Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store.1 We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch.

Apple is <em>still</em> pulling this crap? Give an explanation at the very minimum.

Smartphones powered by the Android and iOS mobile operating systems accounted for more than eight out of ten smartphones shipped in the first quarter of 2012 (1Q12). According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, the mobile operating systems held shares of 59.0% and 23.0% respectively of the 152.3 million smartphones shipped in 1Q12. During the first quarter of 2011, the two operating systems held a combined share of 54.4%. The share gains mean that Android and iOS have successfully distanced themselves from previous market leaders Symbian and BlackBerry, as well as Linux and Windows Phone 7/Windows Mobile.

Puts smartphone shipments at 152m, up 50% year-on-year. Android is 59%; Apple + Samsung is 75m, or half the total. A two-horse race.

Ahonen isn't very happy about what's happening to Nokia. (He used to work there.) Also has calculations for smartphone installed base by platform, which puts Android top at 328m, then Symbian (299m) and iOS (178m) from a total of just over 1bn.

This is great. Knock yourselves out arguing over the interpretation of the pie chart, the mysterious absence of other devices (Wii, PS3?), the non-inclusion of "PC" devices... there's enough here for days of argument. (It also shows how misleading the phrase "more than" can be.)

Fixes cross-site scripting, URL spoofing and remote code execution bugs - all severe. But Graham Cluley has harder words for Apple:

Do you work for Apple? If so, please suggest - to the highest authority in the company you dare to email directly - that your employer tweaks its update publishing system. Make sure that [security article] HT1222 is updated at the same time as any security-related product update is published, not hours or days later. This will have a positive outcome: your users will apply security fixes more promptly.

No signs yet of Apple putting security visibility further up the priority list. It should.

Apple has finally given a public nod to OpenStreetMap, almost two months after it began using OSM's mapping data within iPhoto for iOS. The OpenStreetMap team tweeted about the change on Thursday evening, noting that the app, which was updated earlier this week with relatively minor fixes, quietly gained an OSM mention in the credits.

Finally.

Is Apple blanket-rejecting iOS apps that make use of Dropbox because of an evil plan to push developers toward iCloud? If you asked this question five days ago, the answer from the Internet at large might have been a resounding "yes!" But days later, as is often the case, details have come out that reveal the answer is probably "no."</p><p>

As it turns out, Dropbox inadvertently put other developers using its SDK in violation of one of Apple's app guidelines, resulting in a string of rejections that looked as if apps using Dropbox were being banned. The Web flew into a fury over what is essentially an annoying but long-standing clause in Apple's guidelines. The problem has now been remedied and the fury has died down.

The problem was that Dropbox wasn't letting apps where people could click through to buy Dropbox storage externally the option of buying the same storage inside the app. Guidelines, eh.

In case you haven't seen it:

Other documents entered as evidence come from an internal July 2010 presentation given by Rubin. They reveal that the company got advertising revenue of just $16.8m from Android handsets in 2009, but by mid-year of 2010 that had grown to $132.1m from ads on the fast-growing handset market – though Apple devices such as the iPhone and iPad using Google's search and maps generated $281m, or more than twice as much in total.

Useful ammunition for anyone renegotiating a deal with Google; these detailed internal figures are less than two years old. Apple's success for Google is two-edged: Google has to pay a substantial sum back in revenue share, making iOS devices less valuable to the bottom line than Android handsets.

This was highlighted by the <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/03/27/hugely-popular-ios-game-temple-run-is-now-available-for-android/">recent release of Temple Run</a> on the Android platform. A previously (very) successful game on iOS, it was brought over to Android in order to take advantage of the huge number of devices that run the OS. And it has already hit <a href="http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/03/30/temple-run-gets-a-lot-of-google-play-1-million-android-app-downloads-in-3-days/">1 million downloads</a> in just 3 days, good, even for a free app. But very quickly, the developers of the app discovered the pitfalls of fragmentation

Read the comments too, though: plenty of Android developers saying they don't have any problem. Seems like it's more of a problem for games developers.

Henry Blodget and his team take you through some home truths about the smartphone market. Nothing dramatic, yet all very clear reinforcements of the main messages about the mobile market: you ain't seen nothing yet.

The platforms that run HTML5 faster are likely to have an advantage in running a whole new wave of applications and games. So Spaceport.io, the cross-platform mobile game development tool maker, ran a study to find out whether iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) is faster than Android at running HTML5 games. Hands-down, iOS won.

"Android" in this case being the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (which got the top mark of the Android devices tested), and "iPhone" being the iPhone 4S.

It was May or June of 2010 (I can’t remember exactly) and we were loving our brand new iPads … except for the web browser, Safari. While advancements had been made in terms of its speed, we felt it still lacked in features and experience implementation – or UI. So we had the brilliant idea to make a new browser for the iPad.

See if you can figure out why it's not available before you click through.

A puzzle:

Currently <a href='http://jokru.tumblr.com/post/18929681613'>there is speculation</a> that Apple is using OpenStreetMap data for coverage outside of the United States, and the US Census's <a href='http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/'>TIGER data</a> within. If this is the case, it's a strong vote for the use of OpenStreetMap data in mission-critical scenarios, much like <a href='http://mapbox.com/blog/foursquare-switches-mapbox-streets-openstreetmap'>Foursquare's recent move</a>.

OpenStreetMap contributors have found telling similarities between Apple's maps and OpenStreetMap. Here are some examples from <a href='http://jokru.tumblr.com/post/18929681613'>Germany</a>, <a href='http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2012-March/062212.html'>Italy</a> and <a href='http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2012-March/062213.html'>Austria</a>. However, the data Apple may be using here seems to be from around 2010, as <a href='https://twitter.com/#!/druidsmith/status/177574145981292545'>some people have commented on Twitter</a> or have <a href='https://twitter.com/#!/synack/status/177544571411111936'>hypothesized based on reverse engineering</a>.

Neither Apple's website nor the <a href='http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewEula?id=497786065'>legal terms of the iPhoto application</a> include mention of OpenStreetMap data though, leaving Apple's data sources officially unconfirmed.
Neither Apple’s website nor the legal terms of the iPhoto application include mention of OpenStreetMap data though, leaving Apple’s data sources officially unconfirmed.

The puzzle remains. What's clear though is that Apple hasn't gone for Google Maps. And that's significant enough in its own right.

I'd like to fill in the picture I began in my recent <a href="http://pxldot.com/post/18281312362/android-measuring-stick">post</a> on Android fragmentation by examining the changes in version distribution of the other major mobile operating system: iOS.

Unfortunately, this was no quite as easy as it was for Android. Unlike Google, Apple does not publish the version distribution of its user base. What we do have, however, is a number of developers who have published the version distribution within their own apps, and if we can collect a large enough sample it may be feasible to use these in lieu of direct vendor-supplied data.

Using 50 data points from different developers, we can indeed build an image of version distribution over time for iOS just as we did for Android. Note that these are bundled into major releases. Grouping these into the major releases reduced noise and also matched the groupings more closely to those I used for the Android post — while it may not be a direct Apples-to-Apples comparison, it is likely the best we can do.

Beautiful, beautiful graphics (which suggest that iOS 5 reached 75% of users in less than a month - huh?) but it overlooks the fact that Google really doesn't care about fragmentation. All it wants is to have people connecting to the internet and using its search engine.

Developers of applications for Apple’s mobile devices, and Apple itself, came under scrutiny this month after reports that some apps were taking people’s address book information without their knowledge.

As it turns out, address books are not the only things up for grabs. Photos are also vulnerable. After a user allows an application on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to have access to location information, the app can copy the user’s entire photo library, without any further notification or warning, according to app developers.

Are we tired of this yet?

So iOS basically lets apps upload your address book:

I did a quick survey of 15 developers of popular iOS apps, and 13 of them told me they have a contacts database with millons of records. One company's database has Mark Zuckerberg's cell phone number, Larry Ellison's home phone number and Bill Gates' cell phone number. This data is not meant to be public, and people have an expectation of privacy with respect to their contacts.

Those are some databases, though. Off Steve Jobs's iPhone?

Oh, OK then.

We'll stop doing the BGR links now.

Stolen iPhones despite being wiped on US network Verizon still hold iMessage data. "'I can only speculate, but I can see this being plausible," Zdziarski told Ars. 'iMessage registers with the subscriber's phone number from the SIM, so let's say you restore the phone, it will still read the phone number from the SIM. I suppose if you change the SIM out after the phone has been configured, the old number might be cached somewhere either on the phone or on Apple's servers with the UDID of the phone.'

"In other words, iMessage may be pulling the old phone number from a cache somewhere and continuing to use it on the device if the SIM was removed after it was configured as a new phone. We were unable to test this theory (and keep in mind that it's just a theory), but it certainly sounds like one of the more logical explanations for this phenomenon."

One wonders too why Verizon and US carriers don't, like the UK carriers do, block IMEIs of stolen phones. That would stop it too. (Thanks @rquick for the link.)

"Only one week after Flipboard’s highly anticipated launch on the iPhone (and iPod Touch), the company is announcing it has added 1 million users to its service and has tripled its engagement. According to the company, that means it now has over 5 million users in total using the app across the iOS platform.

"Before last week’s release, Flipboard had registered 650 million flips per month on the iPad. Now it’s trending towards 2 billion flips per month."

"…we get it. Mobile is hot. Mobile is irreplaceable. And most importantly, mobile is the future. But this mobile future takes software for granted.

"We at Skritter are learning that because we’re building a version of our app for iOS. We have found that there are so many apps that the they have been devalued to the point of monetary irrelevance [1]. That’s sad because a good app is a piece of art. The buttons, the interface, the streamlined backend, all the pieces of a finely-tuned app take so much time and energy to perfect that I wanted to write a post to call attention to the level of software perfection that most people have acclimated to without even knowing it. Here are three reasons why it’s insanely hard to make a kick-ass iPhone app."

"The world is a very different place now than it was when DS and PSP launched, when there was no such thing as an iPhone, let alone any real notion of games that could be easily downloaded in seconds for pennies.

"Apple's rampant, rapid growth in handheld gaming has been astonishing and has caught traditional console makers completely off-guard. And what must really stick in Nintendo and Sony's craw is not Apple's boast of making the most popular portable gaming device in the world (a crafty spin, since most don't buy iPod Touch primarily as a games system), but that it's achieved it without even trying."

Very good, and surprisingly subtle, usability advice

Intrigued to see take-up of this.

"Codify for iPad lets you create games and simulations — or just about any visual idea you have. Turn your thoughts into interactive creations that make use of iPad features like Multi-Touch and the accelerometer."

Brilliant. Watch the video.

Very impressive (and long; make some coffee) review. Notifications looks like it has leapfrogged Android by some distance.

"October 12th, 2011. Mark it down, and come back and yell at me in a few years if I’m wrong. Today is the day SMS begins to die.

"It begins with today’s launch of iOS 5. Or, really, it begins with iMessage."

Actually, this is wrong; SMS is already peaking in a number of western countries, but not because of iMessage, but because of the availability of cheap data plans allied to services such as instant messaging and Twitter and Facebook. Tomi Ahonen has pointed to a peak in SMS in Holland last year. That's before iMessage.

"Apple released the much-anticipated iOS 5 update for iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches on Wednesday, an update that was almost immediately met with error messages by throngs of users trying to download it from the company's servers.

"The errors, according to accounts on Apple support pages and this Cult of Mac report, carried messages indicating Apple servers couldn't keep up with demand. A separate report from Business Insider said users were receiving warnings their devices couldn't be restored."

Panic on the streets of Hoxton. However, some of the error codes mean problems at Apple's end, not the user's.

"Compared to Twitter, Facebook overall generated twice as many events, which Localytics counts as sharing, liking or following by a person from an app. But on a pound for pound basis, Twitter won out handily when it came to driving user engagement. The average Twitter user shared three times as many events than the average Facebook user, Localytics found. When you examine the active user base of each network, Twitter generated 50 events per 1,000 users compared to 11 events per 1,000 Facebook users, said Localytics."

Because tweets are shorter than statuses?

"Developers will rush to Android tablets once a lot of people are buying Android tablets. But hardly anyone will buy them if there’s too little compelling software available.<br />
<br />
"So there must be a very good reason why someone would choose any given Android tablet over an iPad, and that reason can’t be the available apps.<br />
<br />
"This, not how closely a manufacturer can mimic the iPad’s hardware, is what reviewers should be asking about each new tablet: Why would a significant number of buyers choose this instead of an iPad?<br />
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"Or, more generally: What will cause enough people to buy this that developers will beat down the door to make great apps for it?"

It's almost as if Apple had recently announced some sort of synchronisation option that might make people tempted to use only its services.

Being included in iOS really is, as one person commented, the anointing of Twitter. If you're built in from the ground up there, you've arrived. And if you can't monetise that, nobody can help you.

"Back in February, I wrote that MobileNotifier (a replacement notifications system for jailbroken iOS devices) would be the one thing that would make anyone want to jailbreak — and I stand by it. Months later, my iPhone is still jailbroken, almost solely so that I don’t have to go back to Apple’s built-in system.<br />
"It seems I’m not the only one who was impressed. Sometime in the last week or so — just days before they announce iOS 5, which is expected to come complete with a new (and hopefully less terrible) notifications system — Apple pulled MobileNotifier’s developer, Peter Hajas, under their wing."<br />
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Expect to see the results later on Monday.

Numbers 7-10 are unequivocally good, though the top 3 - "control your phone from your computer" (uh?), Flash (hmm) and "App integration" (leads to annoying modal dialogs) we're less sure about.

" BeamItDown Software and the iFlow Reader will cease operations as of May 31, 2011.  We absolutely do not want to do this, but Apple has made it completely impossible for anyone but Apple to make a profit selling contemporary ebooks on any iOS device. We cannot survive selling books at a loss and so we are forced to go out of business. We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game. This is a very sad day for innovation on iOS in this important application category. We are a small company that thought we could build a better product. We think that we did but we are powerless against Apple’s absolute control of the iOS platform."

Here's a radical idea: Apple's price/product segmentation might be done by continuing to sell its older generations of products - something it hasn't done before. "Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley says his retail checks show continued strong demand for the iPhone 3GS at AT&T and iPad 1 at Verizon, even as the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 continue to fly off the shelves. At AT&T, for example, the iPhone 3GS is outselling newer Android phones like the HTC Inspire and Motorola Atrix."

"The end of an era is the end of growth in one dominant business model. The PC era was epitomized by the concentration of profits in a dominant operating system vendor. That growth has slowed if not ended. The post-PC era is being kicked off by a new business model where profits are being concentrated in a hardware+software+service integrator."<br />
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It would be interesting to see the profits for Windows PCs manufacturers added in.

"I ported an iOS app to Android. I've sold three (!!) copies while in that same period, the iOS version has sold about 300. I dropped the price from $5 down to $2 over easter and still didn't sell a single copy during the sale.The two apps have the same content and the sales funnel is exactly the same. (The only difference is the iOS app has lots of 5-star reviews.) It seems clear to me that Android users can't or won't pay for certain kinds of apps."<br />
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Interesting discussion thread.

"The fact is that [at the NAB video conference] Adobe previewed video technology, not general Flash (or SWF) capabilities [streaming to iOS]. I’m not sure if they disclosed what kind of source video was being streamed to the iOS, but there’s nothing new being revealed from a capabilities point of view."<br />
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In other words, it's not Flash video, but equally Adobe isn't giving up on Flash. Adobe and Apple are still at loggerheads over this, but some Adobe clients want to get video onto the iPad and iPhone, and Adobe isn't about to leave money on the table.