While some people online stop at overall market share when comparing products, I am more concerned with their usage in the real world. I decided to look at sales numbers for Android and iOS devices in correlation with both their online market share and Black Friday sales numbers to see how they stacked up. What I found was rather interesting.

Saw this over at 9to5Mac:

If implemented, this feature will be great for me, since I would prefer the Podcasts icon to be next to Netflix. Why else would you want to move icons unless you have a ton of them available? Makes me wonder if Apple is planning something bigger, like native Apple TV apps.

I wrote an article last year discussing how there were already Apple TV apps available via streaming from your iPad or iPhone. While passable as an option, having them baked in would be great. No longer would you require an accessible and fully charged iOS device to run apps on your TV.

Apple released a statement indicating that it stopped using Carrier IQ in most of its devices with the release of iOS 5, and that they “will remove it completely in a future software update.” Apple’s statement follows:

“We stopped supporting Carrier IQ with iOS 5 in most of our products and will remove it completely in a future software update. With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information, and if they do, the data is sent in an anonymous and encrypted form and does not include any personal information. We never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other personal information for diagnostic data and have no plans to ever do so.”

[Via AllThingsD]

iPhone hacker chpwn has posted an informative look into how Carrier IQ is incorporated into iOS. Unlike the version Trevor Eckhart discovered in his Android devices, Carrier IQ for both iOS versions 3 and 5—version 4 is still unknown—is disabled by default. If the appropriate setting is enabled on iOS 5, the user can disable it with a single setting change.

When enabled, does Carrier IQ on iOS capture the same level of data that was seen in Trevor Eckhart’s Android demo? No, it appears Apple has limited much of what Carrier IQ will monitor. Below are chpwn’s findings:

• CoreTelephony
  • your phone number
  • your carrier
  • your country
  • active phone calls
    • (However, I only saw it noting that a phone call was active, not what number was dialed or it was received from. But, I am not going to claim it doesn’t do that: it’s certainly possible, but didn’t see it.)
• CoreLocation
  • your location (Only, however, if Location Services are enabled.)
  • (Possibly more I haven’t yet found.)

As Carrier IQ claims in their video, communication with the remote server is all done via SSL. Importantly, it does not appear the daemon has any access or communication with the UI layer, where text entry is done. I am reasonably sure it has no access to typed text, web history, passwords, browsing history, or text messages, and as such is not sending any of this data remotely.

If you are running iOS 5 and want to ensure that Carrier IQ is disabled:

1. Launch “Settings”
2. Select “General”
3. Select “About” (first entry)
4. Select “Diagnostics & Usage” (towards bottom)
5. Select “Don’t Send” if not already selected

[Via The Verge]

From Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash piece posted April, 2010:

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

[…]

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

It appears Adobe has finally realized what Apple was saying all along, and I am happy to see them creating tools to aid in creating great HTML5 content.