For those who have been grumbling about Apple’s App Store (which, let’s face it, is just about everyone), we have good news: Phil Schiller, Apple’s highly regarded Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, is taking over the App Store from Eddy Cue on all Apple platforms: Mac, iOS, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Cue remains in charge of iCloud, iTunes, and Apple’s professional apps (as well as Apple Pay, Maps, and other things), so hopefully this change will allow him to focus more on those areas. Jeff Williams, who oversees development of the Apple Watch, has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer. In other Apple executive news, Johny Srouji has been promoted to Senior Vice President for Hardware Technologies.

Most Apple TV coverage has been U.S.-centric, but Sarah Hendrica Bickerton offers her perspective on the Apple TV as a New Zealander, and it’s not a sunny one. Bickerton reports that Siri and iTunes TV shows are not available, and even iTunes movie releases lag weeks behind the rest of the world. While Netflix is finally available in New Zealand, it doesn’t even offer the Netflix original series “House of Cards” due to muddy distribution rights. Despite all of that, Bickerton is bullish on the new Apple TV due to tvOS and its associated App Store. Her article is a welcome reminder of how technology often isn’t evenly distributed around the world.

Managing Editor Josh Centers once again joined host Gene Steinberg for The Tech Night Owl Live podcast. In this edition, they talk about Josh’s new living room setup, his disappointment with the Apple Watch, and rumors surrounding the Apple Car.

White-hat hacker Chris Vickery discovered data for over 13 million MacKeeper accounts via a simple Shodan.io search. Vickery said that no exploits were involved and the data was published to the open Web by MacKeeper’s developers. Payment information was reportedly not at risk, and the utility’s current owner, Kromtech, says that the vulnerability has been fixed. Nevertheless, we recommend avoiding MacKeeper like the plague — it does nothing unique, has a questionable past (and present, it seems), and is difficult to uninstall (the Macworld article links to instructions).

Over at MacStories, Federico Viticci has helpfully collated Apple’s Best of 2015 lists. The Mac app of the year is Affinity Photo, which some App Store reviewers say is better than Adobe Photoshop. Surprisingly, Apple’s iPhone app of the year is Periscope, Twitter’s live video-streaming app, which hasn’t appeared on our radar after the initial buzz wore off. The iPad app of the year is The Robot Factory, which lets kids play with and build robots. Apple’s top pick for the Apple TV is HBO Now, which is also a bit surprising, but HBO’s new Apple TV apps are great. Finally, the Apple Watch app of the year is the weather app Dark Sky, arguably the most useful app on the watch. Read on at MacStories to see all of Apple’s favorite apps of 2015 — there are quite a few more categories for the iPhone and iPad.

The FBI continues to pressure tech companies to provide backdoors to their end-to-end encryption schemes. In a recent Senate hearing, FBI Director James Comey said, “We see encryption is getting in the way of our ability to have court orders to gather information we need.” Unfortunately, as all security experts pointed out, it would be impossible for Apple to offer the FBI a backdoor to its iMessage encryption without it also being exploitable by individual hackers and foreign governments. In a stance that boggles the mind for its unholy mixture of ignorance and insanity, Comey now insists that allowing backdoors is not a technical problem, but a business model issue, and he hinted that such companies should change their business models.

Apple has at long last raised the track limit for iTunes Match and iCloud Music Library from 25,000 to 100,000. Apple had promised the track increase with the launch of iOS 9 in September 2015, but it wasn’t until this month that users began noticing an increase. Apple is rolling the feature out in waves, so if you’re still limited to 25,000 tracks, give it a few days or weeks before calling Apple to complain. It’s unclear why Apple bothers having a limit at all, given that the small proportion of people with that many tracks wouldn’t increase the overall costs noticeably.

Dropbox has announced that it’s shutting down Carousel, its photo management app, on 31 March 2016 and Mailbox, its suite of email apps, on 26 February 2016. Dropbox said that it will integrate features from both apps into its core cloud storage offering. Carousel was an original creation of Dropbox in 2014 and at least made some sense, while Mailbox was an independent app that was acquired by Dropbox in 2013 for reasons that were never clear. The moral of the story for Dropbox? Stick to your knitting, or in this case, file sharing and document collaboration.