By John Gruber

• Archive
• The Talk Show
• Dithering
• Projects
• Contact
• Colophon
• Feeds / Social
• Sponsorship

Sam Altman and Jony Ive Introduce ‘io’, the Device-Making Partnership Between OpenAI and LoveFrom ★

No details on what yet, but a lovely little 9-minute video on why.

Sam Altman:

“What it means to use technology can change in a profound way. I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago.”

Jony Ive:

“I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment. While I am both anxious and excited about the responsibility of the substantial work ahead, I am so grateful for the opportunity to be part of such an important collaboration. The values and vision of Sam and the teams at OpenAI and io are a rare inspiration.”

I am not a fan of the lowercase styling of “io”, but otherwise shoot this into my veins. This industry needs a heavy dose of new ideas for new devices. This is just a vibes teaser, but the vibe is a shot across the bow. It conveys grand ambition, but without pretension. To say I’m keen to get my hands on what they’re making is an understatement.

Fortnite Returns to the U.S. App Store for iOS ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

After a nearly five-year hiatus, Fortnite is back on the App Store for iPhone and iPad users in the United States. Epic Games announced the return of the battle royale gaming app this afternoon, and you can head to the App Store now to download it.

Son of a bitch Epic did it. This was like a double bank shot.

It was smart for Apple to just concede here. Pick your battles is a cliché but it’s a great truism. Even if Apple’s executives still wanted to keep Fortnite out of the App Store, even if they still think they’d win, ultimately, in court, why fight over this? I think they would win, but probably not with Judge Gonzales Rogers, so they’d be looking at a protracted series of appeals. Why bother?

Also, fascinatingly, neither Apple nor anyone from Apple has commented on this whole thing at any point. Epic published the letter their attorneys received from Apple’s attorneys, which I’m sure Apple fully expected, but Apple itself has never said a word about Epic’s submission of Fortnite to the US App Store.

The craziest thing about this entire saga is that Apple won the original lawsuit on 9/10 or 10/11 points, depending on how you count them. The only point they lost on was the anti-steering nonsense — not allowing apps to link out the web for purchases, or even tell users about offers available on the web. That was the only point they lost on, and it was the one thing Apple has been most clearly wrong about all along.

All Apple had to do was allow apps to link out to the web, which clearly should have been allowed since forever ago — link-outs were the antitrust/competition escape valve — and they’d have swept the entire Epic lawsuit and it would have been over four years ago.

Tuesday, 20 May 2025

Kristi Noem Doesn’t Know What ‘Habeas Corpus’ Is ★

Taegan Goddard:

When Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem for the definition of “habeas corpus,” Noem incorrectly described it as a right that the President of the United States has to deport people.

You can go the Latin route (“produce the body”) or the English common-law route (the accused have a right to be shown the evidence against them and defend themselves in court). Noem went the “biggest clown of the clown-car Trump 2.0 administration” route.

Monday, 19 May 2025

The First Rule of Legal Fight Club Is ‘Don’t Piss Off the Judge’; the Second Rule of Legal Fight Club Is ‘Don’t Piss Off the Judge’ ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

With Apple blocking Fortnite from returning to the U.S. App Store, Epic Games told the court that Apple was violating the injunction and asked that Apple be forced to approve the app. The judge overseeing the case responded to Epic’s request today, and she is sounding more and more fed up with Apple’s continued defiance and Epic’s grousing.

“More and more fed up” is perhaps euphemistic, given Gonzalez Rogers’s tone today.

John Siracusa: ‘Apple Turnover’ ★

John Siracusa, in a piece that, in a bit of rhetorical deftness, only mentions Tim Cook by name once:

What should be motivating Apple to make improvements — the desire to make great products — seems absent. What should not be motivating Apple — the desire for power, control, and profits — seems omnipresent.

And I don’t mean that in a small way; I mean that in a big way. Every new thing we learn about Apple’s internal deliberations surrounding these decisions only lends more weight to the conclusion that Apple has lost its north star. Or, rather, it has replaced it with a new, dark star. And time and again, we’ve learned that these decisions go all the way to the top.

The best leaders can change their minds in response to new information. The best leaders can be persuaded. But we’ve had decades of strife, lawsuits, and regulations, and Apple has stubbornly dug in its heels even further at every turn. It seems clear that there’s only one way to get a different result.

Covers a lot in a relatively short essay. I do not agree with Siracusa on his conclusion, but I’ve sat on linking to it, because — along with a few other recents posts and goings-on — it’s given me much to think about, and has helped me clarify my own thoughts, which I need to put in a piece of their own. But if you haven’t read Siracusa’s yet, you should.

Chad the Bird on ‘Star Wars’ Typography ★

The reader who sent me this video said, “I’ve never seen a more Star Wars + Gruber combo on Instagram” and — right down to the profanity — I have to agree.

WSJ: ‘Apple Considers Raising iPhone Prices, Without Blaming Tariffs’ ★

Rolfe Winkler and Yang Jie, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link):

Apple is weighing price increases for its fall iPhone lineup, a step it is seeking to couple with new features and design changes, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is determined to avoid any scenario in which it appears to attribute price increases to U.S. tariffs on goods from China, where most Apple devices are assembled, the people said.

The U.S. and China agreed Monday to suspend most of the tariffs they had imposed on each other in a tit-for-tat trade war. But a 20% tariff that President Trump imposed early in his second term on Chinese goods, citing what he said was Beijing’s role in the fentanyl trade, remains in place and covers smartphones. [...]

For Apple’s most profitable, high-end phones, such as the Pro and Pro Max models, Chinese factories will continue to handle the bulk of production, people familiar with Apple’s supply chain said. While Indian factories are capable of producing Pro models, India’s infrastructure and technical capabilities aren’t yet sufficient to support mass production at the scale China can currently deliver, they said.

Even if Trump weren’t a vindictive thin-skinned angry kook, I’m sure that if this year’s iPhones have higher prices because of Trump’s tariffs, Apple would not attribute the price increases to the tariffs. At least publicly. But Trump is a vindictive thin-skinned angry kook, irritated even that Apple is shifting some iPhone production to India (which does assemble iPhones already, and has the capability of producing more) instead of the United States (which only has the capability of assembling iPhones, at any sort of scale, in the fever dreams of Trump’s addled mind). So of course no one at Apple is going to blame any price increases — if they do indeed go up — on the tariffs.

But come on. If iPhone prices go up in September, everyone who isn’t drunk on MAGA juice is going to blame it on the tariffs. Like, even if Apple had been planning for years to raise prices for the iPhone 17 lineup — if price increases were already baked-in for this year’s models since before Trump was re-elected — now that the tariffs are here, everyone would attribute the price hikes to the tariffs. Especially after the summer of tariff-driven inflation I expect we’re about to go through.

Trump Tells Walmart to ‘Eat the Tariffs’ ★

The president of the United States, on his blog:

Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS,” and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” So I guess I’m wrong that Trump is a know-nothing ding-dong slipping rapidly into dementia, and in fact possesses a first-rate intelligence. Because it’s Trump — soon to win a Nobel Prize in economics for this keen insight — who has been braying to the world, non-stop, for years, that tariffs are “a tax on a foreign country”.

So given that China pays for any tariffs the US imposes on Chinese-made goods, I, for one, don’t have the intellect to understand how there are any tariffs for Walmart to eat. I’m sure Trump is right and Walmart — a company whose “always low prices” brand results in net profit margins between 2–3% — will somehow “eat the tariffs” without losing money. I don’t know why the WSJ Editorial Board is so upset about this — the Republican Party has always been in favor of government price controls.

---

---

Sunday, 18 May 2025

Bolt ★

My thanks to Bolt for sponsoring last week at DF. You can prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web and mobile apps with Bolt, the AI-powered web development agent that brings coding to your browser.

Bolt lets you build, edit, and test web applications in real time with simple, chat-based prompts. No experience needed.

Super-simple, super-fun. Try it yourself at Bolt.new.

Slate Truck: A $20–30K American-Made Electric Small Pickup With No Paint, No Stereo, No Touchscreen ★

Month-old news but I’m cleaning up tabs today. I love everything about this pickup except the fact that it doesn’t have a speaker system built-in. No one wants to put a Bluetooth boombox in their cabin and, worse, isn’t that sort of an obvious safety hazard? You get in a crash and now there’s a boombox flying around inside. Just put a simple bluetooth speaker system in.

But the aesthetics of this are chef’s-kiss good. It’s a beautiful little truck. It gets everything right that the Cybertruck gets wrong.

However, I have some questions about how real this is. You pay $50 now to get in the queue for pre-orders, but pre-orders haven’t even started. Deliveries are supposed to start in “late 2026” but Car and Driver is cautiously describing it as a “2027 truck EV”. I’m rooting for them but at this point it’s a promise not a truck.

Joe Biden Has an Aggressive Form of Prostate Cancer ★

Tyler Pager, The New York Times:

Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was diagnosed Friday with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office said in a statement on Sunday.

The diagnosis came after Mr. Biden reported urinary symptoms, which led doctors to find a “small nodule” on his prostate. Mr. Biden’s cancer is “characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,” the statement said.

“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” according to the statement from Mr. Biden’s office, which was unsigned. “The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”

Terrible news about a good man. But, man, does it feel like forever ago that he was president. It was only 118 days ago.

Jack Rix at Top Gear Reviews CarPlay Ultra in the Aston Martin DBX ★

There’s an accompanying blog post too, but the video (around 18 minutes) is (unsurprisingly, from Top Gear) better. It’s just a great tour of everything from how you set it up to what it offers, and what the various “themes” look like — and how you switch between them.

The DBX doesn’t have a ton of screen space, so we’re still left to wonder what the experience will be like in a car that has door-to-door screens spanning the dashboard, but Rix does a great job showing the driver’s perspective of the main instrument cluster. One thing Aston did right is that they still have a lot of physical controls — clicking buttons and twisting dials — for the most essential features like climate control. As you’d hope, the CarPlay Ultra interface updates live as you manipulate those physical controls in the car.

I don’t know if CarPlay Ultra came out of Apple’s abandoned “Titan” project to build its own line of vehicles, but it sure feels like for the first time in its modern era (see link below), Apple is licensing an OS to third-party hardware makers. A straightforward “you do the hardware, we’ll do the software, and we’ll work together to make sure the result looks like a partnership between our brands” sort of deal. That never made sense for Apple with other device classes, like PCs (where, in the mid-’90s, they briefly tried and it proved nearly ruinous for the company), phones, or watches, but I think it might make a lot more sense for cars than if Apple had forged ahead with Titan.

They might really have something here, and brands — like Mercedes, which supports regular CarPlay but whose CEO is opposed to CarPlay Ultra taking over all its screens, or, more famously, the electric startups like Tesla and Rivian that are holding out against any CarPlay support at all — that don’t support CarPlay Ultra might see a Hemingway-style slowly-then-quickly decline in customer demand that is more notable than the remarkably high demand for regular CarPlay.

Friday, 16 May 2025

Puzzmo Is Getting a Native iOS App Monday ★

Scheduled to drop Monday, but you can click-through to pre-download it now. If you’re not familiar, Puzzmo is sort of a collection of “newspaper puzzle games for the online age”. (Which is also a good description for recent DF sponsor Lex.Games.) One of Puzzmo’s cofounders is Zach Gage, whose hits include Really Bad Chess and Knotwords, and who was my guest on The Talk Show back in 2022.

Anyway, if casual puzzle games are your jam, you should check out Puzzmo. My suggestion is check them out now, see how you like it as a web app on your iPhone, and then compare when the app hits the App Store on Monday. Puzzmo is a really good web app. I bet, though, the app is better.

See also: This blog post from Puzzmo developer Orta Therox from February, discussing some of the engineering changes they made while developing the app.

Apple Is Not Reinstating Fortnite to the App Store, and Because of the Stunt-Like Way That Epic Submitted the Latest Build, Fortnite Is Currently No Longer Available on iOS Anywhere in the World ★

There’s an old adage in poker: If you look around the table and you can’t tell who the fish is, that means you’re the fish.

If you’re surprised at how this publicity stunt from Epic has turned out, especially if you’re a reporter and ran a piece accepting Tim Sweeney’s word that Fortnite was — not might be, but was — coming back to the US App Store as a fact, then you are Tim Sweeney’s fish.

---

---

Thursday, 15 May 2025

Yours Truly With Nilay Patel on ‘Decoder’ ★

Nilay Patel:

There’s a lot of tactical stuff you might talk about in the aftermath of this ruling — about what Apple might do next, how it might impact revenue, and how developers might respond. But I really wanted Gruber to talk about Apple’s big picture and how a company that so often prides itself on doing the right thing ended up so fully on the wrong side of the courts.

One theme you’ll hear throughout this conversation is that Apple often presents itself as small, but the company is actually huge in every way — Apple now sells nearly as many phones in a single quarter as it did in the entire first three years of the iPhone’s existence combined. It now operates in a geopolitical context that binds the United States, China, and Taiwan in ways you would have never imagined 15 years ago. And perhaps most importantly, Apple has control over applications on the iPhone, which means it has control over what kinds of businesses can and cannot exist on its mobile phones.

That’s the context for the other major theme here that you’ll pick up on in this conversation: Apple’s major shift toward digital services and whether that’s fundamentally changed the company’s culture. You see, as Apple kept selling newer and better iPhones, it simply ran out of people to sell them to. So, in order to keep growing revenue and keep Wall Street happy, it started squeezing more money from its existing customer base, including the very developers that put apps on the App Store.

Good episode, if I do say so myself.

RevenueCat Report Suggests In-App Purchases Perform Noticeably Better Than Link-Outs to the Web ★

Speaking of Jacob Eiting, his company RevenueCat today posted some interesting findings from a test comparing conversions rates for IAP vs. web checkout for the same app:

Two weeks ago, there was a court order in the Apple vs Epic case that forced Apple to allow developers to circumvent in-app purchases (IAP). As of April 30th 2025, developers were finally allowed to send customers in the United States to an external website to complete the purchases, and thus avoid the 30% fee that App Store takes. We quickly released Web Purchase Buttons that, combined with our Web Billing product, create a seamless way for developers to drive purchasers out of their app to the web for check out.

IAP in the US is a $52B market, representing about half of all App Store revenue, and this is the first time that Apple has opened up such a major market to web purchasing. Previously, similar court orders have been limited to much smaller markets. It has been much debated over the years how much, or even if, this new-found freedom would help developers make more money. The only real way to know is to run a test, so we took this opportunity to run the biggest open test of web purchases in history.

Last week, we deployed an experiment on Dipsea (the app we acquired last year as a testing-ground) and we’re excited to share initial results.

The initial conversion rate for IAP was around 28%; the conversion rate for the link-out web flow was just 18%. That’s a notable drop-off.

I don’t find it surprising at all though. IAP really is more convenient. Apple’s built a great system, and they don’t need exclusivity to keep users preferring it, and thus keep developers using it.

Andy Allen on the App Store’s Feature Stagnation ★

Andy Allen, of Not Boring Software, last week on Threads:

While the focus on the App Store injunction has been mostly on the commission rate, what’s been overlooked is just how far the tools of the App Store have fallen behind.

There’s a long and growing list of features common on most payment and subscription service providers that still aren’t possible on the App Store today. Price testing, refunds, managing subscriptions, plan migrations, gifting, discount codes, subscription bundles — to name just a few. Entire businesses have spawned just to fill these critical gaps. [...]

Apple has always been one to embrace competition. It’s a battlefield where they’ve historically done very well. They’ve never been afraid to step into a crowded market with their intense focus on design and user experience to show us how insanely great something can be when you truly care.

More than anything, I hope this moment reignites that competitive spirit.

It’s kind of bananas that it’s 2025 and the App Store still doesn’t allow developers to issue refunds. I’ve had this discussion with numerous developers. They’ll be doing customer support, and want to issue a refund, but explain that they can’t — and users find that so hard to believe they suspect the developer is bullshitting them. But you really do have to request a refund from Apple, not from the developer directly, and step 2 of the process is “Wait 24 to 48 hours for an update on your request”.

---

---

Thursday, 15 May 2025

Apple, Appealing €500M DMA Fine, Contends It Made a Series of Proposals to the European Commission Throughout 2024 but Did Not Receive Feedback ★

Jacob Parry, reporting last week for Politico:

“We have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for,” said Apple spokesperson Emma Wilson. “Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to move the goal posts every step of the way.”

These public comments echo concerns the company raised directly with the Commission.

According to correspondence seen by Politico, Apple offered last summer to drop its rules on how app developers can communicate with users, but was told by the Commission to hold off, pending feedback from developers.

By late September and following a round of consultations with Apple critics like Spotify, Match Group and Epic Games, executives at the U.S.-based firm began worrying that a lack of feedback from the Commission meant it was teeing up a potential fine and noncompliance decision.

In an October 2024 letter sent to senior officials in DG Connect and DG Competition, and seen by Politico, an Apple executive complained that the Commission’s case teams had “made clear” that then-Commissioner Margrethe Vestager intended to issue a decision with a “potentially significant fine.”

Basically, it sounds like the European Commission worked backwards to fining Apple last year in a similar way to how Apple worked backwards to arrive at a 27 percent commission on web transactions initiated in apps from the App Store.

More Old Mac Font Memories ★

Dr. Drang, writing at And Now It’s All This:

Back before the LaserWriter and PostScript (it’s an all InterCaps day here at ANIAT) made resolution independence commonplace, most printers were of the dot-matrix variety, usually at a fairly low resolution. The original ImageWriter had a higher resolution than most: 144 dpi. And this led to the interesting feature.

You may have noticed that the 144 dpi resolution of the ImageWriter is exactly twice that of the Mac’s 72 dpi screen. The ImageWriter printer driver on the Mac took advantage of that. If you were writing a document using a 12-point font, and your Mac had a 24-point version of that font, the Mac would send the 24-point font’s bitmaps (all Mac fonts were bitmapped in those days) to the printer so it could render smoother text.

The upshot of this was a very slight breaking of the WYSIWYG principle. On the screen, your Geneva 12 document would appear with curly ys, but when you printed it out, it would have straight ys. A fun idiosyncrasy that disappeared when PS fonts and Adobe Type Manager took over.

I used ImageWriters a lot when I was using Apple II’s, but almost never from the Mac. When I got my first Mac in 1991 it came with a StyleWriter, a rather dreadful inkjet printer. (At the very least it was dreadfully slow.) But I do remember this curiosity with the different style y glyphs when printing text set in Geneva to an ImageWriter. The 144/72 DPI thing was perhaps Apple’s first @2× “double resolution” trick.

Here’s a copy of Apple’s 227-page (!) user manual for the ImageWriter II from 1985, which includes copious examples of source code in both Applesoft BASIC and Macintosh Pascal. It even contains instructions for designing your own custom bitmapped character glyphs.

Bonus points to Drang for including a screenshot illustrating that you chose font sizes from the Style menu (in a separate section underneath the actual, you know, styles) in early versions of MacWrite.

Trump Says He Has ‘A Little Problem With Tim Cook’ Regarding Apple’s Plans to Increase iPhone Production in India ★

Arjun Kharpal, reporting for CNBC:

“I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday,” Trump said. “I said to him, ‘my friend, I treated you very good. You’re coming here with $500 billion, but now I hear you’re building all over India.’ I don’t want you building in India.”

Trump was referencing Apple’s commitment of a $500 billion investment in the U.S. which was announced in February.

And which would have almost certainly been the same thing they would have announced if Kamala Harris had won the election. They announced a $430 billion US investment in 2021, in the first year of the Biden administration.

Apple has been ramping up production in India with the aim of making around 25% of global iPhones in the country in the next few years, as it looks to reduce reliance on China, where around 90% of its flagship smartphone is currently assembled.

“I said to Tim, I said, ‘Tim look, we treated you really good, we put up with all the plants that you build in China for years, now you got build us [sic]. We’re not interested in you building in India, India can take care of themselves ... we want you to build here,’” Trump said.

The U.S. president added that Apple is going to be “upping” its production in the United States, without disclosing further details.

If Apple were to assemble a single iPhone in the United States, that would be upping its US iPhone production, which, since the original iPhone in 2007, is at zero. It’s not a matter of willpower or spending — it just isn’t possible at anything even vaguely approaching the iPhone’s scale.

CarPlay Ultra, the Next Generation of CarPlay, Is Now Available in New Aston Martins ★

Apple Newsroom:

Starting today, CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, is available with new Aston Martin vehicle orders in the U.S. and Canada, and will be available for existing models that feature the brand’s next-generation infotainment system through a software update in the coming weeks. CarPlay Ultra builds on the capabilities of CarPlay and provides the ultimate in-car experience by deeply integrating with the vehicle to deliver the best of iPhone and the best of the car. It provides information for all of the driver’s screens, including real-time content and gauges in the instrument cluster, while reflecting the automaker’s look and feel and offering drivers a customizable experience. Many other automakers around the world are working to bring CarPlay Ultra to drivers, including newly committed brands Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis.

First announced at WWDC 2022, simply as “the next generation of CarPlay”, it was originally set to ship “before the end of 2024”. So it’s a little late, but by the standards of the auto industry, not too late. It looks really good — Apple’s Newsroom article is replete with photos and videos showing it in action. It feels true to both Apple’s and Aston Martin’s brand identities — but I’d say more Apple-y than Aston Martin-y, simply because the typography is all San Francisco.

Apple successfully kept the name “CarPlay Ultra” secret until today. (Would have been funny, given other news this week, if they’d called it “CarPlay Max”.)

Wednesday, 14 May 2025

‘Max’, the Dumbest Name Ever, Changes Back to ‘HBO Max’ ★

Variety:

The surprise announcement, made less than two months after Max tweaked its logo to look more like the classic black-and-white HBO color scheme, was revealed at Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfront presentation to ad execs in New York on Wednesday.

In a press release, WBD said “returning the HBO brand into HBO Max will further drive the service forward and amplify the uniqueness that subscribers can expect from the offering. It is also a testament to WBD’s willingness to keep boldly iterating its strategy and approach — leaning heavily on consumer data and insights — to best position itself for success.”

Everyone should be clear on what to make fun of here. We should not be making fun of the fact that they’re changing the name back to HBO Max. No one likes to admit to mistakes. It’s intensely uncomfortable. And people who are good at politics and PR are good at spinning mistakes as not-mistakes. We should, in fact, congratulate them for admitting to this dumb fucking mistake and re-embracing the “HBO” name.

What we should be making fun of is the original decision to name the platform “Max”, which was obviously stupid at the time, and has been obviously stupid every single day since. “Max” is one of those trendy words like “Plus” and “Pro” that companies append to their brand names when naming premium tiers. You can’t just name a service “Max” or “Plus” or “Pro” without any other words. It’s stupid. And to make it worse, Warner Bros. Discovery (itself an incredibly awkward and dumb-sounding name — just call the company “Warner Brothers” or “Warner” — no one gives a shit about Discovery) already owned the brand name that stands for “prestige TV”: HBO. They already owned it. People loved it. And now they’re like, “Oh, geez, I guess we should use that?”

I wrote two years ago that David Zaslav might be stupid. That it took him two entire years to reverse this name change proves that there’s no maybe about it — he is stupid. If you were interviewing candidates to be the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery (a dumb name that a good candidate for the job should suggest changing), and one of them told you that they’d like to name the company’s streaming service “Max” — just “Max” — you should end the interview right there. If I were interviewing someone for the job and they insisted that they were serious about removing “HBO” from the name of the service I’d start wondering if I smelled alcohol on them. If you had Dr. Evil-style ejector chairs you’d dump them into the shark tank or whatever. But instead, they hired the guy who thought “Max” was a great name. It’s absolutely unreal how much brand equity Zaslav has squandered.

The App Store Shows a Warning for EU Apps That Use External Purchases ★

The app in question, Instacar, is not available in the US App Store, but multiple people in the EU have confirmed this warning on its App Store page is real:

This app does not support the App Store’s private and secure payment system. It uses external purchases.

The warning is decorated with a big red “!” icon. Update: You can see the warning, minus the red warning icon, on the web version of the Hungarian App Store.

The uncompetitive nature of the App Store — I’m using uncompetitive rather than anticompetitive just to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here — has left at least some top Apple executives hopelessly naive about the state of online payments. It’s like when they still blather on about software being sold on discs inside boxes in physical retail stores. That was true. It was once relevant. It no longer is and hasn’t been for over a decade.

Same with payments. Online payments through, say, Stripe — which zillions of companies use — are completely private and secure today. Amazon payments are completely private and secure. I’m sure there remain sketchy corners of the Internet, but for the most part, all mainstream online payments today are private and secure. Apple’s IAP system has numerous advantages and user-centric features. (If Apple were actively competing, it would have many more.) But the fact that it’s “private and secure” is no longer distinguishing at all.

Update, 15 May: Interesting follow-up: “That EU App Store Warning About External Purchases Is Not New, and Apple Proposed Improving It Nine Months Ago”.

---

---

Wednesday, 14 May 2025

Pete Rose and ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson Among Players Reinstated by MLB in Historic Decision ★

Kyle Feldscher, CNN:

Major League Baseball on Tuesday removed Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson — two of the sport’s most famous players who were previously kicked out of baseball for gambling on the game — from the league’s permanently ineligible list.

The historic decision by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred allows Rose to be considered for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, an honor that had been ruled out as part of the settlement he reached with Major League Baseball. Rose died in September, and Manfred ruled that his lifetime ban ended with his death.

Like a stopped clock displaying the correct time twice a day, even Rob Manfred occasionally makes a correct decision for baseball.

Monday, 12 May 2025

That Stupid Apple Notes ‘a’ ★

Nathan Ingraham, writing for Engadget:

There are a lot of rumors flying around about a big iOS and macOS redesign coming this year, perhaps as a distraction to the continued issues around Apple Intelligence. And while I’m game for a fresh coat of paint across the software I use every single day, I have one plea while Apple’s at it: Please, for the love of god, make the Notes app render the letter “a” properly.

I’ve been meaning to rant about this ever since Vesper went under and I switched to Apple Notes. I absolutely despise the alternate single-story a glyph that Apple Notes uses. I use Notes every single day and this a bothers me every single day. It hurts me. It’s a childish silly look, but Notes, for me, is one of the most serious, most important apps I use. And yet it renders the third-most common letter in English (after e and t) like you’re reading a first-grade primer.

To me, the core problem isn’t Apple’s decision to use the single-story alternate a glyph in Notes by default. It’s modern Apple’s aversion to preferences. (Or, as they call them now, settings.) If you want to make an unusual opinionated design decision, fine, but unusual opinionated design decisions should be preferences. Let us turn off this silly a, please.

WorkOS: Scalable, Secure Authentication ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.

New features they launched just last month include:

• WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
• WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
• AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel.

Saturday, 10 May 2025

Developers as Suppliers ★

Benedict Evans, tweeting on Threads this week:

Apple thinks an awful lot about customer delight and customer satisfaction…

And separately, a whole other part of Apple treats its suppliers with quiet ruthlessness, squeezing them for every penny of margin.

And at some point Apple forgot that its developers are both customers and suppliers, and treated them like suppliers alone.

I think this is also why Phil Schiller has a different perspective on the App Store than Tim Cook or Luca Maestri. Schiller has been involved with developer relations at Apple for decades, since long before the iPhone even existed. In the mid-1990s, Schiller left Apple for a few years and was a senior executive at Macromedia, maker of then-essential design tools for the Mac. He knows that developers need to be treated as partners by Apple, that that’s the only way a platform can thrive. Games are different, but for all other apps, Apple should view developers as a precious resource to be cultivated, encouraged, and protected — not as a profit center to be squeezed. The only benefit from developers to Apple that Apple should be concerned with are the first-class apps those developers are creating to enrich and broaden Apple’s platforms. Especially apps that are exclusive to Apple’s platforms. (Why doesn’t Apple offer a lower App Store commission for platform-exclusive apps? What if the split were 70/30 for cross-platform apps but 90/10 for iOS/Mac-exclusive apps?)

I’m quite certain that everyone at Apple, right up to Tim Cook, would swear up and down that Apple does value third-party developers and does not treat them like they do suppliers.

But ask iOS and Mac developers, small or large, whether they agree with Evans’s succinct summary above. I don’t know any who wouldn’t agree that Evans’s pithy take is largely, if not entirely, true. You’ll have to ask them in private, though, because, like Apple’s suppliers, they’re afraid to speak in public about the App Store.

Friday, 9 May 2025

Trump Administration ‘Actively Looking’ at Suspending Habeas Corpus ★

CBS News:

The Trump administration is “actively looking at” the possibility of suspending the writ of habeas corpus to handle people the administration says aren’t in the country legally, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Friday.

A writ of habeas corpus requires authorities to produce in court an individual they are holding and justify their confinement. Article I of the Constitution says the “privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

Miller made the comments to reporters at the White House Friday when a journalist asked if President Trump is weighing the possibility of suspending habeas corpus to handle illegal immigration.

“Well, the Constitution is clear — and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Miller said. “So it’s an option we’re actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”

There clearly is no “invasion”. An invasion hasn’t happened here since the War of 1812, when the British got us good and burned down the White House and set fire to the Capitol.

You can say, Hey man, look, I’m with you Grubes, but I don’t go to Daring Fireball to read Trump stuff. I swear I’m trying — I’ve been trying since before he took office again — to pay attention only to what Trump and his lickspittle loathsome hateful idiot minions do, not just what they say. But when they even say they’re “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, justified by an “invasion” that obviously doesn’t exist, I think it’s on everyone to just stand up and say “Fuck that. This is America.”

I can’t wait to see Stephen Miller in prison.

Epic Submits Fortnite to App Store Through Swedish Subsidiary ★

Kif Leswing, reporting for CNBC:

Epic Games said on Friday that it submitted Fortnite to Apple’s App Store, the month after a judge ruled in favor of the game maker in a contempt ruling.

Fortnite was booted from iPhones and Apple’s App Store in 2020, after Epic Games updated its software to link out to the company’s website and avoid Apple’s commissions. The move drew Apple’s anger, and kicked off a legal battle that has lasted for years.

It was more than “drawing anger”. It was a blatant and purposeful stunt that violated rules for which the penalties were clear. This is like saying that someone doing time in prison for being convicted of stealing a car “drew the court’s anger”.

Last month’s ruling, a victory for Epic Games, said Apple was not allowed to charge a commission on link-outs or dictate if the links look like buttons, paving the way for Fortnite’s return.

Apple could still reject Fortnite’s submission. An Apple representative did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Apple is appealing last month’s contempt ruling.

I too asked Apple for comment on this earlier in the week, and they had nothing to state. Maybe Apple will just allow this. I don’t know. But if I were a betting man, I’d wager that Apple does not allow Fortnite back. That last week’s injunction was a big loss for Apple doesn’t make it a win for Epic. If all were forgiven or forgotten, Epic wouldn’t need to submit this through their Swedish subsidiary, which has an Apple developer account only because the EU forced Apple to grant them one. There’s nothing in any US legal ruling that requires Apple to have even granted Epic Games a new developer account (or restore their old rescinded one), let alone require Apple to accept a submission for a justifiably banned developer through an EU loophole. If they’re not trying to make this happen through a loophole, why not just get Apple to reinstate Epic’s original Apple developer account? (Worth noting: Fortnite isn’t available in the App Store in the EU either — their Swedish developer account is only there to run the Epic Games Store.)

If someone blatantly violated the rules they’d agreed to, and is unapologetic for having done so, why would you trust them again? It’s the Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me axiom. What would stop Epic from re-enabling in-app purchases in Fortnite again?

Here’s the tweet from Epic Games earlier today:

We’ve submitted Fortnite to Apple for review so we can launch on the App Store in the U.S.

That sure lacks the certainty Sweeney was tweeting with a week ago, when he was, ridiculously, dictating terms to Apple. Tim Sweeney is a proven liar and one of the most unreliable narrators in the industry. I can’t believe how many publications continue to take him and Epic at their word that Fortnite is, for sure, coming back. Again, maybe it is! But that’s Apple’s choice, and if it happens, has zero to do with last week’s injunction against Apple other than the publicity and perception. I for one would find it somewhat surprising for Apple executives to allow Tim Sweeney to push them around and mock them.

How Many Apps Used the Link-Out Policy That Apple Claims Complied With Judge Gonzales Rogers’s Original Anti-Steering Injunction? ★

William Gallagher, writing last week for AppleInsider:

Judge Rogers maintains that Apple had successfully made as few developers as possible benefit from the court’s original anti-steering ruling. “As of the May 2024 hearing,” she wrote, “only 34 developers out of the approximately 136,000 total developers on the App Store applied for the program, and seventeen of those developers had not offered in-app purchases in the first place.”

So 34 was the number in May last year. But did the number go up in any significant way since then? I was thinking about it this week, and I’ve not only never seen an app that used these link-outs, I’d never even heard about one that did. And I try more apps than most people, and I hear about a lot more apps than most people. If you’re aware of any apps that used this (or even better, if you’re a developer who did use it), let me know.

It seems like no exaggeration to say that, effectively, no developers used this. Which does seem to have been Apple’s intention in setting the terms (27 percent commission, invasive rules for tracking users for a week after following a link from the app to the web, and odious requirements to allow Apple to view the developers’ internal accounting figures to make sure they weren’t cheating Apple out of commissions). But it really makes you wonder how anyone at Apple thought the court would see this plan as compliant.

Apple Files Emergency Motion to Pause ‘Extraordinary’ App Store Ruling on Anti-Steering Injunction ★

Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple has filed an emergency motion asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to pause key parts of a recent ruling that dramatically changes how the App Store operates, following a contempt finding in its long-running legal battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games.

In court documents filed Wednesday, Apple called the district court’s order “extraordinary” and argued it unlawfully forces the company to permanently give up control over “core aspects of its business operations.”

“A federal court cannot force Apple to permanently give away free access to its products and services, including intellectual property,” Apple’s lawyers wrote in the motion.

Apple’s argument here might go along the lines of Ben Thompson’s theory (in a subscriber-only post last Friday) on the “Takings Clause” of the 5th Amendment. Thompson wrote:

My use of the word “took” is deliberate, because I am referring to the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment (the clause is emphasized):

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

It seems to me that Judge Gonzales Rogers just did exactly that: her latest ruling basically says that companies like Spotify are entitled to iOS APIs and App Store distribution without having to pay Apple anything.

If this sounds like a new addition to the case, it is! The Takings Clause has not come up in any previous litigation precisely because Judge Gonzales Rogers’ original opinion acknowledged that Apple had the right to charge a commission; the issue under the California Unfair Competition Law was that Apple’s commission was much higher than was justified precisely because Apple foreclosed competition. To that end, what would have made much more sense would have been if Judge Gonzales Rogers lowered Apple’s proposed 27% commission to something significantly lower; to simply wipe it out completely is what prompts this discussion.

Thursday, 8 May 2025

Yours Truly on ‘Primary Technology’ ★

Co-hosts Stephen Robles and Jason Aten were kind enough to have me on their podcast earlier today, and the show’s already up:

Special guest John Gruber joins us to break down Eddy Cue’s statements on AI replacing the iPhone in 10 years, using AI search in Safari, Apple’s continued fight for App Store control, and what we’ll hear about Siri and Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2025.

Available in Overcast, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Or watch on YouTube. Fun show.

Patrick Collison Interviews Former Apple Designer Jony Ive at Stripe Sessions ★

I’m about halfway through and already feel the need to link to this. Good questions and thoughtful answers. Just delightful.

How to Catch a North Korean Fake Worker ★

Iain Thomson, for The Register:

According to Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s senior veep in the counter adversary division, North Korean infiltrators are bagging roles worldwide throughout the year. Thousands are said to have infiltrated the Fortune 500.

They’re masking IPs, exporting laptop farms to America so they can connect into those machines and appear to be working from the USA, and they are using AI — but there’s a question during job interviews that never fails to catch them out and forces them to drop out of the recruitment process.

“My favorite interview question, because we’ve interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of ‘How fat is Kim Jong Un?’ They terminate the call instantly, because it’s not worth it to say something negative about that,” he told a panel session at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Monday.

You could do the same thing with MAGA derps too. Just ask them how fat Trump is. (Via Charles Arthur.)

The Trump Administration Signal Scandal, Somehow, Gets Worse ★

Micah Lee, in a spectacularly detailed post:

• On Thursday, 404 Media reported that in the Reuters photo showing former National Security Advisor and war criminal Mike Waltz checking his Signal messages under the table, he was actually using an obscure modified Signal app called TM SGNL, and not the real and actually secure Signal app.

• On Friday, I wrote an analysis of everything I could find out about TM SGNL using OSINT, including the fact that it’s nearly impossible to install without a device enrolled in an MDM service that’s tied to an Apple Business Manager or a Google Enterprise account.

• On Saturday, after discovering that TeleMessage published the source code for the TM SGNL apps for Android and iPhone themselves, I re-published them on GitHub with the goal of making them easier to research. (It looks like the iOS source code is actually just unmodified Signal, so maybe they actually only published their Android code.)

• On Saturday night, an anonymous source told me they hacked TeleMessage.

• On Sunday, I, along with Joseph Cox, published an article about the hack to 404 Media (and to my blog).

• On Monday, NBC News reported that TeleMessage suspended its service after a second hacker breached TeleMessage and “downloaded a large cache of files.”

• Today, Senator Ron Wyden published a letter, which cites the 404 Media article and my analysis of TM SGNL, to Attorney General Pam Bondi, requesting that the Justice Department investigate the “serious threat to U.S. national security posed by TeleMessage, a federal contractor that sold dangerously insecure communications software to the White House and other federal agencies.”

National security leaders using this app — which effectively just removes all of Signal’s actual security features by backing up all messages as plain text — is so stupid it’s surprising, even from these idiots Trump has surrounded himself with. I mean think about how stupid it is that Mike Waltz was using this app while in front of press photographers at a Cabinet meeting.

Lee goes deep, including an analysis of TM SGNL’s open source Android source code, to show that it’s designed to transmit backups of messages in plain text to publicly-facing servers. And it turns out those servers had easily-hackable flaws.

See also: Wired: “The Company Behind the Signal Clone Mike Waltz Used Has Direct Access to User Chats”.

Wednesday, 7 May 2025

Eddy Cue, on the Stand in U.S. v. Google Trial, Says Apple Is Eying a Move to AI in Safari ★

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is “actively looking at” revamping the Safari web browser on its devices to focus on AI-powered search engines, a seismic shift for the industry hastened by the potential end of a longtime partnership with Google.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, made the disclosure Wednesday during his testimony in the US Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet Inc. The heart of the dispute is the two companies’ estimated $20 billion-a-year deal that makes Google the default offering for queries in Apple’s browser. The case could force the tech giants to unwind the pact, upending how the iPhone and other devices have long operated.

Beyond that upheaval, AI is already making gains with consumers. Cue noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI. Cue said he believes that AI search providers, including OpenAI, Perplexity AI Inc. and Anthropic PBC, will eventually replace standard search engines like Alphabet’s Google. He said he believes Apple will bring those options to Safari in the future.

“We will add them to the list — they probably won’t be the default,” he said, indicating that they still need to improve. Cue specifically said the company has had some discussions with Perplexity. “Prior to AI, my feeling around this was, none of the others were valid choices,” Cue said. “I think today there is much greater potential because there are new entrants attacking the problem in a different way.”

If they can pay, Apple will listen. And I don’t think it’s bullshit, at all, that traditional web search is actually going into decline now because of AI. Honestly at this point it would be weird if it weren’t.

But. Let’s say Apple would prefer for the current arrangement between Apple and Google to continue as is. But it’s under threat as a remedy in Google’s monopoly case. Is this not the perfect testimony? Traditional web search is in decline, usage-wise — and Apple is considering deals with multiple upstarts. I think it’s all true. But I also think it helps make the case that the current deal between Apple and Google should not be disallowed.

I don’t think there’s any bullshit here. I think we’re at a highly competitive moment between browsers and chatbots and between old-school search and new-school AI. And I think Eddy Cue is right in the middle of it.

Also, a really interesting nugget that, according to Cue, searches in Safari dropped last month for the first time ever.

Aftermath ★

Aftermath:

Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them.

You might remember most of us from Kotaku, where we broke news, covered events, and brought you hard-hitting investigations. You might also have seen us at Motherboard by Vice, The Verge and The Washington Post’s games vertical Launcher. We got back together to start this site not just so we could all blog together again, but to try something new for ourselves and for games journalism.

These days it’s tough for journalism, especially about games. The past few years have seen mass layoffs and site closures, with remaining writers being asked to do more and more with less and less. The ad-supported model is crumbling, social media is a mess, and the businessmen and private equity firms buying up news outlets don’t care about workers, readers, and quality writing, they only care about profits. The five of us saw our sites closed, ourselves and our colleagues laid off, and our workplaces turned hostile in management’s pursuit of growth at all costs. [...]

As workers and owners, we’re beholden to no one but ourselves, and to you, our readers. When you subscribe, you’ll get access to writing that pursues the truth and casts a critical eye on gaming and the internet, that doesn’t need to placate capital or kowtow to PR. You’ll be supporting the kind of journalism our past experience has shown us you like best: honest and irreverent, written for people rather than SEO. You’ll get a site that prioritizes the reader experience, with no invasive popups or ads that burn up your device.

They’re a smart crew, so of course, they’re not launching this on Substack. (They’re using a platform called Lede, upon which the excellent Defector has built itself.) How can you not love a site with this ode to a classic bit of kit: “Bring Back Those Long-Ass Game Show Mics”. An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.

Polygon Gutted by Large-Scale Layoffs After Sale to Sweatshop Aggregator Valnet ★

Kyle Orland, reporting for Ars Technica last week:

Vox Media has sold video game specialist website Polygon to Internet brand aggregator Valnet, the publisher of content-churning sites including Game Rant, OpenCritic, Android Police, and Comic Book Resources. The move comes alongside significant layoffs for veteran journalists at the 13-year-old outlet, including co-founder and editor-in-chief Chris Plante and Senior Writer Michael McWhertor. [...]

Polygon was founded in 2012 when Vox Media spent significant money to poach top journalists from popular gaming blogs like Kotaku, Joystiq, and The Escapist. After initially publishing as the Gaming section of Vox.com for a few months, the Polygon domain launched alongside a series of flashy videos hyping up the staff’s lofty goals for video game journalism. In the years since, Polygon has become a respected source for news and views on the gaming and entertainment industries — one that Ars Technica has cited frequently during my tenure as senior gaming editor. [...]

According to publications like The Wrap and Aftermath, numerous Valnet writers have claimed that they receive low pay for long articles, but Valnet insists that working conditions are good. It even sued The Wrap in federal court, saying that Valnet “relies on its reputation as a supporter of high-quality journalism and of talented writers and editors to staff its ever-growing business and need for engaging and well-written content.”

Just brutal. I’m not huge into games, but Polygon has been one of my go-to sources for game-related news for years. If I wanted to catch up on something like, say, Nintendo’s Switch 2 announcements, I knew I could go to Polygon and they’d have the coverage nailed. Polygon was everything you could want: good writing, good design, no hype, trustworthy coverage and analysis.

There’s very little good news in media these days. The only talented people I see launching new things are doing it on Substack, and I think that’s going to end poorly for all of them.

Tuesday, 6 May 2025

Amazon, Finally, Now Has a ‘Get Book’ Button in Its iOS Kindle App ★

Andrew Liszewski, The Verge:

Contrary to prior limitations, there is now a prominent orange “Get book” button on Kindle app’s book listings. [...]

Before today’s updates, buying books wasn’t a feature you’d find in the Kindle mobile app following app store rule changes Apple implemented in 2011 that required developers to remove links or buttons leading to alternate ways to make purchases. You could search for books that offered samples for download, add them to a shopping list, and read titles you already own, but you couldn’t actually buy titles through the Kindle or Amazon app, or even see their prices.

I’d love to just crack a joke here about Amazon, maybe, possibly, finally getting a chance to gain a bit of market share in the e-book market. I’d love to just crack that joke and move on.

But really, this whole situation with e-books has been the best argument against Apple’s App Store policies for at least the last 15 years. Physical printed books are typically sold under a wholesale model. The publishers sells the book to a bookseller for a wholesale price (say, perhaps, half the suggested retail price) and the bookseller is then free to charge whatever actual retail price they want to customers. But e-books are sold under the agency model: the publisher sets the retail price, and the bookseller keeps 30 percent. But Apple’s App Store policies therefore make it impossible for a third-party bookseller to sell e-books and make even a penny of profit. Let’s say there’s an e-book that the publisher decides will sell to customers for $10. When Amazon sells the Kindle edition of that book, the publisher gets $7, and Amazon keeps $3. But if the Kindle iOS app allowed purchases of books through IAP, Apple would take its 30 percent first. Apple would get $3, Amazon would still owe the publisher $7, and there’d be nothing left over — not a cent — for Amazon itself. Effectively they’d lose a bit of money on each sale, and it would be impossible to make even a penny of profit.

You can’t even fix this by raising prices. Double the retail price to $20 and then Apple would take $6, and the publisher would be owed $14. Still not a cent left for Amazon. The App Store model is just fundamentally incompatible with the agency model.

What Apple should have done, 15 years ago, is look at this situation and decide “Well, we have to allow something else. Kindle users should be able to buy books on iOS devices from the Kindle app.” And the solution is incredibly obvious: let apps send users out of the app to the web to make purchases, without Apple taking a cent. That’s what’s happening now, because of Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers’s injunction, but it should have been something Apple permitted 15 years ago because it’s so obviously fair and just. I’ve argued consistently that it’s fine for Apple to insist that in-app purchases for digital content must use Apple’s payment system. But I’ve also argued consistently that Apple should allow from-app purchases to freely go to the web. Tap a button or link, leave the app and go to the web, and make the purchases there. Then go back to the app and the app can sync up what you just purchased. Done. Simple.

Apple’s obstinance on this has created nothing but friction, confusion, and hassle for users for 15 years. It makes no sense for anyone. Until last week, not only were third-party apps forbidden from including buttons/links to send users to the web to buy books, they were forbidden from even informing users that they needed to go to the web to buy books. Apple’s rules included a rule that forbade apps from explaining the rules to the users.

I can see, at some level, where executives at Apple are like, “Fuck Amazon. There’s no way for us to even make an Apple Books app for Kindles, let alone sell our own e-books on their devices, so they can go fuck themselves. Why should we let them sell e-books on our devices?” That’s all true. There are no third-party apps on Kindles. There are third-party apps on iPhones and iPads. But at some point Apple should have just considered their own users. If their users are using the Kindle app looking to buy Kindle e-books on iOS devices, Apple should have just let it happen on the web — and used that as motivation to make Apple Books better so that maybe more users would prefer it to the Kindle ecosystem. What’s the word? Oh yeah ... competed.

Florida Republican Congresswoman Kat Cammack Introduces ‘App Store Freedom Act’ to Mandate Third-Party App Stores on iOS and Android ★

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:

Representative Kat Cammack (R-FL) introduced a bill Tuesday that would require “large app store operators” like Apple to let users install third-party app stores and set them as their default. The bill, called the App Store Freedom Act, aims to “promote competition and protect consumers and developers in the mobile app marketplace,” according to a press release on Tuesday. [...]

It would also require Apple and Google to offer developers “equal access to interfaces, features, and development tools without cost or discrimination,” as well as allow users to remove or hide pre-installed apps. Violations of the bill would result in penalties from the Federal Trade Commission, along with an additional civil penalty of up to $1 million for each violation.

This is a stunt from the Epic/Spotify-backed Coalition for App Fairness that we’ll probably never hear about again.

Display Preferences

Copyright © 2002–2025 The Daring Fireball Company LLC.