Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch:
[Sensor Tower] found that U.S. iPhone users spent 23 percent more on in-app purchases in 2017 than they did the year prior – or, an average of $58 per active user was spent on in-app purchases, up from $47 in 2016.
Hardly surprising when it comes to games — they’re a hot category to build for these days. But the 57% jump in the entertainment category is interesting to see.
Apple has today introduced (PRODUCT)RED iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, which will be available for order on Apple.com starting April 10, 2018 (tomorrow) and in Apple Stores starting April 13, 2018 (Friday).
For 11 years, our partnership with (RED) has supported HIV/AIDS programmes that provide counselling, testing and medicine that prevents the transmission of HIV from a mother to her unborn child. So far, we’ve raised over US$160 million through the sale of our (RED) products. Every purchase brings us a step closer to an AIDS‑free generation.
These new (RED) models of the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus) will be available in 64GB and 256GB versions for the standard non-RED pricing of $699/$849 and $799/$949 respectively. The India pricing has been announced as starting at ₹67,940/- and will be available in May.
Apple has officially announced WWDC 2018, which will take place at San Jose, California from June 4th to June 8th, 2018. The much-awaited keynote announcing the next versions of iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS will be held on Monday, June 4th at 10:30PM IST.
If you’re a developer and are looking to attend the conference, head over to Register for the ticket lottery.
Writankar Mukherjee, reporting for ETtech:
Top smartphone distributors, led by Ingram Micro and HCL, are entering the business of selling refurbished smartphones in the country where they will refurbish old handsets sourced locally and then sell them, which will help them bypass government restriction of sourcing old phones from abroad.
and
Ingram Micro is launching the refurbished handsets under its own brand focused on iPhone. The company, which will also offer six months warranty on these handsets, has tied up with third-party manufacturers such as Dixon Technologies for this, an executive said. The pricing will be 40%-60% lower than the current selling price for a new model.
I don’t know how to react to this.
Mark Gurman and Debby Wu, reporting for Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. is preparing to release a trio of new smartphones later this year: the largest iPhone ever, an upgraded handset the same size as the current iPhone X and a less expensive model with some of the flagship phone’s key features.
The most interesting bit about this report is this:
In at least some regions, Apple is considering offering a dual-SIM card option for the larger model. That would let people use their phones in countries with different carrier plans without having to swap out cards. Such a feature has been growing in importance and popularity, especially in Europe and Asia where business people routinely visit multiple countries.
Could we finally see a dual-SIM version of the iPhone? I’d be bummed if this option was exclusive to the largest (read: most expensive) iPhone though.
Marco Arment comments on the terrible state of WatchKit:
Developing Apple Watch apps is extremely frustrating and limited for one big reason: unlike on iOS, Apple doesn’t give app developers access to the same watchOS frameworks that they use on Apple Watch.
Instead, we’re only allowed to use WatchKit, a baby UI framework that would’ve seemed rudimentary to developers even in the 1990s. But unlike the iPhone’s web apps, WatchKit doesn’t appear to be a stopgap — it seems to be Apple’s long-term solution to third-party app development on the Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch may be the best selling smartwatch out there without any competition, but it still has tremendous potential that 3rd party developers aren’t able to make full use of.
Manish Goregaonkar has published this absolutely fascinating analysis of the iOS crashing bug that occurs when it comes across a particular text string.
So there’s yet another iOS text crash, where just looking at a particular string crashes iOS. Basically, if you put this string in any system text box (and other places), it crashes that process. I’ve been testing it by copy-pasting characters into Spotlight so I don’t end up crashing my browser.
[…]
I was pretty interested in what made this sequence “special”, and started investigating.
Even if you are not interested in the technical details, I urge you to go read it. The explanation about Indic scripts is incredibly interesting read.
Apple’s HomePod goes on sale in just three days. The pre-orders have been open for a little over a week now and so far, very little has been known about this new category of device from Apple. Thankfully, the embargo for the reviews has lifted today and several HomePod reviews are now rolling out as I type this.
Here’s a roundup of some of the notable HomePod reviews I’ve come across so far: