Apple is among a handful of companies that have signed a friend of the court brief in a case of a Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. TechCrunch reports Apple, Yelp, Affirm, PayPal, and Salesforce have all signed on in support of the couple… The report explains that these companies are just the beginning, however, and more will voice their support by next week....

With the latest beta releases, Apple has added the ability for developers to create unified purchases across Mac and iOS. This means that a developer can list an iPad app in the App Store and a Mac version in the Mac App Store. When the customer buys either version, it automatically unlocks for all platforms. Previously, developers could only offer separate independent purchases. This feature is clearly designed with Mac Catalyst in mind but the unified purchase capability can be applied to any Mac app....

Apple is again extending the free period for the Apple TV+ 1-year free trials given out with hardware. With the latest announcement, anybody with an Apple TV+ subscription that was set to expire from now until June will instead expire in July 2021. This means customers who took advantage of the ‘year free’ deal back when the service first launched will now be getting an additional 9 months of free access to Apple original shows and movies....

Apple’s SVP of Operations Jeff Williams said today that the Cupertino company made changes to its requirements for supplier factories with regard to bonded labor practices in October. The practice in question centers on suppliers charging workers recruitment fees in exchange for a job on the assembly line. Apple now says that these fees should be paid by employers, and employees should not pay anything at all. As Bloomberg notes, Apple has previously stated that its supplier partners should not charge laborers “excessive fees” equal to a month’s pay or more, but with the recent shift has banned what Williams referred to as “bonded servitude” entirely....

Update: Customers in Australia have now seen their orders ship with an arrival date of 12/19. According to a handful of customers who placed their order early on Tuesday morning, Apple has started charging the credit cards of customers who ordered AirPods. While orders have yet to start shipping, users beginning to be charged suggests that shipments will begin sooner rather than later. The earliest arrival date for AirPods ordered on Tuesday morning is Monday, December 19th....

[Update: The developer now says his app has been approved after all.] Apple has reportedly rejected an app that claims to detect net neutrality violations and study which carriers throttle major video services. Motherboard reports that researcher David Choffnes says his app Wehe was rejected by the App Store for apparently offering no benefit to the user, but the app’s promise sounds rather straightforward… The rejected app Wehe includes two parts....

Mike Rose posts this interesting change in the iPhone developer agreement: 3.3.17 Your Application may include promotional sweepstake or contest functionality provided that You are the sole sponsor of the promotion and that You and Your Application comply with any applicable laws. Apple is certainly going to frown on straight casino gambling apps but there is a whole lot of gray area in there between roulette and sweepstakes and contests which could be exploited by developers who perhaps want to make apps with cash/prize rewards....

Apple has clarified its policy on battery replacements. As long as the owner of the iPhone 6 (or later) handset is willing to pay the $29 fee, and the device is not otherwise damaged, Apple will process the repair without requiring further checks of condition. This comes after some reported cases where Apple Store employees were refusing customers with ‘ineligible’ batteries which still passed Apple diagnostics testing. As reported by iGeneration, Apple has released new internal documentation to Apple Stores explaining that iPhones do not have to fail a diagnostics test in order for the out-of-warranty battery replacement to go ahead....

Apple is all over its copycat accusations filed in a formal complaint against its key supplier Samsung. Just days after it wrote in court documents that Samsung was “harassing us”, Apple yesterday amended the filing with more intellectual property rights against more products – even re-phrasing accusations more strongly. The legal maneuver comes on the eve of today’s court hearing where the judge will decide about granting each party access to the other’s unreleased products....

Apple has today launched its Back to School deals for students. Similar to last year, Apple will bundle a free pair of Beats headphones with the purchase of an eligible Apple product for college. If you buy an iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro or MacBook Air, you get a free pair of Beats Solo2 wireless headphones worth $299. iPad Pro, iPhone 6s and iPhone 6 buyers can get a free pair of Beats Powerbeats2 wireless headphones, worth $199 retail....

The Data Transfer Project launched last year with Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and others pledging support to work on the open source initiative to improve data portability across platforms and services. Now, Apple has officially joined the project. Here’s the mission of the Data Transfer Project: Today the Data Transfer Project shared updates on the initiative as well as announcing the big news that Apple has joined the effort. In total, there are now 18 contributors....

Next Tuesday, July 10, 2018 marks the ten year anniversary of the App Store. Introduced back in 2008 with just 500 apps, the App Store ignited a huge phenomenon that even Apple likely wasn’t expecting. In a press release from the company, Apple has outlined the App Store’s largest and most exciting milestones over the years. Apple SVP of Worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller said: The App Store allowed developers, whether a one-person development team or large AAA studios to create, develop, and distribute applications that would later be accessed by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users around the world....

Jimmy Iovine seems to be doing the rounds of UK media at present. Following yesterday’s Evening Standard interview, he’s done another with Wired editor Michael Rundle. Much of it is, of course, the usual sales spiel: curation is cool, nobody else will catch us or do it better, lots of great people involved – the kind of things you’d expect him to say. But the interview does contain one unexpected snippet: that Apple Music‘s curated approach could be applied to TV … Apple has reportedly been working on its own web-based TV service for some time, initially expected to be announced back in June and subsequently delayed as we predicted back in May....

In another chapter of the legal battle between Apple and VirnetX, a jury in Texas decided today in a 90-minute session that Apple will be required to pay an additional $502.8 million for infringing patents of the security software company VirtneX. As reported by Bloomberg, the jury had to decide how much Apple owes VirnetX in royalties for VPN on Demand. VirnetX accuses Apple of infringing on its VPN patents on iOS, which offers features to let users connect to virtual private networks on iPhone and iPad....

Shopping list and recipe app AnyList has explained in a lengthy blog post no fewer than ten problems with Sign in with Apple. It says there are five problems for users, and five for developers, and consequently the app will not be supporting the login method … First, it says there is one common problem with any third-party login, whether it’s Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, or anything else. But there are some specific problems with Sign in with Apple, it says – like the fact that many Apple IDs use an iCloud email address....

Electronic Arts have finally released Apex Legends Mobile as an online hero strategy battle royale shooter video game for both the Android and iOS platforms. The mobile version game has been launched the last year but it was in the beta testing phase. It becomes one of the trending battle royale mobile games right now as fans have waited a year or so. Still, some players are getting Apex Legends Mobile Not Available In Your Country error while signing in....

I have always seemed to be one of the few people in the tech world who had no objection to App Tracking, but Facebook has finally succeeded in changing my mind. Just not in quite the way the company intended … Ad revenue pays developers and websites Many useful things in life are paid for by ads, whether it’s free services like Gmail or a huge chunk of the web (including this site)....

WWDC 2020 has come and gone, and while there is a lot to unpack for the consumer side, there is a considerable amount to unpack on the enterprise side as well. One of my favorite slides of the entire keynote is where they show the grab bag features that didn’t make air time but are often very important. This year, one of the key things I noticed for enterprise and K–12 customers was the ability to set default email and browsers on iPad and iPhone....

Apple, Google, and Mozilla are all taking action to block state surveillance of web users through their respective browsers… The Kazakhstan government last month began intercepting all HTTPS internet traffic inside its borders. ZDNet explained how it was able to do so. ISPs were instructed to enforce this by checking for the presence of the root certificate and had to block traffic where it was missing, redirecting users to a webpage with installation instructions....

Apple has bought two seasons of a new TV series that will star Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. The purchase is part of Apple’s push into owning original content and building out a streaming video service to compete with Netflix and HBO. Both Aniston and Witherspoon will executive produce the series for Apple, The Hollywood Reporter says, and the two season purchase will include 20 episodes to start. The series has yet to be named but the plot is expected to center around the lives of morning TV news stars....