Online and in stores, Apple has taken Google’s Nest thermostat off the shelves. Shadier still, “The move comes as the first batch of smart home products that work on Apple's HomeKit platform become available for purchase,” Mashable notes. “Apple was amongst the first retailers to carry the Nest when it debuted in 2011.” 

As ad spending increases, fraudsters must be slavering to get a piece of the pie, writes Adexchanger.com. Location data may be a great development, but it also can be highly unreliable. There are simple steps ad agencies can take to thwart criminals at their own game– captchas and other bot-defeating steps, for example. The article predicts that mobile fraud will reach a tipping point in the next year, at which point no one will be able to ignore it.

Instant messaging software startup Symphony Communication Services has drawn the attention of New York’s top banking regulator. “In a letter sent to the company Wednesday, the Department of Financial Services asked Symphony for details about data retention and deletion, encryption services and open-source features,” The Wall Street Journal reports. 

In its first nine weeks on store shelves, Apple says its smart watch outsold the iPhone and iPad during their first nine week on the market. “Apple itself said that the iPad sold 3 million units in the first 11 weeks, so that gives us some kind of ballpark,” The Verge writes. “More specifics may be hard to come by, though.” 

Google just picked up Pixate -- a startup that specializes in mobile app prototyping. “The company had previously launched a few tiers of their service, focusing completely on prototyping, but promising at some point to get into ‘developer handoff’ to improve the workflow from designer to the development team,” TechCrunch reports. “Sounds like that’ll come to fruition at Google.” 

Advertising is ruining the mobile Web, says Felix Salmon. “The result is a hugely degraded user experience -- bordering on the completely unusable, in many situations,” he writes in The Guardian. Worse still, “ads’ thirst for bandwidth seems destined to increase relentlessly, whether or not bandwidth itself increases quickly enough to meet that need.” 

Facebook, Google, and some other Web giants are apparently taking Samsung’s side in an ongoing patent war between the phone maker and Apple. “The coalition sided with Samsung in a ‘friend of the court’ briefing filed July 1, warning the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals that ordering Samsung turn over the full profits of certain devices over select design elements copied from Apple opens the entire industry up to mass patent infringement lawsuits.” 

Everyone could stand to know a little more about fraud in mobile, says Mobile Marketing in a series on the biggest issues in mobile advertising. While it doesn’t differ drastically from traditional online fraud (botnets -- hacked devices programmed to mimic human behavior, click farms that hire people to click on ads full time in developing countries, etc.), mobile fraud, and ad fraud tend to be realities that  marketers either don’t know much about, or don’t talk about.Best practices to avoid fraud vary throughout the industry, but one thing everyone can do in any campaign, according to JICWEBS’s guidelines, is …

Flipboard’s monthly active usership has grown about 75% since February -- from 40 million to 70 million -- according to CEO Mike McCue. “We’ve had very good growth and it’s coming from a variety of places,” McCue said at a conference this week, VentureBeat reports. According to McCue, Flipboard is also installed on 300 million mobile devices.  

Year-over-year, Apple’s iPad sales dropped 18% in the fourth quarter of 2014, TechCrunch reports, citing new Forrester data. “Even the new iPad Air didn’t help,” it notes. “But it’s not just Apple’s device that slipped … The study points to an overall plateau in tablet sales worldwide.” By way of explanation, TC says: “Saturation in the consumer market may have a lot to do with it.”