Mobile App, Smartphone | featured news

Oleg Kostour moved from Canada to Mountain View to build a 3D software startup. Instead, he built an app to stay in touch with the girlfriend he left behind in Canada. The iPhone app, Pair, launched in the app store this week. It creates a private shared timeline for couples that allows them to easily swap SMS messages, photos, videos and locations.

Ranked No. 16 in the iTunes App Store's "Top Grossing Apps" is an app called "Girl With Clothes." Released March 13, we have some inkling about why this app is such an overnight success. It's probably the monster $160 price tag -- though the vague promise of "intense sexual content" probably doesn't hurt, either.

Ever find yourself frustrated with how smoothly Siri seems to work for the folks in Apple’s commercials but not for you? A New York man has filed a class-action suit against Apple, saying that the company has been “misleading and deceptive” about what the iPhone 4S virtual assistant can do.

Marketers are tracking smartphone users through "apps" - games and other software on their phones. Some apps collect information including location, unique serial-number-like identifiers for the phone, and personal details such as age and sex.

There have been some newsworthy failures over the last couple of years in the photo-sharing field. Facebook has pretty much replaced the need for stand-alone apps because it does everything that most people want, allowing sharing to be relatively seamless between smartphone and profile. After years of searching, I've finally found an app worth using.

Carrier IQ threatens and then drops legal action against a developer who claimed that the company's code could be used to monitor smartphones.

The Windows Phone Marketplace continues to grow at a steady rate. In little over a year, the Marketplace now has over 40,000 published apps according to an estimate from All About Windows Phone. This number is not the total available to consumers, but the total number that has been submitted to the online store. An estimated 5,500 apps are no longer available to consumers because they were removed by Microsoft or the developer.

The BlackBerry has left a bitter taste in the mouths of its users. Trying to make amends for massive outages last week, Research In Motion on Monday promised BlackBerry users free premium apps and a month of technical support. But the apology is unlikely to placate miffed customers, many of whom are considering whether to part with the tarnished brand in favor of more popular devices such as Apple's newest iPhone.

In a recent study conducted by Xyologic, results show that in 2012 Apple will no longer have the advantage when it comes to app downloads, the Cupertino-based company will be surpassed by Android.