MacRumors (CNN, Hacker News):
Apple on late Thursday into Friday removed the popular messaging and social media apps WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Threads from its App Store in China at the request of the Chinese government, The Wall Street Journal reported.
[…]
In a statement shared with several media outlets, Apple said China’s national internet regulator ordered the removal of the apps from the App Store in the country due to unspecified “national security concerns.” Apple said it is “obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree.”
However, it’s Apple’s choice to make distribution through the App Store a single point of failure.
Previously:
Update (2024-04-24): John Gruber:
The answer re: sideloading is yes, and both Signal and WhatsApp offer direct downloads of their latest Android builds.
Kaveh:
A small amount of Googling and it seems like sideloading the default way to get any Google apps in China since Android there isn't offered with the Play Store.
Patrick Wardle:
Apple consciously (& greedily) made the decision to be the arbiter/gatekeeper of what can run on our iOS devices…which directly empowers governments to ban whatever apps they so choose[…]
Update (2024-04-26): See also: Jon Brodkin.
App Store App Store Takedown China iOS iOS 17 iOS App Signal Telegram Threads WhatsApp
VideoLAN (via Hacker News):
App Stores were a mistake.
Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users…
For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?
VideoLAN:
If you do wonder why we don’t update VLC on the Windows Store or why VLC/iOS can’t connect properly to OneDrive shares, it’s because Microsoft Kafkaïesque bureaucracy refuses to help us.
We’re only trying to contact someone since 2years…
VideoLAN (Anisse, Hacker News):
If you wonder why we can’t update the VLC on Android version, it’s because Google refuses to let us update:
- either we give them our private signing keys,
- or we drop support for Android TV before API-30, and all our users on TV API<30 can’t get fixes.
VideoLAN:
VLC cannot even enter the Mac App Store, because of the restrictions…
Look at all those platforms competing to benefit users.
Florian Mueller:
This here is a European app store for Android and Google’s YouTube has just killed their channel. It’s obviously a problem if you depend on the incumbent’s platforms all the way.
Previously:
Update (2024-04-26): President of VideoLAN (Hacker News):
On Android, we can either give Google our private (!) key or not support existing Android versions, and there is (as usual for Google) no one to discuss this with.
On Windows, they changed soo many times the backend of their store, that even with support from the top of the hierarchy, we cannot even update our desktop apps (change a URL, not even a binary…)
Apple, so far, is less annoying, but to support old versions (iOS9 or 10) is an always on battle.
Apple AppStores does not allow GPL, Microsoft does not allow GPLv3 and Unity does not even allow LGPL…
It’s very frustrating and time consuming, but because we don’t make money out of those, and we are on more platforms than anyone, we can complain publically…
Update (2024-10-17): Tim Sweeney:
Nobody has yet figured out Google’s motive for totally breaking the integrity of Android’s digital signing infrastructure by demanding developers hand over their private signing keys to Google. This never made any sense.
Android App Store Google Play Store iOS iOS 17 iOS 9 Mac App Mac App Store macOS 14 Sonoma Microsoft OneDrive Top Posts VLC Windows Store YouTube
Sheena Vasani (Hacker News):
Rakuten Kobo is launching its first color e-readers, the Kobo Libra Colour and the Kobo Clara Colour. Both use E Ink’s latest Kaledio color screen technology, which has subtle, pastel-like hues and drops from a 300ppi grayscale resolution to 150ppi when you view content in color.
[…]
The seven-inch Kobo Libra 2 is my favorite e-reader outside of Amazon’s ecosystem, offering the Kindle Paperwhite’s IPX8 waterproof design but with extras like physical page-turning buttons, no lockscreen ads, and more storage.
The $219.99 Kobo Libra Colour retains all of those features but is also now compatible with the Kobo Stylus 2, just like the Kobo Elipsa 2E.
Nathan:
E Ink’s color “Kaleido” screen technology has been around for several years, but it’s gone through three generations now and devices that use the latest Kaleido 3 screens just started coming out last year.
[…]
Color E Ink supports 4096 colors, which might sound like a lot but it’s actually far lower than a typical LCD screen. Colors tend to look softer and more subdued with E Ink, and color accuracy isn’t great, especially with certain colors, and it has more of a printed newspaper look.
[…]
The main drawback with color E Ink screens is they look darker than regular B&W screens because of a color filter layer that is applied over the top of the screen, which makes the contrast appear lower. Kaleido color screens are really just regular black and white E Ink Carta screens with a fancy passive filter over the top (that’s why color resolution is lower than black and white resolution).
[…]
Afterimage effects are more noticeable on color E Ink screens, where you can see a faint impression of the previous page. Color content may require more full page refreshes and flashes to look clear.
Previously:
Update (2024-05-29): Jason Snell:
And the ugly truth is that as miraculous as it is that E Ink displays can do color, the Libra Colour’s screen is actually inferior to the screen on the Libra 2. Up close, it’s clear that there’s some sort of visible background texture on the Libra Colour (sort of a yellowish-gray wash) that reduces contrast. And when I cranked the brightness up to 100% to read in bright sunlight, it was clear that the Libra 2 was brighter and clearer than the Libra Colour.
Color E Ink Kobo
Alan Baradlay et al.:
We made our fast JSON stringifier work for unicode characters. We also analyzed profile data carefully and made JSON.parse faster than ever.
[…]
We took the release of the new Speedometer 3.0 benchmark as an opportunity to adjust inlining heuristics based on data collected in modern Apple silicon Macs with the latest JavaScriptCore.
[…]
Prior to the opportunistic task scheduler, incremental sweeping in JavaScriptCore was automatically triggered by a periodically scheduled 100 ms timer. This had the effect of occasionally triggering incremental sweeping during asynchronous timing intervals, but also wasn’t aggressive enough to prevent on-demand sweeping in the middle of script execution. Now that JavaScriptCore is knowledgable about when to opportunistically schedule tasks, it can instead perform the majority of incremental sweeping in between rendering updates while there aren’t imminently scheduled timers. The process of sweeping is also granular to each marked block, which allows us to halt opportunistic sweeping early if we’re about to exceed the deadline for the next estimated rendering update.
[…]
Previously, we required a synchronous IPC call from the Web Process to the GPU process to determine which of the existing buffers had been released by CoreAnimation and was suitable to use for the next frame. We optimized this by having the GPUP just select (or allocate) an appropriate buffer, and direct all incoming drawing commands to the right destination without requiring any response. We also changed the delivery of any newly allocated IOSurface handles to go via a background helper thread, rather than blocking the Web Process’s main thread.
[…]
With all these optimizations and dozens more, we were able to improve the overall Speedometer 3.0 score by ~60% between Safari 17.0 and Safari 17.4.
Previously:
CSS Garbarge Collection iOS iOS 17 JavaScript JSON Just-In-Time Compilation (JIT) Mac macOS 14 Sonoma Optimization Parser Programming Safari WebKit
