Three stories headline our short, fast and fun podcast today:
- Microsoft Office for iOS gains the ability to open Office documents that are stored in Files
- PayPal is becoming a bank…without going through the usual hassles associated with becoming a bank
- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has signed off of Facebook, citing the social network’s policy of making money off of user’s personal information as his reason
The text version of the podcast can be read 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 podcast for Monday, April 9th, 2018.
Do you use the Microsoft Office suite for iOS? Microsoft today updated the Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps to version 2.12, and there’s a very useful and helpful change that’s been made. The updates now provide “Open In” capabilities from the iOS share sheet. Previously, you could only make a copy of an Office document, and that dubious feature has been removed. What this means is that you can store your Office documents in iCloud Drive, tap on them, and now open them in the native iOS apps directly from the Files app. Apparently, it will take a little while for iOS to learn that you want to open those documents directly with just a tap instead of using the share sheet, but it does eventually happen.
PayPal has been around as a financial entity since 1998, and for most of its life it has been a way to transfer money online. Now the company is beginning to roll out basic banking services in the US, including a debit card, the ability to deposit checks, and make loans. When customers accept these services, their PayPal balances are protected by Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance. The company has figured out how to do all of this without needing licensing from any federal organization. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the company has a deal with a bank in Delaware to issue debit cards, a bank in Georgia to do instant deposits of checks through its app, and banks in Utah to make loans to consumers and to small business. PayPal is doing away with monthly banking fees, which may make its banking services popular. Some services — like taking money out of ATMs that are not part of PayPal’s network or making those smartphone deposits — do have fees associated with them. With Apple Pay a big way for people to pay for goods and services, and Apple Pay Cash a simple way for people to transfer money between themselves, perhaps Apple will be the next big tech corporation to become a bank.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is joining a lot of people and quitting Facebook. He told USA Today that ”Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and … Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this. The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.” Woz said he’d pay for Facebook instead of having his personal information being exploited for ads, and he also gave the company he co-founded praise for respecting the privacy of its customers. Woz deactivated his Facebook account on Sunday after posting a comment that said “I am in the process of leaving Facebook. It’s brought me more negatives than positives. Apple has more secure ways to share things about yourself. I can still deal with old school email and text messages.” Despite a number of other high profile users leaving Facebook, analysts have found that Facebook’s traffic has not been affected, and a survey of 750 Internet users from the US showed that 93% ares till using Facebook.
That’s all the news for today – join me tomorrow afternoon for another edition of the AWT News Update.
