Apple Assembles First iPhones in India

Apple Inc has begun assembling its low-priced iPhone SE at its contract manufacturer's plant in the technology hub of Bengaluru in southern India, the company said in a statement. Cupertino, California-based Apple, is keen to boost its market share in one of the world's fastest growing mobile phone markets as sales lag in Asian powerhouse China.
"We are beginning initial production of a small number of iPhone SE in Bengaluru," Apple said in the statement, adding the phone would be available locally for sale this month.
In February, Reuters reported that Apple's Taiwanese manufacturing partner Wistron Corp will assemble the iPhone SE in India by April-end or beginning of May.

Apple drives further into Facebook, Snap territory with video app

 

SAN FRANCISCO - With the release of a new video app called Clips, Apple Inc is inching one step closer to fully engaging in the messaging world, where its huge base of iPhone users could help it compete with Snap Inc's Snapchat and Facebook Inc's Messenger.

Clips, which will hit Apple's App Store in April, lets customers take videos and add animated captions and titles, complete with colorful emoji symbols. The app also makes it possible to stitch together multiple video clips and add speech bubbles and filters.
The functions closely resemble those that drive Snap's wildly popular Stories feature. With Stories, Snap users string together photos and videos, embellish them and then post them to their feeds.
Apple's new Clips lets users post their video to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and more. But if users post them to Apple's own Messages app, Apple will recommend whom to share it with based on which friends are in the videos and whom the user frequently contacts -- the kind of predictive social features Facebook excels at.
Apple has a huge number of users for Messages, the flagship app for short notes that is built into the iPhone's iOS 10 software. Apple does not say how many people use the app, but it does say that there more than 1 billion iOS devices on the market and that 79% of them run iOS 10.
Apple also says that Messages is the most commonly used app on iOS devices, giving the company potentially up to 800 million users for its latest messaging platform. Snap, by contrast, has 161 million daily active users. While Apple's Clips competitor will technically be a separate app from Messages, it will be tied closely to it for the ability share Clips videos with other Apple users.
Facebook has more than 1 billion users for both Messenger, which was split off from the main Facebook service in 2014, and for WhatsApp, which it acquired for $19 billion the same year.
Apple has been steadily matching the features of Facebook's Messenger. But Apple is also walking a fine line with other messaging players, cooperating with them often as it competes with them. For example, it has opened up the iPhone's dialer app, long closed off to developers, so that iPhone users could place and receive Skype and WhatsApp calls through the device's native interface.
Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp have been scrambling to get into the game, too. Google has more than a half dozen messaging apps, including Allo, its latest.
Microsoft has tried to integrate chat into its Skype app, and Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is a popular tool for business notes.
But tech giants obsess over messaging because it is where users are headed, according to analyst firm Gartner. Between 2015 and 2016, the percentage of US and UK smartphone owners who used social media apps dropped from 85% to 83% while messaging apps jumped from 68% to 71%, a trend Gartner expects will continue.