iOS

Apple is aiming to sign up a massive 100M subscribers for its streaming music service, according to a source cited by the Associated Press (reproduced in the NY Times). This would be more than double the subscriptions for all other streaming music services combined.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry says that existing worldwide streaming subscriptions total around 41M across all services. The market leader, Spotify, has around 4.7M subscribers in the USA … 
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Mashable has conducted an interesting interview with Tim Cook on the eve of WWDC, one of Apple’s largest events of the year. Although WWDC is known for its product announcements, Apple will announce the next versions of iOS and OS X as well as a streaming music service, the interview revolved around Apple’s efforts on company employee diversity.

Asked about the lack of women at keynotes, Cook says “you’ll see a change tomorrow”. This suggests that women will indeed feature more prominently at Apple’s presentation. In the last ten years, the number of women at Apple’s events comes in at the low single digits, most recently Christy Turlington Burns. Apple’s developer sessions have better gender diversity in their speakers but these are viewable only by registered developers, not the general public.

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MacStories’ Federico Viticci has posted an interesting image of WWDC banners from the second-floor of Moscone West, the WWDC event venue.

These images show Apple highlighting its three platforms: iOS, OS X and watchOS. These banners do not follow the same pattern as previous years with dramatic photography in rectangular banners. These are more like full-height wall posters with simpler geometric logos. Each image has the name of Apple’s OS written in a light font-face (the image is not clear enough to see whether this is Sans Francisco) on a simple background of multicoloured translucent shapes.

What’s particularly striking about this photo is that it confirms a rebranding of Apple’s smartwatch operating system. On Apple’s current public marketing, the Apple Watch is described as running ‘Watch OS’. By these banners, it can be seen that the new name for this platform is actually ‘watchOS’.
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Apple is planning to announce support for Apple Pay in the United Kingdom during its Monday Worldwide Developers Conference kickoff keynote, according to a report from The Telegraph. The report adds that the service will go live in the U.K. within two months. Mike Cowan, a Senior VP at MasterCard, told the publication that his company is “absolutely” ready to support Apple Pay abroad. We have heard this as well, including that major bank Lloyds is a planned launch partner. We have also received a tip claiming that Santander UK is gearing up for new mobile payments training in the coming weeks. The U.K. will likely mark the first international expansion of Apple Pay since its launch in the United States last fall…

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The App Store has been around since iOS 2.0 (back when iOS was still called iPhone OS), and has undergone a variety of changes since it was launched. Aside from countless new features that have been added over time, the store has also seen several redesigns.

With iOS 9 set to be announced on Monday, let’s take a look at some ways Apple could simplify the App Store interface while making it more consistent with other apps and adding some much needed functionality tweaks.

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comScore today has released its latest data regarding smartphone market share. The analytics firm says that 188.6 million people owned a smartphone during a three-month period ending in April. That equates to 76.9 percent of the mobile market being made up of smartphones at this point. Apple, according to the data, further strengthened its lead. The company saw a 1.8 percent increase in market share this time around, going from 41.3 percent in January to 43.1 percent in April.

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A new report by the Financial Times suggests that Apple is looking to change the 70/30 revenue share for certain types of App Store apps. The report claims that Apple wants to change the way revenue is distributed between developers and Apple for music, video and news apps.

The report is a bit circumspect as the timing of the change does not seem to be related to any particular incident, although potentially Apple is forced into cutting the share due to potential anticompetitive complaints with Apple Music, to be announced next week.

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Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference is about to kick off. On Monday, June 8th, company executives will take the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to provide their annual roadmap for Apple’s software, services, and devices.

Traditionally, Apple has used the conference to introduce major upgrades to the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch operating system iOS, as well as the Mac operating system OS X, along with new services. Of course, 2015 will be no different. Apple has been preparing a new version of iOS 9 codenamed “Monarch,” a release of OS X 10.11 codenamed “Gala,” a new streaming Apple Music service based on Beats Music, and updates for the Apple Watch.

Over the last several years, we have provided advance reports on the lion’s share of announcements that will be made at WWDC, as well as a comprehensive roundup ahead of the event. Read on for our roundup of what’s coming, along with fresh new details not found in our earlier reports.

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We’ve already run down much of what can be expected from iOS 9, OS X 10.11 and Apple Music at the 2015 Worldwide Developers Conference, and now it’s time to run down what 9to5Mac’s editors want to see at the conference. You can find our hopes below, and stay tuned for our comprehensive roundup of what to expect at WWDC.

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A new Apple support document for HomeKit has now officially confirmed our earlier report that the Apple TV would serve as a hub for HomeKit devices. The document confirms an Apple TV is needed if you want to control HomeKit accessories while away from home.

If you have an Apple TV (3rd generation or later) with software version 7.0 or later, you can control your HomeKit-enabled accessories when you’re away from home using your iOS device.

Sign in with the same Apple ID on your iOS device and Apple TV, and you’ll be able to use Siri commands to remotely control your accessories.

Apple has also created a page listing the HomeKit devices launched so far, and which we’d expect to be regularly updated as new products are announced … 
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Following last week’s discovery that receiving an obscure text string could cause the iOS Messages app to crash, a similar bug has been discovered in the Skype app on iOS, Android and Windows devices. On all these devices, chat history is loaded when the app re-opens, causing it to immediately crash again.

The text string in this case is less obscure: http://: – in other words, the first part of an URL, on its own … 
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Apple is ready to show the first fruits of its Beats acquisition next week. As we first reported in early March, Apple is planning to introduce its long-awaited Beats-based streaming music service at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday, June 8th. Blending Apple interface design and features from the Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine-created Beats Music app, Apple’s service, known internally as “Apple Music,” is built to take on Spotify and Pandora with several new features and a subscription model. Additionally, Apple is working on overhauling its widely panned iTunes Radio service by striking deals with popular artists and DJs. Below, we detail Apple’s plans for both Apple Music and the new iTunes Radio in an extensive roundup.

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Apple today has informed employees of significant changes to how iPhones are sold via AT&T and Verizon Wireless, according to sources. As we reported last month, Apple has indicated that iPhones sold via AT&T at both physical Apple Retail Stores and on the Apple Online Store will move exclusively to Next financing plans this month, in June. This means that a customer who wants to buy a new iPhone on AT&T will no longer be able to do so on a subsidy…

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The Logic Pros is a new regular series exploring all of the most interesting gadgets and software for making music on your Mac/iOS devices. If there is any gear you would like us to take a closer hands-on look at, let us know in the comments section below or shoot us an email.

Apple’s Logic Remote app for iPad allows for a lot of control over sessions in Logic Pro X on the Mac— its two main functions include controlling the mixer/transport controls, and using it as a midi controller for playing virtual instruments with user interfaces for keyboards, drumpads, and fretboards. But the app’s other feature is a grid of drumpad-like squares that can be used as buttons for key commands.

My goal was to be able to easily flip through amps and pedals as I jam, rather than having to deal with mouse clicks, opening/highlighting the plug-in I want to interact with, etc. So using Logic Remote, I setup a workflow with custom key commands that makes the drumpad-style interface work like a giant foot pedal for flipping through the awesome set of virtual amps and pedals Logic includes. Here’s how I did it:
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The first home automation products using Apple’s new Siri-controlled HomeKit platform will arrive next week, according to sources briefed on Apple’s plans.
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Earlier this week a bug was discovered that centered around a string of text that when received via a message would cause your iPhone Springboard to crash and the Messages app to crash continuously. At the time, Apple said it was aware of the bug and working to push an update to fix it. In the meantime however, the company tonight has published an official support document with a few suggestions on how to temporarily work around the issue.

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Google just wrapped up the opening keynote for its I/O developer conference taking place this week, and not surprisingly many of the announced products and services are direct competitors to Apple’s. Android Pay gets an official coming out party to compete with Apple Pay, Project Brillo is Google’s answer to HomeKit, and the new Android M gets a focus on quality, much like what Apple has in store for iOS 9 at WWDC in June. The company also announced a new Photos app with unlimited photo and video syncing and iOS support, as well as a number of other iOS app announcements.

Head below for a roundup of everything Google announced today from 9to5Google:
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