apps

There might be hundreds of thousands of apps in your favorite mobile marketplace, but chances are, few developers there are actually making serious cash.

During the first 20 days of November, just 25 developers, including Rovio, Zynga, Electronic Arts, and Disney, generated half of all mobile app revenue earned, research firm Canalys discovered in a study announced yesterday. The companies pulled in a combined $60 million in the U.S. from paid downloads and in-app purchases. The remaining $60 million was earned by all other developers.

Canalys analyzed both the App Store and Google's Play marketplace. Although other app … Read more

These days, I expect to find an app for just about anything. There's an app that tells you the best time to hit the restroom during a movie. There's an app that tells you how long your jumping hangtime is. Now we just need an app that tells you how much chocolate you can pig out on after a workout without feeling guilty. Oh wait, that app already exists.

Train for Chocolate is one of hundreds of apps in the Suunto-sponsored Movescount App Zone. The sports community site offers a large collection of apps that work with the Suunto Ambit GPS watch. … Read more

Nearly three months after its debut on the iPhone and iPod Touch, Google has updated its standalone YouTube app for the first time, adding compatibility for the iPad and iPhone 5.

As part of an update today, the app is now universal and works on the three different screen sizes.

Other additions include support for video streaming over AirPlay, support for URLs within video descriptions, and what Google says are "videos that start faster and play more smoothly."

YouTube was once a built-in application on iOS from the very first iPhone. Apple removed it, along with Google Maps … Read more

Mobile traffic is growing so fast globally that in some places it has already surpassed desktop traffic.

That was one of the key conclusions of a year-end Internet trends report delivered this evening at Stanford University by Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Mary Meeker.

Once known as "Queen of the Net," Meeker reported that 13 percent of all Internet traffic is now executed from a mobile device, up from 4 percent just two years ago. In tech-savvy India, mobile Internet traffic has reached 60 percent, surpassing desktop Internet traffic, which has declined to 40 percent.

Monetization of the mobile … Read more

These days, lots of folks are talking about apps and how they might join what looks like the app gold rush. Unfortunately, like the gold rush of yore, most people will come away deeply disappointed.

A recent New York Times article by David Streitfeld, "As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living," showed the reality of trying to make it in the app-making world. In the piece, one unscientific survey of developers showed these stats: "A quarter of the respondents said they had made less than $200 in lifetime revenue from Apple. A quarter … Read more

Last week Apple released the much anticipated, and delayed, update to iTunes. iTunes 11 has a new look and feel, as well as some new features such as "Up Next." Along with the new look and feel comes new methods of interacting and accomplishing once familiar tasks in iTunes. One of those tasks, managing downloads, isn't as obvious as it used to be.

When iTunes 11 was first released I had a few apps with updates available, so I started the downloads. In the previous version(s) of iTunes you could manage active downloads in the sidebar, … Read more

I love audiobooks. Nothing makes a car ride faster or more pleasant than a good spoken-word book piping through the speakers.

That's why I've routinely championed smartphone-powered services like Audible, Audiobooks.com, Simply Audiobooks, and Tales2Go.

Now there's another app worth adding to your audiobook arsenal: Audiobooks HQ, which gives you access to more than 5,000 public-domain titles -- all for a measly $1.99.

The app connects you with two catalogs: the Globe Radio Repertory and Librivox. The former contains just four works (including "Don Quixote" and "Madame Bovary"), while the … Read more

The text message may be celebrating its 20th birthday today, but as far as we know, only one SMS has been sent by a fox in all those years. (And by fox, of course, we mean the mammal belonging to the Canidae family, not the mammal belonging to the hot-humans-with-phones family).

The text reads like so: "jlv l øi\a0ab 34348tu åaugjoi zølbmosdji jsøg ijio sjiw," which, as the multilingual among you may have already ascertained, is Norwegian fox speak. … Read more

WhatsApp, the maker of a popular cross-platform mobile chat program, has been in talks to be acquired by Facebook, sources tell TechCrunch.

TechCrunch had no information about a possible price range or how advanced the talks might be.

WhatsApp said: "The reported story is a rumor and not factually accurate. We have no further information to share at the moment."

Founded in 2009, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company provides a smartphone app for Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Symbian, and Windows Phone that delivers text messages, as well as images and audio and video messages. The ad-free app reportedly … Read more