As Apple's Phil Schiller recently noted on Mastodon, the App Store is now 15 years old. The App Store debuted with 500 apps and grew quickly. Just a few months later, I reported in one of the earliest posts on iPhone J.D. that there were 10,000 apps on the App Store. When the App Store first opened, some of the most popular apps included games like Super Monkey Ball and Bejeweled 2, social media apps like Facebook, Twitterific, AIM, and MySpace Mobile, the New York Times, OmniFocus, and MLB.com At Bat. Some of those apps are long gone, but others are very much thriving today. Between reading the news, doing crossword puzzles, and doing Wordle, some version of the New York Times is still open on my iPad or iPhone every day. And now, the recent news of note:
- Speaking of beloved apps from the past, I remember when it seemed that everyone loved Evernote, one of the first products to introduce folks to the idea of accessing your information from anywhere. As David Sparks of MacSparky notes, the current owner of Evernote is now laying off most of its employees. I haven't used Evernote in a long time, but as David notes, it is an "an ignominious end." For an interesting look at Evernote from about a decade ago when things were very different, check out this article by Harry McCracken.
- The public beta of iOS 17 is now available, so lots of folks are talking about the new features. The headline of this article by Allison Johnson of The Verge says it all: iOS 17 is a lot of little updates that make a big impact.
- Dan Moren of Six Colors likes the new Standby mode in iOS 17, especially when you use the widget view.
- Federico Viticci of MacStories says that the improvements in iPadOS 17 are especially nice, especially the Stage Manager improvements, and he also likes the improved widget on the iPhone and iPad.
- The public beta of watchOS 10 is also now available, so Dan Moren takes a first look at it. He says that the new emphasis on widgets is a fantastic use of the Digital Crown. He also notes that the new Snoopy watch face is truly excellent.
- Kate Kozuch of Tom's Guide interviews Apple's Eric Charles of Worldwide Product Marketing to discuss the changes in watchOS 10.
- Alex Guyot of MacStories previews some of the best new features of watchOS 10. Alex notes that you can still access the Dock, but now you do it with a double-click of the Digital Crown. And if you are using one of the few watch faces that could traditionally be changed by spinning the Digital Crown (like the Metropolitan face), in watchOS 10 you first need to touch the watch face and then spin the Digital Crown to change things.
- If you are using the beta version of iOS 17 and tvOS 17, you can try out using FaceTime on an Apple TV. Filipe Espósito of 9to5Mac says that the beta version of the feature is still a little buggy, but the idea is implemented incredibly well.
- One of the nice features of the current iPhone running iOS 16 is that if Apple sees an urgent need to push out a security update, it can now release a Rapid Security Response: a quick update that is far short of a full software update. Apple released iOS Security Response 16.5.1(a) earlier this week, and I installed it and it seemed to work fine. But Apple quickly pulled back that release because it was causing problems with certain websites. As Juli Clover of MacRumors notes, Apple subsequently released a revised version, 16.5.1(c), a version that addresses the security issue without messing up certain websites. It's nice to see that Apple can issue rapid responses to Rapid Security Responses.
- Aaron Tilley of the Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is the world's first $3 Trillion company.
- Justin Myers of Gadget Hacks notes that when you see a volume slider on the screen (for example, as you press the volume buttons on the side of an iPhone) you can actually touch the on-screen controls to change the volume.
- There is a new social media app on the iPhone, but I suspect that you don't need me to tell you that. John Gruber wrote on July 5 that he liked Thread's chances, and Jay Peters and Jon Porter reported earlier this week that Threads now has over 100 million users. And that is without Threads being available yet in Europe. You can find me on Threads at @iphonejd.
- Oliver Haslam of iMore reports that a burglar in the UK stole a woman's bag from her home, but her bag contained an AirTag, and as a result, the burglar was traced to and arrested at a nearby hotel.
- Yesterday was World Emoji Day, so we saw a preview of some of the new Emoji that are likely to come to the iPhone in 2024. Zac Hall of 9to5Mac runs down what is new, including a head shaking vertically or horizontally, although the new Emoji are not yet set in stone.
- A key reason that many iPhone apps are so useful is that the iPhone has GPS. We all know that GPS works by using satellites in the sky, but most of us don't know much more than that. Bartosz Ciechanowski wrote a truly amazing blog post last year that I just learned about. It explains how GPS works in a way that almost anyone can understand. And he doesn't just explain it, he shows it using fantastic and easy-to-understand animations. If you are interested to learn more about GPS, or if you just enjoy learning how things work from a fantastic teacher, I highly recommend that you check out this incredible post.
- And finally, to highlight the extended battery life of the iPhone 14 Plus, Apple released a funny video this week called Battery for Miles:
