MacRumors

Among many iOS 10 announcements made at WWDC yesterday, one notable update to Apple's mobile operating system came in the form of third party developer support in Apple's iMessage chat platform. With the new SDK, developers can create app extensions -- similar to third party keyboard apps available now on the App Store -- that let users interact with apps from directly within Messages.

Following its announcement at the keynote, the developer of Square Cash [Direct Link] shared a little bit more information about how their payments service works as an app extension for Messages. Once a user has Square Cash installed, they can find it with their other apps in the new iMessage "App drawer." From there, "Just swipe up to pick an amount and attach it to a message. One tap to deposit it!" The iMessage App is still limited by Square Cash's own restraints, however, so international payment transfers are unavailable as of now.

During the keynote, Craig Federighi gave a demo of another iMessage app, DoorDash [Direct Link], collectively collaborating on a group lunch order without leaving Messages. Once he decided on his menu item and selected the quantity of the order, he shared his choice with a contact in Messages to add his lunch to the group ticket. Other entertainment-focused apps, like JibJab [Direct Link], grant users access to the iPhone's camera to place their faces on GIF-like videos to share with friends.

Although not specifically detailed, the iMessage App extensions for already-existing apps, like Square Cash, will presumably be free upgrades for users who already own or have downloaded the base apps. On Apple's developer site, a heavy emphasis is placed on the "purchase" of various sticker packs, however, suggesting that the various Disney and other brand-related stickers will not be free to download.

Help users express themselves in richer ways by providing stickers for purchase on the App Store for iMessage. Users can tap to send stickers in a thread, adjust their size, or place them on top of bubbles, other stickers, and photos. There's no need for you to write code to create stickers — simply drag the images into the designated folder in Xcode.

Not many other iMessage Apps have been detailed by Apple and developers yet, but wording on the developer beta site mentions users will be able to "share content, edit photos, play games, send payments, and collaborate with friends." While some might be similar in execution to third-party keyboards in iOS 9, now that Apple has granted developer access to its Messages platform, it'll be interesting to see what new kind of shortcuts and message-enhancing features come out of the new App Store for iMessage.

Anyone who needs to catchup with the WWDC keynote -- or if you just want a refresher -- can do so by watching MacRumors' 7-minute recap video. Likewise, our iOS 10 tidbits post has more information on iMessage updates, individual read receipts, the ability to remove pre-installed apps, and more.

Apple confirmed during its WWDC 2016 keynote that Apple Pay will be expanding to France, Hong Kong, and Switzerland over the next few months in partnership with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.

Visa and MasterCard will be supported in all three countries, while American Express will also be available in Hong Kong. The specific credit, debit, and prepaid cards that can be used in each country vary depending on the participating issuers listed below.

France

Participating banks and issuers in France at launch will include Banque Populaire, Boon, Caisse Epargne, Carrefour Banque, Orange, and Ticket Restaurant.

Apple Pay will be accepted at many retailers in France, including Apple, Bocage, Boulanger, Cojean, Dior, Le Bon Marché, Louis Vuitton, Orange, Pret a Manger, Sephora, and elsewhere contactless payments are accepted.

Hong Kong

Participating banks and issuers in Hong Kong at launch will include the Bank of East Asia (BEA), Bank of China (Hong Kong), DBS Bank (Hong Kong), Hang Seng Bank, HSBC, and Standard Chartered.

Apple Pay retailers in Hong Kong include 7-Eleven, Apple, Colourmix, KFC, Lane Crawford, Mannings, McDonald's, Pacific Coffee, Pizza Hut, Sasa, Senryo, Starbucks, ThreeSixty, and elsewhere contactless payments are accepted.

Switzerland

Participating banks and prepaid issuers in Switzerland at launch will include Bonus Card, Cornèr Bank (Cornèrcard), and Swiss Bankers.

Apple Pay will be accepted at many retailers in Switzerland, including ALDI SUISSE, Apple, Avec, Hublot, K Kiosk, Lidl, Louis Vuitton, Mobilezone, Press & Books, SPAR, TAG Heuer, and elsewhere contactless payments are accepted.

Six years after making its debut in iOS 4, Game Center has now been quietly removed from Apple's mobile operating system, as a few initial iOS 10 beta testers have noted. Although the company has given users the ability to delete some of its pre-installed apps with the new OS, it appears Game Center in particular is permanently deleted. It is unclear, however, whether the app might be made available to download from the App Store when iOS 10 goes public this fall.

As pointed out by MacRumors' sister site TouchArcade, Game Center is still not completely gone away as a service. In the release notes for the first beta of iOS 10, Apple explains that if a developer wants Game Center-like leaderboards in their app, they will have to implement such features themselves.

• The Game Center app has been removed. If your game implements GameKit features, it must also implement the interface behavior necessary for the user to see these features. For example, if your game supports leaderboards, it could present a GKGameCenterViewController object or read the data directly from Game Center to implement a custom user interface.
• A new account type, implemented by the GKCloudPlayer class, supports iCloud-only game accounts.
• Game Center provides a new generalized solution for managing persistent storage of data on Game Center. A game session (GKGameSession) has a list of players who are the session’s participants. Your game’s implementation defines when and how a participant stores or retrieves data from the server or exchanges data between players. Game sessions can often replace existing turn-based matches, real-time matches, and persistent save games, and also enable other models of interaction between participants.

When it was introduced, Game Center was presented as a way for users to visit a centralized hub of all of their gaming applications on iOS, although not every game supported Apple's app. Game Center provided profiles, achievements, leaderboards, status updates on friends' most recently played games, and a specialized "Turns" tab to keep track of games that used asynchronous multiplayer features.

Apple appears to be addressing multiple user issues with its stock apps in the iOS 10 developer beta, allowing for the removal of over 20 of its first party applications, a long-requested feature many users have been asking for over the past few years.

Read up on more iOS 10 features in our tidbits post here.

Update: As one user has pointed out on Twitter, "Game Center" was mentioned in name during the watchOS 3 section of the keynote. What this means for the future of the service, on either iOS or watchOS, is still unclear.

Update 2: Apple has confirmed to TechCrunch that "Game Center will continue as a service, but it will no longer be available as a standalone application."

With the announcement of iOS 10 at WWDC on Monday, Apple mentioned its adoption of "Differential Privacy" – a mathematical technique that allows the company to collect user information that helps it enhance its apps and services while keeping the data of individual users private.

During the company's keynote address, Senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi – a vocal advocate of personal privacy – summarized the concept in the following way:

We believe you should have great features and great privacy. Differential privacy is a research topic in the areas of statistics and data analytics that uses hashing, subsampling and noise injection to enable…crowdsourced learning while keeping the data of individual users completely private. Apple has been doing some super-important work in this area to enable differential privacy to be deployed at scale.

Wired has now published an article on the subject that lays out in clearer detail some of the practical implications and potential pitfalls of Apple's latest statistical data gathering technique.

Differential privacy, translated from Apple-speak, is the statistical science of trying to learn as much as possible about a group while learning as little as possible about any individual in it. With differential privacy, Apple can collect and store its users' data in a format that lets it glean useful notions about what people do, say, like and want. But it can't extract anything about a single, specific one of those people that might represent a privacy violation. And neither, in theory, could hackers or intelligence agencies.

Wired notes that the technique claims to have a mathematically "provable guarantee" that its generated data sets are impervious to outside attempts to de-anonymize the information. It does however caution that such complicated techniques rely on the rigor of their implementation to retain any guarantee of privacy during transmission.

You can read the full article on the subject of differential privacy here.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Apple has been granted a patent for a possible future iPhone with a wraparound all-glass display (via Patently Apple).

The application was submitted in 2011 but granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today, detailing various embodiments of a portable consumer device with a wraparound screen.

In one example, the device is described as having a transparent housing and a flexible display enclosed within it which is capable of showing visual content at any position inside the housing – using virtual buttons in place of physical volume controls on the handset edge, for instance.

The same embodiment is also described as having a second flexible display assembly that works in concert with the primary one to present visual content in positions beyond the main screen.

The concept images appear to show an old 30-pin connector on the device, likely because Apple's Lightning port had yet to come to market when they were being drawn up.

Nevertheless, the granted patent is timely for Apple – rumors since the beginning of the year have suggested it is looking at the possibility of adopting a curved display for the 2017 iPhone, however it is unclear whether the invention described here would be linked to any special "anniversary iPhone" Apple may be working on.

Other rumors about the 2017 iPhone, which may be called the "iPhone 8" instead of the traditional "iPhone 7s" because of the changes expected, include an edge-to-edge bezel-free display with built-in Touch ID functionality, no home button, and a glass body.

Apple has quietly dropped the requirement that tvOS developers make their games playable using the Siri Remote as a controller.

The policy change was discovered in an update to an existing Apple TV support document covering the use of game controllers, and highlighted by MacRumors' sister site TouchArcade as a revision that will surely be welcomed by developers and gamers alike.

The updated document now recommends to developers: "When designing a tvOS game, you may require the use of an MFi game controller, but where possible you should also support the Siri Remote."

The wording reflects a subtle but significant softening of the company's previous stance on Siri Remote controller support. At the launch of the fourth-generation Apple TV last year, Apple initially encouraged game developers to support the Siri Remote included with the device, but eventually hardened its stance by stipulating the support as a necessary requirement.

That vexed some developers who complained that the Siri Remote simply doesn't function well as a controller for more complex games that involve finer grained control and subtler movements.

The reversed stance therefore paves the way for developers to bring games to Apple TV that would have previously been considered unplayable on the platform.

On the flip side of course, it's also likely to mean that some games which subsequently appear in the Apple TV App Store will be out of reach of users who do not own a compatible third-party MFi game controller.

In related news, Apple yesterday demoed an updated Remote app for the fourth-gen Apple TV and tvOS which mirrors the functionality of the Siri Remote and also allows users to play games using their iPhone.

The company also used its WWDC 2016 keynote to announce an updated version of tvOS that includes new functionality and features for Siri, single sign-on and more.

Following its WWDC keynote address, Apple held an event to announce the winners of its prestigious Apple Design Awards. The company hands out its design awards every year during WWDC, highlighting a section of the best apps and games across Apple's various operating systems.

The design awards were created to recognize high-quality apps that used savvy design to create inventive, compelling new apps and games. Winners of the design awards receive significant recognition, a trophy and receive a selection of Apple products directly from the company.

This year's winners include popular game Lara Croft Go, 3D4Medical's Complete Anatomy, music creation tool Auxy, desktop-class writing app Ulysses Mobile and more.

iOS and watchOS

- Lara Croft Go [iOS]
- Frame.io [iOS]
- Chameleon Run [iOS]
- Auxy Music Creation [iOS]
- Streaks [iOS]
- Complete Anatomy [iOS]
- INKS [iOS]
- Zova - Personal Trainer [iOS]
- Ulysses Mobile [iOS]
- djay Pro [iOS]

Student Winners

- Linum - Free Puzzle Game [iOS]
- Dividr [iOS]

2015 winners include Fantastical 2, Crossy Road, Shadowmatic and Workflow. 2014 winners include Threes!, Leo's Fortune, Blek and Monument Valley.

During the tvOS section of Apple's WWDC keynote today, the company confirmed that Sling TV will be getting an app for the fourth-generation Apple TV. Now, Sling TV has confirmed that the live-streaming app is available to download from the tvOS store, "delivering a live, linear and on-demand multichannel pay-TV service all within a single app."

The Apple TV rollout will introduce a brand-new user interface that the company plans to install on other devices in the coming months. Anyone who downloads Sling TV today to join its beta multi-stream service will additionally gain access to new channels owned by Fox; across all services, new channels from Viacom will also be available.

There's a bundle discount available for users who have yet to purchase an Apple TV, and intend to join Sling TV as well. New customers will have the chance to purchase a new 32GB Apple TV for $89 (previously $150), when they also pre-pay for a three-month subscription to Sling TV ($20 per month), which would eventually equal the Apple TV's original price.

More in-depth coverage of every big piece of tvOS and Apple TV news can be found in our WWDC keynote roundup.

Apple today announced iOS 10, the next major version of its mobile operating system. The software update is compatible with most iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch models capable of running iOS 9, with exceptions including the iPhone 4s, iPad 2 and 3, original iPad mini, and fifth-generation iPod touch.

iOS 10 is available in beta for registered Apple developers starting today, while the update will be seeded to public beta testers in July. The free software update will officially launch in the fall, presumably alongside the iPhone 7 in early to mid September.

iOS 10 features redesigned Messages, Apple News, Apple Music, and Photos apps with several new features, a brand new Home app for controlling HomeKit accessories, a Siri SDK for third-party app developers, and much more. Read our WWDC 2016 liveblog and coverage for a recap of today's announcements.

The complete list of iOS 10 compatible devices:

Apple has shared the full video of its WWDC 2016 keynote, where it also introduced macOS Sierra alongside new versions of watchOS and tvOS.

Update: Apple has removed the iPad 2, iPad 3, original iPad mini, and fifth-generation iPod touch from the compatible devices list on its iOS 10 preview page.

During today's keynote, Apple released several new apps into the App Store under their developer account. The apps are all stock iOS apps that presently come pre-installed under iOS 9.

The list includes:

- Weather
- Stocks
- Mail
- Maps
- Notes
- Voice Memos
- Watch
- Music
- FaceTime
- iTunes Store
- Calendar
- Contacts
- Videos
- Calculator
- Compass
- Tips

If you try to download an existing iOS app, the "Get" button is greyed out, indicating you already have the app. Several readers have confirmed that you can now delete these apps in iOS 10, and later redownload them from the App Store. Apple could also choose to upgrade the apps from the App Store rather than waiting for iOS updates.

Apple has announced a number of new features for the Messages app in iOS 10, including Digital Touch videos and new chat bubble effects.

Messages now shows shared media inside chat transcripts, so that link and image thumbnail previews display, Apple Music tracks can be listened to, and videos can be played without leaving the app.

The camera functionality has also been enhanced inside Messages, allowing users to see what the camera lens is focusing on, while recently taken photos can be browsed alongside the lens view.

iOS 10 also brings emoji predictions as you type, and Messages will highlight words that have corresponding emoji characters, allowing users to tap them and instantly turn them into images. Emojis are also displayed three times bigger than previously in chat transcripts.

Another new feature is called "Bubble Effects", which enable users to expand or deflate chat bubbles in the transcript screen for emphasis. Bubbles can also be made to reveal their contents gradually for dramatic effect.

In addition, Messages in iOS 10 will support handwritten message bubbles, and includes a Digital Touch feature similar to on the Apple Watch, allowing users to sketch responses, share their heartbeat, and more.

Fullscreen animated background effects are also included in the new Messages app, such as disco lights and fireworks, while new third-party 'iMessage apps' can be added in a dedicated app drawer similar to that found in Facebook Messenger, where stickers, seals and animations reside for quick access.

iOS 10 supports all iOS 9 devices except the iPhone 4s and iPad 2, and is available to developers in beta today, while the public beta comes in July, followed by a full release in the fall.

Apple today revealed an all-new "Swift Playgrounds" app that aims to introduce users to "a new way to learn to code with Swift on iPad." The app -- which will be a free download -- is aimed for a public release on the App Store when iOS 10 launches this fall.

The library of Apple-developed programming lessons helps students learn core coding concepts, such as issuing commands, creating functions, performing loops and using conditional code and variables, and allows them to progressively build confidence and skill. Apple will regularly release new standalone challenges so students can continue to refine their coding abilities as their skills and interests grow. Educators and developers can also use Xcode® to create their own unique challenges for the app.

Along with other features, the app has custom "learn to code" lessons from Apple that focus on crafting visual cues around numeric coding data to slowly introduce kids into the world of coding. Multi-touch on the iPad helps coding in the app more straightforward, but Apple also crafted a new coding keyboard to add in new code in just a few keystrokes.

Starting today, Swift Playgrounds is available to Apple Developer Program members, and will additionally be available in the iOS 10 public beta this July. The final version of the app is expected to launch for free on the App Store sometime in the fall. All iPad Air and iPad Pro models will be compatible with the app, as well as iPad mini 2-and-later devices.

Today at its WWDC keynote, Apple announced a redesigned version of Apple News, which the company says has 60 million monthly active users and over 2,000 publications. The new Apple News includes a simpler, bolder interface similar to the Apple Music redesign. It also includes new features like subscriptions, breaking news alerts and more.

Apple News now includes subscriptions, allowing users to read news from select publications within the News app. The For You section also comes broken up into smaller sections to make it easier to follow, including a trending news section and the topics a user follows. News can also create new topic sections based on what you read. There are also featured stories hand-picked by Apple's editors.

The new app can also send breaking news alerts to a user's lock screen, allowing readers to quickly and easily get the news they need.

The new Apple News will be a part of iOS 10, which will debut in the fall.