in last year, according to a Nielsen study released this morning.
Here are the top five downloaded apps across the iOS and Android platforms...
Color me skeptical, but I'm still scratching my head over over a surprising report by Macquarie analyst Ben Schacter which has it that Google's Chrome browser is coming to iOS some time during the June quarter of this year or, if not, then "definitely this year".
If true, this would be a big news as Chrome ended 2011 within spitting distance of market-leading Internet Explorer. Heck, it even overtook Microsoft’s product to become the world’s most popular browser for a day and is certainly expected to become the top browser this year.
The big question is, will Apple allow Chrome into the App Store and let Google own all the searches? Bear in mind that the search giant currently pays Apple an estimated 60 percent revenue share for the searches done through Safari's search box...
The search giant Google is reportedly looking to replicate Apple's Game Center with a native Android app of its own.
Despite the ongoing patent war waged between Apple and a bunch of Android backers over the look and feel of iOS software, Google is reportedly looking to simply copy Game Center.
The search firm needs own social gaming service so Android gamers have a central place to connect with each other, check out leaderboards, scores and challenge friends.
And if their other products are anything to go by, Google's thing is likely to feature deep integration with Google+, their another social thing...
Are you one of the few people left still using Google's social networking service? If so, you'll be happy to hear that the search giant has just released a major update to its Google+ app for iOS.
No, the update doesn't bring about any major new features. But it does include a revamped UI, which looks a lot cleaner than the previous version, and a few other nice improvements...
Last month, the Federal Trade Commission was said to be investigating claims that Google was illegally bypassing privacy settings in Safari. The Mountain View company was caught using a loophole in the browser to allow it to track users' online activities without their consent.
If confirmed, the FTC was expected to slap Google with a hefty fine. And it certainly looks like that will hold true, as Bloomberg is out with a new report claiming that the Trade Commission is about to slap the company with reparations worth millions of dollars...
Giving credit where credit is due, Apple now properly acknowledgeds use of crowd-sourced map tiles from OpenStreetMap for its $4.99 iPhoto photo management program for the iPhone and iPad.
The proper attribution has been discovered in yesterday’s iPhoto 1.0.1 maintenance update, tucked away in legal text found under the Apps section in device Settings.
With that off our backs, we wonder when will Apple make an iOS-wide switch from the Google Maps backend to its own mapping solution...
With just one device family, Apple's iPhone has managed to outgrow Google's Android platform in Japan over the past three months, gaining market share, a survey note out today from research firm comScore indicated. While we've known for awhile that Japan's iOS-Android duopoly is a sign of things to come, the numbers are nonetheless eyebrow-raising.
Together, the two platforms accounted for a staggering 95.6 percent of all smartphones sold in Japan, where still just one in five own a smartphone.
Low smartphone penetration rate in Japan, compared to the one-in-two smartphone penetration rate in the U.S., actually bodes well for Apple. As more folks in Japan upgrade their dumb phones, they are likely to consider the iPhone 4/4S and especially a sixth-generation model that Piper Jaffray's resident Apple analyst Gene Munster deemed "the mother of all upgrades"...
Just as Microsoft took the wraps off of paid storage tiers for its SkyDrive service yesterday, Dropbox updated its iOS and desktop apps with the ability to easily grab a public link for any file or folder on your machine or Dropbox. And now, Google has just beefed up its own cloud storage by launching the brand new Google Drive service, as rumored.
And just as we were processing this news, Google's official video introduction to Google Drive went live on their YouTube channel...
Chitika, an ad network whose reach spans across more than 100,000 websites, is out with a new report this weekend regarding mobile platform usage. The firm has been tracking real-time activity on its network over the last 24 hours, and the results are pretty interesting.
Despite Android devices garnering close to 50% of the smartphone market, Chitika found that iOS seems to be the mobile OS of choice among its users. Here in the US, at least, devices running Apple's operating system accounted for nearly 70% of recent activity...
A recent newspaper interview has caused quite a stir when the blogosphere lit up yesterday with controversial observations from the mouth of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. In a nutshell, Brin painted Apple and Facebook as major threats to Internet freedom because neither company's been open enough, at least in the search giant's view.
This from a guy whose company's been seriously lacking openness in many competitive categories. Naturally, a backlash ensued, prompting the engineer to set the record straight and clarify what he called "distorted secondary coverage".
No, he did not mean what he said and yes, in case you were wondering, he is loving his iMac. I call BS on this one, here's why...
Following a report that claimed Google had been overriding Safari users' privacy settings to set tracking code in order to collect web browsing habits, a newspaper story this morning asserts that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is taking a long, hard look at the search giant's practice.
The FTC is said to be “deep into an investigation” of Google’s tactics of bypassing Apple’s security settings on both the desktop and iOS versions of Safari.
Apparently, they are looking to fine Google and the financial sanctions could be "sizable", according to the obligatory people familiar with the matter.
You can never accuse Google of not trying. Successful or not, the search company has tried its hand in several markets over the past few years. And it's not showing any signs of slowing down.
TheNextWeb is reporting today that it has gotten its hands on a draft release from a partner of Google's upcoming Google Drive service. That's right. Google's about to take on DropBox in the cloud-based storage space...