Category: Apple

Apple Maps has quietly rolled out indoor maps for three new international airports, bringing the total number of supported airports to 37.  The new airports include Sydney International (SYD), Edinburgh (EDI) and Hamad International in Qatar (DOH).  You can find the complete list here on the iOS Feature Availability site.

Indoor mapping of airports and shopping malls is something that Apple Maps has been focusing on over the course of the last several years.  While it is fair to say that Google is certainly ahead with Google Maps in this type of indoor mapping, Apple continues to chip away at catching up.

On the Apple Developer site, the Cupertino company has released the latest update of iOS distribution figures and it is pretty astounding.  For the report which is dated April 22, 2018, 76% of all iPhones and iPads coming to the App Store were running a variant of iOS 11, the latest version of the mobile platform.  A further 19% were running iOS 10, meaning that stunning 95% of all devices are running the last two major updates to the platform.

The numbers stand in stark comparison to Android Oreo, the latest version of Android from Google.  There, you will find just 4.6% of Android devices coming to the Google Play Store.  In fact, if you add up Oreo and Nougat, the version prior, you only get to 35.4%.  While it is easy to point the finger at Google, the reality is that the blame for the lack of updates to the majority of devices in the Android ecosystem lies with manufactures, a problem Apple clearly doesn’t have with iPhones and iPads.

Today Apple has released a small update to iOS for iPhone and iPad devices.  The update is iOS 11.3.1 and addresses a handful of security flaws found in the mobile platform.  The update is a relatively small at 105MB that should take less than 10 minutes to download and install based on your connectivity.

As for fixes, there are four outlined in the release notes having to do with elevated privileges or malicious code.  First, the Crash Reporter was patched against a memory corruption issue that could allow for elevated privileges to happen.  This error was found by Google Project Zero.

The 4″ iPhone SE, based on the chassis of the iPhone 4 and 5 series, looks to be getting a significant update as soon as early as next month.  The news is exciting for those who love the compact iPhone SE as it hasn’t been updated since 2016.  While there is as much rumor as anything around the 2nd generation SE, it does look like a few things seem to be pretty solid.

First, spec-wise, it looks like the new SE is going to be powered by the Apple A10 SoC.  That is the generation found in the iPhone 7 series and a significant bump up in speed, performance and power consumption over the current SE’s A9 SoC.  It also looks like that the 3.5mm headphone jack is going to go the way of the Dodo.  Instead, it will have the same headphones that were introduced with the iPhone 7 series which connect via the lightening connector.

Apple Pay, the tap-to-pay service for retail and app purchases, has expanded the number of partner financial institutions here in the United States as well as  five other countries.  The expansion comes just a few weeks after Brazil iOS users were added to the countries that support the service.

The expansion adds banks here in the United States as well as Canada, China, Italy, Russia, and Spain.  While the list of countries and banks supported by Apple Pay is substantially smaller than its main rival Google Pay, the expansion shows that Apple plans to continue to work with financial institutions and, in some cases, governments, for the service to work in other countries and with more banks.

Following up on the release of the second beta of iOS 11.4, Apple has released the second beta of the next build of MacOS High Sierra, MacOS 10.13.5.  The update is available to testers who have registered their devices in the Apple beta program.  If you have a registered device, the update should be available to you through the Mac App Store.

Not much is known about what is included in this second beta as Apple tends to not release many details on it.  Given it is a “dot” release, it more-or-less focuses on bug fixes and performance improvements as well as refinements to apps on the platform.  One thing that is known is that MacOS 10.13.5 will bring Message on iCloud which is now also in the afore mentioned second beta of iOS 11.4.