Rindala Alajaji (Hacker News):
I’m old enough to remember when age verification bills were pitched as a way to ‘save the kids from porn’ and shield them from other vague dangers lurking in the digital world (like…“the transgender”). We have long cautioned about the dangers of these laws, and pointed out why they are likely to fail. While they may be well-intentioned, the growing proliferation of age verification schemes poses serious risks to all of our digital freedoms.
Fast forward a few years, and these laws have morphed into something else entirely—unfortunately, something we expected. What started as a misguided attempt to protect minors from “explicit” content online has spiraled into a tangled mess of privacy-invasive surveillance schemes affecting skincare products, dating apps, and even diet pills, threatening everyone’s right to privacy.
Marcus Mendes:
Tim Cook is personally involved in an attempt to stop a Texas child safety bill targeting the App Store from becoming law, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Per the report, Tim Cook personally called Texas Governor Greg Abbott last week asking him to either amend or veto the bill that, if it becomes law, will require Apple and Google to collect age data for every user who wants to download an app.
I don’t really understand what’s going on here. iOS already added APIs for this, which seem like a good solution and much more private than handling this at the app level. Is the issue that the APIs somehow don’t satisfy Texas’s requirements? Or does Cook want to avoid any regulation at the marketplace level on principle?
WSJ:
In the weeks leading up to its passage, Apple hired more lobbyists to pressure lawmakers. An interest group it funds targeted the Austin, Texas, area with ads saying the legislation is “backed by porn websites.”
But the App Store doesn’t allow porn, anyway, except via apps that are third-party Web browsers. Obviously, Apple’s not going to bat for them.
Previously:
App Store Children Dating Apps iOS iOS 18 Legal Privacy Texas Tim Cook
Juli Clover:
iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 added the ability for users to set a different translation app as their default. Users worldwide can select Google Translate or another translation app as an alternative, and there are also options for changing the default Email, Messaging, Calling, Browser, and Password apps.
I wish there were more options, like setting the default maps app outside of the EU, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.
John Gruber:
Providing default app settings makes the platform stronger. Apple should want to support alternatives to its own apps and services, not do so only at the point of regulatory pressure. It’s clearly what’s best for the platform.
Previously:
iOS iOS 18 Maps Natural Language Translation Translate.app
John Siracusa (Mastodon):
This is where Apple finds itself today: in need of turnaround-scale changes, but not currently in the kind of (usually financial) crisis that will motivate its leaders to make them.
New leadership is almost always part of a turnaround. In part, that’s because poor financial performance is one of the few remaining sins for which CEOs are reliably held to account. But it’s also because certain kinds of changes need the credibility that only new faces can bring.
[…]
Developers like money, but what they need is respect. What they need is to feel like Apple listens to them and understands their experience. What they need is to be able to make their own decisions about their products and businesses.
To understand just how little power the App Store commission rate alone has to heal this relationship, consider how Apple might leave the rate unchanged and still turn developer sentiment around. Maybe something like this… […] Apple will know it has succeeded when third-party developers feel like Apple is their partner in success, rather than their adversary or overlord.
Lots of ideas that would make Apple’s platforms better, but it’s hard to see them happening even with new leadership.
Adding features wins games, but bug fixing wins championships.
It’s been 15 years since Apple’s leadership last demonstrated that it’s willing to emphasize software reliability at the cost of new features. Since then, bugs in major features have been allowed to fester, unfixed, for years on end.
It’s so demoralizing and a waste of everyone’s time.
Jeff Johnson:
The title of my article, Apple Turntable—a less clever riff on its inspirations—signifies that I believe Apple is a broken record. In other words, it’s too late. My thesis is relatively simple: Apple, as a publicly owned corporation, is incapable of selecting a CEO who can follow Siracusa’s dictum, “Don’t try to make money. Try to make a dent in the universe.”
[…]
Steve Jobs was an historical aberration. He and Woz, neither MBAs, selected themselves to found a company and establish its culture. Years later, Jobs was able to return and reinvigorate the company’s culture only via a fortuitous (for him) set of circumstances in which he was selected as the CEO of last resort. But when Jobs died, everything that made Apple special eventually withered and died too. Without Jobs as a protector, Scott Forstall was soon ousted under the pretense of Apple Maps. Tim Cook asserted his control over the company, putting his own personnel in place, and now his authority is absolute. Even those few others who remain from the Jobs era, such as “Apple Fellow” Phil Schiller, are overridden by Cook, as we learned recently from the Epic Games v. Apple court case, which revealed that Schiller had argued internally for Apple to relent on its App Store revenue demands.
Rui Carmo:
I think you missed a critical aspect of respect towards developers: I still cannot install my own apps “permanently” on the devices that I own without paying Apple a fee or refreshing them every week, which is just stupid across all possible dimensions of the matter.
That is the one key reason I never published any iOS apps, and why I prototype things on Android.
Sarah Reichelt (Mastodon):
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference is just weeks away, but I’m sensing a lot of apathy in the community. The company’s relationship with third-party developers is at a low point.
[…]
Trust is a hard thing to gain. Apple used to have the developers’ trust but now they’ve lost it. It’s much more difficult to regain lost trust than it is to gain it in the first place. I have read many reports of talented developers leaving the Apple ecosystem because they can’t take it any more. This is bad for all of us, but particularly bad for Apple.
I don’t imagine that anyone at Apple reads my blog, but I have thought of some things I think they could do to improve their relationship with their developers.
Sideloading, a public bug database, and better App Review.
Isaiah Carew:
now there is literally a whole generation of users that knows only $2 shovelware.
i’m not sure we can ever put the high quality software genie back in the bottle.
…and apple has no one to blame for this situation but themselves.
Pasi Salenius:
Some people wonder why we look so fondly back to what Mac OS X was back in the day. It was this, a bustling marketplace of indie apps made with love and care. You sensed the humanity in all of it. It really felt special back then.
I say let’s do this again. If Apple doesn’t want to be part of it, let’s do it somewhere else. We can make it happen.
Nobody seems to really like the direction things are moving towards. Why couldn’t we just collectively do our thing and not look back at what Apple does?
Dimitri Bouniol:
Tim Cook is doing an excellent job slowly accumulating all the blame for everything that is wrong with Apple. I wonder how many will actually be surprised when not much changes after he leaves…
Ryan Jones:
The next 18 months defines Tim Cook’s entire legacy. And life story to an extent.
Warner Crocker:
Apple is well known to take a long view, and by and large that’s paid off. They’ve been able to afford that long view historically, even though there have been grumblings along the way. However, I don’t believe Apple is dictating the terms or the timeline any longer.
In the case of Artificial Intelligence, as an example, who knows how that is going to play out for any of the players currently on the field or yet to come. But you can’t deny how OpenAI has changed the pace of things or how Google, and everyone else, is trying to play catch up. The recent announcement that OpenAI was purchasing Jony Ive’s design company to collaborate on what looks like new hardware, coming chock-a-block on top of Google’s mostly AI IO conference announcements, certainly changed the conversation. But then again it might be all smoke and mirrors, no matter how anxious everyone seems to be for some kind of new gadget of the future. Personally, I still think much on this AI front is a race without a finishing line or even a destination beyond collecting data for dollars.
That said, Apple is in it, perhaps thrust into the fray or perhaps fumbling along. Regardless, in my opinion any future achievements are going to require leadership change at the top.
Joe Rosensteel:
This week in tech news:
Microsoft and Google courting developers with announcements that span the spectrum from useful, to tasteless, to repulsive. Including in person presentations, and demos.
Apple reluctantly lets developers bill people on the web and play a popular game after years of litigation. They also sent out invitations for people to watch a video in three weeks about how things are going great.
Previously:
App Review App Store Apple Apple Services Apple Software Quality Artificial Intelligence Business iOS iOS 18 Mac Mac App Store macOS 15 Sequoia Programming Radar and Feedback Assistant Sideloading Tim Cook
