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

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 ...

Bang & Olufsen brand subsidiary B&O Play today announced the Beoplay P6, the latest offering in its range of portable wireless speakers. Designed by Cecilie Manz, the P6 shares a similar aesthetic to the Danish audio company's Beoplay A1 and P2, featuring a dust and splashproof anodized aluminum exterior with square speaker grilles on both sides, and a leather strap looped through one side for ...

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress last week about the ongoing Cambridge Analytica scandal, he was asked a question about what kind of data Facebook collects from people when they use various apps and websites that have Facebook tools and integrations installed. Zuckerberg promised to share more information on that topic at a later time, and today Facebook made...

Introduced in iOS 11, lane guidance in Apple Maps is designed to let Maps users know which lane they should be in to avoid missing an upcoming turn or exit. The lane guidance feature was initially limited to the United States and China when iOS 11 was first released in September, but Apple has been working to expand it to additional countries. Recently, the feature was introduced in Finland,...

Apple's new low-cost sixth-generation iPad with Apple Pencil support has likely spurred many new customers to adopt an iPad or upgrade from an older model. At just $329, the new iPad is much more affordable than the iPad Pro, making it easier than ever to get your hands on a tablet that works with the Apple Pencil. For new iPad owners, we've rounded up a handful of apps that are well worth...

T-Mobile will pay $40 million to the U.S. Treasury for failing to correct ongoing issues with call delivery to rural areas and fooling customers with false ringtones, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced today. The FCC decided that T-Mobile violated the Communications Act following an investigation launched after T-Mobile subscribers were unable to reach...