Aside from a pair of major developer-facing enhancements that are coming to the App Store this fall—Search Ads and Subscription improvements—Apple appears adamant to fix some of the longstanding pain points with store navigation and app discovery.
For instance, the Featured tab will no longer show apps a user has installed on their device.
Apple also said that it'll be bringing back the Categories tab for the store and let you share apps on social media right from the Home screen with 3D Touch.
Beyond Search Ads and a bunch of new options for In-App Subscriptions, Apple is making a few subtler changes to how the App Store's storefront apps function in the hope of improving app discovery.
As per SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller, who also manages App Stores and Apple's relations with developers, the store's Featured tab will soon filter any apps you already have installed on your device, so that you're only looking at new apps.
As we told you this morning, Apple announced big changes are coming to the App Store this fall in the form of some well thought out improvements to In-App Subscriptions and all-new paid ads for apps in App Store search results.
Yesterday, SVP Phil Schiller sat down for an interview with The Loop's Jim Dalrymple to discuss other changes aimed at making app discovery better. The app review process, however, won't be going away anytime soon.
Apple today announced a pair of major changes that will be coming to the App Store this fall, which it said were designed to help grow developer app’s business and engage with new and existing customers.
Both the rumored search ads and various subscription enhancements will soon be available across any app category, games included.
Augmented reality startup Magic Leap, which created the Leap Motion Controller for the Mac, has been awarded a design patent today by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for a virtual reality headset which looks like a Star Wars helmet or something straight out of the Robocop movies. According to Andy Fouché, Magic Leap's Vice President of Public Relations, the patent does not represent the finished product.
The new twelve-inch MacBook is the future of Apple's notebook lineup, but the MacBook Pro family being overdue for a refresh doesn't necessarily mean that the MacBook Air will be going away. According to the fairy reliable Japanese blog Mac Otakara this morning, citing an unnamed Chinese supplier, Apple will be announcing some updated MacBook Airs and Pros later this month, possibly at WWDC.
Slack, a cloud-based, cross-platform team collaboration service, has rolled out support for voice calling, the team announced yesterday. With it, team members can call one another without leaving Slack, and calls even have an emoji response feature.
Calls are currently voice-only, but Slack says that features like video calling and screen sharing will come in the future. Slack is available across iOS, OS X, the web and other platforms.
Apple's iTunes U application has received a refresh in the App Store, bringing out a few new features. For starters, iTunes U 3.3 for iOS now takes advantage of third-party Document Provider extensions.
This enables iPhone, iPod touch and iPad owners to easily add new materials from various cloud services for which they have an app installed on their device, such as iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox and so forth.
Music and media identification service Shazam pushed a new update to its mobile application in the App Store which enables offline mode. The feature used to be present in Shazam from day one before it was temporarily removed in the overhauled app.
With it, you can still Shazam while offline and the app will name any songs you captured in offline mode when you're back online. Shazam is a free app. The paid $6.99 Shazam Encore app is available to those who want to get rid of ads and use advanced features.
If every day is a game, then there should be prizes, right? Foursquare's Swarm app has started offering just that, real-life perks depending on where and how often you check in. Called Swarm Challenges, this is yet another feature that Foursquare has brought back to Swarm from its main mobile application, which is now focused on places reviews while Swarm is all about the check-in game.
Samsung could release a pair of smartphones early next year capable of bending and folding in half “like a cosmetic compact,” without damage, and one of them should be a five-inch model that could be opened to an eight-inch tablet size, Bloomberg reported this morning, citing unnamed people familiar with the project.
After launching in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, China and Singapore, Apple Pay is about to make its debut in Switzerland on Monday, June 13, German-language financial outlet Finews reported this morning.
It will reportedly be supported at launch by Swiss private bank Corner Bank but it's unclear from the report whether major banks UBS and Credit Suisse will work with the service beginning next Monday.