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Mobile commerce vertical added to the Apple app store

Rebecca | November 2, 2015

In advance of the launch of the holiday shopping season, iPhone and iPad users now have new ways to buy.

Before the holiday shopping season has had its official launch, Apple has just revealed a new strategy for taking part in this highly profitable time of year by adding mobile commerce apps as its own shopping category in its App Store.

The idea is to help to make it easier for consumers to more easily find the shopping apps they want to use.

Now, both iPhone and iPad users will see an entirely new Shopping app available in the category lists at the App Store, so they will be able to discover all the available mobile commerce applications. Before this change was made, shopping apps had been included as a part of the broader lifestyle section of the App Store. Now, they will have their own category, bringing the number of mobile application categories at Apple up to 25.

This new mobile commerce app channel will experience its official launch as of November 5.

Mobile Commerce - Apple Store This will ensure that the m-commerce category will be available to the Western world in time for the holiday shopping season, and that it will also be available for the start of China’s equivalent to Black Friday, which is called Singles Day and that lands on November 11, this year.

Apple has stated that launching this new channel, made a lot of sense for better serving its users, as mobile shopping has become quite popular among iPhone and iPad users and because this popularity is only growing. A great deal of the e-commerce traffic that is being experienced around the world is coming from mobile devices as opposed to being exclusively from personal computers. In fact, the Flurry app analytics service has said that there was a growth in the use of m-commerce apps by 174 percent throughout 2014.

That would make mobile commerce the fastest growing app category in 2014. Moreover, a recent survey conducted by Google has revealed that 54 percent of holiday shoppers intend to use their smartphones to do at least some of their holiday shopping this year.

Mobile advertising firm in China issues apology for App Store policy violation

Rebecca | October 22, 2015

The company has released an official statement explaining that it was sorry for the privacy threat it caused.

A mobile advertising company from China has now issued an apology for having disseminated code that made it possible for hundreds of iOS based apps to access the personal data of their users.

This dissemination of code was in direct violation of the policy of the Apple App Store.

Guangzhou Youmi Mobile Technology Co., the mobile advertising company in question, stated that they were offering their “sincere apologies” after Apple had expressed that the firm’s offerings would all be taken down from the App Store. They were taken down because they were discovered to have been collecting and extracting private user data such as device identification, email addresses and other information.

So far, there have been 256 apps that were taken down as they were in violation of the mobile advertising policy.

Mobile Advertising - Apple App Store Researchers at SourceDNA, an American security company, stated that they had identified 256 different mobile apps that were involved in the practice of collecting personal data in a way that was against the policy of the App Store. Those applications were all created through the use of a software development kit (SDK) that was made by Guangzhou Youmi Mobile Technology.

A statement was released by Apple in which the company explained that the collection of personal data in that way is in direct violation of the privacy and security guidelines at Apple. It also said that any new apps that used Youmi’s SDK would be rejected from now onward if they are ever submitted to the App Store.

Youmi has also said that it is now working with Apple in order to be able to bring resolution to this situation. The mobile advertising company’s statement of apology explained that “For those products that have been temporarily taken down, we will provide reasonable compensation once this matter has been properly resolved.” This makes it look as though reimbursements may not be issued right away, but that when the circumstances are better under control, some compensation will occur for customers who paid for the products.