Google Play Review, Paying Selfie, Apple's Trade-in - and other news of the week for a mobile developer

Change your old Android to a new trendy iPhone!

There is evidence that Apple will launch a trade-in program for devices from other manufacturers. Simply put, any owner of a phone for Android or BlackBerry will be able to get a discount on the new iPhone, selling their beliefs and giving up their old device. It sounds more like a stock at a nearby supermarket or just as a joke, given that Apple declined to comment. But the rumor would have remained hardly plausible gossip if it were not for authoritative sources: Forbes referring to Bloomberg (!).

This is not the first trade-in program from Apple. 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 dragging the users of other brands of smartphones - everything was peaceful, honest and within the same brand.

By the way, Tim Cook said earlier that the number of Android exchanging on 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 with sales everything is quite good and without any trade-in shares. Apparently, Apple CEO, taking advantage of the situation, is trying to follow the precepts of his predecessor and “destroy Android”.
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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. The founder of Alibaba demonstrated the technology of paying for purchases with a selfie. Alas, there are no details, and so far there are more questions than answers. How to ensure safety? What happens if you recognize other people's photos?

No, I understand the 21st century is in the yard, and every self-respecting geek has already made 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 perform quite a lot of actions. In my opinion, it is much easier to attach a finger to a button.

New rules from Google

Google decided to fight the garbage that is rapidly accumulating on Google Play. In the near future, the policy of adding applications to the store will be tightened . Applicants will be checked manually by a team specially assembled for this task.

Google reports that such a check will not bring significant delays, and it will be possible to wait for a response on a candidate for entering the site only a few hours after submitting the application.

Previously, the verification of downloadable programs was completely automatic, using special software. This allowed the malicious code and low-quality content to leak into the store, which, of course, greatly reduced the quality of Google Play content.

The new verification procedure paid great attention to the definition of age restrictions. Until now, the developers themselves could assign the age rating of their application, now it will be automatically determined based on the answers to the special questionnaire.

Questionnaire developers will be independent rating organizations. It is curious that the result will be influenced not only by the answers to the questions, but also by the developer’s country, because the requirements for censorship are different everywhere.

17 grams of honor and respect

March 9, the presentation of the gold Apple Watch, but this news does not surprise anyone. But I think it’s worth finding out if these watches are so golden or not.

The most expensive modification of the Apple Watch with the case of 18-carat gold will cost $ 17 thousand. The company uses not 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 life, Apple engineers also added ceramic chips to the alloy. As a result, Apple Watch received a case consisting of gold by 47%.

In the end, how much is the gold itself in this watch ?! It is reported that the “golden” Apple Watch Edition case weighs about 55 g. It turns out that in the 75% alloy of this metal only 37.5 g, and taking into account ceramic chips the weight of the material is 17.6 g, a little more than half a troy ounce. (31.3 g) The cost of one ounce is about $ 1,160, divide in half and get the cost of the case - $ 650.

In fact, for the remaining more than $ 16,000, you buy the most basic Apple Watch for $ 349 ...

Apple servers are falling too

Apple has not given detailed comments that would reveal the reasons for the 12-hour failure of online services, which occurred on March 11. So far, only an internal DNS error has been known, as a result of which European retail stores have stopped working, and almost all users have lost access to the Mac App Store, the App Store, the iTunes Store and iTunes Connect.

There is also information that some developers were faced with the fact that some of the information that they entered there during the last week was lost 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. We can only guess what could happen in reality, and what losses the company suffered, but, according to the most modest estimates, we are talking about at least $ 24 million.

Amazon storming iOS again

Amazon Game Studios 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 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 hit the top 500 rated downloads.

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 the 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 to their own platform and are available on iOS, and not Android. On the other hand, games will be paid, without IAP, and such projects feel much better on the apple platform: features, promotions, awards, etc.

What results will be with Amazon this time, we will know soon, as the projects should appear in the store soon.


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