The terror alert system brought in by the US government after the 9/11 attacks is to be scrapped and replaced with warnings on Twitter and Facebook.

Under a new system set to be introduced on 27 April, US terror alerts will have just two levels – elevated and imminent – and sometimes be broadcast on social networking websites.

The colour-coded warnings introduced almost 10 years ago will be phased out in the move – a big departure for security officials who have struggled with how much information to reveal about terror plots.

A 19-page Homeland Security document outlining the plans was obtained by the Associated Press. It describes the behind-the-scenes process when the US comes under attack.

Terror alerts may be broadcast on Twitter and Facebook only “when appropriate”, according to the hitherto top-secret document. Terror threats are made public only when members of Congress, various counter-terrorism officials, governors and mayors have been informed. The document even specifies how many minutes US officials can wait before organising urgent conference calls to discuss pending threats.

The new advisory system is designed to be easier to understand and more specific. The present warning levels have been lampooned by comedians and criticised by TV broadcasters for being too vague and open to interpretation.

According to the draft plan, the Homeland Security unit will issue targeted warnings based on the threat. For example, if there is a specific threat that terrorists are looking to hide explosives in US airports, the government might issue a public warning that would be announced in airports telling travellers to be extra vigilant and report any suspicious activity.

Under the new system, an “elevated” alert would warn of a credible threat against the US. It would likely not specify timing nor targets, but it could reveal terrorist trends that intelligence officials believe should be shared in order to prevent an attack.

An “imminent” alert would warn about a credible, specific and impending terrorist threat or an ongoing attack against the US.

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“Imagining a post-PC world … at this juncture, given all that has transpired in computing and communications, it’s important that all of us do precisely what our competitors and customers will ultimately do: close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like. How would customers accomplish the kinds of things they do today? In what ways would it be better? In what ways would it be worse, or just different?”

Who do you think said that? Steve Jobs, in his coda to the unveiling of the iPad 2 last week? Nope. What Jobs said was this: “Our competitors are looking at this [tablet market] like it’s the next PC market. That is not the right approach to this. These are post-PC devices that need to be easier to use than a PC, more intuitive. The hardware and software need to intertwine more than they do on a PC. We think we’re on the right path with this.”

The first quote, by contrast, comes from Ray Ozzie – and it’s contained in his parting salvo to Microsoft when he stepped down as chief software architect after five years last October.

Ozzie was signalling, as clearly as he could manage, that the post-PC world is, if not upon us, then coming at us with express train-styled speed. “And the PC and its ecosystem is going to keep growing, and growing, for a long time to come,” he wrote. “But …”

And there’s the thing. You might prefer to stick on the first half of his prognostication. After all, are we truly living in the post-PC era? The numbers initially suggest not. The research company Gartner reckons that this year will see 387.8m PCs sold worldwide, up 10.5% on 2010. Rude health, right?

Look around, though. Look at the adverts for smartphones and data plans that spring up on every web page you visit. Look at the coverage of “media tablets” (not just Apple’s iPad) that you find on every technology website that has any sort of consumer readership – and even some that don’t, because media tablets are (despite what any naysayers might think) finding their way into peoples’ homes and businesses, just as the first PCs did almost 30 years ago.

Dig a little deeper and you see the extent of the change. The research company Gartner last week announced a substantial downrating of its forecast for PC sales, to 387.8m, a 10.5% increase on 2010. But at the start of January, it was forecasting that sales growth this year would be 15.9% (which would mean 406.6m PCs sold). And in November, it was suggesting 17.9% growth, which would have been 413.6m sales.

Which means that in roughly five months, Gartner reckons that 25.8m potential PC sales have vanished. (IDC, another research company, says it will have updated forecasts later this week.)

That’s rather a lot of money lost for Microsoft. My calculations, based on the revenues and profits from Microsoft’s accounts (which I’ve wrangled into annual numbers, because the company’s financial year starts halfway through the calendar year), show that for every 10m PCs sold, Microsoft gets
• $573m of revenues in its Windows division;
• $443m of profits in its Windows division.
(Based on a linear average of seven years’ figures.)

Here are the graphs. (The table with the figures is at the end of this post.) The pinkish lines are the linear best fit. The line connecting the data points shows the time progression.

Worldwide PC sales v revenues

Worldwide PC sales v profits

So if Gartner thinks that tablets have eaten 25.8m PC sales, that is $1.48bn of lost revenues, and $1.1bn of lost profits. That’s money coming straight off Microsoft’s bottom line.

You can argue that this is just spreadsheet-wrangling: imaginary sales that never really existed except on an analyst’s computer. I’m not sure that Microsoft’s board would agree: last year they halved Steve Ballmer’s bonus, on the basis that the mobile business wasn’t doing as well as it should.

And this time it doesn’t look cyclical. Unlike 2008 and 2009, when PC sales were flat because of the horrendous financial outlook, this time the sales have been diverted, Gartner reckons, to our new friends, media tablets and smartphones, which outsold PCs in the fourth quarter of 2010; I don’t think PCs will ever outsell smartphones again, because cheap Android phones are taking off in China, Nokia has 150m Symbian handsets to dump on the world’s markets over the next 18 months, and Apple can now offer GSM and CDMA versions of its phones to high-end buyers.

It’s those media tablets which are snarfing the sales in particular in the region where the PC first had its boom: North America. PC sales actually shrank there by 6% in the fourth quarter, but that’s where media tablets are having their best showing, making up more than 50% of the estimated 19.5m tablets sold in 2010. Imagine the decline in PC sales as a wave washing over the world, starting in the place where the PC boom began – the US.

And this year? Gartner’s talking about nearly 55m tablets being sold worldwide.

That’s a lot of non-PCs; a lot of consumption and creation going on completely beyond the boundaries of the PC. Emails, spreadsheets, music (on Garageband on the iPad 2), movies (Google demoed a movie editor for Honeycomb which can upload directly to YouTube at Mobile World Congress).

And Microsoft still doesn’t have a tablet strategy worthy of the name. It won’t allow Windows Phone 7 on tablets. Nobody (to close enough approximation) is buying Windows 7 tablets.

Are PCs going away? No. But that’s like asking whether radio went away when TV came along. It didn’t – but the time and effort spent on listening to it was quite rapidly diverted to the new medium. Or you could look at it like VHS video v DVDs: VHS hung on pretty well, but DVDs turned out to be a better way to do precisely the same thing.

And in the meantime, there will be a billion-dollar hole in Microsoft’s profits this year because it hasn’t worked out what it should do. The price of not listening to Ray Ozzie is turning out to be high.

A news item from Blonde Ambition Web Design

It’s the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD) and on the Global development site we’ve marked the occasion with an interactive reflecting women’s life experiences from around the world. We asked women of all ages to share the changes they’ve witnessed during their lives. Find out what they had to say.

There’s still time to join our Flickr group, set up to collect thoughts, opinions and messages on the biggest issues facing women. The group is being organised to mark IWD, but also to highlight the recent official launch of UN Women, the UN’s new agency. We’ve already featured some of our favourite pictures in a gallery.

Elsewhere, Anne Wafula Strike blogs on the importance of education in ending inequality between women and men, while Caroline Harper writes that amid the 100th anniversary celebrations a healthy dose of realism is needed in what has been achieved and what still needs to be done to empower women around the world.

And Jaz Cummins from the Global development team is out and about today tweeting from various events taking place in London to mark IWD. Follow her tweets and let us know what’s going on where you are.

Elsewhere on the site

The UK government finally published its bilateral and multilateral aid reviews, which saw funding budgets refocused “on areas of greatest need” across the world. Niger, Lesotho and Burundi were among the countries that will no longer receive direct aid from the Department for International Development, along with Cambodia, Vietnam, China and Serbia. Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary, denied his department was putting security concerns ahead of aid priorities, as Yemen, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Somalia saw funding increased. Unesco, UN Habitat and the International Labour Organisation are set for funding cuts as they were unable to show sufficient value for money, while the Food and Agriculture Organisation has been warned it needs to up its game.

Meanwhile, Peter Moszynski blogs on Ethiopia’s controversial new dam this week.

Kate Hawkins and Lawrence Haddad write on the importance of understanding the impact of sexuality on poverty and social exclusion to implement effective strategies to improve people’s lives.

And Jonathan Glennie calls for development campaigners to link the domestic agenda in the UK with international anti-poverty campaigns.

Coming up

Peter Moszynski will be blogging on human rights groups’ concerns that the investigation into war crimes allegedly committed in Darfur, Sudan, risks being put on hold.

Rinaldo Depagne and Gilles Yabi write about the escalating violence in Ivory Coast and why the country must be pulled back from the brink of civil war.

And we’ll be reporting on the outcome of the UK government’s international development committee’s review of the Commonwealth Development Corporation, the UK’s development finance institution.

Multimedia

Gallery: The human cost of Libya’s uprising

Save the Children estimates that more than 1 million children in western Libya are in serious danger as government forces clamp down on protesters and vie for control of key towns and cities. As many as 700,000 children are believed to be trapped in Tripoli.

Gallery: What chance of education for Guatemala’s street children?

In Guatemala, up to 1.5 million children miss out on school to try to scrape a living on the streets

What you said: Some of the best comments from our readers

Commenting on Samuel Worthington’s blog on UK and US aid budgets, bsalimova wrote:

It is indeed troubling to see that budget cuts will seriously affect development aid. With increasing food prices and worsening effects of natural disasters, it seems that both of these areas need to get more attention not less.

On Florent Baarsch and Lan Marie Berg’s blog on disappearing fish stocks in Tuvalu, terua wrote:

Pacific nations need to unite all Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian nations … [to] share resources and get rid of foreign pirates fishing in our waters destroying our environment.

Writing on Priti Patnaik’s blog on identity cards in India, sharkbog commented:

The introduction of the identity cards has the potential to make a HUGE positive difference.

Highlights from the blogosphere

On his Poverty to Power blog, Duncan Green discusses a special report on the future of food published in the Economist, giving it top marks for its references to science and technology as possible solutions, but querying why people, power and politics have been left out of the mix.

Paul Collier blogs on the UK government’s new aid agenda, insisting a balanced approach and common sense is needed when it comes to measuring impact of its funding.

Devinder Sharma questions whether India’s GDP growth rate is as good as some economists are saying.

A news item from Blonde Ambition Web Design

After Friday’s technical glitch on the London Stock Exchange which left share dealers twiddling their thumbs for four hours, trading seems to be back to normal.

But the LSE has faced another problem, this time with its website. In some browsers, including Chrome and Firefox but not apparently Internet Explorer, users are told that it has been reported as an attack site, with a Google message saying there had been suspicious activity in the past 90 days.

The LSE said the problem had been a third party advert on the site, and if the user clicked through to it, there was a danger of malicious software. It emphasised there was no problem with its own site. The advert has now been removed, and the LSE said it was talking to Google to take down the attack message.

Even so, it marks another embarrassment for the poor LSE.

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A news item from Blonde Ambition.

This article titled “Google One Pass goes up against Apple’s online payment service” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 16th February 2011 15.37 UTC

Google has launched its online charging service for newspapers and magazines, just a day after Apple unveiled a rival internet payment offering for publishers.

Google One Pass opens the door for publishers to charge for content on websites, as well as on smartphones and tablet computers. Publishers will keep 90% of revenue from One Pass sales – compared to the 70% share offered by Apple’s subscription service.

Following months of speculation, the Google online payments service will attempt to woo publishers who are keen to establish new digital charging strategies as print revenues decline.

Although Google’s payments system has been in the pipeline for months, its launch is understood to have been brought forward on the back of Apple’s rival announcement on Tuesday. Apple yesterday expanded the subscription model it developed for Rupert Murdoch’s iPad newspaper the Daily.

One Pass will initially be available to publishers in the UK, US, Canada, France, Italy, Germany and Spain, with a plan to expand further in the future.

Users will be able to sign in to a newspaper or magazine website once and then pay for content on any other site signed up to the Google service – on the web or on mobile apps. Publishers can choose to charge as much or as little as they wish, from a single article to an annual subscription.

Google’s One Pass also allows more freedom to publishers than Apple’s subscription model. Newspapers including the Financial Times, the Economist and New York Times have said they are presently unclear how Apple’s new model affects their iPhone and iPad charging strategy.

Apple’s 30% stake from customer transactions does not sit well with many publishers. Apple’s service also offers less flexibility in payment plans and external links, which has prompted suggestions that it could face anti-trust issues.

Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers, which owns the UK’s most popular national newspaper site, Mail Online, is understood to be developing ways of charging with Google One Pass. Spain’s El País newspaper, the German titles Die Welt and Bild, and online news site Tomorrow Focus will also introduce payment features using Google’s new system.

James Bromley, managing director of Mail Online, said: “We are working with Google, but there are no products live currently. We have no plans to place any articles behind a paywall at the present time.”

Madhav Chinnappa, Google’s head of news partnerships for Europe, said its role is to “help foster innovation and experimentation” in the news industry.

“We’ve been talking to publishers for some time about how to thrive online. They’ve been talking about the complexity and difficulties around paid-for content,” Chinnappa told the Guardian.

“But publishers are coming to the view that they need to experiment with what will work for them. We think One Pass could be very good for the industry – a tool that is simple and good for both users and in business terms.”

Chinnappa said Google One Pass aims to be as flexible as possible. “Our role is working with publishers to let them have control over the pricing of content – we don’t make decisions about how they price. We see ourselves purely as the technology provider,” he added.

The outgoing Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, announced the launch of Google One Pass in a speech at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. Schmidt becomes executive chairman of Google in April, with co-founder Larry Page succeeding him as chief executive.

Dr Andreas Wiele, the head of Bild division and magazines at German publisher Axel Springer AG, which owns Die Welt and Bild, said One Pass could become a “real alternative to existing [payment] systems”.

“The new payment service enables publishers to have full control over their content, the price, sales and customer relations at attractive commercial conditions,” he added. “We hope that One Pass will quickly be developed into a general platform for easy payment on the web, as well as on mobile and [the] app world, to become a real alternative to existing [payment] systems.”

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All the latest technology information from Blonde Ambition.

This article titled “Google will launch iTunes music store competitor with upgrade to Android” was written by Charles Arthur, technology editor, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 16th February 2011 18.54 UTC

Google is to launch a music service to compete with Apple’s iTunes music store as part of a forthcoming upgrade to its Android mobile operating system, according to Sanjay Jha, chief executive of Motorola Mobility, which will soon launch one of the first machines able to run the software.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Jha said: “If you look at Google Mobile services [via Android] today, there’s a video service, there’s a music service – that is, there will be a music service.” He added that the value of the upgrade to the Android system, known as “Honeycomb”, which will power the forthcoming Motorola Xoom tablet is that “it adds video services and music services”.

Google has been expected to launch a “Google Music” service for some time, but it has been unclear how it would promote it. Now Jha has indicated that it will rely on Honeycomb, which is a version of Google’s free mobile operating system that has been specifically written for tablet computers.

The Honeycomb release, which appears to be tied to the release of the Xoom, is expected within the next two months.

Last Friday, Billboard magazine published a list of executives at Google who are believed to be involved in the project. They include Andy Rubin, a vice-president of engineering, who is in overall charge of Android’s evolution. Music executives told Billboard that Rubin has personally contacted them about the idea of a Google music service that would include an online store and service.

Apple’s iTunes music store, first launched in April 2003, has sold more than 10bn songs, a milestone it passed in February 2010, and has a 66% share of worldwide online digital music sales, making it the largest music retailer, despite competition from Amazon.

In spring last year Google acquired Simplify Media, a startup which allowed people to share digitised music across platforms, including the web. At the time, Google vice-president Vic Gundotra said that its technology would be used in a desktop application offering remote access to music and unprotected films to Android devices.

Google had not responded to a request for comment as this story was completed.

Apple’s iPad tablet, launched just over a year ago, sold around 15m units in 2010, prompting the launch of a number of rivals, almost all of which use a 7-inch screen, giving them only half the total screen area of the 10-inch iPad, and using earlier versions of Android designed for the smaller screens of smartphones. The Xoom will be the first device that will feature Honeycomb and use a larger 10-inch screen.

Jha confirmed that the Xoom will cost around 0 in the US, defending the price on the basis that it was competitive with the top-end iPad, at 9, and would be able to connect to 50-megabit-per-second mobile connections from the communications company Verizon via a software update in the future.

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Latest News from Blonde Ambition.

Five men from across the UK were arrested early today in connection with a spate of online attacks last month in support of the whistleblowers’ site WikiLeaks.

Police said the five males, aged between 15 and 26, are being held after a series of arrests in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Herfordshire, Surrey and London.

Three teenagers, aged 15, 16 and 19, were arrested in a series of coordinated raids at 7am along with two men aged 20 and 26. All five are being held in custody at local police stations.

The five men were arrested on suspicion of being involved in the loose-knit group of “hacktivists” known as Anonymous, who temporarily crippled the websites of MasterCard, Visa and PayPal after those companies cut off financial services to WikiLeaks. The attacks followed WikiLeaks’ release of US diplomatic cables from late November.

Today’s arrests were coordinated by the Metropolitan police working in conjunction with other UK forces and international agencies.

“They are part of an ongoing [Metropolitan police] investigation into Anonymous which began last year following criminal allegations of DDoS attacks by the group against several companies,” Scotland Yard said.

“This investigation is being carried out in conjunction with international law enforcement agencies in Europe and the US.”

The so-called “distributed denial of service” (DDoS) attacks, which bring down sites by bombarding them with repeated requests to load web pages, are illegal in the UK.

Anonymous leapt to the support of WikiLeaks after Amazon and other companies terminated business links with the site. The 1,000-strong group of activists launched what they called Operation Payback, vowing to give perceived anti-WikiLeaks firms a “black eye”.

More details soon…

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This article titled “Email spam level bounces back after record low” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 10th January 2011 16.20 UTC

A dramatic fall in the levels of emails advertising Viagra products and herbal medicines has caused a precipitous drop in global spam levels – but today the unsolicited messages showed the first signs of a huge comeback.

Pharmaceutical promotions usually account for around 64% of all email spam globally – around 60bn messages a day. This fell to as low as 0.1% over the Christmas period, accounting for a comparatively tiny 70m emails. “It’s a drop in the ocean compared [to previous spam levels],” said Paul Wood, a senior analyst at cyber security firm Symantec.

The volume of total email spam dropped to its lowest point in two years last month, from 200bn a day in August to around 30bn daily at the end of December.

But today that figure rebounded sharply to 70bn emails, in the first sign of a resurgence since spam levels flatlined two weeks ago.

The vast majority of spam is sent by networks of virus-infected computers, known as botnets. The botnet responsible for just under half of all spam, known as Rustock, ceased activity on Christmas day, sending pharmaceutical spam into a nosedive.

However, overnight Rustock activity soared, prompting security experts to predict that spam levels in the next 24 hours could increase exponentially. Yesterday, Rustock accounted for 1.5% of all global spam, while this afternoon that figure stands at 30% and is rising all the time.

“This is a marked increase. It’s still not the same as spam levels before Christmas but its a sign that, for whatever reason, Rustock had simply gone quiet,” Wood told the Guardian.

“It is very unusual that they would go quiet of their own accord – which is why this stands out much more than previous occasions – but there must be a reason for it, which I suspect we’ll get a sense of it in due course.”

Rustock and other botnets are connected to the recently closed site Spamit.com, which was credited with propping up a large amount of global spam.

Those running spam campaigns, the most popular of which is unsolicited Viagra advertising, can measure the success of their campaigns via Spamit and then get paid on the basis of its performance.

Accurate figures for the monetary value of the global spam industry are hard to come by, but some court documents from previous prosecutions have cited a “conservative” figure of 0bn (£64bn) a year, according to Wood.

Targeting unwitting internet users through their email inbox is the primary route for spammers. But increasingly fraudsters are moving to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Hundreds of Twitter users found themselves inadvertently tweeting advertising for an acai berry diet last month, as hackers broke into the accounts of users whose password had been exposed by an attack on the Gawker websites.

Social networks are easy targets for spammers due to the ease of setting up a plausible-looking profile and hiding malicious links using popular URL shorteners, such as bit.ly.

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This article titled “Facebook ‘friends’ did not act on suicide note” was written by Karen McVeigh, for The Guardian on Thursday 6th January 2011 01.48 UTC

The mother of a woman who told 1,048 Facebook friends that she had taken a fatal overdose has questioned why none of them sought help until it was too late.

Simone Back, 42, posted a message on the social networking site after 10pm on Christmas Day saying: “Took all my pills, be dead soon, bye bye everyone.”

Instead of trying to save her or get help, some of her online contacts left messages taunting her and arguing among themselves. One called her a liar, another said she “does it all the time, takes all her pills”, while another said it was “her choice”.

Her mother, Jennifer Langridge, 60, who called police after receiving a text message about her daughter’s online note, said: “Nobody told me anything about it until the following day when I was sent a text saying ‘get help’.”

The alarm was then raised with police, who rushed to Back’s flat. They took her to the Royal Sussex county hospital, but she died at 5.05pm on Boxing Day.

Langridge, who also lives in Brighton, said: “I am disabled so can’t get up the stairs to Simone’s flat. I called the police straight away. It is upsetting to think nobody did anything for my daughter.”

She posted a note on her daughter’s page, saying: “My daughter Simone passed away today so please leave her alone now.”

It is not yet known whether Back saw any of the 150 online responses. Some Facebook contacts begged for her address and phone number, but it appears no one who lived nearby contacted police or sought her out in time to save her.

Back’s friend Samantha Pia Owen said: “Everyone just carried on arguing with each other on Facebook … Some of those people lived within walking distance of Simone. If one person just left their computer and went to her house, her life could have been saved. These so-called friends are a waste of air. If someone has got problems you don’t go around adding to them, you don’t start attacking people who are already vulnerable … Facebook should put up a flag or button so that a post can be flagged up as a suicide threat, and Facebook should be able to contact the police.”

Graham Bell, from the Brighton and Hove Depression Alliance, said: “This is a very sad reflection on our community. People need to be friends in the real world as well as in the online world.”

A spokeswoman from the charity Mind said: “Loved ones can find it very difficult to know how to support someone who is experiencing mental distress, whether this is being communicated face to face or online. It is a myth that people who talk about suicide don’t go through with it.”

Back, a charity shop worker who described herself as seeking friendship, had previously spoken to online friends about her thoughts of killing herself. But some of the messages on her site show she was not taken seriously and her cries for help were mocked:

Sussex police are not treating her death as suspicious. An inquest has been opened and adjourned.

A Facebook spokesman said users’ safety was of “paramount importance”. It added in a statement: “We have a close working relationship with the Samaritans and have a process in place whereby friends and family who are concerned about someone can report it to us through the help centre.” “A team of trained professionals are then able to review the case and the Samaritans will make contact with the person at risk. The safety of people who use Facebook is of paramount importance to us and this system is just one of a number of tools we have in place to help them stay safe.”

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This article titled “Government wades in to Apple apps donation row” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 6th January 2011 10.41 UTC

The minister for civil society, Nick Hurd, has stepped in to the escalating row between charities and Apple over the technology giant’s refusal to allow donations to be made from iPhone and iPad apps.

Hurd accused Apple of “dragging its heels” over its refusal to allow users to make in-app donations to charities and non-profit organisations.

The minister said he will formally write to Apple and ask for an explanation of its ban, which the company has faced growing pressure to repeal in recent months.

Apple has never officially explained the reasons behind its controversial policy, other than saying that apps “can accept charitable donations via their websites”. But it is thought that the legal responsibility of verifying payments and charities is the company’s chief hesitation.

“I will write to Apple in the next couple of weeks to get clarity on its position and encourage the company to be more positive and constructive,” Hurd told the social enterprise news site Third Sector.

“I’d like to understand it from Apple’s point of view. It seems it could be a leader with this, and I don’t understand why it is dragging its heels.”

Hurd’s interjection is the first time a politician has stepped into the row, which recently attracted more than 10,000 signatories in an online petition.

Charities and other non-profit organisations argue that Apple’s policy dissuades people from donating because leaving the app is too cumbersome a process. Many point out that Google, eBay and PayPal have all implemented charity-vetting programmes to ensure that donations are reaching their intended recipient.

Nick Aldridge, chief executive of MissionFish, a registered charity whose purpose is to help charities raise money, said “huge fundraising potential” was being blocked by Apple. Aldridge estimates that the total monetary loss to charities will run into “many millions” over the coming years, as smartphone uptake continues to rise.

“Apple platforms would provide a huge opportunity for charities if they could engage Apple users in a compelling and convenient way,” Aldridge told the Guardian. “Unfortunately, simple and convenient donations remain impossible on Apple platforms, as potential donors must leave apps to donate.

“Instead, they have to send text messages or launch browser windows in order to send funds. Text donations are clunky, limited, and rarely tax-effective, while few users can be bothered to log-in and enter lengthy payment details on their phone browsers. Apps that enable users to donate to charities with a couple of clicks would overcome these barriers and generate many extra donations.”

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