Google 3D Maps Coming Soon to iPhone And iPad

Google has announced at the "The Next Dimension of Google Maps" event that Google Maps will be finally coming to iOS, just as we had predicted.

At the event, Google announced three major features for Google Maps: Full 3D Maps, Offline mode and a new backpack Street View.

Google Maps will allow users to move around, rotate and interact with 3D models of several major cities. Google explained that they are using automated technology to extract 3D from aerial images taken from planes that fly in a tight pattern, equipped with their own hardware, taking 45-degree imagery. Google 3D Maps will cover areas with a combined population of 300 million people.

Google Maps for iOS will also include the 3D Maps feature. Google gave the demo of the 3D maps feature on an iPad, which was quite ironical.

Google also announced Offline mode for 3D maps, which will allow users to download offline maps of over 100 cities on their smartphones. It was one of the major drawbacks of the Google Maps app compared to other GPS navigation apps as it needed an internet connection to download live maps data and also ended up consuming expensive 3G data. The minimum size of the offline maps is expected to be around 50MB, so it would probably make sense to download them while you're on your home or office Wi-Fi network. Unfortunately, the offline maps feature won't be available to iOS users. Google has mentioned that they plan to add the feature in the future.

Google has also announced that it will be improving Street view by using a backback Street View rig, the Trekker to take images in places where you cannot drive like National parks, castles, Grand canyon etc.

It is widely speculated that Apple will be unveiling their own Maps app at the WWDC 2012 Keynote next week and Google's announcements today seems to have confirmed it.

You can check out the video below to get a glimpse of what 3D imagery will look like on the iPhone:

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iOS 6 to Get Redesigned iTunes Store, App Store And iBookstore

As we get closer to the WWDC 2012 Keynote, where Apple is widely expected to give us a preview of iOS 6, more details about the upcoming major iOS software update seems to be leaking out.

So far we've heard that iOS 6 will include an all-new Maps app with an incredible 3D-mode and Facebook integration.

9to5Mac now reports that iOS 6 will also feature redesigned iTunes Store, App Store and iBookstore.

According to sources familiar with Apple’s upcoming iOS 6 mobile software offering, the company’s three major`digital stores will see design overhauls. The overhauls are said to be major and they focus on improved interactivity when making purchases in iTunes, the App Store, and the iBookstore. Social is a big piece of the store overhauls, and Facebook integration is being tested in the iTunes Store portion, at least.

But 9to5Mac also notes that the redesigned apps won't offer improved discoverability. You may remember that Apple had acquired Chomp - an app search engine earlier in the year. We were expecting Apple to use Chomp's technology to improve App Store search and recommendations. But according to 9to5Mac's source, it may not happen in iOS 6, which would be a pity as discoverability of apps is quite a pain with more than 600,000 apps in the App Store.

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Spotify

• Price: Free
• Category: Utilities , Applications
• Version: 0.5.0
• Size: 12.4 MB
• Languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish
• Seller: Spotify
• © 2008-2010 Spotify Ltd.
• Download: Spotify

Rated 12+ for the following:

• Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor
• Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes
• Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content or Nudity
• Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad. Requires iOS 5.0 or later

Description

Get free access to Spotify Premium now! With Premium you'll get access to millions of tracks from thousands of albums and artists on your iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad. If you haven’t tried Premium before, you can try it on your mobile for 48-hours, completely free. You don’t even have to enter credit card details. Simply download this app and log in using your Facebook account*.

If 48-hours isn’t enough, you can extend your trial by 30 days by following the details in the email we send you when you log in.

If you don't want to extend your Premium trial, or subscribe to Premium, you can still enjoy Spotify on your phone. Wirelessly sync and play mp3s from your computer, explore our music catalogue, and edit your playlists.

Praise for Spotify

- "Spotify is so good" – Mark Zuckerberg - CEO and Founder of Facebook
- "The celestial jukebox is no pipe dream; it’s here now." - Time
- "Spotify makes music fun again, just like the iPod did nearly 10 years ago." – Billboard.biz

Great features

• Instant access to millions of tracks
• Stream online
• Listen offline – no mobile connection needed
• Share music with your friends
• Star your favourite tracks
• Wirelessly sync your own MP3s to your iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad
• Create and sync playlists
• Send the tracks you listen to direct to Last.fm & Facebook

Love Spotify?

Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/spotify
Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/spotify

* Full mobile terms of Use & 48-hour free trial terms and conditions can also be found on the Spotify website.

Download Spotify

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Google+

• Price: Free
• Category: Social Networking
• Updated: May 09, 2012
• Version: 2.0.0.5888
• Size: 18.2 MB
• Languages: English, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Malay, Moldavian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
• Seller: Google Mobile
• © Google Inc. 2012
• Download: Google+

Rated 4+

Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, iPad. Requires iOS 4.3 or later

Description

Share and keep up with people no matter where you are with the Google+ app. Join a hangout, post a photo, or see what friends are sharing while you’re on the go. Use Messenger to get everyone on the same page with fast, simple group chat.

Features:
- Turn on Instant Upload to sync photos from your phone to a private Google+ album
- Video chat with up to 9 friends with mobile Hangouts in Messenger
- Chat with a friend or all your friends at once with Messenger
- Check out the What’s Hot stream to see trending topics
- View the Nearby stream to see what people near your location are saying

Download Google+

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Facebook Acquires Instagram For $1 Billion

Facebook has just announced that it is buying Instagram, the hugely popular photo-sharing service.

According to reports, Facebook may have bought Instagram for a whopping $1 billion.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the acquisition in a blog post:

For years, we've focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family. Now, we'll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests.

We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram's strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That's why we're committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

These and many other features are important parts of the Instagram experience and we understand that. We will try to learn from Instagram's experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure.

Instagram (App Store link) was voted the iPhone app of the year in 2011 by Apple and recently crossed the 30-million iPhone users milestone and had also released an Android app last week, which was downloaded more than a million times in 12 hours.

The San Francisco-based company has only 13 employees and raised $7 million just over a year ago, when it only had 1.75 million registered users. So it is an amazing deal for its founders and employees.

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Air Display Will Allow You to Use Your New iPad as a Wireless HiDPI Retina Display For Your Mac

Avatron - developers of Air Display - a popular iOS app that allows users to use their iPad, iPhone and iPod touch as a wireless display for their Mac or Windows computer have just announced that they will releasing a new version of their app that includes support for the new iPad's Retina Display.

After some initial hiccups, Avatron has managed to get their app working  on the new iPad with good performance. They have also added support for Lion's hidden HiDPI mode, that renders with double-resolution on a double-resolution screen. MacRumors explains:

HiDPI mode allows OS X to support high resolution monitors while retaining the same relative size for user interface elements, such as windows and buttons. 

HiDPI mode will let the new iPad act like a 1024x768 point screen where each point is made up of 4 pixels. Apple has already built in support for HiDPI and some of their Apps, such as Messages, already include Retina-sized artwork that work in this mode. Users simply have to choose "1024x768 (HiDPI)" mode in their System Preferences to take advantage of the new mode. 

Here's how it looks like:

The goods news for other iOS device users (especially iPad 2 and iPhone 4S) is that, thanks to the performance  tuning and profiling, updated iOS app delivers dramatically better frame rates on their iOS devices as well.

Air Display is available in the App Store for $9.99 [direct App Store link] and the update with support for iPad 3's Retina Display will be available as a free update.

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Apple Announces 25 Billionth App Downloaded And Winner of $10,000 iTunes Gift Card

Apple has finally announced the 25th billionth app downloaded and winner of the ’25 Billion App Countdown’ promotion who gets $10,000 iTunes gift card.

Apple has issued the following press release:

The 25 billionth app downloaded, Where's My Water? Free, was downloaded by Chunli Fu of Qingdao, China. As the winner of the App Store Countdown to 25 Billion Apps, Chunli Fu will receive a $10,000 iTunes® Gift Card.

“We’d like to thank our customers and developers for helping us achieve this historic milestone of 25 billion apps downloaded,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “When we launched the App Store less than four years ago, we never imagined that mobile apps would become the phenomenon they have, or that developers would create such an incredible selection of apps for iOS users.”

Hat tip to The Loop's Jim Dalrymple

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Apple Buys Chomp – App Search Engine For $50 Million

TechCrunch reports that Apple has acquired Chomp - a startup that offers app search and discovery platform. Chomp also has a free iPhone app in the App Store. 

TechCrunch reports:

Apple has bought the app search and discovery platform Chomp, we’ve learned.

We first covered Chomp in November 2009 to announce their seed funding. Since then, they’ve grown their scope to include not only iPhone apps, but Android apps as well. In fact, Chomp currently has a deal with Verizon to power all of their Android-based app searches. That relationship, obviously, is going to get a bit awkward with this acquisition.

My understanding is that such deals will remain intact for now but are likely to end once the Chomp team and product fully transitions over to Apple. The same is likely true for Chomp’s stand-alone products.

As the number of apps have increased in the App Store, which is now over 550,000 apps, it has become more and more difficult to find a new app. Apple understands that it has a growing problem on its hand and seems to have bought Chomp to help address it. Chomp claims that "their proprietary algorithm learns the functions and topics of apps, so you can search based on what apps do, not just what they’re called. Try searching for “puzzle games”, “kids games”, “expense trackers”, “tip calculators” or “chat” and start finding great apps."

We just tried Chomp (iTunes link), though we liked the user interface, we were not very impressed with the search results.

Apple has confirmed to AllThingsD that it has acquired Chomp:

Apple on Thursday confirmed it has acquired San Francisco-based start-up Chomp, which operates a search engine for apps, for an undisclosed amount. Apple declined to elaborate on how it plans to integrate Chomp, other than to say it sometimes acquires technology companies and generally doesn’t discuss its plans. 

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that Apple may have bought Chomp for about $50 million, which is an awesome deal for a 20-employee startup that has raised $2.5 million in two rounds of funding. The other bonus is that they all get to work for Apple.

9 to 5 Mac reports that according to their sources Chomp CEO Ben Keighran and CTO Cathy Edwards are already working at Apple.

Keighran has joined the iTunes Marketing team and Edwards is now a Senior iTunes Engineer.

We can't wait to see how Apple plans to use Chomp's technology to improve App Store search and recommendations.

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iOS App Economy: Developers Receive $12 Per iOS Device Sold; 23 Cents Per Download

During the last earnings conference call, Apple's CEO Tim Cook revealed that Apple had paid out a whopping $700 million to developers in the fourth quarter.

Based on that information, folks at market intelligence firm Asymco have come up with some interesting details about the iOS app economy.

Here are some of the highlights:

• If Apple gave away $700 million to developers in the last quarter, it means that iOS apps generated $1 billion in revenues, of which Apple retained $300 million.
• Apple posted total iTunes income of $2.027 billion, so it generated a little over $1 billion revenue from songs, videos and iBooks.
• According to Asymco's calculations, since Apple crossed the milestone of 18 billion apps downloads on October 4th, 2011 and according to them will cross the milestone of 25 billion app downloads on February 25th, the per day download rate is approximately 48.6 million apps. This works out to an average price of 23 cents per download.
• Apple has sold over 335 million iOS devices, so that works out to approximately 75 apps downloaded per iOS device.
• At an average price of 23 cents per download that works out to $17 of iTunes income from Apps.
• This means that for each iOS device sold, it results in a minimum payment of $12 to iOS developers.

Note: These numbers don't include the revenues generated by advertising or subscription for services (which bypass in-app subscription).

That's amazing when you consider 335 million iOS devices have been sold so far. From Apple's point of view, though the revenues generated from the App Store may not be a small percentage of the overall revenues (Apple posted revenues of $46.33 billion in the last quarter), apps and the App Store drive more stickiness to the platform and encourage more hardware sales, which is priceless.

What do you think about these stats? Sound off in the comments.

[via Asymco]

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iOS 5.1 to Bring Rich Text Formatting to Notes App

Folks at iPhoneHellas have posted a screenshot of the Notes app from iOS 5.1 beta, which suggests that Apple plans to enhance the Notes app to finally include rich text formatting.

With iOS apps such as Notes coming to Macs with OS X Mountain Lion, it makes sense to allow rich text formatting in the Notes app.

Based on the screenshot, it looks like we will soon be able to include bulleted lists, add hyperlinks, change the color of the text and more.

Apple is rumored to release iOS 5.1 on or around March 9th, which is couple of days after it unveils iPad 3.

Even though Apple has seeded three beta versions of iOS 5.1 (beta 1, beta 2, beta 3) so far, it hasn't revealed too many new features other than the slider button for the Camera app in the lock screen and support for Japanese coming to Siri.

[iPhoneHellas source iMore]

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Apple Launches ’25 Billion App Countdown’ Promotion; Winner To Get $10,000 App Store Gift Card

When Apple launched the App Store on July 10th, 2008, even they would not have thought in their wildest imaginations that it would end up becoming such a huge success.

The success of the App Store was clear when one billion apps were downloaded in just 9 months. Fast forward to today and the App Store is about to hit the magical 25 billion app download mark.

Apple has launched a 25 Billion App Countdown promotion to celebrate the milestone. The user who downloads the 25 billionth app from the App Store will get a $10,000 App Store gift card.

As of today, nearly 25 billion apps have been downloaded worldwide. Which is almost as amazing as the apps themselves. So we want to say thanks. Download the 25 billionth app, and you could win a US$10,000 App Store Gift Card.

Users can enter the promotion up to 25 times every day by either downloading an app from the App Store or by simply filling an alternate entry form – for free.

Apple ran a similar promotion for 10 billion app downloads almost a year back.

You can checkout this webpage for the contest details. The counter was at 24,296,320,429 at the time of writing this post and it's moving very fast. Keep an eye on the counter and don't miss out on the opportunity to win the $10,000 iTunes gift card. Good luck!

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Twitter Also Uploads Address Book to Its Servers And Stores it For 18 Months

Last week, a developer based in Singapore discovered that Path - the personal life-sharing service with more than 2 million users uploads the entire address book to its servers.

Path has since apologized for the lack of foresight, released an update version of the app, which explicitly requests users for permission to upload their address book to its servers and has also deleted all the address book data uploaded prior to that from its servers.

But while Path took brunt of the blame for the privacy issue, it has been revealed that it was not the only company that uploaded the address book to its servers. Instagram - a popular camera app quietly released an update that added privacy controls (as they uploaded the address book without permission as well) along with some new features.

The Los Angles Times now reports Twitter has also confessed that they upload a user's address book to their servers when the users taps on the "Find friends" feature on their iPhone app and keeps the data on its servers. Twitter says that it plans to update the app to clarify that user contacts will be uploaded and stored.

"We want to be clear and transparent in our communications with users," Penner wrote in an email. "Along those lines, in our next app updates, which are coming soon, we are updating the language associated with Find Friends -- to be more explicit. In place of 'Scan your contacts,' we will use "Upload your contacts" and "Import your contacts" (in Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, respectively).

If you've time then checkout The Verge's article on this issue, which provides information about which apps have your uploaded your data and how they're getting it.

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Apple Makes it Mandatory For iPhone App Developers to Submit Retina Display Screenshots

Apple has notified developers of iOS Developer program to only upload images for Retina Display for their iPhone and iPod touch apps while submitting them to the App Store.

Prior to this, developers could upload images for Retina Display, but it was not a mandatory requirement.

Apple has issued the following notification:

Required iPhone & iPod touch Screenshot Upgrade for Retina Display

When you create or update your apps in iTunes Connect, you must upload screenshots that are high-resolution. We require your screenshots as high-resolution images so that your app is optimized for the Retina display.

The requirements for high-resolution images are 960 x 640, 960 x 600, 640 x 960, or 640 x 920 pixels. Images must be at least 72 dpi, in the RGB color space, and the file must be .jpeg, .jpg, .tif, .tiff, or .png. You can update your screenshot files at any time in iTunes Connect.

Developers need to meet this new requirement even when they submit an update for their existing apps. While this could well be a house-keeping exercise to ensure that the images in the App Store look good on iOS devices like iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S with Retina display, it has also led to speculation that iPhone 3GS may not be around much longer.

We don't agree. While we expect Apple to phase out iPhone 3GS when it launches the next generation iPhone, we don't think Apple will stop supporting iPhone 3GS so soon. Also screenshots are used in the App Store and has no bearing on the support for a particular device.

What do you think?

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Process Killer: App That Allowed Users to Close All Apps Running in The Background Was Briefly Available in The App Store

While there are jailbreak tweaks available to kill processes running in the background to free up memory, did you know that there was an app briefly available in the App Store that allowed users to kill processes running in the background or at least that is what it claimed to do. 

Apple seems to have removed Process Killer app developed by Aeonika from the App Store recently. We found out about the Process Killer app when we came across this article by Digital Inspiration's Agarwal, which talks about "How to close all apps in the background".

Though the app still shows up in the search results on Google, clicking on the link (which is an App Store link) gives you the following error message: "The item you've requested is not currently available in the App Store".

Here're some interesting details about the Process killer app:

• As you can see from the screenshot above, the app received quite a lot of favorable reviews in the App Store from users.
• This was the description of the app in the App Store (courtesy Appolicious):

Application shows you background processes and memory consumption.The app "kills" with it's simplicity!

• You can checkout the screenshot and demo video of the app below:

• It looks like the app was available in the App Store since October 2011 and was available for $0.99. According to the Digital Inspiration's article published on 6th January 2012, it was a free app.

We're not sure how the app sneaked into the App Store, as we're quite sure that the app used unpublished API's that officially break Apple's iOS Developer agreement. The other issue is that when you click on the URL for developer's website, you're taken to an under construction page.

If you've seen this video by iOS developer - Fraser Speirs, which gives a demo of how iOS multitasking works then it is also possible that Apple removed the app from the App Store for misleading users.

Whatever the reason, we were quite surprised to find out that there was an app available to kill background processes in the App Store so we thought of sharing it with you.

Have a nice weekend!

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Apple Sends ‘Take Down’ Notices to AppTrackr – Major Source of Pirated iOS Apps

AppTrackr - which is a website that allows users to illegally download and install pirated iOS apps has announced (via Installous) that they have started receiving take down notices from Apple.

AppTrackr claims that Apple has been scrapping their links and sending them take down notices for a lot of their content, which has forced them to implement CAPTCHA checks to all outbound links.

ApplTrackr has also revealed that they've moved their servers and will be placing an ad on the CAPTCHA page to help them support their servers.

It is good to see Apple taking steps to prevent piracy of iOS apps, which has been an issue ever since Apple launched the App Store and should come as good news to developers. It remains to be seen if Apple can prevent piracy of iOS apps completely as it would also help in getting rid of the stigma of piracy that is unfortunately associated with jailbreaking.

Sometimes we wonder whether Apple would have taken a different stance if jailbreaking was not used for illegal activities such as piracy of apps.

[iJailbreak source 9 to 5 Mac]

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NFL To Stream Super Bowl XLVI To iPhone And iPad

We have some good news for NFL fans (with some caveats).

NFL and NBC has announced that it will stream the Super Bowl and the Pro Bowl live on its website for the first time.

NFL will also stream the Super Bowl and Pro Bowl live to Verizon's NFL Mobile app for iPhone and iPad (App Store link). Unfortunately, this means that it will be available only to Verizon Wireless customers.

According to Fierce Online video, users will be able to watch the game online in HD, access DVR-style controls and select additional camera angles. They'll also get access to in-game highlights, live statistics and other interactive elements.

It won't be the first time NFL has streamed live online, it has streamed Sunday Night Football games since 2008 with SNF Extra previously

Rick Cordella, vice president and general manager for NBC Sports Digital Media had this to say:

"We don't want to limit ourselves to people not in front of the TV."

The Super Bowl is the biggest attraction of the year on television, with last season's Packers-Steelers matchup drawing 111 million viewers, which was a record U.S. audience for any show.

It would have been great if NFL would have streamed the Super Bowl to all mobile users rather than restricting it to only Verizon Wireless customers. We're hoping that yesterday's announcement is a step in that direction.

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Pre-iOS 4 Device Users Reporting Issues Downloading Apps From App Store [Updated]

Engadget reports that users of pre-iOS 4 devices are reporting that they're not able to download apps from the on-device App Store.

Based on this thread in Apple discussion forums, the issue seems to be affecting quite a few pre-iOS 4 device users.

Update: Engadget now reports that the issue has now been fixed.

Engadget reports:

Unfortunately for them, ever since a recent update on the 16th they haven't been able to download any new apps from the App Store straight to their devices.

Apple discussion forums member mwiesner explains the problem he is facing on his iPhone 3GS:

Whenever I go into a specific app in the app store, none of the buttons work properly.

1) clicking on the price no longer downloads the app,

2) the ratings button does nothing,

3) the 'tell a friend' and 'git this app' buttons jump back to the top of the app window,

4) pictures usually don't show up.  They usually appear as five gray rectangular boxes with white borders (though in one app one too-large-for-the-window picture shows up (see pic),

5) the 'app support' button still goes to the developer's website.

6) the 'top in-app purchases' banner is just text now.

We're not sure what change Apple had rolled out on December 16th, but according to users complaining about the problem, the issue seems to have started on that date.

Thankfully these users can download apps from iTunes on their computer and sync them with their pre-iOS 4 devices as a workaround to the problem. This issue seems to affect original iPhone and iPod touch users as iOS 4 or later iOS software updates did not support these devices and also some iPhone 3GS users who decided not to upgrade to iOS 4 or later.

While the blogsphere seems to be speculating that Apple is blocking these users from accessing the App Store, we feel it's a bug, which will be fixed soon.

Update: Engadget now reports that the issue has now been fixed. So as we had mentioned it wasn't a conspiracy against pre-iOS 4 device users, it was just a bug, which Apple has now fixed.

What do you think? Are you facing the problem? Let us know in the comments.

[Source Engadget]

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iTether: iPhone App That Offers Unlimited Tethering For a One-Time Fee Briefly Approved By Apple

Apple has approved a tethering application from Tether.com called iTether in the App Store. The iPhone app is a companion app for the Mac and PC versions, which allows users to use their iPhone's data connection to surf the internet on a Mac or PC over USB.

Apple has previously banned such applications from the App Store possibly due to pressure from carriers like AT&T, Verizon and Sprint who offer tethering plans for $20 per month that can be used using the Personal Hotspot feature that is available for iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS users. In the case of iTether users have to pay only a one-time fee of $14.99, which is the cost of the app and no recurring fees.

Here's a quick description of the app from the App Store:

Tether is an application that allows your Mac and PC to take advantage of your smartphone's data plan, providing you access to the Internet on your laptop anywhere there is cellular coverage from your smartphone.

Tether is easy to install, easy to use, works practically anywhere, and is very cost-effective.

To download the PC software visit: http://tether.com/i/Tether-iPhone.exe

To download the Mac software visit: http://tether.com/i/Tether-iPhone.dmg

It is widely speculated that Apple will remove the iPhone app from the App Store and the approval was a mistake by Apple's app review staff. However, Tether claims:

"We were very clear with Apple what our app did. They asked us a bunch of questions and then approved us."

It won't be the first time if Apple pulls the app from the App Store. Back in 2008, Apple had briefly approved a similar tethering app called NetShare into the App Store, only to remove it within a few hours. Since then we've seen jailbreak apps such as MyWi that offer the personal hotspot functionality and incidentally is also one of the main reasons why users jailbreak their iPhone.

So download iTether using this App Store link before it is removed if you want to enjoy tethering for a one-time fee.

Update 1:

Strange, but the app is still available in the App Store. Is Apple okay with the apps that allow USB tethering? We wonder what carriers like AT&T think about it.

Update 2:

It looks like Apple has pulled the app from the App Store. You now get the following error message when you click on the App Store link. Thanks JB Wi for the heads up.

If you managed to download it before it was pulled then you don't need to worry, it will continue to work for you.

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