Apps

Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov has been “detained” in France, on suspicion of failing to take steps to prevent the criminal use of the messaging app.

Various rumors are circulating regarding the nature of the investigation, and the future of the app, including fake suggestions that it will be removed from the App Store and auto-deleted from user’s phones …

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.

Capture is a productivity app that allows you to easily take notes, write down tasks, save links, and set reminders, all in one clean interface. The app fully supports iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro.

Apple has announced another set of changes to its App Store and iPhone policies in the European Union. This time around, Apple is expanding default app controls, making additional first-party apps deletable, and updating the browser choice screen.

Back in May, Meta started testing the ability to cross-post from Instagram to Threads, and the company is now rolling this out to everyone.

The feature also lets you cross-post from Facebook, continuing Meta’s integration of its three different social media platforms …

Apple is rolling out a big update to its Apple Sports app. As football season quickly approaches, the Apple Sports app now has full support for NFL and NCAA Football. There’s also a new “Stats” tab on game pages, showing box scores, lineups, and more.

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.

SubManager is a simple app that allows you to easily keep track of all of your subscriptions across the web. In a world where it feels like every app wants to charge you monthly for something, this management tool is actually quite helpful! The app fully supports iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro.

Video dominates mobile app revenue, according to a new report. Of the total $3.8B smartphone owners spent on entertainment apps last quarter, three billion of it was spent on streaming and short video apps.

The most dramatic growth in earnings was seen in short video apps, with TikTok coins credited with generating the bulk of this money …

ByteDance’s appeal against a US TikTok ban is underway, and the company has accused the Department of Justice of factual errors in presenting its case – intended to force the sale of the app to an American company.

The DOJ says the app’s feed can be manipulated by the Chinese government for propaganda purposes, but Bytedance said that recommendations are actually generated in the US …

Denim is a cool iPhone app that helps users create unique art for their playlists. In recent weeks, the app has received some major updates that have made this process even more fun and intuitive, taking the possibilities even further. Read on as we detail what’s new in Denim.

When you take a screenshot on your iPhone or iPad, iOS provides some tools such as cropping and markup. However, there’s no way to add device frames to screenshots right from the system. But with the new Shareshot app, users can do just that in an extremely intuitive way.

For years, Apple has prevented developers from distributing any kind of emulators for iOS on the App Store. However, as the company faces pressure from the European Union with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) antitrust legislation, iPhone and iPad emulators are now allowed. Thanks to this, iDOS 3 is now available on the App Store.

Subjects is a class manager available for Apple devices, and we’ve written about it a few times before. With its latest update, Subjects is getting new class icons, as well as a feature that automatically suggests the best icon to users.

As I once wrote here on 9to5Mac, Mercury is an elegant weather app for Apple devices for those looking for an alternative to the native iOS Weather app. The developers behind the app have just released a major update to it, which adds things like a new widget and an extra weather data provider.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has hinted that in future some subreddits could be paywalled, as the company seeks to devise new sources of income.

Huffman raised the prospect during an earnings call in which he said Reddit would also be testing AI-powered search results later this year …

Blackmagic, the company behind the renowned DaVinci Resolve video editing software, launched the “Blackmagic Camera” app for iPhone last year, which provides manual controls for professionals filming with their iPhone. This week, Blackmagic Camera was updated to version 2.0 – and in addition to new features, the app now has an iPad version.

Flighty, the ultra-powerful flight tracking app, has been updated to version 4.0 this week with some major new features. Using machine learning and robust aviation data, Flighty 4 can proactively warn you when your flight could be delayed – and give you the exact reason for that delay.

The Senate has passed two major child protection bills that could have a dramatic impact on how social media apps operate. Update: Congress went into recess before the KOSA Act could reach a vote in the House, and a Wired report suggests the House Republican leadership may not prioritize it when lawmakers return.

If the bills make it through the House to become law, then social media apps would have to make it possible for users to disable algorithmic feeds – with other changes also required …