Thursday, October 10, 2024
Archived Post

AWT News Update: June 7, 2017

WWDC17 is still going on, and we’re hearing some good details of what Apple’s doing to help out developers and users. Today we have some stories on new technologies that may make it to Apple products soon:

  • Be sure to check out our video look at iOS 11 Developer Beta 1!
  • Apple may be moving to Micro LED technology for next year’s Apple Watch
  • WebRTC makes it to Safari this fall
  • The new app store will give developers the opportunity to keep ratings and reviews when posting app updates

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The text version of the podcast can be viewed below. To listen to the podcast here, click the play button on the player below. Apple News readers need to visit Apple World Today in order to listen to the podcast.

Text Version

This is Steve Sande for Apple World Today, and you’re listening to the AWT News Update for June 7th, 2017.

Our video look at iOS 11 Developer Beta 1 is getting a lot of views, so if you haven’t taken a look at it, be sure to head to our YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/c/appleworldtoday as soon as possible. While we can’t show all of the features — some of them just aren’t available on our iPad mini test machine — our video really points out a lot of to major features.

A report from Japan’s Nikkei says that Apple might skip AMOLED displays for the next generation of Apple Watch, going instead to Micro LED displays as early as next year. Apple bought a company called LuxVue in 2014 to begin research into the MicroLED technology, and a former Qualcomm facility in Taiyuan, Taiwan is being used to produce small batches of Micro LED screens for evaluations. Nikkei also says that an “unnamed executive within Apple’s supply chain” verified that the company is adopting Micro LED technology but could not say when the first products might come out.

Another piece of upcoming technology from Apple that was announced during WWDC is that WebRTC will ship in Safari for iOS 11 and macOS. What’s WebRTC? That stands for Web Real-Time Communication, and it’s a set of communications protocols and application programming interfaces that enable real-time communication over peer-to-peer connections. At this point, no Apple browser supports WebRTC, which is why Chrome must be used for apps like Dungeons and Dragons, and several web-based podcasting apps like Cast and Zencastr. The big news? It could make group podcasting from an iPad or iPhone possible for the first time since limitations in iOS make it impossible to record a local microphone while talking on Skype or other conferencing services.

That nice new iOS App Store that will come with iOS 11 is going to make developers happier, too. At this point, when developers release new updates in the App Store, any reviews and ratings for the current version disappear. Apple’s going to change that, allowing developers to have the option to keep app reviews and the rating for the current version when a new update is released. What will most likely happen is that in the future, developers will only reset ratings for major updates, which means that those little bug fix releases won’t keep popular apps from showing that they have good reviews.

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That’s all for today; I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon with another edition of the AWT News Update.

Steve Sande
the authorSteve Sande
Steve is the founder and former publisher of Apple World Today and has authored a number of books about Apple products. He's an avid photographer, an FAA-licensed drone pilot, and a really bad guitarist. Steve and his wife Barb love to travel everywhere!