Gboard, Instagram’s new app icon and more: mobile buzz of the week

The lines between digital, mobile, technology and apps are blurring in today’s world. We at Robosoft are keen followers of developments in this arena. Here’s a quick summary of what’s buzzing:

Gboard app for iOS

Google released a new keyboard – Gboard for iOS last week. The news created a lot of social media chatter including its ease of use and some discussion on privacy issues.  The keyboard has its own dedicated emoji layout built in, including search…so no more app switching to search. The Gboard app is exclusive to iOS and US App Store right now.

Wearables on the rise

Wearable technology is growing at a rapid speed, from 21% of the population in U.S. in 2014, the numbers have more than doubled to 49% this year. In addition to this there was another report from Flurry suggesting that users are more loyal to apps that belong to the category of health and fitness. The findings are similar for both Google Play as well as Apple’s App Store. These studies are quite encouraging for the app developers as well as the industry of wearable technology.

Instagram in a new avatar

The much-loved old-fashioned camera icon that was synonymous with Instagram has now been replaced with a vibrant rainbow-themed icon. Some loved the change while some didn’t. But why do social networks feel the need to change their core functionality and design? And how do users react? Ash Read, one of the content creators at Buffer, has written an excellent blog post answering these questions.

App approval time changes

In an effort to focus on improving its services, Apple has reportedly cut the approval time for new submissions to its App Store from more than a week to less than two days. The shorter review process has been well received by the developer community. Now that the app approval time has reduced to less than two days we can also expect the app development cycle to speed up.

Dag Kittlaus demos Viv

Dag Kittlaus, the creator of Siri, gave the first public demo of Viv at the recently held TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York. Unlike Siri, Viv is better at follow-up questions. The secret to this lies behind Kittlaus’s use of “dynamic program generation”, which allows the AI-powered assistant to understand intent and generate a program itself to answer the query. Would Viv be able to have a better future than Siri?