Yahoo! Meme, Yahoo! Mim, Yahoo! AppSpot, Yahoo! Deals, Yahoo! Shopping, and Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search have all been removed from Apple's App Store. And if you're like most people, you never even looked at these apps in the first place. That's exactly the point. It's part of Yahoo's strategy to rebuild its mobile presence from the ground up.
Virus detection and security group Symantec has today reported that a bug by the name of Android.Counterclank has infected between 1 million and 5 million Android users as of this afternoon. This bit of software sits on a handful of easily downloadable applications available on the Android Market as of late today and each has been downloaded several hundred times at least, with some ranging in the thousands. This Android.Counterclank has the highest distribution of any malware identified inside 2012 and may well be the largest infection on Android in its short history.
The same fellow that brought you and continues to bring you the most famous ROM handler on the hacked Android circuit ROM Manager, Koushik Dutta, aka Koush, has been developing an app store for the relatively small number of banned Android apps out in the wild today. Included in this sort of rogue appstore will be not only gaming emulators that've been tossed from the official market, but Visual Voicemail apps, one-click rooting apps, and other such gems that have otherwise found themselves on the short end of the banning stick ala Google. Full fledged ROMs will MAYBE be included in this app store as well, and should it take off, a full collection of flash-ready modifications for your already hacked Android device.
This week the folks at IHS Screen Digest Mobile Media Intelligence Service have shown that given the information they've got on in-app purchases for app sales revenue verses in-app revenue, that the latter will be dominating the market in no time. In-app purchases, they say, will rise to 64 percent of the total market revenue for apps in 2015, this up from an already whopping 39 percent in 2011. Revenue itself from in-app purchases will rise to $5.6 billion USD in 2015 from a comparatively tiny $970 million in 2011. Time to fire up those free apps, people!
The folks at Qualcomm have been kind enough to give us a tour of their booth and a demonstration of quite a few rather impressive items, not least of all Snapdragon GameCommand. This application is now available for you on the Android Market, it being a representation of Qualcomm's renewed dedication to app developers with listings of games optimized by the developers working directly with Qualcomm to make their apps work amazingly on Snapdragon-toting devices. While the devices that these apps work on is not limited to those containing a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC, they are made to work absolutely the best there.
If that title didn't get you pumped up about what this release possibly could be: have a look at the title image here, complete with gigantic claymation heads on Yoda and Darth Maul, a team of force-wielders whose new favorite drink is Brisk Iced Tea. This duo of cartooned-out characters is promoting two things: the release of the first Star Wars movie (The Phantom Menace) in 3D format, and Brisk. They've got not only this utterly strange duo of video ad spots, but an iPhone app called Brisksaber for your free downloading and use, right this second!
Google has this week announced that it will require manufacturers to include their own "Holo theme" for the newest version of Android if they wish to get their device officially licensed by them as an official Google product. What getting your device licensed by Google means, in this case, is having Google give you the OK to launch it with the Android Market onboard after they've approved its application of Android. This will allow app and game developers to MUCH more easily develop for Ice Cream Sandwich as they wont have to worry about each manufacturer requiring them to work with their own individual user interface. The iOS ease has come at last.
Apple iPad owners have downloaded over three billion applications since the iOS tablet's launch back in 2010, according to new software stats, far outperforming the download count of Android slates. The figures, collated by ABI Research, suggest 19-percent of all app downloads by Apple users are made by iPad and iPad 2 owners, whereas Android tablet users have downloaded 440m apps to-date.
Android has passed the 400,000 active apps milestone in the Android Market, according to code counters Distimo, with almost 100,000 active publishers contributing to that total. Around two-thirds of the 400k titles on offer are free, perhaps relating to Android users' typically lower spend on paid apps compared to their iOS-using cousins.
When the Apple iPhone 4S was introduced to the world, with it came a re-introduction of Siri, an until-then third-party app that used an above-average voice recognition system to do commands and actions - now the Android Market has "Siri for Android," but it's not quite what you might think. Instead of an "Official App" as it jokingly suggests that it is with its developer name, it's just a shortcut to what all Android devices version 2.2 and forward have working on them natively: Google Voice Actions. Sadly you will not be able to ask this this "Siri" if it'll be raining on your parade tomorrow.
If you're an Android gamer you should be happy to know that Gameloft will be offering a special sale during New Year's weekend. All of its paid titles in the Android Market will go on sale for only $0.99, including its latest release Modern Combat 3: Fallen Nation.
When the going gets tough, and you first-world gift receivers are crying because ALL YOU GOT was an Android tablet that wasn't quite the iPad 2 or the Transformer Prime you were hoping for, listen to this: I'm not going to punch you in the face for being ungrateful more than one time, and here's a list of things you can do with this non-returnable hunk of technology trash. You've got a tablet running some form of Android and a processor that's not the worst in the world, but certainly isn't as nice as even the most basic high-end smartphone out there: what do you do? You fill it up to the brim with music, news, and simple games with low requirements for high amounts of fun.