Linked List: February 12, 2019

Tuesday, 12 February 2019

Paczkowski: ‘Apple Event Planned for March 25 Around a News Subscription Product’ ★

John Paczkowski, writing for BuzzFeed News:

Apple has settled on a date for its first big product announcement of 2019. Sources tell BuzzFeed News that the company plans to hold a special event on March 25 at the Steve Jobs Theater on its Apple Park campus. Headlining the gathering: That subscription news service that has been all over the news today. Unlikely to make an appearance: next generation AirPods, or that rumored new iPad Mini.

Sources described the event as subscription services focused, but declined to say anything about Apple’s standalone video streaming service which is also rumored to debut in 2019.

‘At This Time’ ★

Lauren Goode, writing for Wired:

Eero privacy policy currently states that the company collects data about users’ Eero networks to optimize performance, that it may share anonymized data, and that it may share personal data with third-party service providers. However, it also states, “We don’t ever track the websites you visit or collect the content of your network traffic. We don’t sell our customer data, and we don’t sell ads based on this data.”

Amazon tells Wired it has “no plans to change Eero’s policy at this time.”

I know Amazon wants to keep its options open and isn’t going to commit to anything today, but that “at this time” is painful to read.

Apple Fails to Block Porn and Gambling ‘Enterprise’ Apps ★

Josh Constine, reporting for TechCrunch:

Facebook and Google were far from the only developers openly abusing Apple’s Enterprise Certificate program meant for companies offering employee-only apps. A TechCrunch investigation uncovered a dozen hardcore pornography apps and a dozen real-money gambling apps that escaped Apple’s oversight. The developers passed Apple’s weak Enterprise Certificate screening process or piggybacked on a legitimate approval, allowing them to sidestep the App Store and Cupertino’s traditional safeguards designed to keep iOS family friendly. Without proper oversight, they were able to operate these vice apps that blatantly flaunt Apple’s content policies.

The situation shows further evidence that Apple has been neglecting its responsibility to police the Enterprise Certificate program, leading to its exploitation to circumvent App Store rules and forbidden categories.

I had no idea until this Facebook thing broke just how many developers are using the “enterprise” system to effectively sideload native iOS apps, bypassing the App Store. TechCrunch has a list of a few dozen here, but the full list is way longer. Dozens and dozens of bootleg content apps like this one, which just changes its cert every few weeks. Either Apple has been purposefully looking the other way on this, or they’ve been asleep at the switch and a reckoning is coming.

WSJ: Apple Wants ‘About Half’ of Apple News Subscription Revenue ★

Benjamin Mullin, Lukas I. Alpert, and Tripp Mickle, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (paywalled, as usual, alas):

Apple Inc.’s plan to create a subscription service for news is running into resistance from major publishers over the tech giant’s proposed financial terms, according to people familiar with the situation, complicating an initiative that is part of the company’s efforts to offset slowing iPhone sales.

Before we get to the Apple News subscription stuff, can I just point out that every single story about Apple this year frames every single thing they’re doing as an “effort to offset slowing iPhone sales”. This framing makes no sense. Does anyone think they’d be doing anything differently if last quarter’s iPhone sales had been slightly up rather than slightly down? And if you don’t actually know the numbers — that last quarter, although below expectations, was the second-best quarter for iPhone revenue ever, behind only the same quarter one year prior — this framing would lead a reasonable person to believe that iPhone sales are tanking.

I get it, Apple started banging the “look at our growth in Services” drum a few years ago because they’re running out of room for growth to even be possible in iPhone sales. And this Apple News subscription thing is definitely a service. But the context of this framing leaves a casual reader with a very wrong impression.

In its pitch to some news organizations, the Cupertino, Calif., company has said it would keep about half of the subscription revenue from the service, the people said. The service, described by industry executives as a “Netflix for news,” would allow users to read an unlimited amount of content from participating publishers for a monthly fee. It is expected to launch later this year as a paid tier of the Apple News app, the people said.

The rest of the revenue would go into a pool that would be divided among publishers according to the amount of time users spend engaged with their articles, the people said. Representatives from Apple have told publishers that the subscription service could be priced at about $10 a month, similar to Apple’s streaming music service, but the final price could change, some of the people said.

Apple keeping “about half” of this revenue is nuts. Given the margins in the news industry today, even Apple’s usual 70/30 split would seem a bit greedy, but half is insane.

MacRumors Projects WWDC Dates: June 3-7 in San Jose ★

Joe Rossignol, writing for MacRumors:

In our continued research, we discovered that San Jose requires permitting for large public events such as Apple’s WWDC Bash, which took place at the Discovery Meadow park next to McEnery in 2018.

Following that thread, we unearthed a 2019 events calendar from the City of San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affairs that lists this year’s WWDC Bash at Discovery Meadow on the evening of Thursday, June 6. The event is named “Team San Jose 2019 WWDC” and is organized by “Apple.” An identical WWDC entry was listed in the Office of Cultural Affairs’ 2018 events calendar for the actual WWDC 2018 Bash.

Nothing’s official until it’s official, but June 3-7 in San Jose has been the smart money bet all along. It seems highly unlikely Apple will move WWDC back to San Francisco, and the O’Reilly Velocity conference is in San Jose June 10-13.

Hotel rates in downtown San Jose are higher than they’ve been the last two years, but that’s been true for these dates for months. They’ve already gone up since MacRumors published this story this morning, though.