Apple sent an email to registered developers who are registered in Crimea on Sunday terminating their developer agreement with Apple and ceasing the development and distribution of apps.
We're nearly halfway into the first month of 2015 and yet no free songs have appeared on iTunes, leading Business Insider to wonder whether Apple has killed off the promotion for good.
Conceived as a promotional vehicle to drive sales of music downloads and expose music lovers to new songs, Apple's “Single of the Week” promoting launched a decade ago, back in 2004 (three years after the launch of the iTunes Store).
The promotion has been running ever since, giving out free music every week on iTunes up until the start of 2015.
Apple typically handles refunds of digital purchases on a case-by-case basis and with an “All Sales Final” provision. But now, Apple's reportedly switched to a 14-day return policy for movies, TV shows, music, books and apps in most European markets, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and France, German blog iFun.de [Google Translate] reported Monday.
Apple's updated policy in these countries states that customers can now cancel their digital purchase within fourteen days from when they received their receipt “without giving any reason,” with the exception of iTunes Match, Season Pass, Multi-Pass and iTunes Gift Cards and Allowances that can't be refunded once you have redeemed the code or activated the service.
The Interview is now available for download or stream from iTunes, after Apple originally chose not to carry the film at the same time as Microsoft, Netflix, and others.
For the last six years Apple has been running its "12 Days of Christmas" promotion in the UK, and did so last year in both the UK and US "12 Days of Gifts". It joyed customers by giving away iOS apps, music, films and books over the twelve days following Christmas Day. However as noticed first by MacWorld, it appears Apple is discontinuing its holiday tradition in 2014/2015.
We're now three days out of Christmas, and any type of promotion can't be found. MacWorld reports from a reliable source that we're definitely not seeing the "12 Days of Christmas" app this year.
Another twist to "The Interview" movie: The New York Times reports Sony asked the White House for help in lining up a single technology partner to stream its movie "The Interview", and it wanted help from none other than Apple's iTunes.
The Cupertino-based Apple reportedly was not interested, "at least not on a speedy time table," the New York Times says. An Apple spokesman declined to provide official comment on the matter.
As first noted by 9to5Mac, Apple has expanded its social presence with a brand new blog dedicated to iTunes content and hosted on Yahoo-owned Tumblr platform.
Now available at the itunes.tumblr.com URL, the blog highlights a curated selection of movies, television shows, music and books carried on the iTunes Store.
A special emphasis is given to Apple's Best of 2014 charts that were published on iTunes last week. If memory serves me well, this is Apple's second official blog on Tumblr following odd iPhone 5c web adds and Tumblr presence which was supposed to resonate with the blog platform's younger audience.
Apple's proprietary digital rights management software, FairPlay, that prevented users from loading songs from rival music stores on early iPods, did not harm consumers nor did it violate the United States antitrust laws, an eight-person jury has determined.
As reported by The Verge, the jurors have sided with Apple in a decade-long suit and have not found Apple guilty of exploiting FairPlay DRM as a lock-in preventing rival music stores from syncing with iPods. Though the iPhone maker is off the hook now, an appeal will be filed with a higher court.
Welcome to Wednesday. As we prepare for an onslaught of new arrivals that will be hitting the App Store midnight, a number of apps and games have been updated with new features and we're here to tell you what's changed.
We also want to make sure you stay on top of recent discounts as some apps get slashed by as much as eighty percent with the others going all the way down to zero bucks.
And it wouldn't be a roundup without taking a look at some of the forthcoming releases due later this month or sometime next year. This is App Recap, an app-focused column by iDownloadBlog.
App Recap welcomes you to Monday. Our daily column that helps make sense of the latest iPhone, iPad and Mac apps, games and media on iTunes is back with tons of goodies, discounts, software news and more.
We also feature a new Apple Pay television commercial by MasterCard featuring Gwen Stefani and a huge update to Paper by Fifty-Three while casting spotlight on a holiday-themed update to The Sims FreePlay and the latest Star Wars: Commander refresh that features Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.
Like in years past, Apple ahead of the holidays published its list of the best and most popular apps, movies, TV shows, music and books available on iTunes. In the category of the top paid iPhone app, Heads Up! came in first. Facebook's Messenger is Apple's top free iPhone app and Clash of Clans emerged as the top grossing iPhone app, respectively. On the iPad side, Minecraft, YouTube and Clash of Clans have been rated as the App Store's top paid, free and grossing apps, respectively.
Without further ado, here's the rest of Apple's most popular apps and media in 2014.
The official teaser trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens on Black Friday made its debut on iTunes. Lucas film yesterday tweeted that the trailer will hit iTunes after initially saying that it would only be shown in 30 movie theaters across the U.S. Disney in October 2012 acquired Lucasfilm in a transaction valued at a whopping $4 billion.
The acquisition brought Lucasfilm under Disney's fold and gave the Mickey Mouse house rights to further develop the Star Wars franchise and film new movies in the series in co-operation with George Lucas. The trailer has also hit YouTube and we've embedded it for your viewing pleasure right after the break.