Apps

As it is every year, WWDC is a multi-faceted show, with Apple revealing a number of new features across its software lineup. It's the time of year when Apple reveals new iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS updates, and this year's jump to watchOS 7 seems to be a pretty significant one. On top of the more incremental features you'd expect to see, there's even a new feature that could help keep you safe in the midst of a pandemic.

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Apple revealed App Clips, a system where a bit of an app can be launched without downloading the entirety of an app. This feature was revealed with a bunch of iOS 14 elements and didn't seem to be all that extraordinarily important in the moment in which it was first shown. But given the oncoming launch of iPhone devices with 5G connectivity - there's a whole lot this system will do for developers and end-users in the short-term.

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Chris Lacy is one of the more prominent indie Android app developers that have remained active in recent years. Best known for his Action Launcher, Lacy has also authored other popular Android apps such as Link Bubble and ActionDash. The latter was his response to Google's Digital Wellbeing which, while useful, was severely limited in its compatibility. Now, however, Lacy has announced its sale but the app's buyer could raise red flags for some more privacy-conscious users.

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News aggregator Flipboard is rolling out its Storyboard feature to a variety of users, including publishers and bloggers, to help the public find content based on topics and categories. Storyboards are, as the name suggests, collections of content that are grouped around a single theme, such as Black Lives Matter or a particular scientific development.

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Short-form video streaming service Quibi may expand beyond its mobile roots to launch smart TV apps, a new report claims. The service launched in early April with smartphone apps for iOS and Android, but soon found itself in an uncomfortable position: most people were in lockdown at home, meaning they weren't as inclined to watch videos only available on their mobile device.

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The global situation has proven that some of the work your bosses insisted couldn't be done at home can, when circumstances force it, actually be done at home. That doesn't mean, however, that your home, especially your home computer and network, are ideal places to do some professional activity, especially those that require some data security and privacy. As a tool that was designed for remote collaboration, Dropbox is now launching new products to address the growing number of people working from the comfort of their couches or even their beds.

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Facebook is testing a new way for Messenger users to secure their inboxes, at least if they own an iPhone. The feature, which was first leaked back in January, enables Messenger users to secure their inboxes behind Face ID even if the iPhone is unlocked, putting an extra barrier between one's messages and any nosey person who may be trying to get a look.

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A new camera app has been released for iOS that, unlike basically every other photography app, is designed to hide the photo's subject rather than highlight them. Called Anonymous Camera, this app works to protect the people captured in a video or photo by blurring or otherwise hiding their faces -- or, in cases where it is necessary, by removing their bodies entirely.

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This morning Adobe released the Adobe Photoshop Camera app for both iOS and Android. This app utilizes the most advanced in lenses and filters for the smartphones on which it functions - before a photo is captured. This system is made for sharing - users can utilize lenses and effects in-view, live, or after-the-fact.

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The Windows 10 Xbox app, which is currently in beta, is getting a rather big update today. Not only has Microsoft made some improvements to performance, but it's also given the green light to mod support within the app. The list of games that support mods at this point is definitely a short one, but this is nonetheless good news for PC players who like mods as a way of squeezing more replayability out of their games.

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Google is notorious for making experiments that it eventually shuts down, regardless of the popularity of said experiment. That's especially true with apps or software where the investment and costs are far lower than with physical products. Of late, however, Google has mostly relegated those app experiments to its Area 120 skunkworks team and it is indeed permanently shutting down one such project but not exactly on a whim.

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Although Android apps are naturally optimized for running on mobile devices with more constrained resources than even laptops, their packages traditionally weren't. Because Android apps often have to account for the myriad of configurations and Android phone hardware, those packages or APKs used to hold and download all of those different configurations and assets, regardless of your specific hardware. It was for that reason that Google introduced its Android App Bundle format and it is now extending that to Android's biggest space and bandwidth consumers: game assets.

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