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For this week's giveaway, we've teamed up with Tech Armor to offer MacRumors readers a chance to win Tech Armor Lightning Earbuds that come equipped with an extra Lightning port so you can listen to music while your iPhone is plugged in and charging.

Apple removed the headphone jack from the iPhone 7, and since then, iPhones require headphones that work via Lightning, over Bluetooth, or with a Lightning to 3.5mm headphone jack adapter. These Lightning headphones from Tech Armor are ideal for all devices without a headphone jack, and they also work with iOS devices that are still equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack.

With rumors suggesting the 2018 iPad Pro models won't feature a headphone jack either, 3.5mm headphone jacks may be further phased out, making Lightning headphones like these even more useful. Lightning headphones can be inconvenient, but the sound quality is better and the addition of a port on Tech Armor's solution fixes the charging problem.

Tech Armor's Lightning headphones, priced at $70, are Made for iPhone certified and plug into the Lightning port of an iPhone or iPad. A Lightning port is built into the inline cable, so you can charge your iPhone or iPad while you're listening to music or playing a game, and they're resistant to tangling.

A microphone is included so you can use the headphones for phone calls, and there's also a remote for controlling the volume, answering/ending calls, or playing/pausing content. Tech Armor includes multiple earbud caps in the package to fit a wide range of ears.

We have ten sets of Tech Armor's Lightning earbuds to give away to MacRumors readers. To enter to win, use the Rafflecopter widget below and enter an email address. Email addresses will be used solely for contact purposes to reach the winners and send the prizes. You can earn additional entries by subscribing to our weekly newsletter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, following us on Twitter, or visiting the MacRumors Facebook page.

Due to the complexities of international laws regarding giveaways, only U.S. residents who are 18 years or older and Canadian residents (excluding Quebec) who have reached the age of majority in their province or territory are eligible to enter. To offer feedback or get more information on the giveaway restrictions, please refer to our Site Feedback section, as that is where discussion of the rules will be redirected.

The contest will run from today (August 3) at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time through 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time on August 10. The winners will be chosen randomly on August 10 and will be contacted by email. The winners will have 48 hours to respond and provide a shipping address before new winners are chosen.

It's been nearly one year since Disney announced that it will pull all of its movies from Netflix and launch its own streaming service in late 2019, including both TV shows and movies from Marvel and Star Wars. This week, however, Bloomberg reports that the company is facing troubles with the TV rights to the Star Wars film franchise, dating back to a deal it made with Turner Broadcasting in 2016.

Under that agreement, Turner gained the linear basic cable and companion ad-supported on-demand rights to five of the six Star Wars films released between 1977 and 2005 (The Empire Strikes Back to Revenge of the Sith), as well as the new films that began releasing in 2015 (as of now including The Force Awakens, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Last Jedi, and Solo: A Star Wars Story). With these rights, which also includes A New Hope rights inked in a deal with 20th Century Fox, Turner has been airing the Star Wars movies on networks like TNT and TBS, and its deal with Disney grants it the ability to keep doing so until 2024.

Now that Disney is planning its own dedicated streaming service, however, the company wants these rights back so it can be the sole location for users to find and stream the entire Star Wars canon. To do so, Disney has made a "preliminary inquiry" about regaining the rights, but has "met resistance" from Turner, according to people familiar with the matter.

Turner would reportedly want financial considerations and programming to replace the Star Wars films it would lose, but the talks have yet to advance. If Disney doesn't get the rights back, its streaming service would be missing one of the main franchises that many users would be signing up for, although new Star Wars content could appear, such as numerous Star Wars TV shows "specifically" created for the service.

As we get near the launch of Disney's direct-to-consumer app, more of its films have begun disappearing from Netflix, including titles like Finding Dory this month. In regards to Star Wars, Bloomberg reports that Disney's deal with Netflix for recent Star Wars films -- including the currently-streaming Star Wars: The Last Jedi -- will expire "at the end of this year."

Similar to Disney, Apple is on the hunt to fill its own upcoming streaming TV service with an instant catalog of existing shows and potentially even movies. Apple hasn't discussed its streaming service as much as Disney, however, so it's still unclear how it will launch, how much it will be (Disney says its own will be priced "substantially below" Netflix), and when exactly users will be able to watch the first TV shows beyond sometime after March 2019.

At the same time that Disney attempts to negotiate the TV rights to the Star Wars films back into its fold, the company is nearing completion on its $71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox's entertainment assets, which will provide another influx of content for its streaming service.

Fortnite, the ultra popular multiplayer battle royale game that's available for iOS devices, consoles, and PCs, is expanding to Android today, but Epic Games is launching Fortnite for Android in a unique way that's worth paying attention to.

As outlined by our sister site TouchArcade, rather than releasing the game on Google Play or another Android marketplace, Epic has created its own Fortnite installer that skirts all fees and eschews the Google Play monopoly on apps, letting Android users install the app outside of Google Play.

Google, like Apple, collects a 30 percent fee for apps (and in-app purchases) released through the Google Play platform, and despite the fees, most developers use Google Play anyway because it's simple, streamlined, and easier in terms of app discovery. But, in contrast to the iOS platform, it is possible for apps to be installed on Android devices without Google Play (or the Amazon Marketplace) and that's what Fortnite has done here.

Fortnite is so popular that Epic doesn't need Google Play to get people to download the game, and thus Google won't be getting a cut of in-app purchases from a mobile game that's already brought more than $100 million in revenue on iOS devices.

Fortnite on Android is being distributed exclusively through Epic's Fortnite Installer, which TouchArcade says is basically a third-party App Store that lets you install one app - Fortnite.

TouchArcade spoke with Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney, and he said that the company was motivated by "economic efficiency." The 30 percent fee charged by open platforms, he says, is "disproportionate" to the services provided.

The 30% store tax is a high cost in a world where game developersʼ 70% must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games. Thereʼs a rationale for this on console where thereʼs enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers. But on open platforms, 30% is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service. Weʼre intimately familiar with these costs from our experience operating Fortnite as a direct-to-customer service on PC and Mac.

Sweeney says that right now, Epic Games is focused on Fortnite and there are no current plans for a full Epic App Store that permanently shuts out Google Play, but he didn't rule it out.

Unfortunately for Epic, Apple's mobile platform is more restrictive than Android and there is no way to make a similar move on iOS devices. The only options for skirting the App Store are jailbreaking or distributing outside of the App Store via Xcode, two practices that Apple heavily frowns upon. F.lux, for example, tried using side-loading to release an iOS app back in 2015, and Apple shut it down quickly.

While Epic Games won't be paying fees on Android, Apple will continue getting its 30 percent cut of all Fortnite in-app purchases, at least for now. TouchArcade editor-in-chief Eli Hodapp suggests that this launch has the potential to put pressure on both Google Play and the App Store if Epic Games releases an alternative Android platform that offers more affordable rates. Epic's Unreal Engine Marketplace, for example, offers an 88/12 split, a much better deal than the 30/70 split Apple and Google provide developers.

For more details on how Fortnite for Android will work, make sure to check out TouchArcade's walkthrough following a hands-on demo with the app install process.

Kévin Eugène, a web developer and UI/UX designer, this week shared a new iOS concept that he calls "iOS Mogi," with the aim of improving the look and functionality of Apple's AI assistant Siri (via Reddit). As Eugène explains in his Medium post on iOS Mogi, his goal was "not to create new commands" or completely re-build Siri, but to display the voice assistant "in a different way" that is "more useful to the user."

This led to iOS Mogi's main concept: Siri as a drop-down notification banner that Eugène describes as "parallel help." The non-intrusive banner doesn't take up the whole screen as Siri does today, allowing the assistant to perform contextually aware tasks in the background while the user does something else. As with all concepts, it's important to remember that Eugène's designs in no way indicate what we'll see with Siri in a future version of iOS.

In Eugène's main example, he asks Siri to "Show me pictures of Japan" while texting a friend in Messages, and then he swipes down on the notification, scrolls until he finds the ones he wants to send and taps to select them all. Thanks to the contextual awareness of Siri in iOS Mogi, this drop-down notification also has a blue Messages "send" button, which Eugène taps to send all the photos directly to his contact.

iOS Mogi also includes a multitasking feature where it's possible to ask Siri to open pages from an app while performing tasks in another app. Eugène gives the example of writing an email and asking Siri to open a conversation from Messages in a drop-down notification, scrolling to find a picture you need, and then dragging and dropping that image directly into the email.

Eugène's version of Siri also allows for "Siri actions" that translate touch gestures into voice commands, like scrolling in Apple Music or editing an email's content in Mail. Without needing to physically interact with an iPhone, Eugène explains that this could be particularly useful for users with a disability, but believes such actions would be of benefit for all iOS users.

The last of Eugène's Siri concepts in iOS Mogi involves saving elements from anywhere in the OS to use in another app, including an improved copy/paste feature. In the concept, users can copy as normal and then Siri saves all items and text copied, which can be viewed by saying "Show me all my saved elements." From here, each element can be edited, copied again to paste in another app, or dragged and dropped into the open app.

The iOS Mogi concept is full of other ideas for Apple's mobile operating system, including updates to Apple Maps, "live notifications," multitasking, ARKit features, and more. Head over to Eugène's Medium post to see the full concept.

Prior to the unveiling of iOS 12 at WWDC in June, we saw a few concepts for future versions of iOS from other graphic designers, including one from Michael Calcada that focused on a "Siri Sight" augmented reality feature for navigating around cities. Another one shared by Álvaro Pabesio focused entirely on Apple Music -- which isn't a priority for Apple's iOS 12 update -- and beefed up the music streaming app with music history stats, a new UI, new profile pages, group playlists, and more.

In watchOS 5, there's a new Apple Watch activity feature that's designed to motivate people to work out and get active through competitions with friends.

You can challenge any friend to a seven-day competition on Apple Watch, with each person earning points for filling their rings each day.

How to Start a Competition

You can begin a competition on the Apple Watch itself or within the Activity app on the iPhone, with the latter method being the easiest way to get going.

Before a competition can start, you need to be sharing your activity information with the person you're challenging, which you can do by following these steps:

1. Open up the Activity app.
2. Tap the Sharing tab.
3. Press the "+" button to invite one or more contacts with an Apple Watch.
4. Choose the "Send" button to send them an invite to share activity data with you.
5. Wait for your friend to accept the invitation.

Once you're sharing data with someone, you can begin a competition. Again, this is easiest in the Activity app on the iPhone.

1. Open the Activity app.
2. Tap the Sharing tab.
3. Choose a friend you're sharing data with.
4. Tap on "Compete with [friend's name]."
5. Wait for your friend to accept the challenge.

You can invite friends you're already sharing with to competitions using the Apple Watch if preferred.

Just open the Activity app on Apple Watch, tap on a friend's name, and then tap "Compete" twice through the subsequent menus to launch a competition.

Competition Rules

Your friend will have 48 hours to respond to your invite, with a competition officially starting after 48 hours if the invite was accepted. Competitions will last for seven days, so if your competition started on a Saturday morning, for example, it will end on the following Friday evening.

Competitions start in the morning so no one is caught off guard and so each person has seven full days to complete all of their movement goals. You can have more than one competition going at once, but you can only compete with one person per competition, so you can't have three or more people competing together.

Each person earns points for closing the Stand ring, the Move ring, and the Exercise ring. Points are awarded for exceeding each goal and hitting additional move and exercise goals.

As with all activity sharing, you will receive notifications whenever your friend completes a workout. If you want to mute these notifications, open up the Activity app, choose the Sharing tab, select a competition, and the scroll down to the bottom of the screen to find the "Mute Notifications" option.

How Points Are Calculated

Each person participating in the competition receives one point for every percent added to the Stand, Move, and Exercise rings, with up to 600 points available to be earned per day.

So, for example, if you exceed your move goal by 300 percent, you'll receive 300 points for the day. Similar calculations are used for the stand and exercise options.

A total of 4,200 points can be earned for the week, with the award going to whoever earns the most points.

Checking on Your Competition Status

You can view how many points you have compared to the person you're competing with either through the Activity app on iPhone or the Activity app on Apple Watch.

It's best to view this data on the iPhone because you can see more information about how the competition is going, with full data for each day of the competition available.

1. Open the Activity app.
2. Select the Sharing tab.
3. Tap the relevant competition listing under the "Competitions" header.

In this section of the Activity app, you can see the total of number of points each person has earned and then a breakdown of the points earned each day of the competition.

You can also see your friend's total movement, exercise, and stand rankings for the current day, plus steps and total distance traveled.

Sending Kudos

When your competitor completes a workout during the challenge, you'll get a notification, and you can send a message using the Apple Watch. You can also initiate conversations within the Activity App on the Apple Watch or the Activity app on iPhone by selecting the person's name and tapping on "Send Message."

Winning a Competition

When you win a competition with a friend, you earn a badge for completing a competition and a separate badge for being victorious.

From there, you can start a new challenge with the same friend, and under the sharing interface, you'll see your respective number of wins and losses.

All of your badges can be viewed in the Activity app either on the Apple Watch or on the iPhone.

It has been nearly two years since Apple released the iPhone 7 without a headphone jack, forcing users who still use wired headphones to plug them into the Lightning connector using an adapter included in the box.

Apple also includes the adapter in the box with the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X, but more evidence has emerged today that suggests that trend will soon end.

Cirrus Logic, a supplier for the adapter, has apparently "confirmed" that the dongle won't be bundled with Apple's widely rumored trio of new iPhones expected next month, according to a Barclays research note.

Barclays already anticipated this would be the case earlier this year.

"Reported a beat but gave mixed guidance with revenue below but earnings ahead. Cirrus didn't update its FY19 guide… but they did finally confirm the dongle loss, adding more support for our below estimates," the research note reads.

Apple routinely says it is pushing towards a "truly wireless future," and the headphone jack adapter has always been a stopgap amid that transition, so if Apple chooses not to include it in the box, it shouldn't really come as a surprise. Rumors suggest new iPads will also lose the headphone jack and adapter.

Not everyone prefers wireless headphones, like AirPods, however, so if true, the removal of the adapter will almost certainly generate some controversy.

Apple will likely continue to sell the adapter as a standalone accessory for $9, which is cheap by its standards, so customers at least won't be forced to pay too much extra for the adapter if it is indeed removed from the box this year.

The adapter is also available at resellers such as Best Buy, where nearly two years later, it is the retailer's second-best selling Apple product in terms of units, so an argument could be made that Apple is removing the adapter too soon.

In a little over a month, we should find out for sure.

A new one-day-only flash sale has opened up at Best Buy, with nearly 30 models of the Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + Cellular) marked down by up to $250. Sale prices begin at $299.00 for the 38mm Aluminum models and $329.00 for the 42mm Aluminum models, but there are also savings on Stainless Steel and Ceramic versions of the 2017 Apple Watch.

With this sale, Best Buy is offering the best prices online for the GPS + Cellular models of the Apple Watch Series 3, with the entry level Aluminum cases coming in $100 cheaper than rivals like B&H Photo and Walmart.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

Below we've listed a few of the discounted models, but be sure to head over to Best Buy's Daily Deals page to see the full list of Apple Watches on sale and make your purchase before the day ends.

• 38mm Space Gray Aluminum, Black Sport Loop - $299.00, down from $399.00

• 42mm Space Gray Aluminum, Midnight Fog Nike Sport Loop - $329.00, down from $429.00

• 38mm Space Black Stainless Steel, Black Sport Band - $449.00, down from $599.00

• 42mm Stainless Steel, Soft White Sport Band - $499.00, down from $649.00

• 38mm White Ceramic, Soft White/Pebble Sport Band - $1,049.00, down from $1,299.00

• 42mm Gray Ceramic, Gray/Black Sport Band - $1,099.00, down from $1,349.00

Additionally, B&H Photo this week launched a new sale focused on back-to-school savings available to students getting ready for the new school year. The sale extends across numerous product categories on B&H Photo, including MacBooks, iPads, microSD cards, portable hard drives, cameras, headphones, and more.

Below we've highlighted a few of the sales in a list, but be sure to head over to B&H Photo to browse the full array of its back-to-school discounts.

MacBook Pro and MacBook Air - Save $100 on 2017 models

• MacBook Air (1.8 GHz, 8GB RAM, 128GB HD) - $899.00, down from $999.00
• 13-inch MacBook Pro (2.3 GHz, 8GB RAM, 128GB HD) - $1,199.00, down from $1,299.00

MacBook Pro - Save $1,000 on a 2016 model

• 15-inch MacBook Pro (2.9 GHz, 16GB RAM, 2TB SSD) - $2,899.00, down from $3,899.00

9.7-inch iPad - Save $20 on a 2017 model

• 128GB, Wi-Fi only - $379.00, down from $399.00

10.5-inch iPad - Save up to $150 on Wi-Fi + Cellular models

• 64GB - $734.00, down from $779.00
• 512GB - $949.00, down from $1,099.00

Head over to our full Deals Roundup for more information on the latest sales and bargains going on this week.

Apple recently updated its Maps app to expand the availability of transit directions to several new regions.

Transit data is now available in Luxembourg, a country that has an expansive transit system including buses, trains, and the Luxembourg City tram.

Apple also appears to have made transit data available in several new cities in Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, and Oregon.

Transit directions were previously available in some of these locations in select cities such as Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, and Portland, but the transit information appears to have expanded to encompass much of these states.

In Canada, Apple has added support for the VIA Rail system that operates across much of the country, spanning more than 7,000 miles across eight provinces. Popular lines include the Canadian that runs between Toronto and Vancouver and the Ocean running from Montreal to Halifax.

There's also a Corridor service between Ontario and Quebec, and several adventure routes offering transportation to rural areas.

Transit directions were first added to Apple Maps in 2015 with the launch of iOS 9. Maps initially only offered transit information in a handful of cities, but over the course of the last few years, Apple has worked to expand the feature to additional areas.

Transit information is now live in dozens of cities and countries around the world, with a full list available on Apple's iOS Feature Availability website.

(Thanks, Ram!)