(Photo by Ryan Emberley/Invision for Apple/AP Images)
A month after rolling out carrier billing for iTunes and App Store content with German carrier O2, CNBC reports Apple is expanding the initiative with a similar service in Russia.
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Infuse, a popular video library and playback application for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, is making its way to tvOS on the new Apple TV today. As with its iOS counterpart, Infuse on the Apple TV will serve as a way for users to store multiple video file types in a single library.
The application can stream video content from a computer, external wireless storage drives as well as apps like Plex, Kodi, and Servioo. This differentiating feature is handy for users who want a single view of all their video content stored across numerous devices and services.
Because the tvOS version of Infuse is tied to the iOS counterpart, the download is free for users of Infuse 3 on iOS devices. The tvOS version is labeled as Infuse 4.0, and the iOS client will be upgraded to the new version later this year, the developers tell us.
Infuse 4.0 on tvOS (and in the upcoming iOS version) adds automatically downloaded artwork and movie ratings, support for syncing how far along a user is into a video between devices, and support for downloadable subtitles.
Apple has posted the dates of the usual holiday shutdown of iTunes Connect, running for eight days from 22 to 29 December inclusive. During this time, developers will not be able to submit either new apps or updates to existing ones.
Developers can still schedule apps for release during these dates, but they will need to be submitted and approved beforehand. Other iTunes Connect functionality, such as access to analytics data, will remain available.
In the post on its developer website, Apple notes the record downloads, revenue and active customers for the App Store.
Because of your incredible apps, the App Store crossed 100 billion cumulative downloads. Revenue from the App Store increased 25% year over year, and the number of transacting customers grew 18%, setting a new all-time record. We want to thank you for all your hard work and dedication to our platforms.
Apple announced at the start of the year that developers have now collectively earned more than $10B from the App Store.
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Reuters reports that the Germany antitrust body the Federal Cartel Office has opened an investigation into the arrangement by which Apple purchases audiobooks from Amazon subsidiary Audible for sale in iTunes.
“The two companies have a strong position in the digital offering of audiobooks in Germany. Therefore, we feel compelled to examine the agreement between these two competitors in the audiobooks in more detail,” cartel office chief Andreas Mundt said in a statement.
The piece notes that Apple declined to comment, while Amazon could not be reached for comment.
Apple lost a separate U.S. case in which it was found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour in its ebook sales. The U.S. Justice Department recently agreed that Apple had now properly addressed the issues, though this may not be the end of the battle: Apple is appealing that case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
It’s no secret that Apple has had a hand in producing video and other content for artists since launching its new Apple Music streaming service. While we’ve known it has been hosting videos for artists using its own video player inside Apple Music, Apple quietly started adding an embed button to the video player that takes it out of Apple Music and makes it sharable across the rest of the web. The feature is notable for a few reasons and could mean big things to come for Apple, video, and its relationship with YouTube and other competitive music and video services…
The new sharing option began appearing sometime in recent weeks as new videos from Drake and the company’s latest Apple Music ad featuring Kenny Chesney included an embed button on Apple’s usual video player. It’s currently hidden, only appearing on the videos in some locations and only when videos are copied from raw webpage code, but it looks to be something Apple could really exploit.
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Facebook is rolling out a new post format on the latest version of its iPhone app called Music Stories. The new format lets you share songs and albums from popular streaming music services, starting with Apple Music and Spotify, while friends can enjoy 30-second previews of what you share. The Music Stories format also looks rich within the app. Tapping play turns the artwork in a record-like spinning animation, and a button to listen to the whole track or album on the streaming service is presented on the right.
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For all I know, Apple may own my house. Like every other person on the planet, when faced with pages and pages of terms & conditions, I just click Accept and get on with my day.
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Although carriers have created workarounds in the past, Apple has been slow to support carrier billing for iTunes and App Store purchases so far. That appears to be changing, in Germany at least, as TechCrunch reports Telefonica-owned carrier O2 is officially supported as a payment option within iTunes. O2 customers are said to be able to provide a phone number rather than a credit card to allow billing to be handled through O2 rather than directly with a credit or debit card or other options.
iTunes and App Store payments are then handled through the carrier with the phone bill monthly rather than immediately. This allows subscription services like Apple Music and Netflix to also be handled through carrier billing.
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Adele, who initially declined to allow her music onto Apple Music, has brought her new single ‘Hello’ to the streaming music service. The single is also available on iTunes.
Adele hasn’t had the easiest of relationships with streaming music services. She refused to allow Spotify to stream 21 until long after its release, and didn’t sign up to Apple Music until the company did a U-turn on its initial plan not to pay royalties to artists during the three-month free trial. Apple changed its mind after Taylor Swift wrote an open letter to Apple.
It’s been four years since Adele’s last album, 21, and her follow-up, 25, is scheduled for release on November 20. The singer-songwriter said she was sorry it had taken so long.
“[25] is about getting to know who I’ve become without realising,” Adele added. “And I’m so sorry it took so long, but you know, life happened.”
25 can be pre-ordered from iTunes from today.
Instagram is expanding its range of apps further today by introducing a new video-looping service to rival the likes of HTC Zoe and the iPhone’s baked-in Live Photos. Boomerang takes a quick burst of photos in-app, and then turns them in to a moving photo, or video, that loops forward and backward. Don’t call it a GIF though, it’s a Boomerang…
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The big question mark over Apple Music has been how many customers would choose to try it out, and – crucially – how many of them would be willing to pay for the service once the free trial ended. Tim Cook answered both questions yesterday, revealing that the service currently has 15M subscribers, of whom 6.5M are paying customers.
There are still plenty of unknowns, of course. We don’t know the exact split between individual and family subscriptions (though family subs were around 18% back in August), and we don’t know how subscribers map out across the countries – both of which we’d need to know to accurately calculate how much Apple is earning from the service.
But if we do a back-of-an-envelope guesstimate and say that the split between solo and family accounts is around 80/20 and that the costlier countries like those in Europe cancel out the cheaper ones like India, then an average monthly subscription of $11 times 6.5M customers gives us $72M a month. Multiply that by 12 months, and we can get $858M Apple Music revenue per year. Given that this is all very rough and ready, let’s call it a billion dollars a year in round numbers …
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Update (15/10/2015): Apple services again experiencing outages across App Store, iTunes Store and more services as reported by their system status page. Not a good week for Apple’s cloud uptime.
Following a similar outage yesterday, some iTunes users are continuing to experience service disruptions as Apple confirms the downtime. Apple recently updated its system status page tracking issues with its services, stores and iCloud to note the ongoing problem with the iTunes store for some users:
“Users are experiencing a problem with the service listed above. We are investigating and will update the status as more information becomes available.”
The outage has been affecting some users since around 12pm ET, according to Apple, and is yet to be resolved.
Yesterday a number of users reported experiencing issues with Apple’s online services but Apple didn’t detail the problems on its status page.
We’ll update here if Apple confirms the problem as resolved.
To help with the international refugee crisis happening right now, Apple and the band Imagine Dragons have collaborated on an exclusive charity single, called “I Was Me” ($1.29). All proceeds of the song sales go to the UN Refugee Agency to support relief efforts. In addition, SAP will be donating an additional 10 cents per download for the first 5 million iTunes downloads. The Imagine Dragons track is exclusive to iTunes and available worldwide.
Some users on Reddit and Twitter are reporting that iTunes and the App Store are down. Other are able to access normally, suggesting that the issue is either small-scale or intermittent. Apple’s status page is not yet showing an issue, though it is common for Apple to be very slow to update the page.
The issue doesn’t seem to be specific to any one country, with reports from the U.S., Europe and Asia (including me in the UK) …
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The revamped Apple TV set top box and iPad Pro will both begin showing up in Apple Retail Stores for sale during the first week of November after going on sale via Apple’s website in late October, according to reliable sources. It is also likely that the first online orders of both products will reach customers in early November.
Tomorrow will mark three months since the launch of iOS 8.4 and Apple Music, and this means that the first free trial sign-ups will begin expiring. In its latest push to retain users, Apple has begun emailing users with set-to-expire trials as well as pushing notifications to their devices. As can be seen in the image above, the notification encourages users to renew.
As we learned in the summer, users who do not manually end their free trial with Apple Music will be automatically opted into continuing their subscription for either $9.99 or $14.99 (family plan). Users who wish to not continue with Apple Music can disable their subscriptions manually via their iTunes account page. Last week, our own Ben Lovejoy weighed the pros and cons of Apple Music in order to make his own renewal decision.
Netflix today has announced an update to its iOS app that ads the ability for users to subscribe to the service from within the iOS app itself. The change was announced in a new advertisement from Netflix that stars two characters from its hit show Orange is the New Black talking to an iPhone using Siri for the first time, which can be seen below. PayPal is holding a sale on iTunes Gift Cards that makes subscribing to Netflix via in-app purchase even more tempting…
Update below.
With the number of refugees now fleeing war-torn Syria reaching into the hundreds of thousands, Apple is inviting customers to donate to the Red Cross through a splash page on the iTunes Store. There are donate buttons for amounts ranging from $5 to $200 in the U.S. store, and for similar sums in other countries.
Many Syrian nationals have seen their homes and, in some cases, entire towns destroyed by bombings. Others were forced to run as ISIS continues its brutal expansion, with murder and rape commonplace. The Red Cross has launched a crisis appeal to raise money to provide food, water, shelter and medical care for those fleeing the country …
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iOS 9 marked the first major version of the iPhone and iPad software that Apple opened up for public beta testing after a similar trial run with iOS 8.3 last year. As many users have noticed, Apple’s public beta program is continuing with the upcoming iOS 9.1 release available as an OTA (over-the-air) update for non-developer testers, but many users will surely want to hop off the beta train and onto the stable release cycle with today’s iOS 9.0 release.
Several readers have already asked about downgrading from the iOS 9.1 public beta to today’s iOS 9.0 release, and while it’s possible it does come at a cost: potentially losing some important data. If moving from iOS 9.1 public or even dev beta to today’s official iOS 9.0 release is worth it for you, read on for a detailed guide for doing just that.
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According to several users around the web and Apple’s own System Status website, the iTunes Store has been experiencing issues throughout the day. Apple’s System Status webpage shows that the outage began around 3PM ET and lasted for an hour and a half before being resolved. Now, however, it appears that the iTunes Store is down yet again.
Apple says that “some users” are affected by the problem and that it is investigating the issues. Downdetector.com shows that the outage became more widspread around 6PM ET, with users reporting issues downloading content, opening the store, and logging in. Apple Music content does not appear to be affected by these issues.
Users are also reporting that similar issues are affecting the App Store, although Apple has yet to acknowledge those claims on its official System Status website. The Order Status page on Apple.com is also currently down and displaying a “We’re sorry” error message.
We’ll update this post as Apple updates its System Status website. Have you been having issues with the App Store, iTunes Store, or Apple.com? Let us know in the comments.
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Transferring files from your old iPhone to a new iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus isn’t difficult, but after a reader emailed about the many, many hours he expected to wait for the old-to-new iPhone transfer process to complete, I realized that his experience has become more common — even though it’s not necessary. Years ago, iTunes was the only (and fairly straightforward) way to transfer one iPhone’s contents to another. But now, between iCloud, larger device capacity sizes, and iTunes encryption options, there are certainly ways to turn a simple process into a day-long ordeal.
This quick How-To guide is designed to save you a wasted day by helping you select the best options in iTunes and get most of the work done ahead of time. I’ve used this process more times than I can count, and beyond working perfectly each time, it requires far fewer hours than relying on iCloud…
I don’t plan on subscribing to Apple Music when my free trial of the service runs out. It’s not really something I care to pay $10 a month for. I’m not an avid music listener; I sometimes put some hip hop on in the car, but that’s about it. For me, paying $10 every month for access to a large library of music that I don’t plan to use to the fullest extent just isn’t worth it, and I prefer to own what music I do listen to.
I also hate the idea of subscription software, like Adobe’s current Creative Cloud offering. Like my music, I’d rather own my software outright than pay a monthly fee to have access to it. The same is true for just about every other subscription service that’s out there.
So it might surprise you to find out that I think Apple should get into the TV and movie subscription business. What’s more, I’d be willing to pay every single month for access to that service. Why the difference of opinion on this topic? Keep reading and find out.
