Linked List: May 15, 2025

Thursday, 15 May 2025

Yours Truly With Nilay Patel on ‘Decoder’ 

Nilay Patel:

There’s a lot of tactical stuff you might talk about in the aftermath of this ruling — about what Apple might do next, how it might impact revenue, and how developers might respond. But I really wanted Gruber to talk about Apple’s big picture and how a company that so often prides itself on doing the right thing ended up so fully on the wrong side of the courts.

One theme you’ll hear throughout this conversation is that Apple often presents itself as small, but the company is actually huge in every way — Apple now sells nearly as many phones in a single quarter as it did in the entire first three years of the iPhone’s existence combined. It now operates in a geopolitical context that binds the United States, China, and Taiwan in ways you would have never imagined 15 years ago. And perhaps most importantly, Apple has control over applications on the iPhone, which means it has control over what kinds of businesses can and cannot exist on its mobile phones.

That’s the context for the other major theme here that you’ll pick up on in this conversation: Apple’s major shift toward digital services and whether that’s fundamentally changed the company’s culture. You see, as Apple kept selling newer and better iPhones, it simply ran out of people to sell them to. So, in order to keep growing revenue and keep Wall Street happy, it started squeezing more money from its existing customer base, including the very developers that put apps on the App Store.

Good episode, if I do say so myself.

RevenueCat Report Suggests In-App Purchases Perform Noticeably Better Than Link-Outs to the Web 

Speaking of Jacob Eiting, his company RevenueCat today posted some interesting findings from a test comparing conversions rates for IAP vs. web checkout for the same app:

Two weeks ago, there was a court order in the Apple vs Epic case that forced Apple to allow developers to circumvent in-app purchases (IAP). As of April 30th 2025, developers were finally allowed to send customers in the United States to an external website to complete the purchases, and thus avoid the 30% fee that App Store takes. We quickly released Web Purchase Buttons that, combined with our Web Billing product, create a seamless way for developers to drive purchasers out of their app to the web for check out.

IAP in the US is a $52B market, representing about half of all App Store revenue, and this is the first time that Apple has opened up such a major market to web purchasing. Previously, similar court orders have been limited to much smaller markets. It has been much debated over the years how much, or even if, this new-found freedom would help developers make more money. The only real way to know is to run a test, so we took this opportunity to run the biggest open test of web purchases in history.

Last week, we deployed an experiment on Dipsea (the app we acquired last year as a testing-ground) and we’re excited to share initial results.

The initial conversion rate for IAP was around 28%; the conversion rate for the link-out web flow was just 18%. That’s a notable drop-off.

I don’t find it surprising at all though. IAP really is more convenient. Apple’s built a great system, and they don’t need exclusivity to keep users preferring it, and thus keep developers using it.

Andy Allen on the App Store’s Feature Stagnation 

Andy Allen, of Not Boring Software, last week on Threads:

While the focus on the App Store injunction has been mostly on the commission rate, what’s been overlooked is just how far the tools of the App Store have fallen behind.

There’s a long and growing list of features common on most payment and subscription service providers that still aren’t possible on the App Store today. Price testing, refunds, managing subscriptions, plan migrations, gifting, discount codes, subscription bundles — to name just a few. Entire businesses have spawned just to fill these critical gaps. [...]

Apple has always been one to embrace competition. It’s a battlefield where they’ve historically done very well. They’ve never been afraid to step into a crowded market with their intense focus on design and user experience to show us how insanely great something can be when you truly care.

More than anything, I hope this moment reignites that competitive spirit.

It’s kind of bananas that it’s 2025 and the App Store still doesn’t allow developers to issue refunds. I’ve had this discussion with numerous developers. They’ll be doing customer support, and want to issue a refund, but explain that they can’t — and users find that so hard to believe they suspect the developer is bullshitting them. But you really do have to request a refund from Apple, not from the developer directly, and step 2 of the process is “Wait 24 to 48 hours for an update on your request”.

Apple, Appealing €500M DMA Fine, Contends It Made a Series of Proposals to the European Commission Throughout 2024 but Did Not Receive Feedback 

Jacob Parry, reporting last week for Politico:

“We have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for,” said Apple spokesperson Emma Wilson. “Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to move the goal posts every step of the way.”

These public comments echo concerns the company raised directly with the Commission.

According to correspondence seen by Politico, Apple offered last summer to drop its rules on how app developers can communicate with users, but was told by the Commission to hold off, pending feedback from developers.

By late September and following a round of consultations with Apple critics like Spotify, Match Group and Epic Games, executives at the U.S.-based firm began worrying that a lack of feedback from the Commission meant it was teeing up a potential fine and noncompliance decision.

In an October 2024 letter sent to senior officials in DG Connect and DG Competition, and seen by Politico, an Apple executive complained that the Commission’s case teams had “made clear” that then-Commissioner Margrethe Vestager intended to issue a decision with a “potentially significant fine.”

Basically, it sounds like the European Commission worked backwards to fining Apple last year in a similar way to how Apple worked backwards to arrive at a 27 percent commission on web transactions initiated in apps from the App Store.

More Old Mac Font Memories 

Dr. Drang, writing at And Now It’s All This:

Back before the LaserWriter and PostScript (it’s an all InterCaps day here at ANIAT) made resolution independence commonplace, most printers were of the dot-matrix variety, usually at a fairly low resolution. The original ImageWriter had a higher resolution than most: 144 dpi. And this led to the interesting feature.

You may have noticed that the 144 dpi resolution of the ImageWriter is exactly twice that of the Mac’s 72 dpi screen. The ImageWriter printer driver on the Mac took advantage of that. If you were writing a document using a 12-point font, and your Mac had a 24-point version of that font, the Mac would send the 24-point font’s bitmaps (all Mac fonts were bitmapped in those days) to the printer so it could render smoother text.

The upshot of this was a very slight breaking of the WYSIWYG principle. On the screen, your Geneva 12 document would appear with curly ys, but when you printed it out, it would have straight ys. A fun idiosyncrasy that disappeared when PS fonts and Adobe Type Manager took over.

I used ImageWriters a lot when I was using Apple II’s, but almost never from the Mac. When I got my first Mac in 1991 it came with a StyleWriter, a rather dreadful inkjet printer. (At the very least it was dreadfully slow.) But I do remember this curiosity with the different style y glyphs when printing text set in Geneva to an ImageWriter. The 144/72 DPI thing was perhaps Apple’s first @2× “double resolution” trick.

Here’s a copy of Apple’s 227-page (!) user manual for the ImageWriter II from 1985, which includes copious examples of source code in both Applesoft BASIC and Macintosh Pascal. It even contains instructions for designing your own custom bitmapped character glyphs.

Bonus points to Drang for including a screenshot illustrating that you chose font sizes from the Style menu (in a separate section underneath the actual, you know, styles) in early versions of MacWrite.

Trump Says He Has ‘A Little Problem With Tim Cook’ Regarding Apple’s Plans to Increase iPhone Production in India 

Arjun Kharpal, reporting for CNBC:

“I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday,” Trump said. “I said to him, ‘my friend, I treated you very good. You’re coming here with $500 billion, but now I hear you’re building all over India.’ I don’t want you building in India.”

Trump was referencing Apple’s commitment of a $500 billion investment in the U.S. which was announced in February.

And which would have almost certainly been the same thing they would have announced if Kamala Harris had won the election. They announced a $430 billion US investment in 2021, in the first year of the Biden administration.

Apple has been ramping up production in India with the aim of making around 25% of global iPhones in the country in the next few years, as it looks to reduce reliance on China, where around 90% of its flagship smartphone is currently assembled.

“I said to Tim, I said, ‘Tim look, we treated you really good, we put up with all the plants that you build in China for years, now you got build us [sic]. We’re not interested in you building in India, India can take care of themselves ... we want you to build here,’” Trump said.

The U.S. president added that Apple is going to be “upping” its production in the United States, without disclosing further details.

If Apple were to assemble a single iPhone in the United States, that would be upping its US iPhone production, which, since the original iPhone in 2007, is at zero. It’s not a matter of willpower or spending — it just isn’t possible at anything even vaguely approaching the iPhone’s scale.

CarPlay Ultra, the Next Generation of CarPlay, Is Now Available in New Aston Martins 

Apple Newsroom:

Starting today, CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, is available with new Aston Martin vehicle orders in the U.S. and Canada, and will be available for existing models that feature the brand’s next-generation infotainment system through a software update in the coming weeks. CarPlay Ultra builds on the capabilities of CarPlay and provides the ultimate in-car experience by deeply integrating with the vehicle to deliver the best of iPhone and the best of the car. It provides information for all of the driver’s screens, including real-time content and gauges in the instrument cluster, while reflecting the automaker’s look and feel and offering drivers a customizable experience. Many other automakers around the world are working to bring CarPlay Ultra to drivers, including newly committed brands Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis.

First announced at WWDC 2022, simply as “the next generation of CarPlay”, it was originally set to ship “before the end of 2024”. So it’s a little late, but by the standards of the auto industry, not too late. It looks really good — Apple’s Newsroom article is replete with photos and videos showing it in action. It feels true to both Apple’s and Aston Martin’s brand identities — but I’d say more Apple-y than Aston Martin-y, simply because the typography is all San Francisco.

Apple successfully kept the name “CarPlay Ultra” secret until today. (Would have been funny, given other news this week, if they’d called it “CarPlay Max”.)