The Week in iOS Apps: Grand Theft Angry Birds

Two of the most popular game franchises in the world have fresh offerings this week. Plus, apps for listening to podcasts and writing, and updates to all your favorite social media apps.

ICYMI: Acronymph is a $1 iPhone app that sounds kinda off-color, but isn’t. As the name suggests: The whole purpose of the app is to discover the meanings of acronyms, and there are thousands of entries. This week’s update makes it easy to share your acronym discoveries with your friends via social media. TTYL.

Remember when Angry Birds was all about knocking down pigs? That was an empire ago, folks. Angry Birds Go! is a “freemium” app for iPhone and iPad that features the birds—still angry, nay, ENRAGED even—pitted against the pigs in go-cart races. Billed as the “first-ever 3D Angry Birds world,” it’s compatible with Angry Birds Telepods figurines and also features highlights from the Angry Birds Toon animated series.

Just when you thought the world had run out of podcast players for iOS, along comes Castro, a $3 iPhone offering designed for iOS 7. It offers episodes both in streaming and offline modes and includes show tabs to make it easy to find both your favorite show and its latest episodes. Podcasts can update even when the app is in the background, but you’ll be notified just as soon as they’re available.

Want to make sure you don’t exceed your data limits on your iOS devices? Data Man Pro, a $5 offering for both iPhone and iPad, tracks usage for you, forecasting when you’ll hit the limits based on your rate of data consumption. This week’s update makes those forecasts “smarter,” the developer says, and lets you tap the main screen to see “extended forecasts” for your data usage. And it advises you how much you can use every day without busting through your data ceiling.

Elements, a $5 text editor for iOS, has been updated for iOS 7 and now supports the MultiMarkdown writing language. New font options have been added, as well as the latest version of TextExpander SDK. You can also make an in-app purchase to customize Elements's interface to your liking.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas features violence! Thuggery! A great soundtrack! More violence! The $7 game for iPhone and iPad is out today, and is expected to be a blockbuster hit almost immediately, mostly because it features violence! Thuggery! A great soundtrack!

Pandora is still fighting off competition from iTunes Radio, and doing it the only way it knows how—new features. The latest addition: an alarm clock. Pick your favorite station and the time you want it to start playing. If you need extra rest, you can always hit the snooze button and restart the music a few years later.

If you’ve ever wished Turner Classic Movies was showing its movies on your iPad, Warner Archive Instant comes pretty close; it delves deep into the Warner Bros. archive for hundreds of classic movies and TV shows that can be seen only rarely. Most are offered in high-definition, too. The app is free, as is a two-week trial to the service, after which you’ll pay $10 a month.

Videos now play automatically in the Facebook news feed … Google Drive has added “find and replace” capability in documents … Twitter now lets users share photos in Direct Messages … and Pinterest has had its look refreshed for iOS 7, as has Microsoft’s Bing for iPad search engine app.