Tag Archive for: Apple’s

We need app store competition, not Apple’s 1960s-style paternalistic monopoly – TechCrunch

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Karen Gullo is an analyst and senior media relations specialist at Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A pair of bills moving through Congress would force some of the largest tech companies to cede control over how people find and use mobile apps, leading to more competition and lower prices. But Big Tech companies, especially Apple, want to scare people with dire warnings that the bills would put their security in jeopardy.

Tellingly, Big Tech firms are not so loud about other things jeopardized by the bills — their app store monopolies and ability to make more money off mobile customers and app developers.

Pro-competition bills — S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act and S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act — would open up the largest app stores, including Apple’s and Google’s, by requiring them to allow competing third-party app stores and alternate channels for in-app payments. The bills would also stop the largest app store operators from preferencing their own apps over competitors’.

iPhone users would have the freedom to install less expensive third-party apps and choose to shop at third-party app stores. While some alternative app stores might have a greater volume of malicious apps, others may take a stronger approach to security and privacy than Apple — one that isn’t limited by the drive to enhance a monopolist’s bottom line.

Alternative app stores or app-vetting services could also offer important security- and privacy-enhancing apps that Apple has banned from iOS devices.

Nothing in the bills would stop Apple and Google from vetting apps for their phones for privacy and security or prevent them from offering new protective measures. So, because they trust Apple’s vetting of apps and are happy with the apps Apple lets them download, many iPhone users will choose to stick with the App Store. For those users, nothing will change under these bills.

The choice would be theirs. But Apple doesn’t want that. It wants to decide what, and how, users can purchase mobile apps. And it’s not just because the company is concerned about users’ privacy and security, which indeed it is.

No, it’s also because…

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Elon joins Twitter’s board, Apple’s subscriptions pilot, WWDC stays online – TechCrunch

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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China grew 19% in 2021 to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion.

Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games generated over $100 million in consumer spend, and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend, and just eight apps topped $1 billion.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place, with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps to try, too.

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Apple pilot tests a commerce feature for subscription apps 

Apple app store iOS

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Apple may be changing how iOS subscriptions operate when price increases are involved. Recently, some developers noticed that the streaming service Disney+ was seemingly only informing users of upcoming price changes, then automatically opting them in. This is different from how subscription price increases would typically be handled. In most other cases, a customer is presented with options to either agree…

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Whitelist JumpCloud Protect™ if You Use Apple’s Focus Functionality

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Apple’s iOS 15 introduced Focus mode, a feature that aims to help you disconnect from apps and notifications, only interact with who or what you choose to at set times of the day, and establish a better life/work balance. I’ve found it useful, and my colleague Tom Bridge has documented how well it’s worked for him. The trouble is that it can work too well: some notifications are “buried” if you don’t configure their importance correctly or update your apps list.

Late last year, the JumpCloud Protect™ app launched push prompts to simplify multi-factor authentication (MFA). It offers a secure, user-friendly system that’s designed to increase security. Unfortunately, app notifications like those from JumpCloud Protect don’t “surface” immediately unless you explicitly whitelist the app in Focus’s settings. As a result, it’s possible that your end users will scratch their heads and ask for support if JumpCloud Protect isn’t whitelisted in their “work” profile.

How To Whitelist JumpCloud Protect From Focus

The JumpCloud Protect app is instrumental in cutting through MFA complexity, so ensure that Focus permits it to work as it should. Apple provides more detailed instructions on its website. The basics are:

  1. Go to Settings > Focus. 
  1. Tap a provided Focus option — like Do Not Disturb, Personal, or Sleep — then turn on the Focus.
  1. After you choose a Focus, select options like Allowed Notifications, Time Sensitive Notifications, and Focus Status.

JumpCloud Protect asks for notification privileges on the first run, but that won’t carry through to Focus. It’s important to take this additional step so that notifications are always visible. Mobile device management (MDM) payloads cannot preconfigure this setting, yet.

Try JumpCloud Protect

JumpCloud considered the human side of MFA implementations when JumpCloud Protect launched with a push capability; other methods can be less secure or befuddle end users who aren’t tech-savvy across the board. JumpCloud is much easier to deploy than the security keys I used in my previous role as an IT director. Whitelisting the app ensures that your rollout goes smoothly.
It’s important for IT departments to become…

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Apple’s Private Relay Roils Telecoms Around the World

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When Apple pushed iOS 15 out to more than a billion devices in September, the software update included the company’s first VPN-like feature, iCloud Private Relay. The subscription-only privacy tool makes it harder for anyone to snoop on what you are doing online, by routing traffic from your device through multiple servers. But the tool has faced pushback from mobile operators in Europe—and more recently, by T-Mobile in the US.

As Private Relay has rolled out over the past few months, scores of people have started to complain that their mobile operators appear to be restricting access to it. For many, it’s impossible to turn the option on if your plan includes content filtering, such as parental controls. Meanwhile in Europe, mobile operators Vodafone, Telefonica, Orange, and T-Mobile have griped about how Private Relay works. In August 2021, according to a report by the Telegraph, the companies complained the feature would cut off their access to metadata and network information and suggested to regulators that it should be banned.

“Private Relay will impair others to innovate and compete in downstream digital markets and may negatively impact operators’ ability to efficiently manage telecommunication networks,” bosses from the companies wrote in a letter to European lawmakers. However, Apple says that Private Relay doesn’t stop companies from providing customers with fast internet connections, and security experts say there’s been little evidence showing Private Relay will cause problems for network operators.

Apple’s Private Relay isn’t a VPN—which carriers freely allow—but it has some similarities. The option, which is still in beta and is only available to people who pay for iCloud+, aims to stop the network providers and the websites you visit from seeing your IP address and DNS records. That makes it harder for companies to build profiles about you that include your interests and location, in theory helping to reduce the ways you’re targeted online.

To do this, Private Relay routes your web traffic through two relays, known as nodes, when it leaves your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Your traffic passes from Safari into the first relay, known as the “ingress…

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