apps
AT&T CEO: apps should be sold by carriers instead
At the Mobile World Conference, AT&T’s CEO gave a talk where he mentioned that app stores like the Apple’s iTunes App Store and Google’s Android Market are bad for the consumer. According to him, carriers should be the one selling apps instead, and apps should web app-based so they can work on any platform instead of just working for one platform like apps are now (iOS apps won’t work on Android and vice-versa). He was quoted saying:
You purchase an app for one operating system, and if you want it on another device or platform, you have to buy it again. That’s not how our customers expect to experience this environment.
Sure it makes sense, but there is a limit to what you can do with web apps (at least for now) and apps designed specifically for the operating system just work better. And if everyone gets the same apps from the same store, what’s going to differentiate all the different operating systems then? Everyone might as well be using the same phone.
It sure sounds like AT&T are just feeling the pinch of not getting any revenue from the iTunes App Store/Android Market, and want a piece of the pie. But these words coming from a carrier that disables the sideloading feature on their Android handsets; they should take a look at themselves before making such statements.
Apple is well known to be a company that continues to push the envelope when it comes to technological advancements and firsts. This time around, Cupertino has introduced the first ever automated security update for Mac computers in order to assist them in preventing attacks from recently identified bugs, which are also the very same bugs that that security researchers have pinpointed and warned against, as those could be the gateway for hackers to actually gain remote control of machines.
Over in New Jersey, District Judge William Martini has come up with a ruling that the police are not required to actually pick up a warrant before opening a fake Instagram account. This is because the bogus account could actually be used to receive pictures shared by a suspect, and some folks wonder whether this would require a search warrant to be issued beforehand. Not so, according to Judge Martini in his ruling that stated whenever Instagram users post photos on the site, they happen to be practicing “consensual sharing.”
In other words, users who put up photos on Instagram are more or less in the know that should they “follow” or “friend” others, they will also end up sharing their pictures with them. All in all, one should always be extra careful with whatever one shares with others online, as you can never quite tell how something might end up to bit you in the rear some day down the road.
Both iOS and Android number close to a million apps each on their respective app stores, which is one of the reasons why smartphone users flock to either operating system. Of course there are other factors, such as hardware, pricing, availability and so on, but it is safe to say that app availability plays a big role as well. Well Blackberry seems to think so as well as they have revealed that the Blackberry World app store currently sits at about 120,000 apps, which while still pretty small compared to iOS and Android, is a pretty huge deal considering that the platform and its accompanying devices were only launched earlier this year! Blackberry’s CEO Thorsten Heins praised the thriving ecosystem, which we guess was boosted by Blackberry’s efforts where they held events to encourage developers to submit as many apps as they can, and even offering monetary rewards on top of earnings for every app successfully submitted to Blackberry World. We can see that Blackberry is going for quantity at the moment, and we suppose there are quality apps within those 120,000, but for now it looks like as far as apps are concerned, they may very well be edging Windows Phone out of the picture!