Archive for July 1, 2025

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Brazil Recommends Sanctions for Apple Over App Store and NFC Rules

Hartley Charlton:

The recommendation was issued by the General Superintendence of Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (SG/CADE), the technical body of the federal antitrust authority. In a public statement translated from Portuguese, SG/CADE determined that Apple’s conduct with iOS constitutes a violation of Brazilian competition law and urged CADE’s internal tribunal to impose penalties, including financial fines and mandatory changes to Apple’s policies.

The investigation started in 2022 after formal complaints were submitted by Latin American e-commerce platform MercadoLibre and other digital service providers. The companies alleged that Apple engaged in anti-competitive practices by requiring in-app purchases to be made exclusively through its own payment system and by restricting developers from informing users about alternative purchasing options — a practice known as anti-steering.

MercadoLibre further argued that Apple abused its control over the iOS platform by denying third-party access to critical technologies such as the iPhone ‘s NFC chip, effectively limiting mobile payment competition in Brazil.

Previously:

Tim Robertson, RIP

Peter Cohen:

Confirmed with the family this morning that @mymac founder Tim Robertson passed away after a recent illness.

Tim was not just a mainstay of Apple blogging, podcasting and smart analysis for decades, but one of the very nicest people I’ve ever met.

Like ATPM, My Mac began in 1995 and was originally published in DOCMaker format. Each issue was a standalone app-document file, downloadable like shareware from AOL and eWorld.

Grammarly Acquires Superhuman

Krystal Hu (via Hacker News):

Grammarly has signed a deal to acquire email efficiency tool Superhuman as part of the company’s push to build an artificial intelligence-powered productivity suite and diversify its business, its executives told Reuters in an interview.

The San Francisco-based companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the deal. Superhuman, once an exclusive email tool boasting a long waitlist for new users, was last valued at $825 million in 2021, and currently has an annual revenue of about $35 million.

Previously:

iPadOS Windows Mess Up Data Saving

Craig Hockenberry (Mastodon):

From the very beginning, iOS has had a notion of an app being in the foreground or background. When you saw an app on screen it was active and when it was gone it was inactive.

[…]

It was simple system that let you do what you needed to do, when you needed to do it. Now with windows on iPadOS, that’s gotten a lot harder.

That’s because apps stay active even when their windows do not.

If you’re using iPadOS 26 and noticing that the saving/syncing/exchange of data is not happening, there’s a stupid trick you need to do to get things working: Tap on the home screen to hide the windows (they slide off to the sides of the display). That makes all the apps on screen inactive and triggers the work that they need to do.

It seems like there’s a missing API for apps to know what’s happening.

Previously: