Linked List: February 7, 2014

Friday, 7 February 2014

My thanks to New Relic for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. New Relic provides real-time application performance monitoring for web and mobile applications. They make it super easy to get started — you can be up and running with a free demo (no credit card required) in just five minutes. They provide a ton of data, presented in a beautiful, well-designed interface. New Relic makes it easy to spot bottlenecks and isolate bugs.

Again, you can get started free of charge, and it takes just minutes to deploy. Check it out and see for yourself.

WSJ Interview With Tim Cook ★

Excerpts from Daisuke Wakabayashi’s interview with Tim Cook:

WSJ: People want a bigger screen iPhone. Are you against that?

Cook: What we’ve said is that until the technology is ready, we don’t want to cross that line. That doesn’t say we’ll never do it. We want to give our customers what’s right in all respects — not just the size but in the resolution, in the clarity, in the contrast, in the reliability. There are many different parameters to measure a display and we care about all those, because we know that’s the window to the software.

“Until the technology is ready” is a very interesting answer.

WSJ: Will the smartphone market follow the PC market, where Apple is a niche player?

Cook: I don’t view it that way. There are several reasons. If you look back at the Mac/Windows battle that was going on at the time, you’d find that one of the things that was the catalyst for separating Mac from Windows share was applications. There was a vast, vast difference in the number of applications that was available for the Macintosh than what was available on Windows. Over time, that gap grew and grew and grew. And in fact, the Mac began to lose some key applications. We have over a million apps on iOS. We have over half-million that have been optimized for iPad. That half-million compares to 1,000 for Android tablets. That’s one of the reasons, although not the only reason, why the experience on Android tablets is so crappy because the app is nothing more than a stretched out smartphone app.

I love that he used the word “crappy”.

Speaking of the Sochi Olympics and iOS Devices ★

Betabeat, yesterday: “Olympics Sponsor Samsung Asks Athletes to Cover Up Apple Logos”

Update: MacRumors reports:

In an email exchange with MacRumors today, an IOC spokesperson was asked about athletes being asked to cover non-Samsung logos on mobile devices. She responded saying the report was “not true”:

No it is not true. Athletes can use any device they wish during the Opening Ceremony. The normal rules apply just as per previous Games.

The Samsung Note 3 that were distributed are a gift to the athletes, so they can capture and share their experiences at the Games, and the phones also contain important competition and logistical information for competing athletes.

It is possible that Samsung requested that logos be covered, but it is not an official IOC request and athletes will not be penalized for using or displaying non-Samsung phones.

Update 2: Samsung denies it, too.

Update 3: Three-time Olympian Dominick Meichtry (Swiss swimmer) says on Twitter that he was asked to put duct tape on his phone at the 2012 summer games in London. So it’s not exactly unprecedented.

Follow the Money ★

Ed Bott charts the revenue sources for Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

USA Bobsled and Skeleton Coaches Record and Analyze Their Athletes Using iPads ★

The love affair is over.

Dungeon Keeper Stacks Deck in EA’s Favor When It Comes to Android Feedback ★

Chris Plante, writing for Polygon:

It’s typical for an app to ask the player to submit a review after it’s been played for a few hours. A prompt appears, pointing to the app store, where the player can select 1 through 5 stars and leave a blurb of text.

In Dungeon Keeper, if the player selects the “1 - 4 Stars” option, they’re directed to a private feedback submission page. Only if the player selects the “5 Stars” option will they be taken to the Google Play page, where they can leave any rating they wish along with a blurb. The system is designed to make good feedback public and visible, and to allow EA to keep negative feedback hidden so it can be dealt with privately, or ignored entirely.

I’ve seen screenshots from a slew of apps — including Facebook — that use similar chicanery so that only users who intend to rate the app with five stars are actually forwarded on to the store. EA should be ashamed of themselves, but they’re far from alone.

In principle, these app store user ratings are a fine idea — but only in an ideal world where all such reviews are honest and legitimate. Here in the real world, developers are gaming the system.

Unlocked iPhones, the New International Currency ★

Vernon Silver, writing for Businessweek:

I’ve been paying my bills with iPhones. Not with apps or on bank sites — I’ve been using the Apple hardware as currency.

It started by accident in December, during a business trip to New York. I live in Rome, where domestic work comes cheap and technology is expensive. An unlocked, gold, 32-gigabyte iPhone 5s that costs about $815 with tax in the U.S. goes for €839 (about $1,130) in Italy, roughly a month’s wages for workers who do laundry, pick up kids from school, or provide care for the elderly. When one worker heard I was visiting the States, she asked me to pick her up an iPhone in lieu of the equivalent cash for work she’d done. Lining up inside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, I was surrounded by shoppers speaking languages from around the world. The salesman looked stunned when I said I wanted an unlocked iPhone. Just one?

Love Affair ★

Zal Bilimoria, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, writing yesterday for Recode: “Our Love Affair With the Tablet Is Over”.

What I love best is that the headline says “the tablet”, not “tablets”, but then the article goes on to talk about a lot of non-iPad tablets. Tablets, in general, may well not be living up to Bilimoria’s expectations from a few years ago. The tablet, though, which is to say the iPad, is doing pretty well. Growth has slowed; in the just-completed holiday quarter, iPad sales were 26 million units, compared to 23 the year prior. But the notion that iPad usage isn’t growing — largely at the expense of Windows PCs — is silly.

This week-old tweet from Horace Dediu is as good a counterargument as any. Not just because of the data it presents, but what he used to make it.

Woz Thinks Apple Should Make an Android Phone ★

DF reader Glen Turpin brought this to my attention on Twitter, asking “Does Woz have any idea what has made 21st century Apple successful?” Bless his heart, we all love him to death, but I don’t think Woz understands what has made Apple successful since 1984.