Latest news with #apps
Android Authority
8 hours ago
- Android Authority
Samsung TV glitch locks users out of apps worldwide
Samsung TVs seem to be facing a widespread issue where apps won't load properly. The problem appears to be affecting users globally. A Reddit thread with over 700 comments shows that many Samsung TV owners are unable to use any apps on their TVs. According to users, most apps, including popular ones like Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video, are visible in the menu but won't open. Instead, they show a '202 error' message, which usually points to an internet issue. However, affected users say their internet connection is working just fine. One user said that after contacting Samsung support, they received the following message: We are aware of a potential disruption of service on your Samsung TV. Our engineers are currently working to restore service as soon as possible. At this time, no additional information can be provided by our representatives. We apologize for this inconvenience. Another user who tried resetting their TV ended up with no apps at all, as the TV couldn't download the terms and conditions due to server maintenance.
Entrepreneur
2 days ago
- Business
- Entrepreneur
AI Made It Easy to Build. Now Everyone Needs Help Fixing It
From broken apps to bad UX, vibe coders are turning to platforms like Fiverr to find the expertise AI still can't replicate. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. You're reading Entrepreneur Asia Pacific, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media. The Bottom Line: AI can build apps fast, but many break in the real world. Founders are hitting limits with AI-generated products and turning to platforms like Fiverr for expert help. Human specialists fix what AI can't - making products actually work. The AI Build Boom In the last two years, generative AI tools have radically accelerated how quickly products get built. What once took a small team can now be prototyped in a weekend. With a few prompts, founders can spin up SaaS platforms, mobile apps, landing pages, and marketing copy. The building phase has never been faster. But as more AI-built products hit the real world, a new pattern is emerging. Many of them simply do not work. Apps that function on localhost crash when five users log in. Authentication flows behave unpredictably. Frontends freeze under dynamic user conditions. Landing pages look sharp but convert poorly. Even when everything appears to be in place, performance lags, design lacks cohesion, and users bounce. The Hidden Gap: From Generation to Execution This isn't about bugs. It's about something deeper: a growing mismatch between what AI can generate and what real-world users actually need. At the core of the issue is how AI builds. Generative models are designed to produce outputs that resemble the average of what they've seen. They operate on probability, not purpose. They don't understand edge cases, design principles, or user psychology. They do not evaluate trade-offs. They do not say, "This won't scale," or "This feels off." The result is a flood of products that are technically complete, but structurally or experientially hollow. It's a new kind of failure: things that look finished but break the moment they matter. For founders and indie builders, this is becoming the norm. What starts as a rapid, exciting build phase often slows to a crawl the moment something needs to ship. Founders realize they are debugging LLM-generated code they don't fully understand. Their stack is stitched together by plugins and templates that do not perform under pressure. They've reached the wall between generation and execution. The Return of Human Expertise This is where the demand for human expertise is quietly surging. Not for full teams or expensive consultants, but for precisely the kind of targeted help that AI cannot offer. A DevOps engineer to rework a deployment pipeline. A security specialist to audit the login system. A conversion copywriter to rewrite a page that users actually trust. A front-end developer to untangle React state management issues introduced by a model that didn't understand lifecycle hooks. To solve these problems, many builders are turning to platforms built over the past decade to connect skilled professionals with companies in need. Among them, Fiverr has become one of the most widely used. Fiverr and the Last 20 Percent Originally known for creative gigs, the platform has expanded to include deep technical talent, vetted specialists, and task-specific services across software, design, data, and marketing. Whether someone needs a database query optimized or a landing page redesigned, platforms like Fiverr are becoming a critical resource for solving the last 20 percent of the build cycle. These aren't massive hires. They're fast, surgical interventions. A three-hour audit to fix a memory leak. A two-day rewrite of AI-generated copy that sounds robotic. A redesign to bring visual clarity to a brand made from template components. In a market where every extra sprint can cost momentum, being able to drop into a network of experts and pull in the right one is now an advantage. Human talent has always been part of the story, but what's changing is the precision with which it's needed. It's no longer just about hiring help. It's about filling very specific gaps, exactly when and where they appear. That means platforms with diverse skill sets across verticals are no longer nice to have, they are infrastructure. Builders return to them again and again, not just to launch, but to stabilize, optimize, and iterate. AI may be the engine, but it's these platforms that provide the traction. The Human Edge There may come a time when AI can handle the full product lifecycle. But for now, the final 20 percent still belongs to people. And those people are already available. Builders just need to know where to look.
CNA
23-07-2025
- Business
- CNA
UK steps up scrutiny of Apple and Google over mobile platforms
LONDON :Britain on Wednesday told Apple and Google to be fairer in how they distribute apps on their mobile platforms, setting out possible interventions as it plans to designate the U.S. tech companies with strategic market status over their duopoly. The country's competition regulator, which was given a wider remit this year to take on Big Tech, laid out concerns relating to inconsistent and unpredictable app review processes, inconsistent app store search rankings, and up to 30 per cent commission on some in-app purchases. Apple and Google's mobile platforms hold an "effective duopoly", with around 90-100 per cent of UK mobile devices running on their mobile platforms, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said in a statement. "Apple and Google's mobile platforms are both critical to the UK economy ... but our investigation so far has identified opportunities for more innovation and choice," CMA head Sarah Cardell said. She said the CMA's "targeted and proportionate" actions would support British app developers - who contribute an estimated 1.5 per cent to the country's economy - to innovate. Interventions could require the companies to make their app store review and ranking processes fairer and more transparent, including fair warnings of changes to the process or guidelines and appropriate channels for businesses to raise concerns. Apple and Google pushed back against the CMA's proposals, with Google calling the step "disappointing and unwarranted." "It is ... crucial that any new regulation is evidence-based, proportionate and does not become a roadblock to growth in the UK," Google's senior director for competition, Oliver Bethell, said. Apple said it was concerned that the new rules being considered would undermine the privacy and security protections expected by its users. 'MISSED OPPORTUNITY' In contrast, "Fortnite" maker Epic Games, which stands to benefit from a more open mobile ecosystem, said the regulator had not gone far enough. It said the CMA, which gained more global prominence as a regulator following Brexit, had "deprioritised store competition entirely" by pushing it to be considered in 2026, calling it a "missed opportunity." The company, which has launched its own marketplace app in Europe, said it could not bring its app store to Apple's mobile operating system (iOS) in Britain this year and said that Fortnite's return to Apple's iOS was also uncertain. The regulator is also under pressure from Britain's Labour government, which has called on regulators to prioritise growth in hopes of rejuvenating a stagnant economy to regain voter confidence. A final decision on both the designations will be made by October 22, the CMA said. It also published roadmaps on potential further action as part of these parallel investigations. A strategic market status designation allows the CMA to impose interventions on a company, such as requiring it to adhere to specific behaviour so as not to undermine fair competition. For Alphabet-owned Google, mobile platforms are the second market where it has come in for closer scrutiny under the CMA's new regime, following the watchdog's proposal last month to designate Google in general search and search advertising.
Bloomberg
22-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Singapore's App-Led Car Sharing Offers Relief From Stratospheric Cost
Welcome to Tech In Depth, our daily newsletter about the business of tech from Bloomberg's journalists around the world. Today, Benicia Tan addresses her home city's uniquely expensive car ownership and the alternative paths that people have charted with the help of apps. GE Vernova buys AI company: GE Vernova is acquiring French software company Alteia, as the maker of power generation equipment looks to use AI for ways to strengthen the electric grid.
Times
22-07-2025
- Times
Smartphone apps' data demands pose risk to privacy, experts warn
Popular smartphone apps are demanding 'risky' access to your devices in a potential breach of your privacy, experts have of the most popular apps, including Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Amazon, were investigated by the consumer group Which?, the consumer found that 15 out of the 20 wanted your 'fine' location (within 5m), 15 asked for access to files on the device, and 14 wanted permission to access the is one of users' biggest privacy concerns, according to a survey by the group. Two thirds of people were concerned about an app collecting a phone's precise apps requested to start operating when as soon as you open your phone, even if you haven't have not yet interacted with it. Four — AliExpress, Facebook, Strava and WhatsApp — wanted to see what other apps you have recently used or are currently running. If a person downloaded all 20 apps, they would grant 882 permissions, Which? Rose, the editor of Which?, said: 'Millions of us rely on apps each day to help with everything from keeping on top of our health and fitness to doing online shopping. While many of these apps appear to be free to use, our research has shown how users are, in fact, paying with their data — often in scarily vast quantities.'While it's easy to quickly skim a privacy policy and tick 'yes' on autopilot, our research underscores why it's so important to check what you're agreeing to when you download a new app.'The researchers criticised two apps for the process of signing up to the privacy policy. The brain training app Impulse 'barely flagged any privacy information on sign up sign-up', Which? employed a 'dubious design to nudge users to consent' — the agree button was bright orange while the disagree option was greyed was the most data-hungry social media app (69 permissions, of which six are considered risky), followed by the app's Meta stablemate WhatsApp (66 permissions, and 6 risky).TikTok asked for 41 permissions, including three risky ones three of which were risky. These included the ability to record audio and view files on the device.A risky permission is one that potentially gives invasive access to an aspect of your mobile device and is based judged on an industry-standard grading devices appsApps connected to smart devices, such as watches, fridges and washing machines (AS has clarified with reporter) were among the most data-hungry of all the categories, with Xiaomi and Samsung SmartThings asking for the highest numbers of permissions overall (91 and 82 permissions respectively).The Chinese shopping apps AliExpress and Temu raised concerns. AliExpress's privacy policy was easy to miss during set-up and 'bombarded users' with marketing emails after download, in some cases amounting to 30 messages in a month. Temu sent 23 marketing emails in 30 consumer organisation advises users to review the permissions being requested in the relevant app store (data safety for Google and app privacy for Apple) and to restrict them in the section of the smartphone that manages settings, apps and worked with the cybersecurity firm Hexiosec to assess the 20 apps: AliExpress, Amazon, Bosch Home Connect, Calm, Facebook, Flo, Impulse, Instagram, MyFitnessPal, Ring, Samsung SmartThings, Shein, Strava, Temu, TikTok, Tuya, WhatsApp, Vinted, Xiaomi and YouTube. All were tested on Android in June 2025, and the permissions may change differ on Apple claimed that the precise location permission is not used in the UK, and that the microphone permission requires user (WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram) said that none of its apps 'run the microphone in the background or have any access to it without user involvement'.Samsung said all its apps comply with data protection said people sign up for fitness apps with a 'specific intent and understanding' that the 'value stems from accessing, visualizing visualising, and analyzing analysing user data'.Temu said that the precise location permission is 'used to support completing an address based on GPS location', but it is not used in the UK said it 'collects information that users choose to provide, along with data that supports things like app functionality, security, and overall user experience'.
