Happy App Friday!
Practice addition and subtraction with Bubbletime First Grade Math, and work on reading and pronunciation in multiple languages with Praktiki. Plus, Pepi Superstores goes free for a limited time, and the lucrative business of tracking your smartphone location.
Garry Froehlich
Jellybean Tunes
Bubbletime First Grade Math
by Quackenworth
Bubbletime is a polished multiple choice math app focussing on addition and subtraction. The app encourages thinking and selecting the correct answer (instead of tapping on all of them) by awarding points for correct answers and for getting several correct in a row. Questions get progressively more difficult through levels which can only be unlocked by completing the previous levels.
PRAKTIKI – Reading and pronunciation
by EMANSO Technologies, Inc.
Created by a father of 3 children, Praktiki is an app to help anyone who wants to practice reading and pronunciation. In addition to English, users can also practice multiple languages including French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian. It’s currently available on Google Play and has a 4.9 rating on the store as of this week. More features include speech recognition and statistics for progress tracking. The app includes in-app purchases.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.emanso.praktiki.free
Sale!
Pepi Superstores by Pepi Play Studio will be FREE for a limited time starting this Friday.
Some Apps are Tracking and Selling Your Location
“At least 75 companies receive anonymous, precise location data from apps whose users enable location services to get local news and weather or other information, The Times found. Several of those businesses claim to track up to 200 million mobile devices in the United States — about half those in use last year. The database reviewed by The Times — a sample of information gathered in 2017 and held by one company — reveals people’s travels in startling detail, accurate to within a few yards and in some cases updated more than 14,000 times a day.”
“Many location companies say that when phone users enable location services, their data is fair game. But, The Times found, the explanations people see when prompted to give permission are often incomplete or misleading. An app may tell users that granting access to their location will help them get traffic information, but not mention that the data will be shared and sold. That disclosure is often buried in a vague privacy policy.”
Be sure to restrict location permissions to apps that really need it, and restrict it to only when using the app, if possible.
I recently noticed that an app I use was accessing my location far more often than it needed and I deleted it as I value my privacy more than I value their app.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/10/business/location-data-privacy-apps.html
