MacRumors iPhone and iPad Blog: Apps, News, and Rumors

Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover are planning to combine their online payment options into "a single button," hoping to make customers' shopping easier and reduce friction in the checkout process. The button will be a major competitor to PayPal, and combat what's called "the NASCAR effect," where multiple payment logos and options dot the purchasing interface on online...

AT&T is planning to add a new streaming service to its lineup called "AT&T Watch," priced at a low cost of $15 per month with the removal of all sports channels. The service will be one of the cheapest streaming bundles available on the market, and will even be free for AT&T wireless subscribers on unlimited plans (via The Wall Street Journal and Variety). As of now not much else is known...

LG Display is widely considered to be ramping up its OLED display production capabilities in hopes of securing orders for Apple's next-generation iPhone lineup, expected to be released later this year, but mass production challenges have caused the company to fall behind schedule, according to The Wall Street Journal. The report, citing people familiar with the matter, claims that Apple...

eBay today announced a new update for its iOS and Android apps, aimed at further simplifying the item listing process. The headlining feature of the update is a new barcode scanner, allowing sellers to quickly scan the box of an item (if they still have it), select a condition, and click "list your item." The barcode scanner will automatically populate the listing with all of the requisite...

Verizon today announced the evolution of its existing "FamilyBase" parental controls product into "Smart Family," a redesigned app that lets parents track screen time, set content filters, monitor whereabouts, and more. With the Verizon Smart Family app, parents can instantly pause the internet to manage their kids' screen time, check the battery status of their phone, and look at a summary...

Sleep Cycle, a popular and highly downloaded alarm clock and sleep tracking app available for the iPhone, today announced a new Apple Watch app that introduces more features for an even better waking up experience. With the Sleep Cycle for Apple Watch, Sleep Cycle users can enable "snore stopper" and silent wake up options. Sleep Cycle uses "sound analysis technology" to detect when someone is ...

Anyone who uses Apple Pay to checkout in the McDonald's iOS app on a Friday in April will have the opportunity to get free Medium fries with their order. The offer for a free side of fries is Apple's latest promotion for Apple Pay, and customers have two more Fridays to take advantage of it: April 20 and April 27. The McDonald's promotion is valid only with a minimum $1 purchase (excluding...

Netflix today added a slew of 30-second video trailers to its iOS app, after limited testing of the feature since early March. Optimized for mobile, the trailers ape the look of Snapchat and Instagram Stories, appearing as circular icons on the app's main screen and playing back in a vertical format on iPhones. Netflix offered its rationale for the feature in a blog post on its website: Tod...

A new version of Drafts, the simple note-taking app from Agile Tortoise, was released today. Drafts 5 stays faithful to its predecessor's primary goal of allowing users to quickly jot down text, thoughts, ideas, and notes, and builds on these functions by introducing a ground-up rewrite of the app with a raft of new features and customization options. Agile Tortoise has opted to release...

3D Touch is a feature that's been around since the 2015 release of the iPhone 6s, and it's become an integral gesture system on all of Apple's latest iPhones. Though it's been around for a while, there are several hidden and less obvious 3D Touch gestures that you may have forgotten or might not be aware of, especially if you don't use the feature often. In our most recent YouTube video and in ...

Apple today released a new update for Safari Technology Preview, the experimental browser Apple first introduced more than two years ago in March of 2016. Apple designed the Safari Technology Preview to test features that may be introduced into future release versions of Safari. Safari Technology Preview release 54 includes bug fixes and feature improvements for Clipboard API, Beacon API, Web...

When Apple first announced its ARKit developer platform, one of the examples it gave was an image that showed someone playing Dejarik, a holographic board game from the Star Wars universe. The game has been available in an augmented reality experience on the iOS "Star Wars: Jedi Challenges" app [Direct Link], but it required pieces of hardware -- namely the Lenovo Mirage AR headset -- that current...

Just under two years after launching on the iOS App Store, Opera this week announced that its free "Opera VPN" app will be permanently discontinued as of April 30, 2018. Opera's virtual private network app masks the user's true IP address and allows them to bypass firewalls, block tracking cookies, change their virtual location to unlock geo-specific content, and more. At the end of April, the ...

Apple Music has seen a consistent rise in subscriber numbers over the past year, with the streaming music service's fastest growth yet -- hitting 40 million subscribers -- coming just this month. According to Macquarie Capital analyst Ben Schachter, Apple Music will keep up its progress and average 40 percent growth each year over the next three years (via The Wall Street Journal). With this...

Facebook this week shared a blog post explaining "new privacy experiences" that will be available on the social network, in compliance with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), coming into effect on May 25. Facebook originally detailed part of its plan for GDPR-related privacy features back in January, and is now following through in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica...

Popular to-do app Things received a "spit and polish" update today for both macOS and iOS. Version 3.5 of the software bundles in 29 features and improvements based on user feedback, including performance tweaks, tagging enhancements, and more. Collapsible areas in Things has been one of the most requested features, according to the developers, which is why Things 3.5 enables users with...

Apple today seeded the second beta of an upcoming tvOS 11.4 update to its public beta testing group, two weeks after seeding the first beta and three weeks after releasing tvOS 11.3, a minor update that introduced a few smaller features. The tvOS 11.4 public beta can be obtained by going to the Settings app on the Apple TV and navigating to the Software Updates section under "System." "Get...

Sonos today announced the upcoming debut of new color options for the Sonos One speaker, launching in addition to the device's current colors of white and black. Created in collaboration with Danish design brand HAY, the Sonos One will be available in red, yellow, and green in September 2018. Although not mentioned specifically, the announcement of the new speaker colors also includes an image ...