Pandora and Spotify rank as the number one and number two music streaming apps in terms of downloads, analytics firm AppAnnie reports - no big surprise. However, where things become interesting is that Apple's Beats Music, which the company purchased for $3 billion in May, is placed ninth, below iHeartRadio, SoundCloud and Apple's GarageBand.
Apple is in preliminary talks to offer its iPhone in Iran, perhaps one day marking the company's first entry in the country, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Cupertino-based company is said to be in contact with Iranian distributors in case "Western sanctions ease sufficiently" and it makes sense to enter the country for business.
The social networking giant Facebook on Wednesday pushed a small update to its Messenger client for the iPhone and iPad which lets you preview sticker animations.
Facebook Messenger 12.0 (what's up with version numbers, Facebook?) allows you to press and hold down on a sticker to expand it and view any animations before sending it.
The app is available free in the App Store.
Keeping true to its promise, T-Mobile, the nation's fourth-largest carrier, on Wednesday announced that customers can now buy Apple's iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3 in participating T-Mobile stores and online. The new tablets are available in Wi-Fi-only and cellular flavors and in all three colors.
The top-of-the-line iPad Air 2 model with 128 gigabytes of storage is not yet available, leaving early adopters to choose between 16GB and 64GB iPad Air 2 models. The iPad mini 3 is available in 16/64/128GB storage flavors.
The whole CVS/Rite Aid/Apple Pay controversy is about to get uglier as MCX, the consortium of retailers who back the competing CurrentC mobile payment system, on Wednesday responded to accusations that it was purposefully blocking Apple Pay, Google Wallet and other NFC-based payment solutions and requiring participating retailers to use CurrentC exclusively.
Apple Pay has been praised for being secure and protecting your privacy by not sharing customer or transaction data with merchants. According to MCX, it does not store sensitive customer information in the mobile app. Instead, users’ payment data is stored “in our secure cloud-hosted network”.
Maybe I'm reading their blog post wrong, but if customer data and especially payment information is stored in the cloud, then it's not secure and this is precisely why Apple Pay is, in my personal opinion, better.
Five days after Facebook announced its $16 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in February of this year, the world's most popular messaging platform announced plans to enable voice calling in the first half of this year.
The summer came and went and here we are well into the third quarter of 2014 and now WhatsApp is saying that the planned release has been pushed back.
Citing a series of technical challenges, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said during his presentation at the Code/Mobile conference this week that the VoIP calling service will make its debut in WhatsApp mobile apps in the first quarter of 2015.
Yesterday, the Internet giant Google announced a newsworthy promotion giving its users the first minute free when placing outgoing calls through Hangouts to phone numbers in more than two dozen countries.
“The first 60 seconds is on us,” the company said in a post over at Google+. “What you say is up to you”. You can place Hangouts using Gmail and Google+ on desktop, using the Hangouts extension for Chrome, or via Google's mobile Hangouts app for iOS and Android.
If you've been on the lookout for the latest deals on iTunes Gift Cards, head over to PayPal’s Digital Gifts eBay store as it's currently offering 20 percent off iTunes Gift Cards in several denominations. The $25, $50 and $100 cards are now available with a twenty percent discount so you'll end up paying $20, $40 and $80, respectively.
That's a nice 20 percent saving right off the bat on anything you purchase on Apple's content stores. iTunes Gift Cards can be used to buy Mac and iOS apps, electronic books, movies, TV shows, music and other digital items carried on Apple's content stores.
You can also apply your iTunes credit toward the purchase of iCloud storage upgrades and use it to buy stuff in apps via In-App Purchases.
Many social media users were intrigued when Taco Bell's social media accounts went dark on Tuesday, fearing the worst. Luckily, it was just Taco Bell announcing a major overhaul to its iOS app that allows customers to order and pay for food on their smartphones before even setting foot in the fast food chain.
Apple's iOS 8 has been rolled out 52 percent of all active iOS devices, indicating a slower rollout than versions of Apple's mobile software in the past. Apple updated its Developer Center with the data on Tuesday, indicating that some of iOS 8's early flaws may have slowed down its rollout over the last five and a half weeks.
Apple has expanded its iAd platform to 75 additional countries, bringing the total reach to 95 countries around the world, the company announced on its Developer Center on Tuesday. This is Apple's largest rollout of the network, and drastically increases its reach to iPhone and iPad users worldwide.
Pocket, a read-later service, with a recent Mac app update has completed its support for Apple's refreshed mobile and desktop operating systems.
According to developers last week, Pocket for Mac now includes Handoff and can send stuff to other apps that use the Mac's new multi-purpose Share menu. It's Pocket's largest Mac update in over a year.
The iOS edition of Pocket has had Handoff support in place for weeks. And with Handoff now live in the Mac edition of Pocket, I'm not sure how I've managed to do without such a useful feature. I'm a huge, huge Pocket fan and use it every day to bookmark and save dozens of articles that I find during the day for later reading.
With Handoff implemented in both Pocket editions, I now am able to seamlessly continue reading an article right where I left off on any of my Apple devices (Bluetooth must be enabled).
It's awesome and I couldn't imagine my daily computing without Handoff. It's the one feature I use the most, all the time. As I constantly move between my mobile and desktop devices, Handoff removes the friction completely without the mental burden of having to remember where I left off.
Handoff is tremendously convenient. It's fun, easy to use, a time-saver and bridges the gap between desktop and mobile like no other technology before it. And it's only getting started.
Pocket for Mac is available free of charge in the Mac App Store.