Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

The big social networks and video games have failed to prioritize user well-being over their own growth. As a result, society is losing the battle against bullying, predators, hate speech, misinformation and scammers. Typically when a whole class of tech companies have a dire problem they can’t cost-effectively solve themselves, a software-as-a-service emerges to fill the gap in web hosting, payment processing, etc. So along comes AntiToxin Technologies, a new startup that wants to help web giants fix their abuse troubles with its safety-as-a-service.

It all started on Minecraft. AntiToxin co-founder Ron Porat is cybersecurity expert who’d started ad blocker Shine. Yet right under his nose, one of his kids was being mercilessly bullied on the hit children’s game. If even those most internet-savvy parents were being surprised by online abuse, Porat realized the issue was bigger than could be addressed by victims trying to protect themselves. The platforms had to do more, research confirmed.

A recent Ofcom study found almost 80% of children had a potentially harmful online experience in the past year. Indeed, 23% said they’d been cyberbullied, and 28% of 12 to 15-year-olds said they’d received unwelcome friend or follow requests from strangers. A Ditch The Label study found of 12 to 20-year-olds who’d been bullied online, 42% were bullied on Instagram.

Unfortunately, the massive scale of the threat combined with a late start on policing by top apps makes progress tough without tremendous spending. Facebook tripled the headcount of its content moderation and security team, taking a noticeable hit to its profits, yet toxicity persists. Other mainstays like YouTube and Twitter have yet to make concrete commitments to safety spending or staffing, and the result is non-stop scandals of child exploitation and targeted harassment. Smaller companies like Snap or Fortnite-maker Epic Games may not have the money to develop sufficient safeguards in-house.

“The tech giants have proven time and time again we can’t rely on them. They’ve abdicated their responsibility. Parents need to realize this problem won’t be solved by these companies” says AntiToxin co-founder and CEO Zohar Levkovitz, who previously sold his mobile ad company Amobee to Singtel for $321 million. “You need new players, new thinking, new technology. A company where ‘Safety’ is the product, not an after-thought. And that’s where we come-in.” The startup recently raised a multimillion-dollar seed round from Mangrove Capital Partners and is allegedly prepping for a double-digit millions Series A.

AntiToxin’s technology plugs into the backends of apps with social communities that either broadcast or message with each other and are thereby exposed to abuse. AntiToxin’s systems privately and securely crunch all the available signals regarding user behavior and policy violation reports, from text to videos to blocking. It then can flag a wide range of toxic actions and let the client decide whether to delete the activity, suspend the user responsible or how else to proceed based on their terms and local laws.

Through the use of artificial intelligence, including natural language processing, machine learning and computer vision, AntiToxin can identify the intent of behavior to determine if it’s malicious. For example, the company tells me it can distinguish between a married couple consensually exchanging nude photos on a messaging app versus an adult sending inappropriate imagery to a child. It also can determine if two teens are swearing at each other playfully as they compete in a video game or if one is verbally harassing the other. The company says that beats using static dictionary blacklists of forbidden words.

AntiToxin is under NDA, so it can’t reveal its client list, but claims recent media attention and looming regulation regarding online abuse has ramped up inbound interest. Eventually the company hopes to build better predictive software to identify users who’ve shown signs of increasingly worrisome behavior so their activity can be more closely moderated before they lash out. And it’s trying to build a “safety graph” that will help it identify bad actors across services so they can be broadly deplatformed similar to the way Facebook uses data on Instagram abuse to police connected WhatsApp accounts.

“We’re approaching this very human problem like a cybersecurity company, that is, everything is a Zero-Day for us” says Levkowitz, discussing how AntiToxin indexes new patterns of abuse it can then search for across its clients. “We’ve got intelligence unit alums, PhDs and data scientists creating anti-toxicity detection algorithms that the world is yearning for.” AntiToxin is already having an impact. TechCrunch commissioned it to investigate a tip about child sexual imagery on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. We discovered Bing was actually recommending child abuse image results to people who’d conducted innocent searches, leading Bing to make changes to clean up its act.

AntiToxin identified publicly listed WhatsApp Groups where child sexual abuse imagery was exchanged

One major threat to AntiToxin’s business is what’s often seen as boosting online safety: end-to-end encryption. AntiToxin claims that when companies like Facebook expand encryption, they’re purposefully hiding problematic content from themselves so they don’t have to police it.

Facebook claims it still can use metadata about connections on its already encrypted WhatApp network to suspend those who violate its policy. But AntiToxin provided research to TechCrunch for an investigation that found child sexual abuse imagery sharing groups were openly accessible and discoverable on WhatsApp — in part because encryption made them hard to hunt down for WhatsApp’s automated systems.

AntiToxin believes abuse would proliferate if encryption becomes a wider trend, and it claims the harm that it  causes outweighs fears about companies or governments surveiling unencrypted transmissions. It’s a tough call. Political dissidents, whistleblowers and perhaps the whole concept of civil liberty rely on encryption. But parents may see sex offenders and bullies as a more dire concern that’s reinforced by platforms having no idea what people are saying inside chat threads.

What seems clear is that the status quo has got to go. Shaming, exclusion, sexism, grooming, impersonation and threats of violence have started to feel commonplace. A culture of cruelty breeds more cruelty. Tech’s success stories are being marred by horror stories from their users. Paying to pick up new weapons in the fight against toxicity seems like a reasonable investment to demand.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | AntiToxin sells safetytech to clean up poisoned platforms

Uber’s best hope to beat all its ride sharing and food delivery competitors is that it does both. Through cross-promotion, it can combine activities people might only do a few times per week or month into a product they open daily.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said cryptically on the company’s first earnings call last month that “Suffice it to say we are starting to experiment in ways in which we can upsell our ride customers to Eats deals in a way that — you know, to be plain spoken — isn’t annoying . . . I will tell you that we are very, very early in the stages of exploring the many, many ways in which our Ride business can help continue to build our Eats business and vice versa by the way . . . I don’t want to give away too much.”

But TechCrunch has discovered that specifically, Uber is starting to make a web view of Uber Eats accessible from its main app. A tipster in Boston first clued us in to the feature and now Uber confirms that it’s merging a fully functional web version of Uber Eats into its ride-hailing product. Uber quietly began rolling out a pilot of the merged app in late April. Uber Eats app will remain available as a standalone app.

The move could give Uber a customer acquisition and retention edge on single-product competitors like Lyft or DoorDash, while helping it keep up with multi-product peers like Careem and Bolt (which recently added food delivery), and its biggest global foe Didi from China which just launched food delivery in Uber stronghold Mexico. Combining functionality means Uber’s ride hailing customers could see a promotion for Eats and instantly try it without downloading a new app as their tummy rumbles. It could also get the 50% of Eats customers who don’t ride in Ubers to try it for transportation.

“We’re rolling out a new way to order Eats directly in the Uber app on Android (we’ve already been experimenting on iOS)” an Uber spokesperson tells me. “This cross-promotion gives riders who are new to Eats a seamless way to order a meal via a webview instead of opening up the App Store for download.”

The merged app is now available to all iOS users in cities where Uber doesn’t offer bikes and scooters that already clutter the interface of its car service app such as SF, LA, and NYC. The Android version is out to 17% of riders in Uber Eats’ 500 other markets with the goal of the cross-promotional tool being available to all riders outside of micromobility cities soon.

“We believe our platform model allows us to acquire, engage and retain customers with the cost, as well as efficiency and effectiveness advantage over our rivals, typically monoline competitors” Khosrowshahi said on the earnings call. “What we found is that with Rides and Eats . . . we are seeing early signal where essentially you can have very little if any cannibalization of a Ride and throw a significant amount of potential demand onto the Eats side.”

The CEO also mentioned Uber’s loyalty and subscription programs are vital to cross-promotion. Its Uber Rewards that rolled out in January earns users points for both rides and food orders, and higher reward tiers score users free Eats deliveries that could get them hooked on the convenience. And last month, TechCrunch broke the news of Uber prototyping a $9.99 Uber Eats Pass subscription that offers unlimited free Eats deliveries.

“Really what we are looking to do is significantly increase the percentage of our MAPCs [monthly active platform consumers] that use both products [ride-hailing and Eats] and when we see customers using more than one product, their engagement with the platform more than doubles” Khosrowshahi concluded on the call. “So not only does engagement with Uber increase, but the engagement with our individual products increases as well, so it’s kind of a win, win, win.”

Uber’s market is all about lifetime value. If it can lock users in now, it could earn a fortune off them in the decades to come. That’s why it’s spending so much on marketing and expansion now even if it means racking up earnings losses. But its best (and cheapest) marketing channel is likely cross-promotion through the apps it’s already gotten people to install.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Uber eats Uber Eats, embedding it in the main app

As expected, there was a lot at yesterday’s big WWDC keynote. In fact, you got the sense watching the whole thing unfold that Apple had to race through a number of its new features to cram everything into the two-hour-plus event.

For many, the new Mac Pro was the star of the show, but for Apple, the clear the focus was on software. The company is keenly aware as hardware sales slow that its future is all about software, services and content. This week at the show, we got a guided look through the best new features iOS, macOS and watchOS have to offer.

No surprise, iOS 13 brings the biggest changes of the bunch. Dark Mode is the highlight so to speak. The feature has the same selling points as it does on other operating systems — namely being easier on the eyes and the battery. With a touch in settings, users can turn set it as a constant or have it switch when the sun goes down.

The feature swaps in dark wallpapers and will work with all of Apple’s native apps. Third-party supports is coming as well and will be a part of its development platforms like Swift, going forward.

Apple Maps, a major underdog at launch, continues to get some key upgrades. Most notable is Lookaround — a competitor to Google’s longstanding Street View, which brings seamlessly stitched photographs to help users better navigate around. The feature was extremely smooth in our brief demo. It’s hard to say how it will behave on cellular networks out on the street, but the preview was certainly impressive.

Imaging is a key part of every iOS upgrade, and this one’s no different. Photo editing has been much improved, with more pro-style control over aspects like white balance, contrast, sharpening and noise reduction.

There are some handy dummy proof additions as well, like the ability to adjust saturation without impacting flesh tones. iOS’s editing tools are coming to video as well, this time out, with the ability to adjust settings and even rotate orientation. The photos app also gets a new dynamic view that groups images by occasions like birthdays, giving you another opportunity to mark the unwavering march of time.

This year’s show marked a big moment for iPad as well, as the tablet’s operating system broke free from iOS. For users, that primarily means more functionality on the larger screen, including the ability to to open up multiple windows of the same app for additional multitasking. That joins various other features like improved gesture based highlighting and cut and paste that help iPadOS behave more like a PC.

Far and away the most exciting addition here, however, is actually on the mac side. macOS Catalina brings Duet/Luna style second screen functionality to the tablet, letting it serve as an external monitor. The feature can be used wirelessly (over bluetooth) or tethered.

Our demo was the latter (WWDC is a busy place for wireless signals), but operated pretty flawlessly in spite of some complicated demands. With an iPad Pro, users can draw with the Apple Pencil. There’s also a handy Touch Bar-style menu tray at that populates the bottom of the iPad display.

A couple of watchOS additions are worth mentioning, as well. The most significant is native menstrual cycle tracking. The feature, which is also coming to iOS, gives users a way to keep track of another key aspect of health.

Other additions to the wearable operating system include a native app for audiobooks and a noise app that uses the watch’s built in mics to alert wearers of loud sounds that can lead to hearing loss.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | A closer look at the best new iOS, macOS and watchOS features from WWDC

Something from the fine print out of today’s WWDC keynote. Sign In With Apple didn’t get a ton of time on-stage today, but it should prove a nice new feature for the company — and for those concerned about handing over sensitive information to third-parties.

Turns out it will also be required for app developers utilizing any sort of third party login service. If they offer social logins or other third party options, they’ll have to offer Sign In With Apple as an option.

TechCrunch has learned that the company will require the new feature for developers utilizing services like Google and Facebook’s third-party login. Apple acknowledges the requirement at the tale end of its newly updated App Store Review Guidelines.

“Sign In with Apple will be available for beta testing this summer,” the company writes. “It will be required as an option for users in apps that support third-party sign-in when it is commercially available later this year.”

Yes, that means that apps with third party logins like Google or Facebook or whatever other service must offer Apple’s sign in service as well — once the service is out of beta later this year. Apple’s position on this is that there is a real benefit to offering users a sign-in option that does not require a user to hand over their personal data to an outside third-party company when trying to use a service.

A company like Bird, for instance, would want to offer customers the quickest possible signup process to get them onto a scooter. Right now, that means a social login that can put a user as little as one tap away from a ride. The tradeoff, of course, is that now Facebook knows that user is logging into that app and whatever information they’ve chosen to share with Facebook can be anonymously paired with that data to serve ads etc.

Apple’s argument is that the consumer benefits if they do not have to pass along information to anyone other than the direct company they are working with — and even then they do not have to give them anything personally identifiable.

Apple noted the lengths it took to ensure user privacy during today’s event. The ability to auto-generate a random “relay” email address that forwards to the users’ received one of the biggest applause breaks of the event.

It wasn’t clear on stage but unless a developer requests an email there is literally no second step to signing into/up for an app or service with Apple’s new sign-in service. It’s literally the holy grail of signups – one single tap and it’s done. This is huge for apps that want to get people onboarded as fast as possible, especially for use in the moment. And, it’s worth noting, they also get the benefit of not having to hand off inferred usage data to outside sign-in services from other companies.

Requiring developers to utilize the feature could go a ways toward minimizing the use of popular logins like Facebook — though it could also rub a few companies the wrong way in the process.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Apple will soon require apps with any third-party logins to offer Sign In With Apple also

Sharing with everyone is passé and more than a little bit scary these days. We want to send photos to friends without posting them publicly. We want to reminisce without being permanently defined by our timelines. And we want the utility of apps without giving away our contact info to developers.

The problem is that this philosophy is hard to monetize for a social network that needs to maximize broadcasted content and engagement to score ad views. But it’s easy to monetize if you sell the phone and then let people be as private as they want on it. That’s why today at WWDC, Apple showed off changes that turn iOS into the asocial network — software that mimics the tools of Facebook but without the pressure to overshare.

Most stunningly, Apple will require apps that offer third-party login options like those from Facebook and Google to integrate its new Sign In With Apple feature that lets users hide their email addresses from developers. It’s a power move that makes Facebook look wreckless with your contact info by comparison.

Privacy has been a core Apple talking point for years, from the iPhone’s secure enclave and FaceID to message encryption to protection against tracking. But those safeguards have been focused on getting out of the way to let Apple’s products to ‘just work’. Increasingly, Apple is moving privacy further forward in the user experience to highlight how you can get more out of sharing less. That’s a wise strategy since the company has proven its inability to build full scale social networks out of Ping, Apple Music Connect, and iMessage.

“At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right and we engineer it into every single thing we do” said Apple SVP Craig Federighi .  Mark Zuckerberg declared “The future is private” at Facebook’s F8 conference a month ago, but proved it wasn’t his company’s past or present by failing to launch products that protect users. Now like Google did at I/O a few weeks ago with a slew of privacy tech launches, Apple is actually living up to its talking points with today’s beta release of iOS 13.

Photo Message Recommendations – When you bring up the Share Sheet for a photo or video in iOS 13, Apple will recommend people to send it to over iMessage or Mail based on who you frequently share with and if friends appear in the content. With a few taps you can privately deliver your imagery to a slew of your closest friends and favorite group chats, which could eliminate the need to post it more widely on Facebook or Instagram.

Asocial Media Tools – Instagram offers no way to download a photo or video you edit without first posting it to the feed first. That greedy growth hack leaves room for Apple to usurp more of the creative process. iOS 13 will let you edit videos for lighting, color, contrast, and more plus rotate clips you accidentally shot sideways — all which Instagram and Facebook can’t do. Forgoing the social network side lets Apple focus on tools that you’re free to use however you want.

And with the new Photo Day feature, Apple automatically hides and emphasizes different photos from each day to create magazine-style layouts. These ignite nostalgia and create a visual diary without the embarassment of all that content being on social media to power those TimeHop and Facebook On This Day features.

Memoji – To date, Apple’s interest in animated avatar masks that look like you has centered around FaceTime and video messages. But now it’s realizing how these virtual mini-me’s can enhance privacy while connecting more deeply. iOS 13 will let you opt to share your name and Memoji (or a real photo) as your message thread thumbnail in iMessage so new conversation partners like group chat friends-of-friends can better identify you without showing strangers your actual face. And Memoji can now be used as pre-generated stickers in chat, making it a direct competitor to Snapchat’s Bitmoji and Facebook’s Avatars that just launched today.

AirPods Audio Sharing – What if instead of trumpeting what you’re listening to on social media or fumbling to text a song link to a friend, they could just instantly pipe the sound into their headphones too so you’re rocking out in sync? That’s how the upcoming AirPods Audio Sharing works to let you exchange music privately over Bluetooth without exposing your guilty pleasure jams.

Sign In With Apple, Not Facebook

Apple’s most brazen attack saw it call out the social network by name on screen at WWDC. Flashing logos for “Sign In With Facebook” and “Sign In With Google” that are popular for joining new apps without setting up an account, Federighi noted that “This can be convenient, but it also can come at the cost of your privacy. Your personal information sometimes gets shared behind the scenes. These logins can be used to track you.”

As an alternative, Apple is launching “Sign In With Apple”. It uses FaceID in lieu of asking you to create a new username and password to register for a third-party app. Federighi told users they can opt to hide their email addresses from app developers and instead have Apple provide a randomized proxy address that forwards to their real one. That means users can permanently block spam messages from the app, prevent the developer from sharing or selling their contact info, and avoid being targeted with marketing via their email address as with Facebook Custom Audience ads. 

The announcement drew the loudest cheers of any at WWDC. And it seems Apple is determined to wring as much competitive advantage out of its Sign In feature as possible. You might imagine that adoption by developers would be outside of Apple’s control, and it’d have to prove it drove more lifetime value than login options that always provide a user’s real email.

But while Apple failed to mention this on stage, the fine print of its developer news brief notes that “Sign In with Apple will be available for beta testing this summer. It will be required as an option for users in apps that support third-party sign-in when it is commercially available later this year.”

That’s right. Apple is going to force developers to add its sign in tool. It’s also requiring use of its new location sharing permissions screen that offers one-time access for developers instead of just permanent snooping. But for now, Apple doesn’t specify exactly how. That means the tech giant will have to convince developers to offer Sign In With Apple as prominently as Facebook and Google’s options…even though privacy could be detrimental to their business.

Sure, developers want to maximize signups by minimizing onboarding friction, which is why Sign In With features that don’t make you remember more passwords have grown popular. Adding the Apple sign-in option should theoretically help. But developers also rely on sucking in email addresses to wake up lapsed users with message blasts, target them and people similar to them with reengagement or install ads, and exclude existing users to save money when buying ads to recruit new users.

If developers fear Sign In With Apple’s proxy email address feature will hurt them by cannibalizing registrations made with Facebook or Google that don’t offer users a way to hide their real contact info more than the convenience of a third sign-in option will help, they may try their best to bury or minimize the mandatory feature. Apple might have to incentivize growth for developers in other ways, such as heavily promoting them in the App Store if they prioritize its login option to offset the lifetime value per user decline from the loss of contact info. Unless compelled by some moral imperative, developers aren’t likely to risk their business any more than they have to in the name of privacy.

It’s here that Apple will learn that taking the high road can have its speed bumps. It might monetize selling hardware, but its developer partners often still rely on constantly grabbing our attention.

Privacy is often an abstract concept to the mainstream consumer, that doesn’t dictate their decisions, judging by Facebook’s continued user growth. That’s why promotional campaigns around the philosophy of privacy can seem to have little impact. But by building products and platforms that are objectively more useful yet more privacy-friendly than those of competitors, Apple can allow natural market forces to sweep users in the right direction — which just happens to lead into its shiny retail stores.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Apple attacks Facebook by becoming the asocial network

Apple is known for fluid, intuitive user interfaces, but none of that matters if you can’t click, tap, or drag because you don’t have a finger to do so with. For users with disabilities the company is doubling down on voice-based accessibility with the powerful new Voice Control feature on Macs and iOS (and iPadOS) devices.

Many devices already support rich dictation, and of course Apple’s phones and computers have used voice-based commands for years (I remember talking to my Quadra). But this is a big step forward that makes voice controls close to universal — and it all works offline.

The basic idea of Voice Control is that the user has both set commands and context-specific ones. Set commands are things like “Open Garage Band” or “File menu” or “Tap send.” And of course some intelligence has gone into making sure you’re actually saying the command and not writing it, like in that last sentence.

But that doesn’t work when you have an interface that pops up with lots of different buttons, fields, and labels. And even if every button or menu item could be called by name, it might be difficult or time-consuming to speak everything out loud.

To fix this Apple simply attaches a number to every UI item in the foreground, which a user can show by saying “show numbers.” Then they can simply speak the number or modify it with another command, like “tap 22.” You can see a basic workflow below, though of course without the audio cues it loses a bit:

Remember that these numbers may be more easily referenced by someone with little or no vocal ability, and could in fact be selected from using a simpler input like a dial or blow tube. Gaze tracking is good but it has its limitations, and this is a good alternative.

For something like maps, where you could click anywhere, there’s a grid system for selecting where to zoom in or click. Just like Blade Runner! Other gestures like scrolling and dragging are likewise supported.

Dictation has been around for a bit but it’s been improved as well. You can select and replace entire phrases, like “Replace ‘be right back’ with ‘on my way.’ ” Other little improvements will be noted and appreciated by those who use the tool often.

All the voice processing is done offline, which makes it both quick and robust to things like signal problems or use in foreign countries where data might be hard to come by. And the intelligence built into Siri lets it recognize names and context-specific words that may not be part of the base vocabulary. Improved dictation means selecting emoji and adding dictionary items is a breeze.

Right now Voice Control is supported by all native apps, and third party apps that use Apple’s accessibility API should be able to take advantage of it easily. And even if they don’t do it specifically, numbers and grids should still work just fine, since all the OS needs to know are the locations of the UI items. These improvements should appear in accessibility options as soon as a device is updated to iOS 13 or Catalina.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Apple’s Voice Control improves accessibility OS-wide on all its devices

Apple has finally listened to its small, but slowly growing user base in India. The iPhone-maker today announced a range of features in iOS 13 that are designed to appease users in the world’s second largest smartphone market.

First up, the company says its Siri voice assistant now offers all new and “more natural” Indian English male and female voices. It has also introduced a romanized bilingual keyboard, featuring support for Hindi and English languages with typing predictions. There is also typing predictions in Devanagari Hindi language that can suggest the next word as a user types and it learns from their typing over time.

Additionally, the keyboard in iOS 13 supports all of 22 Indian languages, with the inclusion of 15 new Indian language keyboards: Assamese, Bodo, Dogri, Kashmiri (Devanagari, Arabic), Konkani (Devanagari), Manipuri (Bangla, Meetei Mayek), Maithili, Nepali, Sanskrit, Santali (Devanagari, Ol Chiki), and Sindhi (Devanagari, Arabic).

The addition of these features comes as Apple cautiously grows more serious about India, where it holds about just 1% of the smartphone market share, according to research firm Counterpoint. Even as smartphone shipment is declining in much of the world, India has emerged as the fastest growing market for handsets in recent years. According to Counterpoint, more than 145 million smartphones shipped in India last year, up 10% year-over-year.

But users in India have long complained about Apple services not being fully optimized for local conditions. Siri, for instance, has so far offered limited functionalities in India, and many Apple services such as Apple Pay and Apple News are yet to launch in the nation.

The upcoming version of iOS, which will ship to a range of iPhone handsets later this year, also includes four new system fonts in Indian languages: Gurmukhi, Kannada, Odia, and Gujarati. These will “help deliver greater clarity and ease when reading in apps like Safari, typing in Messages and Mail, or swiping through Contacts,” the company said in a statement.

Additionally, there are 30 new document fonts for Indian languages Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Bengali, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Gurmukhi, Malayalam, Odia, and Urdu.

Apple says iOS 13 will also enable improved video downloading option for patchy networks. It says users in India can now set an optimized time of the day in video streaming apps such as Hotstar and Netflix for downloading videos. Consumption of video apps is increasingly skyrocketing in India. Just last week, Alibaba said it was investing $100 million in its short video app called Vmate in the nation.

In recent months, Apple has also improved Apple Maps in India. Earlier this year, Apple Maps added support for turn-by-turn navigation, and enabled users to book a cab — from Ola or Uber — directly from within the maps app. The company has also been aggressively hiring people to expand its maps and other software teams in  the country, according to job postings on the its site.

Improvements to software aside, Apple has also been working to reduce the cost of iPhones in India, the single major factor for their poor sales in the country. Two years ago, Apple started to assemble the iPhone 7 handset in India. It plans to ramp up its local production in the coming weeks, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

As part of local government’s ‘Make in India’ program, phone vendors that assemble phones in the country are offered tax and other benefits. Ravi Shankar Prasad, an Indian minister who oversees law and justice, telecom, and electronics and IT departments, said at a press conference earlier today (local time) that Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party which was reelected last month, will work on expanding Make in India program as one of its top priorities.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | With iOS 13, Apple delivers new features to court users in India

When you need to find a photo on your iPhone, what do you do? There are tons of ways, but let’s be honest. You probably just go to the camera roll and scroll through at lightning speed, trusting your eyes to pick out the target shot. That may change with Apple’s new layout for Photos, which organizes shots into easy-to-browse days, months, and years.

Right now the Photos app is kind of a mess. There are so many ways your photos are organized that it feels like none is the “main” one. The “For You” tab has a best of the last (insert random duration here) and randomly selected photos from random periods; Search shows me “one year ago,” “spring,” “trips,” and “dining” — great, thanks! And even the chronologically listed “Photos” tab has such tiny images that it’s hard to pick out the ones you want. So we all just go to camera roll and scroll and scroll.

That may change with the Days, Months, Years theme Apple just announced at WWDC. Under the default photos tab in the Photos app, you’ll now see a new set of tabs — yeah, probably too many tabs — with the different durations on it.

The default mode looks a lot like camera roll. But when you hit “Days,” each day shows as a selection of highlighted images, large and mosaiced, and with live photos active. Each day is marked by a full-width shot, so you can easily slide down to the next day — more recent shots are towards the bottom.

Flip over to Months, and it compresses each calendar month of shots into a handful of events, such as events or locations the system has detected. Years does the same thing, except as the “cover” for each year’s album it shows an image from the same day or period — for example, if it’s someone’s birthday party, you’ll see shots from when you (hopefully) attended their party in years past.

Of course Photos already had a “on this day” type feature, but this makes much more sense to me. You can dive into a year and it breaks into months, and of course months break into days. It’s just a more efficient way of scrubbing through your camera roll — though I have no doubt we’ll still do that from time to time.

In a way this is a minor change to iOS, but because users interact with Photos so much, it could significantly change how you think about getting to the images you want.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Photos on iPhone is about to look completely different

Apple shared some of the new features that you’ll get with the release of iOS 13 this fall. There are a ton of small and big feature updates, and it felt like Apple executives were rushing through the presentation because there are so many things to announce.

“iOS 13 is a huge release packed with lots of capabilities,” VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said. But Federighi immediately started with performance improvements.

For instance, Face ID is 30 percent faster. Downloads and updates on the App Store are a lot smaller. Updates are 60 percent smaller on average because your iPhone won’t download the full app every time you get an update. And apps should launch twice as fast.

Dark mode and low-level improvements

Many apps have already adopted dark mode. But Apple is adding system-wide dark mode for iOS 13. With a simple button in Control Center, you’ll be able to switch from a light interface to a dark interface. Native apps, such as Music, Messages and Calendar have all been updated to support dark mode.

Notifications and widgets look darker. When you open an app, Apple is using a solid black background, which should look good on an OLED screen as it won’t emit any light.

The native keyboard now supports typing by swiping from one letter to another. The share sheet has been redesigned with intelligent suggestions based on your most important contacts. In the Music app, you can now see scrolling lyrics.

Apple apps get updated

When it comes to first-party apps, Safari has options to change text sizing and settings per website. Mail gets rich text editing. Notes gets a gallery view and folders.

Reminders has been completely redesigned. There’s a new quick type bar to add a task. You can indent tasks below bigger tasks. You can also tag people — they receive a notification in iMessage.

Apple’s Meg Frost also showed the new version of Apple Maps. In addition to improved data in some parts of the U.S., there’s a feature that works just like Google Street View called Look Around. Moving from one location to another in Look Around is incredibly smooth.

There are more updates to Apple Maps, such as the ability to share your ETA with friends, collections of favorite places, the ability to share lists with friends, etc.

Apple will map the U.S. with its own data by the end of 2019, other countries will be upgraded later.

Privacy, privacy, privacy

Apple is updating location tracking in apps. You can share your location with an app just once. Third-party developers soon won’t be able to share details about your Wi-Fi network or Bluetooth signal, which should put an end to many privacy scandals.

Apple is also going to compete with “Sign in with Facebook” or “Sign in with Google” by introducing “Sign in with Apple.” This way, you can create an account without sharing personal information. You can even share a randomly generated email address that relays emails to your real email address.

HomeKit is also becoming more private. With HomeKit Secure Video, you can store up to 10 days of security camera footage in your iCloud account. Apple doesn’t have the keys, and footage doesn’t count against your storage. Logitech, Netatmo and others will support that feature.

In order to make HomeKit devices more secure, Apple is bringing HomeKit to routers so that connected devices don’t always have to talk to the internet directly.

iMessage gets more personal

iMessage still feels like an improved version of SMS. Apple is going to make it more like WhatsApp. With iOS 13, you’ll be able to add a profile picture and share it with your contacts, and you’ll get to control who can see your profile picture.

Apple is using this opportunity to improve Memoji with more customization options. And the company is going one step further by copying Bitmoji and creating stickers with your Memoji.

Photos

On the photo front, Apple is adding a new portrait lighting effect — and portrait lighting will become more customizable. The camera app is getting more pro features with buttons to control saturation, highlights, shadows, etc. All of this will be available for videos, as well. And Instagram users will love that you’ll be able to rotate videos.

When it comes to your photo library, iOS automatically hides duplicates photos to keep the best shot. There’s also a new tab to explore your photo library. Navigating your library feels more fluid with autoplaying video vignettes. There’s a new tab bar so that you can see highlights from the past years, months and days.

Siri gets smarter

Apple is adding more voice features across the board. For instance, when you receive a message and you’re wearing AirPods, you can hear the message you just received and reply.

If you want to watch a video or listen to music together, you can share audio with someone else who has an iPhone and a pair of AirPods. I don’t think it means that you’ll be able to stream music to two pairs of AirPods — you still need two iOS devices (update: nope, you can pair two pairs of AirPods with one iOS device).

On the HomePod front, you can tap your phone on your HomePod to send audio to your HomePod. The smart speaker is also getting support for live radio stations — I can’t believe it wasn’t already available. You’ll finally be able to set up multiple users for the HomePod to control your own calendar, messages, music and get personalized results.

CarPlay is also receiving an update with better Siri features. You can now control third-party apps, such as Pandora or Waze, with Siri. And the Siri animation doesn’t fill up the entire screen anymore.

On iOS 13, the Shortcuts app will be installed by default. You’ll get recommendations for shortcuts that could help you. And Siri should sound better overall with new voice-generating software.

There are plenty of other new features in iOS 13, especially on the iPad. If you want to read more about iPadOS, read our separate post.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Apple announces iOS 13 with dark mode, updated Apple apps and privacy features

Apple’s iOS 13 is getting a dark mode, the company announced today at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose. Confirming an earlier leak, the new dark mode will be system-wide and can be turned on or off from iOS’s Settings or through a new Control Center toggle. Once enabled, Dark Mode will change the color of the Home screen dock, the background colors of iOS screens, and Apple’s built-in apps like Apple Music, Notes, Messages, Photos, Calendar, Music and more.

Other system features have also been prepped for Dark Mode like the dock and share sheet, so it’s a seamless experience.

Meanwhile, Apple iOS developers will be able to customize their own apps for Dark Mode by way of Apple’s newly announced framework, SwiftUI, also announced today.

Dark themes for apps have become fairly popular, thanks to the rise of OLED smartphones in recent years. Because a dark mode lights up fewer pixels, it can help conserve battery life on phones’ OLED screens. Dark themes may have other benefits as well, in terms of decreasing device addiction and improving sleep, some claim.

Apple is not the first to launch a system-wide dark mode, however. At Google’s developer conference in May, the company introduced Dark Theme for Android Q which will work across its mobile OS and in first-party Android apps, with developers able to code for it in their own applications.

Several third-party apps today support darker themes of their own, including Twitter, YouTube, Google, Medium, Reddit, Wikipedia, Instapaper, Pocket, IMDb, iBooks, Kindle, Google Maps, Waze and Opera Mini.

Below is the leaked image of Dark Mode for comparison:

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Apple’s iOS 13 will include a system-wide Dark Mode