European Commission Holds ‘Apple DMA Compliance Workshop’ 

This was an opportunity for critics of Apple’s DMA compliance plans to address questions to representatives from Apple. There’s video of the 9-hour workshop, but it’s locked behind a password (insert joke about the EC’s support for openness here). I can’t imagine sitting through that, even at 2× speed. Lucky for us, Kay Jebelli followed along live and took copious notes in a thread on Twitter/X:

Interesting detail: the EC told Apple that they aren’t allowed to notarize apps to protect users. So “government authorities are the ones that are going to have to step up to protect” app developers and users from the risks of these 3rd-party apps.

In other words, the EC has a problem Apple doing any vetting whatsoever on app distributed outside the App Store. The EC will take care of making sure malware, phishing, scams, clones, IP rip-offs, and pirated apps aren’t getting through.

Debugging the Voyager 1 From a Light Day Away 

Denise Hill, writing on NASA’s The Sun Spot blog:

Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, but the signal does not contain usable data. The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit.

On March 3, the Voyager mission team saw activity from one section of the FDS that differed from the rest of the computer’s unreadable data stream. The new signal was still not in the format used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team wasn’t initially sure what to make of it. But an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory. [...]

Because Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for the probe’s response to reach antennas on the ground. So the team received the results of the command on March 3. On March 7, engineers began working to decode the data, and on March 10, they determined that it contains a memory readout.

Remind me never to complain about anything I’ve had to debug again.


My 2023 Apple Report Card

Last month Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2023. As I’ve done in the past — 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 — I’m publishing my full remarks and grades here. I’m late publishing this year because I forgot to last month. On Snell’s report card, voters give per-category scores ranging from 5 to 1; I’ve translated these to letter grades, A to E.

Mac: A

By the end of the year, every single Mac in the lineup, save one, is arguably in the best shape that model has ever been. (Spoiler: the exception is the Mac Pro.)

When Apple Silicon debuted at the end of 2020, Apple started consumer-grade models first, with the regular M1 chips, and the M1 Pro/Max/Ultra chips followed the next year. That pattern repeated with the M2 generation. But at the end of 2023, Apple debuted the M3 generation of Apple silicon starting with the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros (with M3 Pro/Max chips), along with a lesser 14-inch MacBook Pro with the regular M3. It makes more sense for the MacBook Pros to get a new generation of chips first than for the MacBook Air. And these are the best MacBook Pros ever.

The 24-inch iMac skipped the M2 generation but got an update to the M3, along with Apple making it as clear as possible that they have no plans to make a 27-inch iMac with Apple silicon. I’m OK with that — I think a Studio Display with a Mac Mini is better solution. And those who miss the iMac Pro of the Intel era are better off with a Studio Display and Mac Studio.

The Mac Pro is the only sour note in the lineup. It finally came to Apple silicon (hooray), but spec-wise it’s pretty much a Mac Studio with advanced I/O options (boo). If your work requires high-end I/O, that’s great. But if not, it’s hard to see anything the Mac Pro offers that the Mac Studio doesn’t, other than a higher price and consuming a lot more space on or under your desk. Even if this first Apple silicon Mac Pro is a disappointment though, I say it’s great news overall, because it’s a sign that Apple still wants the Mac Pro in its lineup. At some point in the next year or two, I expect Apple to unveil a Mac Pro with specs that race ahead of the Mac Studio. It’s just obviously the case that Apple silicon isn’t there yet.

MacOS 13 Ventura and 14 Sonoma have both been fine releases. Reliable and (mostly) familiar.

iPhone: A

The new iPhone 15 lineup is great, especially the 15 Pro models, which Apple changed from heavy polished stainless steel to lightweight brushed titanium. The weight reduction is dramatic, and the titanium feels so much nicer in hand.

iOS 17 (can you believe it’s up to 17 now?) feels like what it is: a stable mature operating system. Apple has gone through two major transitions with iOS: the ground-up UI redesign with iOS 7 (can you believe that was 10 years ago?) and the all-screen, no-more-home-button system redesign with the iPhone X. Nothing major has changed since, and nothing seems to need to. The switch from Lighting to USB-C was, overall, no big deal controversy-wise, and enabled new features like recording ProRes video directly to an attached SSD.

iPad: C

That there was no new iPad hardware this year makes it hard to give it a high grade, so a gentleman’s C it is. Worse, the existing lineup is rather confusing. iPadOS remains fine, but to me still seems like the no-man’s land platform: nowhere near as capable productivity-wise as a Mac; nowhere near as portable as an iPhone. Next year better bring clarity and some “wow” to the iPad lineup. I’d love to see a completely rethought Magic Keyboard — perhaps a combination keyboard/trackpad that works just as well with a Vision Pro as with an iPad?

Watch: B / Wearables (including Watch): B

The Series 9 models don’t look any different from Series 8, and the Ultra 2 doesn’t look any different from the Ultra 1, but inside, the new S9 SiP chip provides noticeably better battery life — which at this point is really one of the platform’s only weaknesses.

WatchOS 10 is the biggest re-think of the software platform ever. Far more colorful, a bit more “computer on your wrist”, and I think widgets are generally more useful on Apple Watch than apps are.

AirPods Pro 2 are just terrific, and the new Adaptive noise control mode is amazing for my day-to-day usage.

Apple TV: B

No news on the hardware front this year, but it wasn’t needed. The big change in tvOS is moving the iTunes Movie and TV stores into the TV app. Overall that’s a wash for me, but it’s slightly irritating insofar as I really only ever buy or rent movies nowadays — my TV-show-watching goes through streaming apps. But the “Store” tab in the TV app gives prominent placement on the main screen to a row full of popular TV shows. All I want to see are movies.

The best change in tvOS this year, though, is that the circular up/down/left/right wheel on the remote now works like it should have all along: you can run your finger around it in circles to scroll and scrub, just like using the scroll wheel on an iPod of yore. No idea why it didn’t work like this all along, but I’m sure glad it does now.

Services: B

Lots of great shows and movies on TV+. Slow Horses, Silo, Hijack, For All Mankind, and Flowers of the Killer Moon were all standouts.

iCloud remains secure, fast, and reliable. So much seamless continuity (including via Continuity-branded features) across devices.

But I’ll repeat this gripe from previous years: it’s miserly that Apple is still offering only a mere 5 GB of storage at the free tier, and have left the paid-tier storage allotments unchanged since like forever. I wonder how many zillions of iPhone users out there don’t have device backups because they only have a free iCloud account with 5 GB? The Apple One bundle is a good deal, but the free iCloud tier should be genuinely useful for backing up a modern iPhone.

HomeKit/Home: C

I’ll repeat my line from last year: Big picture, this whole thing still feels like it’s always poised to get good “next year”. 2023 wasn’t that year (again).

Hardware Reliability: A

No news is great news in this category.

Software Quality: B

I’ll keep it short: I have concerns and complaints about aspects of the direction Apple’s software design is headed (or in some ways, has been now for years), but their software reliability has been very good for me.

Developer Relations: C

Third year in a row with the same comment: Resentment over App Store policies continues to build. Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unimproved. Apple’s goal should be for developer relations to be so good that developers want to create software exclusively for Apple’s platforms. The opposite is happening.

Social and Societal Impact: A

Another repeat comment, but another good year on this front: Climate/carbon is the societal area where a company like Apple can and should make the most difference, and I’m hard-pressed to think how they could be doing more than they are, practically. 2023 saw the launch of several entirely carbon-neutral Apple Watch configurations.

We’re living in sensitive times on other social issues, and Apple seems to be managing that very astutely and honestly. 


Is Apple Out of the Generative AI Game? 

Dare Obasanjo, on Mastodon:

2024 is the year Apple faced its limitations. First giving up the dream of competing with Tesla in EVs and now conceding it can’t compete with Google and OpenAI in generative AI.

This means iOS users end up winning as we get actual cutting edge features and not Siri warmed over.

I agree that Apple users win either way — either Apple builds out its own best-of-breed generative AI system, or they license the best one(s) from whoever makes them. But it could well be like maps. Lean on Google or others until the in-house project is ready to go. (Put aside the fact that Apple was forced to switch to their own maps a year or two before it was ready.) Or compare it to Apple building Macs on Intel’s x86 architecture until three years ago.

We are only in the very early days of LLMs and generative AI, and the only moat that seems to exist is large-scale data center processing power, not the models themselves.

Apple Researchers Publish ‘Breakthrough’ Paper on Multimodal LLMs 

Michael Nuñez, reporting for VentureBeat:

Apple researchers have developed new methods for training large language models on both text and images, enabling more powerful and flexible AI systems, in what could be a significant advance for artificial intelligence and for future Apple products.

The work, described in a research paper titled “MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training” that was quietly posted to arxiv.org this week, demonstrates how carefully combining different types of training data and model architectures can lead to state-of-the-art performance on a range of AI benchmarks.

“We demonstrate that for large-scale multimodal pre-training using a careful mix of image-caption, interleaved image-text, and text-only data is crucial for achieving state-of-the-art few-shot results across multiple benchmarks,” the researchers explain. By training models on a diverse dataset spanning visual and linguistic information, the MM1 models were able to excel at tasks like image captioning, visual question answering, and natural language inference.

Summary thread on Twitter/X from team member Brandon McKinzie, Hacker News thread, and roundup of commentary from Techmeme. The consensus is that this paper is remarkably open with technical details.

Gurman: ‘Apple in Talks to License Google Gemini’ 

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is in talks to build Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence engine into the iPhone, according to people familiar with the situation, setting the stage for a blockbuster agreement that would shake up the AI industry.

The two companies are in active negotiations to let Apple license Gemini, Google’s set of generative AI models, to power some new features coming to the iPhone software this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. Apple also recently held discussions with OpenAI and has considered using its model, according to the people.

Apple’s own LLM efforts seem directed toward on-device processing, but there are some AI tasks that require enormous cloud computing resources, which Apple simply doesn’t have (and likely doesn’t want to build) the infrastructure for. As Ben Thompson noted in today’s Stratechery daily update, it’s quite possible that Google alone could handle such features if built into iOS — OpenAI is currently struggling under load at times, without the veritable avalanche of traffic that would come from integration into iOS.

I could also see Apple negotiating deals to use multiple AI providers behind the scenes, treating them like white-label providers, while presenting the features to users under the Siri brand. Apple used to — and might still? — do something similar with cloud storage providers like AWS and Azure.

Alphabet shares rose as much as 7.4% on Monday as the markets opened in New York. It was the biggest intraday gain since Feb. 2, 2023. Apple was up 2.2%.

Bloomberg gonna Bloomberg.

Nick Heer on the MacOS 14 Sonoma Typography Palette 

Nick Heer, Pixel Envy:

For a long time, this palette was a dry list of checkboxes and disclosure triangles. A user would need to first know this palette exists, and then know what each option did. But, in a recent version of MacOS, the palette has been updated with icons that more clearly display what will change. Depending on the font file in question, there are many different options available, and the numerically differentiated “stylistic sets” have never been clear. This is much nicer.

This is indeed a nice update to a little-known but wonderful standard feature in Cocoa’s text system. Who says AppKit is dead?

(One gripe I have is that the small caps options are no longer labelled “small caps” — you just sort of have to know what they are from the glyphs alone. And, oddly, on my Mac, for many but not all fonts, instead of seeing “A → A” to indicate small caps, I see a dollar sign: “$ → $”.)

CloudSLAW 

My thanks to Rich Mogull for sponsoring DF last week to promote CloudSLAW — Cloud Security Lab a Week. He wants to make cloud security knowledge accessible to anyone, with or without security or cloud experience, for free. CloudSLAW delivers a 15-30 minute lab to your inbox, RSS feed, or YouTube. You don’t need to be a tech pro, but, as Rich says, it helps to know the difference between an API and an IPA.

Rich has taught cloud security around the world for over a decade. He’s also one of the preeminent writers about security issues in general, and Apple platforms particularly. If you’re a regular reader, you probably recognize his name: I’ve linked to articles by Rich dozens of times over the years, and he was my guest on The Talk Show just a few years ago. He knows his shit and he’s great at explaining it. CloudSLAW is his attempt to help anyone go from zero to hero on cloud security. Go ahead and sign up now — it’s free of charge.

Using ASCII Art to Work Around Content Restrictions in the Top 5 AI Chatbots 

Dan Goodin, reporting for Ars Technica:

Researchers have discovered a new way to hack AI assistants that uses a surprisingly old-school method: ASCII art. It turns out that chat-based large language models such as GPT-4 get so distracted trying to process these representations that they forget to enforce rules blocking harmful responses, such as those providing instructions for building bombs.

Such a silly trick, but it epitomizes the state of LLMs. It’s simultaneously impressive that they’re smart enough to read ASCII art, but laughable that they’re so naive that this trick works.

Why Mickey Mouse Is So Famous 

10-minute video by Phil Edwards positing that Mickey Mouse is a singularly famous character because of a technology breakthrough: synchronized sound.


Quickly Toggling Closed Captions on Apple TV (But Not in Netflix)

I know it’s a trend for people to just leave closed captions enabled whenever they’re watching TV, even for shows and movies in which they can easily understand the dialog. I can’t do that though, because I find captions highly distracting if I don’t need them.

But while watching the aforelinked The Gentlemen on Netflix this past week, I found myself toggling captions on and back off frequently, as I couldn’t understand the cockney accent spoken by many characters. So when a scene with cockney-speaking characters would start, I’d swipe up on the Apple TV remote, and toggle the on-screen “CC” button in the Netflix app. When the scene ended, repeat. I tried just leaving captions on, but I really do find it unbearably distracting when I do understand what’s being said. This made me think there has to be a better way to toggle captions than manually swiping and clicking on the Apple TV remote touchpad.

Turns out there are two better ways:

  1. If you use the Control Center Apple TV remote control on your iPhone, there’s a dedicated “CC” button.

  2. In tvOS, go to Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut, and set it to “Closed Captions”. Now you can just triple-click the Menu/Back button on the remote to toggle captions. (On older Apple TV remotes, the button is labelled “Menu”; on the new remote, it’s labelled with a “<”.)

But here’s the hitch: Netflix’s tvOS app doesn’t support either of these ways to toggle captions. Netflix only supports the on-screen caption toggle in their custom video player. I get why Netflix and other streaming apps want to use their own custom video players, but it ought to be mandated by App Store review that they support accessibility features like this one.

Postscript: Ben Markowitz tried the captions accessibility shortcut in a dozen popular tvOS apps. Only works in Paramount+ and ESPN. Just terrible. 


‘The Gentlemen’ on Netflix 

New series on Netflix created by Guy Ritchie (who directed the first two episodes as well). I’ve been a fan of Ritchie’s zany, violent crime movies ever since 1998’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, and The Gentlemen scratches the same itch. (Ritchie also made a movie called The Gentlemen in 2020, which I think takes place in the same cinematic universe as the show.)

I enjoyed this show so much, it took all my self-restraint not to stay up all night and binge it straight through. Funny, clever, exciting. Recommended.

The Wedge-Shaped M1 MacBook Air Lives On: At Walmart, Starting at $700 

Walmart:

Walmart will begin selling MacBook Air with the M1 chip — continuing to deliver premium quality and unmatched affordability for customers. MacBook Air features amazing performance and a long battery life in its thin and light design. This is the first time customers can purchase a Mac directly from Walmart. The MacBook Air with the M1 chip is now available on Walmart.com and will soon be available in select Walmart stores for only $699.

“Our mission at Walmart is to help customers save money so they can live better — it’s not an either/or proposition. The very heart of that mission is the belief that customers should not have to sacrifice quality because of price,” said Julie Barber, executive vice president of Merchandising at Walmart U.S. “We’re working hard to bring premium brands to our physical and virtual shelves, and we’re excited to work with Apple to do just that.”

This is a big deal. When the M3 MacBook Airs arrived last week, Apple dropped the M1 Air from its lineup and moved the M2 Air to the magic $999 spot in the lineup. But it looks like Apple is going to keep producing the M1 MacBook Air for this deal with Walmart. These aren’t refurbs, or leftover stock (Apple hasn’t kept excess stock in inventory for bestselling products for decades — keeping inventory low is one of the hallmarks of Apple’s operations in the Cook era).

And while, yes, these machines are now over three years old, for $700 this is a great deal. That’s 30 percent less than the cheapest MacBook in an Apple Store. I’d bet serious money that a base M1 MacBook Air outperforms any other $700 laptop on the market. Show me another $700 laptop with a retina display. I’ll wait.

Fascinating example of pricing-as-branding that Apple won’t sell this machine in its own stores, but will through Walmart — which doesn’t sell any other Macs.

Privacy-Conscious EU Now Requires Developers to Include Mailing Address and Phone Number on App Store Listings 

Apple Developer, “Manage European Union digital services act compliance information”:

You’ll be asked to disclose whether or not you’re a trader under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) in order to stay compliant across regions when distributing on the App Store. If you’re distributing content as a trader, the DSA requires that you provide certain identification information, including address and contact details, to be displayed on your App Store product pages to consumers in the European Union (EU). Confirm your trader status if you have at least one app that qualifies you as a trader. You’ll then have the option to turn off or specify your trader status for each specific app that you distribute. If you’re not a trader, consumers in the EU will be informed that consumer rights stemming from applicable consumer protection laws won’t apply to contracts between you and them.

How to know if you’re a trader

The DSA defines a trader as “any natural person, or any legal person irrespective of whether privately or publicly owned, who is acting, including through any person acting in his or her name or on his or her behalf, for purposes relating to his or her trade, business, craft or profession.” If you have questions about your status as a trader, consult with your legal advisor.

Clear as a bell, that definition. (Via Michael Tsai.)

’Objectified’ Turns 15, Streaming Free Through March 17 

Objectified (2009, 75 minutes) is a documentary film about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

A lovely film, and you can’t beat the price this week.

Masimo Proves New Apple Watch Series 9 Units Still Have the Blood Oxygen Sensor 

Florian Mueller, writing at IP Fray:

The January 12, 2024 CBP order has recently been published (CBP webpage). The parties’ filings with the appeals court were heavily redacted where they discussed the enforcement dispute over Apple’s workaround. Now it’s a bit clearer what technical changes Apple made and why they managed to get their workaround Watches cleared. There is some hardware “designation” in the newer Watches that tells the software in those Watches not to perform pulse oximetry although all of the necessary components are present. Masimo managed to reenable pulse oximetry, but only after jailbreaking older iPhones and using them to manipulate the Watch, which constitutes a “significant alteration” of the product.

The fact that Masimo could reenable the feature by running some custom software on jailbroken older iPhones absolutely positively means that Apple itself can reactivate that feature for its customers in the event it prevails on appeal or, in the alternative, in late August 2028 at the latest (because the patents-in-suit expire then).

It’s been pretty clear since January that the sensors in dispute are still present in newly-sold Apple Watches, and they’re simply disabled in software, but this seemingly confirms it.

Speedometer 3.0 Browser Benchmark 

Ryosuke Niwa, writing on the WebKit blog:

As announced on browserbench.org today, in collaboration with other browser engine developers, Apple’s WebKit team is excited to introduce Speedometer 3.0, a major update that better reflects the Web of today. It’s built together by the developers of all major browser engines: Blink, Gecko, and WebKit with hundreds of contributions from companies like Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Mozilla. This post is a deep dive into how the collaborative Speedometer project improved the benchmark’s measurements methods and test content.

I care about Speedometer not for comparing different browser engines against each other on the same machine (even though that’s Speedometer’s primary purpose), but as a benchmark for measuring CPUs. It measures something very real and utterly practical: how fast web rendering is in an actual browser.


Apple Adjusts DMA Plan to Offer Direct Downloading of Apps From the Web (With a Big Asterisk), Custom Link-Out Screens, and Marketplaces Solely for the Distribution of a Developer’s Own Apps

Apple Developer News, yesterday:

Developers who’ve agreed to the Alternative Terms Addendum for Apps in the EU have new options for their apps in the EU:

  • Alternative app marketplaces. Marketplaces can choose to offer a catalog of apps solely from the developer of the marketplace.

  • Linking out to purchase. When directing users to complete a transaction for digital goods or services on an external webpage, developers can choose how to design promotions, discounts, and other deals. The Apple-provided design templates, which are optimized for key purchase and promotional use cases, are now optional.

These two tweaks follow three others from a week ago. The first new one, above, means a company like, say, Adobe or Microsoft, can offer a marketplace just for their own suite of apps. The second is a bigger concession — effectively, the elimination of mandatory Apple-designed scare sheets for link-outs to the web. It sounds like the second truly eliminates anti-steering provisions for developers who opt into the new EU rules.

And then, boom, the big one:

Web Distribution, available with a software update later this spring, will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to EU users directly from a website owned by the developer. Apple will provide authorized developers access to APIs that facilitate the distribution of their apps from the web, integrate with system functionality, back up and restore users’ apps, and more. For details, visit Getting ready for Web Distribution in the EU.

So direct downloads — single-app sideloading from developers’ own websites — are now an option. The devil is in those details though:

To be eligible for Web Distribution, you must: [...]

  • Be a member of good standing in the Apple Developer Program for two continuous years or more, and have an app that had more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.

  • Agree to, among other things,

    • Only offer apps from your developer account.

    • Be responsive to communications from Apple regarding your apps distributed through Web Distribution, particularly regarding any fraudulent, malicious, or illegal behavior, or anything else that Apple believes impacts the safety, security, or privacy of users.

    • Publish transparent data collection policies and offer users control over how their data is collected and used.

    • Follow applicable laws of the jurisdictions where you operate (for example, the Digital Services Act, the General Data Protection Regulation, and consumer protection laws).

    • Be responsible for handling governmental and other requests to take down listings of apps.

The eligibility requirement of having an app with over 1 million annual installations in the EU is a high barrier. The intention, obviously, is to limit web distribution to ostensibly trustworthy developers. But it’s sort of a catch-22: the entire feature is by definition intended for developers who want to distribute their apps outside Apple’s App Store (or anyone else’s EU app marketplace) — but the only way to qualify is to have at least one very popular app in the App Store or an app marketplace.

If this change is at the behest of the EC, via back-channel feedback, the EC is seemingly only concerned with large developers. And to me it makes no sense that this change — a huge one — came from anywhere but back-channel communications with the EC. Apple’s presentation of its original compliance plan, just six weeks ago, went out of its way to emphasize that requiring all apps to go through a marketplace — and requiring stricter eligibility requirements for marketplace providers than regular developer accounts — was in the name of user security. If Apple had wanted to offer direct downloads of individual apps from developers’ own websites, they would have included this from the start. But given that the feature will be available “later this spring” — which I take to mean before WWDC — they were seemingly already working on it, preparing for the EC to say, publicly or privately, that the DMA requires it. But if Apple had wanted to allow web distribution, it would have been part of the initial announcement.

Almost all the changes Apple has made to its compliance plan, so far, are merely policy changes. Marketplace providers no longer necessarily need to obtain a million-dollar stand-by letter of credit. Developers who opt into the new EU rules can now change their minds and go back to the original business terms. Corporations with multiple developer accounts can opt into the new rules on an account-by-account basis, instead of all-or-none. Companies can create marketplaces solely for their own apps. All just policy changes. And all of those policy changes quite likely are the result of direct feedback from developers. It’s easy to imagine that Apple never considered that a company with multiple developer accounts might want only to move some of those accounts to the new business terms. I don’t see why Apple would begrudge any of these changes, even an iota. They can be filed under “Sure, we just didn’t think of that.

That link-out screens may now contain promotional and pricing information, and don’t need to follow Apple’s templates — that’s a mere policy change too, but one I suspect Apple does begrudge. And it’s obviously something developers want. Do you want a very plain-looking, totally unbranded screen, that emphasizes more than anything that you’re leaving the safe confines of the Apple ecosystem? Or would you like to design your own screen, in your own style, with your own emphasis? This, to me, reeks of a change at the behest of the EC.

But then there’s web distribution — that’s both a major policy change and a major technical one. (How will software updates work for web downloaded apps? For that matter, how will software updates work for marketplace apps themselves? Will the Foobar Marketplace app be able to somehow update itself? That doesn’t seem possible without running a background process.) And as I noted earlier, Apple specifically described direct web downloads of apps as a bad idea just six weeks ago.

I have no little birdie information on this, but Apple changing policy on this issue only makes sense if they have reason to believe the EC considers it mandatory under the DMA. That it will only be available to longstanding developers with at least one million-EU-downloads app may well be completely compatible with the DMA. There’s nothing at all in the DMA about the interests of small or indie developers.

And as Steven Sinofsky expounded upon at length in his analysis of the DMA, the DMA wants to have its cake and eat it too. It requires Apple both to open up iOS to additional methods of software distribution and to keep iOS as secure as possible. Allowing direct downloads, but only from already-successful developers, aligns with that. I suspect Apple was ready to go from the start with web downloads — they knew the EC might demand it — and so they opened their hand January 25 with the compliance plan they hoped would fly, and are ratcheting out, piecemeal, with additional changes in the direction of more openness, as they obtain feedback — both from developers, and whatever EC back channels they may have. (Officially, the EC doesn’t provide issue-by-issue feedback to its regulatory subjects.)

The other change that suggests Apple is in unofficial contact with the EC regarding compliance is the “never mind” on PWAs. Beta versions of iOS 17.4 in the EU changed Home Screen web apps into bookmarks that open in a new tab in the user’s default browser. Apple made this change not because they want to “kill” web apps,1 but because they were under the impression that the DMA required them to either (a) have no Home Screen web app support at all in the EU, or (b) allow all third-party rendering engines to save PWAs to the Home Screen using their rendering engines. Option (c) — the status quo, WebKit-only PWA support on the Home Screen — is seemingly disallowed under the DMA, as it would constitute preferencing WebKit over third-party engines. Apple doesn’t have a system in place in iOS to allow third-party rendering engines to save web apps to the Home Screen, so, alas, (a) it was — no more PWAs in the EU. The DMA is not clear about much, but it is seemingly clear that gatekeepers cannot preference their own web browser or rendering engine. Allowing PWAs — but only via WebKit — is, obviously, showing preference to WebKit. Apple’s initial decision to remove PWAs in the EU sucked, but that’s because the DMA sucks, not because Apple hates or fears web apps. But I think what happened is that when the EC realized the DMA was going to result in a worse PWA experience, they let Apple know that WebKit-only PWAs would not be penalized.2

So my gut feeling is that we’re seeing Apple adopt changes in response to unofficial feedback from the EC. If so, that suggests that the things Apple isn’t changing — like the Core Technology Fee — are either OK with the EC, or, if not, that Apple is willing to fight for them. Or perhaps we’ll be right back here with additional compliance plan changes every Tuesday for the next few weeks. 


  1. If Apple wanted to kill web apps they’d have made this change worldwide in iOS 17.4, not limited to the EU. And they wouldn’t have been adding new web app features to WebKit, on both iOS and especially MacOS, just in the last year. But there exists a contingent of tinfoil-hat-wearing web app zealots who think PWAs are like this close to taking over mobile app development — the dream of write-once/run-everywhere just within grasp — and it’s mean old monopolistic walled-garden-defending Apple that’s holding them back, because PWAs threaten the App Store. That’s just nonsense. The truth is PWAs just aren’t popular. Almost no normal people use them, or even know they exist. “That’s because Apple is holding PWAs back by withholding features from WebKit”, goes the conspiracy thinking. Most recently, it was mobile push notification support. Then WebKit added that. It’s like desktop Linux getting popular, or Bluetooth getting reliable: always “next year”. Except with PWAs, web developers can imagine it’s somehow Apple’s fault, not the fact that users prefer idiomatic native apps from app stores — including on Android, which has always used Chrome’s web rendering engine, and which has all the features PWA advocates want from WebKit. ↩︎

  2. I also suspect that Apple, eventually, will support PWAs in iOS in the EU using third-party browser engines, if possible. But it’s easy to see how complicated that could be. What happens if a user installs Chrome, then uses Chrome to install a PWA using Chrome’s Blink rendering engine, and then deletes Chrome from their iPhone? How does that PWA continue to function after its rendering engine has been removed from the system? It can’t just automatically fall back to using WebKit because (a) the PWA might be using features only available in Chrome (that’s the whole reason web developers are clamoring for third-party rendering engines); and (b) the PWA’s stored data is tied to the rendering engine that created it. This is not a simple problem to solve. ↩︎︎


House Passes Bill That Requires ByteDance to Sell TikTok or Face Ban in the U.S. 

Cristiano Lima-Strong, Jacob Bogage, and Mariana Alfaro, reporting for The Washington Post:

The House overwhelmingly passed a measure Wednesday to force TikTok to split from its parent company or face a national ban, a lightning offensive that materialized abruptly after years of unsuccessful negotiations over the platform’s fate. The legislation, approved 352 to 65, is a sweeping bipartisan rebuke of the popular video-sharing app — and an attempt to grapple with allegations that TikTok’s China-based parent, ByteDance, presents national security risks.

For years, lawmakers have been introducing proposals seeking to restrict the company’s activities in the U.S., and finding limited momentum. But these lengthy behind-the-scenes deliberations were hastened, lawmakers said, by the Biden administration’s growing support of the effort, coupled with concerns about TikTok’s potential to influence U.S. politics, which intensified after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Private briefings from national security and law enforcement officials, including a classified hearing last week, served as a “call to action” for Congress to “finally” take a stand against TikTok, said Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It’s unclear whether these meetings with the FBI, Justice Department and Office of the Director of the National Intelligence surfaced new evidence against the company.

It seems pretty clear those briefings did surface alarming evidence. The two concerns about TikTok are that (a) the Chinese government is using it to surveil Americans; and (b) that it serves as a powerful propaganda vehicle for the PRC. It’s the latter concern — propaganda — that has had me calling for a TikTok ban (or divestiture by ByteDance) for years.

Remember too: China itself bans all foreign social networks. Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter/X, Pinterest — none of them are available in mainland China. It’s bananas that we allow an algorithmically-driven social media app controlled by China here.

The DMA Has Crippled Google Search in the EU 

Oliver Bethel, legal director at Google, back in January, on changes to search results in the EU:

When you are searching for something like a hotel, or something to buy, we often show information to help you find what you need, like pictures and prices, as part of our results. Sometimes this can be as part of a result for a single business like a hotel or restaurant, or sometimes it can be a featured group of relevant results. Over the coming weeks in Europe, we will be expanding our testing of a number of changes to the search results page. We will introduce dedicated units that include a group of links to comparison sites from across the web, and query shortcuts at the top of the search page to help people refine their search, including by focusing results just on comparison sites.

Most of those comparison sites are garbage. I suspect these changes will make Google Search far less useful for hotels and shopping.

For categories like hotels, we will also start testing a dedicated space for comparison sites and direct suppliers to show more detailed individual results including images, star ratings and more. These changes will result in the removal of some features from the search page, such as the Google Flights unit.

Unreal. Google Flights is the best cross-airline search tool I’m aware of. Years ago I used Hipmunk — which was great — but, alas, they shut down in January 2020. I presume people in the EU can still go to the dedicated Google Flights page, but just typing “PHL to SFO” on Google’s homepage or in your browser’s location field is what most people expect to work.

Google’s EU Choice Screens for Android, for Default Browser and Default Search Within Chrome, Only Show Up on New Devices 

Google:

The browser and search choice screens will begin appearing on new devices distributed in the EEA on or after March 6, 2024.

Not clear to me why Apple did this in a software update for all eligible iPhones, but Google is only doing it for newly-sold ones.

Over 15,000 Hacked Roku Accounts Sold for 50 Cents Apiece 

Bill Toulas, writing for BleepingComputer:

Roku has disclosed a data breach impacting over 15,000 customers after hacked accounts were used to make fraudulent purchases of hardware and streaming subscriptions. However, BleepingComputer has learned there is more to this attack, with threat actors selling the stolen accounts for as little as $0.50 per account, allowing purchasers to use stored credit cards to make illegal purchases. [...]

The company says that once an account was breached, it allowed threat actors to change the information on the account, including passwords, email addresses, and shipping addresses. This effectively locked a user out of the account, allowing the threat actors to make purchases using stored credit card information without the legitimate account holder receiving order confirmation emails.

More good news for Roku users, including the fact that Roku first discovered the hack in early January, and waited until now to notify affected users.

Don Lemon Is Shocked — Shocked — That the Face-Eating Leopard Ate His Face 

Back on January 10, Twitter/X and former CNN host Don Lemon announced a deal for Lemon to host a new show on the platform.

Last Friday Lemon interviewed Elon Musk for his first episode of the show. Not liking the questions he was asked, Musk cancelled the show the next day.

Agreeing to a deal with Musk is like agreeing to a deal with Trump. At best you’ll be paid pennies on the dollar, and probably will never see a nickel.

Help Sarah Perez 

GoFundMe drive to help longtime (and oft-cited here at DF) TechCrunch reporter Sarah Perez and her daughter:

In the early hours of March 13th, Sarah’s world turned upside down. As the bright glare of flames illuminated her bathroom window, she was able to escape safety with her 14-year-old daughter, Josie, and their dog Princess. They escaped the engulfing inferno just in time, but not without losing everything they held dear.

The fire department’s grim assessment confirmed the extent of the devastation: severe structural damage rendered their home uninhabitable, leaving them with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Sarah, a resilient single mother who has always worked tirelessly to provide for her family, now faces the task of rebuilding their lives from scratch.

A lot of people, each giving a little, can make a big difference here.

iPulse for iOS 

Craig Hockenberry, writing at The Iconfactory blog:

We released the first version of iPulse on a new operating system called Mac OS X in 2002. Our unobtrusive and stylish system monitor showcased the features of Apple’s new OS and was a hit.

Now, two decades later, we’re happy to announce that groundbreaking product is coming to iOS and iPadOS. And just as it did with macOS, it’s taking a new approach with its user interface to get the job done. An app that can monitor your device is a great thing to have when you need it, but can get in the way when you don’t. On iOS we solved this problem by using Picture in Picture technology.

$10 one-time purchase in the App Store. That’s a great deal for a great tool.

There are zillions of “system monitor”-type apps in the App Store. Good luck finding one other than iPulse that works well, is attractive and well-designed, and has no ads.

Steven Sinofsky: ‘Building Under Regulation’ 

Steven Sinofsky, back on January 27 (two days after Apple announced the first draft of their DMA compliance plans):

This week Apple detailed the software changes that will appear in an upcoming release of iOS to comply with the European Union Digital Markets Act (DMA). As I read the over 60 pages of the DMA when it was passed (and in drafts before that, little of which changed in the process) my heart sank over the complexity of a regulation so poorly constructed yet so clearly aimed at specific (American) companies and products. As I read through many of the hundreds of pages of Apple documents detailing their compliance implementation my heart sank again. This time was because I so thoroughly could feel the pain and struggle product teams felt in clinging to at best or unwinding at worst the most substantial improvement in computing ever introduced — the promise behind the iPhone since its introduction. The reason the iPhone became so successful was not a fluke. Consumers and customers voted that the value proposition of the product was something they preferred, and they acted by purchasing iPhone and developers responded by building applications for iOS. The regulators have a different view of that promise, so here we are.

Sinofsky warns that his essay is long, and it is. At over 18,000 words, it’s veritably booklet-length. But it’s really worth reading. I read it shortly after Sinofsky published it, and have been meaning to comment upon sections at length, but I might as well just link to it. Sinofsky, having been in charge of Windows when Microsoft went through the same sort of European Commission regulatory wringer Apple is now, is in a unique position to expound upon the dynamic. His focus on Apple’s “brand promise” with the iPhone, and how nearly every aspect of the DMA compliance plan breaks — or at least chips away at — that promise, is spot on.

The whole point of the DMA is the EC asserting that they know better than Apple (and Google) how phones should work.

App Store WTF of the Week: DealMachine for Real Estate 

Message from a DF reader:

I came across an app that’s getting away with directly linking to a website to start a subscription instead of IAP. It’s a straightforward violation of App Store rules in the US. If you look at reviews, a lot of people complain about fraudulent charges and not being able to cancel. But apparently Apple hasn’t stopped them yet.

I downloaded the app and signed up; immediately after confirming your email address, you get sent to a screen in the app where you choose from account tiers to begin a free trial. The lowest tier is $100/month, the highest is $500/month. And after making your selection, you get sent to this page on DealMachine’s website to pay using Stripe. (That link won’t actually work, because I omitted the tracking code portion of the URL for the throwaway account I created, so here’s a screenshot.) Not only are they circumventing in-app payments, they don’t even offer using them as a choice.

Here’s a review from their App Store Listing:

No Customer Support / Rough
Their annual plan is over a thousand dollars. I haven’t used their service in months. The renewal comes around, they charge me another thousand dollars. I reach out to get a refund, all I get is a robot.

I don’t think DealMachine is a scam. Stripe is as legit as it gets. But when you handle payments on your own, you handle refunds and subscription cancellations on your own too. Renewal reminders too. And if you don’t send renewal reminders, customers don’t get them. And if you don’t feel like issuing a refund for a $1,000/year subscription that a customer wanted to cancel but didn’t, you can let the customer sort it out with their credit card company. All that stuff works awesome, from the user’s perspective, with Apple’s App Store payment system. So DealMachine offers a taste of what our friends in the EU may be getting from marketplace apps soon.


Once More Unto the Apple / Epic / European-Commission Breach, Dear Friends, Once More

Three weeks ago, when Epic Games announced their approval from Apple for a new Apple developer account, under Epic’s Swedish subsidiary, and their intention to use that account to create an Epic Games Store app marketplace in the EU, the assumption was that this had been approved at a high level inside Apple. It seemed pretty safe to assume that no one at Apple had forgotten who Epic is, and that was certainly how Epic presented it, starting with Tim Sweeney graciously describing it as “a good faith move by Apple amidst our cataclysmic antitrust battle”.

So the conventional wisdom as to what has occurred from then forward goes like this:

  1. Epic, seeing the opportunity offered by Apple’s DMA compliance plan in the EU, petitions Apple for a new developer account to create an EU marketplace.
  2. Senior Apple executives — perhaps Phil Schiller, head of the App Store, personally — consider the petition, and despite having previously banned Epic Games’s Fortnite developer account for the 2020 in-app payments Trojan horse stunt, decide to grant it.
  3. Epic announces their plans.
  4. Apple then revokes Epic’s newly-granted developer account, citing other recent tweets from Sweeney in which he scathingly criticizes Apple’s DMA compliance plan.
  5. Epic goes public with the correspondence from Schiller (email to Sweeney, asking for assurances) and Apple’s attorney (letter [pp. 1 and 2] to Epic’s attorneys, officially terminating the new account, and thus, briefly, dashing Epic’s plans for its own EU marketplace.
  6. Everyone, largely assuming item 2 in this list, sees this as astonishingly thin-skinned retaliation on Apple’s part for public remarks criticizing Apple’s plans. “Everyone” here includes EC commissioner Thierry Breton, who tweets that he is immediately opening an investigation.
  7. Under this pressure, Apple relents and reinstates Epic’s newly-created account and agrees to allow the Epic Games Store marketplace to proceed.

This list is largely true, but the problem is item 2. Epic, under the assumption or hope that the DMA demanded Apple permit them to open a store, had simply gone through the enrollment form on Apple’s developer website and paid the $99 annual fee. Per Sweeney, responding to a question from me tonight on Twitter/X, that was Friday, February 9, and their account was approved on the following Monday, February 12. Epic made their public announcement that they intended to create an Epic Games Store for iOS in the EU on Friday, February 16.

That announcement, seemingly, was in fact the first time Epic’s plans came to the attention of Apple’s leadership. Schiller’s email to Sweeney was sent the following Friday, February 23, and concluded:

You have stated that allowing enrollment of Epic Games Sweden in the Developer Program is “a good faith move by Apple.” We invite you to provide us with written assurance that you are also acting in good faith, and that Epic Games Sweden will, despite your public actions and rhetoric, honor all of its commitments. In plain, unqualified terms, please tell us why we should trust Epic this time.

It doesn’t make any sense for Schiller to have asked that on February 23 if any senior Apple executives had considered the implications — including Epic’s history of performative non-compliance with the App Store’s terms — and explicitly approved Epic’s new developer account two weeks earlier. Florian Mueller was the first observer to note this, in a post on his new site Games Fray on March 6, this past Wednesday:

The original grant of the developer account appeared to be a sign of a potential improvement of their relationship, but that may have been the result of an oversight as opposed to a conscious decision by Apple’s executives and lawyers to give Epic a chance to prove to be a reliable app store operator in the EU. Right after the developer account was announced (February 16, 2024), Epic’s Swedish subsidiary applied for a DMA consultation slot, and five days later apparently saw that the request had been turned down. Those consultations are offered by Apple to organizations interested in exercising certain rights under the DMA with a view to alternative app stores. The fact that they weren’t going to talk to Epic about this was already a first negative sign.

Stephen Warwick, reporting for iMore, followed up on Florian’s speculation and confirmed it:

Apple has confirmed to iMore that Epic Games Sweden entered the DLPA without any executive review on Apple’s part, confirming Mueller’s suspicion.

To be clear, regardless of executive review, “Apple” had approved Epic Games Sweden’s developer account. But that approval was seemingly automated, or mostly automated, and only after that did Apple executives and lawyers engage Epic in any back-and-forth regarding assurances of future compliance with Apple’s DMA guidelines.

So the real order of events is something more like this:

  1. Epic Games Sweden enrolls in the developer program online and gets approval after the weekend.
  2. Epic presumes, somewhat reasonably, that this means they have the go-ahead.1 It is very Apple-like to simply grant the new account without any personal contact. Epic knows Apple is doing this through gritted teeth, because Apple itself has made clear they don’t agree with any of the demands of the DMA.
  3. Epic announces their plan for an iOS games store.
  4. Now Schiller and others in Apple leadership ponder the question of what to do, and a week later Schiller emails Sweeney.
  5. Sweeney responds in the affirmative, replying to Schiller: “Epic and its subsidiaries are acting in good faith and will comply with all terms of current and future agreements with Apple, and we’ll be glad to provide Apple with any specific further assurances on the topic that you’d like.”
  6. Apple considers that insufficient, thinking something to the effect of “These guys complained incessantly about the App Store before pulling their Fortnite IAP stunt, and we perma-banned them for good reason then. Now they’re complaining just as incessantly about our DMA compliance plans, so they’re just as likely to pull a rule-breaking stunt again if we grant them a developer account to run a marketplace in the EU. Nothing’s changed with Epic, so screw ’em, they still don’t deserve to be in the developer program.

I.e., while Apple as an institution granted, revoked, and under public pressure reinstated Epic’s new account, from the perspective of Apple leadership, they only revoked a new account that had been created through an automated system — not for criticism, per se, but for the same reason Epic’s Fortnite developer account remains revoked and Fortnite remains unavailable on Apple platforms worldwide: for the 2020 Fortnite IAP Trojan horse stunt. The “colorful” tweets Schiller quoted and which Apple’s attorney cited were mentioned as proof that Epic hadn’t changed, not as the reason for revoking the new account.

I’m farting into the wind by writing about this somewhat subtle distinction, because the conventional wisdom isn’t going to change. Almost everyone paying any attention at all to this will continue to believe, forever, that Apple executives granted Epic a new developer account and then revoked it because Tim Sweeney tweeted things Apple didn’t like about their DMA plans.2

The bottom line remains as I concluded Friday: Apple played this whole thing terribly. The automated developer program enrollment form — the one that gave Epic the impression they’d been granted express permission to proceed with building an iOS marketplace for the EU — is Apple’s. The whole App Store bureaucracy is Apple’s. (Or as Sweeney aptly called it tonight, “Apple’s App DMV”.)

At the beginning of Apple attorney Mark Perry’s letter terminating Epic’s new developer account, he lays bare Apple’s thinking:

In the past, Epic has denigrated Apple’s developer terms, including the Developer Program License Agreement (DPLA) as a prelude to breaking them.

To Apple executives, it might have made sense to cite in their correspondence with Epic their ongoing denigration of Apple’s developer terms, as evidence that Epic remains recalcitrant and untrustworthy. To almost everyone outside Apple Park, however — most especially (a) third-party developers who have been, for years, souring on Apple’s App Store policies; and (b) EC commissioners, who are ebulliently roasting Apple as a regulatory target and feasting on the resulting publicity — it looks not like a policy of “We’re not going to reinstate Developer Program privileges to a proven rule-breaker whose stated goal was then, and remains now, to break our control over our own platform”, but instead a retaliatory policy of “We’ll terminate the account of any developer who speaks out against us.

That Apple couldn’t see how this would play is on them. 


  1. I asked Sweeney on Twitter/X about the approval timeline, wondering whether it was measured in mere hours (or minutes, even) or days. If it had been immediately, or nearly so, wouldn’t it seem likely to have been part of an automated approval for new developer accounts, not a dramatic change of stance on Apple’s part regarding Epic Games post-Fortnite IAP lawsuit? Apple fought hard in court — US court, of course, which now matters — to assert its right to revoke Epic’s Fortnite developer account and permanently ban Fortnite from the App Store. But if Sweeney is correct and the approval of the new account came three days after enrollment — even if over a weekend — it seems reasonable for Epic to have assumed they were cleared. Not that Apple had a change of heart, but that Apple accepted that the DMA changed the ground rules in the EU.

    Which, it is now clear, the DMA has indeed done. ↩︎

  2. Apple attorney Mark Perry’s letter to Epic’s attorneys informing them Apple was terminating Epic’s new developer program account cited just one tweet, in which Sweeney embedded a photo of the two Steves working on an Apple II. Sweeney doesn’t mention either Steve by name, but added the photo after writing:

    Apple is a few bold and visionary decisions away from being the company they once were and that they still advertise themselves to be: beloved brand to consumers, partner to developers, and overlord to none.

    The clear implication being that Apple was different — and better — under Steve Jobs. But, Jobs is the guy who, in February 2011, emailed this to Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller:

    I think this is all pretty simple — iBooks is going to be the only bookstore on iOS devices. We need to hold our heads high. One can read books bought elsewhere, just not buy/rent/subscribe from iOS without paying us, which we acknowledge is prohibitive for many things.

    So one can imagine that if you worked with Jobs personally, considered him a friend, and continue to miss him dearly, you might be a bit annoyed — to say the least — by Sweeney’s insinuation that he knows how Jobs would proceed today with the App Store better than you. ↩︎︎


Business Insider Report Claims Apple Is Testing an AI-Powered Ads Platform 

Benjamin Mayo, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Apple is said to be testing an AI-powered ads platform with a select group of partners, via Business Insider.

The AI tool chooses where to place ads in the various App Store promoted ad placement slots. Right now, this is seemingly being used to improve advertiser campaign performance for App Store Search Ads. However, Business Insider speculates the technology could eventually be used elsewhere as Apple gradually expands its offering of ad-supported services.

If this AI system is so smart, I suggest Apple use it to figure out how to run the App Store without any ads at all.

Steven Spielberg, FineWoven Case Owner, Photographs His Hamburger at an Oscars Party Using an iPhone 15 Pro 

Zoom in on that first image and you can see his case is rather stained.

(Thanks to DF reader Harrison Krebs.)

Roku Locks Devices Until Users Agree to New Terms of Service 

Scharon Harding, reporting for Ars Technica:

This month, users on Roku’s support forums reported suddenly seeing a message when turning on their Roku TV or streaming device reading: “We’ve made an important update: We’ve updated our Dispute Resolution Terms. Select ‘Agree’ to agree to these updated Terms and to continue enjoying our products and services. Press * to view these updated Terms.” A large button reading “Agree” follows. The pop-up doesn’t offer a way to disagree, and users are unable to use their device unless they hit agree. [...]

Roku has further aggravated customers who have found that disagreeing to its updated terms is harder than necessary. Roku is willing to accept agreement to its terms with a single button press, but to opt out, users must jump through hoops that include finding that old book of stamps.

To opt out of Roku’s ToS update, which primarily changes the “Dispute Resolution Terms,” users must send a letter to Roku’s general counsel in California mentioning: “the name of each person opting out and contact information for each such person, the specific product models, software, or services used that are at issue, the email address that you used to set up your Roku account (if you have one), and, if applicable, a copy of your purchase receipt.” Roku required all this to opt out of its terms previously, as well.

Requiring a written letter (and a copy of the purchase receipt — how many people keep that for what may well be a years-old purchase?) is just a huge “fuck you” to their customers.


Sponsorship Openings at Daring Fireball and The Talk Show, Early 2024 Edition

After being sold out for months, the upcoming sponsorship schedule at DF is unusually open at the moment — including this upcoming week.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch. And again, this coming week remains open.

Also, sponsoring The Talk Show is a great opportunity for a lot of the same services and products that sponsor the website. And because there are up to three sponsors per episode, the price is significantly lower than the weekly sponsorship of the entire site. Advertising in the podcast industry is going through upheaval, and my show is really feeling it. Those of you who listen to ATP know they are too, and I’ll bet the same is true for just about all your favorite ad-based podcasts. What I’ve seen, in broad terms, is that the early years of podcasting were indie across the board — indie podcasters with indie sponsors. Then, when podcasting exploded in popularity, advertising agencies stepped in, and most spots on my show — and most spots on the shows I listen to — were sold to internet startup brands through ad agencies. The brands and products were great — companies like Warby Parker eyeglasses, Casper mattresses, Hullo pillows, you know the type — but dealing with ad agencies was (and remains) a much, much bigger hassle than dealing with smaller independent companies directly (which is how I sell almost all my weekly sponsorship spots).

So if you have an app, product, service or whatever that you think is a good fit for Daring Fireball, I encourage you to consider a sponsorship of The Talk Show. Small indie products have been vastly underrepresented amongst The Talk Show sponsors in recent years, but I hope to change that. Again, the number of repeat sponsors is the best proof I can offer that it’s a great value. (Those big brands going through ad agencies track their results.) I don’t sell the podcast sponsorships myself, so if you’re interested, get in touch with Elaine Pow at Neat.fm. There are a bunch of openings in the next few months, and we’re happy to offer a discount to first-time sponsors to fill them.

I kind of hate writing these sponsorship-pimping posts, but my job, from an accounting point of view, is an ad salesman, not a writer/podcaster. The obvious truth is that I should be publicly promoting these sponsorships — both on the site and the podcast — far more often than I do. (I’d have been fired from this sales job years ago if I had a boss.) 


‘Your Father Wanted You to Have This When You Were Old Enough’ 

Jason Kottke:

When the Star Wars films aired in Chile, instead of cutting away from the movie for commercial breaks, the TV station “seamlessly” inserted ads for Cerveza Cristal beer. We’re talking Obi-Wan opening a chest to find a lightsaber for Luke and instead it reveals an ice-chest full of beer. Or the Emperor Force-reaching for a lightsaber and a can of beer flies into his hand.

These commercials aired like 20 years ago, but went supernova-viral last week. It’s impossible to explain how that works, but they deserved to go crazy viral. They’re so goddamn funny, even though you know the gag.

(Sidenote: Pitch-perfect redesign over there at the home of fine hypertext products since 1998.)


Apple Reinstates Epic’s EU Developer Account

Epic Games:

Apple has told us and committed to the European Commission that they will reinstate our developer account. This sends a strong signal to developers that the European Commission will act swiftly to enforce the Digital Markets Act and hold gatekeepers accountable. We are moving forward as planned to launch the Epic Games Store and bring Fortnite back to iOS in Europe. Onward!

Tim Sweeney:

The DMA went through its first major challenge with Apple banning Epic Games Sweden from competing with the App Store, and the DMA just had its first major victory. Following a swift inquiry by the European Commission, Apple notified the Commission and Epic that it would relent and restore our access to bring back Fortnite and launch Epic Games Store in Europe under the DMA law.

A big win for European rule of law, for the European Commision, and for the freedom of developers worldwide to speak up. #FreeFortnite!

This is in response to a tweet, just yesterday, from Thierry Breton of the European Commission (emojis and hashtags untouched):

🚨Under the #DMA, there is no room for threats by gatekeepers to silence developers.

I have asked our services to look into Apple’s termination of Epic’s developer account as a matter of priority.

To all developers in 🇪🇺 & 🌍: now is the time to have your say on gatekeepers’ compliance solutions!

(I had a version of this post almost ready to publish before I ran out of gas late last night; I seemingly can’t write fast enough to keep up with Apple’s EU regulatory adventure. Today’s Dithering is, I think, a particularly good episode and still relevant, but its shelf life of being up-to-date on the news was about 6 hours.)

Theory A: Apple is playing grandmaster-level chess, and orchestrated this entire back-and-forth to give the EU a high-publicity win — “Look, the DMA, just one day old, is already working, showing that we can push Apple around” — regarding an Epic Games Store that Apple should have just let through from the start. It’s a lot of publicity for a thing that I don’t expect will amount to a significant concession by Apple.

Theory B: Apple is flailing erratically trying to deal with their loss of autonomy.

I vote B, because to me the real win for Apple would have been just letting Epic use their Swedish subsidiary to open an iOS games store without the back-and-forth. If Apple had gone that route, the European Commission could still have taken credit for proof of the DMA’s effectiveness, and Apple would look like they were complying graciously with the law. But the way things actually played out makes clear they’re complying begrudgingly, and, worse, plays into the worst assumptions about Apple’s institutional arrogance and vindictiveness.

Apple seems to have been particularly wrong-footed (to borrow a sports analogy even EU citizens might get) by this Epic thing. Again, I think Apple should have let Epic open an Epic Games Store in the EU. I think Apple could have just made clear from the moment they announced their DMA compliance plans that Epic remained ineligible for a developer account because of their flagrant violation of the App Store rules four years ago. The EC might have — and I think would have — forced Apple to relent on that, but it could have been adjudicated without any implication of spite or pettiness on Apple’s part.

But instead Apple played it the worst way possible: They let Epic’s Swedish subsidiary open a new Apple Developer Account, and proceed far enough toward building a games store that Epic announced it, and only then revoked Epic’s developer account, while almost literally justifying it not on the grounds that Epic can’t be trusted because they’re an egregious rule breaker, but instead because Tim Sweeney continued to voice his strident (or if you prefer, colorful) opinions about the App Store being an illegal monopoly. Apple doesn’t revoke developer licenses for criticizing Apple. But a lot of people — including the EC! — now think Apple did just that.

How was a “priority” investigation by the EC not going to happen the way Apple played this? If Apple had just let Epic proceed from the start, they’d have looked magnanimous. They even had Tim Sweeney calling it “a good faith move”. But as it stands, Apple looks bitter, and from the EC’s perspective, in need of close policing. 


Signal Introduces Usernames 

Signal:

Usernames in Signal do not function like usernames on social media platforms. Signal usernames are not logins or handles that you’ll be known by on the app — they’re simply a quick way to connect without sharing a phone number. [...]

Usernames simply allow you to initiate a connection on Signal without sharing your phone number, and Signal’s robust privacy safeguards remain unchanged. Signal is built so that we do not know who you message, what you say, which group chats you participate in, who’s in your contact list, and more.

If you want to create a username, you can do so in Settings > Profile. A username on Signal (unlike a profile name) must be unique and must have two or more numbers at the end of it; a choice intended to help keep usernames egalitarian and minimize spoofing. Usernames can be changed as often as you like, and you can delete your username entirely if you prefer to no longer have one.

Clever solution. Especially given that these usernames aren’t like social media handles, I particularly like the “every username gets at least 2 digits appended” rule.

How iOS Is Determining Eligibility for Alternative App Marketplaces in the European Union 

Apple support document:

To reflect the Digital Markets Act’s changes, users in the European Union are able to install alternative app marketplaces and install apps offered through alternative app marketplaces in iOS 17.4 or later. The country or region of your Apple ID must be set to one of the countries or regions of the European Union, and you must be physically located in the European Union.

Your device eligibility for alternative app marketplaces is determined by using on-device processing, with only an indicator of eligibility sent to Apple. To preserve your privacy, Apple does not collect your device’s location.

If you leave the European Union for short-term travel, you’ll continue to have access to alternative app marketplaces for a grace period. If you’re gone for too long, you’ll lose access to some features, including installing new alternative app marketplaces. Apps you installed from alternative app marketplaces will continue to function, but they can’t be updated by the marketplace you downloaded them from.

How long is “too long”? What a confusing mess this is shaping up to be.

Meta’s Plans for E2EE Messaging Interop for WhatsApp and Messenger 

Engineering at Meta:

To comply with a new EU law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which comes into force on March 7th, we’ve made major changes to WhatsApp and Messenger to enable interoperability with third-party messaging services. [...]

To interoperate, third-party providers will sign an agreement with Messenger and/or WhatsApp and we’ll work together to enable interoperability. Today we’ll publish the WhatsApp Reference Offer for third-party providers which will outline what will be required to interoperate with the service. The Reference Offer for Messenger will follow in due course. [...]

In order to maximize user security, we would prefer third-party providers to use the Signal Protocol. Since this has to work for everyone however, we will allow third-party providers to use a compatible protocol if they are able to demonstrate it offers the same security guarantees as Signal.

Unclear to me whether these third-party providers will, somehow, only function in the EU, or if Meta is opening this up worldwide. Also unclear to me is who benefits from this?

Here’s the New iOS 17.4 Default Browser Nag for iPhone Users in Europe 

Thomas Ricker, writing for The Verge:

It’s DMA day in Europe, and I’ve immediately been prompted to choose a default browser after updating to iOS 17.4. The list is populated with “the most downloaded browsers on iOS in that country in the prior year.”

This screen is ridiculous. I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks this sort of user experience is anything but confusing to a typical user. Someone who’s been using Safari for a decade, and doesn’t even know what a “default browser” is, might have to scroll below the fold to even see Safari as an option, depending on the random order.

From Apple’s developer documentation for this screen:

Up to 11 of the most downloaded browsers on iOS in that country in the prior year that meet the above criteria will be selected for the browser choice screen in addition to Safari. Apple will update the list of browsers eligible to be shown on the choice screen once per calendar year.

The current list of browsers shown on the browser choice screen per country are below. The lists below are in alphabetical order, on a user’s device browsers will be shown in a randomized order per user. Click on a country below to jump to it.

If this is a good idea for web browsers, why stop there? Why not mandate the same sort of choice screen for every app? Mail, Calendar, Notes, Weather, Camera — why not require all of them to show a choice screen for picking a “default”?

Vision Pro’s Battery Indicator Is Confusing 

Apple, in a support document on charging Vision Pro:

The light next to the battery’s USB-C port can give you a quick look at the battery’s current charge state when you’re not wearing Apple Vision Pro. The light turns on briefly when you connect the battery to the USB-C Charge Cable, when you disconnect it, and when you move or gently tap it.

Here’s what the light means when you first connect the battery to power, or if you move or tap the battery while it’s charging:

  • Green for several seconds: the battery is charged to capacity.
  • Amber for several seconds: the battery’s charge level is less than 100%, but has enough charge for you to use Apple Vision Pro.
  • Amber pulsing slowly: the battery’s charge level is too low to power your Apple Vision Pro. Keep charging the battery for 10 minutes, or until the light shows amber steadily (not pulsing) when you tap the battery.

Here’s what the light means when you disconnect the battery from power, or if you move or tap the battery while it’s not connected to power:

  • Green for several seconds: the battery is charged to 50% or higher.
  • Amber for several seconds: the battery’s charge level is between 5% and 49%.
  • Amber pulsing slowly: the battery’s charge level is too low to power your Apple Vision Pro. Charge the battery for 10 minutes, or until the light shows amber steadily (not pulsing) when you tap the battery.

This seems like it could and should have been so much simpler. Why not have 4 lights instead of one, representing 25/50/75/100 percent charge levels? It seems like madness that green means “charged to capacity” when plugged in, but “50% or higher” when not. That’s a big difference!

Television for Vision Pro 

Speaking of new apps from recent guests on my podcast, Adam Lisagor has created a new app for Vision Pro that he introduces thus, with a clever one-minute video:

Welcome to the future of television. I call it ... Television.

The gimmick is that Television offers an assortment of realistic-looking televisions, old and new, and you can just place them in the world around you. You can watch videos from your Photos library, and, starting with the 1.1 update, from YouTube and other web streaming platforms.

I don’t know if this is a useful way to watch video but I’m certain that it’s fun. And I think fun is exactly what we need from developers in the early days of a new platform. In a weird way, that stupid beer-drinking iPhone app mattered. I think Television matters the same way. It’s joyful to plop a realistic old-time CRT TV on your desk. I get why Apple didn’t go this way — with skeuomorphic VR objects — with the system design of VisionOS, but that just means the opportunity is there for the taking for third-party developers.

It’s just fun.

Setapp Mobile 

MacPaw:

MacPaw’s Setapp is the first subscription-based platform offering a curated collection of Mac and iOS apps to users. The platform empowers developers by aligning rewards with apps’ usage and market value, thus fostering a thriving ecosystem of innovation. Now, Setapp will be available directly on iOS devices, allowing for a more integrated and convenient user experience. This expansion promises a diverse selection of premium applications for users and a supportive environment for developers.

EU-only, of course. But so much for the notion that “no one” is going build an alternative app marketplace under Apple’s DMA compliance proposal.

Project Tapestry 

The Iconfactory:

What if you had one app that gave an overview of nearly everything that was happening across all the different services you follow? A single chronological timeline of your most important social media services, RSS feeds, and other sources. All of the updates together in one place, in the order they’re posted, with no algorithm deciding what you should see or when you should see it.

That’s what we’d like to build.

Already funded, but the stretch goals are sooo… good.

M3 MacBook Airs Are Out 

Apple’s Newsroom post announcing the speed-bumped M3 MacBook Airs has an entire section about “AI”:

World’s Best Consumer Laptop for AI

With the transition to Apple silicon, every Mac is a great platform for AI. M3 includes a faster and more efficient 16-core Neural Engine, along with accelerators in the CPU and GPU to boost on-device machine learning, making MacBook Air the world’s best consumer laptop for AI. Leveraging this incredible AI performance, macOS delivers intelligent features that enhance productivity and creativity, so users can enable powerful camera features, real-time speech to text, translation, text predictions, visual understanding, accessibility features, and much more.

With a broad ecosystem of apps that deliver advanced AI features, users can do everything from checking their homework with AI Math Assistance in Goodnotes 6, to automatically enhancing photos in Pixelmator Pro, to removing background noise from a video using CapCut. Combined with the unified memory architecture of Apple silicon, MacBook Air can also run optimized AI models, including large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models for image generation locally with great performance. In addition to on-device performance, MacBook Air supports cloud-based solutions, enabling users to run powerful productivity and creative apps that tap into the power of AI, such as Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, Canva, and Adobe Firefly.

WorkOS 

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. WorkOS is a modern identity and user management platform that enables B2B SaaS companies to accelerate enterprise adoption. Free up to 1 million MAUs, WorkOS brings a modular approach to B2B Auth with enterprise-ready features like SSO, SCIM, and User Management.

The APIs are flexible and easy to use, designed to provide an effortless experience from your first user all the way through your largest enterprise customer.

Today, hundreds of high-growth scale-ups are already powered by WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom.

Richard Lewis on Letterman 

So many fond remembrances of Richard Lewis are coming out — he really was “the menschiest of mensches” — but this highlight reel from his appearances on Letterman’s show, especially the early ones from the 1980s, hits home for me. He was a great comedian and an absolutely perfect talk show guest. He was seemingly always on Late Night back then, and every time he was, as a viewer, it was like, “Richard Lewis again? Can’t wait!”

Also:

Weather Up 3.0 

One more link from the latest episode of The Talk Show: Weather Up 3.0. If you’re a longtime reader you know I’m a nut for iPhone weather apps. There are so many great ones for iOS, starting with Apple’s own. I just love how much creativity and originality there is in presentation, emphasis, and information design.

Weather Up 3 stakes out two unique positions. The app itself presents a map-first design. No other weather app (that I’m aware of) goes map-first presentation-wise (which, as David Barnard explained on my podcast, is expensive).

But even more interesting is that Weather Up 3 is really widget-first — the app interface is secondary to the widget interface, which, for weather, I think is the right priority — and the widget design is:

  • Information-dense
  • Attractive
  • Original

Just a phenomenally good weather app, that you should definitely try.