News from category ‘AppStore’

Opera Mini has been submitted to the AppStore. The browsing speed is impressive, since Opera is sending traffic through its servers which compresses webpages. The iPhone picks up the compressed content and displays it at rates which Opera believes to be up to five times as fast as Mobile Safari. This technology works nice especially on low speed networks.

Check out the video below.

Will Apple let Opera Mini into the AppStore? The chances are quite low.

Update: Opera published a counter tracking how long the approval process has taken.

Take a look at Opera on iPhone photo gallery:

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There are 30,000 games on the iPhone and this number is growing. People pay for games, but exactly how much do they pay? A new report from mobile app analytics company Flurry gives some impressive numbers. Flurry estimates that users spent $500 million on games in the US AppStore during 2009. This is up from $115 million in 2008. Compared to the overall U.S. console and portable video game market, the iPhone/iPod Touch now represents 5% of total video game sales. In just the portable videogame market, the numbers are even more exciting - Apple has 19% of portable games revenue.

The numbers are especially painful for Sony who had four times as much revenue as Apple in 2008 which dropped to just over half of Apple's revenue in 2009. With the iPad coming soon the iPhone OS will grab even more of that Portable Gaming revenue.

Apple just announced that iTunes users now have the ability to gift apps to one another. The process is quite simple, like gifting a song - all you have to do is click the 'gift app' button. You must use your credit card on the account and cannot use gift cards or any other types of promotional payment to gift apps.

If you want to use this feature you have to sign into your iTunes account and accept the new terms policy.

From Apple:

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Navigon created a series of regional U.S. GPS turn-by-turn navigation applications for the iPhone. Each costs just $24.99. This is significantly cheaper than its more comprehensive MobileNavigator North America ($79.99).

These apps divide the United States into three overlapping segments, permitting customers to purchase discounted versions covering their area of the country. Additional regions are available through in-app purchasing for $12.99. Here are AppStore links: U.S. East, U.S. Central, U.S. West.

Navigon reports that сгккуте prices are valid through April 12th. After that date MyRegion apps will cost $29.99 for the application and $14.99 for in-app expansions.

The iPhone OS is a great operating system and is also one of the safest. That's why Apple rejected the anti-virus application developed by Kaspersky Lab. Such app will never make it to AppStore, just because users don't need it.

Some users who run the jailbreak might catch a virus. However if they do everything right - there will be no troubles and no viruses.

Another popular antivirus program is eset nod32 antivirus.

iSMEStorage is the first application for iPhone with cloud storage virtualization service that allows users to manage more than 10 different storage clouds from their device in 1 Cloud file. Clouds include Google Docs, FTP-as-a-cloud, Email-as-a-cloud, Gmail-as-a-cloud, Miscrosoft SkyDrive and LiveMesh, Apple Mobile Me and Amazon S3 and other.

SMEStorage CEO says:

"We are very happy to add the iPhone to the list of clients that users can use to get access to their files from our platform... It is the first [application] to virtualize storage clouds and make them available from one Cloud File System, and it is the first App of any kind in the App Store that enables access to Microsoft SkyDrive files."

iSMEStorage v1.01 is available here in the Productivity Category from the AppStore only for 0.99$.

TomTom is discounting their navigation apps. For example, US and US+Canada are down to $50 and $70 respectively, Western Europe is $90. They've done this before, so it's not unprecedented. However $10 discount is a good deal if you're looking for an iPhone Navigation.

Here is a link to AppStore.

Penguin, one of the biggest publishers, gave a very interesting presentation in London. Penguin CEO John Makinson spoke about eBooks, iPad Books and Apps.

Penguin is not using the ePub format for books, rather building the applications in html according to Makinson:

"We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about".

"So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs".

"We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error."

Makinson sees ebooks hitting 10% of book sales next year (up from 4%). Take a look at the video:

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Gameloft has finally released Brothers In Arms 2: Global Front game for iPod Touch and iPhone.

In this game you can challenge up to five friends to multiplayer battles. Connection needs to be established via Bluetooth or Wi-fi.

Key features:

• 5 locations and 13 levels in detailed 3D-world
• 3 different game mods (Free For All, Team DeathMatch, Domination)
• 3 different vehicles
• wide variety of historically accurate weapons

You can purchase Brothers in Arms 2: Global Front for 7.99$ here.

As we wrote before, Apple started to delete apps with sexual-content in App Store two days ago. That was explained by changing their moderating guidelines. Yesterday Apple representatives commented on this situation:

“Whenever we receive customer complaints about objectionable content we review them. If we find these apps contain inappropriate material we remove them and request the developer make any necessary changes in order to be distributed by Apple.”

But since the Frasier Spears filed the radar bugs in order to filter the inappropriate content at his school and blogged about it, the problem seems to be solved. Obviously, it will be better for Apple to implement soft porn filters that prohibit access to apps with dubious content rather than change their policy.

Meebo has recently released the iPhone version of popular service for stress-free and enjoyable chat. It has a number of advantages that differ it from other chat apps available. It is easy to handle and you are kept in touch with your contacts even when Meebo is switched off. It also provides the conventional chat history and the directions provide quick understanding of the manipulation process. And what is more important - it is free of charge.

You can download Meebo app here

Apple announced that it has added App Store support for 13 new countries:

You can now distribute your apps to more customers with the addition of App Store support in Armenia, Botswana, Bulgaria, Jordan, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, and Uganda. Log in to iTunes Connect to view and update the countries where your applications are available.

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In one night the App Store Photography, Lifestyle and Entertainment categories suddenly became stripped bare.
The developer of popular "Wooble iBoobs" Jon Atherton said his app was also removed and he even received an e-mail with words like these:

"...we have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately.
We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application..."

So it looks Apple just ban any sexual content from the App Store. Maybe they just cleaning the house before iPad is launched?

Apple decided to increase the limit of MB downloaded from the AppStore over 3G or cellular network. Previously applications could be bought if their size was less than or equal to 10 MB. Apps over this limit were available only through Wi-Fi. Many game and app creators deliberately whittle their software down to less than 10MB to make them more accessible to iPhone users.

This limit now has been doubled. Although it might not seem like a big difference for developers it is certainly a plus to both developers and end users.

Here is a video of Opera Mini for iPhone (Alpha version). Now the product is in complete beta, so this video is a bit outdated. However it still it gives some impression of what Opera Mini on iPhone looks like: