Apple

During an interesting session at the 2022 Code Conference with Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs, Tim Cook said that Apple customers are apparently not asking for RCS support on the iPhone.

At WWDC 2022 today, Apple finally announced a Weather app for the iPad but, more importantly, a detailed WeatherKit to replace the Dark Sky API that was deprecated for Android in 2020. This new weather service will allow developers to create Android apps that use the same Dark Sky back end as before.

Following Apple Music’s redesign of its widgets, Beats for Android is adding some to let you quickly manage headphones from the homescreen, while the companion app is also getting a “Locate My Beats” capability.

For quite some time, there’s been demand for Apple to adopt USB-C on its iPhone, but the company has so far refused to do so in favor of its tightly controlled Lightning standard. Now, a clever engineer has successfully managed to install a Lightning port on a Samsung Galaxy device, and no, it’s not an April Fools’ Day joke.

Both Google and Apple have been the target of several anti-trust suits and complaints in the past couple of years, and this week the UK is progressing further towards attempting to intervene with the two tech giants. A new report released today shows that the UK takes issue with the “duopoly” Google and Apple have over the mobile space.

High refresh rate screens are not a new trend, but after a couple of years of inexplicably avoiding the feature on its iPhone lineup, Apple has finally adopted the feature in the iPhone 13 Pro series. However, they’ve been preceded by dozens of phones in the Android camp, so let’s take a look at every Android device that had a 120Hz refresh rate before Apple’s iPhone.

Messaging has always been a tough point for Android phones compared to iPhones simply because iMessage is, put simply, very good both for its experience and its security. As Google finally solves that problem with expanded adoption of RCS with end-to-end encryption, the company is pushing for its rival, Apple, to do the same by pointing out that the current fallback method instantly drops security.

Yesterday, Apple showed off an extensive suite of new software features for iOS, macOS, watchOS, iPadOS, and more. Here’s a rundown of everything Apple showed at WWDC 2021 that was already possible with Google’s apps on Android and Chrome OS.

After years of ignoring the fact that it was originally supposed to be a cross-platform standard, Apple finally announced an expansion of FaceTime to Android and Windows devices through a web app allowing users on other platforms to join iOS 15 users in their calls. To go with it, though, Apple picked a pretty ugly-looking and cheap Android phone to depict the functionality. It’s a tactic that’s sure to annoy a lot of Android fans, but the honest truth is this: it’s perfectly accurate.

Google’s biggest consumer-facing augmented reality offerings today are Lens and Live View in Maps. At WWDC 2021, Apple announced it was planning to go after those two features with iOS 15 this fall.

The big battle between Epic Games and Apple comes to a head today as the court case starts. One of Apple’s key arguments in the case is that developers have choice and can distribute “apps” for iOS through the web, but a Google engineer has recently spoken out against Apple’s practices on the web, calling iOS browsers “uniquely underpowered.”

Epic’s lawsuit against Apple has revealed quite a bit about iMessage for Android, including how platform lock-in is one reason it doesn’t exist. New filings today revealed that Apple executive Eddy Cue made the case for iMessage on Android to stop Google from owning messaging.

Besides iTunes, Apple’s biggest offering on Microsoft’s operating system is the iCloud sync client for files, photos, and mail. Apple is now extending its presence on Windows with an iCloud Passwords Chrome extension.

Samsung may still be the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer, but according to a new report, Apple dominated the Korean firm in Q4 2020 smartphone sales.

With iOS 14, Apple is requiring app developers to tell users about and have them opt-in to tracking. Google announced today that its first-party iOS apps will stop using certain tracking methods to avoid having to show the upcoming permission prompt. Meanwhile, the company also provided guidance to developers and advertisers ahead of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency initiative.

Back in May, Apple and Google rolled out a system to help trace who has COVID-19. The two companies today announced “Exposure Notifications Express” to hopefully boost adoption by doing most of the hard technical work. As such, local health agencies no longer have to create individual apps, but rather can rely on Apple and Google.

Apple made a surprise acquisition of Dark Sky in March and there are signs that it’s already live in iOS 14. As part of this, the weather forecasting service is gradually being deprecated for non-Apple devices and clients. The Dark Sky shutdown is now complete for Android and Wear OS, but the website sees a reprieve.

Apple today launched a Security Research Device Program to help third parties find iPhone and iPad vulnerabilities. Google’s Project Zero team says its won’t be able to use the modified iOS devices because the program imposes restrictions that prevent 90-day disclosures.

Back in 2017, Apple acquired music recognition app Shazam and removed advertising, as well as third-party SDKs, from the service. The company now looks to be taking that a step further by removing the ability to sign in with Facebook on Shazam for Android.