March 19, 2015 at 12:20Google Play review, Selfie payment, Apple trade-in - and other news of the week for the mobile developer
Change your old Android to the new trendy iPhone!
There is evidence that Apple will launch a trade-in program for devices from other manufacturers. Simply put, any owner of an Android or BlackBerry phone will be able to get a discount on the new iPhone by
This is not Apple's first trade-in program. In the near 2013, a discount on the new iPhone model could be obtained by presenting your old iPhone. But there was no question of pulling smartphone users of other brands to their side - everything was peaceful, honest and within the same brand.
By the way, Tim Cook said earlier that the number of Android exchanges for Apple in the fourth quarter of last year reached a maximum by the standards of the past three years. Yes, and the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus themselves with sales are all quite good and without any trade-in shares. Apparently, the CEO of Apple, taking advantage of the situation, is trying to follow the precepts of his predecessor and "destroy Android."
Pay for purchases with a selfie
At the moment, many companies have announced the development of their payment systems: Apple uses a fingerprint, and Google intends to use voice recognition. Founder Alibaba demonstrated selfie payment technology. Alas, there are no details, and so far there are many more questions than answers. How to ensure security? What happens if I recognize other people's photos?
No, I understand, in the courtyard is the 21st century, and every self-respecting geek has already taken more than one selfie. But the idea of taking photos to confirm the purchase seems strange to me, after all, this is inconvenient, because you need to do quite a lot of actions. In my opinion, putting a finger on a button is much easier.
New rules from Google
Google decided to deal with the garbage that is so rapidly accumulating on Google Play. In the near future, the policy of adding applications to the store will be tightened . Verification of applicants will be done manually, by a team specially assembled for this task.
Google reports that such a check will not bring significant delays, and you can wait for a response to the candidate for entering the gate within a few hours after submitting the application.
Previously, checking downloaded programs was completely automatic, using special software. This allowed malicious code and low-quality content to leak out, which, of course, greatly reduced the quality of Google Play content.
In the new verification procedure, much attention was paid to determining age restrictions. Until now, the developers themselves could assign an age rating for their application, but now it will be determined automatically based on the answers to the questions of the special questionnaire.
Questioning developers will be independent rating organizations. It is curious that not only answers to questions, but also the country of the developer will influence the result, because the requirements for censorship are everywhere different.
17 grams of honor and respect
On March 9, a presentation of the golden Apple Watch took place, but this news did not surprise anyone. But to figure out whether these watches are so gold or not, I think it’s worth it.
The most expensive modification of the Apple Watch with a case of 18 carat gold will cost $ 17 thousand. The company does not use pure gold, but its 75% alloy. The remaining 25% are silver and copper impurities (15% and 10%, respectively). Since pure gold does not withstand long-term operation, Apple engineers also added ceramic chips to the alloy. As a result, the Apple Watch received a case consisting of 47% gold.
As a result, how much does gold itself cost in this watch ?! It is reported that the "golden" case of Apple Watch Edition weighs about 55 g. It turns out that in the 75% alloy of this metal only 37.5 g, and taking into account the ceramic chips, the material weight is 17.6 g, a little more than half a troy ounce (31.3 g). The cost of one ounce is about $ 1160, we divide in half and we get the cost of the case - $ 650.
In fact, for the remaining more than $ 16,000 you get the most basic Apple Watch for $ 349 ...
Apple servers crash too
Apple did not give detailed comments that would reveal the reasons for the 12-hour failure of online services that occurred on March 11. So far, only the internal DNS error is known, as a result of which European retail stores stopped working, and almost all users lost access to the Mac App Store, App Store, iTunes Store and iTunes Connect.
There is also information that some developers are faced with the fact that part of the information that they contributed there over the past week has disappeared from their accounts: descriptions, screenshots, videos and other data. The internal DNS error could not lead to such consequences, and Apple does not provide other information. One can only guess what could actually happen and what losses the company suffered, but, according to the most conservative estimates, we are talking about a minimum of $ 24 million.
Amazon again storms iOS
Amazon Game Studios has announced four new games to be released on iOS: Lost Within, Til Morning's Light, Tales From Deep Space, and To-Fu Fury. In September, the company already tried to launch on iOS with the Sev Zero: Air Support project (a shareware game released only on the iPad). But the game could not conquer the market and did not even get into the top 500 in terms of download ratings.
Little is known about new games, but teams that previously produced titles for consoles are working on them, and this already speaks of the quality of projects. Of course, the projects will be released not only on iOS, but also on Fire OS, but it is not clear why the games will not be exclusive for their own platform and are available specifically on iOS, not Android. On the other hand, the games will be paid, without IAP, and such projects feel much better on the apple platform: featured, promotion, awards, etc.
What results will Amazon have this time, we will know soon, since the projects should appear in the store soon.
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