Chance Miller (MacRumors):
With the latest betas of these updates, Apple has added a new feature to iPhone Mirroring: the ability to enter “jiggle mode” and rearrange your iPhone’s Home Screen.
With iPhone Mirroring enabled you can now long-press on your iPhone’s Home Screen with your Mac’s mouse or trackpad to enter jiggle mode. The feature then works just as it does on your iPhone, allowing you to drag icons and widgets between different pages. You can also adjust widget sizes, manage the new icon tinting feature in iOS 18, and add new widgets.
[…]
There are a few things still missing from iPhone Mirroring in macOS Sequoia and iOS 18, including the ability to access Notification Center and Control Center and edit your iPhone’s Lock Screen.
It’s so much easier using a mouse. But this seems worse than the old way with iTunes where you could see all the home screens at once on the Mac.
Previously:
iOS iOS 18 iPhone Mirroring Lock Screen Mac macOS 15 Sequoia Notification Center Springboard.app
Flickr:
The “Albums” tab now gives you the ability to search your albums based on keywords used in album titles and descriptions. Click on the search icon near your album covers to activate the album search.
[…]
You can now reorder your albums and create new ones directly from your profile’s “Albums” tab. You no longer need to go to the “Organize” tool to do so unless that’s your preference!
[…]
When viewing a specific album, you can now add new photos and sort them directly from the album page. And the most thrilling part is that Flickr will remember your preferred sorting method for each album individually, so new photos added to the album will be sorted according to your preference for that album.
These are all great improvements that I’ve been wanting for a long time. I wish there were a list view for albums and album search results because the thumbnails are far too small to see the full titles.
Flickr Photography Web
Jess Weatherbed (MacRumors, Slashdot):
Spotify will begin showing in-app pricing information for iPhone users in the European Union starting today, following a yearslong legal battle against Apple. In an update to an old blog post, Spotify says that EU iPhone users will now see things like promotional offers and pricing information for each subscription tier — including how much a plan costs once a promotion ends.
One thing that’s missing is the ability to click a link to make those purchases from outside the Apple App Store. Spotify says it’s opting into the “music streaming services entitlement” that Apple introduced after being served a €1.84 billion (about $2 billion) EU antitrust fine in March for “abusing its dominant position” in music streaming, rather than accepting the complicated new developer terms Apple outlined last week.
Dare Obasanjo:
After being fined $2 billion by the EU for preventing Spotify from telling people they can subscribe on its website, it still took Apple four months to approve their app with those changes and they still can’t link to their website.
Apple has elevated rent seeking to a high art.
John Gruber:
For anyone who isn’t paying close attention to these arguments over Apple’s draconian anti-steering terms for apps, it is surely very surprising that it took years of legal wrangling and a $2 billion fine (which, it should be noted, Apple hasn’t yet paid, and which quite possibly will be reduced or thrown out upon appeal) just to allow Spotify to present this information to users. Just to tell them the price and tell them they need to go to Spotify’s website to sign up.
These anti-steering provisions are indefensible. They make Apple look bad in the court of public opinion, and they look even worse in actual courts of law.
Previously:
Antitrust App Store Business European Union iOS iOS 17 iOS App Spotify
Hamish McKenzie:
But creators aren’t Apple’s traditional customers. They’re not app makers or game developers. They don’t actually have a piece of real estate in the App Store. They instead find their distribution through media platforms, including the likes of Patreon and Substack. It might feel weird for someone who publishes a podcast through Patreon, or a publication through Substack, to receive the same treatment from Apple as Netflix.
The emergence of the creator economy presents an interesting challenge and opportunity for Apple, and some delicate questions for Patreon and Substack. We want creators and subscribers to benefit from the power of Apple’s in-app purchases. In fact, at Substack we have been working with Apple to bring in-app purchases into our app, because we believe that anything that reduces the friction of a subscription is great for creators. We’re doing everything in our power to make the implementation of in-app purchases as creator-friendly as possible.
How much is the ease of in-app purchases worth to creators? It’s a salient question.
For something like Substack (or Patreon), you give them your payment information once on the Web and then subscribe to multiple creators, with them helping you manage the subscriptions. They can provide better tools to do this than Apple’s generic solution. For these types of apps, it’s obviously great to be able to add a new subscription within the app. But this is mostly because you’re already in the app, not because of Apple’s IAP per se. The benefit of IAP is that it’s the only way Apple allows them to process subscriptions. If they could just use stored payment information, like with the Amazon app, they wouldn’t be clamoring for IAP. If you consider how the Amazon shopping experience could be improved by switching it to using IAP (were that allowed) the idea is ridiculous.
John Gruber (Mastodon):
How I got it wrong is that I checked, in the app, by looking at a publication to which I was already subscribed at the free tier, to upgrade to a paid account. That showed me a panel that read “You cannot manage your subscription in the app.” But that’s because I started the subscription on Substack’s website. For Substack subscriptions made on the web, you must continue to manage them on the web. This probably isn’t merely about avoiding Apple’s payment fees, but a practical requirement. I don’t think there’s any way, technically, that an individual subscription you started paying for on the web could be migrated on-the-fly to Apple’s payments, or vice-versa.
It sure seems like Apple’s restrictive guidelines and rigid payment system are hurting the user experience.
It seems obvious to me that creator-platform apps like Substack and Patreon ought to be in a new category of their own, the basic idea of which would be for Apple to take some sort of smaller cut of these transactions.
Christina Warren:
I think they should be a separate category but I also think they should have no fees. Amazon and Walmart and DoorDash and Uber and PayPal and eBay don’t pay fees to Apple for every transaction inside their commerce apps (and Amazon pays a much smaller fee for their digital purchases post Apple TV deal so that ATV could have Amazon content). If Patreon or Substack uses Apple as the payment processor, pay whatever those fees are. But not beyond that.
Personalized services should also be a separate category. It makes no sense to treat a therapy app with real humans responding one-on-one the same as an IAP loot box that has zero marginal cost.
Michael Love:
The idea of special treatment for ‘creator platforms’ is interesting, but I think at that point anybody selling e-books or other 3rd party content - anything in the “Reader app” category, basically - ought to get the same deal; there’s nowhere obvious to draw the line.
Apple has a much better case for taking 30% of Amazon’s cut of a Kindle purchase than they do of taking 30% of the whole thing; the problem of course is that this can’t be audited in a scalable way.
Jimmy Callin:
Adding additional special categories for certain app genres is just putting lipstick on a pig. The whole monopolistic app store business model is fundamentally broken and is damaging the whole ecosystem.
Previously:
Update (2024-08-15): Jim Rea:
Does anyone understand how Patreon can work with Apple’s in-app purchase system? […] Did Apple add some new capability to in-app purchases to enable this? 🤔
John Gruber:
Look at Substack. Each subscription for each creator gets its own SKU. Substack’s App Store listing exposes the most popular ones[…]
Nick Heer:
It feels like a particularly janky thing when you look at something like X, too, where each account’s subscription is its own SKU. I don’t know about now, but the App Store used to allow only some maximum number of SKUs (off the top of my head, maybe 10,000?).
My understanding is that there was a relatively low limit and that the SKUs had to be created manually. Now there seems to be an API, and I don’t know what the limit is.
A commenter reports that, on the Web, Substack has separate billing info for each subscription.
App Store Business In-App Purchase iOS iOS 17 iOS App Patreon Substack
