Apple Music launches a ‘Top Charts’ playlist series

Apple Music is rolling out a new playlist series that will feature the Top 100 songs on Apple Music globally and for those countries where Apple Music is available. Because they’re playlists, users will be able to add these top charts for their country or the Top 100 Global songs to their library so they can stream them any time, or listen offline.

The feature was first reported by Rolling Stone, which was given a preview of the changes by Apple.

At launch, there are 116 charts launching in total, including the Top 100 Global and one for each Apple Music market. Many countries will have access to all of these new Top 100 playlist charts, but availability will vary, we understand.

What’s also interesting about the top chart playlists is that they’ll be updated daily at 12:00 AM PT based on Apple Music streams, which keeps them fresh.

Rolling Stone’s report indicates the release of these charts is due to growing importance of streaming numbers. Artists and their managers as well as labels and scouts tend to reference top streaming charts in the hunt for new talent, it says. And the industry has adapted, too, by more heavily weighting paid streaming over free.

On that front, Apple Music’s dominance in North America means its numbers, in particular, are important to track.

Apple Music, now with 50 million paid subscribers worldwide, is currently ahead of Spotify in the North American market, according to comments made by CEO Tim Cook on the latest earnings call.

“We took the leadership position in North America during the quarter and we have the leadership position in Japan, and in some of the markets that we’ve been in for a long period of time,” he said in July.

Spotify is still ahead on the worldwide stage, with 83 million paid users. 

However, it’s worth also pointing out that these new top charts aren’t just launching as a static section of the Apple Music app – they’re dynamic playlists.

That is, Apple’s new Top Charts playlists will not be replacing the existing Top 200 Songs chart, available today.

Playlists are an important battleground between the major streaming services, with Spotify focusing heavily on personalization with playlists like its flagship Discover Weekly, plus Release Radar, Daily Mixes (and a newer variation, Your Daily Car Mix), Your Summer Rewind, and Time Capsule.

Apple Music, meanwhile, offers users a Favorites playlist, along with a New Music Mix, Chill Mix, and is rolling out a Friends Mix in iOS 12.

The feature is available today on Apple Music. You can check out these playlists as an example:

• Top 100 Global 
• Top 100 USA
• Top 100 UK 
• Top 100 Canada 
• Top 100 Russia
• Top 100 Germany
• Top 100 Australia
• Top 100 France
• Top 100 Mexico 
• Top 100 China

 

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Apple’s 5G iPhone conundrum

Wednesday is Apple’s big product release day, where analysts expect the company to release the next edition of the iPhone. While the usual upgrades to the screen, CPU, and storage are expected as always, one major lingering question is how the company is going to handle 5G, the next-generation telecommunications standard.

The conventional wisdom among analysts is that Apple will ignore 5G in 2018 and 2019 just as it took extra time to rollout 3G and 4G chipsets in its phones. A typical example of this analysis comes from Chris Smith at BGR, who says that “We already saw what Apple did when 4G LTE came out. The company waited for carriers actually to offer decent coverage before launching the first 4G iPhone. That was the iPhone 5, by the way, which launched more than a year after the first Android-based LTE phones came out.”

I’m not nearly as convinced. There are many reasons for Apple to ignore the tech this year, which I will get to in a moment, but one major factor could drive an earlier discussion of 5G than expected: Apple’s growth markets, particularly in China.

China is becoming one of Apple’s most important markets for its smartphones, and particularly for its flagship iPhone X. It’s greater China revenue in the third quarter of this year was $9.6 billion, and its operating income from the region was just shy of Europe’s. More importantly, greater China is just slightly behind the Americas as the fastest-growing region for Apple’s sales.

That makes 5G a particularly challenging issue for the company. China has made 5G leadership a critical pillar of its industrial strategy, and many analysts believe the country will set the pace for 5G rollouts globally. Furthermore, Chinese consumers are deeply interested in buying premium products and experiences, and adoption for 5G is expected to be strong and rapid.

With the technical specifications around the 5G standard complete, companies are racing to build the chipsets and deploy the infrastructure necessary to enable this new standard in smartphones and other devices. Early networks are expected to be deployed in 2019, and chipset maker Qualcomm has publicly unveiled more than a dozen handset manufacturers who are partnering with it on 5G. For instance, Vivo, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer, announced today that it was developing its first “pre-commercial 5G smartphones” for launch next year.

The speed and timing of the 5G rollout is awkward for Apple, which has traditionally timed its iPhone events for September. It almost certainly will make no announcements this week, but its next iPhone launch would likely be September 2019 — giving Chinese handset manufacturers with early 5G devices nearly exclusive access to the local market for the first three quarters of next year.

Apple would find itself falling behind its competitors in a fast-moving and critical growth market. While the company has built a brand in the country with devoted fans, its place in the market is not nearly as secure as in the U.S., particularly as the trade war between the two nations reaches a fevered pitch.

There’s no doubt that the challenges for Apple to include the technology are immense. First is the patent licensing cost, which Jeremy Horwitz at VentureBeat put at roughly $21 per device, up from around $9 for 4G. Second, the leading American company in 5G is believed to be Qualcomm, which Apple has been fighting in a long-running patent war, to the point that the company has been actively trying to remove Qualcomm equipment from its phones. Apple’s name was notably absent from Qualcomm’s 5G partner list.

While some early chip designs are available, they are hardly ready for primetime, and certainly not for a flagship phone like the iPhone X. Nor do I expect that Apple will imply on Wednesday that the company will support 5G in future releases and dampen enthusiasm for its newly-released devices. No one wants to be told that next year’s devices are going to be better than one released just minutes ago.

Instead, I expect Apple will use smoke signals to clearly demonstrate that it intends to remain at the cutting edge of 5G deployment. That could include joining certain industry trade groups, testing the technology in a more public fashion, and potentially releasing a roadmap next year, say at its Worldwide Developers Conference, which is traditionally held in June and thus earlier in the year than its September iPhone events.

What would be concerning though is if we get to the end of 2018 and into 2019 with nary a peep from the company about its plans for the technology. Given its commitment to China, as well as its leading position within the smartphone market, the company has to engage on the technologies around 5G in a public manner in order to prevent a loss in its competitive position.

Ultimately, much will depend on China Mobile and other telcos in China as well as around the world on how fast they can deploy 5G infrastructure (sadly, it looks increasingly like the U.S. faces a bumpy road in that direction). Beyond gold iPhone rumors, 5G may well be the first time that China drives the company’s product roadmaps, and it should be wary of finding itself on the defensive.

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Apple wins first original video Emmy for ‘Carpool Karaoke’

Ahead the launch of its own video streaming service, Apple has been awarded its first-ever Primetime Emmy for its original video programming, for “Carpool Karaoke.” The series won the “Outstanding Short Form Variety Series” category on Sunday night. This is not Apple’s first-ever Emmy – it has won other technical and engineering awards in the past, including last year’s win for Siri integration in Apple TV – but it is its first for original video.

The series beat out “Between The Scenes – The Daily Show,” “Creating Saturday Night Live,” “Gay of Thrones,” “Honest Trailers,” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon – Cover Room.”

Apple’s “Carpool Karaoke” was spun out from a recurring sketch on CBS’ “The Late Show With James Corden” in 2016, and was one of the first originals from Apple, along with its Shark Tank-like “Planet of the Apps, which largely bombed.

Over “Carpool Karaoke’s” past episodes, it has featured a number of big-name guests, including Will Smith, Alicia Keys, John Legend, LeBron James, Billy Eichner, Metallica, Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams, Seth MacFarlane, Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Shaquille O’Neal, John Cena, Shakira, Trevor Noah, and many others.

The series itself received almost universally negative reception from critics, but nevertheless earned a second season.

Apple has since shifted its focus from shows like this to other more high-profile series with the hires of Sony TV vets, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht.

Its upcoming video streaming service now has a number of anticipated shows, including a Witherspoon-backed comedy starring Kristen Wiig, a thriller starring Octavia Spencer, a revival of “Amazing Stories” exec-produced by Steven Spielberg, a new space drama from “Battlestar Galactica’s” creator Ronald D. Moore, called “See,” a scripted basketball show based on Kevin Durant’s life, a show from “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle, an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation,” original shows produced by Oprah Winfrey, a psychological thriller produced by M. Night Shyamalan and many others.

It has also been making acquisitions to expand the service, with additions like the documentary “The Elephant Queen” and animated film “Wolfwalkers.”

The company is expected to launch its streaming service in March 2019 – something we may hear more about at Apple’s press event on Wednesday.

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Alex Jones’ Infowars gets banned from Apple’s App Store

Another domino has fallen in Alex Jones’ media empire. Apple this week announced that it’s pulled the controversial conspiracy theorist/provocateur from the App Store this week, banning the Infowars app over violations to its “objectionable content” rules.

Slightly more specifically, the host was determined to have violated the TOS around “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content, including references or commentary about religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups, particularly if the app is likely to humiliate, intimidate, or place a targeted individual or group in harm’s way.”

There’s been a cascade effect with many of the major platforms Jones has used to distribute his video content. Facebook, Google and Spotify have all pulled Infowars content from their respective platforms. This week, Twitter and Periscope banned him after widespread criticism.

Among other controversial comments, Jones has come under fire for suggesting that the Sandy Hook shooting, which resulted in the deaths of 20 elementary school students, was a hoax.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.

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Fortnite hits 15 million installs on Android

Circumventing the Google Play store wasn’t exactly a gamble for Epic, given the fact that Fortnite is essentially a license to print money. But even by its own standards, the game is posting some impressive numbers three weeks after hitting Android.

In a blog post this week, Epic noted that the wildly popular sandbox survival game hit 23 million players on Google’s mobile operating system, spread out across 15 million APK installs. Those numbers are arriving 21 days after the title launched on the OS.

This, like every other piece of Fortnite news, means big bucks for Epic. That’s especially the case here, however, given that the launch means the gaming company is cutting Google’s 30 percent take out of the equation.

Along with the numbers, Epic also highlighted some of its efforts to tackle potential malware threats — an added issue given that the game isn’t distributed through Google’s official channel.

“So far, Epic has instigated action on 47 unauthorized “Fortnite for Android’ websites,” the company writes, “many of which appear to be run by the same bad actors. We continue to police the situation with a goal of taking them offline, or restricting access by leveraging Epic’s connection to a network of anti-fraud partners.”

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A top-tier app in Apple’s Mac App Store will steal your browser history

A popular top-tier app in Apple’s Mac App Store was found pilfering browser histories from anyone who downloads it.

Yet still, at the time of writing, the rogue app — Adware Doctor — stands as the No.1 grossing paid app in the app store’s utilities categories. But Apple was warned weeks ago and did nothing to pull the app offline.

As of publication, the app is still in the store. (We’re not linking to it.)

Apple’s walled garden approach to Mac and iPhone security is almost entirely based on the inability to install apps outside the app store, which Apple monitors closely. While it’s not uncommon to hear of dangerous apps slipping into Google’s Play store, it’s nearly unheard of for Apple to face the same fate. Any app that doesn’t meet the company’s strict security and sometimes moral criteria will be rejected, and users won’t able to install it.

This app promises to “keep your Mac safe” and “get rid of annoying pop-up ads” — and even “discover and remove threats on your Mac.” But what the app won’t tell you is that for just a few bucks it’ll steal and download your browser history — including all the sites you’ve searched for or accessed — to servers in China run by the app’s makers.

Thanks in part to a video posted last month on YouTube and with help from security firm Malwarebytes, it’s now clear what the app is up to.

Security researcher Patrick Wardle, a former NSA hacker and now chief research officer at cybersecurity startup Digita Security, dug in and shared his findings with TechCrunch.

Wardle found that the downloaded app jumped through hoops to bypass Apple’s Mac sandboxing features, which prevents apps from grabbing data on the hard drive, and upload a user’s browser history on Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers.

Wardle found that the app, thanks to Apple’s own flawed vetting, could request access to the user’s home directory and its files. That isn’t out of the ordinary, Wardle says, because tools that market themselves as anti-malware or anti-adware expect access to the user’s files to scan for problems. When a user allows that access, the app can detect and clean adware — but if found to be malicious, it can “collect and exfiltrate any user file,” said Wardle.

Once the data is collected, it’s zipped into an archive file and sent to a domain based in China.

Signal for Mac users should disable notifications to keep their messages secure

Wardle said that for some reason in the last few days the China-based domain went offline. At the time of writing, TechCrunch confirmed that the domain wouldn’t resolve — in other words, it was still down.

“Let’s face it, your browsing history provides a glimpse into almost every aspect of your life,” said Wardle’s post. “And people have even been convicted based largely on their internet searches!”

He said that the app’s access to such data “is clearly based on deceiving the user.”

Apple was contacted weeks ago. The email it responded with, in not so many words, said “we can’t tell you anything,” but forwarded the feedback.

A meagre $4.99 for the app may not seem much to the average user, but it’s a heavy price to pay for having the app steal your browser history — which users will never get back. And given that Apple makes a 30 percent cut of every purchase of this popular app, there isn’t much financial incentive to withdraw the app from the store.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

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What to expect from next week’s big iPhone event

It’s been a slow year for Apple hardware. The company has traditionally done a good job spreading announcements throughout the calendar, but aside from an iPad event in Chicago and a MacBook refresh a few months back, there’s been little news out of the company. Even this summer’s WWDC was utterly devoid of hardware news.

All that’s about to change at the big show being held next week at Steve Jobs Theater on the company’s new space-age Cupertino campus. Rumors are coming fast and furious, and by all accounts, there’s A LOT to expect, from a slew of new phones, to an updated Apple to some additional news on the iPad front.

Here’s a breakdown of some of what we expect from the big show on September 12.

iPhone XS: This is the big one. In more ways than one. Last year’s 10th anniversary iPhone event found the company intent on pushing the state of the art on iPhone (and bezel) technology. This year, we fully anticipate the arrival of the sequel.

The flagship model will arrive in two sizes — 5.8 and 6.5 inches, referred to as the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Plus (or, possibly, max), respectively. One of the smaller (but compelling) rumors of the bunch is the inclusion of a Lightning to USB-C cable in-box.

Yes, for better or worse, Apple is keeping Lighting around, but the new cable will make it easier to hook up to those new MacBooks and also enable fast charging. The phones will all supposedly be available in gold, as well, which appears to have been hinted at with the invite’s art work.

Cheaper iPhone X: Along with the flagships, Apple is said to be bringing a cheaper version of the X-style phone. After all, the first iPhone X was pretty commonly understood to be cost-prohibitive. The easiest way to drop the cost? Swap the OLED display for LCD, naturally. The phone will reportedly get Face ID as it drops the home button. As for the name? iPhone XC has been somewhat credibly floated.

Apple Watch Series 4: It’s the time of the season. The suggestion of a round face appears to be little more than wishful thinking, but the standard squircle shape has been improved a bit with the addition of an edge-to-edge display, marking the first major hardware redesign in the three years the watch has been kicking around. Along with a 15 percent larger display, battery and heart-rate monitoring are said to be improved, as well.

Etc.

Speaking of wishful thinking, here’s an assorted collection of what else could be on hand:

• HomePod Mini: A smaller version of the company’s premium smart speaker? Siri could certainly use the boost.
• MacBook Air upgrade: The legacy line is certainly due for an update, including a long-awaited Retina display.
• AirPods: Water resistance and improved Siri functionality could be on tap.
• iPad Pro: This one feels like a bit more of a crapshoot, all said, but a new iPhone X-style design is likely coming sooner or later.
• AirPower: A year should be enough time, right?

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