Less than a week following iOS 9.1 beta 4, Apple on Monday issued a brand new, fifth beta of what would become iOS 9's first major software update.
iOS 9.1 beta 5 (build 13B137) for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad is available to both members of the Apple Developer Program and public beta testers.
In addition, the software is available as a standalone download through Apple's portal for developers.
Google announced today that Apple fans who are running iOS 9 on their iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices will soon start seeing app content in their search results in the Safari browser.
The company's so-called App Indexing feature is now compatible with HTTP deep link standards for iOS 9. Owners of iOS 9 devices should expect app content to begin surfacing in search results by month's end.
According to Apple's own data, the adoption rate for iOS 9 has reached 57 percent of iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices in the wild after three weeks of availability, as measured by the App Store on October 5, 2015. By comparison, it took iOS 8 nearly six weeks to zoom past the 50 percent barrier.
A total of 33 percent of iOS devices running iOS 8 visited the App Store on October 5, while earlier version of the mobile operating system accounted for the remaining ten percent of hardware in the wild.
Hot off the heels of its big Mac update, developer Flexibits today issued an update to Fantastical for iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch. The new software takes advantage of the new productivity-enhancing features provided by iOS 9 and watchOS 2.
These include 3D Touch support for iPhone 6s owners, a dedicated Fantastical complication for Apple Watch wearers, Slide Over and Split View multitasking modes on the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 4 and much more.
Just as all the hoopla surrounding the XcodeGhost attack appears to have died down, security researchers over at Palo Alto Networks have identified a new type of harmful malware.
Dubbed YiSpecter, it can install itself on both jailbroken and non-jailbroken iOS devices and is the first iOS malware that exploit Apple's private APIs to implement malicious functionalities.
Here's everything you need to know about this new type of attack, what Apple is saying about the malware and what you can do in order to protect your devices from becoming infected with YiSpecter.
Apple Music on iOS includes an option to stream your music at high bitrates over a mobile data network at all times. As you know, Apple Music defaults to high-quality streams on Wi-Fi.
With this toggle, you can control your cellular data usage by enabling or disabling high bitrates when streaming or downloading music over your carrier's cellular data network.
iOS 9.0.2 has patched a potentially disturbing vulnerability which allowed malicious users who have access to your device to use Siri from the Lock screen in order to browse your photos and contacts.
According to Apple' official iOS 9.0.2 release notes, the software has fixed the issue which allowed access to photos and contacts on a locked device by “restricting options offered on a locked device.”
The vulnerability was left unpatched in iOS 9.0 and iOS 9.0.1 and affected the iPhone 4s and later, fifth-generation iPod touch and later and iPad 2 and later.
Starting with the release of iOS 9.0.1, Apple has increased your security by defaulting to 6-digit passcodes on Touch ID devices. “If you use Touch ID, it’s a change you’ll hardly notice,” says Apple.
Compared to 4-digit passcodes which have 10,000 possible combinations, their 6-digit counterparts strengthen your security with one million possible combinations, meaning 6-digit passcodes will be a lot tougher to crack.
Non-Touch ID iPhones and iPads still default to less secure 4-digit passcodes, however. You can enable a 6-digit passcode with a quick trip to Settings, here's how.
The App Store offers several high-quality apps that help you create strong passwords for various services, manage your passwords and synchronize them between devices with ease, AgileBits' freemium 1Password being perhaps the most popular one.
But there's now a brand new password manager on the block which takes a clever approach to securing all your online accounts with strong passwords but without having to actually remember them.
How about re-creating passwords from recipes?
Welcome to Naranja Studio's Password Chef, a novel $2.99 app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad which takes advantage of unique recipes to basically turn any site name into an easy-to-recall password, canceling the need for additional software or devices.
Siri's Proactive features let you do so much more, and in a more intelligent fashion than ever before. In addition to suggesting apps, people, locations and more when you use Spotlight Search, iOS also lets you ask Siri to actually create context-aware reminders for what you’re looking at on the screen of your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.
Asking to be reminded about things you’re looking at in apps like Safari, Mail and Notes that you want to follow up on later can be a tremendous productivity boost.
The feature is a great time-saver when you cannot currently deal with what you're doing right now, and would like to get reminded about it at a later stage, but are too lazy to create a reminder yourself. Here's how it works.
Apple today refreshed its official XcodeGhost FAQ webpage, listing the top 25 iPhone and iPad apps on the App Store that contain the widely reported though mostly harmless XcodeGhost malware.
In addition to WeChat, one of the top messaging apps in the world, Rovio's Angry Birds 2 and China Unicom’s Customer Service app, most of the listed apps are distributed on the Chinese App Store only.
“If users have one of these apps, they should update the affected app which will fix the issue on the user’s device,” writes the company. “If the app is available on App Store, it has been updated, if it isn’t available it should be updated very soon.”
Apple has pulled many of the infected apps and said it's working closely with developers to get impacted apps back on the App Store.
Pixelmator, the tremendously popular Photoshop replacement available for both iOS and OS X platforms, today gained an update which adds several new features on iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices.
For starters, Pixelmator 2.1 for iOS is now fully compatible with iOS 9 (in fact, it's now an iOS 9-only app) and supports Slide Over and Split View iPad multitasking modes.
With Split View on compatible iPads, customers can use Pixelmator and any other app at the same time. More importantly, the app now opening and editing images in 8K resolution.