Linked List: February 2, 2018

Friday, 2 February 2018

My thanks to Instabug for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their comprehensive bug reporting SDK for mobile apps. Instabug allows mobile developers and product managers to receive detailed bug reports and feedback from their testers and users.

With each report, Instabug attaches screenshots, screen recordings, device details and repro-steps in one organized dashboard. Also, Instabug integrates with tools like Slack, Jira, and GitHub to help your team focus on developing not debugging.

They have a cool sample app in the App Store that you can try for free, to experience their reporting interface first hand. Then, you can log into their demo dashboard and see what the reports look like from the developers’ end. I tried it out and it looks and works great, on both sides.

Tens of thousands of companies like Lyft, eBay, and T-Mobile rely on Instabug to iterate faster and enhance their app quality.

Try Instabug now for free. Even better, they’re offering a special 25 percent discount on all paid plans to Daring Fireball readers with promo code “DARING18”.

Google Releases YouTube TV App for Apple TV (and Roku) ★

A lot of people are looking at HomePod’s exclusive first-class support for Apple Music and see selfish intent. Apple isn’t working with Spotify or other services because they want everyone to use Apple’s media ecosystem for everything, is the thinking. Maybe! But maybe HomePod only works with Apple Music for now. I don’t know, and Apple isn’t going to tell anyone.

But look at Apple TV. There’s still no “skinny bundle” from Apple itself but now you use Apple TV to watch YouTube’s TV package, Playstation’s, and I’m sure others. There’s certainly no lock-in to the Apple media ecosystem on Apple TV. I think a lot of this is just a big complicated mess behind the scenes.

(To be clear, because I see a lot of misinformation on this front: You can play Spotify or anything else on HomePod, but only over AirPlay, not just by talking to the device like you can with Apple Music and iTunes Store music.)

Why Alexa Won’t Light Up During Amazon’s Super Bowl Ad ★

Brad Stone, writing for Bloomberg:

The patent broadly describes two techniques. The first calls for transmitting a snippet of a commercial to Echo devices before it airs. Then the Echo can compare live commands to the acoustic fingerprint of the snippet to determine whether the commands are authentic. The second tactic describes how a commercial itself could transmit an inaudible acoustic signal to tell Alexa to ignore its wake word.

About a year ago, a Reddit user calling himself Asphyhackr did a little more legwork and concluded that Amazon was creatively employing this second technique.

Will be amusing — insofar as silly patent fights are ever truly amusing — if Amazon tries to keep Apple and Google from doing the same thing in commercials.

Actual Headline From NBC News: ‘Can Self-Taught Rocket Scientist Mike Hughes Prove Earth Is Flat?’ ★

We all know questions in headlines are generally bullshit. But this one really takes the cake. For shame, NBC.

Walt Mossberg on the iPad ★

Walt Mossberg:

A footnote on @apple and tablets: the iPad alone brought in nearly $6 billion in the holiday quarter, and unit sales were up very slightly at over 13 million. Most companies would kill for a single product with those kinds of numbers, even if they’re well down from the peak.

Steven Sinofsky, in the same thread:

@waltmossberg @Apple Also, worldwide 2017 there were perhaps 100 million consumer laptops sold. iPads selling at ~half that puts the number in context, especially considering the price, durability, and lifespan of an iPad compared to PC laptop.

In short, iPad sales are way down from their peak, but amount to a unit sales market half the size of the entire consumer PC laptop market. And iPads tend to last longer.