iOS

A new report French website iGen indicates that France could be seeing an Apple Pay announcement in as early as the first half of this year. While Apple announced the UnionPay partnership for China two months ago, there has yet to be any signs that other additional countries outside the US and UK (aside from Australia and Canada’s American Express arrangement) would be seeing Apple Pay any time soon. Other reports believe that China could be seeing Apple Pay, which is promised to go live in early 2016, activated as soon as this Thursday at 5 AM (Beijing time).

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The 58th Annual Grammys are broadcasting tonight and thanks to CBS All Access, nearly anyone can watch it for free without a cable subscription or TV set. The show starts at 8PM ET, with a pre-telecast red carpet show at 7PM ET. Viewers can catch the show on CBS’s site, or by using the iOS or Apple TV app. Here’s how to do it for free:

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No one will be surprised to hear that I greatly prefer Apple’s platform to those of competitors. I’ve often argued that if you want a single ecosystem where everything Just Works across devices, Apple still has a significant lead, even if other platforms are gaining ground.

But that doesn’t mean I think Apple’s own platform is perfect. There are reliability issues that mean the platform doesn’t always live up to that Just Works ideal, and there are annoyingly persistent bugs which the company doesn’t seem in any hurry to fix.

In a podcast interview on Friday, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi argued that while all software has bugs, the sheer number of users means that complaints are “amplified,” making them appear more prevalent than they are in reality. There may be some truth in this – at least on the iOS side – but I’d argue that Apple allows known bugs to persist through too many platform and app releases …

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Last week, it was discovered that setting your iOS device system date and time back to January 1st 1970 would crash your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch effectively bricking it. Setting the date back this far would prevent the iPhone or other iOS device from booting up until the battery died.

AppleCare has been flooded with people bringing in their devices after trying out this bug … Now, Apple has officially acknowledged the problem on its Apple Support website. The company says it will release an upcoming software update to prevent this issue from affecting iOS devices in the future.

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Apple is currently on target to start selling its next iPhone and iPad models the same week that the new products are introduced in March. Apple is currently planning to introduce a new 4-inch iPhone dubbed the “iPhone 5se” and a new iPad Air at an event on Tuesday, March 15th, then put the products up for sale online and in retail stores as early as Friday, March 18th, according to sources. Apple is unlikely to offer pre-orders for the new devices, according to sources who cautioned that the plans could still change.

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John Gruber surprised podcast listeners today by getting Apple’s own Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi on The Talk Show to discuss a variety of topics behind Apple. Since Tim Cook took leadership at Apple, it hasn’t been unheard of for Apple execs to appear on Gruber’s show. The first occurrence was last June when Phil Schiller met John Gruber on stage during WWDC to discuss Apple’s recent announcements and decisions over the past few years. This marks the second time that Federighi has been on the The Talk Show, and Cue’s first.

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An interesting bug relating to the date and time system in iOS has emerged recently. Several users have discovered that if you change your iOS device’s date to January 1st, 1970, your device will be permanently bricked. You can see the process in the video below, and while I don’t have any desire to try it out to confirm, it’s pretty apparent based on separate reports that it’s a legitimate issue.

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For anyone looking to get better tracking and a bird’s eye view of your sleep habits, be sure to check out Sleep++ 2.0 available today. This latest version brings in a major sleep analysis algorithm overhaul to help users get a better understanding of nightly sleep patterns.

For users who frequently forget to stop their sleep tracking, the app’s update also introduces the ability to trim time off any extra hours accidentally accrued.

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Apple has released the third iOS 9.3 public beta to non-developer testers today. iOS 9.3 public beta 3 follows this week’s third developer iOS 9.3 beta release as well. The latest beta cleans up issues introduced in the last version while adding some new features as well.

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The first official implementation of BitTorrent’s peer-to-peer technology hits iOS and the Apple TV today, but not in the way you may have expected. OTT News, a small team bringing a different perspective to the election coverage, has launched an app in partnership with BitTorrent to livestream coverage of the New Hampshire primaries and beyond.

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Apple is now deploying its new screen protector program to Apple Stores across the United States and other countries from today. The introduction of the program was first reported by 9to5Mac and rolled out to Japanese Apple Stores last week. The program allows customers to get a Belkin screen protector carefully applied to their iPhone in store. At Apple Stores across America, customers can purchase a Belkin screen protector and have it applied in store by an Apple Store employee. The program supports only Apple’s latest iPhone models in both 4.7 and 5.5 inch variants: the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus.

The service has been offered in select stores from late last week, but has officially launched today according to Belkin’s website. The main benefit of the service is the assisted application, which prevents bubbles or imperfections from appearing on the screen when the protective cover film is applied …

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Apple today has released the third iOS 9.3 beta to registered developers for testing. The first iOS 9.3 beta introduced at the start of the year introduced new 3D Touch shortcuts on new iPhones, Touch ID-secured Notes, a new Night Shift mode for blue light reduction, and much more. iOS 9.3 beta 2 added a Night Shift toggle in Control Center and other tweaks. We’ll check out the latest beta version of the upcoming release and highlight any changes below.

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Apple today has started selling the View-Master Virtual Reality Starter Pack on its online store. With all the news about the company building out and prototyping virtual reality tech, it’s interesting to see it offering a glimpse at what that future tech may be by selling the device on the online store. Harkening back to the classic ideals of the View-Masters from the past, the new View-Master allows users to go on exciting new adventures. Utilizing a mix of augmented reality and virtual reality, these adventures are now taken to a whole new level. Taking advantage of Experience Packs, users can navigate space, various destinations, and wildlife through a mix of AR and VR.

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Apple has quietly added a server-side API to CloudKit, following an announcement on the developer news blog. This will enable developers to add a lot of functionality to apps powered by CloudKit, enabling developers to interact with the iCloud CloudKit database outside of user interaction with iOS, Mac or web apps. The web service API enables developers to run independent code on servers that can add, delete and modify records in the CloudKit stack.

Until now, interaction with CloudKit has been limited to the APIs Apple provided in apps. Although this was useful, it lacked the options for more advanced use — most modern apps rely on servers to perform tasks whilst users are away. With the addition of the web API, developers can create many more types of applications using CloudKit as the backend. For instance, an RSS reader app can now add new feed items to the CloudKit stack from the server. Before, this action could only occur when a user opened a CloudKit-powered app, which was essentially impractical and meant developers had to use other tools.

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There’s been a lot of conversation this week around the quality of Apple’s software and services, and yesterday’s brief App Store outage certainly didn’t help. It’s true that new services like Apple Music and iCloud Photo Library are improving but aren’t rock solid yet, but there are two things that currently sour the app experience for me.

First, Apple only does a so-so job of implementing new software features from operating system updates into their own apps. It’s too easy to rattle off a dozen examples. Second, major players like Facebook and YouTube don’t have first class apps that showcase new software features either, and this is where customers spend the most amount of time.

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