Author: Clinton

An interesting rumor has surfaced just days before Google I/O 2018 about the future of Google News and Play Newsstand.  In a post on AdAge, It is reported that News will become the flagship news service for the Mountain View company, integrating video elements and digital magazines into a single app.  It will mean that Play Newsstand, where digital magazines are currently kept in the Google ecosystem, will be deprecated at some point.

The news is interesting as it reflects a broader effort by Google to streamline their app portfolio to be less congested and confusing for consumers.  Taking this news in balance along with the expected revamp of Google Play Music and YouTube, Google is moving more to the “Google” brand and away from the “Play” brand.  This has already happened with the company moving away from “Android” branding products too.

Following up the release of the third beta of iOS 11.4, Apple has also released a third, and likely final, beta build of MacOS 10.13.5 to beta testers.  The Apple Beta Program is open to anyone with an eligible device and you can sign up if you want at this site.  Remember, it is beta software so you may find the odd bug or behavior as final testing is done.

Much like the iOS 3rd beta, the MacOS 10.13.5 3rd beta more or less is a polishing and bug crushing exercise.  There aren’t any new features of note other than those which are already known about, namely Messages in iCloud and AirPlay 2.

Apple posted their best second quarter financials yesterday, posting some $61.1 billion in revenue with $13.8 billion in profit.  Apple CEO Tim Cook indicated that it was the best March quarter the company had ever enjoyed with strong sales across all of the major product lines.

In all, the company sold 52.2 million iPhones, up 1.5 million units when you compare it to Q2 2017.  iPads were up slightly at 9.1 million units, 180,000 units over last year.  As for Macs, they lost a bit of ground over last year.  4.07 million units were sold this quarter, slightly less than the 4.19 million sold in 2017.

Apple Pay has had another wave of banks here in the United States, adding 26 banks and financial institutions to the list of supporting institutions.  The additions are mostly smaller regional banks as Apple continues to push the adoption of the tap-to-pay service both here in the United States as well as in Europe and Asia.

For the US, here are a few of the new financial institutions that now support Apple Pay:

• Canandaigua National Bank & Trust
• Chesapeake Bank
• Citizens National Bank (TX)
• Classic Bank
• Dowell Federal Credit Union
• Embarrass Vermillion Federal Credit Union

The team over at 9to5Mac have put together a full list of the banks supported.

Good news this morning for those of you who have the Honor 7X here in the United States.  The Huawei sub-brand has released its Android Oreo update for the midrange phone with a select roll out already underway.  The update comes as EMUI 8.0, Huawei’s flavor of Android and it is more-or-less the same build that is on the Mate 10 and P20 lineup of phones.

The update brings all the normal goodness that Oreo brings but also includes a lot of Huawei/Honor features such as Face Lock (similar to that on the iPhone X), a floating dock, improved settings layout and other features.  It also comes with the April Android Security Update Patch.

There was an exciting new announcement today from Google Cloud Platform and Fitbit.  The fitness wearable company is not only moving to GCP as their preferred cloud platform provider, but they will also be taking advantage of the Google Cloud Healthcare API.

The Cloud Healthcare API… “provide an interoperability solution that enables their users to collaborate on care with their own healthcare providers.”  This could be a big deal as there have been some 76 million Fitbit devices sold and some 25 million active users.