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Find out the week’s top mobile stories from around the world. Headlines this week include… Developers complain that Apple promotes scam apps on the App Store, Why artificial intelligence is being used to write adverts, how are app marketers managing programmatic advertising campaigns in the post-IDFA world? and much more…

Developers complain that Apple promotes scam apps on the App Store

Ars Technica

Developers are once again publicly highlighting instances in which Apple has failed to keep scam apps off of the app store. The apps in question charge users unusual fees and siphon revenue from legitimate or higher-quality apps. While Apple has previously come under fire for failing to block apps like these from being published, developers complained this week that Apple was actually actively promoting some of these apps.

Apple’s Australian App Store published a story called “Slime relaxations” highlighting a certain category of apps. But according to some developers and observers, some of those apps have very high subscription fees despite not providing much functionality.

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Why artificial intelligence is being used to write adverts

BBC

What springs to mind when you think of advertising? Don Draper in the TV show Mad Men sipping a cocktail? Or perhaps trendy people swapping catch phrases in a converted warehouse?’ Well, more of the creative work these days is not being done by humans at all.

When Dixons Carphone wanted to push shoppers towards its Black Friday sale, the company turned to Artificial Intelligence (AI) software and got the winning line “The time is now”.

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Oh, Facebook changed its privacy settings again

Tech Crunch

Ever considerate of its users, Facebook has determined that its privacy settings needed a bit of a shuffle to keep things clear and easy to find. To that end they’ve taken the “privacy settings” settings and scattered them mischievously among the other categories.

“We’ve redesigned our entire settings menu on mobile devices from top to bottom to make things easier to find. Instead of having settings spread across nearly 20 different screens, they’re now accessible from a single place,” writes Facebook in a blog post announcing the changes.

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Mobile payments like Google Pay are everywhere — except in small communities

Android Central

Google has been providing a digital wallet option since 2011 with Google Wallet, and since that time the service has gone through multiple phases of evolution to what we now know as Google Pay. Google Pay has become a much more well-known product, usable in millions of stores, thanks to the proliferation of NFC adoption and, in no small part, to Apple Pay. But even with all of that growth, access to contactless payments in smaller communities is still scarce.

Living in rural Kansas, my experience when going to local retailers, restaurants, and gas stations is to expect no access to Google Pay. That’s not to say that I don’t come across it from time to time; instead, it’s rare enough of an encounter that I have been trained to not even look for it as an option.

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Mobile Games and the Essential Need for Customer Reviews

Telemedia Online

Most people love to play more mobile games. It is getting high consumer ratings, and its popularity grows by the day. It is essential to check the importance of reviews sites to ensure consumers continue to find what they are looking for in casinos easily.

Reviews are an integral part of mobile games. Players use them to check the quality of games in a particular casino site before playing on them. They can also use the reviews to check the legitimacy of a casino site.

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How are app marketers managing programmatic advertising campaigns in the post-IDFA world?

Mobile Marketing Magazine

Since the launch of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) back in April this year, app marketers have been on the hunt for the best ways to operate in this new privacy-focused environment. How players across the entire mobile ecosystem address identifiable and anonymous traffic, measure campaign performance, and target consumers will play a pivotal role in the future of programmatic advertising.

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Blockchain holds the key to a coronavirus vaccine passport the world can trust

SCMP

There is an urgent need for an accreditation framework that works across different systems and jurisdictions. Borderless and interoperable by design, blockchain can help establish an efficient, automated system to reconcile user data against local measures

The idea of a vaccine passport was the reason I first got into the blockchain space back in 2014. However, that was before Covid-19 and my initial vision of how a vaccine passport could utilise blockchain technology was a mere pipe dream at a time when there was no need for it.

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ANALYSIS-Got your number: Privacy concerns hobble Nigeria’s digital ID push

Reuters

Joining several other countries, including Kenya, Uganda and India, Nigeria’s government is in the process of rolling out a digital identity system to enable easier access to public and private services.

But, like those and other digital ID projects around the world, Nigeria’s initiative has been dogged by privacy concerns, with citizens and rights groups saying the country’s lack of data protection leaves their personal information open to abuse.

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The mobile board game market is growing, and ripe for disruption | Opinion

Games Industry Biz

Physical board games give players exactly what they can’t get over the Internet: the shared pot of tea, a real friend who is socially bound to finish the game, the reaction of a brother having lost a third time in a row. Obviously, these are things that can’t be transferred to a mobile device.

For the scope of this article, board games will mean multiplayer, strategic, often turn-based games played on a board with pawns or meeples and sometimes with dice or cards. Dice only or card only games will not be discussed. Games with board game elements, but with another dominant genre, will also be ignored.

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MEF