As you may have heard, WhatsApp is starting to share some of users' account data with Facebook (things like your registered phone number and the last time you used the service) to improve targeted advertising and friend suggestions on Facebook and better fight spam on WhatsApp. Thankfully, you can easily opt out, right when the prompt goes up, or within 30 days of accepting the new terms, here's how.
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.”
Respected journalist Steven Levy has scored another nice exclusive with a new write-up over at Backchannel, a Wired Media Group property, giving us a rare inside look at how artificial intelligence and machine learning work at Apple.
The article contains a lot of gems, with company executives Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, Phil Schiller and Siri leads Tom Gruber and Alex Acero providing a bunch of previously unknown facts about Apple's AI efforts, including this one: machine learning has enabled Apple to cut Siri's error rate by a factor or two.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Released in March of 2014, The New York Times' news curation app, NYT Now, is scheduled to shut down on August 29, the newspaper announced in a blog post.
The app debuted as a more affordable alternative to the paper's digital subscriptions, offering premium content for as low as $8 per month. It was regularly updated and at one point even gained features like 1Password integration.
A lot of times while using Siri, you might have to repeat yourself or start over while you're talking because if you speak too slowly, or pause while you're talking, you'll get the "I didn't quite get that" message.
As frustrating as this can be, especially in louder environments, a new free jailbreak tweak called SiriKeepListening now available in Cydia helps remedy this problem.
Various editions of iOS 9 are currently installed on 87 percent of iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices, a one-point gain versus a month ago. During the same period, iOS 8 has dropped from eleven to ten percent of devices, suggesting much of iOS 9's growth could be owed to upgrades. Earlier editions of iOS continue to comprise about three percent of devices.
The stats were derived from Apple's logs capturing devices that accessed the App Store on August 15, 2016, and are publicized on the App Store dashboard.
Earlier this week, Snapchat issued a small update to its free of charge iPhone application on the App Store. Bumping version number to 9.37, the app is now optimized for iOS's Low Power Mode which debuted in iOS 9 last year.
“When your device is in Low Power Mode, Snapchat will now automatically reduce its battery usage,” according to release notes accompanying a 96.1-megabyte download.