Chrome for Android has been available for more than a year, but the improvements it offered over the operating system’s more basic browser weren’t available to developers who wanted to draw upon the browser’s abilities for their own native apps. Until now. With the KitKat release of Android, Google updated a programming interface called WebView …

AMSTERDAM — Spotify is one of the most prominent “over the top” services that tax the mobile data networks of wireless carriers, but the music-streaming service should be seen as an ally, not an enemy, in the view of the company’s telco partnership leader. Michael Abbatista argued here that a Spotify partnership actually helps carriers by reducing subscriber churn — …

Why do iOS users get all the new apps first? Many companies get their start on Apple’s mobile market, but a start-up called Cover that’s launching Thursday hopes to find profits from the increasingly powerful and widely used Android instead. The company’s software, free and beginning closed beta testing Thursday, is designed to make it easier and faster to use …

AMSTERDAM — Electrical wires hardly have the glamor of 4G mobile networks or invisibly small microchip transistors. But Qualcomm hopes a faster new version of technology called HomePlug will breathe new high-tech life into homes’ old wiring. Qualcomm’s Atheros division makes processors that let devices such as set-top boxes and wireless network range extenders communicate over power lines using HomePlug. …

AMSTERDAM — From the European government’s perspective, those who operate telecommunications networks are moving too slowly. From the operators’ perspective, the government’s rate of change would mean unacceptable financial risk. That, in a nutshell, is the debate that underscores many declarations and discussions here at the Broadband World Forum. The industry players share a love of high-speed networking and all …

Now playing: Watch this: Nokia Lumia 1520: the first Full HD, quad-core Windows… 2:18 Giving the smartphone market an option that’s been successful in attracting photo enthusiasts to higher-end cameras, Nokia’s new Lumia 1520 phablet can take photos in raw image formats. The Lumia 1020 will get raw support next year, too. Juha Alakarhu, head of camera technology for Nokia, …

AMSTERDAM — Telecommunications companies can be reluctant to spend the money necessary to bring higher-speed broadband Internet access to the masses, but two network equipment suppliers think they have sales pitches that will convince them. Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei, two giants in the telco equipment market, share a powerful business motivation to sell telcos the next round of high-speed gear. But …

Android and iOS won the mobile operating system wars, right? Not if you’re Yotam Ben-Ami, who as director of open Web services at Spanish carrier Telefonica is responsible for bringing a new competitor to market, Firefox OS. Last week, Mozilla finished Firefox OS 1.1, but even with some shortcomings fixed, the smartphone operating system faces immense challenges competing against Google’s …

Every citizen in the European Union now has broadband Internet access at home, a goal the European Commission said it reached before its year-end deadline. Pushing the needle all the way to 100 percent is satellite-based Internet access, which reached the 0.6 percent of homes that wired connections and mobile networks couldn’t reach, the EC announced Thursday. DSL, cable TV, …

Ingress, an augmented-reality Android game from Google’s Niantic Labs unit in which players try to conquer territory in the real world, will come to iOS in 2014. Arriving on the scene a year ago, the closed-beta software Ingress has been gradually updated with bug fixes and new features. One thing that hasn’t changed is the absence of an iPhone version, …