It's not every day we see Windows Phone being used to launch a major new feature, but Twitter has done just that. An update to its official app has just enabled automatic translation if you happen to be reading a person's tweet that isn't in English. The tweet isn't translated in your actual timeline; instead you have to manually click through, but that's nothing to complain about. Microsoft's Bing Platform, also released yesterday, is likely being used as the backend, so this feature could very well come to Twitter's official apps on Android and iOS (not to mention a whole range of other apps) in the near future.

People with an entrepreneurial streak should run with Elevatr on their phone so they don't miss those moments of inspiration. Elevatr is a free-form note-taking app with a business plan focus.

The app lets you create a note with fields for your business idea, the target market, product details, business model and execution. Each field has sub-fields that help you organize your ideas. For example, the section for defining your market includes fields for you to add details on the target market, the competition and your idea's competitive advantage.

Elevatr can store your ideas locally, or you can sign up for an account to store them in the cloud and share them with others. The app now is a single-user productivity tool, but the company has plans to add collaboration to the app. With its slick look and feel, Elevatr is definitely worth the storage space on your iPhone.

Elevatr is available for free from the iOS App Store.

Competition is heating up in the on-demand transportation industry, but unlike other segments of the market, there’s no lock-in that keeps customers loyal to one service or another. Users looking for a way to get from one place to another seemingly only care about the cost, convenience, and reliability of the service.

With that in mind, services like Uber and Lyft aren’t fighting to be the only app people user necessarily, but they definitely want to be the first app passengers turn to when requesting a ride. With convenience and reliability becoming commoditized, the next battle will be waged based on price.

MAKING ON-DEMAND A COMMODITY

Once upon a time, Uber was pretty much the only game in town if you needed a fast, reliable alternative to hailing a cab on the street, or calling one of the local taxi dispatchers. It’s not surprising, then, that it charged a premium for that convenience and reliability. If you needed to be somewhere, it was worth it to pay a little bit more to know that a car was on its way and, well, how far away that car would be.

Over the last few years, however, competitors have popped up with on-demand ride apps of their own. On the one hand there are apps like Hailo, which allow customers users to use their phone to hail a taxi, rather than having to find one on the street, or rely on a local dispatcher. And on the other hand, there were apps like Lyft, which rely on community, non-commercially licensed drivers to get passengers from point A to point B.

In both cases, Uber’s competitors undercut its traditional black car prices by a significant margin. With convenience and reliability becoming commoditized, they’re competing on price instead.

Of course, Uber hasn’t been sitting still since its lower-cost competitors have arrived. It, too, has been working on making lower-priced options available to users. In cities like New York, that means its own e-hail taxi service. And in San Francisco and some other cities, it’s moving forward with its own peer-to-peer ride share offering as part of its UBERx service.

FIRST APP OPENED

But while UBERx’s prices are lower, they’re still above the typical cost of a Lyft or SideCar ride. That’s led some in the San Francisco Bay Area to switch. Anecdotally, I know a number of people who are active users of both service in San Francisco, but tend to open the Lyft app first when they need a ride.

Price is a big reason for choosing one over the other. But the community aspect is another reason. Say what you will about the big pink mustaches on Lyft rides, or the obligatory fist bump when you enter the car of one of its drivers, but those things lend users to know what kind of experience they can expect when they get into a Lyft. (Then, again, it’s not for everyone — I know plenty of people who would prefer not to get into a conversation with their driver when requesting a ride.)

For a while, even if those users opened the Lyft app first, there was no guarantee that there would be rides available. The startup went through some growing pains in San Francisco at the beginning of the year, as demand outstripped its supply. It seems like Lyft has gotten those problems mostly under control over the last few months, as it more than doubled the number of drivers it has serving the city.

Even still, there are still times when an Uber will be available and a Lyft will not. In those cases, Uber wins the ride, but those cases are becoming rarer as Lyft removes its supply constraints and better positions its drivers.

PRICE WARS ARE COMING

What happens if UBERx becomes cheaper than Lyft, though? That’s a scenario we will see play out soon, as Uber is poised to lower the price of UBERx fares by 25 percent, according to a memo it sent its drivers last week. While lower fares will reduce the amount drivers will make per ride, Uber is betting that the increase in volume will more than make up for it.

That’s a bet Uber likely feels comfortable making, in part because it has years of data to back it up. And it’s a bet that Uber can make in part because it has a diversified set of higher-priced services in UberBLACK and UberSUV that will be able to provide healthier margins even as it reduces fares on UBERx.

Will that make it first app opened? Or maybe only app opened? You can be the guys at Uber sure hope so.

The PRISM project is hitting the news just now, with the Director of National Intelligence issuing statements, and people talking about what privacy means in a free society.

This morning, our backchannel discussion about PRISM drifted to the topic of user privacy in apps. Specifically, we've noticed a recent trend -- our apps are starting to contact us by email.

Here's an example of a real email generated by an iOS app:

Hello, Thank you for trying [redacted] out!

I noticed that you've used the app a couple of times over the past few weeks but are no longer using it. We trying to make the calendar a better experience and in doing so I'd really appreciate if you could take a moment and tell me why [redacted] isn't working for you.

If you have any other thoughts you'd like to share with the team, please feel free to send it our way!

That's a pretty startling email to receive, especially when we never contacted the company in question or opted into monitoring. In fact, the app in question offers a lengthly privacy statement, which states, "we may use other Anonymous Information to analyze usage patterns". Clearly that data is not so anonymous that it wasn't able to hijack the Gmail credentials used within the app.

There's a saying that basically goes, "if the app is free, then you are the product." It's become commonplace to reap device and usage statistics for analytics. Developers may forget that there remains a real privacy line between a user's personal data and how they use the app. With Apple's support of developer- and app-specific tracking identifiers, you shouldn't lose sight of how that data is supposed to be used.

In February, the FTC issued recommendations for mobile privacy disclosure. Among these, the FTC suggested that apps offer affirmative express consent for access to sensitive information, along with an access "dashboard" that would allow users to review in-app privacy settings.

At the time, Verne Kopytoff wrote at Bloomberg Businessweek about the motivation behind app privacy policies, "Privacy advocates like to call mobile phones by a more menacing name: tracking devices. Mobile apps log the pages people browse, the products they buy, and the videos they watch. Many apps also note their users' locations and, over time, glean their daily routines."

As mild as email feedback outreach efforts are, they cross a critical line when leveraging account information meant for in-app use only. A user who buys an app intending to manage his calendar, isn't expressly trying to build a product feedback relationship with the developer. Repurposing Gmail account credentials for further contact breaks an important trust.

Taxi finding apps are a hot topic right now in the Chinese startup ecosystem – both for their success, and for their being under increasing scrutiny from authorities. Beijing’s government will soon challenge the startups with a taxi booking service – both via phone and an upcoming app – of its own for the capital. Trouble is, the municipality’s own effort has one truly ludicrous flaw.

Whereas startup taxi finding apps pin-point your location and can connect you immediately, down on the street, to the nearest cab driver that has partnered with the service, Beijing’s state-approved ‘96106’ will require people to book several hours in advance – to a maximum of 15 hours. Yes, even when 96106’s smartphone app launches, it will still require you to book way ahead of time. Clearly that’s utterly useless when you’ve just emerged from a supermarket with armfuls of shopping, in the rain, and all the taxis are flying by with someone already sat smugly in the passenger seat. In contrast, private-sector apps can help someone locate a vacant taxi on their smartphone screen and get that driver to immediately come find you.

Worse yet, the pilot program for 96106, which started on June 1 across Beijing, has hit only a 68 percent success rate on its 4-hour reservations. So basically this thing is a lottery. However, the aim is for this municipal taxi booking service – it’s clearly not a taxi finding one – to hit a successful delivery rate of 99 percent.

So why are the startup-created taxi apps proving so controversial when they’re clearly far more advanced? Basically it comes down to monetization and the varying and unregulated extra fees for cabs that are picked up using Chinese taxi apps such as Kuaidi Dache, Yaoyao Zhaoche, Didi Dache, and DaChe Xiaomi. Indeed, authorities in the cities of Shanghai and Beijing have banned such apps if they charge fees in addition to the taxi’s metered fare; free services are still permitted.

So startups in this sector can still compete with 96106 in this space, but will have to forego monetization from their smartphone app users. But their real-time usefulness makes them a better option than the state-approved service.

Although companies are starting to open up more to Android, Apple phones and tablets still dominate when it comes to business use of mobile devices.

“Android is clearly growing quickly,” Good Technology CEO Christy Wyatt said in an interview. “It shouldn’t shock anyone that iOS is still out in the lead.”

But Wyatt said she is somewhat surprised the iPad remains so dominant in the tablet space some three years after its introduction. Nearly nine in 10 tablets in connecting to Good’s software are iPads.

Overall, Good’s quarterly look at its customers showed three in four device activations were iPhones or iPads, though that is down five percentage points from a year earlier.

As for Windows Phone, Wyatt said it remains less than 1 percent of devices connecting to its software, but interest is growing with more companies wanting to make sure it is something Good supports.

Other findings from the quarterly survey include:

*The iPhone 5 was the most popular phone, followed by the iPhone 4S with Apple devices making up all of the top five devices and six of the top 10 devices.

*The Galaxy S3 was the most popular Android device, accounting for 5 percent of total device activations and one in five Android devices.

*As far as industries adopting iPads, the business, professional services, financial services and insurance industries were the most active, while the life sciences was the fastest growing sector, with adoption double that of a year earlier.

SlamBots is the latest title from Retro Dreamer, a company that's been taking the one game a month idea very seriously this year. This title is based on a game Retro Dreamer put out back in February of this year, which took an endless jumping game and turned it into more of an arena-style beatdown, where you could jump on the heads of various monsters, touching down on the screen to "slam" them. Retro Dreamer took that idea and ran with it, converting it into a robot-style theme and adding a few more progression and monetization elements, and the result is this US$1.99 app in the App Store right now.

The result is a very interesting title -- it's casual, but offers up a whole lot of depth if you're looking to go and find it. The basics are clear: You tilt your iPhone back and forth to control your slambot, bouncing off of platforms and enemies and collecting coins as best you can. But as you start to figure out the game's mechanics, there's actually a lot of complexity, and if you can land a few slams in a row, your scores can get sky high. See this players' guide by developer Matt Rix for more -- there's actually a lot of really deep, criss-crossing elements present in this game.

Some of you might not be convinced at the price of $1.99, and that's fine: Retro Dreamer says there's a free, ad-supported version on the way soon, and I definitely recommend that one when it appears. But this is a really interesting title, and especially if you've been following Retro Dreamer's path through the App Store. It shows very well how app ideas can evolve forward into something really special.

Lenovo has never made a serious push into the realm of mobile devices but that may be about to change. The Wall Street Journal reports that Lenovo “is in preliminary talks with ‘multiple parties’ about a possible joint venture in smartphones” as a way to offset the global decline in PC sales. What makes Lenovo particularly interesting is that it’s been the only major Windows OEM to weather the collapse of the PC industry so far, as IDC earlier this year estimated that the company’s overall year-over-year PC shipments remained steady even asrival vendors’ sales plummeted by more than 20%.

The reason Lenovo’s PC business has stayed afloat has been that it’s concentrated on selling PCs in emerging markets such as Brazil and in its native China, where many consumers are still buying PCs at a fairly healthy pace. If Lenovo can use the brand recognition it’s generated in these markets to boost interest in its smartphones then it could conceivably pose a challenge to rival vendors such as Samsung, Huawei and ZTE.

Apple‘s big annual event, WWDC 2013, is just around the corner. In anticipation of the event, Apple has now rolled out a new iOS app, exclusively for the event. The app will essentially allow the participants to keep track of meetings and get real-time updates.

WWDC events are known as the occasions where Apple usually unveils its future plans. In the past, Apple has taken the instance to reveal its upcoming iOS and OS X releases and the same is expected of the company this year too.

WWDC 2013 typically features multiple events, meet-ups and talks going on in parallel at different sessions. If you are among the lucky developers who will get to attend this year’s WWDC, you can be sure that you will miss out a lot, specially all the updates coming from other sessions without the official iOS app.

The official app lets you get all the updates, photos and snapshots of the events at the end of each day. Moreover, you will also be able to find the venues easily and quickly. The app also comes with the apt descriptions of different shows at the event, so that you are sure of where you are headed to.

Moreover, rather than being given hard passes, participants will be handed Passbook credentials which they can present whenever they have to gain entry into a session. If you are worried, from where to download the app, then you can download the app here.

People have been espousing the consumerization of information technology for more than three years. But enterprises are still pushing out stodgy apps, and employees are throwing those apps out the window. Fortunately, IT administrators can escape this cycle and give employees applications of real value, if and only if they take steps to listen to end users, Sanofi executive Brian Katz explained Monday at the Consumerization of IT in the Enterprise Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

Katz, head of mobile engineering at the drug company, talked about the widespread existence of “crapplications” — you know, those that are technically capable of doing way too many things, or suffer from convoluted interfaces, or take too long to click through — and presented tips for admins to keep in mind in the quest to actually help employees.

• Companies should find out what employees actually want and need from an application before blindly building one and rolling it out to everyone. “I advocate going on a ride-along, … to see what they’re actually doing,” Katz said. “Spend time with them. Bring them in for focus groups.” For example, his company’s representatives need applications that keep working inside hospitals, where service can drop off. If apps can’t work with that, reps might well delete the apps.
• Instead of sharing proprietary internal data willy-nilly, expose it through secure application programming interfaces (APIs). And don’t let every user see every file. “We’re going to wrap identity around it, because I shouldn’t be seeing the CEO’s data,” Katz said. Look to API-management tools such as Mashery and Layer 7 Technologies to “appify” your data,” he said.
• Companies should avoid choosing to write an HTML5 application, a native mobile application or a hybrid based on what they think is hip. “This is a religious war,” Katz said. Companies should do what’s best for their users. An HTML5 application in a browser might not be the best path if a camera function is critical but it takes many seconds for the camera to pop up.
• Having a mobile-first strategy is important, but it shouldn’t be a mobile-only strategy. It’s a good idea to give employees the ability to work with company data on a tablet and on a desktop. And kicking off a mobile-first strategy shouldn’t be done just to keep to be hip. It should be done to support traditional business goals. That will help guide application development.

So what’s a good mobile app look like in Katz’s book? One, from the New York Waterway, presents users with ferry schedules, maps, alerts, a bus finder, a means to buy tickets and not much more than that. It’s stripped down to what customers want most.

He also gave a shout-out to Shazam, that music-recognizing application. There’s just “a big button that says, ‘Click to listen,’” Katz said. “That’s it. There’s nothing else there. You don’t have to figure out anything. You click it, and it runs. It’s pretty simple. You have a UX (user experience) that people can’t follow? They’re going to get rid of it.”

Just as Box CEO Aaron Levie talks about serving up “a consumer-grade experience” in trying to become the Dropbox of the enterprise, Katz comes across as the kind of guy whs believes that anyone — a consumer if nothing else — should be able to figure out an application aimed at enterprise use. If that’s the case, productivity can increase, and less data will end up floating from internally sanctioned applications to unapproved clouds commonly talked about when people talk about shadow IT.

Gmail 4.5 started rolling out today to Android devices (have you installed your update yet?), and immediately some of you noticed that it has definitely shuffled some things around. The bottom bar moved up top, the navigation is now on the left, and the multi-select checkboxes are gone. Don't worry, though - multi-select functionality hasn't disappeared. In fact, it's still very easy to use.

With the addition of sender images, two separate scenarios exist for using good old multi-select. Let me demonstrate.

Sender Images Enabled

Sender images are kind of neat - they instantly let you tell what kind of correspondence you're looking at in a very visual way. I personally love them. Some of you may not - if you are one of those people, go to the next section.

By the way, in case you haven't figured it out yet, if a sender image is missing, the first letter of the sender's name is used instead.

Here's the thing about sender images - they are your multi-select checkboxes. Just tap them. Easy, right?

  

Sender Images Disabled

So you hate sender images and decided to disable them. Don't worry - you can still select multiple messages. Just long-press one of the emails until it gets highlighted and then simply single tap others. A little bit more effort, but it still works and works well.

 

Now if we could get an option to restore the bottom button bar, I'd be a happy camper.

Smartphones have been forecast to undercut newspaper photography professionals for years. Still, the Chicago Sun-Times’ decision to eliminate all of its full-time photography staff came as a surprise. This is one of the oldest continuously published newspapers in the United States, established in 1844. Its paid circulation of 260,000 in 2012 makes it one of the biggest newspapers in the country. Laying off 28 photography professionals is a drastic move. In a leaked memo, the Sun-Times’ managing editor mentions “iPhone photography basics” as one of the mandatory training session for journalists.

Newspaper journalists are increasingly facing pressure to pick up photography and image editing skills that used to be the domain of dedicated professionals. The rapidly improving camera quality on smartphones like Apple’s iPhone is a major factor in this ongoing shift; the latest wave of high-end phones feature cameras with resolutions between 8- and 13-megapixels, LED flashes, HD video and fairly sophisticated image stabilization software out of the box.

The Chicago Sun-Times’ print circulation dropped by nearly 8% in the latest last two quarters compared to the same six-month period a year earlier. As print continues its grim downward spiral, papers are slowly consolidating several vanishing stand-alone jobs onto the shoulders of a shrinking number of harried journos.

In the brave new world of newspaper journalism of 2020, the evolutionary pressure is likely to produce a strange hybrid creature snapping photos and shooting video, editing images, designing layouts, devising SEO strategies and cultivating social media presence to promote stories… and perhaps actually writing an article or two.

Eye-Fi cards have been around since 2006 as a way to wirelessly transmit your digital camera photos to your computer or mobile device. The catch was that you had to connect to a Wi-Fi network before in order to do so. Not so with the new Eye-Fi Mobi.

The new Mobi cards will let you transfer photos absolutely anywhere, since the card is its own WiFi hotspot. You just have to download a free app for iOS or Android and connect it with your card, a process that Eye-Fi claims is simple and seamless. We hope so, because the setup process for the original Eye-Fi cards was a real pain.

The Eye-Fi Mobi is available now at $50 for an 8 GB card, and $80for a 16 GB card (both Class 10). [Eye-fi]

Vine is a way to shoot short videos and share them on Twitter, but it's been an iOS exclusive for the last few months. Well, Twitter has finally seen fit to grace the lowly Android users with some mini videos. Happily, the interface has a bit of Holo to it.

The Vine app is still propagating in the Play Store, so don't be alarmed if the link doesn't work yet. Once you get up and running, you'll be able to shoot 6 second videos with sound. That might not sound terribly impressive, and from a technical perspective, it isn't. Vine is useful because it makes sending videos over Twitter much easier.

Vine for Android will be available on phones running 4.0 or higher. The Twitter blog post promises future updates will bring support for front-facing cameras, search, mentions, hashtags, push notifications, and Facebook sharing. If the initial release is sounding a bit barebones, the Android version is at least getting a unique feature: zoom. Twitter promises more Android-only features in the future.

Even if you're not particularly in love with live wallpapers, you owe it to yourself to check out the newest offering from Maxelus. This developer has a reputation for creating beautiful live wallpapers that don't destroy performance. And the just-released Space Colony might take things to an entirely different level.

  

  

Space Colony turns your home screen into an alien cityscape with towering buildings, epic star-filled skies, and glowing starships flying past. There are five different city locations, and all the colors are configurable. Accelerometer control can be used to move the view around, but swiping does the same thing if you want to save a little battery.

  

This live wallpaper does indeed look fantastic, but it appears to render better on the Nexus 4 than it does on the Nexus 7. There are a few jaggies on the latter device, but performance is acceptable. This seems like a pretty good way to blow a few bucks.

Nimbuzz is continuing its push for South Asian dominance with its latest telco partnership. The Indian messaging startup just announced a tie-up with Hutch in Sri Lanka, offering six months of free Nimbuzz usage to Hutch subscribers.

Today’s announcement is just another in a steady string of telco partnerships that the company has been striking up. In May, it linked up with Mobilink in Pakistan, to give the telco’s 35 million subscribers access to Nimbuzz at a flat cost.

The deal was similar to one that Nimbuzz made with India’s Aircel in February. The company has a total of eight telco tie-ups in India, covering nearly 75 per cent of the country, except for Vodafone’s users, said Vikas Saxena, Nimbuzz’s CEO.

The point of all these deals is to ease friction in getting Nimbuzz on phones in the country.

Saxena explained that billing continues to be an issue in Asia, where credit cards are not as common as they are in the West. Here, telco billing is one of the easier ways to reach users, offering the option of prepaid credit or through monthly phone bills. ”Ringtones and ringback tones sell (over phones) like hotcakes here, even though you can download these over the Internet,” he said.

Telco billing is a strategy that even music providers in Asia have turned to. KKBOX and Deezer, for example, have used carrier tie-ups in the region to reach users more effectively.

A second reason for the telco tie-ups is that bundled offerings are especially necessary in price-sensitive markets like India and the neighboring countries.

In the Aircel deal, for example, signing up for Nimbuzz granted users 40Mb of data per month to use. It doesn’t sound like much, but it helps in a country where people hold multiple SIM cards to use different offers from rival telcos, such as more voice minutes from one and free texts from another.

The smartphone messaging landgrab

Nimbuzz has a total of 150 million users, and counts more than 210,000 new registrations per day. 25 million of its users are in India.

Its plans to stake a claim to South Asia is not unchallenged. Other Asian messengers are eyeing new markets too, and have large existing user bases to pull new users toward them.

Tencent’s WeChat app has a base of 300 million subscribers, and Japan’s Line just passed 150 million. US-based WhatsApp has 200 million active monthly users. Korean Kakao Talk has a smaller but growing base of 90 million, according to recent reports.

Vikas Saxena, Nimbuzz CEO

The fight for Asia’s new markets is evident. WeChat has started to air TV commercials in countries in Asia. And in the emerging markets—clashing head-to-head with Nimbuzz, especially—WeChat just made its apps compatible with the low-end Nokia Series 40 Asha smartphones. WhatsApp is also compatible with the Asha line.

India, as a relatively less penetrated market, appears to hold great potential for getting a large volume of users onboard. But several barriers persist in the immediate timeframe.

For one, the smartphone base is growing but still minuscule because of the relative price of smartphones to average income. Data plans are generally priced a little outside of mainstream access, too, resulting in a small mobile data subscriber base. According to the country’s regulator, only 2 percent of Indian cellphone users had 3G subscriptions in 2012.

Besides price, part of this can be blamed on the country coming late to 3G. The spectrum licenses were only auctioned in 2010.

For now, Saxena is eagerly waiting for smartphones to become mainstream in India. “When smartphones get below $100 in the next two to three years, the 60-70 million mobile Internet users will become 200-300 million,” he said.

Nimbuzz gets a cut of data revenues or has flat fee deals with the telcos, but this isn’t the main plan for revenue—mobile advertising is.

In March, it launched a commercial tie-up with Mentos-maker, Perfetti Van Melle (India). Nimbuzz has a Chat Buddy module allows Mentos to directly chat with Nimbuzz’s users.

It seems opt in: Nimbuzz users can install the Mentos Chat Buddy and solve a murder mystery, with a prize awarded by a lucky draw.

Line has a similar strategy. According to an e27 interview with Bubble Motion’s CEO, Thomas Clayton. the Japanese company charges brands about $200,000 for official accounts on the app, which allow brands and celebrities to broadcast messages to users.

Nimbuzz is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners. Saxena would not say if the startup was profitable yet.

It employs less than 100 people, most of whom are located in India. It also has a regional office in Dubai.

Seattle-based WhitePages has acquired Mr. Number–a startup whose Android software aims to make it easier for people to see who is calling them and to block unwanted calls.

Mr. Number has been fighting an uphill battle since last year when Google made it turn off a crowd-sourced Caller ID database it was building from its user’s contact lists. In response, the company turned off the calling and texting features of its app and focused on reverse lookup and other features.

WhitePages, which already has a Caller ID mobile product of its own, didn’t say how much it is paying for Mr. Number.

“Truly effective call management must provide consumers not only an understanding of who’s on the other end of the line, but the ability to block spammers and unwanted callers and texters,” WhitePages CEO Alex Algard said in a statement. “Our users now have access to the best of both worlds.”

Oracle lost a patent and copyright case against Google last year when a Northern California District judge ruled that APIs, or “declaring code,” cannot be copyrighted. But Oracle is now appealing that decision, hoping that the "structure, sequence, and organization" of its Java APIs will be protected under copyright law.

On Friday, the Application Developers Alliance along with Rackspace, TMSOFT, and Stack Exchange filed an amicus brief in the appeals case, which is being heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. (The Federal Circuit normally only hears patent cases, but is taking on this copyright case because it was joined with patent infringement allegations by Oracle in the original case.) In the brief, the interested parties explain that for the past several decades, declaring code has been understood to be outside of copyright, while implementing code is protected by copyright. “Were this Court to accept Oracle’s position, almost every player in the industry would be susceptible to suits for copyright infringement when using declaring code,” the brief states.

The group of developers also says that the court can't solve software developers' liability problem by allowing APIs to be copyrighted and then applying a fair use doctrine to determine whether they infringed, either. “If liability for the entire market were determined based on a case-by-case determination of fair use (an already unpredictable doctrine), developers would be unable to adequately predict their exposure.”

Since Oracle brought its appeal to the Federal Circuit in February of this year, Microsoft, EMC, and Netapp have together filed an amicus brief in favor of Oracle's position, saying that without copyrighted APIs, the software industry would become destabilized.

Naturally, the signatories on this week's amicus brief disagree. “It's like using the + sign to mean addition,” wrote Joel Spolsky, Chairman of the Application Developers Alliance Board of Directors and CEO and Co-founder of Stack Exchange, in a press release on Friday. “Letting one company copyright APIs would be like letting one company have a monopoly on the use of the + sign. It's nothing more than a ridiculous, shameful attempt to abuse the legal system for the purpose of extortion.”

SMS fees are pure profit for the cellular carriers. They’re basically free for carriers to send, but they can often cost ten cents or more per message. It costs more to send a text message on Earth than it does to transmit data from Mars.

Given these extortionate fees, it’s no surprise that a variety of apps are springing up that allow people to send text messages for free and avoid the carriers. The most popular, WhatsApp, claims it has more users than Twitter and sends more messages than Facebook worldwide.

Why Do Texts Cost So Much, Anyway?

The truth about text messages is that they don’t put any additional load on a cellular network. They’re sent along with other data that’s already being used with the wireless network. A text is basically free for a carrier to send.

So why do carriers charge so much for text messages? Well, for a similar reason that carriers add so much profit to roaming fees — because they can get away with it.

If your plan gives you unlimited text messages — something that sounds nice, but is basically free for the carrier to offer so they bundle it to justify high monthly fees — you probably don’t care about getting text messages for free. However, if you use a prepaid carrier with pay-per-use billing, using one of the apps below can help you and your friends save money, texting entirely for free when you’re on Wi-Fi.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp, the most popular free messaging app, piggybacks on top of your existing phone number and contacts. When you install WhatsApp on your phone, you’ll have to confirm your phone number by receiving a text message. After you do, WhatsApp will associate the app with your current phone number on its servers. It will scan your phone’s address book and look at the phone numbers you have associated with your contacts, displaying your contacts that are using WhatsApp. If they’re using WhatsApp, you can message them via the WhatsApp app. WhatsApp functions similarly to SMS, but it sends messages via the Internet — so it will be completely free if you’re connected to Wi-Fi or will only cost you a small bit of data if you’re on a cellular network.

The interesting thing about WhatsApp is how low-friction it is. You don’t have to tell your friends to sign up for WhatsApp accounts and then friend each other, as you do on other messaging services. If someone in your address book is on WhatsApp, you’ll know. If you already text with people, you can just ask everyone to download WhatsApp and you’ll see them in WhatsApp without any friending required.

US Only: Google Voice

If you’re in the USA, you can sign up for a free Google Voice number. Using the Google Voice mobile app or even Google Voice on the web, you can send free text messages. Like with WhatsApp, if you send a text message via Google Voice while not connected to Wi-Fi, the app will use a bit of data instead of counting as a text message. One nice thing about Google Voice is that it isn’t mobile-only. You can also send and receive text messages on the web,.

You can even port your existing phone number to Google Voice, using it as your main number to send and receive calls from.

iOS Only: Apple iMessage

Apple’s iOS devices and Macs include iMessage. If you’re using iMessage and send a message to another iMessage user, iMessage will send that message over the Internet (via Wi-Fi or a data connection) rather than sending it as a traditional text message. This all happens automatically — the app routes as many messages as possible via the Internet rather than sending them as traditional SMS messages.

If you’re using an iPhone and send a message to another iPhone user, that message will be probably transmitted over the Internet rather than as a traditional SMS message. However, this requires your contacts have Apple devices — if they don’t, you’re better off using a cross-platform app like WhatsApp.

Other Services

The above options are far from the only SMS-replacement services. There are a wide variety of services,some of which are more popular in individual countries. Kik, Viber, Line, Facebook Messenger, BlackBerry Messenger (soon to be available for iOS and Android), Google Hangouts — the list goes on and on.

Unfortunately, while SMS was a service that allowed people with different phones and apps to interoperate with each other, all of these messaging apps are confined to their own little world. If you want to message someone on WhatsApp, you’ll need to be using WhatsApp. If you want to message someone via Google Hangouts, you’ll have to do it via the Google Hangouts app.

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If you really want to send free texts between your social circle or family, you may want to decide on an app that you’ll all use. Thanks to the carriers’ greed, the world of mobile messaging services has become fragmented.