iPhone OS

Today iPhone game giant Gameloft announced that they've decided to scale back development for Google's Android OS. What's the reason? According to Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort, it's because they've been able to sell significantly more games on the iPhone than on Android devices. "We are selling 400 times more games on iPhone than on Android," Rochefort said at an investor conference.

Of course you might think that the number of Android devices out there might be to blame, but Rochefort believes that the Android marketplace is the real issue. "It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone," he explained. "Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue."

AdMob, a firm that supplies advertising services targeting ad-supported iPhone adds, says that between September 15th and 22nd, only 23% of devices running apps with AdMob adds had updated to iPhone OS 3.1. Nonetheless, they say this is "significant update" compared to other releases. 51% of devices exposed to AdMob ads are still running OS 3.0, and 19% are still running v2.2.1, while 7% are still running v2.0 or earlier.

If you've been having trouble with your battery life on your iPhone running version 3.1 of the firmware, Apple cares. It's just being quiet about it. According to the iPhone blog, an undisclosed number of users who have posted on Apple’s discussion boards about poor battery life following the iPhone 3.1 software update are being contacted by AppleCare helpdesk with a hefty list of 11 follow-up questions.

Following up on the recent addition of an anti-phishing feature in the recently-released iPhone OS 3.1 firmware and the fact that the feature seems to be inactive by default, The Loop's Jim Dalrymple caught up with Apple spokesman Bill Evans to discuss how to activate the feature:

Truphone, a mobile Voice over Internet Protocol application for the iPhone, is undergoing conflicts with Apple's recently-released iPhone OS 3.0 update. According to Macworld UK, an e-mail sent from the company to customers has stated that some users are now seeing the wrong application icon or the Truphone application icon not showing at all under the iPhone 3.0 Software Update.

A potential security hole in the iPhone OS 3.0 and 3.0.1 firmware has just surfaced via a YouTube video in which the host describes how, by searching for the title of a deleted message, the resulting screen displays two copies of the message; when either is selected for the first time, Mail crashes. According to MacNN, when the messages are selected a second time however, an iPhone will either display the original text, or a warning saying "This message cannot be displayed because of the way it is formatted."

An updated USBConfiguration.plist file discovered in the most recent version of the iPhone OS 3.1 firmware beta offers evidence that Apple is continuing development on an unknown device. According to an ArsTechnica story, the product, referred to as "iProd", was first discovered in March and has since been updated as "1,1", which has led users to believe there is indeed an unknown product inside of Apple under active development running the iPhone OS.

Today Apple provided iPhone developers with a beta version of iPhone OS 3.1 for all versions of the iPod touch and iPhone, including iPhone 3GS. Additionally, Apple has released an updated version of the iPhone SDK for both Leopard and Snow Leopard. No changes have been reported as of yet, but we expect the big differences will come in the form of bug fixes.

If you find any changes, let us know in the comments!

Engadget reports that Apple will be previewing iPhone OS 3.0 at a special event on March 17th. With the new OS, Apple will also be updating a revised edition of their SDK. The event will take place at 10am PST, and is being described by Apple as an "advance preview of what we're building", so it's unlikely that they'll have it ready for release by that time, but hopefully we'll start seeing some of those features we've been waiting for.

With any cool new gadget, especially ones from Apple, there are a couple of first goals set by the hackers to try to achieve. With the iPhone, jailbreaking and then soft-unlocking was one of them, and now another has been met. Dev Team member planetbeing announced that they have successfully installed a working copy of Linux on the iPhone.