Apple changes the iPhone return window from 30 to 14 calendar days

According to a change in Apple's Standard Return Policy, from tomorrow onwards users will have only 14 calendar days to return an iPhone without a reason, regardless if it was bought from an Apple Store or online. This change equalizes the return policies of Apple and its carrier partners, as well as the company's other products. Up until now, the period for returning an Apple smartphone and receiving a refund was 30 days.

The return policy of Apple now clearly states that "you may return your undamaged iPhone with its included accessories within 14 days of purchase for a full refund". However, the company also notes that "returning your iPhone may not automatically cancel or reset your wireless account; you are responsible for your wireless service agreement and for any applicable fees associated with your wireless account".

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DigiCal for Android gets new-look widgets and calendar view options

We’ve already featured DigiCal before in our 12 best Android calendar apps roundup last year, but today, the app has been updated to introduce a sleek new look and more flexibility to its calendar widgets.

The update brings an overall cleaner design to all widget types and introduces some much needed pre-configured widget options for people that don’t have time to tinker and set up their own. As a bonus, it’ll also now show a live preview of how widgets will look before you settle on your theme.

Among the list of updates, there’s the option to set lock screen widgets so you can view your meetings without needing to unlock your device (provided you’re running Android 4.2 or newer) and a few other little tweaks for premium DigiCal

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Sunrise Calendar Stops Sending iCloud Credentials Back To Their Servers

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The increasingly popular Sunrise calendar app faced a bit of a brouhaha last week, after a couple of well-respected developers (namely, Neven Mrgan and Instapaper creator Marco Arment) pointed out that the application asked the user to punch in their iCloud credentials with little indication of what happened to them next.

Given the amount of sensitive data that tends to be transmitted over iCloud (iMessages, backed up photos, email, etc.), such a request was iffy, at best. It’s certainly not the sort of thing you want to become the norm.

Making things worse, the company was in turn taking those credentials and transmitting back them to their server (though they note that they were not storing them.) They were sending the credentials in a secure way — but still: if it’s at all avoidable, sending important credentials back to the mothership isn’t good practice.

This morning, Sunrise pushed out a patch that makes things a little better. They’ll still need you to punch in your credentials, which is a bummer — but now, at least, they’re handling authentication within the app itself. Instead of sending your username and password back to their servers, they send a unique token that allows them to access your iCloud data without ever sending your actual username/password off of the device. And if you decide that you don’t want Sunrise to be able to access your data? Just change your password, which renders the token useless.

It’s not a perfect solution, as it does still require the users to trust a third-party with some pretty precious data. In this case, since Sunrise is now being quite transparent about how they handle the data, that’s fine. But it’s still not something that apps should be getting users comfortable with doing. Until/unless Apple builds in some sort of iCloud permissions dialog that allows for the user to grant a service like Sunrise access to data (sort of like the way Facebook handles Facebook logins within apps), however, this is the safest route they’ve got apart from.. you know, not existing.

It’s been just 9 days since concerns about Sunrise’s methodology were raised; good on them for moving quick.

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Hub Launches To Become The All-In-One Calendar And To-Do App For Your Family

Organization within families — or even within teams — has never been easy. Different people use different calendars and tools for to-do lists, which means that it’s tough to stay on the same page. Well there’s a new app called Hub that is designed to allow family members to share calendars and lists with one another.

Hub was created by the same team behind SimplyUs, one of the many couples apps that popped up during the spring and early summer of last year. But in building that app, the team realized that couples apps weren’t really sufficient for all the people involved in family decisions.

While sharing calendars and lists definitely helped facilitate communications between couples, there were other members of the family who were left out.

For instance, grandparents who take care of kids might want to share schedules with the parents. And children who are old enough, like teenagers for instance, could have their chores assigned via the app direct to their own smartphone. And there’s also the ability to add babysitters, daycare providers, and other service providers to facilitate scheduling.

With that in mind, the team built the new app to enable easier calendar and list sharing. It’s especially good for wrangling calendars from various different services and making them accessible to each other. That’s because it supports any calendar your phone does, including Google Calendar, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, and Exchange.

Users can also create multiple hubs with different participants. So there can be like a kid’s chore hub, a babysitter hub, a romantic couple hub, whatever. Hub operates on a freemium model, where free hubs get 5 event shares and 10 task shares per month.

To upgrade, pricing is $35.99 annually or $4.99 monthly for unlimited hubs and event shares and task shares. And once one person in a hub has upgraded, everyone he or she shares with gets unlimited shares in the hub.

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