Six Colors:

The Apple Watch’s app model doesn’t work. The large screen of circular app icons is hard to navigate, and most apps aren’t worth the trouble, often because they’re slow and unreliable. Glances are interesting, but often too limited. The sole button is dedicated to a feature—bringing up a wheel of friends so you can send them texts and Digital Touch sketches—that’s not remotely core to the experience of using the device. There aren’t enough watch face options, and the ones that do exist aren’t particularly customizable. Fitness features are erratic and require too much user interaction.

And:

I’d like to see at least an option to map the watch’s button to an action other than bringing up a list of favorite friends. More watch faces are also on my wish list, and while I’d like to see third-party watch faces, I’d trade that for Apple-designed faces that are more flexible about how (and when) they display information, including support for complications that appear only in certain contexts.

Third party watch faces would be a big win. Or how about the ability to resize the various areas that make up the watch face?

The biggest problem with the Apple Watch is that it’s sloooooow. The second biggest problem is that it’s sloooooooooooooooow. There’s only so much software can do to fix those problems without a commensurate hardware update, but there are improvements that can be made so that we spend less time waiting for our Apple Watch.

And that’s the biggest problem of all. Snappy is as snappy does.

Tuesday, Phil Schiller had a sit-down to talk about major changes coming to the App Store. Jim Dalrymple wrote a nice overview of the changes in this post.

One of the three core topics Phil covered was the expansion of subscription pricing. From JimD’s post:

Currently the 70-30 revenue split for subscriptions is the same as regular purchased apps. However, under the new subscription rules, that revenue split will favor the developers more in the second year on individual subscriptions. Developers will get an 85-15 revenue share for all subscribers that have been customers for over a year. This will also affect all existing apps and subscribers, not just new apps.

Developers will be able to choose one of over 200 subscription price points, and they can create territory specific prices, making subscriptions even more flexible.

John Gruber dug into the details in this longer post, focusing on the uncertainty seemingly built into the system:

The problem with that is that developers don’t know whether they’re going to be approved or not. As it stands, they would need to do all the engineering (and design) work to support subscriptions, submit the app, and wait to see if it’s approved and perhaps appeal if it isn’t. That’s bad enough for an existing app whose developer wants to switch to subscription pricing. But this uncertainty is downright untenable for a new app whose developer sees subscription pricing as the only sustainable business model to justify the app’s development in the first place.

The dream for developers is to be able to make money doing what they love, building apps for the App Store. For most developers, that dream is simply unrealistic. The App Store economics just aren’t there any more. The possibility of subscription pricing can help balance the scales, make it more financially feasible to make a living building and maintaining apps.

But developers need a bit more guidance here. They need to know up front if an app they build is eligible for subscription pricing. If not, they can put there energies into building something else.

My guess is, this guidance is coming, either at next week’s WWDC or as subscription pricing gets closer to rollout. But sooner is better than later for these details.

Peter Kafka, writing for Recode:

If you are an independent app developer or publisher, you have probably known this for a while, because you have found it very difficult to get people to download your app — the average American smartphone user downloads zero apps per month.

But now even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether. Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They’re not looking for new ones.

Last month, the top 15 app publishers saw downloads drop an average of 20 percent in the U.S., according to research from Nomura, which relies on data from app tracker SensorTower.

Indie developers have known this for quite some time, but the falling numbers are making their way to the very top of the food chain, where the bread is buttered.

Makes me wonder if that is part of the motivation for Apple’s App Store shakeup.

Everyone seems to really like this new app, although Dave Caolo did have some trouble with the GIF.

Uber must hand over documents to a New York judge probing whether private investigators hired by the ride-hailing company fraudulently sought information about its opponents in an antitrust case, according to a court ruling on Tuesday.

uh-oh.

Jonny Evans, writing for Computerworld, weighs in with his predictions for the future of Apple Pay. One in particular struck me:

Banks are developing cash machines with NFC support. I imagine these will demand both a biometric element and passcode in order to protect against theft, but one day you will inevitably be able to withdraw cash from any ATM anywhere just by waggling your Apple Watch above the machine.

I can definitely see this happening. I wonder what impact this will have on ATM crime. Will the secure enclave make ATM local robberies harder or easier? [See the follow-on post, An Apple Watch wrist experiment]

UPDATE: This from a few years ago. And this. And this.

The concept has been proven, prototypes built, looks like it’s now simply a matter of waiting through the ATM refresh cycle. [H/T Loop reader James Lopez]

Interested in learning how to program? Have some dead time, perhaps during a commute or visit to the DMV? Check out TapCoding, an iOS app that teaches you the fundamentals of Swift, all via taps on your iPhone.

This is a very clever approach and definitely worth a look. The app is free, with in-app purchases to unlock content. Don’t let those in-app purchases turn you off. The entire curriculum is only $6.99, far less than you’d pay for a book with comparable content.

Here’s a link to TapCoding. Go learn Swift.

Farhad Manjoo, writing for the New York Times:

Basketball has always been accommodative of celebrity culture — the small arena and the courtside seats make seeing and being seen one of the central perks of high-dollar tickets. In an earlier time, Jack Nicholson became a fixture at Lakers games, while the Knicks claimed Spike Lee and Woody Allen as all but official mascots.

Now, in Oakland, the Golden State Warriors have … Eddy Cue.

And:

With Silicon Valley just a short Tesla drive away from Oracle Arena, Mr. Cue is far from the only techie losing his mind over the Warriors. The team is owned by a coalition of tech investors, and on any given night, you will find a passel of executives, venture capitalists and other assorted billionaires cheering from the sidelines.

And:

Yet success has had its costs. Thanks to bandwagon fans like me, ticket prices have soared, leaving longtime ticket holders fuming. Gentrification has already begun, and it is bound to get worse. Soon the team will move to an exclusive new arena in San Francisco, abandoning its roots in an industrial area of Oakland.

The price of success. The Warriors are emblematic of the Valley Effect, where the moneyed move in and prices are driven up.

How do you preserve the fan base as the entry price rises? The problem for the Warriors resembles, in broad strokes, the problem of housing in the Bay Area. There is a finite supply of tickets to the games, and in an industry that produces astonishing wealth, there will always be enough people with enough money to pay nearly any price for tickets.

A very valley problem.

Since its inception, podcasting has largely been an indie game. Though there are larger players in this space, almost all are independent companies. Ben Thompson digs into the current model, and the difficulties of making money with this model:

A major challenge in podcast monetization is the complete lack of data: listeners still download MP3s and that’s the end of it; podcasters can measure downloads, but have no idea if the episode is actually listened to, for how long, or whether or not the ads are skipped.

Enter Stitcher, a free app that streams more than 65,000 podcasts. Stitcher was just bought by Midroll Media (itself owned by E.W. Scripps), and it promises to upend the podcast universe.

Stitcher is thought to be the 2nd most popular podcast player, although it has long been controversial in some circles for its default practice of hosting podcasts itself (instead of directing users to download them directly from a podcaster’s server) and inserting ads. That model, though, was likely attractive to Scripps/Midroll: controlling the files and the player means the possibility of making meaningful measurements of play data plus dynamic ad insertion at scale.

As you might expect, this relatively gargantuan entry into the podcasting space does not sit well with independent podcasters.

The big threat:

Moreover, Midroll’s leading role in advertising combined with Scripps’ bank account mean the company could offer big bucks to leading podcasters to make themselves exclusive to Stitcher, driving users to the measurable app to the long-term benefit of the company’s efforts to attract brand advertisers.

Read Ben’s post. There’s a lot at stake for the future of podcasting.

Weeks after CurrentC was delayed (again) and half the team was laid off, the mobile payment that was supposed to serve as a merchant-backed alternative to payment systems from Apple and Android may be over for good. Or at least that’s the impression one might get from an email sent to testers of the system.

Not a surprise at all.

They added the page to their site today. Bookmark it and be ready, it’s going to be fun.

Today we are releasing Motion Stills, an iOS app from Google Research that acts as a virtual camera operator for your Apple Live Photos. We use our video stabilization technology to freeze the background into a still photo or create sweeping cinematic pans. The resulting looping GIFs and movies come alive, and can easily be shared via messaging or on social media.

Interesting.

Techcrunch:

A new application called Flag has launched on the App Store, promising user free photo prints that are actually free – no shipping or handling charges, no credit card required. This is possible because these photo prints will be ad-supported – that is, businesses pay to advertise on the back of the photo. Effectively, it’s an ad that people will never throw away.

This is an interesting solution but it’s not for everyone – you have to give up a certain amount of information to advertisers. That being said, I ordered my 20 prints fairly easily from the app on my phone. I’ll be interested to see how they come out.

This is just a notification of an investigation, not a judgement.

The National Football League’s Twitter account was hacked on Tuesday and a false tweet was sent that Commissioner Roger Goodell had died, an NFL spokesman said on his Twitter account.

A couple of good tips here. It will definitely save a lot of time searching back through years of photos by narrowing the search a little. I wonder if it will find a photo you named—I’ll have to try that later.

Den of Geek:

With private business illegal in the Soviet Union, Pajitnov was nervous about what his superiors might do if he attempted to make Tetris into a commercial piece of software.

And:

Tetris was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and into Hungary a short while later, and it was from here that Pajitnov’s game began to head across Europe. Like a virus, Tetris was spreading its addictive properties from computer to computer.

And:

Tetris was an immediate hit, earning ecstatic reviews and selling in healthy quantities. The game’s fame was spreading, but as Tetris’ name became ever more valuable, the tussle over who should own the rights to it would soon intensify.

This is a pretty interesting read. I think the story would make a great movie.

Times of India:

The government is expected to allow Apple to open its own retail outlets in the country without any sourcing requirement for two-to-three years as it tries to work out an arrangement under which the Cupertino, California-based company will agree to local purchases once it gets a stronger toehold in the country.

This would be a foot in the door for Apple. Hard to imagine the government would force Apple to close all their Apple Stores once they are operating, especially since they would become a local employer and a shutdown would mean job loss.

Huh. Think this price cut is purely a Best Buy loss leader, or is this a sign of new Apple Watch hardware in the short term?

Kirk McElhearn:

Macworld UK published an article explaining how to find the IMEI of an iPhone. This number used to be etched on the back of the device, and it’s now under the SIM tray. But there are other ways you an find it: by dialing a secret code in the Phone app, or in the Settings app.

But the article left out another way. You can find the IMEI in iTunes, even if you no longer have the phone, as long as you’ve backed it up.

Read on for the details.

Steve Hendrix, writing for The Washington Post:

When the traffic on Timothy Connor’s quiet Maryland street suddenly jumped by several hundred cars an hour, he knew who was partly to blame: the disembodied female voice he could hear through the occasional open window saying, “Continue on Elm Avenue . . . .”

The marked detour around a months-long road repair was several blocks away. But plenty of drivers were finding a shortcut past Connor’s Takoma Park house, slaloming around dog walkers and curbside basketball hoops, thanks to Waze and other navigation apps.

And:

Connor borrowed a tactic he read about from the car wars of Southern California and other traffic-weary regions: He became a Waze impostor. Every rush hour, he went on the Google-owned social-media app and posted false reports of a wreck, speed trap or other blockage on his street, hoping to deflect some of the flow.

He continued his guerrilla counterattack for two weeks before the app booted him off, apparently detecting a saboteur in its ranks.

Does Waze have a responsibility in these sorts of situations? Are the suburban streets fair game here?

Either way, I suspect these sorts of conflicts will end in speed bumps.

Jason Snell, writing for Macworld:

It strikes me that Siri could be a much better assistant to people who are driving their cars. CarPlay is a nice idea, but far more people have Bluetooth audio in their cars than have CarPlay. It’s unsafe to look at an iPhone screen while you’re driving, but Siri can theoretically replace that need. It performs some basic capabilities now — reading recent text messages when you ask, for example — but too much of what it offers requires you to look at the screen. (Siri should also be much more wordy when it knows I’m driving, including offering to read the text of notifications I receive and providing a more interactive interface for processing lists of information.)

This whole article was interesting, but this bit about Siri, CarPlay and the problem of translating information into an audio response for screenless folks really clicked for me.

I think rote reading of a screenful of data is not necessarily the best approach. As Siri gets smarter about the data that flows through it, Siri can also learn a set of ways to summarize that data.

Instead of reading a screenful of weather data, Siri could just say Sunny and 81°, then allow you to ask a follow up question.

Classy.

Lance Ulanoff, writing for Mashable, from his long form interviews with Apple VP of Sales and Marketing Phil Schiller and VP of Mac and iPad Engineering John Ternus:

The little strip of black along the two back edges of the MacBook’s twin speakers could easily have been mistaken for a bit of shielding or a vibration dampener. Except, that’s not what it is.

Some like to call it the “Speaktenna.” The black strip along the back edge of the MacBook speakers is a never-before-tried combination of speakers and antennas for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It’s a fairly ingenious bit of space-saving technology that teardown artists ignored.

But that’s not really the story. It’s about what “speaktenna” represents: the Apple way of conceiving, designing and building its products.

Chock full of examples, quotes, images and anecdotes, this is another great read, worth making time for.