For this sunny (at least at Apple World Today HQ) day in May, we have four short news items that you’ll find interesting:
- Apple has announced the date and time of the annual Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote. Expect to see new versions of every Apple operating system, as well as announcements of some other surprises…
- Dropbox updated its iOS app today, adding a file activity notifications feature and a refreshed file preview design
- Apple Pay may seem ubiquitous…but it falls behind the Starbucks app in terms of the number of users in the USA
- The iPhone continues to dominate the United States smartphone market, with six of the top 10 smartphone models being from Apple
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 Tuesday, May 22nd, 2018.
It’s time to clear out space on your calendar for a few hours on June 4th, 2018. That’s when the keynote at the 2018 World Wide Developers Conference is going to be held, starting at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Like last year, this year’s event is being held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. And also like last year, nobody from Apple World Today was invited. That means that we’ll be watching the keynote and “meta-live-blogging” it. Expect to see our preview posts in the next week, where we try to make educated guesses as to what will be announced at the event.
Dropbox has updated its iOS app, with two new major changes including a file activity notifications feature and a refreshed file preview design. For File Activity, when users preview a file in Dropbox one tap pulls up a list of events, including edits and shares. For Dropbox Professional and Business Advanced users, they also see a viewer history. The streamlined File Preview Design lets users easily comment right alongside their content. At the bottom of any file preview, users can access teammates’ feedback, add their own feedback, and get file activity updates. If you’re not a Dropbox user and would like to try the service, it’s a free download from the App Store.
With all of the banks and businesses in the US that support Apple Pay, you’d probably guess that it’s the biggest US mobile payment provider…and you’d be wrong. eMarketer says in a recent report that Starbucks has a larger customer base than Apple Pay with 23.4 million people expected to use the Starbucks app to make an in-store purchase by the end of 2018. Apple Pay will be used by an estimated 22 million people, while Google Pay and Samsung Pay will only have 11.1 million and 9.9 million users. That trend is expected to continue for at least four more years, with Starbucks reaching an estimated 29.8 million US users by 2022, with Apple Pay close behind with 27.5 million users.
Speaking of market research, info out today from Counterpoint Research shows that Apple’s US iPhone sale were up 16 percent year-over-year during the March quarter to 16 million units, even as the entire domestic smartphone market fell by 11 percent. Six of the 10 most popular smartphone models were iPhones, with the 64 GB iPhone 8 leading the pack. The 64- and 256-GB versions of the iPhone X were in second and third place. How did the Samsung Galaxy S8 do? It was in sixth place, and that was the highest any non-Apple device placed on the list.
That’s all the news for today – join me tomorrow afternoon for the next edition of the AWT News Update.
Like this podcast? Consider supporting Apple World Today with a $5 monthly Team AWT membership.
