Archive for January 15, 2026

Thursday, January 15, 2026

Closing Setapp Mobile Marketplace

Tim Hardwick:

The service will officially cease operating on February 16, 2026. Setapp Mobile launched in open beta in September 2024.

In a support page, MacPaw said Setapp Mobile is being closed because of app marketplaces’ “still-evolving and complex business terms that don’t fit Setapp’s current business model,” suggesting it was not profitable for the company.

[…]

These alternative app marketplaces, as Apple calls them, are a relatively new frontier for app distribution on iOS, but they face hefty challenges, such as navigating Apple’s controversial Core Technology Fee, and competing with its established App Store ecosystem.

Epic Games currently pays the Apple fees that EU developers incur when distributing their apps through the Epic Games Store. However, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has said it is “not financially viable” for Epic Games to pay Apple’s fees in the long term, but it plans to do so while it waits to see if the European Union requires Apple to further tweak its rules for third-party marketplaces under the DMA.

Steve Troughton-Smith:

Clear indicator that Apple’s DMA implementation never actually met its obligations under the DMA in the first place. Apple scared developers away from ever signing up to their poison pill Core Technology Fee terms, so alternative app stores simply have no apps to offer.

It’s kind of the same situation as BrowserEngineKit. Apple is going to say that they did all this work and there was no adoption, so that proves the EU was wrong; there’s no demand because customers prefer Apple’s “protections.” The developers will say that Apple designed third-party browsers and marketplaces to fail, or at least didn’t care very much about solving the reported problems; they tried their best in spite of this, but it wasn’t enough. I guess at some point the EU will decide whether it thinks there was malicious compliance.

Previously:

Tahoe Broke Resizing Finder Columns View

Jeff Johnson:

At the bottom of each column is a resizing widget that you can use to change the width of the columns. Or rather, you could use it to change the width of the columns. On macOS Tahoe, the horizontal scroller covers the resizing widget and prevents it from being clicked! Compare with macOS Sequoia, where the horizontal scroller and scroll bar are below the column and allow access to all of the resizing widgets.

[…]

Notice what happens when you use the default value: not only do the scrollbars disappear, the resizing widgets also disappear.

You can still resize the columns, though, by hovering over the horizontal column border lines. Thus, it appears that the Finder team did not even test with the combination of columns view and always show scroll bars.

That’s the problem with settings like Show Scroll bars: Always and the accessibility display options. They’re there because a vocal minority wants them and Apple feels it has to offer them in order to check a box, but it’s clear that its heart isn’t in making them great. Another one I’d put in this category is Natural scrolling. There’s nothing wrong with its behavior, as far as I know, but you can tell from the name that Apple doesn’t want you to turn this off. The Smooth scrolling checkbox was removed long ago, though thankfully the user default to turn it off still works in most cases.

Previously:

How Markdown Took Over the World

Anil Dash (Hacker News, Mac Power Users):

If mark_up_ is complicated, then the opposite of that complexity must be… mark_down_. This kind of solution, where it’s so smart it seems obvious in hindsight, is key to Markdown’s success. John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet.

[…]

After being nagged about it by users for more than a decade, Google finally added support for Markdown to Google Docs, though it took them years of fiddly improvements to make it truly usable. Just last year, Microsoft added support for Markdown to its venerable Notepad app, perhaps in attempt to assuage the tempers of users who were still in disbelief that Notepad had been bloated with AI features. Nearly every powerful group messaging app, from Slack to WhatsApp to Discord, has support for Markdown in messages. And even the company that indirectly inspired all of this in the first place finally got on board: the most recent version of Apple Notes finally added support for Markdown.

Alas, Apple Notes’ Markdown support does not extend to AppleScript. So there’s still no built-in way to automate getting your data out of the app in a good format.

But it’s not just the apps that you use on your phone or your laptop. For developers, Markdown has long been the lingua franca of the tools we string together to accomplish our work.

[…]

Because Markdown’s format was frozen in place (and had some super-technical details that people could debate about) and people wanted to add features over time, various communities that were implementing Markdown could add their own “flavors” of it as they needed. Popular ones came to be called Commonmark and Github-Flavored, led by various companies or teams that had divergent needs for the tool. While tech geeks tend to obsess over needing everything to be “correct”, in reality it often just doesn’t matter that much, and in the real world, the entire Internet is made up of content that barely follows the technical rules that it’s supposed to.

I’m pleasantly surprised at how ubiquitous Markdown has become, though strangely it’s still not built into WordPress. I actually don’t love it for blogging—since it can’t express a cite attribute and also I’m starting with chunks of text that are already HTML. I don’t see much benefit in mixing the two, so I continue to use plain HTML. I also continue to use reStructuredText for my product manuals. But pretty much everywhere else I use Markdown.

Previously:

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