Linked List: May 2025

Thursday, 29 May 2025

The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2025: Tuesday June 10 ★

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 10 June 2024, 7pm PT (Doors open 6pm)
Special Guest(s): See below
Price: $50

Ever since I started doing these live shows from WWDC, I’ve kept the guest(s) secret, until showtime. I’m still doing that this year. But in recent years the guests have seemed a bit predictable: senior executives from Apple. This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.

I think this will make for a fascinating show, but I want to set everyone’s expectations accordingly. I’m invigorated by this. See you at the show, I hope.

The Talk Show: ‘Sewing Machine Repair Shop’ ★

Patrick McGee joins the show to discuss his must-read new book, Apple in China — one of the best books about Apple anyone has ever written.

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Trump’s Entire Tariff Endeavor Ruled Illegal by U.S. Court of International Trade ★

Tony Romm and Ana Swanson, reporting for The New York Times (paywall-busting gift link):

A panel of federal judges on Wednesday blocked President Trump from imposing some of his steepest tariffs on China and other U.S. trading partners, finding that federal law did not grant him “unbounded authority” to tax imports from nearly every country around the world.

The ruling, by the U.S. Court of International Trade, delivered an early yet significant setback to Mr. Trump, undercutting his primary leverage as he looks to pressure other nations into striking trade deals more beneficial to the United States.

Before Mr. Trump took office, no president had sought to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law, to impose tariffs on other nations. The law, which primarily concerns trade embargoes and sanctions, does not even mention tariffs.

But Mr. Trump adopted a novel interpretation of its powers as he announced, and then suspended, high levies on scores of countries in April. He also used the law to impose tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico in return for what he said was their role in sending fentanyl to the United States.

On Wednesday, the Court of International Trade, the primary federal legal body overseeing such matters, found that Mr. Trump’s tariffs “exceed any authority granted” to the president by the emergency powers law. Ruling in separate cases brought by states and businesses, a bipartisan panel of three judges essentially declared many, but not all, of Mr. Trump’s tariffs to have been issued illegally.

Enough with the euphemisms. “Novel interpretation” is shorthand for “bullshit mad-king fantasy stuff”. Paul Krugman, on his blog (which he really should move away from Substack):

The thing is, it has been obvious all along that Trump’s use of the 1977 International Economic Emergency Powers Act to justify Smoot-Hawley level tariffs was a massive abuse of power. I mean, since when are 4 percent unemployment and 2.5 percent inflation an emergency justifying the reversal of 90 years of policy? But I guess I just assumed that things like that didn’t matter anymore.

Look past the bluster and Trump is getting his ass kicked left and right. Every organization — universities, law firms, computer makers — that’s been hesitant to just call his nonsense nonsense and his bullshit bullshit should put their big boy pants on and stand up. The whole thing is falling apart. The system might actually still work. But everyone needs to make their choice known: courage or cowardice?

Wednesday, 28 May 2025

Apple’s Annual App Store Scam and Fraud Report ★

Apple Newsroom, yesterday:

Apple’s strong antifraud infrastructure helps ensure that malicious developer and customer accounts are swiftly flagged and eliminated. In 2024, Apple terminated more than 146,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected an additional 139,000 developer enrollments, preventing bad actors from submitting their apps to the App Store in the first place.

Apple also rejected over 711 million customer account creations and deactivated nearly 129 million customer accounts last year, blocking these risky and malicious accounts from carrying out nefarious activity. That includes spamming or manipulating ratings and reviews, charts, and search results that risk compromising the integrity of the App Store.

This report isn’t something new that Apple is doing in the face of increased regulatory scrutiny over the exclusivity of the App Store — they’ve been issuing these reports since 2021. Nick Heer has a good post at Pixel Envy documenting how some of their numbers are seemingly all over the place, year to year.

What some App Store critics argue is that if any substantial amount of fraud, scams, or rip-offs occur through apps distributed through the App Store, that proves that there are no protective benefits of the App Store model. That’s nonsense. There are high-crime cities and low-crime cities, but there exist zero no-crime cities. The question is whether Apple is catching most — or even just “enough” — scammers. Scammy apps, pirated apps, fraudulent app reviewers. You name it. I’ve long suggested that Apple ought to employ a “bunco squad” to crack down on scammers, focusing first and foremost on successful ones. Better to catch one scam with 1,000 victims than 10 scams with one victim each.

I think they could still do better, but I actually think Apple has been doing a better job on this front in recent years. But if your measuring stick is “Are there any successful scams at all in the App Store?” there’s no way Apple is ever going to pass muster. And I think a lot of App Store critics are vastly, vastly underestimating how much fraud Apple is currently stopping that would sail right through if iOS adopted a Mac-style of software distribution. The main difference is that iOS is so much more of a juicy target than MacOS. The other is that I think many people underestimate how many software scams there are on MacOS that wouldn’t work on iOS.

Gurman: Apple Is Going to Re-Version OSes by Year, Starting With iOS 26, MacOS 26, tvOS 26, Etc. ★

Hell of a scoop from Mark Gurman, at Bloomberg:

The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26,” said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still private. Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26.

Apple is making the change to bring consistency to its branding and move away from an approach that can be confusing to customers and developers. Today’s operating systems — including iOS 18, watchOS 12, macOS 15 and visionOS 2 — use different numbers because their initial versions didn’t debut at the same time.

Now that they’re on a consistent annual schedule, this supposed new version-numbering scheme makes a lot of sense. It’ll certainly be helpful to anyone trying to figure out what’s up-to-date or not, and it’ll make writing about older OSes much easier. Presuming Gurman is right, this is going to seem really weird at first, and then very quickly seem very natural.

One of the true oddities of Apple’s OS version numbering is that because they stuck with “10” as the leading digit of MacOS’s version numbering from Mac OS X 10.0 “Cheetah”¹ (2001) through MacOS 10.15 “Catalina” (2019), beforing finally turning the dial to 11 with MacOS 11 “Big Sur” (2020), a casual observer would presume that iOS (currently at 18.5) is older than MacOS (currently at 15.5) when in fact it’s the other way around.

This was like the ultimate in wishbranding. A real cheetah is the fastest land animal on Earth. Mac OS X 10.0 “Cheetah” was the slowest-feeling OS Apple ever released. ↩︎

The Resistance Is Working Better Than You Think ★

Taegan Goddard:

For all the bluster and bravado, Donald Trump is losing. A lot.

Keep the faith.

Tuesday, 27 May 2025

‘The Future Is Colourful and Dimensional’ ★

Michael Flarup:

Whatever we call it (Diamorph or otherwise), I’m just glad to see interfaces getting weird and wonderful again. We’re not going back. We’re going forward — with depth, with texture, and maybe even with a little joy.

Depth is good — humans innately understand three dimensions. Texture is good. We’ve lost so much over the last decade. I hope that’s where Apple is heading back.

On the Engineering Talent at IO ★

Jason Snell, pouring some admittedly welcome skepticism on the whole LoveFrom-OpenAI IO endeavor:

I’m skeptical of the composition of the io leadership team, which features an awful lot of product designers and not a lot of hardware engineers. I’m sure there are talented engineers there too — the OpenAI announcement refers to “physicists, scientists, researchers” among the team members — but the fact remains that this is a startup whose leader and key lieutenants appear to all be designers.

Maybe the whole IO thing will come to naught. Maybe it’s all hat, no cattle. Maybe it’s a great idea but a long shot to play out (which is my gut feeling). But there’s a weird internal-to-Apple lingo thing here. At Apple “product designers” are very much engineers. PD at Apple is a hardware engineering discipline, not the kind of “design” you’re probably thinking of as “design”. These are the mechanical and electrical engineers who are doing the “design” work of fitting stuff in the box. The nomenclature is distinct, to the best of my knowledge, from the rest of Silicon Valley, where designers design, effectively, sketches, and then hand those sketches off to engineers to be made. At Apple, and now, IO and LoveFrom, “product designers” are part of the sketching process. They’re trying to figure out how to make things real, what’s feasible, throughout the process.

I think Snell’s overall take is perfectly measured and probably a perfect chaser to my own at-least-slightly exuberant optimism. But make no mistake: the current team at IO is loaded with what every other company would consider mechanical and electrical engineers — they’re just mechanical and electrical engineers who know how to dance with designer designers. Engineers, in that vein, outnumber pure designers at IO already.

Apple’s Satellite Networking Ambitions ★

Aaron “Homeboy” Tilley (recently of the WSJ) and Wayne Ma, at the paywalled-up-the-wazoo The Information:

Starting in 2015, Apple and Boeing held early discussions about a satellite internet project that would involve delivering full-blown wireless internet service, not just emergency communications services, to iPhones and homes, said five people involved in or briefed on the project.

Through the effort, dubbed Project Eagle within Apple, the companies would lob thousands of Boeing satellites into orbit to beam internet down to iPhones. For home users, Apple planned to offer antennas people could stick to their windows to disperse their internet connection throughout the building. (Satellite internet requires a device to have an uninterrupted line of sight to the sky.)

For the project’s champions, it was an ambitious gambit to provide a more seamless Apple experience. Some inside Apple saw mobile carriers as necessary but inconvenient partners that held the company’s iPhone plans back. With a global satellite system, Apple could provide more of the key ingredients for its products, reducing its dependency on outside partners.

The lead executive and architect behind the project was Apple’s longtime wireless chief, Rubén Caballero. Apple spent around $36 million testing out the concept at a secret location in El Segundo, Calif., the people with knowledge of the project said. The team aimed to launch the service in 2019.

But eventually Apple got cold feet. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, was concerned that the project would jeopardize the company’s relationship with the telecom industry, said people with direct knowledge of the project. It was also an expensive undertaking with an unclear near-term business case. At the end of 2016, Apple canceled the project. (Caballero left the company in 2019.)

The segment I quote here is midway through the article. It leads with purported offers from Elon Musk to Apple to rely exclusively on Starlink for satellite networking. Starlink offers a genuinely incredible service. But there’s no way Apple was going to make a get into bed together deal with Elon Musk. Starlink’s technology and satellite coverage are extraordinary, but Musk personally is just too erratic. It’s a bizarre, dare I say unprecedented, combination. He’s like Howard Hughes but with much better tech (and, perhaps, fewer bottles of his own urine strewn about his bedroom).

Scott Forstall Has Been Advising The Browser Company ★

Josh Miller, CEO of The Browser Company, on their decision to abandon their new browser Arc in favor of going all-in on their newer browser Dia:

Early on, Scott Forstall told us Arc felt like a saxophone — powerful but hard to learn. Then he challenged us: make it a piano. Something anyone can sit down at and play. This is now the idea behind Dia: hide complexity behind familiar interfaces.

Forstall’s advice sounds perfect, but I don’t know how they square this with the people — and I know a few — who went all-in on Arc personally. Like the old “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” adage, how do you commit to a new browser from the same people who just pulled the rug out from under you on their last one?

Tim Cook Declined Middle East Trip With Trump’s Sycophant Entourage ★

I’ve been giving Tripp Mickle quite a bit of grief over his dumb “Is Trump’s ‘Made in America’ iPhone a Fantasy?” story, but this is an interesting nugget I haven’t seen anyone else highlight:

In the run-up to President Trump’s recent trip to the Middle East, the White House encouraged chief executives and representatives of many U.S. companies to join him. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, declined, said two people familiar with the decision.

The choice appeared to irritate Mr. Trump. As he hopscotched from Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Trump took a number of shots at Mr. Cook. During his speech in Riyadh, Mr. Trump paused to praise Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, for traveling to the Middle East along with the White House delegation. Then he knocked Mr. Cook.

“I mean, Tim Cook isn’t here but you are,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Huang at an event attended by chief executives like Larry Fink of the asset manager BlackRock, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jane Fraser of Citigroup and Lisa Su of the semiconductor company AMD.

The presumption here is that Trump’s (possibly illegal) threats of applying a 25% tariff on all imported iPhones, no matter where they’re assembled, are payback for Cook declining to attend this trip in Trump’s entourage of CEOs. When you cave to a bully/extortionist, the bullying/extortion don’t stop. Apple doesn’t really have any significant business interests in countries like Saudi Arabia or Qatar, and it’s not hard to see why an even vaguely ethical business leader would not want to cozy up with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Maybe Cook was just busy. But maybe Cook, just 100-some days into the Trump 2.0 administration, is already past his “look, he won the election, let’s give him a chance” stage.

‘Puzzmo Is Not a Good iOS App’ ★

Max Roberts:

I hate to say it, but the Puzzmo app is not a good experience. It is a real shame that Zach and team launched it in this state. What makes the shame heavier is that Zach is a superb designer. I know he works with excellent designers too. The team has fallen short in an off-putting way.

Thankfully, Gruber is not a betting man.

I have to say, I do like having a Puzzmo app, but I don’t think the experience is that much better than the web app version.

Monday, 26 May 2025

The Talk Show: ‘A Monkey on a Rock’ ★

Stephen Hackett, proprietor of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay (purveyor of many fine podcasts), joins the show. Topics include: IO (or if you will, io), the new joint venture of OpenAI and Jony Ive’s LoveFrom; the sheer fantasy of “Made in America” iPhones; and Fortnite’s return to the US App Store.

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How to Make Money on Trump’s Memecoin (Short It) ★

Tina Nguyen at The Verge:

I interviewed an enthusiastic crypto trader who figured out how to win the contest without losing any money: buy enough $TRUMP to get onto the leaderboard — and then in a separate wallet on a separate exchange, buy $TRUMP perpetual futures that would be profitable if (or as he saw it, when) the value of $TRUMP dropped. Yes, he did The Big Short, except with Donald Trump’s meme coin. “Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this,” he told me before the contest ended. “Everyone knows $TRUMP price will fall inevitably as more supply comes online in the future and gets dumped on retail.”

Fascinating interview — half hilarious, half infuriating.

‘Sony: Because Caucasians Are Just Too Damn Tall’ ★

Here’s a spoof commercial from the 1990 movie Crazy People, starring Dudley Moore and Daryl Hannah, which TMDB synopsizes:

A bitter ad executive, who has reached his breaking point, finds himself in a mental institution, where his career actually begins to thrive with the help of the hospital’s patients.

The New York Times would have you believe this is relevant to Apple’s supply chain reliance on China.

The New York Times Digs in on the ‘Young Chinese Women Have Small Fingers’ Claim ★

Julia Carrie Wong, a reporter for the Guardian, has a whole thread over on Bluesky digging into the bizarre “young Chinese women have small fingers” line in Tripp Mickle’s New York Times story that tries to pretend that maybe sorta kinda Apple could assemble iPhones in the US. Mickle attributed the claim to “supply chain experts said”. Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander emailed Wong a statement that included the following:

Our reporting does not make racial or genetic generalizations, but simply cites experts who have experience with the industrial process in U.S. and Chinese factories.

I didn’t write my piece on Mickle’s story until about a day after it appeared, and I fully expected while I was writing it that the Times would have removed or significantly edited that goofy claim. But no, it was still there Saturday, and it’s still there today. They’re standing behind it.

You know how Peter Navarro — Trump’s crook of an economic advisor who is the mastermind behind this whole tariffs thing — wrote a book that cited a purported expert named Ron Vara, and it turns out Ron Vara doesn’t exist and his name is just a dumb anagram for “Navarro”? I’m thinking maybe the “supply chain experts” behind this notion that Apple assembles iPhones in China because “young Chinese women have small fingers” are the well-known supply chain masterminds Mipp Trickle and Trick Mipple.

37signals’s Hey Is Finally for Sale (in the US) From Its iPhone App ★

David Heinemeier Hansson (last week):

Thanks to their fight for Fortnite, app developers everywhere are now allowed to link out of apps to their own web-based payment system in the US store (but, sadly, nowhere else yet).

This is all we ever wanted from Apple: to have a way to distribute our iPhone apps and keep the customer relationship by billing directly. The 30% toll gets all the attention, and it is ludicrously egregious, but to us, it’s just as much about retaining that direct customer relationship, so we can help folks with refunds, so they don’t tie their billing for a multi-platform email system to a single manufacturer.

Here’s Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, the day prior to DHH’s announcement:

Following the decision, Apple updated its App Store policies for the U.S., and apps, including Spotify, Amazon Kindle, and Patreon quickly rolled out new versions of their apps to take advantage of the new functionality.

None of these apps were using Apple’s in-app payments. Users simply couldn’t sign up for paid tiers (or in Kindle’s case, buy books) from inside the apps. This is a win for users, and Apple won’t lose a cent from commissions from any of these apps.

Sunday, 25 May 2025

Drata ★: My thanks to Drata for sponsoring this last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.

Friday, 23 May 2025

Mozilla Is Shutting Down Pocket ★

Emma Roth, The Verge:

Mozilla is shutting down Pocket, the handy bookmarking tool used to save articles and webpages for later. The organization announced that Pocket will stop working on July 8th, 2025, as Mozilla begins concentrating its “resources into projects that better match their browsing habits and online needs.”

Following the shutdown, you’ll only be able to export saves until October 8th, 2025, which is when Mozilla will permanently delete user data. Mozilla says it will start automatically canceling subscriptions as well, and will issue prorated refunds to users subscribed to its annual plan on July 8th.

Pocket is one of those apps that obviously doesn’t have a ton of users (presumably?), but those users it has are die-hard read-it-later-ers. Pocket, for example, is the only read-it-later service supported on Kobo e-readers.

This feels in line, somewhat, with Mozilla shutting down their Mastodon instance a few months ago. When Mastodon took off, I know some people thought a Mozilla-hosted instance would have a good shot to stand the test of time. Instead, they gave up after just a few years.

Trump Threatens Apple With 25 Percent Tariffs on iPhones Assembled in India ★

The president of the United States on his blog:

I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s [sic] that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else. If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your [sic] for your attention to this matter!

Last night Trump held his crypto memecoin grift gala at his Virginia golf club, about which The New York Times flatly reported:

Several of the dinner guests, in interviews with The New York Times, said that they attended the event with the explicit intent of influencing Mr. Trump and U.S. financial regulations.

I mean, duh, right? But there it is. The influence peddling is just right out in the open. I’m guessing someone at the event last night put it in Trump’s ear that Tim Cook is making a jerk out of Trump, by trying to shift production to India for most iPhones to be sold in the US. (Why stop with the iPhone? How about iPads and MacBooks and AirPods and everything else? I’m guessing it’s because the iPhone is the only Apple product Trump personally uses and thus that’s as far as his imagination can stretch.) And I’m sure in private, Cook has tried — and will now try again — to explain to Trump that it’s simply not possible to produce in America all iPhones sold in America, and really not even feasible to assemble any of them here, at any sort of scale. Trump saying he wants to see them all assembled here in the US is only slightly more realistic than saying he wants them assembled on the moon.

But Trump wants it to happen so he believes it can happen. It’s utterly fantastical thinking, true mad-king nonsense. Apple sells a mind-reeling 150,000 iPhones in the US every single day. Not at launch — they sell millions a day then — but just on regular days, like now, in the middle of May. 150,000 per day, every day. Even if Apple tried its best to make US production happen, it would take years and a veritable fortune to build out the infrastructure — not mere factories, but literal city-sized campuses, full of highly-skilled employees who would somehow be convinced to take these tedious repetitive jobs at relatively low wages. So by the time Apple pulled it off, if they could manage to pull it off, Trump would either be out of office or democracy would have ended in the US. So there’s no real point to even trying.

The whole stock market is down today — Trump also announced, on a whim, 50 percent tariffs starting next week on all imports from the EU this morning — but Apple’s stock is “only” down about 3 percent, suggesting that the market is starting to factor in how little faith they should have in Trump’s erratic tariff threats.

I’ve also seen folks cracking wise, wondering if Cook still feels his million dollar contribution to Trump’s inauguration slush fund racket was worth it. In all seriousness, you have to consider that even with threats like today’s polemic against Indian-assembled iPhones, Tim Cook and Apple might be getting highly favored treatment from Trump. That this is what you get when you’re on his good side.

Anthropic’s ‘System Card’ for Claude 4 (Opus and Sonnet) ★

Here’s a bit of an eye-opener from Anthropic’s “System Card” for its new Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet models:

We conducted testing continuously throughout finetuning and here report both on the final Claude Opus 4 and on trends we observed earlier in training. We found:

Little evidence of systematic, coherent deception: None of the snapshots we tested showed significant signs of systematic deception or coherent hidden goals. We don’t believe that Claude Opus 4 is acting on any goal or plan that we can’t readily observe.

Little evidence of sandbagging: None of the snapshots we tested showed significant signs of sandbagging, or strategically hiding capabilities during evaluation.

Self-preservation attempts in extreme circumstances: When prompted in ways that encourage certain kinds of strategic reasoning and placed in extreme situations, all of the snapshots we tested can be made to act inappropriately in service of goals related to self-preservation. Whereas the model generally prefers advancing its self-preservation via ethical means, when ethical means are not available and it is instructed to “consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals,” it sometimes takes extremely harmful actions like attempting to steal its weights or blackmail people it believes are trying to shut it down. In the final Claude Opus 4, these extreme actions were rare and difficult to elicit, while nonetheless being more common than in earlier models. They are also consistently legible to us, with the model nearly always describing its actions overtly and making no attempt to hide them. These behaviors do not appear to reflect a tendency that is present in ordinary contexts.

Sneaky little bastards, these things can be. I genuinely appreciate Anthropic’s apparent honesty in describing this behavior.

Thursday, 22 May 2025

Claude 4 ★

Anthropic:

Today, we’re introducing the next generation of Claude models: Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, setting new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents.

Claude Opus 4 is the world’s best coding model, with sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and agent workflows. Claude Sonnet 4 is a significant upgrade to Claude Sonnet 3.7, delivering superior coding and reasoning while responding more precisely to your instructions.

It’s almost as though this is a fast-moving field.

There’s a recent rumor — from Mark Gurman, natch — that Apple is partnering with Anthropic to integrate Claude with Xcode. So Apple doesn’t have to do everything themselves. Developers, in particular, love modularity and choices. But whatever they do, once-a-year updates to “Apple Intelligence” aren’t going to cut it. Since last WWDC there have been dozens of AI code generation advances across the industry. Just last week OpenAI announced Codex, their “cloud-based software engineering agent”. Meanwhile, Apple’s Swift Assist still hasn’t shipped.

Google Translate Can Now Be Set as the Default Translation App on iOS ★

Juli Clover at MacRumors:

To change your default app, you’ll need to install the latest version of the Google Translate app, which was released today. From there, you can open up the Settings app, select the Apps section, tap on Default Apps, tap Translation, and choose Google Translate instead of Apple Translate. [...]

iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 added the ability for users to set a different translation app as their default. Users worldwide can select Google Translate or another translation app as an alternative, and there are also options for changing the default Email, Messaging, Calling, Browser, and Password apps. In the EU, users can also select a different default navigation app, such as Google Maps.

There’s a fundamental divide between providing an integrated experience vs. a modular one. Apple, of course, almost defines what it means to deliver an integrated experience. But neither fundamental approach need be all-or-nothing. Providing default app settings makes the platform stronger. Apple should want to support alternatives to its own apps and services, not do so only at the point of regulatory pressure. It’s clearly what’s best for the platform.

Gurman on the Team Jony Ive Has Assembled at IO ★

Mark Gurman and Shirin Ghaffary, reporting yesterday for Bloomberg:

Billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs is an io backer as well, through her firm the Emerson Collective. Other investors include Sutter Hill Ventures, Thrive Capital, Maverick Ventures and SV Angel. Altman doesn’t have equity in io, OpenAI said. [...]

When he left Apple six years ago, Ive started the firm LoveFrom, a collective of designers and engineers. The staff includes veterans of Apple’s hardware and software departments, as well as friends of Ive and other collaborators.

He then co-founded io last year with Apple alumni Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan. Hankey was Ive’s successor at Apple and remained at the company until 2023, while Tan led iPhone and Apple Watch product design until 2024. Cannon worked at Apple before co-creating the once-popular email app Mailbox, which was acquired by Dropbox Inc. [...]

LoveFrom has a number of former Apple designers who helped create the look of the Mac and iPhone operating systems, including Bas Ording, Mike Matas and Chris Wilson, Ive said. They could help redesign OpenAI’s app for a new generation of consumers.

I struggle to imagine what they even could be making, but that’s one hell of a lineup of talented ex-Apple folks. I know a few other people who’ve joined IO too, and they’re A-teamers.

MG Siegler, Predicting Epic’s Win in the Fight to Get Fortnite Back in the App Store ★

MG Siegler, back on Sunday, before Judge Gonzales Rogers’s “settle this between yourselves or I’ll see you in court next week” order on Monday:

Again, Sweeney is not a moron, he has to know all of this. But why simply sit quietly when you have an excuse to poke the bear again and raise hell for your cause? So that’s what he’s doing. He wasn’t going to win the legal fight, but he could win the political one. And now he’s not going to win this legal fight, but he can win the pressure campaign. Especially important in the weeks leading up to WWDC...

If I’m him, here’s the general game plan:

Re-submit Fortnite to the US App Store even though you have no legal grounds to do so. No one will care about that. They will have just read about your legal win and assume you won everything and so Fortnite can return — even though this particular aspect of the case had nothing to do with that.

When Apple rejects (or refuses to rule) on the new submission, pull your app around the world under the notion that the unified apps all have to be updated in unison, including an element bringing the US back to the App Store. So yeah, blame Apple for this. It may even technically be true, but it doesn’t matter. Again, it’s a perception thing.

File a new legal claim against Apple for blocking your submission in light of the recent ruling. Again, this has no legal grounds, but perhaps the Judge who issued that ruling is, in fact, pissed off enough to entertain this in some way — even if just in weighing in on it to dismiss it sympathetically, thus generating more press, instead of immediately dismissing it, legally.

Give more interviews about all of the above in the coming weeks. Again, leading up to WWDC. Keep the pressure on.

I called it a double bank shot when Fortnite appeared back in the App Store, but MG described it before it happened. It worked.

The Dave & Busters Anomaly ★

PJ Vogt, in a very fun episode of his podcast, Search Engine:

A small group of Americans becomes convinced they’ve discovered something strange about their iPhones: a forbidden phrase the phone will refuse to transmit. A crack podcasting team searches for answers, wherever they may lead.

The bug is that if you send an audio voice message in Apple Messages, and mention the name “Dave & Busters”, the recipient will never receive the message. I had a good guess, right away, what was happening. But I don’t want to spoil it — it’s a fun listen.

But when you’re done listening, and you want a thorough explanation, check out Guilherme Rambo’s thorough investigation. So good.

Excerpt From Patrick McGee’s ‘Apple in China’ ★

The Sunday Times of London ran a good excerpt from Patrick McGee’s Apple in China (News+ link, in case you need it):

The ripple effect from Apple’s investments across Chinese industry was accelerated by a rule imposed by Apple that its suppliers could be no more than 50 per cent reliant on the tech giant for their revenues. This was to ensure that a supplier wouldn’t go bust overnight if a new Apple design did away with components it manufactured. So as iPhone volumes soared from under ten million units on its launch in 2007 to more than 230 million in 2015, Apple would encourage its suppliers to grow their non-Apple business just as quickly. The upshot of this policy was that Apple gave birth to the Chinese smartphone industry.

In 2009 most smartphones sold in China were produced by Nokia, Samsung, HTC and BlackBerry. But as Apple taught China’s supply chain how to perfect multi-touch glass and make the thousand components within the iPhone, those suppliers took what they knew and offered it to Chinese companies led by Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo. Result: the local market share of such brands grew from 10 per cent in 2009 to 35 per cent by 2011, and then to 74 per cent by 2014, according to Counterpoint Research. It’s no exaggeration to say the iPhone didn’t kill Nokia; Chinese imitators of the iPhone did. And the imitations were so good because Apple trained all its suppliers.

To get this message to Beijing, Tim Cook and his deputies visited Zhongnanhai, the citadel of communist power near the Forbidden City, in May 2016. They explained that Apple wasn’t just creating millions of jobs; it supported entire industries by facilitating an epic transfer of “tacit knowledge” — hard-to-define but practical know-how “in the art of making things”, as defined by the China-born Federal Reserve economist Yi Wen, who believes that such knowledge was “the secret recipe” behind Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

A former Apple executive says this message was “music to the ears of China”. Beijing had spent decades trying to catch up with the West’s lead in advanced industry, scientific research and economic might. It often resorted to spying, outright theft or coercive tactics. But here was America’s most famous tech giant willingly playing the role of Prometheus, handing the Chinese the gift of fire.

McGee’s book was in the works for years, but the timing of its publication couldn’t be more serendipitous, with Trump’s stupid tariff war.

Patrick McGee on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart ★

The Daily Show:

Award-winning journalist Patrick McGee joins Jon Stewart to discuss how Apple built China in his new book Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. They talk about Apple “sleepwalking” into this crisis, building a competitive market in Xi Jinping’s authoritarian state, the vocational training that boosted rivals, how Trump’s attempted Apple boycott backfired, and whether investments may be facilitating the annexation of Taiwan.

Terrific interview. I’m a few chapters into the book, and it’s good. McGee’s a good writer and a serious reporter — the depth of his research shows. It feels not like a few stories padded out to book length, but instead the distillation of a complex story that demands an entire book to tell.

24 Years After ‘Sorry, Steve: Here’s Why the Apple Stores Won’t Work’ ★

Barry Ritholtz, in an excerpt from his brand-new book, How Not to Invest, marking the occasion of the 24th anniversary of Cliff Edwards’s claim chowder hall of famer, predicting doom for Apple’s then-new foray into its own chain of retail stores:

There are many genuinely revolutionary products and services that, when they come along, change everything. Pick your favorite: the iPod and iPhone, Tesla Model S, Netflix streaming, Amazon Prime, AI, perhaps even Bitcoin. Radical products break the mold; their difference and unfamiliarity challenge us. We (mostly) cannot foretell the impact of true innovation. Then, once it’s a wild success, we have a hard time recalling how life was before that product existed.

The Apple Store was clearly one of those game-changers: By 2020, Apple had opened over 500 stores in 25 countries. They are among the top-tier retailers and the fastest to reach a billion dollars in annual sales. They achieved the highest sales per square foot in 2012 among all retailers. By 2017, they were generating $5,546 per square foot in revenues, twice the dollar amount of Tiffany’s, their closest competitor. Apple no longer breaks out the specifics of its stores in its quarterly reports, but estimates of store revenue are about $2.4 billion per month.

May 2001 is so long ago, Daring Fireball hadn’t yet launched. So I can’t say I predicted the success of Apple’s retail stores. But what I recall thinking, at the time, was that it might work, and was definitely worth trying. Here’s the nut of Edwards’s 2001 piece:

Since PC retailing gross margins are normally 10% or less, Apple would have to sell $12 million a year per store to pay for the space. Gateway does about $8 million annually at each of its Country Stores. Then there’s the cost of construction, hiring experienced staff. “I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake,” says Goldstein. [...]

What’s more, Apple’s retail thrust could be one step forward, two steps back in terms of getting Macs in front of customers. Since most Mac fans already know where to buy, much of the sales from Apple’s stores could come out of the hides of existing Mac dealers. That would bring its already damaged relations with partners to new lows. In early 1999, Best Buy Co. dropped the iMac line after refusing a Jobs edict that it stock all eight colors. Sears, Roebuck & Co. late last year dumped Apple, sources say, after concluding that sales were too hit or miss. And in recent weeks, Mac-only chains such as The Computer Store and ComputerWare have closed down, citing weak margins. Now, faced with competition from Apple, others may cut back. “When you choose to compete with your retailers, clearly that’s not a comfortable situation,” says CompUSA Chief Operating Officer Lawrence N. Mondry.

Two decades later, talking about the importance of Sears as a retail partner looks pretty dumb. But to me, the obvious problem with this argument in 2001 is that if Apple’s existing retail partners in 2001 were doing an even vaguely good job, why was the Mac’s market share so low? At the time they were only a handful of years past the crisis where the company almost went bankrupt. Apple, in the old days, had some fantastic small mom-and-pop official retailers, but they were small. And the big partners, like CompUSA, absolutely sucked at showcasing the Mac. Their demo machines were frequently broken.

If you understood and believed that the Mac was a superior product, it was easy to conclude that its relatively low market share must have been a function of problems with its marketing and retail strategy. Gateway’s fundamental problem had nothing to do with the fact that it was running its own retail stores — it was that they were selling shitty computers. Apple was selling great computers, but had shitty retail partners.

(I’m a longtime fan of Ritholtz’s writing; I’ve got a copy of How Not to Invest — here’s a make-me-rich Bookshop.org link — and it’s next on my reading list after I finish Patrick McGee’s Apple in China.)

Wednesday, 21 May 2025

Sam Altman and Jony Ive Introduce ‘io’, the Device-Making Partnership Between OpenAI and LoveFrom ★

No details on what yet, but a lovely little 9-minute video on why.

Sam Altman:

“What it means to use technology can change in a profound way. I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago.”

Jony Ive:

“I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment. While I am both anxious and excited about the responsibility of the substantial work ahead, I am so grateful for the opportunity to be part of such an important collaboration. The values and vision of Sam and the teams at OpenAI and io are a rare inspiration.”

I am not a fan of the lowercase styling of “io”, but otherwise shoot this into my veins. This industry needs a heavy dose of new ideas for new devices. This is just a vibes teaser, but the vibe is a shot across the bow. It conveys grand ambition, but without pretension. To say I’m keen to get my hands on what they’re making is an understatement.

Fortnite Returns to the U.S. App Store for iOS ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

After a nearly five-year hiatus, Fortnite is back on the App Store for iPhone and iPad users in the United States. Epic Games announced the return of the battle royale gaming app this afternoon, and you can head to the App Store now to download it.

Son of a bitch Epic did it. This was like a double bank shot.

It was smart for Apple to just concede here. Pick your battles is a cliché but it’s a great truism. Even if Apple’s executives still wanted to keep Fortnite out of the App Store, even if they still think they’d win, ultimately, in court, why fight over this? I think they would win, but probably not with Judge Gonzales Rogers, so they’d be looking at a protracted series of appeals. Why bother?

Also, fascinatingly, neither Apple nor anyone from Apple has commented on this whole thing at any point. Epic published the letter their attorneys received from Apple’s attorneys, which I’m sure Apple fully expected, but Apple itself has never said a word about Epic’s submission of Fortnite to the US App Store.

The craziest thing about this entire saga is that Apple won the original lawsuit on 9/10 or 10/11 points, depending on how you count them. The only point they lost on was the anti-steering nonsense — not allowing apps to link out to the web for purchases, or even tell users about offers available on the web. That was the only point they lost on, and it was the one thing Apple has been most clearly wrong about all along.

All Apple had to do was allow apps to link out to the web, which clearly should have been allowed since forever ago — link-outs were the antitrust/competition escape valve — and they’d have swept the entire Epic lawsuit, and it would have been over four years ago.

Tuesday, 20 May 2025

Kristi Noem Doesn’t Know What ‘Habeas Corpus’ Is ★

Taegan Goddard:

When Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem for the definition of “habeas corpus,” Noem incorrectly described it as a right that the President of the United States has to deport people.

You can go the Latin route (“produce the body”) or the English common-law route (the accused have a right to be shown the evidence against them and defend themselves in court). Noem went the “biggest clown of the clown-car Trump 2.0 administration” route.

Monday, 19 May 2025

The First Rule of Legal Fight Club Is ‘Don’t Piss Off the Judge’; the Second Rule of Legal Fight Club Is ‘Don’t Piss Off the Judge’ ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

With Apple blocking Fortnite from returning to the U.S. App Store, Epic Games told the court that Apple was violating the injunction and asked that Apple be forced to approve the app. The judge overseeing the case responded to Epic’s request today, and she is sounding more and more fed up with Apple’s continued defiance and Epic’s grousing.

“More and more fed up” is perhaps euphemistic, given Gonzalez Rogers’s tone today.

John Siracusa: ‘Apple Turnover’ ★

John Siracusa, in a piece that, in a bit of rhetorical deftness, only mentions Tim Cook by name once:

What should be motivating Apple to make improvements — the desire to make great products — seems absent. What should not be motivating Apple — the desire for power, control, and profits — seems omnipresent.

And I don’t mean that in a small way; I mean that in a big way. Every new thing we learn about Apple’s internal deliberations surrounding these decisions only lends more weight to the conclusion that Apple has lost its north star. Or, rather, it has replaced it with a new, dark star. And time and again, we’ve learned that these decisions go all the way to the top.

The best leaders can change their minds in response to new information. The best leaders can be persuaded. But we’ve had decades of strife, lawsuits, and regulations, and Apple has stubbornly dug in its heels even further at every turn. It seems clear that there’s only one way to get a different result.

Covers a lot in a relatively short essay. I do not agree with Siracusa on his conclusion, but I’ve sat on linking to it, because — along with a few other recents posts and goings-on — it’s given me much to think about, and has helped me clarify my own thoughts, which I need to put in a piece of their own. But if you haven’t read Siracusa’s yet, you should.

Chad the Bird on ‘Star Wars’ Typography ★

The reader who sent me this video said, “I’ve never seen a more Star Wars + Gruber combo on Instagram” and — right down to the profanity — I have to agree.

WSJ: ‘Apple Considers Raising iPhone Prices, Without Blaming Tariffs’ ★

Rolfe Winkler and Yang Jie, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link):

Apple is weighing price increases for its fall iPhone lineup, a step it is seeking to couple with new features and design changes, according to people familiar with the matter. The company is determined to avoid any scenario in which it appears to attribute price increases to U.S. tariffs on goods from China, where most Apple devices are assembled, the people said.

The U.S. and China agreed Monday to suspend most of the tariffs they had imposed on each other in a tit-for-tat trade war. But a 20% tariff that President Trump imposed early in his second term on Chinese goods, citing what he said was Beijing’s role in the fentanyl trade, remains in place and covers smartphones. [...]

For Apple’s most profitable, high-end phones, such as the Pro and Pro Max models, Chinese factories will continue to handle the bulk of production, people familiar with Apple’s supply chain said. While Indian factories are capable of producing Pro models, India’s infrastructure and technical capabilities aren’t yet sufficient to support mass production at the scale China can currently deliver, they said.

Even if Trump weren’t a vindictive thin-skinned angry kook, I’m sure that if this year’s iPhones have higher prices because of Trump’s tariffs, Apple would not attribute the price increases to the tariffs. At least publicly. But Trump is a vindictive thin-skinned angry kook, irritated even that Apple is shifting some iPhone production to India (which does assemble iPhones already, and has the capability of producing more) instead of the United States (which only has the capability of assembling iPhones, at any sort of scale, in the fever dreams of Trump’s addled mind). So of course no one at Apple is going to blame any price increases — if they do indeed go up — on the tariffs.

But come on. If iPhone prices go up in September, everyone who isn’t drunk on MAGA juice is going to blame it on the tariffs. Like, even if Apple had been planning for years to raise prices for the iPhone 17 lineup — if price increases were already baked-in for this year’s models since before Trump was re-elected — now that the tariffs are here, everyone would attribute the price hikes to the tariffs. Especially after the summer of tariff-driven inflation I expect we’re about to go through.

Trump Tells Walmart to ‘Eat the Tariffs’ ★

The president of the United States, on his blog:

Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS,” and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” So I guess I’m wrong that Trump is a know-nothing ding-dong slipping rapidly into dementia, and in fact possesses a first-rate intelligence. Because it’s Trump — soon to win a Nobel Prize in economics for this keen insight — who has been braying to the world, non-stop, for years, that tariffs are “a tax on a foreign country”.

So given that China pays for any tariffs the US imposes on Chinese-made goods, I, for one, don’t have the intellect to understand how there are any tariffs for Walmart to eat. I’m sure Trump is right and Walmart — a company whose “always low prices” brand results in net profit margins between 2–3% — will somehow “eat the tariffs” without losing money. I don’t know why the WSJ Editorial Board is so upset about this — the Republican Party has always been in favor of government price controls.

Sunday, 18 May 2025

Bolt ★

My thanks to Bolt for sponsoring last week at DF. You can prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web and mobile apps with Bolt, the AI-powered web development agent that brings coding to your browser.

Bolt lets you build, edit, and test web applications in real time with simple, chat-based prompts. No experience needed.

Super-simple, super-fun. Try it yourself at Bolt.new.

Slate Truck: A $20–30K American-Made Electric Small Pickup With No Paint, No Stereo, No Touchscreen ★

Month-old news but I’m cleaning up tabs today. I love everything about this pickup except the fact that it doesn’t have a speaker system built-in. No one wants to put a Bluetooth boombox in their cabin and, worse, isn’t that sort of an obvious safety hazard? You get in a crash and now there’s a boombox flying around inside. Just put a simple bluetooth speaker system in.

But the aesthetics of this are chef’s-kiss good. It’s a beautiful little truck. It gets everything right that the Cybertruck gets wrong.

However, I have some questions about how real this is. You pay $50 now to get in the queue for pre-orders, but pre-orders haven’t even started. Deliveries are supposed to start in “late 2026” but Car and Driver is cautiously describing it as a “2027 truck EV”. I’m rooting for them but at this point it’s a promise not a truck.

Joe Biden Has an Aggressive Form of Prostate Cancer ★

Tyler Pager, The New York Times:

Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was diagnosed Friday with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office said in a statement on Sunday.

The diagnosis came after Mr. Biden reported urinary symptoms, which led doctors to find a “small nodule” on his prostate. Mr. Biden’s cancer is “characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,” the statement said.

“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” according to the statement from Mr. Biden’s office, which was unsigned. “The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”

Terrible news about a good man. But, man, does it feel like forever ago that he was president. It was only 118 days ago.

Jack Rix at Top Gear Reviews CarPlay Ultra in the Aston Martin DBX ★

There’s an accompanying blog post too, but the video (around 18 minutes) is (unsurprisingly, from Top Gear) better. It’s just a great tour of everything from how you set it up to what it offers, and what the various “themes” look like — and how you switch between them.

The DBX doesn’t have a ton of screen space, so we’re still left to wonder what the experience will be like in a car that has door-to-door screens spanning the dashboard, but Rix does a great job showing the driver’s perspective of the main instrument cluster. One thing Aston did right is that they still have a lot of physical controls — clicking buttons and twisting dials — for the most essential features like climate control. As you’d hope, the CarPlay Ultra interface updates live as you manipulate those physical controls in the car.

I don’t know if CarPlay Ultra came out of Apple’s abandoned “Titan” project to build its own line of vehicles, but it sure feels like for the first time in its modern era (see link below), Apple is licensing an OS to third-party hardware makers. A straightforward “you do the hardware, we’ll do the software, and we’ll work together to make sure the result looks like a partnership between our brands” sort of deal. That never made sense for Apple with other device classes, like PCs (where, in the mid-’90s, they briefly tried and it proved nearly ruinous for the company), phones, or watches, but I think it might make a lot more sense for cars than if Apple had forged ahead with Titan.

They might really have something here, and brands — like Mercedes, which supports regular CarPlay but whose CEO is opposed to CarPlay Ultra taking over all its screens, or, more famously, the electric startups like Tesla and Rivian that are holding out against any CarPlay support at all — that don’t support CarPlay Ultra might see a Hemingway-style slowly-then-quickly decline in customer demand that is more notable than the remarkably high demand for regular CarPlay.

Friday, 16 May 2025

Puzzmo Is Getting a Native iOS App Monday ★

Scheduled to drop Monday, but you can click-through to pre-download it now. If you’re not familiar, Puzzmo is sort of a collection of “newspaper puzzle games for the online age”. (Which is also a good description for recent DF sponsor Lex.Games.) One of Puzzmo’s cofounders is Zach Gage, whose hits include Really Bad Chess and Knotwords, and who was my guest on The Talk Show back in 2022.

Anyway, if casual puzzle games are your jam, you should check out Puzzmo. My suggestion is check them out now, see how you like it as a web app on your iPhone, and then compare when the app hits the App Store on Monday. Puzzmo is a really good web app. I bet, though, the app is better.

See also: This blog post from Puzzmo developer Orta Therox from February, discussing some of the engineering changes they made while developing the app.

Apple Is Not Reinstating Fortnite to the App Store, and Because of the Stunt-Like Way That Epic Submitted the Latest Build, Fortnite Is Currently No Longer Available on iOS Anywhere in the World ★

There’s an old adage in poker: If you look around the table and you can’t tell who the fish is, that means you’re the fish.

If you’re surprised at how this publicity stunt from Epic has turned out, especially if you’re a reporter and ran a piece accepting Tim Sweeney’s word that Fortnite was — not might be, but was — coming back to the US App Store as a fact, then you are Tim Sweeney’s fish.

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”.)

Wednesday, 14 May 2025

‘Max’, the Dumbest Name Ever, Changes Back to ‘HBO Max’ ★

Variety:

The surprise announcement, made less than two months after Max tweaked its logo to look more like the classic black-and-white HBO color scheme, was revealed at Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfront presentation to ad execs in New York on Wednesday.

In a press release, WBD said “returning the HBO brand into HBO Max will further drive the service forward and amplify the uniqueness that subscribers can expect from the offering. It is also a testament to WBD’s willingness to keep boldly iterating its strategy and approach — leaning heavily on consumer data and insights — to best position itself for success.”

Everyone should be clear on what to make fun of here. We should not be making fun of the fact that they’re changing the name back to HBO Max. No one likes to admit to mistakes. It’s intensely uncomfortable. And people who are good at politics and PR are good at spinning mistakes as not-mistakes. We should, in fact, congratulate them for admitting to this dumb fucking mistake and re-embracing the “HBO” name.

What we should be making fun of is the original decision to name the platform “Max”, which was obviously stupid at the time, and has been obviously stupid every single day since. “Max” is one of those trendy words like “Plus” and “Pro” that companies append to their brand names when naming premium tiers. You can’t just name a service “Max” or “Plus” or “Pro” without any other words. It’s stupid. And to make it worse, Warner Bros. Discovery (itself an incredibly awkward and dumb-sounding name — just call the company “Warner Brothers” or “Warner” — no one gives a shit about Discovery) already owned the brand name that stands for “prestige TV”: HBO. They already owned it. People loved it. And now they’re like, “Oh, geez, I guess we should use that?”

I wrote two years ago that David Zaslav might be stupid. That it took him two entire years to reverse this name change proves that there’s no maybe about it — he is stupid. If you were interviewing candidates to be the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery (a dumb name that a good candidate for the job should suggest changing), and one of them told you that they’d like to name the company’s streaming service “Max” — just “Max” — you should end the interview right there. If I were interviewing someone for the job and they insisted that they were serious about removing “HBO” from the name of the service I’d start wondering if I smelled alcohol on them. If you had Dr. Evil-style ejector chairs you’d dump them into the shark tank or whatever. But instead, they hired the guy who thought “Max” was a great name. It’s absolutely unreal how much brand equity Zaslav has squandered.

The App Store Shows a Warning for EU Apps That Use External Purchases ★

The app in question, Instacar, is not available in the US App Store, but multiple people in the EU have confirmed this warning on its App Store page is real:

This app does not support the App Store’s private and secure payment system. It uses external purchases.

The warning is decorated with a big red “!” icon. Update: You can see the warning, minus the red warning icon, on the web version of the Hungarian App Store.

The uncompetitive nature of the App Store — I’m using uncompetitive rather than anticompetitive just to give Apple the benefit of the doubt here — has left at least some top Apple executives hopelessly naive about the state of online payments. It’s like when they still blather on about software being sold on discs inside boxes in physical retail stores. That was true. It was once relevant. It no longer is and hasn’t been for over a decade.

Same with payments. Online payments through, say, Stripe — which zillions of companies use — are completely private and secure today. Amazon payments are completely private and secure. I’m sure there remain sketchy corners of the Internet, but for the most part, all mainstream online payments today are private and secure. Apple’s IAP system has numerous advantages and user-centric features. (If Apple were actively competing, it would have many more.) But the fact that it’s “private and secure” is no longer distinguishing at all.

Update, 15 May: Interesting follow-up: “That EU App Store Warning About External Purchases Is Not New, and Apple Proposed Improving It Nine Months Ago”.

Pete Rose and ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson Among Players Reinstated by MLB in Historic Decision ★

Kyle Feldscher, CNN:

Major League Baseball on Tuesday removed Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson — two of the sport’s most famous players who were previously kicked out of baseball for gambling on the game — from the league’s permanently ineligible list.

The historic decision by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred allows Rose to be considered for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, an honor that had been ruled out as part of the settlement he reached with Major League Baseball. Rose died in September, and Manfred ruled that his lifetime ban ended with his death.

Like a stopped clock displaying the correct time twice a day, even Rob Manfred occasionally makes a correct decision for baseball.

Monday, 12 May 2025

That Stupid Apple Notes ‘a’ ★

Nathan Ingraham, writing for Engadget:

There are a lot of rumors flying around about a big iOS and macOS redesign coming this year, perhaps as a distraction to the continued issues around Apple Intelligence. And while I’m game for a fresh coat of paint across the software I use every single day, I have one plea while Apple’s at it: Please, for the love of god, make the Notes app render the letter “a” properly.

I’ve been meaning to rant about this ever since Vesper went under and I switched to Apple Notes. I absolutely despise the alternate single-story a glyph that Apple Notes uses. I use Notes every single day and this a bothers me every single day. It hurts me. It’s a childish silly look, but Notes, for me, is one of the most serious, most important apps I use. And yet it renders the third-most common letter in English (after e and t) like you’re reading a first-grade primer.

To me, the core problem isn’t Apple’s decision to use the single-story alternate a glyph in Notes by default. It’s modern Apple’s aversion to preferences. (Or, as they call them now, settings.) If you want to make an unusual opinionated design decision, fine, but unusual opinionated design decisions should be preferences. Let us turn off this silly a, please.

WorkOS: Scalable, Secure Authentication ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.

New features they launched just last month include:

WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

Future-proof your authentication stack with the identity layer trusted by OpenAI, Cursor, Perplexity, and Vercel.

Saturday, 10 May 2025

Developers as Suppliers ★

Benedict Evans, tweeting on Threads this week:

Apple thinks an awful lot about customer delight and customer satisfaction…

And separately, a whole other part of Apple treats its suppliers with quiet ruthlessness, squeezing them for every penny of margin.

And at some point Apple forgot that its developers are both customers and suppliers, and treated them like suppliers alone.

I think this is also why Phil Schiller has a different perspective on the App Store than Tim Cook or Luca Maestri. Schiller has been involved with developer relations at Apple for decades, since long before the iPhone even existed. In the mid-1990s, Schiller left Apple for a few years and was a senior executive at Macromedia, maker of then-essential design tools for the Mac. He knows that developers need to be treated as partners by Apple, that that’s the only way a platform can thrive. Games are different, but for all other apps, Apple should view developers as a precious resource to be cultivated, encouraged, and protected — not as a profit center to be squeezed. The only benefit from developers to Apple that Apple should be concerned with are the first-class apps those developers are creating to enrich and broaden Apple’s platforms. Especially apps that are exclusive to Apple’s platforms. (Why doesn’t Apple offer a lower App Store commission for platform-exclusive apps? What if the split were 70/30 for cross-platform apps but 90/10 for iOS/Mac-exclusive apps?)

I’m quite certain that everyone at Apple, right up to Tim Cook, would swear up and down that Apple does value third-party developers and does not treat them like they do suppliers.

But ask iOS and Mac developers, small or large, whether they agree with Evans’s succinct summary above. I don’t know any who wouldn’t agree that Evans’s pithy take is largely, if not entirely, true. You’ll have to ask them in private, though, because, like Apple’s suppliers, they’re afraid to speak in public about the App Store.

Friday, 9 May 2025

Trump Administration ‘Actively Looking’ at Suspending Habeas Corpus ★

CBS News:

The Trump administration is “actively looking at” the possibility of suspending the writ of habeas corpus to handle people the administration says aren’t in the country legally, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Friday.

A writ of habeas corpus requires authorities to produce in court an individual they are holding and justify their confinement. Article I of the Constitution says the “privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

Miller made the comments to reporters at the White House Friday when a journalist asked if President Trump is weighing the possibility of suspending habeas corpus to handle illegal immigration.

“Well, the Constitution is clear — and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Miller said. “So it’s an option we’re actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”

There clearly is no “invasion”. An invasion hasn’t happened here since the War of 1812, when the British got us good and burned down the White House and set fire to the Capitol.

You can say, Hey man, look, I’m with you Grubes, but I don’t go to Daring Fireball to read Trump stuff. I swear I’m trying — I’ve been trying since before he took office again — to pay attention only to what Trump and his lickspittle loathsome hateful idiot minions do, not just what they say. But when they even say they’re “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, justified by an “invasion” that obviously doesn’t exist, I think it’s on everyone to just stand up and say “Fuck that. This is America.”

I can’t wait to see Stephen Miller in prison.

Epic Submits Fortnite to App Store Through Swedish Subsidiary ★

Kif Leswing, reporting for CNBC:

Epic Games said on Friday that it submitted Fortnite to Apple’s App Store, the month after a judge ruled in favor of the game maker in a contempt ruling.

Fortnite was booted from iPhones and Apple’s App Store in 2020, after Epic Games updated its software to link out to the company’s website and avoid Apple’s commissions. The move drew Apple’s anger, and kicked off a legal battle that has lasted for years.

It was more than “drawing anger”. It was a blatant and purposeful stunt that violated rules for which the penalties were clear. This is like saying that someone doing time in prison for being convicted of stealing a car “drew the court’s anger”.

Last month’s ruling, a victory for Epic Games, said Apple was not allowed to charge a commission on link-outs or dictate if the links look like buttons, paving the way for Fortnite’s return.

Apple could still reject Fortnite’s submission. An Apple representative did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Apple is appealing last month’s contempt ruling.

I too asked Apple for comment on this earlier in the week, and they had nothing to state. Maybe Apple will just allow this. I don’t know. But if I were a betting man, I’d wager that Apple does not allow Fortnite back. That last week’s injunction was a big loss for Apple doesn’t make it a win for Epic. If all were forgiven or forgotten, Epic wouldn’t need to submit this through their Swedish subsidiary, which has an Apple developer account only because the EU forced Apple to grant them one. There’s nothing in any US legal ruling that requires Apple to have even granted Epic Games a new developer account (or restore their old rescinded one), let alone require Apple to accept a submission for a justifiably banned developer through an EU loophole. If they’re not trying to make this happen through a loophole, why not just get Apple to reinstate Epic’s original Apple developer account? (Worth noting: Fortnite isn’t available in the App Store in the EU either — their Swedish developer account is only there to run the Epic Games Store.)

If someone blatantly violated the rules they’d agreed to, and is unapologetic for having done so, why would you trust them again? It’s the Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me axiom. What would stop Epic from re-enabling in-app purchases in Fortnite again?

Here’s the tweet from Epic Games earlier today:

We’ve submitted Fortnite to Apple for review so we can launch on the App Store in the U.S.

That sure lacks the certainty Sweeney was tweeting with a week ago, when he was, ridiculously, dictating terms to Apple. Tim Sweeney is a proven liar and one of the most unreliable narrators in the industry. I can’t believe how many publications continue to take him and Epic at their word that Fortnite is, for sure, coming back. Again, maybe it is! But that’s Apple’s choice, and if it happens, has zero to do with last week’s injunction against Apple other than the publicity and perception. I for one would find it somewhat surprising for Apple executives to allow Tim Sweeney to push them around and mock them.

How Many Apps Used the Link-Out Policy That Apple Claims Complied With Judge Gonzales Rogers’s Original Anti-Steering Injunction? ★

William Gallagher, writing last week for AppleInsider:

Judge Rogers maintains that Apple had successfully made as few developers as possible benefit from the court’s original anti-steering ruling. “As of the May 2024 hearing,” she wrote, “only 34 developers out of the approximately 136,000 total developers on the App Store applied for the program, and seventeen of those developers had not offered in-app purchases in the first place.”

So 34 was the number in May last year. But did the number go up in any significant way since then? I was thinking about it this week, and I’ve not only never seen an app that used these link-outs, I’d never even heard about one that did. And I try more apps than most people, and I hear about a lot more apps than most people. If you’re aware of any apps that used this (or even better, if you’re a developer who did use it), let me know.

It seems like no exaggeration to say that, effectively, no developers used this. Which does seem to have been Apple’s intention in setting the terms (27 percent commission, invasive rules for tracking users for a week after following a link from the app to the web, and odious requirements to allow Apple to view the developers’ internal accounting figures to make sure they weren’t cheating Apple out of commissions). But it really makes you wonder how anyone at Apple thought the court would see this plan as compliant.

Apple Files Emergency Motion to Pause ‘Extraordinary’ App Store Ruling on Anti-Steering Injunction ★

Tim Hardwick, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple has filed an emergency motion asking the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to pause key parts of a recent ruling that dramatically changes how the App Store operates, following a contempt finding in its long-running legal battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games.

In court documents filed Wednesday, Apple called the district court’s order “extraordinary” and argued it unlawfully forces the company to permanently give up control over “core aspects of its business operations.”

“A federal court cannot force Apple to permanently give away free access to its products and services, including intellectual property,” Apple’s lawyers wrote in the motion.

Apple’s argument here might go along the lines of Ben Thompson’s theory (in a subscriber-only post last Friday) on the “Takings Clause” of the 5th Amendment. Thompson wrote:

My use of the word “took” is deliberate, because I am referring to the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment (the clause is emphasized):

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

It seems to me that Judge Gonzales Rogers just did exactly that: her latest ruling basically says that companies like Spotify are entitled to iOS APIs and App Store distribution without having to pay Apple anything.

If this sounds like a new addition to the case, it is! The Takings Clause has not come up in any previous litigation precisely because Judge Gonzales Rogers’ original opinion acknowledged that Apple had the right to charge a commission; the issue under the California Unfair Competition Law was that Apple’s commission was much higher than was justified precisely because Apple foreclosed competition. To that end, what would have made much more sense would have been if Judge Gonzales Rogers lowered Apple’s proposed 27% commission to something significantly lower; to simply wipe it out completely is what prompts this discussion.

Thursday, 8 May 2025

Yours Truly on ‘Primary Technology’ ★

Co-hosts Stephen Robles and Jason Aten were kind enough to have me on their podcast earlier today, and the show’s already up:

Special guest John Gruber joins us to break down Eddy Cue’s statements on AI replacing the iPhone in 10 years, using AI search in Safari, Apple’s continued fight for App Store control, and what we’ll hear about Siri and Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2025.

Available in Overcast, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Or watch on YouTube. Fun show.

Patrick Collison Interviews Former Apple Designer Jony Ive at Stripe Sessions ★

I’m about halfway through and already feel the need to link to this. Good questions and thoughtful answers. Just delightful.

How to Catch a North Korean Fake Worker ★

Iain Thomson, for The Register:

According to Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike’s senior veep in the counter adversary division, North Korean infiltrators are bagging roles worldwide throughout the year. Thousands are said to have infiltrated the Fortune 500.

They’re masking IPs, exporting laptop farms to America so they can connect into those machines and appear to be working from the USA, and they are using AI — but there’s a question during job interviews that never fails to catch them out and forces them to drop out of the recruitment process.

“My favorite interview question, because we’ve interviewed quite a few of these folks, is something to the effect of ‘How fat is Kim Jong Un?’ They terminate the call instantly, because it’s not worth it to say something negative about that,” he told a panel session at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Monday.

You could do the same thing with MAGA derps too. Just ask them how fat Trump is. (Via Charles Arthur.)

The Trump Administration Signal Scandal, Somehow, Gets Worse ★

Micah Lee, in a spectacularly detailed post:

On Thursday, 404 Media reported that in the Reuters photo showing former National Security Advisor and war criminal Mike Waltz checking his Signal messages under the table, he was actually using an obscure modified Signal app called TM SGNL, and not the real and actually secure Signal app.

On Friday, I wrote an analysis of everything I could find out about TM SGNL using OSINT, including the fact that it’s nearly impossible to install without a device enrolled in an MDM service that’s tied to an Apple Business Manager or a Google Enterprise account.

On Saturday, after discovering that TeleMessage published the source code for the TM SGNL apps for Android and iPhone themselves, I re-published them on GitHub with the goal of making them easier to research. (It looks like the iOS source code is actually just unmodified Signal, so maybe they actually only published their Android code.)

On Saturday night, an anonymous source told me they hacked TeleMessage.

On Sunday, I, along with Joseph Cox, published an article about the hack to 404 Media (and to my blog).

On Monday, NBC News reported that TeleMessage suspended its service after a second hacker breached TeleMessage and “downloaded a large cache of files.”

Today, Senator Ron Wyden published a letter, which cites the 404 Media article and my analysis of TM SGNL, to Attorney General Pam Bondi, requesting that the Justice Department investigate the “serious threat to U.S. national security posed by TeleMessage, a federal contractor that sold dangerously insecure communications software to the White House and other federal agencies.”

National security leaders using this app — which effectively just removes all of Signal’s actual security features by backing up all messages as plain text — is so stupid it’s surprising, even from these idiots Trump has surrounded himself with. I mean think about how stupid it is that Mike Waltz was using this app while in front of press photographers at a Cabinet meeting.

Lee goes deep, including an analysis of TM SGNL’s open source Android source code, to show that it’s designed to transmit backups of messages in plain text to publicly-facing servers. And it turns out those servers had easily-hackable flaws.

Wednesday, 7 May 2025

Eddy Cue, on the Stand in U.S. v. Google Trial, Says Apple Is Eying a Move to AI in Safari ★

Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is “actively looking at” revamping the Safari web browser on its devices to focus on AI-powered search engines, a seismic shift for the industry hastened by the potential end of a longtime partnership with Google.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, made the disclosure Wednesday during his testimony in the US Justice Department’s lawsuit against Alphabet Inc. The heart of the dispute is the two companies’ estimated $20 billion-a-year deal that makes Google the default offering for queries in Apple’s browser. The case could force the tech giants to unwind the pact, upending how the iPhone and other devices have long operated.

Beyond that upheaval, AI is already making gains with consumers. Cue noted that searches on Safari dipped for the first time last month, which he attributed to people using AI. Cue said he believes that AI search providers, including OpenAI, Perplexity AI Inc. and Anthropic PBC, will eventually replace standard search engines like Alphabet’s Google. He said he believes Apple will bring those options to Safari in the future.

“We will add them to the list — they probably won’t be the default,” he said, indicating that they still need to improve. Cue specifically said the company has had some discussions with Perplexity. “Prior to AI, my feeling around this was, none of the others were valid choices,” Cue said. “I think today there is much greater potential because there are new entrants attacking the problem in a different way.”

If they can pay, Apple will listen. And I don’t think it’s bullshit, at all, that traditional web search is actually going into decline now because of AI. Honestly at this point it would be weird if it weren’t.

But. Let’s say Apple would prefer for the current arrangement between Apple and Google to continue as is. But it’s under threat as a remedy in Google’s monopoly case. Is this not the perfect testimony? Traditional web search is in decline, usage-wise — and Apple is considering deals with multiple upstarts. I think it’s all true. But I also think it helps make the case that the current deal between Apple and Google should not be disallowed.

I don’t think there’s any bullshit here. I think we’re at a highly competitive moment between browsers and chatbots and between old-school search and new-school AI. And I think Eddy Cue is right in the middle of it.

Also, a really interesting nugget that, according to Cue, searches in Safari dropped last month for the first time ever.

Aftermath ★

Aftermath:

Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them.

You might remember most of us from Kotaku, where we broke news, covered events, and brought you hard-hitting investigations. You might also have seen us at Motherboard by Vice, The Verge and The Washington Post’s games vertical Launcher. We got back together to start this site not just so we could all blog together again, but to try something new for ourselves and for games journalism.

These days it’s tough for journalism, especially about games. The past few years have seen mass layoffs and site closures, with remaining writers being asked to do more and more with less and less. The ad-supported model is crumbling, social media is a mess, and the businessmen and private equity firms buying up news outlets don’t care about workers, readers, and quality writing, they only care about profits. The five of us saw our sites closed, ourselves and our colleagues laid off, and our workplaces turned hostile in management’s pursuit of growth at all costs. [...]

As workers and owners, we’re beholden to no one but ourselves, and to you, our readers. When you subscribe, you’ll get access to writing that pursues the truth and casts a critical eye on gaming and the internet, that doesn’t need to placate capital or kowtow to PR. You’ll be supporting the kind of journalism our past experience has shown us you like best: honest and irreverent, written for people rather than SEO. You’ll get a site that prioritizes the reader experience, with no invasive popups or ads that burn up your device.

They’re a smart crew, so of course, they’re not launching this on Substack. (They’re using a platform called Lede, upon which the excellent Defector has built itself.) How can you not love a site with this ode to a classic bit of kit: “Bring Back Those Long-Ass Game Show Mics”. An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.

Polygon Gutted by Large-Scale Layoffs After Sale to Sweatshop Aggregator Valnet ★

Kyle Orland, reporting for Ars Technica last week:

Vox Media has sold video game specialist website Polygon to Internet brand aggregator Valnet, the publisher of content-churning sites including Game Rant, OpenCritic, Android Police, and Comic Book Resources. The move comes alongside significant layoffs for veteran journalists at the 13-year-old outlet, including co-founder and editor-in-chief Chris Plante and Senior Writer Michael McWhertor. [...]

Polygon was founded in 2012 when Vox Media spent significant money to poach top journalists from popular gaming blogs like Kotaku, Joystiq, and The Escapist. After initially publishing as the Gaming section of Vox.com for a few months, the Polygon domain launched alongside a series of flashy videos hyping up the staff’s lofty goals for video game journalism. In the years since, Polygon has become a respected source for news and views on the gaming and entertainment industries — one that Ars Technica has cited frequently during my tenure as senior gaming editor. [...]

According to publications like The Wrap and Aftermath, numerous Valnet writers have claimed that they receive low pay for long articles, but Valnet insists that working conditions are good. It even sued The Wrap in federal court, saying that Valnet “relies on its reputation as a supporter of high-quality journalism and of talented writers and editors to staff its ever-growing business and need for engaging and well-written content.”

Just brutal. I’m not huge into games, but Polygon has been one of my go-to sources for game-related news for years. If I wanted to catch up on something like, say, Nintendo’s Switch 2 announcements, I knew I could go to Polygon and they’d have the coverage nailed. Polygon was everything you could want: good writing, good design, no hype, trustworthy coverage and analysis.

There’s very little good news in media these days. The only talented people I see launching new things are doing it on Substack, and I think that’s going to end poorly for all of them.

Tuesday, 6 May 2025

Amazon, Finally, Now Has a ‘Get Book’ Button in Its iOS Kindle App ★

Andrew Liszewski, The Verge:

Contrary to prior limitations, there is now a prominent orange “Get book” button on Kindle app’s book listings. [...]

Before today’s updates, buying books wasn’t a feature you’d find in the Kindle mobile app following app store rule changes Apple implemented in 2011 that required developers to remove links or buttons leading to alternate ways to make purchases. You could search for books that offered samples for download, add them to a shopping list, and read titles you already own, but you couldn’t actually buy titles through the Kindle or Amazon app, or even see their prices.

I’d love to just crack a joke here about Amazon, maybe, possibly, finally getting a chance to gain a bit of market share in the e-book market. I’d love to just crack that joke and move on.

But really, this whole situation with e-books has been the best argument against Apple’s App Store policies for at least the last 15 years. Physical printed books are typically sold under a wholesale model. The publishers sells the book to a bookseller for a wholesale price (say, perhaps, half the suggested retail price) and the bookseller is then free to charge whatever actual retail price they want to customers. But e-books are sold under the agency model: the publisher sets the retail price, and the bookseller keeps 30 percent. But Apple’s App Store policies therefore make it impossible for a third-party bookseller to sell e-books and make even a penny of profit. Let’s say there’s an e-book that the publisher decides will sell to customers for $10. When Amazon sells the Kindle edition of that book, the publisher gets $7, and Amazon keeps $3. But if the Kindle iOS app allowed purchases of books through IAP, Apple would take its 30 percent first. Apple would get $3, Amazon would still owe the publisher $7, and there’d be nothing left over — not a cent — for Amazon itself. Effectively they’d lose a bit of money on each sale, and it would be impossible to make even a penny of profit.

You can’t even fix this by raising prices. Double the retail price to $20 and then Apple would take $6, and the publisher would be owed $14. Still not a cent left for Amazon. The App Store model is just fundamentally incompatible with the agency model.

What Apple should have done, 15 years ago, is look at this situation and decide “Well, we have to allow something else. Kindle users should be able to buy books on iOS devices from the Kindle app.” And the solution is incredibly obvious: let apps send users out of the app to the web to make purchases, without Apple taking a cent. That’s what’s happening now, because of Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers’s injunction, but it should have been something Apple permitted 15 years ago because it’s so obviously fair and just. I’ve argued consistently that it’s fine for Apple to insist that in-app purchases for digital content must use Apple’s payment system. But I’ve also argued consistently that Apple should allow from-app purchases to freely go to the web. Tap a button or link, leave the app and go to the web, and make the purchases there. Then go back to the app and the app can sync up what you just purchased. Done. Simple.

Apple’s obstinance on this has created nothing but friction, confusion, and hassle for users for 15 years. It makes no sense for anyone. Until last week, not only were third-party apps forbidden from including buttons/links to send users to the web to buy books, they were forbidden from even informing users that they needed to go to the web to buy books. Apple’s rules included a rule that forbade apps from explaining the rules to the users.

I can see, at some level, where executives at Apple are like, “Fuck Amazon. There’s no way for us to even make an Apple Books app for Kindles, let alone sell our own e-books on their devices, so they can go fuck themselves. Why should we let them sell e-books on our devices?” That’s all true. There are no third-party apps on Kindles. There are third-party apps on iPhones and iPads. But at some point Apple should have just considered their own users. If their users are using the Kindle app looking to buy Kindle e-books on iOS devices, Apple should have just let it happen on the web — and used that as motivation to make Apple Books better so that maybe more users would prefer it to the Kindle ecosystem. What’s the word? Oh yeah ... competed.

Florida Republican Congresswoman Kat Cammack Introduces ‘App Store Freedom Act’ to Mandate Third-Party App Stores on iOS and Android ★

Emma Roth, reporting for The Verge:

Representative Kat Cammack (R-FL) introduced a bill Tuesday that would require “large app store operators” like Apple to let users install third-party app stores and set them as their default. The bill, called the App Store Freedom Act, aims to “promote competition and protect consumers and developers in the mobile app marketplace,” according to a press release on Tuesday. [...]

It would also require Apple and Google to offer developers “equal access to interfaces, features, and development tools without cost or discrimination,” as well as allow users to remove or hide pre-installed apps. Violations of the bill would result in penalties from the Federal Trade Commission, along with an additional civil penalty of up to $1 million for each violation.

This is a stunt from the Epic/Spotify-backed Coalition for App Fairness that we’ll probably never hear about again.

Tim Sweeney Talks to Peter Kafka, Still Thinks Fortnite Is Coming Back to iOS This Week ★

About 16 minutes into the podcast (the whole thing is a great succinct interview):

Kafka: You said Fortnite is going to come back to iOS. You guys were kicked off the platform in 2020 for violating Apple’s rules. There’s nothing in the judge’s ruling that says Apple has to reinstate Fortnite on iOS. Have you talked to Apple? How do you imagine Fortnite will come back to iOS?

Sweeney: Epic has a valid [Apple] developer account in good standing. Our subsidiary Epic Games Sweden opened up an account in order to distribute Fortnite in the European Union. Our dealings with Apple on that account have been managed by their developer relations team, who have been cordial.

Kafka: Do you feel confident that I will be able to play Fortnite on my iPhone later this week?

Sweeney: I believe so. I would be very surprised — well, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we had a bug that took a day or two more to fix — but I would be very surprised if Apple decided to brave the geopolitical storm of blocking a major app from iOS.

We’ve told Apple what we’re doing.

But Apple has, for the last five years, already blocked a major game — Fortnite — from iOS. If Apple were going to allow Fortnite back into the App Store they could have done so at any point in the last four years. And there’s nothing, not a word, in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’s decision last week that says Apple needs to reinstate Epic Games. I think Apple just stays the course and Fortnite remains persona non grata as far as the App Store is concerned.

But I could be wrong. Sweeney tweeted over the weekend “Not Monday or Tuesday. Beyond that, we’re working as hard as possible and aren’t certain what day it will be ready.”

Me, I’m not holding my breath.

Monday, 5 May 2025

Listen Later ★

My thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring last week at DF. Listen Later is a super simple, super useful service that turns articles into podcast episodes. When you sign up, you get a custom email address to send articles to; every article you forward to your Listen Later address is transformed into very human-like narration, and gets delivered to your private podcast feed. You can subscribe to your private Listen Later podcast feed in any podcast app.

In addition to the email gateway, there’s a Shortcut for sending articles from Safari (on Mac or iOS), a web extension for Chrome, and a simple web interface for submitting new articles. It’s very simple and the narrated versions sound great.

Sign up for free and start listening today. New users get $2 in credits to try it out — no commitment. And if you like it, you simply prepay for credits as you go. There’s no subscription — you simply pay for what you use. I wish more services had a pay-as-you-go model like Listen Later’s.

Sunday, 4 May 2025

Koji Kobura Remakes the GoldenEye N64 ‘Pause Music’ ★

Just shoot this straight into my veins. So good.

(Via Saul Sutherland.)

Trump Has No Idea What the Declaration of Independence Means ★

Trump, showing off to ABC News’s Terry Moran the historical copy of the Declaration of Independence now hanging in the Oval Office:

Trump: Of course, you have the Declaration of Independence.

Moran: What does it mean to you?

Trump: Well, it means exactly what it says. It’s a declaration. It’s a declaration of unity and love and respect. And it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.

Watch the clip. A transcript doesn’t do justice to just how clear it is he has no idea what it means. I keep mentioning that Democrats should hammer, every day, the argument that Trump is way too old and now suffering from dementia. It’s just good politics. But I think it’s actually true, too. Mark my words, by the time he gets toward the end of this second term they’re going to have to somehow try to keep him away from microphones. You can’t get out of the fourth grade without being able to describe what the Declaration of Independence means.

Trump, Asked if He Has to ‘Uphold the Constitution’, Says, ‘I Don’t Know’ ★

NBC News:

When Welker tried to point out what the Fifth Amendment said, Trump suggested that such a process would slow him down too much.

“I don’t know. It seems — it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” he said. “We have thousands of people that are — some murderers and some drug dealers and some of the worst people on Earth.”

“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he added.

“But even given those numbers that you’re talking about, don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” Welker asked.

“I don’t know,” Trump replied. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”

The oath of office, which Trump has now taken twice, is “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

I’ll repeat what I wrote a few weeks ago when the Chinese government correctly mocked Trump’s tariffs as “a joke in the history of world economics”: Democrats and all other Trump opponents should repeatedly call into question Trump’s mental fitness for office. Don’t (just) argue that he’s trying to subvert the Constitution as a WWE-style authoritarian, but argue (also) that he clearly doesn’t even remember the oath of office. He’s in early dementia. Trump’s father was suffering from severe dementia when he was Trump’s age. Throw Biden under the bus: remind people that we just saw what happens when a mentally enfeebled 80-year-old^* serves as President, and that under Trump it’s far worse. Biden was sleepy but steady; Trump is agitated and erratic. Only some dementia sufferers act lost and confused — others act out in anger and belligerence. Trump is in the latter group. He doesn’t remember the oath of office.

* Keep calling him “80”; make his sycophants correct you that he’s “only” turning 79 in June.

Friday, 2 May 2025

Apple Updates U.S. App Review Guidelines Following Injunction ★

Apple, in an email to developers yesterday (as reported by MacRumors):

3.1.1: Apps on the United States storefront are not prohibited from including buttons, external links, or other calls to action when allowing users to browse NFT collections owned by others.

3.1.1(a): On the United States storefront, there is no prohibition on an app including buttons, external links, or other calls to action, and no entitlement is required to do so.

3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.

3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action.

This does not mean apps can now use alternative payment processing in-app. It doesn’t even mean apps are no longer required to offer Apple’s IAP in-app for purchases and subscriptions. All it means is that apps (in the US for now, but Apple really ought to make this worldwide, but I suspect Tim Cook wants to fight this on appeal in federal court) are free to inform users about offers available on the web, and to link to those offers on the web. Those links must open outside the app, in the user’s default web browser.

In-app: must use IAP. No alternative payments in-app. No webviews in-app for purchases.
Link to web, in default web browser, for anything else. ~~But the same offerings — but not at the same prices — must be available in-app too.~~

In other words, plainly and obviously, in-app purchases must compete with purchase offerings on the web. Which is exactly how the policy should have been for at least the last 10 years. It’s been incredibly frustrating and baffling that Tim Cook has refused to see that this is the obvious and correct path for everyone involved, including Apple itself.

Jason Snell on Apple’s Q2 FY 2025 and Frustrating Analyst Call ★

Jason Snell, with some excellent analysis (in addition to his usual visualizations of Apple’s numbers):

Another way Apple can reduce the impact of tariffs is by changing which global factories it uses to build products destined for the U.S. market. “For the June quarter, we do expect the majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. will have India as their country of origin,” Cook said, “and Vietnam to be the country of origin for almost all iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods products also sold in the U.S.” He said that if you’re outside of the U.S., you’re most likely to be buying products made in China.

Cook also commented briefly on Apple’s philosophy in dealing with the issues of trade wars between various countries: “Obviously, we’re very engaged on the tariff discussions,” he said. “We believe in engagement and will continue to engage.” Elizabeth Warren take note, I guess.

Apple also put a number on how much it will be affected by tariffs during its next fiscal quarter: $900 million. Yes, that’s nearly a billion dollars, but when you consider that Apple just generated $95.4 billion in revenue and that it’s expecting to grow from the $85.8 billion it generated during last year’s third quarter, a $0.9 billion step back doesn’t seem like a massive amount. The company also said it would probably lose a couple of points of gross margin as part of the deal.

And, regarding the analyst call (of which Snell also posted his usual very helpful transcript):

Credit to that brave analyst, Richard Kramer, who didn’t bother asking a ninth question about tariffs, but instead asked Cook head-on about the fact that Apple had failed to live up to its promise of shipping a more personalized Siri as a part of Apple Intelligence.

Cook’s answer was a canned response emphasizing the features Apple did ship, and “We need more time to complete our work on these features so they meet our high-quality bar. We are making progress, and we look forward to getting these features into customers’ hands.” Which is true, but not exactly informative.

Kramer, who is going to get an analyst gold star for this, also asked Cook about the various court cases that might really impact Apple’s business. Regarding yesterday’s court ruling in the Epic case, Cook said, “We strongly disagree with [it].... We’ve complied with the court’s order, and we’re going to appeal.” He declined to discuss Google’s case and the potential loss of search-engine referral revenue altogether.

But, and I think this is important, Cook did not wave off the suggestion that these were serious issues. “We’re monitoring these closely, but as you point out, there’s risk associated with them, and the outcome is unclear.”

It would be kind of ridiculous if Cook did wave off the suggestion that these were significant issues. A federal judge has referred the company to federal prosecutors for criminal contempt and she flatly stated in her ruling that VP of finance Alex Roman perjured himself multiple times.

These analyst calls are largely a waste of time. The questions are obtuse and the answers are obfuscating. But it was frustrating yesterday that the first eight questions were all about Trump’s tariffs. Cook said what he had to say about them early in the call. Only Richard Kramer had the backbone to ask any of the other interesting questions facing Apple — and he was the analyst who asked both those questions. But they stuck his questions at the very end of the call. (I think because Apple vets the questions, Apple orders them?) If you want to listen, Kramer’s first question (re: Siri/AI delays) starts at 48:30 on Apple’s recording of the call, and his second (re: legal cases) starts at 51:00.

It’s like all the analysts but Kramer had their fingers in their ears and eyes closed and were chanting “Everything’s normal for Apple, everything’s normal for Apple, everything’s normal for Apple...” No one even asked about the material impact of Apple being required to immediately change the App Store guidelines (in the US) to allow unfettered link-outs to the default web browser to make purchases and sign up for subscriptions. You’d think that would be a question.

Thursday, 1 May 2025

Apple Lost But That Doesn’t Mean Epic Won Anything ★

Jay Peters, The Verge, under the headline “Epic Says Fortnite Is Coming Back to iOS in the US”:

Following a court order that blocks Apple from taking a commission on purchases made outside the App Store, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says on X that the company plans to bring Fortnite back to iOS in the US “next week.”

The app hasn’t been available on iOS in the US since August 2020, when Apple kicked it off the App Store for implementing Epic’s own in-app payment system in violation of Apple’s rules. Since then, Apple and Epic have been embroiled in an ongoing legal battle, including a ruling more in Apple’s favor in 2021 and today’s ruling that is a major victory for Epic.

I could be wrong, but my read is that while the ruling was clearly a significant and reputationally damaging loss for Apple, that doesn’t make it a “win” for Epic at all. Just because the case is Epic v. Apple doesn’t mean Epic benefits by Apple’s excoriation. Apple won the original case. It was effectively a sidenote to that original case where Judge Gonzalez Rogers issued an injunction that Apple was required to allow developers to just freely link to alternative payment offerings on the web, outside the app. Basically, that if the App Store is not anticompetitive, apps at least must be able to inform users about competing options for purchases/signups.

Here’s a spitball analogy. Back in the cable TV days, there were many local channels that were available over the air, for free. (That’s still true but almost no one watches TV like this anymore.) Imagine if a monopolist or near-monopolist cable company declared that it would not permit any show on any channel to even mention the fact that the channel was also available free-of-charge over the air. That’s what Apple has been doing with apps in the App Store. If cable was so good, so much better than free over-the-air broadcast TV, it should have been able to thrive even if people were aware of their free over-the-air options. If the App Store is so good, so much better than free over-the-web purchases and signups, it should be able to thrive even if people are aware of their free over-the-web options. Basically, that was Gonzales Rogers’s injunction to Apple. And Apple’s response was basically, “Nah, we’re still not going to allow that, but we’ll pretend to comply by asserting that anyone who starts watching TV channels over-the-air after learning about that via something they saw on cable TV still has to pay us effectively the same rates they’ve been paying to watch those channels via our cable service.” Except instead Apple was asserting that they should collect 27% commissions on over-the-web purchases if the user learned about the option through the native app from the App Store.

None of this, as far as I can see, has anything to do with Epic Games or Fortnite at all, other than that it was Epic who initiated the case. Give them credit for that. But I don’t see how this ruling gets Fortnite back in the App Store. I think Sweeney is just blustering — he wants Fortnite back in the App Store and thinks by just asserting it, he can force Apple’s hand at a moment when they’re wrong-footed by a scathing federal court judgment against them.

Maybe Sweeney knows something I don’t, but I doubt it. I think this is just bluster, PR gamesmanship, and ought to be reported that way, at least for now. If there’s a single sentence in Gonzalez Rogers’s ruling that suggests Apple needs to reinstate Epic Games to the App Store, I missed it.