apps
Microsoft confirms Windows Phone 7 push notification app limit
It was discovered this week that Windows Phone 7 would only support up to 15 different apps using push notifications at any given time. Seeing how push notifications are becoming much more common in apps nowadays, 15 apps doesn’t mean much anymore. When users go over the limit of enabling push for more than 15 apps, they will be presented with a message telling them to uninstall another app that uses push to continue. Developers noticed this problem and raised the issue to Microsoft. In response to the issue, they posted an official statement on their developer blog. In the blog they confirm that the operating system supports only up to 15 push channels- excluding the default live tiles that come with the phone (i.e. people hub, outlook). They suggest that developers code their apps with the ability to turn off push so that users can free up the channels for their other apps. Even though the feature to turn on/off push should be an option in all apps, 15 is still a tad too little for today’s users. Microsoft has no immediate plans to increase this limit (which they say can be done) but will monitor how people use push before making any changes. As a smartphone user, you probably have a number of push apps enabled on your phone. What do you think of the 15 app limit?
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!