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Apple Removes the Free Speech Social Media App, Parler, from App Store

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The Capitol Hill Siege is one of the most unfortunate incidents. On Wednesday the Donald Trump Supporters came forward to protest against US President Joe Biden’s win. And, the social media company Parler has been accused of having a hand in igniting the riots. The accusation has resulted in the removal of this self-proclaimed ‘Twitter without rules’ app from Apple Store and the Google Play Store.

The Parler App

The Parler app is a community social media app, launched in August 2018 and headquarters in Henderson, Nevada. The app advertises itself as a free-speech app, and most of its users are right-wing extremists. The app has got a huge Donald Trump supporter community who, most of the time, are involved in posting content related to far-right, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy theories. Since the company calls its app the platform for free speech, there is no filtration or moderation service for the posts on the platform.

Parler
Image Source: bbc.com

The app has become a home for the conservatives and the ones who have been banned from the mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for their hate speech or hateful posts. This app has also been the topic of criticism for being the cover for its right-extremist user-base. Noticeably, Donald Trump got banned from Facebook and Twitter recently, but on the other hand, the Parler app did not ban Trump from its platform. This act of Parler has attracted all the attention to itself.

The Removal from App Store

As mentioned before, the company does not include any moderation for the posts on the app, and it has been accused of being far-right itself. After the riots, the app is also being accused of supporting the protestors. According to Apple, it has warned Parler many times to update its policy and make some solid changes to it. And, when the riots took place on Wednesday, the California-based technology company Cupertino came forward and gave Parler 24 hours to represent new moderation and post-filter plan to Apple, so that to remain available on the Apple Store.

In return, Parler had told Apple that it is working on the moderation service for the last many weeks. But according to Apple, the company has shown no signs of improvement. Apple said in an email sent to Parler, “We have continued to find direct threats of violence and calls to incite lawless action. It was not removing content that encourages illegal activity and poses a serious risk to the health and safety of users.” Apple further wrote, “We want to be clear that Parler is, in fact, responsible for all the user-generated content present on your service and for ensuring that this content meets App Store requirements for the safety and protection of our users.”

The Response from Parler

On the other hand, the CEO of Parler, John Matze, said in an interview that he and his company doesn’t feel responsible for the riots, “considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.” Shortly after Apple removed the app from the App Store, Google also decided on taking down the app from the Google Play Store. Now there is news that Amazon is also looking forward to pulling its support from the app, as Parler is using the AWS services, but again, was found to be violating the AWS Acceptable Use Policy.

The reaction of the Users of Parler

The action led to the criticism of Apple by the conservatives and users of the Parler app. One of the Parler app investors, Dan Bongino, who was also banned from Twitter some time ago, wrote on the site, “The tech tyrants at Apple have pulled the app from their App Store. Apple is no different than the Chinese communist party in its preference for totalitarian thought control. I’m proud of the remaining liberty-loving people of this great country. And I’m embarrassed, and horrified by the tech totalitarians who’ve taken control of it.”

It is really strange to see that Parler has been on the top of all the News apps on the Apple Store and among the top 13 apps on the top charts of non-gaming apps on the Apple store, despite all the complaints against the app. For now, though it is no more available on Apple Store and Google Play Store, people who have the app on their phones will still be able to use the app.

Ethan Nicholas

Ethan Nicholas : From A Software Engineer to an Overnight Successful Game Developer

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In the programming world, which is already brimming with the tech experts and finest coders, only a few have achieved overnight success. Experience plays a vital role in the journey of a long-term accomplishment, but who knows when one can turn out to be a millionaire while just planning to earn some extra cash. Ethan Nicholas, a senior software engineer currently working at Google, developed a game with the sole purpose of earning some extra cash. But iShoot, the game he developed, turned out to be the biggest achievement of his life and brought him profit he never dreamt of.

Early Life

Nicholas started programming from the tender age of 8 and became a professional coder at the age of 16. He went to North Carolina State University and graduated in 1998. In June 1998, he joined GeoCities as a software engineer, but he shifted to Yahoo! only after a year and worked there as a lead developer. In July 2006, he joined Sun Microsystems and worked as a primary developer on the Java Kernel Project. And, while working for this company the idea of developing a game strike his mind, and he started learning objective C. Nicholas had to learn objective C so that he could start developing the game.

Development of iShoot

Ethan Nicholas
Image Source: wired.com

While he was working as a staff engineer in Sun Microsystems, he spent eight hours every day to develop iShoot. Since he didn’t know objective C and also didn’t have enough cash to afford the documentation he needed to learn it; he mastered it from various internet sources within six weeks followed by writing the code. Programming from an early age of 8, he was able to ace a whole different language very quickly.

Ethan Nicholas, in one of his interviews, mentioned that he was inspired by Steve Demeter, developer of Trism, a game that brought him overnight glory and became a connoisseur in the world of game development. In 19th October 2008, Nicholas launched iShoot, an artillery combat game which was available in Apple’s iPhone app store. The launch of iShoot changed his life dramatically by earning $37,000 in a single day.

He was still working at Sun Microsystems and decided to leave his job to work on the next version of the game. In January 2009, Nicholas left his job and founded the gaming software company, Naughty Bits, under which he launched the second version of the game. By then, he totally made up his mind to devote all his time to iPhone software development.

The Success of iShoot

Though many game and application developers release their apps on the Apple Store, the success of Ethan Nicholas was quite appreciable and unpredictable. Initially, when the app was launched in October the number of users was less than expected and to attract more of them, Nicholas created both paid and free (iShoot Lite) versions of the game. This hiked the selling of the app, and the game became ranked number 1 on the App Store, within a few months of its release.

The game also acquired the top spot on the Top Paid Apps list, witnessing minimum 10,000 downloads per day. The free app was downloaded around 2.4 million times and over 300,000 users bought the paid app. Revenue of $21,000 was confirmed for 10,000 downloads per day, which were partially the driving force for creating the second version of it. By early 2009, Nicholas had already bagged $800,000, which is a more than a decent amount.

He was pretty surprised about the success, the 6-weeks hard work brought to him. So, for the next version, he was ready to blow the minds of the users with better graphics and game strategies exposing more of his programming skills.

Apart From Being a Game Developer

While Nicholas focused on expanding Naughty Bits, he was also involved with other business tycoons to expand his influence on other fields.

In January 2010, he cofounded echoBase and served as the lead server engineer for four years. He developed software that was useful to the medical professionals to track patient’s data. He served as a software engineer at Oracle for eight months.

At present, apart from working at Google, he is developing a swift compiler in Apportable.

Apple Pulls Off Third-Party Screen Time Apps from Apple Store Violating its Privacy Policies

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Apple launched its screen time monitoring feature for all its iOS users and following that many other third-party developers also released their screen time monitoring and parental control apps. But it seems that Apple is not happy about it, as it has abruptly removed a few such apps from its iOS stores.

apple screen time feature
Image Source: gadgethacks.com

Noticeably, Apple has built its screen time monitoring feature only for the iOS users, whereas the third-party apps are compatible with both iOS and Android having better features than the Apple’s screen time monitoring features. Reportedly, iOS’s feature has flaws like only a few methods of blocking apps for kids, less-granular scheduling, as well as in many cases the kids were able to modify the filtering tools themselves.

But it is not that the company is insecure about the popularity of its screen time feature, but in a blog post, Apple mentioned the name of some apps including Balance Screen Time by Moment Health and Verizon Smart Family, as the best parental control apps apart from its own, giving the reasons for removing the other third-party apps from Apple store.

“We recently removed several parental control apps from the App Store, and we did it for a simple reason: they put users’ privacy and security at risk. It’s important to understand why and how this happened,” said Apple in the blog post.

According to Apple, the removal of the apps from its Apple Store has been presented as a step out of insecurity. But those third-party apps were using Mobile Device Management (MDM), an invasive technology, which makes the apps to access the users’ some of the very personal information, including location, email address, gallery, browsing history, etc. The company has been investigating this MDM technology since 2017, and by the mid of 2017, it had made some strict guidelines on the usage of MDM in the non-enterprize apps.

On the other hand, the third-party companies which got their apps removed from the Apple store, have claimed that there were no clear indications or notification from Apple on the pulling off their apps from the Apple store. Most of the companies have admitted that 80 per cent of their revenues come from Apple Store.

But Apple is confident that those apps were a bigger threat to its customers’ privacy and data security as those apps had violated its guidelines. Though the company is simply following its rules for the safety of its ‘users’ data’, a few companies including Kidslox and Qustodio as well as Kaspersky Lab filed an antitrust complaint against Apple in the European Union, after Apple pulled off their screen time apps from Apple Store.

Apple Giving 10% Cash Bonus to its Users to Make Purchases for Apple Services

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According to a report from MacRumors, Apple is sending emails to its App Store and iTunes users about the bonus Apple is offering to its users when they add money to their Apple ID account. According to the news, these offers have been made available from 10th March and will be over as soon as 14th March.

apple
Image Source: slashgear.com

The offers will be applied to the direct transactions of money through a credit or debit card while making purchases on iTunes, App Store and iCloud. For now, the users will get a 10 per cent discount on the transactions, and the offer will be valid for only a single purchase per user.

The money can be easily added from the settings of the Apple Account. The users need to go to the Settings, tap on their Account Name, then select the iTunes and App Store option. After that, they can choose the “Add Funds to Apple ID” option from the selected Apple ID. In this option, the various options of amounts to be added will appear on the screen. Here the users need to add the money.

The money can also be added to the Apple Account directly from “Add Funds” options on the iTunes Store or by clicking on the Apple ID on App Store. The offer is also available for Desktop users.

The new bonus offer from Apple is applicable to any purchase amount between the US $1 to the US $200. So the greater the amount, the greater will be the discount.

The offer currently, is not valid for the users in the UK, Australia or Canada. And, for countries like Germany, the discount rate is set to 15 per cent. The money added to the Apple Account is used to purchase paid apps, music on iTunes, and to purchase storage space on iCloud. So when the users will add money to their Apple Accounts in the given dates, they will get 10 per cent extra money to pay for Apple services.

Apple Unveils ‘Best of 2018’ iPhone And iPad Apps

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2018 is about to end, and recalling the year, every person and every company has its own story to tell. For the tech giants like Google and Apple, it’s about their products that worked really well in 2018. At the beginning of December, Google revealed its best android apps of the year and now Apple has also announced its ten best apps of 2018, for iPhone, iPad and Apple watch.

mac
Image Source : macstories.net

The Apple’s editors in the different categories have created the list that includes the most-downloaded apps, most-streamed films-music, and the best games of 2018, etc. The editorial list includes both free as well as paid versions and has been selected on the basis of popularity and on the basis of the best content across the App Store and iTunes.

In the category of free iPhone apps, YouTube topped the list, followed by Instagram and Snapchat.

Top 10 Free iPhone Apps:
1. YouTube
2. Instagram
3. Snapchat
4. Messenger
5. Facebook
6. Bitmoji
7. Netflix
8. Google Maps
9. Gmail
10. Spotify Music

The selfie-editor FaceTune won the best app in the Paid iPhone apps category.

Top 10 Paid iPhone Apps:
1. Facetune ($3.99)
2. Kirakira+ ($0.99)
3. Dark Sky Weather ($3.99)
4. HotSchedules ($2.99)
5. PlantSnap ($2.99)
6. AutoSleep Tracker for Watch ($2.99)
7. Sky Guide ($2.99)
8. 1 Second Everyday: Video Diary ($4.99)
9. The Wonder Weeks ($2.99)
10. Afterlight 2 ($2.99)

Fortnite not only won the best game in the free iPhone games category but also topped the iPad free games category.

Top 10 Free iPhone Games:
1. Fortnite
2. Helix Jump
3. Rise Up
4. PUBG Mobile
5. Hole.io
6. Love Balls
7. Snake VS Block
8. Rules of Survival
9. Roblox
10. Dune!

Heads Up won the best paid iPhone Game. It is also on the number 5 in the paid games list on iPad.

Top 10 Paid iPhone Games:
1. Heads Up! ($2.99)
2. Minecraft ($6.99)
3. Plague Inc. ($0.99)
4. Bloons TD 6 ($4.99)
5. Pocket Build ($1.99)
6. Bloons TD 5 ($2.99)
7. Geometry Dash ($1.99)
8. The Game of Life ($2.99)
9. Papa’s Freezeria To Go ($0.99)
10. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas ($6.99)

YouTube again was crowned as the best free app for iPad, Netflix and Messenger came on the second and third positions, respectively.

Top 10 Free iPad Apps:
1. YouTube
2. Netflix
3. Messenger
4. Facebook
5. Amazon Prime Video
6. Google Chrome
7. Gmail
8. YouTube Kids
9. The Calculator
10. Amazon Shopping

The drawing app Procreate became the best of the paid iPad app of 2018.

Top 10 Paid iPad Apps:
1. Procreate ($9.99)
2. Notability ($9.99)
3. GoodNotes 4 ($7.99)
4. Toca Life: Pets ($3.99)
5. Duet Display ($9.99)
6. Toca Life: After School ($3.99)
7. XtraMath ($4.99)
8. Toca Hair Salon 3 ($3.99)
9. MyScript Nebo ($7.99)
10. Toca Kitchen 2 ($3.99)

Fortnite reigns as the top free mobile game for iPad too.

Top 10 Free iPad Games:
1. Fortnite
2. Roblox
3. Kick the Buddy
4. Love Balls
5. Helix Jump
6. Color by Number Coloring Game!
7. Bowmasters – Multiplayer Game
8. Hole.io
9. Rise Up
10. Rules of Survival

Minecraft sits on the top of the paid iPad games list.

Top 10 Paid iPad Games:
1. Minecraft ($6.99)
2. Geometry Dash ($1.99)
3. The Game of Life ($2.99)
4. The Room: Old Sins ($4.99)
5. Heads Up! ($0.99)
6. Bloons TD 6 ($4.99)
7. Goat Simulator ($4.99)
8. Five Nights at Freddy’s ($2.99)
9. Lego Jurassic World ($4.99)
10. Terraria ($4.99)

The year was incredibly good for the self-wellness apps like, Fabulous and Calm, and also for the games like Fortnite and PUBG (Players Unknown Battleground). Apple also chose its own favourite apps and games of the year, among which Procreate Pocket and Donut County, were selected as the app and the game of the year on iPhone. And, Froggipedia and puzzle-game Gorogoa were selected as the app and the game of the year on iPad, respectively.

Apple Pulls Out 25000 Illegal Apps From China’s App Store

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App Store
Image Source: wccftech.com

The news of Google re-entering into China has already created many controversies, even within the company resulting in a mass protest by its employees. Now again Apple, an American company is facing some regularity issues in China.

Noticeably, the State media broadcaster CCTV had recently criticised Apple for allowing many illegal apps on the App Store. The media has been giving a negative feedback to Apple for its no control over such apps. Apple has removed over 25000 apps from its App Store and allegedly, 4000 of them, were based on gambling. With the removal of these illegal apps, Apple has also removed those developers that distribute them.

Gambling is not allowed in China and most of these apps had used Gambling as a keyword. China media had criticised Apple for not doing enough to stop this kind of illegal activities. Apple has even made guidelines for uploading Apps on to the App store and has restricted these type of apps.

“Gambling apps are illegal and not allowed on the App Store in China,” Apple said in an emailed statement sent to Bloomberg on Monday. “We have already removed many apps and developers for trying to distribute illegal gambling apps on our App Store, and we are vigilant in our efforts to find these and stop them from being on the App Store.”

It is a tough task for an American company to maintain a business in world’s largest economy and Apple is trying hard to fall in line with Chinese authorities. Last year Apple pulled out nearly 700 VPN apps from its App Store. Apple has been entangled in conflicts with China in the past. Also, the growing friction between Washington, D.C. and Beijing is also causing the American companies in China to follow all the rules carefully to keep China on their side.