Sierra will ship on September 20, so I’ve been testing my apps with the Golden Master (GM). Unfortunately, GM doesn’t mean what it used to. Not only is the macOS 10.12 GM different bits than customers will install (same with the Xcode GM) but there are actually multiple GMs.
The first GM that I downloaded was build 16A319. Then I heard about 16A320 and 16A322. There was probably one in between those, too.
When a new GM is released, it does not appear in the Mac App Store as an update. You have to delete the Install macOS Sierra.app, redownload the installer, and install the whole thing again.
I have been using VMware for testing. Despite the update to VMware 8.5, VMware will not automatically install Sierra for me. If I create a new VM and tell it to use the installer app, VMware reports an error: “Unable to create the installation medium.”.
There are two methods that have worked for me:
Copy and open a Mac OS X 10.11 VM, drag the installer app to its Finder, then run installer. (Then, optionally, delete the installer, empty the trash, and compact.)
Create a blank disk image called Sierra, then make an installer disk:
sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Sierra --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Sierra.app
And tell VMware to create the VM based on the disk image.
Unfortunately, the Sierra GM is still rather buggy.
Update (2016-09-15): Another GM build, 16A323, has been released, and I’m told that the “official” release next week will be different still.
Emma Rios reports that the second GM still has an issue with slow Wi-Fi.
Bug Mac macOS 10.12 Sierra PDF VMware Wi-Fi
Overall, it is impressive and better than I was expecting. The processor is much faster, battery life is better, the camera has an image stabilizer (but still the bump), it’s water resistant like the original Apple Watch, the display supports wide color, and the speakers are better. I plan to keep my iPhone 6s, though.
I was a bit surprised that it does not support the Apple Pencil or True Tone, and also that the old iPhones got bumped up to 32 GB.
As expected, the case is the same uncomfortable shape—the worst of all the iPhone designs.
I’m not sure what to make of the new home button—early reports are mixed.
The AirPods look great, especially the battery life and ease of charging. Of course, this assumes that the wireless pairing works as well as Apple promises. Bluetooth audio has always been unreliable. I’m not sure I want to give up my Jawbone ERA, which is very easy to hear in noisy environments. It sounds like the AirPods only filter out the noise for the microphone, not the speaker. And I’m not sure the AirPods will have a snug enough fit for jogging. I was also hoping for better controls, i.e. the ability to play/pause/next without using Siri, a regression compared with wired earbuds.
Of course, there is no headphone jack. The way Apple justified this was pretty disappointing—no real reason was given. Even if the AirPods are great, that is a separate issue, not a benefit. The “courage” line was rather strange. They have the courage to make a proprietary wireless product, but they’re including wired EarPods and an adapter in the box? Or was it the courage to make everyone who likes their headphones carry a bulky adapter? At least extra adapters are only $9. There was also no reassurance about different use cases. For example, I have yet to see an adapter that would let me attach the iPhone to my car’s audio and charge it while it’s in a GPS mount.
Update (2016-09-08): Michael Nelson (via Parker Higgins):
That’s great, right? They “started allowing” it. You know who wasn’t so in love that idea? Headphone makers. As MacWorld wrote back in 2014, the rest of the audio industry largely resisted Apple’s invitation to revamp entire product lines to service a single piece of hardware that was bound to be updated again in a few years anyway.
Nick Lockwood:
Having standard ports lets hardware manufacturers bypass MFI.
The MFi licensing fee is $2/port.
John Paczkowski:
But the thing is, when Apple scrapped the iMac’s floppy drive, the floppy disc was ferociously inadequate as a storage solution and in obvious need of replacement.
The 3.5-millimeter audio jack, however, is neither inadequate nor in obvious need of replacement.
[…]
At the top of both devices is something called the “driver ledge” — a small printed circuit board that drives the iPhone’s display and its backlight. Historically, Apple placed it there to accommodate improvements in battery capacity, where it was out of the way. But according to Riccio, the driver ledge interfered with the iPhone 7 line’s new larger camera systems, so Apple moved the ledge lower in both devices. But there, it interfered with other components, particularly the audio jack.
So the company’s engineers tried removing the jack.
Andrew Pontious:
“It’s a dinosaur. It’s time to move on.”
Throwing away perfectly good tech because of “progress” will be the death of us.
David Smith:
I really don’t understand the way they’re marketing this >.< why not lead with “it made room for the camera + 2hrs of battery”?
My guess is because it didn’t really make room for all that. Besides, this is all premised on the idea that the phone’s size can’t change. If the decision really was about size rather than “courage,” surely Apple could have found way to fit the headphone jack into the iPhone 7 Plus.
Phil Schiller:
Remember, we’ve been through this many times before. We got rid of parallel ports, the serial bus, floppy drives, physical keyboards on phones — do you miss the physical keyboards on your phone?
As far as I know, Apple never shipped a device with a built-in parallel port.
Jesper:
This is much worse than I imagined – I was expecting some sort of shoe to drop to make this palatable, like wireless charging of the phone too. I will admit that a fair amount of conventions were uprooted and smart things were done to help the wireless story towards what it needs to be. But here’s the problem: if things that you start to play from your other connected devices really do start to play on the AirPods too, that’s the wireless headphones nightmare, to not have any control over those things.
Andrew Cunningham:
Apple’s Taptic Engine does provide feedback when you touch the button, but it’s now much more like the haptic feedback you’d get from a capacitive or software button on an Android phone. […] The iPhone 7’s Taptic Engine is less precise, so the entire phone vibrates slightly as you press down on the Home button. You can adjust the force of that feedback in the settings (and an Apple representative said it would be added to iOS’ increasingly lengthy first-time setup process, too), but it still feels like pushing a solid thing that makes the phone vibrate instead of pressing a button. It will also take some time to get used to the amount of force needed to register as a “click,” something that was far more obvious with the old clicky button.
[…]
A quick note on the W1: it’s used to make pairing and battery status checking and the Siri features work quickly and seamlessly, but the actual audio is still being streamed over good-old Bluetooth, and the AirPods can be paired the standard way with anything that will do Bluetooth audio.
Juli Clover:
Belkin today announced the Lightning Audio + Charge RockStar for the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus, an accessory that will allow iPhone 7 users to charge their iPhones and listen to music at the same time.
It has two Lightning ports, but no headphone jack, so you would also need to use Apple’s dongle to plug into regular headphones or a car’s Aux input.
AirPods Battery Life Bluetooth Camera iOS iPhone iPhone 7 Lightning Phil Schiller Siri
David Smith (Hacker News):
I don’t have solid data going all the way back to 2008 when I launched my first app, but I do from 2012. In the last 4.5 years the split of where my revenue comes from has followed a clear, inexorable march from being paid-based to advertising-based. Starting in 2012 advertising in my apps made up around 10% of sales whereas now it is nearly 80%. That increase has come almost entirely from a near collapse of my paid upfront sales (with my in-app purchase income largely unchanged).
[…]
The sizable jump in advertising revenue this year was caused by switching away from iAd to AdMob when Apple announced they were discontinuing that advertising platform. The dip in revenue from January to May of this year was caused by staying on iAd even when their rates started to slide, likely an early indication of the end of the service.
I wonder how much revenue Apple is losing by discontinuing iAd.
Russell Ivanovic:
In 2008 we made all our money from paid apps. In 2016 we still do and our revenue is higher than ever. There is no one rule for everyone.
I know plenty of devs who are struggling in every business model. Paid, IAP, Ads. Being indie is not easy. There is no silver bullet model.
Previously: Apple Eliminating Its App and Radio Ads.
Advertising App Store Business In-App Purchase iOS
Apple Store Review Guidelines History (Apple, Hacker News):
If you offer an auto-renewing subscription, you must provide ongoing value to the customer. While the following list is not exhaustive, examples of appropriate subscriptions include: new game levels; episodic content; multi-player support; apps that offer consistent, substantive updates; access to large collections of, or continually updated, media content; software as a service (“SAAS”); and cloud support.
The “consistent, substantive updates” part is the most interesting, but I don’t understand how that works in practice. When you are submitting a new app, it doesn’t have a track record of updates, and it’s hard to even predict what the development path will be like.
Curtis Herbert:
Unfortunately subscriptions require a lot more work on our part than paid up front. StoreKit and receipt validation can be new territory, even for a lot of senior developers as many just haven’t had to touch a lot of this before.
[…]
One annoyance, here, is that this only seems to happen on app launch. If the user is inside your app when the renewal actually goes through, you won’t get the callback until next time.
[…]
There is no insight into when they turn off auto-renew. I can’t adjust my wording in-app to acknowledge that they disabled auto-renew.
[…]
Subscriptions were born from newstand, and it still shows. One of the final steps of the purchase phase is to prompt the user to share email, name, and zip code. It is billed as “the publisher wants this information”, but I don’t! A friend on Twitter pointed me to this dev forum post which explains that there is no automated way to opt out of asking this, but if you email App Review they’ll manually flag your app to remove the prompt.
Previously: Pre-WWDC App Store Changes.
App Store App Subscriptions Business iOS Mac Mac App
Apple (details, Hacker News):
We know that many of you work hard to build innovative apps and update your apps on the App Store with new content and features. However, there are also apps on the App Store that no longer function as intended or follow current review guidelines, and others which have not been supported with compatibility updates for a long time. We are implementing an ongoing process of evaluating apps for these issues, notifying their developers, and removing problematic and abandoned apps from the App Store.
I think this is what most people expected Apple would do all along. We’re long past the point where Apple should be bragging in keynotes about how many apps are in the store. People don’t want quantity; they want better apps that are easier to find. Hopefully, Apple will not remove useful apps that still work but that have not been updated in a while.
In hopes of influencing search results, some developers have used extremely long app names which include descriptions and terms not directly related to their app. These long names are not fully displayed on the App Store and provide no user value. App names you submit in iTunes Connect for new apps and updates will now be limited to no longer than 50 characters.
This makes less sense to me. If the terms are irrelevant, Apple should never have allowed them to begin with. If they’re legitimate, why the arbitrary limit? Long names are a workaround for the fact that the App Store’s search engine doesn’t work very well, so this change could potentially make apps harder to find. As with search ads, the name limit is not necessarily a bad idea, but it’s worrying that Apple continues to work on the edges of the problem instead of just improving its search engine.
Manton Reece:
My worry is that Apple attempts to fight problems with new policy alone instead of also encouraging the right behavior with App Store features.
David Smith:
It looks like only around 9% of apps currently have names that are longer than 50 characters (around 200k).
[…]
The average length of an app name is 22 characters. The mode is 11. The median is 17. Which tells me that the 50 character limit was added largely to constrain the problem rather address it directly.
[…]
At the very least I suspect the trend of adding a dash/colon to the end of your app’s name and then appending a subtitle will be strictly forbidden.
Daniel Jalkut:
There are over 2 million apps in the App Store, and Apple has effectively announced that they are prepared to re-review all of them in the name of improving overall quality in the store. This hints strongly that there has been some systematic improvement to the review process. It boggles the mind to imagine that all 2 million of those apps were in fact reviewed by humans, but that happened over the course of almost 10 years. Whatever process Apple is gearing up to apply, they claim apps will start dropping from the store as early as September 7.
App Store iOS Mac Mac App Store Search
Erica Sadun:
SE-0102 removes the rarely-used @noreturn function type and replaced it with a dead-end return type[…]
[…]
Never allows a function or method to throw: e.g. () throws -> Never. Throwing allows a secondary path for error remediation, even in functions that were not expected to return.
As a first class type, Never works with generics in a way that the @noreturn attribute could not.
Erica Sadun:
Guard conditions require you to exit scope. Never mean you cannot return from your function. So, instead, add a simple do-scope layer[…]
Fortunately, I don’t think this sort of contortion is commonly needed.
Language Design Programming Swift Programming Language
Kirk McElhearn:
“Someone at Apple thought it would be a good idea, a few years ago, to have iTunes display content in certain views using colors extracted from album artwork. Sometimes this is quite attractive. But sometimes, this borders on torture.”
[…]
Well, Apple is changing this in iTunes 12.5. They’re eliminating this feature entirely. While there is currently an option to turn it off, I suspect that most people don’t bother to look for the setting, or don’t know it exists. And they then end up with a display that is simply unreadable.
Design iOS iOS 10 iTunes Mac Mac App macOS 10.12 Sierra
