Linked List: February 1, 2019

Friday, 1 February 2019

Abu Zafar: ‘Why iMessage Is Better Than the Best Messaging Apps on Android’ ★

Abu Zafar:

Messaging on Android is a mess.

iPhone users have it easy. iMessage comes preinstalled, and it achieves more than even the best messaging apps on Android. iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, it supports SMS, and it’s packed with features that range from gimmicky (Animoji) to can’t-live-without-it useful (Memoji). The experience of one iPhone user messaging another is seamless, secure, and convenient.

The same can’t be said for Android users.

In the video above, I tested a number of popular messaging apps on Android to try and replicate the iMessage experience. I found many that came close, but not a single one achieves the perfect trifecta of seamless, secure, and convenient.

iMessage is one of the most successful and most important products in Apple’s history. It’s widely taken for granted though.

See also: Dieter Bohn: “The Moral Case for iMessage on Android”.

Apple Apologizes for Group FaceTime Bug, Software Update With Fix Delayed Until Next Week ★

Apple:

We have fixed the Group FaceTime security bug on Apple’s servers and we will issue a software update to re-enable the feature for users next week. We thank the Thompson family for reporting the bug. We sincerely apologize to our customers who were affected and all who were concerned about this security issue. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we complete this process.

We want to assure our customers that as soon as our engineering team became aware of the details necessary to reproduce the bug, they quickly disabled Group FaceTime and began work on the fix. We are committed to improving the process by which we receive and escalate these reports, in order to get them to the right people as fast as possible. We take the security of our products extremely seriously and we are committed to continuing to earn the trust Apple customers place in us.

Good on Apple for thanking the Thompson family, and for acknowledging that something is wrong with their process for escalating critical bugs reported by regular customers.

In the meantime, regular 1:1 FaceTime works and is safe to use. But Group FaceTime is unavailable until the software update rolls out next week.

The Design of Loopback 2 ★

Rogue Amoeba’s Neale Van Fleet:

When we shipped the first version of our audio routing tool Loopback in early 2016, its powerful technology was packaged into a somewhat stripped-down interface. Because we were uncertain how large the market for this tool would be, we chose not to devote too much time to the front-end of that initial release.

By Loopback’s first birthday, it was clearly a hit with audio professionals and hobbyists alike. We knew it was time to begin planning how to flesh out the skeletal Loopback 1 into a much more refined version 2.

I love this sort of “from sketch to finished product” look at the evolution of a design. There are a lot of thoughtful small touches in Loopback 2.