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Apple and the World Wildlife Fund together raised more than $8 million in proceeds during April's "Apps for Earth" campaign on the App Store, the two groups have announced.

Apple on Thursday launched "Apps for Earth," an App Store promotion which will direct all of the proceeds from a small collection of apps and in-app transactions to the World Wildlife Fund during the month of April.

According to fresh statistics from analytics firm App Annie published on Wednesday, social media giant Facebook is responsible for four of the top ten most downloaded iOS apps of all time, with Google and Apple titles in tow.

The Apple Watch won't launch until late April, but a couple dozen apps have already arrived.

Christmas is a time of the year for friends and family, but if you can’t be with your loved ones (or want to surprise them while you are on your way to meet them) technology can help, and in particular video calling apps....

As we wind down the year, The Next Web compiled a list of some of the social apps that have made some significant moves in 2013. How did we qualify what a social app was? In our mind, it was a service that had a core functionality that enabled users to interact and engage with other people, either online or offline....

Line, the messaging app that blew up in Japan over the past two-and-a-half years, is now bringing in nearly $100 million in revenue a quarter. The app, which spun out of its parent company NHN earlier this year, said it brought in 9.9 billion yen ($99.9 million) in net sales for the quarter ending in September. Overall revenues, which include the amount that Line has to pay out to the app…

We’ve known for sometime that SMS is becoming passe for many smartphone owners worldwide....

Japanese messaging service Line is moving beyond just texts and stickers to include video features, as it continues introducing new (and more creative) ways of communicating in its march to become a content platform....

Mobile messengers are all the rage now. That and stickers. But most of us still spend plenty of time at our computers, so being able to message across PC and mobile platforms is a feature that has been overlooked all too often by service providers....

Along with Skype, WhatsApp is the grand daddy of the mobile messaging app space. But despite its relative great age it appears to be continuing to build usage momentum. Earlier today WhatsApp announced a new daily messaging metric record, following on from its recent “bigger than Twitter” boast. Its new daily high is 10 billion+ inbound (sent) messages and 17 billion+ outbound (received) messages.

Mobile messaging service LINE updated its iOS app today with additional language support and an in-app browser, as well as a bunch of new themes for users to dig into....

MessageMe — a messaging app that launched in March with a little Facebook controversy thrown in — has raised another $10 million, according to an SEC filing earlier today. The Series A round was led by Greylock Partners; and as part of it, John Lilly, the ex-ceo of Mozilla who is now a partner at Greylock, will be joining the board of LittleInc Labs, makers of MessageMe.

Line, the chat app that is exploding in popularity in Japan and other Asian countries, has published an online safety guide for teens after a string of incidents in which it was used to maliciously target young women....

Line, a messaging app made by South Korea’s Naver Corp. that took off in Japan, just crossed 100 million users globally 19 months after it originally launched. The app is one of the leading contenders in smartphone messaging in Asia and faces off against Tencent’s WeChat and KakaoTalk. As I’ve written before, when rumors emerged that Facebook was in acquisition talks with…

It would be easy to assume that giants like Apple, Facebook and the carriers will control smartphone messaging. But the reality is that the global messaging market remains fragmented with several independent players like Sequoia-backed WhatsApp and Korea’s Kakao TALK. Japan, in fact, has a dominant smartphone messaging app of its own — and one with very enviable usage figures. A free calling…