iOS

As Apple looks to increase Services revenue from existing iPhone users, new data from Sensor Tower sheds more light on those efforts. According to the data, which was obtained by TechCrunch, U.S iPhone users spent an average of $79 last year on apps and subscriptions.

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Following the release of iOS 12.1.4 this afternoon, a top Google security engineer revealed two zero-day security threats. Ben Hawkes, team leader at Google’s Project Zero security team, revealed the existence of the vulnerabilities on Twitter this afternoon.

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Popular weather application Dark Sky has been updated today with a highly anticipated new dark mode theme. This means there’s now a gorgeous black design, and support for automatically switching between light and dark mode.

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Netflix has supported downloading movies and TV shows for offline viewing on iOS for a while now, but the process has been a bit manual. Android gained automatic downloads last summer, and now the iPhone and iPad are finally catching up and gaining the handy feature.

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Apple has turned its Group FaceTime feature back on following the release of iOS 12.1.4 for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Apple manually disabled the feature over a week ago after a privacy bug was discovered with Group FaceTime that allowed eavesdropping between FaceTime users.

Apple has also shared an on-the-record statement confirming the fixes are in place:

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Update: iOS 12.1.4 is now available.

Last week was a tough one for Apple and privacy. First, a huge bug in Group FaceTime would allow someone to eavesdrop on another FaceTime user just by calling them and adding themselves to a group call before the contact answered. Then, a project from Facebook was revealed to be spying on users, violating Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program policies. The latter was dealt with by revoking Facebook’s enterprise certificate, rendering their internal apps unusable. The same action was taken against Google, which had a similar project.

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A new investigation from TechCrunch today reveals that some iPhone apps are using services like Glassbox, a “customer experience analytics firm” to track the taps and swipes you make. Apps such as Hollister, Air Canada, Expedia, and Hotels.com are using this framework, and in some cases they inadvertently reveal sensitive information.

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Apple today has stopped signing iOS 12.1.2 and iOS 12.1.1, which means it is no longer possible to downgrade from iOS 12.1.3. Apple regularly stops signing older versions of iOS to ensures users stay on the most up-to-date builds for security and stability reasons.

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Update: The second iOS 12.2, watchOS 5.2, tvOS 12.2, and macOS 10.14.2 betas are now available. Apple also has new betas for its Classroom apps.

Apple will be releasing the second developer betas of iOS 12.2 and watchOS 5.2 later today. On the first iOS 12.2 developer beta, we found evidence of a new generation of AirPods with voice-activated Hey Siri, the Apple News Premium subscription service, new iPads and iPod touch that could be released with this update, and many other changes and improvements.

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Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Apple is working on a new system-wide Dark Mode option for iOS 13 later this year. Dark Mode on the iPhone and iPad has the potential to be extremely popular if implemented well, but what should we expect from Dark Mode on iOS?

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Apple has today released an update on the FaceTime eavesdropping bug and offered an apology. The company says it has patched the flaw on its servers and will roll out an update to iOS users next week to bring back Group FaceTime with the bug fixed. It also makes a promise to improve how it handles bug reports and its escalation process.

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iPhone 11 render based on alleged prototype

News today from Bloomberg lines up with previous reports we’ve heard that this year’s iPhone 11 will feature a triple-camera system and potentially USB-C, but also offers much more. We could see the 2020 iPhone lineup using laser-powered 3D camera systems. Some other fresh exciting details include iOS 13 bringing a Dark Mode and iPad specific improvements, news about an updated 10-inch iPad and iPad mini 5, when we’ll see the next iPhone design changes, and more.

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Popular iOS PDF app, GoodReader, is out with a major update today for its 10th anniversary. The new release brings a brand new UI and PDF viewer, a continuous scrolling mode, 256-bit encryption, Split View support on iPad, Apple Pencil 2 support, Secure Photocopy redaction, and much more.

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Apple is releasing the first public beta of iOS 12.2 later today, three days after releasing its first iOS 12.2 developer beta on Thursday.

With its first developer beta, we found evidence of a new generation of AirPods, the Apple News subscription service, new iPads and iPod touch, and many other changes and improvements. It’s likely that tvOS 12.2 public beta 1 and macOS 10.14.4 public beta 1 will also become available; we will update the post if they are released.

For customers, iOS 12.2 introduces support for the recently announced AirPlay 2 and HomeKit smart TVs while introducing a handful of other changes and improvements.

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The most significant change to Apple’s developer ecosystem this decade has been the introduction of the Swift programming language – and we’ll probably see the next big change come during this year’s WWDC with the introduction of third party UIKit apps on the Mac.

As for Swift, the new language was announced at WWDC 2014. With contributions from both Apple engineers and the open-source community, it has seen constant updates and is now in version 4.2.1.

An important aspect of Swift that has been affecting users since its first version is that its application binary interface, or ABI, is not stable. What that means in practice is that Apple can’t include the Swift language support in its operating systems, because an app written with Swift 3 won’t work with the language support binaries for Swift 4. The solution to that is to include the Swift language libraries inside the app bundle that gets downloaded from the App Store, increasing the bandwidth and storage required by the app.

That’s finally changing for Apple and Swift soon…

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Apple released the first beta of iOS 12.2 earlier this week and we’ve already highlighted a lot of new features. One small but useful feature that hasn’t yet been widely noted is more granular control of Screen Time’s Downtime feature.

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Apple released the first iOS 12.2 developer beta today, and in tow is support for Apple News in Canada, finally branching out from the initial launch countries: US, UK and Australia.

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