Category: Tech news

 One of Apple’s biggest announcements at this year’s WWDC event was its brand new streaming music service. The offering has long been rumored, but Apple made it official this morning, setting the stage for the biggest player in digital music sales to also become the biggest player in online streaming music. Apple Music will eventually hit Android, too. The Apple Music offering… Read More

 Apple is continuing to put blue water between itself and data-mining mobile rivals such as Google by engineering its services with a clear focus on user privacy.
At Apple’s WWDC developer conference today, senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi showed off an update to its Siri voice assistant, called Proactive, which will offer some Google Now-esque predictive… Read More

 Apple didn’t kick off this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference with updated stats about the App Store — but it didn’t leave them out completely. More than one hour into the presentation, the company revealed that there are now 1.5 million apps in the App Store, putting it past the number of Android apps in Google Play. Apple also said that it’s passed the 100… Read More

 Today Apple announced at WWDC that CarPlay will now be able to wirelessly connect to your iPhone. Previously, interfacing your iOS device with CarPlay required a constant wired connection with the car’s entertainment system.
Additionally, automakers themselves will now be able to create apps for CarPlay which can control systems within the vehicle. Previously, drivers had to exit the… Read More

 Apple capped off its announcement of new features in iOS 9 with information about timing — the public beta will become available in July, followed by a full launch this fall. Read More

 The Apple Watch just became a much more interesting development platform with the announcement of watchOS 2 and a true native app SDK at WWDC this morning. Apple vice president Kevin Lynch came on stage to demonstrate the first new function available for third-party developers: Complications. Developers will be able to create widgets for the Apple Watch’s various watch faces, making… Read More

 It’s pretty much tradition for Apple to announce a new version of iOS at WWDC. For the past few months, rumor had it that Apple was taking a gap year to focus on fixing existing features and solidifying Apple’s mobile OS foundation. And it’s true that many existing apps received some much-needed refinement. Still, Apple announced new features, including a few unexpected… Read More

 Apple senior vice president Craig Federighi just announced that the company is open-sourcing Swift, the programming language it debuted at its Worldwide Developer Conference last year. In addition to providing the code to Swift compilers and libraries for iOS and OS X, Federighi said Apple will go the extra step of providing that same source code built for Linux, too. That could lead to… Read More

 Today at its WWDC keynote, Apple announced ‘News,’ an application for iOS that combines news content from a number of sources and an interface that will be familiar to any Flipboard user.
News can be summarized as Flipboard with search, though I doubt that either company would be too enthused by the description. Apple’s Susan Prescott walked the audience through the app… Read More

 It’s just a keyboard, and so it should be limited to keys. But with the new version of iOS 9 for iPad, announced at WWDC, the touch-sensitive QuickType keyboard now has the ability to transform into a trackpad whenever you set down two fingers on the keyboard portion of the screen. Simply move those fingers to the left and the cursor moves with them. This allows you to move the cursor… Read More

 Apple is looking to make iPads more functional devices for business productivity with a new split-screen app mode which allows iPad users to run two different apps side-by-side. This sort of feature is something Microsoft has previously used to target the iPad in its advertisements, which highlighted its own Surface tablet as something that’s better for those doing “real work”… Read More

 Apple’s ongoing work to improve its search features got a big boost on mobile today: Apple launched a search API for iOS 9. This will let developers index and link out their apps, making their content discoverable through the native search experience on iOS 9. In other words, you will now be able to search on  your phone not just for apps on there, or for content on the web, but for… Read More

 Happy Friday! It’s time for another episode of CrunchWeek, the show that throws a few of us bloggers in front of TechCrunch TV cameras to chew the fat about some of the more interesting tech news stories of the past seven days. Read More

 HTC and Valve are playing catch-up a bit with Oculus in terms of getting their virtual reality headset out in the wild, but today they began shipping their developer hardware, which by all accounts is much further along than Oculus VR’s first kick at the can following their original Kickstarter campaign. The Valve/HTC Vive developer kit includes a Vive headset, along with two Lighthouse… Read More

 We hear a lot of startup origin stories here at TechCrunch, and sometimes they can blur together. But this one’s a little different.
It’s about Ramesh Haridas, an entrepreneur and angel investor. He’s backed some successful startups, including Rapportive, which was acquired by LinkedIn. What Haridas told me about, however, was the one that got away — namely, Uber. Read More