Linked List: February 12, 2025

Wednesday, 12 February 2025

Apple Has Resumed Advertising on X for the First Time Since Late 2023 ★

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple this month started advertising on X for the first time in more than a year. The company had stopped advertising on the social media platform in November 2023 following controversial remarks made by its owner Elon Musk.

For example, the @Apple account is running an ad promoting Safari’s privacy features. The ad was spotted by MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris. The @AppleTV account has also been running ads for the Apple TV+ show Severance.

The November 2023 outrage was in response to, among other things, Musk replying “You have said the actual truth” to a tweet from a rando that stated “I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much. You want truth said to your face, there it is.”

Musk clearly learned his lesson. Since then, he’s been lying low, out of the public eye, and refraining from any sort of controversial statements or actions. He barely even tweets anymore. The one and only time I can recall him even being in the news in the last 18 months was this year-ago profile in the Wall Street Journal documenting Musk’s health and nutrition regimen. So it’s all cool now and Apple feels comfortable advertising on the social network Musk wholly owns.

The Apple TV App Is Now Available on Android ★

Apple Newsroom:

The Apple TV app is now available to download from Google Play on Android mobile devices — including phones, tablets, and foldables — offering Android users access to hit, award-winning Apple Original series and films on Apple TV+, along with MLS Season Pass, the home of Major League Soccer.

Available around the world, the Apple TV app for Android was built from the ground up to deliver Android users a familiar and intuitive interface. Android users can subscribe to Apple TV+ and MLS Season Pass using their Google Play account on Android mobile and Google TV devices. Apple TV+ also offers a seven-day free trial.

The Apple TV app on Android includes key features like Continue Watching to pick up where a user left off across all their devices, and Watchlist to keep track of everything they want to watch in the future. The app streams seamlessly over Wi-Fi or a cellular connection, and includes the ability to download to watch offline.

One thing that’s funny about this press release is that no one from Apple is quoted in it. Not just not Eddy Cue, but no one, not even a lieutenant under Cue. The second-paragraph quotes from executives are where these press releases contain their superlatives proclaiming how awesome the news is. E.g. last week’s announcement for the new Apple Invites app — the second paragraph is a quote from Brent Chiu-Watson, a senior director of product marketing. They didn’t want to include one of those sugary quotes saying how frigging awesome it is that there’s now an Apple TV app for Android, and that it works great and if you use an Android device you can still have a great Apple TV experience.

But the Apple TV app does seem frigging awesome, and it does seem like if you use an Android device you can now have a great Apple TV experience. Here’s Dan Seifert, longtime writer and editor for The Verge, who left for a position at Google as “product critic” a year ago:

thrilled to see Apple TV land on Android devices today!

it’s an excellent Android citizen too:

themeable app icon: ✅
PIP support: ✅
offline downloads: ✅
foldable posture support: ✅

(Also perhaps ever so slightly interesting that in its announcement, Apple positioned “foldables” as an entirely separate third category from phones and tablets. I wouldn’t make a big deal of that — I’m not sure how else they could mention that the app supports “foldable posture”.)

I’m most curious about why it took so long for this to happen. Apple Music launched (albeit as a beta) for Android almost 10 years ago. (Eddy Cue then: “The menus will look like Android, you know the little hamburger they use on the top. It’ll definitely feel very much like an Android app.”) And, what I think is a related question as to why this took so long: Is Google taking its usual Play Store cut from subscriptions to TV+ made in the app?

How WikiTok Was Created ★

Benj Edwards, writing at Ars Technica:

The original idea for WikiTok originated from developer Tyler Angert on Monday evening when he tweeted, “insane project idea: all of wikipedia on a single, scrollable page.” Bloomberg Beta VC James Cham replied, “Even better, an infinitely scrolling Wikipedia page based on whatever you are interested in next?” and Angert coined “WikiTok” in a follow-up post.

Early the next morning, at 12:28 am, writer Grant Slatton quote-tweeted the WikiTok discussion, and that’s where Gemal came in. “I saw it from [Slatton’s] quote retweet,” he told Ars. “I immediately thought, ‘Wow I can build an MVP [minimum viable product] and this could take off.’”

Gemal started his project at 12:30 am, and with help from AI coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude and Cursor, he finished a prototype by 2 am and posted the results on X. Someone later announced WikiTok on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, where it topped the site’s list of daily news items.

“The entire thing is only several hundred lines of code, and Claude wrote the vast majority of it,” Gemal told Ars. “AI helped me ship really really fast and just capitalize on the initial viral tweet asking for Wikipedia with scrolling.”

At first I read that as the project taking from noon until 2am to launch, and I was impressed. Then I re-read that and realized it was just 90 minutes. Jiminy. Programming with AI assistance is just gobsmacking.

WikiTok – Web App With TikTok-Style Interface for Exploring Random Wikipedia Articles ★

WikiTok is the creation of Isaac Gemal. The premise is that it’s a TikTok-style interface for random articles from Wikipedia. One thing at a time on screen, swipe up to scroll down to the next item whenever you’re ready, and you can keep going forever if you want. But instead of videos that tend toward mindless media-diet calories, these are facts. WikiTok has no videos at all — each item is just a full-bleed image and a summary factoid. (And, of course, a “Read More” link to open the full Wikipedia entry in a new browser tab.) It’s not going to beat the actual TikTok on engagement, but TikTok can’t beat WikiTok for mental nourishment. It’s like choosing to snack on something that isn’t junk.

WikiTok works on any size device, but like TikTok, it’s clearly meant to be used on a phone. Save it to your home screen, and it’s like having an app. During this interim between the NFL season and March Madness (and after that, baseball) I’ve freed up a space on my first home screen from Apple Sports, and for the moment, I’ve put WikiTok there. I don’t know how long it’ll last. The “hit rate” for things that actually interest me is kind of low — but maybe that’s what TikTok itself is like? And, every time I launch it, I learn something interesting within a few swipes. There’s no algorithm powering what it shows, but I wish there were — I’d switch in a heartbeat to a fork of WikiTok that learns, even just a little, what sort of stuff actually interests me. Give it a try. WikiTok’s debut seems especially well-timed at the moment, given the alternative experience of checking the news.

If I could bend Gemal’s ear for just one moment, I’d beg him to consider changing the name from WikiTok to WikTok. That needless middle i syllable strikes a discordant note. Say what you want about TikTok, but it’s a great fucking name. Verbally, WikiTok sounds like WikiTalk, which sounds like what Wikipedia editors might call the meta-discussion “Talk” pages for each entry. WikTok, on the other hand, works well both visually and verbally as a parallel to TikTok.

Update 25 March 2025: I deleted the web app bookmark today, too frustrated by its inability to learn what I’m actually interested. Something like WikiTok, but with some smarts, could be so great.

Allison Johnson Reviews the Samsung Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus: ‘Incredibly Iterative’ ★

Allison Johnson, writing at The Verge:

Samsung’s Galaxy S-series is in its software era. Maybe the whole smartphone industry is, too, save for a few phones with hinges (Samsung’s included). But overall, we have exited the hardware-driven innovation cycle and are firmly in the midst of a software-based one. If you want proof, the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus are a good place to start. [...]

This was all true of the S24 and S24 Plus and the S23 and S23 Plus. I couldn’t give you a good reason why the S25 stands out compared to Samsung’s last three generations of S-series phones. I don’t think Samsung can, either, because its entire sales pitch for the S25 revolves around software and AI capabilities — much of which will almost certainly be ported to previous S-series phones in short order.

When an innovative device form factor settles into maturity, the shift from groundbreaking new hardware dropping every few years to iterative evolution stands out. The heady, go-go years of iPhone-derived touchscreen smartphones (including iPhones themselves) weren’t that long ago. Iterative evolution is, let’s face it, more boring. Or at least it’s not exciting. But it’s inevitable.

The laptops that established the form factor were the PowerBook 100 series, which Apple shipped at the end of 1991. (Before the PowerBooks, laptops generally lacked built-in pointing devices, and were more like briefcases. Apple’s own 1989 Macintosh Portable was more like a suitcase.) Steve Jobs pulled the original MacBook Air out of its manila envelope in January 2008. Everything since then, for laptops, has been iterative.

The stretch from PowerBook 100 series to MacBook Air was about 15 years, give or take. The “smartphones are boring now” complaints really started to hit a few years ago — about 15 years after the 2007 original iPhone. Somewhere in the second decade is when year-over-year changes start to become more and more iterative. But compound interest generates tremendous wealth over time. People wrongly think Apple’s success is forged mostly by spectacular groundbreaking products, but the true key to their success is nonstop iterative improvement. That, as I wrote in 2010, is how Apple actually rolls. You wouldn’t want to use a 2010 MacBook Pro today. There will be small generational leaps and innovations to come (including, perhaps, an “iPhone Air” this year — and future leaps like 2020’s debut of Apple Silicon), but the wheels of technological progress are mostly done wowing us with one-, two-, and maybe even three-year improvements to phones. But trading in a phone older than that should continue to pack a significant amount of wow. So it goes.

Johnson:

Maybe this says more about what passes for a “small” phone in 2025, but the Galaxy S25 is secretly the best small Android phone you can buy in the US. That’s probably not intentional — more like a victory in a war of attrition. Google’s phones since the Pixel 5 only come in big and bigger, and niche small phone options like the Asus Zenfone have dropped out of the race. By merely continuing to exist with a 6.2-inch screen, the smaller S-series model has become the default option if you don’t want a huge Android phone.

Google’s Pixel 9 and 9 Pro have 6.3-inch displays, not too much bigger than the S25, but the trend is clear. All phones are getting bigger. Everyone knows the 5.4-inch iPhone 12 and 13 Minis weren’t hits, sales-wise, but the people who preferred them absolutely loved them. I’ll bet some of you are reading this, nodding your heads, with your aging 12/13 Minis still in your pockets, dreading the day you upgrade — knowing that the longer you wait, the larger the “smallest” new iPhone will be. Maybe this year’s much-rumored thin-is-in “iPhone Air” will take some of the sting out of that.

The Information: Apple Chooses Alibaba as AI Partner in China ★

Qianer Liu and Jing Yang, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas — MacRumors summary):

Apple has recently started working with Chinese internet and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group to roll out artificial intelligence features in China, according to one person with direct knowledge of the decision. The move is part of Apple’s strategy to offer more compelling software features to counter declining sales in the country, where it faces increasing competition from domestic brands like Huawei and Vivo.

Apple and Alibaba have submitted the Chinese AI features they co-developed for approval by China’s cyberspace regulator, the person added, indicating that the partnership has gained significant progress. [...]

The iPhone maker began testing different AI models from prominent Chinese AI developers beginning in 2023 and last year selected Baidu as the primary partner, said two of the people. But the collaboration ran into snags because Baidu’s progress in developing its models for Apple Intelligence fell short of Apple standards.

As a result, Apple in recent months started to consider other options, assessing models developed by Tencent, ByteDance, Alibaba, as well as Deepseek, said two people with direct knowledge of the matter. Apple eventually passed over Deepseek’s models because the Deepseek team lacked the manpower and experience required to support a large customer like Apple, said one of the people.