By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: April 29, 2024
Monday, 29 April 2024
- The Talk Show: ‘I Decapitated the MacBook Air’ ★
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Federico Viticci returns to the show to discuss MacStories’s 15th anniversary, Apple’s upcoming “Let Loose” keynote for new iPad hardware, and more.
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- Google Security Blog: ‘How We Fought Bad Apps and Bad Actors in 2023’ ★
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Google Security Blog:
In 2023, we prevented 2.28 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play in part thanks to our investment in new and improved security features, policy updates, and advanced machine learning and app review processes. We have also strengthened our developer onboarding and review processes, requiring more identity information when developers first establish their Play accounts. Together with investments in our review tooling and processes, we identified bad actors and fraud rings more effectively and banned 333K bad accounts from Play for violations like confirmed malware and repeated severe policy violations.
Additionally, almost 200K app submissions were rejected or remediated to ensure proper use of sensitive permissions such as background location or SMS access.
App stores are just greedy monopolies, am I right?
- European Commission Designates iPadOS a DMA ‘Gatekeeping’ Platform Too ★
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European Commission press release (italics added):
On 5 September 2023, the Commission designated Apple as a gatekeeper for its operating system iOS, its browser Safari and its App Store. On the same day, the Commission opened a market investigation to assess whether Apple’s iPadOS, despite not meeting the quantitative thresholds laid down in the DMA, constitutes an important gateway for business users to reach end users and therefore should be designated as a gatekeeper.
The rules are what the EC commissioners decide they are, not what the DMA says. Among their reasons cited:
End users are locked-in to iPadOS. Apple leverages its large ecosystem to disincentivise end users from switching to other operating systems for tablets.
Business users are locked-in to iPadOS because of its large and commercially attractive user base, and its importance for certain use cases, such as gaming apps.
The “lock-in” is basically just features exclusive to Apple’s own platforms. I’m not even sure how Apple could possibly create a platform without “lock-in”.
On the other hand, iPadOS is clearly more of a marketing distinction than a technical one. It’s iOS under the hood, so I doubt it’ll be much trouble for Apple to apply its DMA compliance features from iOS to iPadOS. I would have been surprised if the EC had not decided to designate iPadOS a “gatekeeping” platform, and I’m guessing Apple itself is unsurprised as well.