Apps

According to fresh statistics from analytics firm App Annie published on Wednesday, social media giant Facebook is responsible for four of the top ten most downloaded iOS apps of all time, with Google and Apple titles in tow.

Job-based social network LinkedIn began rolling out a redesigned messaging service on Tuesday, incorporating the look and features of popular chat apps like Facebook Messenger. Instagram, meanwhile, made several upgrades to its Direct messaging and sharing functions.

Can’t we just rewind the clock to June and forget that jackets exist for another three months?

Twitter has been making a lot of changes to direct messages lately, including removing the 140-character limit, and letting you chat with strangers, send URLs, and create groups. But the one thing that’s missing is a standalone direct messaging app. But just because Twitter isn’t working on it — at least not that we know of — doesn’t mean third-party developers aren’t giving it a shot. Direct Messenger is an unofficial Twitter app with a singular purpose — it lets you send and receive...

Visit the Eiffel Tower in Paris, as I did last year, and you’ll see tourists contorting themselves to try and fit the length of the monument into Instagram’s iconic square frame. Even after Instagram began letting you shoot in landscape mode, you could still only share your work as a square. That all changes today: Instagram is updating its Android and iOS apps to enable native support for full-size landscape and portrait photos and video inside the app. They'll run alongside the traditional square...

Google makes so many apps for iOS, we thought maybe we could live the Android life on our iPhones. Joel Mathis tried it for a week. Here's what you need to know.

Frustrated by how difficult it was to have spur of the moment get-togethers with friends, Stanford classmates Joseph Lau and Nikil Viswanathan spent a Friday afternoon in San Francisco’s SoMa district building what they called Down To Lunch.“I want to emphasize how simple or silly it was,” said Lau. “We didn’t know who was free, and who was where, and who was able…

A group of high school friends, now UC Berkeley engineers, have created an app called Bash to make it easier for friends to organize hangouts, meetups and other events. Launching today on the App Store following a small beta test on the UC Berkeley campus, the idea with Bash is to offer a less cumbersome alternative to using text messages or emails to organize these sorts of…

Foursquare's check-in app Swarm has brought back the leaderboard — but it's making a key change to it. Swarm now rewards its users with virtual coins for being active, and those coins are what rank you on the leader board against your friends. "For now, [coins] just help you beat your friends and conquer your leaderboard, but stay tuned for more fun to come," Foursquare writes in a blog post....

Launching today, Cardwheel is an app that recalls a fresh set of memories each day. However, unlike year-ago-remembering apps, Cardwheel uses machine learning to recall relevant, contextual memories based on a number of different factors.Here’s how the service works: Every morning users are presented with a daily wheel of up to 12 photos. These photos come from places like your…

Google Hangouts for mobile has gotten a major design overhaul. The design refresh comes as part of Hangouts 4.0, which is rolling out today on Android and was released about a month back on iOS. Hangouts 4.0 keeps the app's distinct green accent color, but it adds a floating compose button, cleans up and simplifies the interface, and presumably adds in all of the animated flourishes you'd expect from a Material Design app. Hangouts' Android Wear app should also be looking a bit nicer today....

Twitter has added a much-needed feature to its Periscope livestreaming app: the ability to cut back on notifications from those who livestream way too much.

The rise of live-streaming apps this year has proven a boon to journalists, media organizations, and everyday people who find themselves standing at the center of a news event — and those who want to watch them unfold. But their drop-everything-and-look nature can be addictive, and frequent broadcasters wind up spamming the notifications of the people who follow them. It's been my biggest complaint about Periscope, Twitter's live-streaming app, from day one. Today the company took an important step...

This week's list includes a social news app, a relaxing game centered around a tree and Google's immersive Spotlight Stories app making its iOS debut.

Somewhere between texting and video chat, the mobile phone stopped being a phone. But there’s a special intimacy unique to simply talking to someone, and early YouTuber Brent Hurley wants to bring it back with SayMore. His new app lets you browse pre-made discussion topics, preview the profile of a conversation partner, and start a free VOIP call with them. You know, so you can just…

Casey Neistat unveils an app called Beme that lets you share moments without the self-awareness of doing so.

Authenticity is in short supply online, says video maker Casey Neistat, with social media forcing us to present over-stylized and over-perfect versions of ourselves to world. Neistat thinks he has the answer, though: he's built a new social media network named Beme (pronounced "beam") where users communicate with self-destructing videos recorded by placing their phones on their hearts. Well, that's not a necessity, but it's how Neistat demonstrates the iOS-only app, explaining that Beme uses the...

At first, TVShow Time was just a calendar to keep track of your favorite TV shows. Now, TVShow Time is one of the best community of TV addicts on the Internet. The French startup is well aware of that, and just launched a major 5.0 update to its mobile app to showcase the best content created by its community.“We want our users to open the TVShow Time app after watching an episode and…

This week's list includes Microsoft's latest experiment, an app that helps you read faster, a visual storytelling app and more.

After running silently for in a public beta for a few weeks, Lynx — an app that builds a stream of links shared between friends — is opening up to the rest of the world.Lynx’s primary purpose is a private sharing channel between friends for sharing links. Rather than showing up as text, the links show up as a stream of small images with text overlaid on them that serve as…

A number of apps over the years have attempted to make it easier for friends to get together offline by helping them to plan everything from casual get-togethers to more formal events. Now Microsoft is taking a shot at this space with a new social polling app called Tossup. The app lets a group of friends vote on things like where and when to meet, what restaurant to choose, as well as RSVP.

Sharing your social media contact details is now just an Apple Watch swipe away.

Since live streams began taking over Twitter feeds earlier this year, a common complaint has been that they end before you could watch them. Periscope did enable replays within 24 hours after a stream ended, but only on its apps for Android and iOS. That changes today with the launch of web replays. Just click a link to a Periscope stream, and once the page opens in your browser, you can hit the play button to re-live the stream....

One of the best things about the old Foursquare has made its way back to Swarm: mayorships. You can now compete with users everywhere for the most check-ins at any business listed in the app, earning badges and bragging rights in the process. It's a surprisingly addicting feature that once made Foursquare feel much more like a real competition or game between everyone in your city — before the company split into two apps, that is....

A mobile application called WeMesh wants to make watching videos more of a real-time social experience by allowing you and your friends to watch videos together in perfect sync, while also texting and voice chatting. Today, the app aggregates videos from YouTube, but the plan is to soon expand that selection to include videos from your Facebook News Feed, then other video services like Vimeo…