Linked List: July 23, 2015

Thursday, 23 July 2015

Amazon’s Market Cap Now Bigger Than Walmart’s ★

Some interesting graphs from Quartz. Amazon wins on growth. Walmart wins on profit — but we all know Amazon doesn’t even try to turn a profit. More importantly, Walmart’s revenue remains more than five times that of Amazon.

More interesting, perhaps — and a big reason behind continued investor enthusiasm — is that thanks to AWS, Amazon is more than just a retailer now. AWS is now a $6 billion a year business.

Flopping Into the Lead ★

John Moltz:

Apple leads the pack, but the pack is still a pack made up of smartwatches. No one really knows how big this market is going to get and how long it’ll have steam. Let me repeat that for emphasis: No one really knows. So feel free to point and laugh at anyone estimating the next five years of smartwatch sales. Remember when Windows Phone was going to overtake Android? Good. Times. We laughed ourselves until we died and then we were reborn, shiny and chrome.

‘Coming Soon’ ★

Craig Hockenberry on the various ways Apple treats the Mac App Store as a second-class citizen to the iOS App Store: no TestFlight (which means no testing betas against production iCloud servers), no analytics, and, just to rub salt in the wound, they haven’t applied the new rule that disallows app reviews from users running beta versions of the OS.

Hockenberry:

I think the thing that bothers me most about this situation is the inequality. Mac developers aren’t getting the same value from the App Store as their counterparts on iOS. We all pay Apple 30% of our earnings to reach our customers, we should all get the same functionality for that fee.

Non-Sarcastic ‘Finally’ of the Week ★

MacStories: “Apple Prevents App Store Reviews From Users on iOS 9 Betas”.

This is the first year Apple has done a public beta of iOS, so better late than never, but app reviews from people running developer betas of the OS have been a problem for years.