Follow Benjamin on Threads to keep up with his latest projects. Benjamin blogs about Apple news and rumors and posts insightful product and app reviews. Read his work on 9to5Mac and his personal blog.
Benjamin Mayo also creates apps for iOS as a professional indie developer and contractor; more details here. Email to discuss making your iOS project.
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Facebook Messenger is coming to the Mac (and Windows) later this year. The company is set to announce the new app at its F8 conference at 1 PM ET, but tipped the hat slightly early thanks to a blog post published too soon. iGeneration first spotted the (now-removed) announcement.
As standard, Apple offers a single static Home app launcher complication for the Apple Watch. HomeRun is an Apple Watch app that lets you set individual scenes as complications, just tap to run a scene.
We first covered HomeRun when it launched last year. Today, HomeRun 1.2 adds a handy new dynamic: you can set up complications that automatically change based on time. With some scheduling, you can make a single complication slot contextually relevant across the entire day.
According to a report from Economic Daily News, iPhone assembly giant, Foxconn, is expanding its investments in micro-LED screen manufacturing with an eye to capture orders for future iPhones.
Apple has released an official company statement in response to the recent controversy surrounding Apple’s decision to remove apps that relied on MDM systems to provide features similar to those introduced by Apple in iOS 12 as Screen Time.
Echoing comments made in an email from Phil Schiller, the statement directly refutes the claims made by The New York Times this week: ‘Contrary to what The New York Times reported over the weekend, this isn’t a matter of competition. It’s a matter of security’.
Apple has systematically removed many time-tracking / parental control over the last year, leading to a bevy of upset developers whose businesses have been crippled, and even an antitrust lawsuit.
In an email to a MacRumors reader, Apple’s Phil Schiller explains that Apple is pulling third-party screen time apps that abused the MDM (mobile device management) system to track all data and activity on a children’s device to be able to present that information to parents who have downloaded these apps. Schiller says this is a privacy issue which cannot be left to continue, and Apple will not reject apps that use alternative methods other than MDM.
A report on Monday indicated that Apple is spending upwards of $30 million a month on Amazon Web Services, suggesting Apple’s spending had increased by about 10% over the previous year.
Today, The Information disputes these claims. It says that Apple spent about $370 million across 2018 (roughly $30m per month) but that is actually down compared to the year previously. In fact, Apple reportedly paid $775 million for AWS in 2017, which means 2018’s numbers represent a 50% drop …
Some sizeable number of people are experiencing an issue with the App Store at the moment. On an affected account, when attempting to download a pending app update or a whole new app, users are presented with a dialog to accept new Apple Media Services Terms & Conditions.
The problem is that if you press accept, the same legal screen appears again asking to approve or reject the new terms and conditions. This process repeats indefinitely and the download completely stalls.
Following just hours after a Digitimes report on ‘AirPods 3′, the veritable TF Industries’ Ming-Chi Kuo reports that Apple is set to launch two new AirPods hardware models as early as the fourth quarter of 2019, quoting a ‘4Q19 – 1Q20’ timeframe.
One of these models is reported as an iterative update to the existing AirPods, and other will come with an all-new form factor and associated higher price.
Digitimes today reports that Apple is working with assemblers and suppliers to ready a third generation ‘AirPods 3’ by the end of this year. This is not the first rumor of this ilk. AirPods 2 with wireless charging case debuted in March, and even before then there were publications claiming there would be separate spring and fall AirPods refreshes.
Digitimes says the primary feature of the late 2019 AirPods will be noise cancellation. Like AirPods 2, AirPods 3 are expected to be manufactured by Inventec and Luxshare Precision.
As rumored, Apple Pay has indeed launched today in Austria. The supporting banks are Erste Sparkasse and N26, across Maestro, Mastercard, and Visa debit and credit cards. If you meet this criteria, open the Wallet app on your iPhone and press the Add button to start setting up Apple Pay. You may need to restart your phone to get the Wallet app to refresh.
Apple has announced that additional Austrian Apple Pay partners are ‘coming soon’, including Bank Austria, Boon, Edenred, Revolut, and VIMPay.
Apple Pay has been gradually making its way across the globe. After debuting in Saudia Arabia and Czech Republic, the contactless service is now expected to launch in Austria tomorrow, Wednesday 24th.
The Qualcomm and Apple legal battle has now concluded thanks to a settlement of unknown financial value, but as the settlement came one day in to the start of the trial, a few tidbits from discovery process have still seeped out.
One particularly devious point is that Qualcomm lawyers found internal Apple emails that showed the company was specifically seeking patent licenses that were bargain deals to then use it as evidence against Qualcomm’s royalties, by contrasting the cost of each pile.
Kuo today said that Apple plans to upgrade the front camera in the 2019 iPhones from 7-megapixels to 12-megapixels. He also said that the much rumored triple-camera system will come to the 6.5-inch and 5.8-inch OLED iPhones, adding a brand new super-wide 12-megapixel lens.
Both the super-wide and front camera lenses will be specially coated in black, to make them blend in better with the surrounding bezel for an ‘inconspicuous’ look.
According to Reuters, Apple is in talks with several suppliers of LIDAR sensors, intended to be used in the Apple Car self driving project. Whilst it is still unclear if Apple intends to release an actual car, the company is clearly invested in developing the software and hardware components for autonomous vehicles.
Apple reportedly wants suppliers to make lidar sensors that are ‘cheaper, smaller, and more easily mass produced’ than what is currently available. Reuters also says that Apple is designing its own lidar array whilst evaluating offerings from third-parties.
A report from Economic Daily News suggests that Apple is preparing to relaunch a new 4.7-inch iPhone based on the iPhone 8 design.
This model would purportedly come with 128 GB storage, the new A13 chip, a single-lens camera and cost around $650.
Apple appears to be ready to once again lead smartphone chip architecture with manufacturing partner TSMC readying 7-nanometer fabrication to be used to make the A13 chip for the 2019 iPhone later this year.
Who knew, Apple has deep pockets? The company is reportedly spending billions of dollars a year on Apple TV+ original content, will pay about $480 million for the Texture acquisition which ultimately became News+, and is reportedly also spending several million dollars per game in Apple Arcade.
The Financial Times says the company is spending ‘several million dollars each’ on more than 100 games, putting Apple Arcade’s budget in excess of $500 million dollars. At its March event, Apple announced that Arcade would launch in the fall but did not announce pricing.
Skype has announced that it is planning to roll out screen sharing to its iOS and Android apps soon. The feature is currently included in the Skype Insider betas. Microsoft did not announce a public release timeframe but features usually roll out within a couple months.
Apple crossed the 100% renewable energy goal for its own operations (headquarters, data centers, retail stores) this time last year. However, the company is also convincing supply chain partners to go green too.
Today, Apple announced that it has doubled the number of suppliers who have agreed to run Apple manufacturing on 100% renewable energy too. The supply chain will add 5 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2020, exceeding Apple’s original 4 gigawatt goal.
Apple had Oprah on stage at its March event to announce two documentaries focusing on sexual harassment and mental health. They did not say that the show production had links to royalty …
Today, the Instagram account representing the Duke & Duchess of Sussex announced that Prince Harry will be a co-creator and executive producer on the mental health documentary.
TF Securities’ Ming-Chi Kuo has released a report which lays out Apple’s product interest in mini-LED technology. Kuo says that Apple will launch a 31.6-inch (6K resolution) external display in the second or third quarter of 2019 and feature a mini-LED backlight.
By late 2020 or early 2021, Kuo says that Apple will also launch a new iPad and new MacBook with mini-LED displays. It seems that whilst the 2019 31.6-inch display will only use mini-LED technology for the backlight, these future iPad and MacBook would feature true end-to-end mini-LED screens. This is why the timeline for these products stretches further into the future.
The Pixelmator team is today launching a new iPad app called Pixelmator Photo, a variant on their existing Pixelmator suite focused on non-destructive editing for photographers.
The app is available in the App Store now for $4.99. It takes the essence of the Pixelmator Pro experience to an interface tuned for the iPad tablet form factor, concentrated on photography.
In yet another abuse of the enterprise distribution program, security analyst Lookout has identified apps (via TechCrunch) that were pretending to be published by cell carriers in Italy and Turkmenistan. The apps were available for iPhone users to download through Safari as they were signed by an enterprise certificate. These apps used carrier branding and pretended to offer utilities for the users’ cell plans when in reality they would ask for every permission they could to track location, collect contact, photos, and more, and had the capability to listen in on users’ phone conversations.
Apps using enterprise certificates are not available through the App Store, but malicious criminals can target iOS users through Safari (perhaps with a phishing attack-esque email) and get people to download the app over the web, outside of the purview of the App Store review process.
Japanese Apple blog Macotakara is making some unorthodox claims this morning regarding the 2019 iPhone lineup. Previous rumors had indicated that the 2019 lineup would be direct successors to the 2018 iPhone XR, iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max.
Today’s report, citing reliable Chinese supply chain sources, suggests that in addition to spec bumps to the XR and XS, there will be two new 2019 iPhone models with 6.1-inch and 6.5-inch OLED displays. These models would be specially designed to accommodate the rumored triple-camera system.