Google

Google’s 2018 I/O developer conference has begun today and the company has announced a slew of new features and updates for its software and services. Among the most interesting features are impressive updates to Google Assistant and a new Digital Wellbeing dashboard, putting more pressure on Apple to deliver in these areas.

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A statement made by Google could suggest a slowing in the growth of the payments the company makes to Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices …

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A survey reported over the weekend said that Apple lags behind Amazon and Google in having the most positive impact on society.

The original report was rather light on detail – it seems the survey didn’t ask people the reasons for their choices. That’s problematic because I suspect most people answered from their own selfish viewpoint rather than from a societal perspective …

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Google officially announced today a rebranding of its wearable platform from Android Wear to Wear OS. The company says the shift “better reflects our technology, vision, and most important of all—the people who wear our watches.” Along with this news is some interesting data on how a subset of users on Google’s wearable platform are also iPhone users.

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A security researcher has successfully exploited a Safari vulnerability to take control of the Touch Bar on a MacBook Pro. Samuel Groß demonstrated the exploit at the first day of this year’s Pwn2Own ethical hacking conference …

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Apple has fallen 24 places in a huge annual survey of corporate reputations. The Harris Poll Reputation Quotient shows that the company fell from 5th to 29th place …

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The iOS Security Guide was updated last month to indicate that Apple is now using the Google Cloud Platform for iCloud storage. The company has long used Amazon’s S3 alongside Microsoft Azure, but a reference to the latter service has been replaced by one to Google’s cloud storage service …

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We’ve already seen a couple of Chinese Android phones copy the iPhone X notch, but a report today suggests that Google is planning to do the same thing.

The report says that Google is specifically trying to persuade iPhone users to switch to Android by improving the look of its software and boosting the sensor tech …

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If you were to guess which app would top the charts of free iOS apps, you’d probably guess Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, a game or something to do with emoji. But no, right now it’s an app no-one would ever have predicted: Google Arts & Culture.

Google Arts & Culture has collaborated with over 1,200 international museums, galleries and institutions from 70 countries to make their exhibits available for everyone online.

Sadly, this unexpected popularity doesn’t reflect a sudden popular interest in either cultural artifacts or art …

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A new report from Canalys today shares its prediction that smart speakers are on track for record growth and will be the hottest consumer tech items of 2018. Canalys believes that consumers will buy 56.3 million smart speakers in 2018, just shy of doubling from 2017 sales.

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A recent report from The Information details Google’s efforts to grow its chip development efforts, which in turn is costing Apple some considerable talent. The report explains that Google has hired several key chip engineers from Apple, including well-regarded chip designer John Bruno…

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Inspired by the success of Motion Stills, Google is releasing more photography apps built on experimental technology. Today, Google is launching two new “appsperimentals” for iOS that take advantage of recent phone and computer vision advancements.

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Millions of Brits who used an iPhone between June 2011 and February 2012 could receive as much as £500 ($672) each from Google as compensation for the search giant bypassing Safari privacy settings between those dates.

A British campaign group has launched a ‘representative action’ (the UK equivalent of a class action lawsuit) on behalf of the 5.4M iPhone users in England and Wales affected by what is known as Google’s ‘Safari workaround.’ The lawsuit could be worth as much as £2.7B ($3.63B) in total …

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Qualcomm has long accused Apple of infringing its patents, but the latest twist to the saga reverses the position. In a new countersuit, Apple accuses Qualcomm of infringing its patents.

Qualcomm is accused of violating at least eight Apple patents in its Snapdragon 800 and 820 processors, which are used in both Samsung and Google Pixel phones …

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Google has updated its suite of productivity apps on iPhone and iPad to support the latest screen sizes and platform features. Docs, Sheets, and Slides have each been updated for iPhone X and iOS 11.

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