In keeping true to its promise, The Great App Store Purge is now underway as Apple recently began removing old, outdated and seldom updated apps from the App Store, as first spotted by French blog iGen.fr. “We noticed that your app has not been updated in a significant amount of time,” reads Apple’s message to affected developers.
To keep their apps alive on the App Store, Apple is demanding that developers submit updated versions for review within 30 days.
This week's edition of our Apps of the Week roundup features some great apps and games for you to check out this weekend. We have an easy wallpaper-maker, a productivity app for shortcuts, a one-stop-shop for all of your news and social feeds, and of course two awesome new games that you won't want to miss.
Apple on Thursday updated its App of the Week promotion with the game AG Drive. This means from now through next Thursday, you can pick up the popular futuristic racing title for free—a solid savings of $4.
AG Drive puts you behind the wheel of a blazing fast anti-gravity craft and up against opponents on gorgeous tracks. It features amazing graphics, easy-to-learn controls, and it works on both iOS and Apple TV.
Facebook just pushed a major update to its Messenger software in the App Store. On iPhones with iOS 10, the app now takes advantage of Apple's new CallKit framework to make audio (VoIP) calls from Messenger look and behave like normal cellular calls with full support for Lock screen and Phone integration.
Bumped to version 89.0, the app now shows incoming VoIP calls from Messenger contacts right on your Lock screen complete with fullscreen contact images, standard controls like the Mute, Keypad, Speaker, Add Call and Video buttons and more.
Snapchat recently rolled out a minor refresh to its iPhone application in the App Store, bumping version number to 9.39.3.0 and bringing out a new Sticker Search feature. As the feature's name suggests, this lets you find precisely the sticker you want simply by typing its description. A previous Snapchat update introduced a few tweaks, including support for caption styling with the new bold, underline and italic options.
At the annual I/O developer conference in April 2016, Google previewed two new mobile apps: a one-to-one video calling app called Duo, which released in mid-August, and a messaging software called Allo, which surfaced on the App Store this morning as a free download.
It sports features commonly found in messaging apps and includes a built-in Assistant, Google's conversational artificial intelligence helper, an Incognito mode and more.
While Google originally promised Allo would only store messages transiently and in non-identifiable form, the firm's had a change of heart as Allo logs all chats by default.
With Instagram drafts, you can save any half-finished photo edits and work on them later, which is handy for those times you get too busy to post right away. And if you run an Instagram account for your business, letting your social media manager save a post as a draft makes it easy for you to review it in advance of publishing.
In addition to macOS Sierra, Apple on Tuesday also released updates for its Mac iWork apps to support real-time collaboration. The feature was announced at the iPhone 7 event earlier this month, and was added to iOS apps last week.
Real-time collaboration is exactly what it sounds like. With it, users can work simultaneously in any iWork app regardless of device. A list is displayed of all current document editors, and users see the others' cursor activity in real time.
Tweetbot users will be happy to hear that the Tapbots have updated their popular Twitter client today to support the just-released macOS Sierra software. The release brings the app to version 2.4.2, and it includes several improvements.
Among these improvements is support for extended Tweets—a change Twitter made to its service this week that prevents media URLs and Quote Tweets from counting against your 140 character limit. It also now supports extended videos.
In May of this year, Twitter promised it would be stopping counting media and other non-text content against its 140-character limit. Today, the company announced that embedded photos, videos, GIFs, polls and quoted tweets no longer count toward your 140 characters.
Twitter originally promised to also stop counting user mentions like @iDownloadBlog, but didn't specify today when it'll drop @usernames from the character count.
It's been a crazy week, what with the iPhone 7 launch and all. So we know everyone is ready to kick back and relax this weekend with some fun new apps and games. The latest edition of our Apps of the Week roundup includes a unique reading app, a TV series manager, and a new raw camera app. Plus we have a couple of new games for you to check out.
Game publisher Niantic has launched a minor update for the popular GPS-based Pokémon GO game for the iOS platform bug fixes.
Version 1.7.1 can now be downloaded from the App Store and comes just three days after the update that enabled buddy Pokémon in the game.