Linked List: January 8, 2020

Wednesday, 8 January 2020

App Store Year-Over-Year Growth in the Christmas to New Year’s Eve Holiday Week 

Tim Hardwick, summarizing the highlights of Apple’s services year-in-review post today:

App Store customers spent a record $1.42 billion between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, a 16 percent increase over last year, and $386 million on New Year’s Day 2020 alone, a 20 percent increase over last year and a new single-day record.

I couldn’t resist the joke when I linked to it this morning, but these App Store year-over-year growth numbers are impressive. iPhone unit sales have peaked (and iPad unit sales long ago leveled out) but because these devices remain in use for so long, the number of them in active use continues to grow, and it’s probably the case that engagement per-device is growing too.

No numbers on paid subscribers to Apple Arcade, News+, or TV+ though.

FBI vs. iPhone Encryption, Round Two: Pensacola Shooter 

Devlin Barrett, reporting for The Washington Post:

The FBI is pressing Apple for help opening iPhones that belonged to the Saudi military student who killed three people last month at a naval base in Pensacola, Fla., signaling a potential revival of the fight between the federal government and Silicon Valley over encryption technology.

On Monday, the FBI’s general counsel Dana Boente wrote a letter to Apple’s top lawyer, Katherine Adams, seeking the tech giant’s assistance.

“Even though the shooter is dead, the FBI, out of an abundance of caution, has secured court authorization to search the contents of the phones in order to exhaust all leads in this high priority national security investigation,” Boente wrote. “Unfortunately, FBI has been unable to access the contents of the phones,” the letter said, even after asking private technology experts if they could help agents crack them. “None of those reachouts has shown us a path forward.” […]

In a statement, Apple said it had already helped FBI agents on the Pensacola case by sharing relevant data in its cloud storage. Apple and other companies have said that encryption on phones is an important safeguard protecting millions of consumers against hackers and other criminals.

There are two entirely separate issues here, and the FBI either doesn’t understand them or (more likely, I think, but I’m not sure) is willfully conflating them.

The first issue is Apple offering law enforcement whatever information they can, when appropriate. In this case, they’ve apparently done so: providing the FBI with whatever they can from the suspect’s iCloud account.

The second is Apple being technically incapable of complying with additional law enforcement requests. Apple does not have a way to get at the contents of a locked, encrypted iPhone. Also true of iPads and the boot drives of Macs with a T2 security chip and File Vault enabled. That’s how these encryption systems are designed. If Apple had a way in, anyone could have a way in. That’s a backdoor, and backdoors are inherent security vulnerabilities.

Most people don’t understand anything at all about encryption (which is to be expected), and reasonably assume that surely Apple can “get into” any device that it makes. It used to be that way, in fact, in the early years of iPhones, and it was a disaster for security — a thief who had your iPhone also had access to whatever data was on your iPhone.

It’s fine that most people don’t understand anything about encryption, but experts at the FBI surely do, and my suspicion all along with the San Bernardino case was that the FBI was trying to turn the public’s ignorance of encryption — both how it works and how owning truly encrypted devices benefits them, even if they don’t know it — against Apple.

Honestly, I don’t think this has anything to do with the Pensacola shooter. I think this is part of a campaign to drum up public support for making true encryption illegal. And if it really is about the Pensacola shooter, the FBI’s leadership doesn’t understand how encryption works, which is disgraceful.

The San Bernardino case, you may recall, did not turn out well for the FBI.

Cybart: Not So Fast on AirPods Revenue 

Neil Cybart on Kevin Rooke’s estimates on AirPods revenue (linked here at DF last night):

A few hours ago, this tweet came to my attention. It’s about AirPods revenue and it’s not correct. AirPods revenue does not exceed Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat, and Shopify revenue. It’s not even close either. […]

By the way, the article in question put AirPods revenue at $12 billion in 2019. The actual number will end up being more like half that — closer to $7.5 billion.

I’d put my money on Cybart’s numbers over Rooke’s, but even if Rooke’s numbers are too high, at $7.5 billion his point still stands: AirPods as a standalone startup would be a fantastic business, growing at an extraordinary pace, with a very high ceiling. Note too that AirPods Pro were sold out until late January by the beginning of December. Could have been a much bigger holiday quarter if Apple could have made them fast enough to keep up with demand.

Apple Recaps Its Year in Services 

Apple Newsroom:

The App Store is the world’s safest and most vibrant app marketplace, with over half a billion people visiting each week. It remains the safest place for users to find software and provides developers of all sizes access to customers in 155 countries.

“Did we mention how safe it is?”