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Instagram Hits 400 Million Users→

Instagram announced yesterday that they had hit the milestone of 400 million monthly active users:

We are thrilled to announce that the Instagram community has grown to more than 400 million strong. While milestones like this are important, what really excites us is the way that visual communication makes the world feel a little bit smaller to every one of us.

Our community has evolved to be even more global, with more than 75 percent living outside of the US. To all the new Instagrammers: welcome! Among the last 100 million to join, more than half live in Europe and Asia. The countries that added the most Instagrammers include Brazil, Japan and Indonesia.

I can’t believe its been nearly five years since Instagram launched, it really doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. But I was really surprised to remember that Facebook acquired Instagram in April 2012, when Instagram had “only” 40 million users. If I recall correctly, a lot of people thought Facebook was crazy to buy Instagram for $1 billion. Well, I think Facebook got the last laugh on that one, and as Forbes points out, Instagram now has more monthly active users than Twitter (316 million).

It’s been a few years since I updated my Instagram growth chart, so here’s an updated version.

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Matthew Panzarino on the iPhone 6s and 3D Touch→

TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino has written my favorite iPhone 6s review yet. He goes into detail on performance and camera improvements, but he also focuses on the productivity aspect of 3D Touch and why iOS 7’s design helped bring the feature to life.

This is one of the big things that 3D Touch does, it eases the fear of handling actionable items. It allows you to retain your context while adding something to your calendar, peeking at an email or sneaking a look at a link to see if you really want to read it.

Pressing lightly to ‘peek’ and pushing hard to ‘pop’ it into existence provides an escape hatch that eases your mind, and a new iOS 9 affordance injects a ‘back’ button at the top left corner of any screen you jump to. iOS 9’s new task manager, accessed by a firm press on the edge of the screen (or the standard double-tap of the home button) is also arranged in a much more contextually rich card format — a time-line of your jumping around through apps.

It’s not hard to imagine how apps will take advantage of 3D Touch, and Matthew gets it.

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Joanna Stern on the iPhone 6s’ Battery Life→

From Joanna Stern’s iPhone 6s review for the WSJ:

Let’s get this out of the way first. The No. 1 thing people want in a smartphone is better battery life. And the iPhone 6s doesn’t deliver that.

And:

Still, there is no battery improvement over last year’s iPhone 6 models. In our grueling test; which loops a series of websites with brightness set at around 65%, I found the 6s and 6s Plus get no more—but also no less—battery life than their predecessors. (iOS 9 itself adds an hour of savings to the iPhone 6, and has Low Power Mode.) Strangely, although Apple says that the 6s Plus gets hours more battery life than the 6s, repeated testing on multiple devices reveals a slimmer difference. In a Web surfing test, the 6s on average lasted for 8 hours, while the 6s Plus went 20 minutes longer. In a video playback test, the difference was an hour.

This is a common theme in reviews I’ve read this morning. Given that Apple had to ship a smaller battery to make room for new components, the fact that the 6s is still getting the same performance on a more powerful hardware suggests that iOS 9’s optimization technologies are working.

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Jim Dalrymple on the iPhone 6s→

The iPhone 6s review embargo lifted this morning. As usual, the first review of a new iPhone I read is Jim Dalrymple’s:

Peek and Pop work all over the place on iPhone. In Apple Music, you can use it to view albums and playlists; you can view Messages and texts; You can set calendar events, view flight info, view images and videos and all kinds of other things.

3D Touch is one of the handiest features that I’ve seen from Apple in a long time. It’s not just that it’s cool, it actually saves me time. It’s a new way to navigate the iPhone that’s quick, easy, and efficient.

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iPad mini 4 Gets Improved Display→

The scientists at DisplayMate have tested the latest iPad mini’s display and found it to be some of Apple’s best work yet:

First of all, the colors and color accuracy of the iPad mini 4 now match all of the recent full size iPads and also the recent iPhones (5 and 6 including S and Plus). So across the entire mobile iOS product line you’ll now see color matched photos and screen images. The mini 4 is an excellent super size upgrade to the iPhone 6(S) and Plus and now truly qualifies as a small version of the iPad Air 2.

But in terms of real-world viewing conditions, the record low 2.0% screen Reflectance actually makes a bigger visual difference for the image colors and image contrast that you actually see because ambient light washes out and degrades the displayed images and reduces screen readability - so its record low Reflectance actually makes a bigger difference!

A big update from the iPad mini 3.

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How to Wear Your Apple Watch 24/7→

David Smith has released a new app called Sleep++, which uses the Apple Watch to track your sleep. To wear a Watch at night, though, Smith had to figure out a way to charge it quickly during the day.

He ran some tests, and the results are interesting:

I have been tracking my sleep every night for a couple of months now so I’ve learned a few strategies to make this work pretty well.

The TL/DR is to charge your Apple Watch in the morning while you get ready for your day (take a shower, get dressed, etc) and then again in the evening while you get ready for bed (brush teeth, put on pajamas, etc). Then put your Apple Watch in Airplane Mode while you sleep.

I can’t wait to try Sleep++ with this method (which also happens to be used by other cool people).

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Apple Refunding All Purchases of Peace→

Apple has informed Marco Arment that all purchases of Peace will be refunded to customers after he pulled the app from the App Store:

Apple notified me this afternoon that they’ll be proactively refunding all purchases of Peace. It will probably take a few days to process.

As far as I know, this effectively never happens. When I decided to pull the app, I asked some Apple friends if this was even possible, and we all thought the same thing: iTunes billing works the way it works, period, and no special cases can be made.

This is the first time I’ve heard of Apple proactively refunding an app removed from sale. I wonder what will happen to purchase history in iTunes: will Peace be available for redownload from a user’s account, or will it effectively disappear forever?

(In the meantime, I’m keeping Peace on my devices. It’s still a great app.)

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iOS 9 Installed on 50% of iOS Devices→

Apple published a press release this morning confirming that the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus will be available in retail stores at 8 AM on Friday, September 25. In the press release, the company also announced that iOS 9 has been installed on 50% of active iOS devices:

Apple also announced the fastest iOS adoption ever, with more than 50 percent of devices already using iOS 9.

And:

“Customer response to the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus has been incredibly positive, we can’t wait to get our most advanced iPhones ever into customers’ hands starting this Friday,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iOS 9 is also off to an amazing start, on pace to be downloaded by more users than any other software release in Apple’s history.”

The numbers are based on App Store stats as measured on September 19 – three days after the launch of iOS 9. While the adoption rate will slow down in the next few weeks, this is an impressive result regardless and it shows that Apple’s focus on making updates smaller in size and easier to install is paying off.

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On Multiple App Views for iPad Multitasking→

Clayton Miller thinks that iOS should offer a way to view multiple documents from the same app side by side in iPad multitasking:

It’s not too hard to imagine a solution that can leverage the app-centric paradigm of iOS into something supporting multiple documents from the same app. Apps and documents both share the metaphor of the window on the desktop, so why not let them share the iOS pane model?

In an application that supports it, the slide-over menu gains a new option at the bottom for the current app. Tapping that instantiates another view of the app, defaulting to the document management or “open” view. The underlying iOS process model would likely need an overhaul for this to become a reality, but it’s a necessity.

I like the concept he came up with, using the lower section of the Slide Over app picker to open a second pane for another document. But I’d go a step further and argue that users should have the ability to pin any view from the same app next to the current view, not just documents.

As I argued in my review:

One of the key aspects of Slide Over and Split View is that they cannot show two sections of the same app at once. Only individual apps can be displayed concurrently on screen: you can’t split Safari in multiple views and display both views on screen at the same time. If you were hoping to manage multiple Safari tabs or Pages documents in Split View, you’re out of luck.

Splitting apps into multiple atomic units for standalone views and documents seems like an obvious next step going forward.

If Apple brings the ability to split the current app in multiple instances for Slide Over and Split View, I hope they’ll do it for any view available in the app. Documents are ideal candidates for this, but all apps would benefit from such addition.

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