Nintendo Switch game Pokémon UNITE is coming to the App Store on September 22, the company revealed on Wednesday.
Preregistration has already kicked off on the App Store and Google Play Store. If you haven’t preregistered already, there’s an added incentive to do so. If preregistration totals reach 2,500,000, participants will receive a Pikachu Unite license. And if preregistration numbers hit 5,000,000, participants will get a special Holowear—Festival Style: Pikachu.
The app review process has another casualty. FlickType, an award-winning keyboard app for the blind, won’t be available for iOS any longer.
U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) introduced the Open App Markets Act on Wednesday.
An app called Weedmaps was updated to let customers purchase products directly within the app. It’s a notable move because Apple’s restrictions previously forbade in-app purchases for cannabis.
The change comes after Apple opened up the App Store for some cannabis apps. Under the new guidance, licensed cannabis operators fall under the same restrictions (to Apple) as licensed pharmacies allowing apps like Weedmaps, which lists licensed cannabis operators, to offer such services.
Charlotte Henry and Dave Hamilton join host Kelly Guimont to look back on 13 years of the iOS App Store and share their first apps.
Apple released a whitepaper [PDF] about the safety of the App Store, and the company’s head of user privacy, Erik Neuenschwander, spoke to Fast Company about it.
Without iOS, users wouldn’t have a mobile operating system platform they could choose from that is impossible to be targeted by malicious sideloading. In Apple’s view, in other words: Do you want the best privacy and security possible? Your choice is iOS. Do you want sideloading? Your choice is Android.
First, “if you want X move to Android” is a bad argument. I like Cory Doctorow’s text on the subject. Second, it’s not “sideloading” it’s downloading your software from the internet like desktop users have enjoyed for decades. Apple has smart people and I’m sure they can figure out a way to bring Gatekeeper to iOS.
Tim Cook has hit out a proposed European law that would force it to allow users to be able to install software not in the App Store.
UK regulator the Competition and Markets Authority has launched a market study into both Apple and Google.
A new report examines the adoption rate of iOS 14.5 App Tracking Transparency and App Store privacy labels.
Democrats in the House of Representatives are preparing five bills targeting tech companies in different ways.
Apple announced on Wednesday that the App Store’s billings and sales generated US$643 billion in 2020, in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Apple has removed from the App Store an app that forced users to leave a good review before they could use it, iMore reported. It was, though, possible to leave bad reviews in other ways, such as on the web.
Kosta Eleftheriou highlighted the strange behavior of the app in a tweet. The video appears to show a review prompt that can’t be bypassed, and one that won’t accept anything lower than a three-star review before only letting users hit ‘submit’. The app does have plenty of bad reviews, but these are all about being forced to leave good ones. It is unclear how a developer would be able to bork the App Store review prompt so comprehensively like this, but Eleftheriou claims the developer has more than 15M downloads and “$MILLIONS” in revenue, of which Apple receives a commission.
Bryan Chaffin and Andrew Orr join host Kelly Guimont to discuss Apple’s relationship with China, and how it’s not a good look for the company.
Endel is an app that is meant to help users focus, sleep, and relax. Apple published an interview with one of its co-founders, CEO Oleg Stavitsky, in which he described the importance of music and art to the company and its products.
The unexpected makeup of Endel’s founding team — which Stavitsky emphasizes is more of an artist collective than a traditional app development team — provided a certain synergy around the power of sound. The collective’s first foray into app development was BUBL, a suite of digital art apps for kids blending abstract design, sound, and a carefully crafted user interface, launched on the App Store in 2013. “They almost looked like Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings that sort of came to life,” he says. “I was always fascinated with the correlation of color, form, and sound,” Stavitsky says. “That has everything to do with Kandinsky, who is one of my favorite painters, and then at the same time, with the minimalist composers of the ’70s, like Brian Eno, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich. And so even for our BUBL apps, we built a lot of technology that would generate musical composition in real time, depending on what someone was doing in the app.”
As Apple’s court clash with Epic Games continues, campaigners in the U.S and China have reiterated their complaints against the App Store.
In the midst of its legal battle with Epic Games concerning the App Store, Apple says it stopped over US$1.5 billion fraudulent transactions in 2020.
Emails published in the Epic v Apple trial on Friday revealed that 128 million users downloaded malware from the App Store in 2015.
Apple announced on Tuesday that developers have a new area to place App Store ads for their apps.
Apple hit back at a figure put forward by an expert witness for Epic Games who said the App Store had operating margins of nearly 78 percent.
As Apple faces scrutiny in the Senate, a man named Kosta Eleftheriou is challenging Apple in another way: By finding scam apps.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is preparing to hear testimony from app developers regarding the App Store. In preparation, Fight For The Future has created AbolishTheAppStore.org.
By centralizing software distribution through the App Store, Apple is upholding the unjust laws of authoritarian regimes and restricting innovation in the mobile software industry. We believe that iOS should work like every other general purpose computing system, including Apple’s own MacOS. Developers should be free to create — and users should be free to install — software directly onto the devices that they own without asking for Apple’s permission.
In a letter sent to Congress on Monday, Apple says it will allow Parler into the App Store again after improvements were made.
Critics are accusing Apple of backroom dealing over the fact that the Arizona HB2005 bill that would affected app stores was never voted upon.
ProtonVPN announced in a blog post that Apple has blocked its app updates, saying this harms users in countries like Myanmar.
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