App News Round Up 

Planning a new app for your business can be a significant undertaking if it’s the first time you’re embarking on such a project. While our design and development team is here to make your life easier, sometimes being up-to-date with what‘s happening in the wider industry can help you identify gaps you can leverage with your business app, get inspiration for features and brainstorm ideas for how to market your app. To that end, this week we’re rounding up some of the latest and breaking news in the app industry to spark your imagination for your own business app development project.

Kik Messenger to Shut Down

Popular messenger app Kik has announced it will be shutting down and closing its doors. The messenger app is particularly popular in North America and gained its popularity against competitors like the Facebook owned WhatsApp by being one of the only major messenger app services that doesn’t require a phone number during user registration.

The app is expected to let go all of its 80+ staff in the process and has expressed regret at having to say goodbye to hard working employees with families.

The apps reasoning for shutting down comes down to its sister crypto currency business, Kin. The USA SEC or Security and Exchange commission had been pursuing a suit against Kik founders versus the joint businesses stock market worth. As a critical decision to save the value of the crypto currency business, the founders have essentially agreed to sacrifice Kik messenger in order to continue to grow Kin.

With the crypto business only running with 19 employees, the overall business is set to reduce overheads by an estimated 85%+ in the process.

iOS 13 Completely Revamps Reminder Functionality

While the new iPhone 11 has had its criticism for not coming equipped with forward thinking 5G capability there is good news from the Apple launch for all iPhone owners. The new iOS 13 has been completely revamped with updates to functionality virtually untouched since iOS 7.

And it’s glorious!

Just one of the new features you can expect to find is a smart reminder creation. Instead of laboriously typing the name of a reminder and then scrolling through various drop downs to select the date or frequency, you can just type it all in the name and the new app will intelligently create the reminder for you. For example: type or speak “yoga class every Thursday at 7pm” and the reminder app will pick out the keywords and create the reminder for you without the need to select anything further.

You can also add attachments like files and images to your reminders (finally!) so you can easily prepare for meetings or save yourself time searching for specific files or details associated with your reminders. What’s more, if you have entered a specific store using the location functionality when setting a reminder for shopping and your reminder is to buy a certain brand of beer which you have saved a picture of, the reminder will pop up a notification for you with a picture of the beer when it knows you’ve entered the store. You have to admit that’s pretty nifty.

It really is the little things that matter most! iOS 13 is available to download now.