App Store Apps

Instagram gains pinch-zoom on photos and videos, a new button to improve low-light shots

Christian Zibreg ∙ August 31, 2016

Instagram today announced that users of its free of charge iPhone app can now use the familiar pinch-zoom gesture to zoom in on photos—and videos—found in their feed and elsewhere in the app. I've long craved for this feature: in fact, I've been using iOS's system-wide Zoom feature to get a closer look at photos in the Instagram app that interest me. Just yesterday, Instagram pushed another update which brings out a new low-light button for its built-in camera.

Snapchat’s sweet new update makes a handful of things a tad easier

Christian Zibreg ∙ August 30, 2016

A brand new version of Snapchat is now available in the App Store on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It's a point update but don't let that fool you as it makes a handful of things a bit easier. For starters, you can now finally preview a person's public Stories without adding them as a friend. Before today, you had to add a contact as your friend to view their Stories so just this nice improvement alone could go a long way toward helping us discover new accounts and content on Snapchat a bit more easily than before.

Instagram’s popular Explore tab now recommends Stories from people you could follow

Christian Zibreg ∙ August 30, 2016

Today, Instagram's Explore tab will start showing some users a bar of Stories from accounts they could follow, TechCrunch reported yesterday, saying these algorithmically personalized suggestions will roll out to everyone soon. Stories recommendations are based on who you follow and the topics you care about, making it easy to add someone new to your Home feed’s Stories section.

Bonk!, tldarling, Jam Looper, and other apps to check out this weekend

Cody Lee ∙ Updated March 17, 2019

We'll keep things short and sweet this week. The latest edition of our Apps of the Week roundup includes a fun new photo editor from Jimmy Fallon, an app that auto-summarizes long web articles, a minimal music-maker, and of course two new games for you to check out.

WhatsApp begins sharing account data with Facebook to boost targeted advertising

Christian Zibreg ∙ August 25, 2016

Facebook-owned WhatsApp today updated its Terms and Privacy Policy for the first time in four years to reflect that the messaging service will start sharing select account data with Facebook in order to improve targeted advertising. Wait, does that mean that you're going to be inundated with ads on WhatsApp? In a word, no—at least for the time being. As per the amended terms of service, “We still do not allow third-party banner ads on WhatsApp.”

You can now mark recommended videos as ‘Not Interested’ in YouTube for iOS

Christian Zibreg ∙ August 24, 2016

Google today issued a small update to its YouTube client on the App Store, adding a feature that enables better suggestions while fixing three annoying bugs.

Bumped to version 11.32, the iPhone and iPad application now makes it easy to improve personalized suggestions by marking recommended videos under the Up Next section as “Not Interested,” which helps train the algorithm to better tailor recommendations to your personal tastes.

Pinterest just bought Instapaper

Christian Zibreg ∙ August 23, 2016

In a newsworthy move that in all likelihood makes lots of sense, the photo sharing service Pinterest has acquired Pinterest, the popular app and web service for saving webpages to read later.

According to the announcement, Pinterest will continue to develop and maintain the mobile Instapaper app, available at no charge on the App Store.

This just made my day: Oceanhorn 2 is in development—and it looks awesome!

Christian Zibreg ∙ August 23, 2016

Inspired by Nintendo's wildly popular Legend of Zelda console game series, Oceanhorn by Cornfox & Bros is one of the best-looking, most satisfying RPG-based action adventure games “for the rest of us” that I've had a blast playing on my iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.

Ever since completing the game, I've been rooting for Oceanhorn's developers to make a sequel and now, GameMob points us to the official confirmation that it's indeed being worked on as we speak.

Titled Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm, the game's mechanics are based on a third-person camera angle versus the original game's isometric view. The storyline revolves around a new hero—a grown-up boy who is training to become a Knight of Arcadia.

Skype for iOS gains connectivity status bar, more informative notifications & other perks

Christian Zibreg ∙ August 22, 2016

Microsoft today pushed an update to its mobile Skype application for iOS, bumping the app's version number on the App Store to 6.22. The new edition includes several enhancements related to notifications and Skype Credit, which can now be purchased from within the app in more currencies than before. Skype for iPhone and iPad are available free on the App Store.

Facebook launches Lifestage, a teens-only social app built around video profiles

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated February 17, 2018

If you're a high-schooler aged under 22 and eager to connect with your classmates within an environment that harkens back to the Facebook from 2004, when it was exclusively a college student network, then today's Facebook where everyone creeps on others may not be the safest place to engage in such interactions.

That's why Michael Sayman, Facebook’s 19-year-old product manager, created Lifestage, a teens-only iPhone app that encourages high-schoolers to create video profiles and share them with their school network.

Canvas, Spark Pro, Mimo and other apps to check out this weekend

Cody Lee ∙ Updated May 1, 2018

It's the weekend again, and you know what that means! It's time for another edition of our Apps of the Week roundup. This week we have some awesome selections for you including a new realtime collaboration app, a minimal video capturing app, a new app that makes learning to code fun and easy, and of course two games that we think are worth checking out.

Twitter gains features to limit notifications and filter out lower-quality content

Christian Zibreg ∙ August 19, 2016

Twitter continues adding features to let users control and personalize their experience on the service with yesterday's announcement of a new quality filter and notification settings.

Now available in Twitter 6.6 for iOS, the new content quality switch allows you to optionally weed out lower-quality tweets from your feed, notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience.

“It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with – and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings,” cautioned the service.