Google Chrome will see greater expansion on mobile devices
By Rachel King.
Summary: Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome and Apps at Google, talks up the dual strategies of Android and Chrome, but don't expect the two platforms to merge anytime soon.
SAN FRANCISCO - The mobile web is in its infancy, according to Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome and Apps at Google, adding that this market will flourish over the next three to five years.
Pichai sat down for a chat during the closing keynote discussion of the 2012 Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference on Thursday afternoon.
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For critics who would ask what is there left to innovate with a browser, Pichai retorted that even though browsers have been around for 15 years, if you make the experience better, people will respond.
There are roughly 200 million Chrome users worldwide, and while Chrome is primarily a desktop experience as part of Google's dual strategy (Chrome and Android), it's starting to make its way on to mobile devices.
Last week, Google released a beta version of Chrome for Android for mobile devices running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).
Pichai noted that the "future of Chrome" is pushing the platform across smartphones and tablets. Part of the motivation for pushing Chrome to tablets, in particular, is how much more people use the browser on these devices.
"Users expect a seamless, integrated experience across devices," Pichai asserted, explaining the necessity (and opportunity) to ensure Chrome's presence and continuity across Google's products, from the desktop to mobile devices to Google TV.
The underpinnings to Chrome relies on two things: cloud-based apps and the browser that makes these things work.
Although the Chrome App Store is "in its early days," according to Pichai, he boasted about its success thus far given that install rates have tripled over the last three months, and there are approximately one million downloads in this space each day.
Pichai didn't offer many specifics about where the Chrome App Store will go from here, but he did note that we'll be seeing many more gaming and productivity apps released in the near future.
As far as productivity goes, Pichai pointed towards both Chrome and Google Apps, cloud computing products that are becoming much more popular with businesses trying to wrangle with the bring-your-own-device to work trend.
Businesses want something "that will scale across all this: a cloud-based solution that supports multiple endpoints," Pichai argued. "That changes the value of Apps significantly."
But as for any kind of pressure about merging the Android and Chrome platforms into a single unit, Pichai remained mum.
"We don't know. We will always do the right thing by users," Pichai said. "People use them differently, and we want to address them differently for today."
Apple tweaks apps policy under lawmaker pressure
By Gerry Shih.
(Reuters) - Under pressure from U.S. legislators, Apple Inc moved Wednesday to quell a swelling privacy controversy by saying that it will begin to require iPhone and iPad apps to seek "explicit approval" in separate user prompts before accessing users' address book data.
Apple's move came shortly after two members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce committee requested the company to provide more information about its privacy policies. Bloggers, in recent days, have published findings that some of the most popular software applications in Apple's App Store have been able to lift private address book data without user consent.
"Apps that collect or transmit a user's contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines," an Apple spokesman told Reuters. "We're working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release."
In a letter addressed to Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, Representatives Henry Waxman of California and G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, both Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asked Apple earlier on Wednesday to clarify its developer guidelines and the measures taken by the company to screen apps sold on its App Store.
The letter came after Path, a San Francisco startup that makes a Facebook-like social networking app, attracted widespread criticism last week after a Singaporean developer discovered that Path's iPhone app had been quietly uploading his contacts' names and phone numbers onto Path's servers.
In the following days, other technology bloggers discovered that iPhone apps like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Foodspotting similarly uploaded user data -- without permission, in some cases.
The Path incident "raises questions about whether Apple's iOS app developer policies and practices may fall short when it comes to protecting the information of iPhone users and their contacts," the letter said.
The legislators' request for information cast the spotlight squarely onto Apple for the first time since an independent blogger, Dustin Curtis, wrote in a widely distributed post last week that "there's a quiet understanding among many iOS app developers that it is acceptable to send a user's entire address book, without their permission to remote servers and then store it for future reference."
Curtis blamed Apple, writing that he could not "think of a rational reason for why Apple has not placed any protections on Address Book in iOS."
In their letter to Apple, Waxman and Butterfield, referenced Curtis' blog post, adding: "There could be some truth to these claims."
The legislators had asked Apple to submit its response by February 29.
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