App Store

Today in Tech: Facebook buys e-book publisher

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* Facebook bought up Push Pop Press, a small iPad book designer, raising questions over whether the social networking champ plans to enter the e-book business. "Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, MORE

Apple to book readers: Our way or the highway

Over the weekend, the Kindle, Nook and Google Books apps got crippled. Thanks, Steve.

"The fact is," Steve Jobs famously told the New York Times in 2008, trying to convince them that Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle was a nonstarter, "that people don't read books anymore."

What Jobs really meant, we discover three years later, is that people don't get to read books on his iPads or iPhones unless they buy them from his MORE

Morris Lessmore's fantastic flying iPad app

Climbing the iTunes top-grossing app charts is a touching homage to the printed page

It's nice to see, among all the Angry Birds and Fruit Ninjas, an animated children's book doing well on Apple's (AAPL) App Store -- especially when the work in question is as lovingly conceived and rendered as William Joyce's The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.

The $4.99 iPad app debuted on May 31 and has MORE

Apple users buying 61% more apps, paying 14% more per app

The appetite for cool software is increasing, and customers are willing to pay more for it

Apple's (AAPL) business model is increasingly dependent on the health of its App Store, the rich breeding ground of the company's software ecosystem, and a report to clients issued Monday by Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster suggests that the ecosystem's vital signs are good.

Apple only releases data about the App Store when it serves its interest MORE

Brian S Hall's Top 10 reasons iPads are selling like hotcakes

Why, he asks, do Android users prefer Apple's tablet to the ones that run Google's OS?

I've never met Brian S Hall and don't know much about him except that he went to school in Michigan, lives in Madison, Wisc., and has worked as a marketing manager for several firms I'm only vaguely aware of.

But I like the way he thinks, and on his Smartphone Wars Community blog I've often found MORE

How many ways can you say 15 billion App Store downloads?

Apple's latest press release manages to do it four times in seven paragraphs

In its missives to the press, Apple (AAPL) is usually content to repeat its favorite buzz words -- "incredible," "amazing," "exciting," "revolutionary" etc. -- to drive home how amazing and incredible the company is, especially compared with its humdrum competitors.

But the announcement issued Thursday takes Apple's penchant for banging and banging and banging its own drum to new MORE

Apple iPad apps: 100,000+. Android tablet apps: 1,300+

It took the iPhone App Store 482 days to hit six figures. The iPad did it in about 450.

Sometime this week, the number of apps written or adapted for Apple's (AAPL) iPad hit the 100,000 mark.

It's hard to say exactly when. On Thursday afternoon, MacStories' Frederico Viticci noticed that the number posted on the iPad's App Store (under Featured/Release Date) had rolled over to 100,161.

That's curious because when we checked MORE

Your company's own app store

Private "storefronts" let corporations outfit employees with homegrown business apps.

FORTUNE -- Want to develop a small-molecule-based drug? There's an app for that. But you won't find it in Apple's App Store -- it's available only through a private storefront run by biotech giant Genentech.

The company, based in South San Francisco, Calif., has created some 20 mobile apps for its employees -- and a dozen more are in the works. In MORE

Apple pulls Third Intifada app

The decision follows an official request from the Israeli government

Apple (AAPL) on Wednesday removed a controversial application from the App Store after a Jewish human rights group and a top Israeli official complained that it contained anti-Semitic content and promoted violence against Israel.

The app, "The Third Intifada," passed along anti-Israeli news and alerted users of upcoming protests against Israel.

"Intifada" -- literally "shaking off" -- is the Arabic term for two MORE

The Android Market: 'It's a loud, obnoxious baby'

Having ported a hit game from iOS, one developer reveals the good, the bad and the ugly

"With Battleheart having been on sale for a few weeks, I feel I'm equipped to offer up some impressions of the Android market from a developer's perspective."

So began a post Saturday by Noah Bordner, a veteran game animator (EA, Lukas Arts, Bungie) whose indie development house Mika Mobile has had several hits on Apple's MORE