Apps, Cell Phone | featured news

Did "sexting" just get safer? Maybe, but probably not. A free and increasingly popular iPhone app called Snapchat allows users to take a picture, send it and control how the message is visible – between 1 and 10 seconds.

Oleg Kostour moved from Canada to Mountain View to build a 3D software startup. Instead, he built an app to stay in touch with the girlfriend he left behind in Canada. The iPhone app, Pair, launched in the app store this week. It creates a private shared timeline for couples that allows them to easily swap SMS messages, photos, videos and locations.

Here are six easy, inexpensive DIY solutions for creating apps for iOS and Android devices.

As unlimited data plans fade away, services and applications are being designed to help users manage their consumption.

Marketers are tracking smartphone users through "apps" - games and other software on their phones. Some apps collect information including location, unique serial-number-like identifiers for the phone, and personal details such as age and sex.

Carrier IQ threatens and then drops legal action against a developer who claimed that the company's code could be used to monitor smartphones.

How do you like those Apples? An unnamed New Yorker claims Apple's new "Find My Friends" app -- which uses GPS to locate any of your friends that have allowed you access to their location -- led to a stunning revelation: His wife has been cheating on him.

The BlackBerry has left a bitter taste in the mouths of its users. Trying to make amends for massive outages last week, Research In Motion on Monday promised BlackBerry users free premium apps and a month of technical support. But the apology is unlikely to placate miffed customers, many of whom are considering whether to part with the tarnished brand in favor of more popular devices such as Apple's newest iPhone.

After the wild success of its mobile application, IMDb is branching into games and releasing its first title, a trivia game that draws on the company's extensive movie and TV database.

Need extra money? Who doesn't, these days? If you have an iPhone, extra cash is only a Gigwalk away. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it's not. I tried Gigwalk last week, and it works. In fact, I'm relying on the app to fill a gap in my income. I'll tell you how so you can, too.