Late last week, the news broke that Apple was removing "overtly sexual" applications from the App Store. The list of applications that have been removed have not only included novelty apps and adult themed slideshow apps, but also a number of games including Daisy Mae's Alien Buffet. This graph provided by AppShopper.com shows that on a typical day, about 100 apps are removed from the U.S. App Store. This includes forcible removals by Apple as well as instances where a developer has chosen to remove an application from sale.
On Wednesday, February 17th, however, this number shot up to 932 removals and peaked at nearly 4000 removals on Thursday, February 18th. The high number of removals has continued over the weekend as Apple continues to clear out these newly blocked apps. In speaking with Apple, ChilliFresh found out that over 5000 apps were affected, which corresponds to AppShopper's stats as of Saturday, though the higher than normal rate of removals seem to be continuing. So far, the removals represent about 3% of the total number of apps in the App Store.
While the merit of Apple's new policy remains an ongoing debate, the new policy may slightly improve some of the clutter found in the App Store as the most prolific "sexy app" developer had published nearly 500 variants of their bikini photobooks.
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
