iOSnoops would like to wish all our readers, writers, contributors and advertisers a very Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year!
Have a safe and fun night and a peaceful New Year’s day.
We’ll see you next year!
The iOS Snoops
Thanks to mangrove for the video
iOSnoops is constantly on the lookout for great deals at the App Store, so here are 19 iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps that recently enjoyed a price drop. This deal alert includes apps like Essential Travel Checklist, TrialPad, Gertrude McFuzz – Dr. Seuss, Rapunzel Classic Story HD, and many others. Remember, prices can change quickly, these apps may not be free anymore when you read this post!
According to a new report from CNN Money, the Windows Phone 7 apps marketplace just reached a new milestone earlier this week, as less than two months after its launch, the store offers more than 5,000 apps.
5,000 apps may not seem like much when compared to the 300,000+ apps already available for iOS devices, but when the Apple App Store launched in 2008, it took the iOS eco-system about the same amount of time to reach a similar milestone.
Interestingly enough, Windows Phone 7 is indirectly benefiting from the success of iOS and Android, as the vast majority of the apps available on the Microsoft platform are ports from iPhone, iPad and Android apps – in other words, the Microsoft apps marketplace is catching up, but eventually, the growth it is currently enjoying could prove to be short-lived.
The iPhone Dev-Team is getting close to releasing the final version of its flagship untethered jailbreak for all iOS 4.2.1 devices, redsn0w 0.9.7. The fourth beta of the jailbreak will be released to beta testers via Twitter today, and according to the developers, the new version squashes most of the major bugs identified so far, such as video playback and FaceTime issues.
The beta 4 also eliminates the need of the USB mutiplex daemon (usbmuxd) to perform the jailbreak, an external library required with previous beta versions of the jailbreak (click here for more details).
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iOSnoops is constantly on the lookout for great deals at the App Store, so here are 24 iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps that recently enjoyed a price drop. This deal alert includes apps like 편한성경, everyAir, Star Defender 3, Goldilocks And The Three Bears HD, and many others. Remember, prices can change quickly, these apps may not be free anymore when you read this post!
RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie thinks highly of his company’s upcoming tablet, the Playbook, as during RIM’s last quarterly earning meeting, he wasn’t exactly kind to the devices his competitors launched so far, and considered his tablet to be “way ahead” of the iPad.
But so far, nobody had the chance to play with the PlayBook, and according to a report from industry analyst Shaw Wu of Kaufman Bros, the tablet is proving to be more difficult to finalize than expected.
Peter Vesterbacka, the main developer behind the uber-successful Angry Birds franchise, shared earlier today some thoughts on the various mobile ecosystems his company works with, namely iOS and Android. His game is available on both App Store and Android Market, and more than 50 million users purchased it so far.
While Vesterbacka is an advocate of both platforms, he also believes the recipe for success is very different from one to the other.
Need to stretch your apps budget? Here are 31 iPhone, iPad and iPod touch apps that just went on sale. This deal alert includes apps like 3D Compass for iPhone4 (Gyroscope enabled), THE Hand Heater, iCan Stop Smoking, The Good Life – 2011 Daily Calendar, and many others. Remember, prices can change quickly, these apps may not be free anymore when you read this post!
Apps deals have been fairly scarce over the last couple of days, as iTunes Connect – the App Store app management service – was closed for the holidays, which prevented developers from adjusting the price of their apps.
iTunes Connect just re-opened, and new apps are starting to show up in our database. Note that it will likely take several hours before we spot enough good deals to write posts about them, so please check back later tonight or tomorrow for your daily dose of discounted and free apps.
About two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a great – albeit scary – article about a trend affecting a large number of popular apps: the transmission of potentially identifying information back to a network of companies willing to pay to know more about apps users (see here for more details).
The article revealed that many popular and apparently harmless apps collect and share sensitive information such as phone numbers, location, the phone owner’s name and the device’s unique ID, without the user’s consent. In less than ten days, an iPhone user filed a new class action lawsuit against Apple.
Even though the sixth generation iPod nano does not really run iOS, but an ultra-light iOS-like operating system instead, it does not prevent the hacking community to look at ways to expand its capabilities.
Almost four months after its launch, the first basic hacks for the device are now emerging, as the folks at NanoHack.me managed to hack the device’s user interface.
With New Year’s eve around the corner, at&t just decided to deploy additional WiFi hotspots throughout the nation, with a first wave of new hotspots slated to be installed in crowded places, such as New York’s Times Square, as well as San Francisco’s Embarcadero.
Since iPhones and iPads with an active at&t data plan can automatically connect to at&t’s hotspots for free, the Dallas-based company is betting on the additional WiFi coverage to help offload some traffic from its busy 3G network. If successful, the move will help increase the overall quality of at&t’s 3G network, especially during peak periods such as Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve.
Hackulous, the community behind the Installous tool and the online database of hacked iOS apps Apptrakr, is about to launch a new sharing feature that could potentially increase iOS apps piracy – not a good news for apps developers out there.
When iOS users use Installous to crack an app not already available on Apptrakr, the app will soon offer the option to send the cracked app to a new cloud-based sharing service.
iPhones, iPads and iPod touches were eagerly waiting to be unwrapped this holiday season, and a slew of new iOS-powered devices were activated over the last couple days, which led to an impressive spike of downloads at the App Store.
Business Insider managed to obtain some figures for a couple of apps, namely Facebook and Tap Tap Revenge, to illustrate the trend – for instance, Facebook was downloaded a whopping 1.6 million times since Friday, pushing the number of active app users to 57 million.
