Apple today announced a number of coming changes and improvements to the App Store that will help developers better target their apps to users, get their apps discovered by more people, and even highlight what sort of events are taking place inside their apps to entice new users to download the app and encourage existing users to return.

The company said its App Store today sees 600 million weekly users across 175 countries, and has paid out over $230 billion to developers since the App Store launched, highlighting the business opportunity for app developers.

However, as the App Store has grown, it’s become harder for app developers to market their apps to new users or get their apps found. The new features aim to address that.

One change involves the app’s product page. Starting this year, app developers will be able to create multiple custom product pages to showcase different features of their app for different users. For instance, they’ll be able to try out things like different screenshots, videos, and even different app icons to A/B test what users like the most.

They’ll also be able to advertise the dynamic things that are taking place inside their apps on an ongoing basis. Apple explained that apps and games are constantly rolling out new content and limited time events like film premieres on streaming services, events like Pokémon Go fests, or Nike fitness challenges. But these events were often only discoverable by those who already had the app installed and then opted in to push notifications.

Apple will now allow developers to better advertise these events, with the launch in-app events “front and center on the App Store.” The events can be showcased on the app’s product page. Users can learn more about the events, sign up to be notified, or quickly join the event, if it’s happening now. They can also discover events with personalized recommendations and through App Store search.

App Store editors will curate the best events and the new App Store widget will feature upcoming events right on users’ homescreens, too.

Apple says the feature will be open to all developers, including those who already run events and those who are just getting started.

FaceApp. So. The app has gone viral again after first doing so two years ago or so. The effect has gotten better but these apps, like many other one off viral apps, tend to come and go in waves driven by influencer networks or paid promotion. We first covered this particular AI photo editor  from a team of Russian developers about two years ago.

It has gone viral again now due to some features that allow you to edit a person’s face to make it appear older or younger. You may remember at one point it had an issue because it enabled what amounted to digital blackface by changing a person from one ethnicity to another.

In this current wave of virality, some new rumors are floating about FaceApp. The first is that it uploads your camera roll in the background. We found no evidence of this and neither did security researcher and Guardian App CEO Will Strafach or researcher Baptiste Robert.

The second is that it somehow allows you to pick photos without giving photo access to the app. You can see a video of this behavior here:

While the app does indeed let you pick a single photo without giving it access to your photo library, this is actually 100% allowed by an Apple API introduced in iOS 11. It allows a developer to let a user pick one single photo from a system dialog to let the app work on. You can view documentation here and here.

Because the user has to tap on one photo, this provides something Apple holds dear: user intent. You have explicitly tapped it, so it’s ok to send that one photo. This behavior is actually a net good in my opinion. It allows you to give an app one photo instead of your entire library. It can’t see any of your photos until you tap one. This is far better than committing your entire library to a jokey meme app.

Unfortunately, there is still some cognitive dissonance here, because Apple allows an app to call this API even if a user has set the Photo Access setting to Never in settings. In my opinion, if you have it set to Never, you should have to change that before any photo can enter the app from your library, no matter what inconvenience that causes. Never is not a default, it is an explicit choice and that permanent user intent overrules the one-off user intent of the new photo picker.

I believe that Apple should find a way to rectify this in the future by making it more clear or disallowing if people have explicitly opted out of sharing photos in an app.

One good idea might be the equivalent of the ‘only once’ location option added to the upcoming iOS 13 might be appropriate.

One thing that FaceApp does do, however, is it uploads your photo to the cloud for processing. It does not do on-device processing like Apple’s first party app does and like it enables for third parties through its ML libraries and routines. This is not made clear to the user.

I have asked FaceApp why they don’t alert the user that the photo is processed in the cloud. I’ve also asked them whether they retain the photos.

Given how many screenshots people take of sensitive information like banking and whatnot, photo access is a bigger security risk than ever these days. With a scraper and optical character recognition tech you could automatically turn up a huge amount of info way beyond ‘photos of people’.

So, overall, I think it is important that we think carefully about the safeguards put in place to protect photo archives and the motives and methods of the apps we give access to.

 Apple’s latest iOS 8.4 beta, the third for the next significant iOS software update, is now available. This most recent installment continues to offer a revamped Music app, bringing both function and UI changes to the music playback app, a move many suspect also prefaces the possible arrival Read More

 Ever since Apple introduced support for third-party keyboards in iOS 8, developers have been racing to offer users more functionality than what’s provided by the stock keyboard alone, whether that’s better predictive typing, support for GIFs or different input methods like Swype. A new keyboard app launching today, WordBoard, is instead focused on saving you from having to type… Read More

 Apple has issued iOS 8.1.3, and update for its mobile devices that fixes a number of bugs, and makes it so that iOS requires less free storage space on your hardware (this update itself comes in at 247 MB) to actually perform an update. Especially with iOS 8’s launch, users without much free space on their device had difficulty updating because of the size of the software download itself. Read More

If you have an iPhone that you use for business it can be tempting to be constantly connected, after all, the device and various apps are designed to give users the ability to do almost anything. While this is great for business, it may not be ideal for a healthy work-life balance or if you really need to concentrate on a specific task. Luckily, if you have iOS 8 installed on your device there is a useful feature, called Do Not Disturb, that could help promote a break from your phone.

What is Do Not Disturb?

Do Not Disturb is a handy iOS 8 feature that when enabled, silences all notifications, calls, and alerts that you usually get coming through when the device is locked. You can either turn it on and off manually, or schedule a time for when it is to be activated. If your device is unlocked, e.g., you are using it, notifications will usually still trigger.

Turning Do Not Disturb on

To turn this feature on simply:

1. Slide up from any screen on the device to open the Control Center.
2. Tap on the crescent moon icon at the top of the Control Center.

This will turn on the Do Not Disturb feature. You should see a crescent moon icon appear in the menu bar at the top of your device’s screen indicating the feature is activated. To turn it off, open the Control Center and tap the crescent moon icon again so that it disappears from your screen.

Setting a Do Not Disturb schedule

If you would like to schedule a time where your device automatically puts itself into Do Not Disturb mode, simply:

1. Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
2. Tap on Do Not Disturb.
3. Slide the radio beside Scheduled to On (green).
4. Set a time to enable this feature.

As with the manual triggering of this feature, you will see a crescent moon icon in the top menu bar of your device when it is active.

Changing feature settings

If you tap on Settings and then select Do Not Disturb you will also be able to tinker with the settings related to this feature. The options you will see include:

• Manual - Allows this feature to be manually enacted via the Control Center.
• Scheduled - Schedule a time when this feature will be automatically enacted.
• Allow Calls From - Pick which contacts to allow calls and notifications from so that these sound even when Do Not Disturb is active.
• Repeated Calls - Set whether multiple calls in a short amount of time will ring when the feature is active. If enabled, two calls from the same person in less than three minutes will cause the device to ring.

If you would like to learn more about using the iPhone for business, please contact us today to see what difference we can bring to your business.