Tag: iOS

Apple Pay Support Expands in the United States and Other Countries

Apple Pay, the tap-to-pay service for retail and app purchases, has expanded the number of partner financial institutions here in the United States as well as  five other countries.  The expansion comes just a few weeks after Brazil iOS users were added to the countries that support the service.

The expansion adds banks here in the United States as well as Canada, China, Italy, Russia, and Spain.  While the list of countries and banks supported by Apple Pay is substantially smaller than its main rival Google Pay, the expansion shows that Apple plans to continue to work with financial institutions and, in some cases, governments, for the service to work in other countries and with more banks.

iOS 11.4 Beta 2 Arrives for Testers With Several Improvements

The second beta of iOS 11.4 has arrived for testers running their iPhones, bringing several bug fixes along with the new Messages in iCloud.  The beta is only available to those who have registered their devices in the Apple beta program with the official release of the new version expected to be late in May or early June.

The big new feature in this build is Messages in iCloud which returns to the beta program.  It originally showed up in the 11.3 beta program but was dropped and not released as part of that update.  It appears that Apple has been doing their homework and will allow users to enable it.  This will allow for new messages to be sync’d to your iCloud account along with photos and videos which will save space on your iPhone.

Apple Music is Outpacing Spotify in Monthly Growth Numbers

Apple Music, the subscription music streaming service from the Cupertino company, is doing exceptionally well.  In an exclusive report at Variety, the company shared that the service now has 40 million subscribers world wide.  Perhaps even more of an indicator of the health of the service, it is outpacing Spotify when it comes to month-over-month growth.

Right now Spotify is gaining about 2% each month in new subscribers, which outstanding growth.  But Apple Music is growing at a staggering 5% each month.  The service, like Spotify, is helped by the fact that it works on both Android and iOS phones.

Google Maps Adds Language Support for 39 Languages and 1.2 Billion People

Google Maps, one of Google’s apps with over 1 billion users, has been updated to bring nearly four dozen new languages.  The update is a cloud-side change so as long as you are running latest version of the app on your phone, you are good to go.

As for the 39 new languages, here is the full list:  Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bosnian, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Kazakh, Khmer, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Mongolian, Norwegian, Persian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, Vietnamese, and Zulu.

G Suite to Enabled Basic Mobile Management by Default This Year

Google has announced that by the end of 2018, the basic mobile management feature on G Suite domains will be enabled by default.  The announcement comes as part of a series of announcement the company has made regarding data and device security.

When the change is enabled, it will require that all users of Android and iOS phones associated with a G Suite domain to have, at a minimum, a password or PIN to unlock their phones.  Without it, users will not be able to access G Suite associated apps and thus, the data associated with those apps.

Google Assistant App Expands Support for Lollipop, Tablets and iPads

Google’s efforts to have Google Assistant available on all the things took another step forward yesterday.  The company released an update to the stand alone app, essentially a shortcut to Assistant, for both Android and iOS that expand device availability and functionality.

First, for Android, two big changes came to the Google Assistant app.  It can now run on devices running Android Lollipop which greatly expands the overall number of devices that Assistant can run on.  Second, support for tablets has also arrived on the app.  So instead of the app looking awkwardly huge and only in portrait mode, it now works in landscape and looks like a proper tablet app.  Keep in mind that both of these were actually supported by Assistant last year.  This update to the Assistant stand alone app just adds the support.

Microsoft Cortana Likely Coming to Outlook for Android and iOS

When it comes to Personal Assistants on phones, we tend to think of Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa most often while iOS users tend to think of Siri.  But Microsoft Cortana slowly and quietly continues to develop and made inroads on both Android and iOS.  A new report suggests that Cortana is about to go even further into both platforms.

The Verge is reporting that Microsoft is working on integrating Cortana in Outlook for both Android and iOS.  This would allow for things like emails to be read to you while you are on-the-go but could also allow for dictation of emails.

Google Announces The First Beta of Their New Cross Platform Mobile SDK Flutter

Today at Mobile World Congress, Google introduced Flutter, their new cross platform mobile SDK.  The new development tool will allow for developers to create native UI frameworks for both Android and iOS that are native to each platform.

The beauty of Flutter is that it comes packing its own rendering engine and framework which, in essence, bypasses the native UI frameworks in both platforms.  This is not something new for developers, especially game developers who have used different rendering engines.  This allows for significant performance increases (particularly on Android).  When you compile the app with the available Android and iOS SDKs, you get the appropriate app & framework for the respective platform.

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