Facebook-owned WhatsApp has some notable improvements in the pipeline, including support for large emoji characters, all-new public groups, the ability to share locally stored tracks and Apple Music songs with friends and family, deeper Facebook integration, profile codes, stickers and multi-account support, to name a few.
But we're just getting started.
Dropbox today announced a major update to its mobile and desktop clients across platforms, including the ability to scan documents in the mobile app, create Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel files on the go, share files securely with others using access privileges and much more.
On the downside, Dropbox's existing Camera Sync feature has been removed from the mobile app so you now must manage photos using the desktop client. Dropbox for iOS is available at no charge via the App Store. The Mac client must be downloaded directly from the Dropbox website.
The Unicode Consortium, the organization which develops the Unicode standard that specifies the representation of text in all modern software, officially announced Unicode 9.0, the next major revision to the Unicode standard.
The Unicode 9.0 specification is now available to vendors with 7,500 new characters for a total of 128,172 characters, including six new scripts and 72 new emoji characters.
MIT Technology Review has discovered that the kernel in iOS 10 beta is unencrypted, making it a lot easier for technology-minded users, jailbreak developers and the like to take a peek under iOS's hood and pinpoint any potential vulnerabilities.
For those wondering, kernels in all prior iOS betas used to be encrypted. Is this a bold move meant to help strengthen security in iOS 10 or will this decision actually introduce further security risks and open new attack vectors for hackers to exploit?
Yahoo today released a brand new mobile application for planning trips, Radar for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. The app is available at no charge in the App Store and includes a smart chat bot that you can interact with. Using data from a number of popular third-party services, like Yelp and TripAdvisor, Radar delivers personalized recommendations of sights to see, activities and restaurants in an attractively designed mobile user interface.
After using it briefly, I can safely say that Radar is one of the best mobile apps Yahoo has published in a while.
Twitter today said its users will soon be able to tweet out 140-second videos, a major increase in video duration compared to the current 30-second limit. The company also announced that its shortform video-sharing app, Vine, will start an experiment with longer video as well.
Micro-blogging startup Twitter on Tuesday announced a major expansion of native video length, with users able to upload videos to the service which can now be up to 140 seconds long, or two minutes and twenty seconds. Before today, Twitter video uploads were capped at thirty seconds. This change is scheduled to go into effect soon and will require an updated mobile app.
Facebook-owned Instagram today announced a major milestone as the service just passed 500 million monthly users, more than 80 percent of whom are living outside of the United States. The announcement came a little more than a month following Instagram's major redesign of its mobile app. The only metric that matters is daily active users and Instagram said that out of the 500+ million monthly users, 300 million use the service every single day.
Siri has gained new features in iOS 10. Not only does she power smarter QuickType keyboard suggestions and lets you control HomeKit-compatible accessories using your voice, but Apple now officially supports third-party integration with SiriKit for developers.
In opening up Siri to apps, Apple's taken the same controlled approach like with iOS multitasking by only permitting certain app types.
In this iOS 10 preview, we're going to take a closer look at an improved QuickType keyboard with added Siri intelligence, explain specific app types that can take advantage of Siri and look into the technologies that make all of this possible.
Five days ago, iDownloadBlog's own Andrew O'Hara first wrote about jailbreak developer Andy Wiik's discovery of Dark Mode resources buried deep within iOS 10's Messages app.
During the weekend, Wiik shared a few new screenshots showing a dark mode for the Settings app, running in iOS Simulator, strongly suggesting that these Dark Mode resources may not have been left within iOS 10 code by accident.
iOS 10 has a lot going on. There are a lot of enhancements that we've covered so far, and many more we haven't. New features aside, many people have been digging through iOS 10 beta in search for unannounced features, or upcoming devices.
Thanks to iOS developer Andrew Wiik, we have another idea of what might be coming in a future iOS 10 beta: the sought-after cellular data toggle in Control Center.
Since installing iOS 10 Preview on my iPhone 6s I've been discovering these little gems that, in my personal opinion, will make this particular revision to Apple's mobile OS the most worthwhile upgrade yet.
Aside from major new headlining features, it's the little things that make our hearts sing. One of such subtle refinements is the ability to quickly get to Spotlight Search from any app.