In recent weeks, both Apple and Google have announced improved privacy measures that make it more difficult for police to search suspects’ smartphones, even with a warrant. This isn’t sitting well with FBI Director James Comey. [More]
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The Time Has Come: Facebook Forcing Smartphone Users To Download Separate Messaging App
By 7.29.14
Have the urge to send a Facebook message to your ex at goodness knows what time in the morning saying Zeus only knows what? If you want to make that mistake on your phone, soon you’ll have to download the social network’s entirely separate Messenger app, or forever keep your peace. Until the next time you hang out with your pal tequila, at least. [More]
Google To Start Alerting Mobile Search Users To Flash-Heavy Sites
By 7.15.14
You know what’s really great? When you’re trying to access a website on your phone and the page you’re looking at uses Flash, which is not supported on iOS devices and hasn’t been supported on Android since version 4.1 started rolling out in 2012. In an effort to preempt user frustration (and nudge sites to upgrade their mobile experiences), Google is now including information about unsupported technology on a site when it turns up in mobile search results. [More]
Former iPhone User Suing Apple Over Unreceived Texts After Switching To Android
By 5.16.14
If you wouldn’t mind casting your mind back to Wednesday, we learned that many former iPhone users who’d made the switch to an Android phone have been having problems receiving text messages from iPhones, if they got them at all. And now one consumer is taking that seemingly unaddressed issue all the way to a lawsuit seeking class-action status. [More]
Trouble Getting Texts From iPhones After Switching To Android? You’re Not Alone
By 5.14.14
UPDATE: A Consumerist reader and former AT&T tech rep has a possible fix for some iPhone-to-Android switchers having this problem. Which, by the emails we’ve gotten since posting the original story below, is happening to a lot of our readers. [More]
Steve Jobs Called The Competition With Google’s Android System A “Holy War”
By 4.2.14
How devoted was the late Steve Jobs to the company he co-founded? Devoted enough for him to liken Apple’s competition with Google’s Android operating system to a “holy war,” according to emails unearthed by Samsung’s lawyers as part of the Korean company’s legal fight against Apple. [More]
Apple And Samsung Back In Court For Round Eleventy Billion Of Their Legal Fight
By 3.31.14
What’s happened once has happened before, and will happen again. Whether or not you ascribe to that kind of Battlestar Galactica/Rust Cohle on True Detective life view, it certainly feels like seeing Apple and Samsung in the legal ring again was inevitable. We’re on about round eleventy billion, give or take an eleventy, as the two head back to court today in a dustup over patents. Again. [More]
Most Apps Mobile Users Purchase Are Free
By 3.24.14
This piece of news will surprise absolutely no one: most smartphone and tablet applications that consumers purchase are free to download. Not free to use, necessarily, thanks to in-app purchases and upgrades, but free to download. Analysis by Statista for the Wall Street Journal shows that the consumers who spend the most on apps are iPad users, who shell out an average of fifty cents each for apps.
Google Sued Over Kids’ In-App Currency Purchases
By 3.11.14
While the folks at Apple have already settled civil and regulatory complaints about in-app purchase policies that allowed children to run up huge bills on their parents’ accounts, the Google Play store has only recently come under scrutiny for its allegedly lax controls. Now, a mom in New York has filed a potential class action against the Internet giant, claiming its policies encourage kids to waste their parents’ money. [More]
Too Much Of A Good Thing? ‘Flappy Bird’ Developer Pulls Game After Surge Of Success
By 2.10.14
Anyone who’s ever eaten an entire cake in one sitting knows that yes, it is possible for there to be too much of a good thing. And that goes for inedible things as well: The sudden success of mobile game Flappy Bird appears to have been too overwhelming for its developer, who pulled the mega popular game from app stores yesterday say he just “cannot take this anymore.” [More]
EA Doesn’t Really Want People Sharing Negative Game Reviews Where Someone Might Read Them
By 2.10.14
It’s almost time to start thinking about this year’s Worst Company In America tournament, which can mean only one thing — two-time reigning WCIA champ Electronic Arts is once again making a final push to be hated by its own customers. This time, the video game giant has been caught apparently trying to game the Google Play review and ratings system. [More]
What’s The NSA Using To Spy On You Now? Angry Birds.
By 1.28.14
The revelations about just how embedded into every facet of modern, technological life the NSA is just keep coming. The spy agency isn’t just collecting calling records and tracking electronics; they’re in your iPhone games, too. [More]
South Korea Has Outlawed Bloatware On Smartphones
By 1.28.14
While Apple has long prevented wireless companies from force-placing cruddy, memory- and battery-sucking apps on its iPhones, most Android users have phones loaded with apps from their wireless providers and phone manufacturers that will probably never be used but which can’t be removed. Realizing that this is a mammoth annoyance to consumers, regulators in South Korea have banned the practice. [More]
Maker Of Wildly Popular Flashlight App Failed To Tell Users It Was Sharing Their Location Info
By 12.5.13
Most of us have had the bright idea to use our smartphones as flashlights when searching underneath the couch or in the backseat of a dark car. And many millions of people have downloaded flashlight apps that maximize the light coming out of their devices. Most of those people probably never even considered that a flashlight app would be doing anything other than turning on the phone’s lights, and certainly not transmitting location data to third parties. [More]
Drones, Shmones: Google Is Building An Army Of Androids That Don’t Fall When You Kick’em
By 12.4.13
While we’ve all got our eyes in the sky waiting for the robot revolution to start with Amazon (and burrito) drones, we must not be distracted by the threat on the ground. By threat I mean intelligent, walking, talking robots. Or more fittingly for Google, which quietly snapped up seven technology companies, androids. [More]
FCC Android App Lets You Test Wireless Broadband Speeds
By 11.14.13
In an effort to include more wireless data in its periodic reports on the state of broadband in America, the Federal Communications Commission has released an Android app that lets consumers test the speed and quality of their wireless provider (and of course shares that data with the FCC). [More]
How The Heck Do I Decide Whether The New iPads Are What I Want?
October 22, 2013
While the smartphone market has become much more diverse in recent years, Apple’s iPad still dominates the tablet business in the U.S. Today, the company announced the latest iteration of the full-sized iPad — the iPad Air — along with an improved iPad Mini, hoping to continue this dominance. But many consumers aren’t fully informed of how these devices compare to already available Android and Windows tablets. [More]
Microsoft Finally Takes Head Out Of Sand, Opens Up Xbox Music To Android, iOS
September 9, 2013
Nearly a year after replacing its failed Zune music store with Xbox Music, Microsoft has finally come around to the realization that the service, which only worked on computers and wireless devices running Windows operating systems, wasn’t going to convince people to drop their Galaxy S4s, iPhones, iPads, or Kindle Fires. The company announced today that Xbox Music is now available for use on iOS and Android devices, and that web-based streaming is no longer relegated to computers running Windows 8 or RT. [via PCmag.com] [More]
