LG promises to speed up bringing Android updates to its smartphones

LG is making efforts to improve the user experience on its devices after it opened a “Software Upgrade Center” in its native Korea.

The new lab will be focused on “providing customers worldwide with faster, timelier, smartphone operating system and software updates,” the company explained in a brief statement.

The idea is to help get the latest versions of Android out to more users at a faster pace than it does right now.

That’s a genuine problem for Android OEM who are tasked with bringing the latest flavor of Android to devices that already in the market. Issues they have to deal with include different chipsets, Android customization and carriers.

The issue has been pretty problematic for LG. Android Oreo, for example, announced by Google last September only began rolling out to the first handful of LG devices last month.

The Korean firm said that one of the first priorities for this new center is to get Oreo out to Korea-based owners of the LG G6 — last year’s flagship phone — before the end of this month. After that, it will look to expand the rollout to G6 owners in other parts of the world.

Beyond Android updates, the center will also focus on stability update to make sure that the newest features work on devices without compromising performance.

This move is one of the first major strategies from new LG Mobile CEO Hwang Jeong-hwan, who took the top job last year. He came directly from the company’s R&D division, which suggests that he identified the update issue as a fairly urgent one to address.

His bigger challenge is to stop LG’s mobile division bleeding capital. LG Electronics itself is forecasting record Q1 financial results later this month, but its smartphone unit is likely to post yet another loss that drags the parent down.

We’ll find out more when LG’s next flagship is unveiled next month.

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Apple starting to alert users that it will end 32-bit app support on the Mac

Tomorrow at noon PT, Apple will begin issuing an alert box when you open a 32-bit app in MacOS 10.13.4. It’s a one-time (per app) alert, designed to help MacOS make the full transition to 64-bit. At some unspecified time in the future, the operating system will end its support for 32-bit technology… meaning those apps that haven’t been updated just won’t work. 

That time, mind you, is not tomorrow, but the company’s hoping that this messaging will help light a fire under users and developers to upgrade before that day comes. Says the company on its help page, “To ensure that the apps you purchase are as advanced as the Mac you run them on, all future Mac software will eventually be required to be 64-bit.”

It’s similar to the transition the company made on the mobile side with iOS 11. Of course, making the shift is a bit messier on the desktop. For one thing, the company’s desktop operating system has been around a lot longer than iOS. For another, while Apple does have a MacOS App Store, plenty of desktop apps are still downloaded from other channels.

As the company notes, the transition’s been a long time coming. The company started making it 10 or so years ago with the Power Mac G5 desktop, so it hasn’t exactly been an overnight ask for developers. Of course, if you’ve got older, non-supported software in your arsenal, the eventual end-of-lifing could put a severe damper on your workflow. For those users, there will no doubt be some shades of the transition from OS 9 to OS X in all of this.

You can skip the alert and just see for yourself by clicking the System Report button. For those apps that haven’t updated yet (I’m looking at you, Audacity), Apple recommends bugging the developers directly.

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Apple Music hits 40 million subscribers as it accelerates towards surpassing Spotify, report says

Apple Music is continuing its upward climb in subscriber count, quickening its pace as it seeks to overtake Spotify in the battle for users’ ears. The music streaming service now has 40 million subscribers, a report today from Variety claims.

We have reached out to Apple for confirmation.

The service still has a ways to go before it surpasses Spotify, which currently has 70 million paid Premium subscribers. A report in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year suggests that Apple Music’s quicker growth rate (five percent versus Spotify’s two percent growth) could mean it surpassing the Swedish streaming service as soon as this summer, however. Apple Music hit 30 million subscribers in September of 2017.

In addition to an updated note regarding subscriber notes, the report also says that the streaming service will have a new boss with the promotion of Oliver Schusser to the role of VP of Apple Music & International Content. Schusser has been at Apple for 14 years, previously leading efforts outside the U.S. on content efforts surrounding the App Store.

Apple’s continued prominence in the music streaming market comes after a rocky introduction thanks to a rough user interface. For Apple to continue to court Spotify Premium subscribers, they’re going to have to continue to focus on more intuitive app design and a more intelligent user recommendation engine, areas where Spotify is still holding strong ahead of it. With Spotify going public last month with a hefty market cap of $28 billion, it’s clear that the company has a lot riding on its ability to stay ahead of Apple in intelligence and continue driving more sophisticated playlists to users.

An area where Apple’s $9.99 per month service is undoubtedly succeeding is in the intimate tie between its audio hardware and Apple Music. Users of the HomePod and AirPods gain essential functionality for music playback only if they are subscribers to Apple Music.

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Apple is making a show based Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ books

Okay, Apple, now you’ve got my attention.

Not content with landing an Amazing Stories reboot from Steven Spielberg, multiple series from Reese Witherspoon, a space opera from Ron Moore and much more for its upcoming original TV initiative (which might launch next March), Apple is also developing a series based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books.

Deadline reports that the project from Skydance Television is “in development for straight-to-series consideration,” with David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman attached as showrunners. Goyer is best-known for comic book adaptations like Blade, Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, while Friedman was the creator of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

The Foundation stories depict the fall of a massive galactic empire, and the efforts of a small group of scientists to preserve knowledge and restore civilization. They were first published in Astounding Science Fiction in the 1940s, then collected into three books in the ’50s. (At the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention, the series beat out Lord of the Rings to win the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series.)

Asimov returned to the series near the end of his career, and while the later books are not as well-loved by fans, they also won him awards and landed him on The New York Times bestseller list for the first time.

If you want to read thousands more words about why the books mean a lot to me, be my guest. But when it comes to a TV adaptation, two points seem salient: One, the books takes place over hundreds of years, with a constantly rotating cast of characters, and two, they consist almost entirely of conversation, with just a few brief scenes of action.

That may be why previous attempts to adapt Foundation — including an effort at HBO by Goyer’s Dark Knight co-writer Jonathan Nolan  — have failed. If this one pans out, I suspect we’ll see some pretty big changes.

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Fleetsmith secures $7.7M investment to manage Apple devices

Fleetsmith, a startup that wants to make it easier for companies to manage their Apple devices, announced a $7.7 million Series A round today led by Upfront Ventures.

Seed investors Index Ventures and Harrison Meta also participated in the round. The company has raised a total of $11 million. They also announced that Luke Kanies, founder and former CEO of Puppet has joined their Board of Directors.

Fleetsmith wants to help SMBs provision and manage Apple devices whether that’s computers, phones, iPads or Apple TVs. Trying to provision these devices manually is a time-consuming process, one that larger organizations no longer have to deal with because of other commercial options or in-house solutions, but Fleetsmith puts that same kind of efficient device management within reach of smaller organizations by offering it as a cloud service.

The two co-founders, Zack Blum and Jesse Endahl, who came from Dropbox and Phantom were both in positions where they needed to buy and deploy Apple devices and couldn’t find a good way for a small company to do that on the market.

“How do you manage a fleet of Macs and secure them through the internet? We looked around when we were in a build/buy position and saw a lot to be done. We are democratizing what companies like Google and Facebook have with their own [home-grown] internal Mac management tools,” CEO Blum told Techcrunch.

Fleetsmith device admin console. Photo: Fleetsmith

The company takes advantage of the Device Enrollment Program, a business device management service offered by Apple to simplify provisioning of Apple products. As long as the IT administrator is enrolled in DEP, you can use Fleetsmith, Blum explained. An employee can then order a laptop (or any device), and when they connect to to WiFi, it connects to Fleetsmith, which configures the device automatically.

“The really cool thing about how DEP integrates into our feature set is that as soon as the employee connects to WiFi, it take care of deployment. The account is created, software gets installed, the drive gets encrypted. It makes installing and enrolling new people really simple,” he said. Once you’re setup with everything you need installed, the admin can force critical updates, but the system will give you several warnings before installing the update.

“Fleetsmith is automation applied perfectly, handing all of the menial work to the computer so the people do less firefighting and more strategic work. This is especially important in the mid-market because the teams are leaner and every computer counts,” new board member Kanies said in a statement.

The service costs is just $99 per year per device to access the cloud service. They offer a freemium version to manage up to 10 devices at no cost. The company launched in 2016 and currently has 20 employees. Customers include HackerOne, Robinhood and Nuna.

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Apple says its global facilities are now powered by 100-percent clean energy

Last week, Apple called out the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to rollback the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. The company cited both the obvious environmental impact of such a move, along with potential economic fallout.

It turns out Apple’s got quite a bit invested in the latter.  The company announced today that its global facilities are now 100-percent run by renewable energy.

The move is in line with the company’s 2015 plan to push toward 100-percent renewable energy, a list that includes all of Apple’s data centers as of 2014. As of today, the company’s officially adding retail stores, offices and co-located facilities to that list, covering 43 countries, including the US, China, UK and India.

The addition of nine manufacturing partners, meanwhile, brings the total number up to 23 suppliers promising to produce their products entirely with clean energy. How the companies involved actually hit these numbers is, unsurprisingly, somewhat more complex.

“Where feasible, we produce our own renewable energy by building our own renewable energy facilities, including solar arrays, wind farms, biogas fuel cells, and micro-hydro generation systems,” the company writes in its 2017 Environmental Responsibility Report. “Where it’s not feasible to build our own generation, we sign long-term renewable energy purchase contracts, supporting new, local projects that meet our robust renewable energy sourcing principles.”

The push toward renewable energy has included some creative solutions, including 300 solar rooftops in Japan and 800 in Singapore. The company says it’s currently running 25 renewable energy projects globally, with 15 more in the process of being built. That will bump green energy capability from 626 megawatts to 1.4 gigawatts, by its count — and the finally tally doesn’t appear to include carbon offsets, unlike some of the competition. 

It’s easy to see how a rollback of the Clean Power Plan could ultimately have an averse effect on the company’s bottomline.

“We’re committed to leaving the world better than we found it. After years of hard work we’re proud to have reached this significant milestone,” Tim Cook said in a release tied to the news. “We’re going to keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible with the materials in our products, the way we recycle them, our facilities and our work with suppliers to establish new creative and forward-looking sources of renewable energy because we know the future depends on it.”

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Apple releases a red iPhone 8

Apple is doing it again. The company just unveiled a new version of the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus. It has a bright red enclosure and a black front. A portion of Apple’s proceeds will fund HIV/AIDS grants from the Global Fund.

Other than that, it’s an iPhone 8. You’ll get the exact same features and components as the ones in other iPhone 8 models. The iPhone 8 is also available in gold, silver and (“space”) gray. Alas, there’s still no rose gold option.

When Apple unveiled the red version of the iPhone 7, many people didn’t understand why Apple put white bezels at the front of the device. Red and black seem like a good match. That’s why some people even bought screen protectors with black borders to fix this.

This year, Apple is switching to black. It’s interesting to see that Apple waits around 6 months before launching red versions of its iPhones. It could be a way to foster sales in the middle of a product cycle.

The red iPhone 8 is going to start at $699 with 64GB just like regular iPhone 8 models. There will be 256GB versions too. Pre-orders start tomorrow and you’ll be able to buy it in Apple stores on Friday.

For iPhone X users, Apple is launching a dark red leather folio. Apple is also sharing some numbers about its partnership with (PRODUCT)RED. Since 2006, Apple has donated $160 million to the Global Fund through limited edition iPods, iPhones and accessories.

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