This week is Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, and that means almost all of Apple’s biggest competitors are getting together to show off their latest phones, tablets, and other gadgets. Yesterday was the official press day, so let’s take a look at all the devices that were announced by Samsung, LG, Sony, Huawei and others…
After first being announced and previewed at WWDC in June of last year, Apple launched its music streaming platform on Android on November 10th. Now, after almost a year of being available to the public (and only a month since it finally exited beta), the app has garnered more than 10 million downloads on the Google Play Store…
While Apple has seen declining sales of its iPhone over recent quarters, new data from Gartner provides another look into the decline facing Apple and the smartphone market in other regions. Overall, the data shows that smartphone sales worldwide grew 4.3 percent year-over-year, though Apple saw a 7.6 percent decline itself. When it comes to operating systems, iOS and Android continue their dominance.
Apple today pushed a new update to Apple Music for Android that officially brings the app out of its extended public beta period. With the update, Apple Music for Android is now at version 1.0, nearly 10 months after its initial release to the Play Store.
I’m not going to get into the politics of who came up with which ideas first, or who steals ideas from the other, because quite frankly, both iOS and Android have borrowed heavily from one another over the years. I could just as easily head over to 9to5Google and highlight iOS features that I’d love to see in Android, and I probably will in the future.
For now, though, I’d like to focus on iOS, specifically Control Center. It’s a feature that’s been around for going on four generations, and although it has evolved over the years, it still has a long way to go as far as I’m concerned. Here’s a look at four lessons that iOS could learn from Android when it comes to Control Center functionality.
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Apple Music for Android — one of Apple’s three apps on Google’s platform — has an update today that includes fixes for both playback and sorting issues. Here’s the change log for version 0.9.11:
Prior to WWDC, a report emerged claiming that Apple would at long last unveil iMessage for Android. Seeing how Apple had made its streaming music service available on Android, many found this report to be somewhat plausible. As you’re probably aware of by now, however, iMessage for Android was nowhere to be found at WWDC this week. Now, we’ve gotten a little bit of insight into Apple’s reasoning for not bringing its messaging service to Google’s smartphone platform…
Apple last night confirmed it will live stream the opening press event for its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, but the stream is limited to certain devices. The company will stream the event to iPhone, iPad, and Mac users via its Safari browser, and to Apple TV users, and it’s also recently added support for Windows 10 via Microsoft Edge.
Nick Lee, CTO of development studio Tendigi, previously was able to get Windows 95 running on an Apple Watch and now he’s back at it again with a new project. As he details in this blog post, Lee was able to get Android running on an iPhone thanks to a custom-built case.
Yesterday, well-respected venture capitalist Mary Meeker released her annual Internet Trends Report. Inside the over 200 slide PowerPoint were some interesting numbers relating to the continuing battle between iOS and Android. As we reported last night, Meeker’s report showed iOS continue to decline in marketshare, while Android continues to gain. In many ways, the current split between Android and iOS in terms of market share and unit shipments is very similar to the split between Mac and PC shipments and marketshare. And it’s been a long time coming for Apple.
Jason Snell has written an interesting piece at Macworld, berating Google for using its Material Design user-interface in iOS apps. In other words, Google ignores all the iOS conventions and instead makes its iPhone and iPad apps look exactly like Android ones. This can be seen in everything from the ‘white card on gray background’ overall design all the way down to small details like using vertical rather than horizontal dots as a menu icon.
He argues that Google is acting like Microsoft did back in the early 90s, suddenly making its Mac apps look and behave like Windows ones. It is, he suggests, arrogant …
A new open source project called PieMessage enables cross-platform iMessage support, allowing Android users to communicate using Apple’s iPhone messaging platform.
In the video below, we get a short look at the PieMessage app in action with a still unreleased prototype version of the app.
Apple today is rolling out an update to the Apple Music app for Android users. The update continues to bring the app up to speed with its iOS counterpart and adds support for music videos and family memberships. The update follows the addition of widget support last month for the Android Apple Music app.
With support for family plans, users can now subscribe or update to a six-person family membership, which is arguably one of the best features about Apple Music. A six-person family membership runs $14.99, which is just $5 more than the one-person $9.99 membership.
After reading Zac’s opinion piece on how the iPhone SE could actually tempt him not to upgrade to the iPhone 7, I realized that I hadn’t even begun to think what Apple could do to get me to want to upgrade to an iPhone 7. Overall I’ve been happy with the iPhone since its iPhone 5 iteration. It was the device I felt Apple really hit its stride with the hardware. I only upgraded to an iPhone 6 because I wanted a better camera and needed more storage space, but the larger form factor was a serious drawback for me. So what could possibly make me even want to upgrade from my current iPhone 6 to another phone later this year?
For both Google and Apple, the operations on their virtual stores are hugely important, as they account for millions of dollars. However, there has historically been a disparity between the number of downloaded applications and the actual money generated by them, a trend that seems to have peaked in the first quarter of this year.
According to App Annie‘s Index Market for Q1 of 2016, in fact, Google’s Play Store saw a number of downloads that roughly doubles that of the iOS App Store, which in turns represents the platform with the highest profitability, with over 90% more revenue generated over its counterpart…
Android has featured the ability to stream to AirPlay devices like the Apple TV by means of third-party utilities for some time now, but no Android device has ever shipped with native AirPlay support in tow. That’s all changed with the announcement of the HTC 10, the first device to ship with native AirPlay support.
Apple’s recently open-sourced programming language, Swift, may be seeing itself get adopted into Google’s Android platform in the future. Sources have told The Next Web that Google is “considering making Swift a ‘first class’ language for Android”.
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Shopping analytics giant Kantar Worldpanel reports that Apple’s smartphone has experienced its first fall in market share in urban China since 2014.
“For the first time since August 2014, iOS share did not grow in urban China in the 3 months ending February,” said Tamsin Timpson, strategic insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech Asia. “iOS declined 3.2 percentage points between February 2015 and February 2016.”
Kantar said that the increasing popularity of local smartphone brands was the main reason for the fall …
In a blog post announcing their launch of an embeddable web and native app VR viewer, Google also introduced the official launch of their Cardboard SDK for iOS. The SDK allows iOS developers to embed virtual reality content within their own apps to then be viewed using a viewer like Google’s own Cardboard.
iPhone SE might be helping Apple attract more new users from Android compared to previous recent iPhone launches, according to the latest data on sales of the new device from Slice Intelligence. Specifically, Slice points to the higher number of SE buyers coming from Android compared to the iPhone 6S:
Apple today has released an update to the Apple Music app for Android users. The update over month after the app’s last update that added support for saving music to SD cards for offline listening. Today’s update adds yet another feature that isn’t supported on iOS: the ability for users to add an Apple Music widget to their homescreen. The Beats Music app offered a widget when it was available for Android, but Apple Music has lacked it since release.
After announcing a deal in September to produce a Pokémon Go games with Nintendo and Alphabet-owned Niantic, the Pokémon people are today showing a little more about how gameplay will work and giving us a first look at the title coming to both iOS and Android devices.
The game uses augmented reality features to blend real world objects and locations with the gameplay, and the company today gave the run down and a look at how exactly that will work:
In the days following Apple’s record Q1 earnings announcements, Apple CEO Tim Cook and other top Apple executives held a Town Hall meeting at the Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino to reveal new announcements and take attendee questions.
Multiple sources in attendance at the event said that Cook as well as newly appointed Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams each spoke and made announcements and teases related to new employee benefits, future iPad growth, Apple Watch sales, future retail stores in China, Apple Campus 2, and the future product pipeline.
Cook also fielded questions from the audience, attempting to reduce concerns related to the company’s iPhone dependence, discussing porting more Apple services to Android, growth in India, and releasing cheaper iPhones to appease growing markets.
Apple has some good news for all of the Apple Music users on Android. The company has just released an update to Apple Music in the Google Play Store that allows users to download songs to an SD card so that they may store even more music for offline listening.