iOS

As reported earlier, Apple CEO Tim Cook is visiting Beijing, China this week. The earlier Reuters report suggested Cook was intending to talk with government officials about company matters amidst increasing tensions between the country and Apple, following trademark disputes and the ban on iTunes Movies and iBooks content.

On Monday, though, Cook met with Chinese app developers at an Apple Store. The talk was hosted by Jean Lui, president of taxi company Didi Chuxing, of which Apple has invested $1 billion dollars. A plethora of Chinese app publishers were in attendance, including a Groupon-esque clone ‘Meituan’,  photo app MeituPic, news provider Toutia.com, cooking app DayDayCook and game developer Tap4Fun (via CNBC).

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Apple has officially acknowledged community reports of inadvertently deleted music, with users left with missing tracks in their libraries that may never be recovered, in a statement to iMore. The company says that it is pushing an iTunes update next week with ‘safeguards’ to pre-emptively prevent data loss.

However, Apple says it cannot reproduce the issue in internal testing so the forthcoming iTunes update is not guaranteed to work. It also means that the exact cause of the bug is still unknown, although it appears to be a problem with the iTunes desktop app misbehaving rather than the Apple Music streaming service.

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Taylor Swift is continuing her partnership with Apple Music, with yet another ad featuring the singer and the streaming service. The new minute-long commercial features Taylor Swift dancing around to ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’ by The Darkness.

Swift demonstrates using the Apple Music discovery features (via the ‘Friday Night Rocks!’ playlist) to find the track. The ad ends with the slogan ‘Dance like no one’s watching’.  Watch the ad after the jump …

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Maintaining a high level of consumer security on iOS is a huge cornerstone to what makes Apple the company it is. Tim Cook believes that we’re at the ‘golden age of surveillance’, and that Apple’s level of encryption impacts the wellbeing of U.S. citizens. It’s no surprise that users who care about security want to be up to date on the latest practices and methods that guarantee that. That may just be one of the reasons Stefan Esser’s timely app, System and Security Info, is climbing the iOS App Store’s Top Charts (all the way to the top of the paid apps chart in the US).

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Last week, the creators of Siri teased their next virtual assistant service named Viv. At the time, the creators said that Viv does more than Siri or any other virtual assistant currently available. As expected, Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus today took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City to officially show off Viv to the public for the first time, touting that it will “the intelligent interface for everything.”

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T-Mobile today announced a deal with Cuban carrier Empresa De Telecomunicaciones De Cuba, S.A. (ETECSA) that will see its customers get access to voice, text and data while traveling to Cuba as well as lower rates on calls to landlines and wireless phones in the country from the US.
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Live tweeting aficionados and tweet storm lovers may welcome Tweetbot’s latest update for iOS, and coming soon to the Mac. The app has introduced ‘Topics’, an intuitive way to link tweets together with an optional hashtag without having to reply to each one of your previous tweets. A very small, but welcome feature for those who find themselves easily surpassing Twitter’s 140-character limit.

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Apple is today introducing an Apple Music plan aimed at students. The service is identical in features to the standard plan but rather than paying $9.99 per month, qualifying students can subscribe to Apple Music for $4.99 per month. The offering is rolling out today in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and more countries (via TechCrunch). Prices vary per region but the discount should be around 50% of the normal Apple Music price.

To qualify, students must be currently attending an eligible university or college and gain the discount for up to four years. Apple has partnered with UNiDAYs to verify people who sign up to the student plan are legitimate students attending a school.

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Earlier this year Immersion Corporation, one of the leading companies in haptic feedback technology, filed a lawsuit against Apple over haptic technology used in the iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, and Apple Watch. Today, the company has filed a second lawsuit against Apple and AT&T in which it says the MacBook and MacBook Pro violate one patent relating to haptic feedback. Additionally, Immersion says the iPhone 6s infringes on three more of its patents not mentioned in the first lawsuit.

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Netflix is today introducing a new way for users of its mobile apps to adjust the quality of video streams based on data usage. The new “cellular data controls” in the mobile apps include Low, Medium, or High settings.

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In a statement, Apple has said that it will appeal a Chinese trademark ruling which saw the company lose exclusive rights to the iPhone name, allowing other Chinese companies to use the name for leather goods products. Obviously, the iPhone is Apple’s cash cow so the initial ruling was a big blow allowing legal dilution of its most-valuable brand.

Apple will take the appeal to the Supreme People’s court, the highest court in the Chinese law system …

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The original minds behind the iOS virtual assistant Siri have a new project in the works. A new report from The Washington Post details that Siri’s creators are working on an artificial intelligence technology called “Viv” that does more than Siri or any other virtual assistant currently available.

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Nearly a year after Apple Music’s debut, Apple is preparing to announce its streaming music service’s first end-to-end overhaul, according to multiple sources familiar with the changes. The changes are expected to be shown off at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in mid-June, and Apple currently plans to launch the updated service across its product lines that currently support Apple Music this fall as part of new operating system versions. The updated version of Apple Music has been in the Apple product development pipeline since the end of last year, and work in earnest on the updated service began at the end of February, according to sources.

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Apple has released the fourth beta of its iOS 9.3.2 update to both developers and public beta testers today. OS X El Capitan 10.11.5 and tvOS 9.2.1 also saw a fourth beta release for developers today. The latest developer and public betas haven’t seen any major changes as it appears they are turning out to be more bug fix releases than anything. Simultaneous use of Low Power Mode and Night Shift had been reactivated as of iOS 9.3.2 beta 2.

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The iPhone 7 had been rumored to be dropping the analog 3.5 mm headphone jack, in favour of wireless Bluetooth or Lightning cable headphones for audio output. However, a new iPhone 7 component leak posted on Weibo disagrees with previous reports, depicting a board that includes a 3.5mm jack (in the top right of the photo above).

The 3.5mm jack is large (relative to the thinness of the phone), dates back more than a hundred years and has been superseded in terms of signal quality by the modern digital solutions, so it is plausible that Apple would want to abandon it. However, the idea of removing the port has been controversial (with complaints about existing accessory compatibility). This Chinese leak indicates it is sticking around …

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eBay has begun rolling out major UI and overall app improvements to its mobile applications today. Most notable will be both iOS and Android apps seeing a redesign of the main navigation menu. Previous versions of both mobile apps utilized a custom navigation menu: a mix between a top navigation bar and hamburger menu. The app update rolling out from today utilizes standard UI navigation elements for both iOS and Android. Android will be seeing the update released today, and the iOS update will be available in the coming days.

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A Weibo report has surfaced that indicates the iPhone 7 may have a slightly larger battery than the current generation iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. According to the poster, the iPhone 7 will include a battery with a 1735 mAH capacity and iPhone 7 Plus will feature a 2810 mAH battery. On both models, this is (slightly) more than the current-generation iPhones. The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus have batteries with 1715 mAH and 2750 mAH respectively.

The iPhone 7 is rumored to look very similar to the current iPhone, with a thinner body and redesigned antennas. A major chassis design change is currently expected for the ‘iPhone 8’ in 2017.

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