In 2011, Apple advised that iPhone and iPad apps should stop logging the unique identifiers of users’ devices, a practice that can be exploited to build up profiles for ad-targeting purposes. But a new study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, suggests that many apps still do so.
A smartphone app that launches this week from the health insurance company Aetna helps users monitor their own health-tracking data. As costs spiral upward, health-care companies could eventually turn to such apps as a way to encourage healthy behavior.
At MIT Technology Review’s Mobile Summit in San Francisco last week, Martha Wofford, consumer platform vice president at Aetna, said the company would launch an app called CarePass to serve as a portal for an individual’s health-related activity and, if he allows it, his medical records, too.
Many smartphone apps have terms and conditions that allow them to collect location data from users—whether or not those apps actually use that information to improve their service. That data could soon be used in some surprising ways, by music or photo apps, for example.
Factual, a company that processes and sells data tied to the locations of 65 million businesses and other places worldwide (see “50 Disruptive Businesses, 2013”), is cooking up ways for a broader range of mobile device apps to make use of knowledge about where a person is located at any given time.
Cisimple a startup that helps automate the build, testing and deployment process for mobile applications, is today exiting its beta and making its new testing platform available to all developers. The company is also the first to integrate with Kickfolio’s API, another newly launched startup which brings iOS applications to the browser using HTML5.
Viddy, a mobile video-sharing service that bathed in media attention and more than $36 million in investor funds last year (see “What’s the Next Instagram?”), is facing hard times. Users have abandoned its app by the millions, and last month it had to fire its cofounder and CEO and a third of its staff.
With the rising popularity of mobile health app and mobile health use, marketers are keen to know who it is that is using these digital tools to monitor their health. The infographic below, courtesy of Indus Net Technologies, provides data not only about the growing enthusiasm for mobile apps, but also who is most likely to download a health app and what is the profile of an average mobile health user. (The data comes from mhealthshare.)
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