Pokémon GO Plus, a Bluetooth-driven wearable device that helps you catch 'em all without looking at Nintendo's Pokémon GO augmented-reality game on your smartphone, is now set to launch in September, not late-July as previously announced. Nintendo of America tweeted news of the delay earlier this week.
“The Pokemon GO Plus accessory will now be released Sept 2016 instead of the originally expected end of July launch,” reads the announcement.
In addition to adding support for Accelerated Mobile Pages to Chrome for iOS, Google also this morning issued a refresh to its native search app on the App Store, which supports Google Now cards. Google 17.0 for iOS, a free download, packs in improvements to help you get things done more quickly in the app such as the addition of a Forward button (what took them so long, really?), a more reliable voice search, the ability to revisit recent pages for a full seven days and a few local search results improvements.
Google today issued a small but important refresh to the Chrome browser for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch on the App Store. The updated software bumps up version number to 52.0.2743.84 and brings official support for Accelerated Mobile Pages that, similar to Instant Articles on Facebook, load in a fraction of the time of their non-accelerated mobile versions. Any news stories and articles from partner publishers that have a lightning bolt and “AMP” next to them in search results will load instantly when tapped on.
Just like rival WhatsApp, the popular Rakuten-owned Viber messaging application pushed an update to its App Store app this morning, bumping version number to 6.2 whilst adding a few new features related to handling sticker packages within the app. You can now share sticker packages with others and preview stickers before sending one in a chat. And to preserve storage space on the device, there's now the option to delete sticker packages you no longer use. Grab Viber for free on the App Store.
After launching a desktop Mac app in May, Facebook-owned WhatsApp today gave its iPhone application a little love with a new version now available on the App Store. WhatsApp 2.16.7 for iPhone includes three times bigger emoji when sent alone, a feature also found in iOS 10's Messages app. In this release, you can now zoom when recording videos within the app and select multiple chats to quickly archive, delete or mark as read.
Plus, thanks to under-the-hood tweaks chats now open a lot faster than before.
Google today updated its mobile mapping application for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with some rather useful visual tweaks. Google Maps 4.21 for iOS now highlights local areas that might interest you, adding multiple destinations to a route is supported in the new version and the typography of street names, points of interest, transit stations and other places has been improved to make them easier to read on smaller screens, among other changes.
We're back with another edition of our Apps of the Week post. This is a weekly roundup of a handful of new and unique apps and games we think are worth checking out this weekend. Today's selections include new apps for highlighting and sharing interesting quotes from around the web, making music, and learning more about new topics, and of course we have two new games for you to try.
Pokémon GO set an App Store record for most downloads during its first week of availability, reports The Loop's Jim Dalrymple. This should come as no surprise to folks who have been following the craze surrounding the hit game, which has sat atop the App Store's Top Free and Top Grossing lists since it launched earlier this month.
Earlier in the week, Apple updated iOS adoption numbers via its App Store dashboard for developers. According to the refreshed stats, the various iOS 9 editions now power 86 percent of iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, a two-point gain versus the 84 percent adoption rate that iOS 9 hit on April 20.
Apple on Thursday updated its App of the Week promotion with the game Super Arc Light. This means that for the next 7 days you’ll be able to pick up the popular arcade shooter for free on both iPhone and iPad—a solid savings of $2.
For those who haven't played Super Arc Light, it's a minimalistic radial shooter, in which you must defend your base to the death against waves of challenging enemies. The developer describes it as Super Hexagon meets Geometry Wars.
Periscope, Twitter's live-broadcasting app, was updated in the App Store with a few new features, among them Replay Highlights, Live Autoplay and Tweet Embeds. Highlights automatically generates a short trailer for every Periscope broadcast of your home feed, making it easier to catch up on broadcasts you missed from the last day.
Periscope is a free download from the App Store.
The British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) iPlayer Radio mobile app, which used to be limited to customers in the United Kingdom, has expanded stateside today, TechCrunch just announced. Now customers in the United States can download iPlayer Radio from the US App Store and tune in to BBC's high-quality radio stations and content.
Earlier in the week, BBC announced launch of a brand new personalized content portal with a new BBC+ app on the UK App Store.