At this point, saying Android has a serious problem when it comes to phones receiving reliable Android upgrades is getting old. We’ve written about it a lot — even I, specifically, have written about it a lot. You’ve told us your thoughts. We all get it. Even with all that, though, the latest announcement of iOS 14 really sends the message home.
We do talk about this a lot. By its very nature, the Android market is fragmented. Extremely so.
Meanwhile, the flagship Android device from 2015 was the Samsung Galaxy S6. The most recent official version of Android that phone received was Android 7 Nougat, which dropped in 2016. Of course, it was well into 2017 before the Galaxy S6 actually got it. Since then: nothing.
I’ve seen this same message in a number of places, staunch Android supporters grumphing about their older phones reaching the practical end of Android update rollouts. And they are not wrong.
I’m intrigued by this show. Sara Bareilles is a terrific musician and songwriter, and J.J. Abrams has a great body of work behind him. But this trailer provides the first look at the show itself, a glimpse of the characters that inhabit Little Voice.
This is a nice to have feature, but especially useful here:
The new charged notification is a useful feature for the Apple Watch’s Sleep app, which lets users wear the Apple Watch at night for sleep tracking purposes.
The Apple Watch can’t be charged while it’s worn at night, of course, so after waking up, it will need to be placed on the charger if the battery is getting low.
Wake up, throw your Apple Watch on the charge, do your morning Loop posts (OK, maybe you do you), then, when you get the notification, grab your watch and go.
Doing unusual things at Mac startup has long required remembering keyboard shortcuts. Is it Command-Control-P-R or Command-Option-P-R that zaps the PRAM? Is that still even a thing? Is it Command-S for Recovery Mode—or wait, that’s Single User Mode, it’s Command-R for Recovery mode, Command-T for Target Disk Mode, Option to choose a startup disk.
With the advent of Macs running Apple-designed processors, things will get a whole lot simpler. As described Wednesday in the WWDC session Explore the New System Architecture of Apple Silicon Macs, these new Macs will only require you to remember a single button: Power.
Holding down that button at startup will bring up an entirely new macOS Recovery options screen. From here you’ll be able to fix a broken Mac boot drive, alter security settings, share your Mac’s disk with another computer, choose a startup disk, and pretty much everything else you used to have to remember keyboard shortcuts to do.
I’ll quibble with the “has long required remembering keyboard shortcuts” (my wife’s MBA refused to boot this AM and I had to Google the various shortcuts. No need to remember them), but it will definitely be a welcome change regardless.
We started Fleetsmith to balance the management and security needs of IT with the experience users love about Mac, iPad, and iPhone. We’re proud of the incredibly talented team we’ve built, and that we’ve stayed true to our mission: to make powerful, secure Apple fleet management available to everyone.
We’re thrilled to join Apple. Our shared values of putting the customer at the center of everything we do without sacrificing privacy and security, means we can truly meet our mission, delivering Fleetsmith to businesses and institutions of all sizes, around the world.
This is another one of those “small” acquisitions Apple makes of a company most of us have never heard of but, at some point in the future, will become very important to many of us.
Tuesday’s come and gone, but we’ve got you covered.
We learned all about WidgetKit, a tool that helps you build personal, relevant, glanceable interactions; the App Clip, a small part of your app that’s discoverable the moment it’s needed; new features and enhancements in iPadOS 14 that help create amazing experiences; and so much more. Check out the best of the sessions released today and find out what’s coming next.
I found this recap even more interesting than yesterday’s if only because I watched the keynote and didn’t need the recap. But now that the developers are getting hands on, more and more interesting things that didn’t make the Keynote are being reported on. There’s some really interesting screenless app interaction demoed at 57 seconds in for example.
Yesterday Apple killed the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) without killing the IDFA, by taking it out of the depths of the Settings app where almost no-one could find it — although increasingly people were finding it and turning it off — and making it explicitly opt-in for every single app. If an app wants to use the IDFA, iOS 14 will present mobile users with a big scary dialog box.
This is actually a genius move by Apple. Marketers can’t really get upset about losing the IDFA capability, because technically it’s still around. Apple gets to burnish its privacy credentials while not taking huge amounts of flack from brands and advertisers because, after all, who can argue with giving people more rights with their personal data?
And make no mistake: this is a great move for user privacy.
But it’s also a huge problem for a massive industry.
While I’m generally loathe to link to anything coming out of the Forbes Contributor Network, this is a well-done piece. Let’s all shed one single solitary crocodile tear in false sympathy for an industry that did everything it possibly could to abuse users.
John and I get together every year for a special podcast during WWDC to talk about the announcements. Despite the distance between us, this year was no different. John and I talk about the Mac transition, iPadOS, iOS, macOS, and even the lack of any major tvOS announcement.
It is easy to get wrapped up in debates about specifics, excited by tweaks or surprises, even an occasional scandal, or to wonder about the quality (is this is a good beta?). Under the hood, is a team that over time has done more and executed better than any I can name, ever.
Quite simply, what we’re seeing is some of the most remarkable product engineering over time in history.
High praise from Sinofsky, a guy who has lots of experience with this kind of stuff.
Steve Jobs said it would be bigger than the PC. Some dubbed it the most hyped product since the Apple Macintosh. An era of secrecy bubbled up in the year 2000 about an invention that would change the world as people knew it. People speculated it was a hydrogen-powered hovercraft, or a device that would break the rules of gravity itself.
Instead, it was a two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transport device called the Segway. Now, less than 20 years after the first Segway’s release, Fast Company has learned that the Segway brand will retire the last Segway as we know it.
Segway had originally planned to sell as many as 100,000 units in the first 13 months; the company only ever sold around 140,000 vehicles total.
Riding a Segway is gloriously dorky. I’ve ridden them in a warehouse in Nashville, and on tours in San Antonio, Rome, and London and always had a blast. But they were doomed as soon as various big city governments banned their use on city streets.
Apple’s new App Clip technology lets people load transient mini-apps without installing through the App Store. Users don’t have to authenticate or authorize the mini-app. It just downloads and works. Whether scanning a code (think QR code) or detecting an NFC tag, iOS users can download and run these pre-vetted packages that represent a light, typically transactional, view of a larger app experience. I went through some writeups and video today and thought I’d share a mental dump of my thoughts.
App Clips are designed for transaction. As an app, rather than a web page, they integrate seamlessly with the store ecosystem, allowing users to purchase goods and services from an instant menu and integrate with features like Apple Pay.
Honestly, there’s nothing an App Clip can do (maybe other than something like Apple Pay) that a reasonably designed web page cannot but it’s that charm and an eye towards lowering the transaction barrier that makes the Clips so compelling. With Clips, end-users can point, pick, and pay with an absolute minimum of effort.
Short but good description of the possibilities of App Clips.
With Back Tap, you can perform various action by double or tripple tap on the back of your iPhone. Here’s one I set double tap to take screenshot. pic.twitter.com/uZKv4Cjorf
At first blush, Back Tap seems wonderfully geeky but useless. Thinking on it some more, I can see some advantages but also some disadvantages as well. For example, would it be invoked easily, say while bumping around in a jacket or purse?
Apple, which has been the target of sharp criticism over its App Store policies and the power the company holds over developers, says it’s establishing a new process to hear the complaints of developers who disagree with its app-approval policies.
The tech giant announced two changes that it will roll out this summer for the app review process. First, Apple said, developers will “not only be able to appeal decisions about whether an app violates a given guideline of the App Store Review Guidelines, but will also have a mechanism to challenge the guideline itself.”
In a second change, Apple said, for apps that are already on the App Store, “bug fixes will no longer be delayed over guideline violations except for those related to legal issues.” Instead, the company said, developers will “be able to address the issue in their next submission.”
How the new policies will be put into practice remains to be seen, but Apple is at least trying to show that it’s willing to hear out the complaints of disgruntled iOS developers.
It will take some time to tell whether this is an olive branch or lip service to developers. On the face of it, it sounds like Apple is making some accommodations in the wake of the Hey email app kerfuffle.
In huge news within the camera industry, it has been announced that Olympus Corporation will be divesting its imaging business to a Japanese private equity fund.
We spoke to Olympus, which is eager to stress to customers that it is very much business as usual, and that “this is the right step to preserve our brand’s legacy, the products, and the value of our technology”.
I wonder if this is just the first shoe (of possibly many) to drop? According to the story, “JIP specializes in restructuring loss-making businesses to make them profitable before reselling them.” So this is likely the end of Olympus as we know it which would be a huge shame. I’ve used their M1 and TG brand cameras and like and recommend them.
This is an excellent explainer, soup to nuts, about Apple’s move from Intel to ARM. Per usual for Rene, this is packed with detail, but is ultimately rewarding.
Absolutely worth your time. One question remains for me: Does Apple need a Windows story anymore?
It wouldn’t be WWDC without a little music. Bring Khalid and The Killers into your living room and create your very own musical conference experience with the WWDC20 playlist collection, now available on Apple Music. The opening WWDC20 playlist features great artists like Glass Animals and Alicia Keys, and includes Aurora from this year’s opening video.
In addition, Apple Music is celebrating the powerful connection the development community has to music with a new “Music to Code to” series, which features several multi-hour playlists featuring different musical styles and genres.
If you are on an iOS device, follow this link to get to the official WWDC music playlist page.
Interestingly, if you follow the link on a Mac, you’ll get to an XML dump, but no musical joy.
The Verge’s Dieter Bohn takes the iOS 14 beta through its paces. Pretty watchable, and he covers a lot of ground, with sections on widgets, jiggle mode, editing app pages, app libraries, and much more.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and U.S. Senators Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) today introduced the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act, a bill to bolster national security interests and better protect communities across the country by ending the use of “warrant-proof” encrypted technology by terrorists and other bad actors to conceal illicit behavior.
This is breathtaking. At least they’re being somewhat clear here: they’re proposing outlawing all end-to-end encryption. Encryption that is “warrant-proof” is everything-proof — there are no decryption keys in the middle. Encryption that can be undone at the behest of a lawful warrant can also be undone by anyone with access to the keys.
The way I read it, this would require device manufacturers (like Apple) to build in some mechanism to allow them to (as the result of a warrant) break encryption. This is no small thing. This would break Apple’s privacy foundation.
Apple is cracking down on what it allows other companies to know about you. The company announced on Monday that iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur will feature a host of improved privacy features that will give users better control over their data and knowledge over what apps and websites know about them. This is great for users who don’t like the idea of, say, a period tracker app sending their data to a company they’ve never heard of. It’s bad news for that company they’ve never heard of.
Over on iOS, the mobile operating system that powers iPhones, apps will now have to get your permission before they can track your data, which is used to target ads to you based on that behavior. Apps often come loaded with secret trackers that send data, such as your location, device type, or usage time, to big companies like Facebook or Google or to the lesser-known brokers like Unacast or Cuebiq. These companies usually have their trackers in several, even thousands, of apps, allowing them to track your data across all of them. Your identity is typically anonymized and hidden behind a unique advertising identifier assigned to your phone. Privacy experts, however, will tell you that nothing is truly anonymous, and we’ve seen how it’s possible to re-identify someone.
If nothing else, Apple is making users more aware of the security issues surrounding web browsing. What the user does with that information is up to them.
First things first, that’s Serenity Caldwell doing the voiceover on that video. Great to hear her in her new role at Apple.
As to the video itself, it’s fantastic. To me, it’s like a 15 second, quick cut, high energy iPhone commercial, stretched out to almost 2 minutes. And every bit as enjoyable.
Rene doing what he does best: Talk through a bunch of detail, this time on iOS 14. Lots and lots of detail, worth watching all the way through.
One bit that struck me, albeit more for the macOS implications than what it does for iOS. Rene raises the issue of Safari changing codes, from H.265 to AV1. Question is, will I be able to finally see 4K YouTube videos in macOS Safari? Seems likely.
Anyway, lots to process in the video below. Good stuff.
Apple outlined several failsafes to ensure as few bumps along that road as possible. It will ship Rosetta 2, an emulator that will let ARM-based Macs run Intel software from any lagging developers. It will allow for virtualization of Linux, although Apple has been mum as to whether Macs will continue to be able to load Windows through Boot Camp or virtualization software. Most intriguingly—and unexpectedly—iPhone and iPad apps will be able to run natively on a Mac.
And, on the Roseta 2 emulator:
“It translates the apps when you install them so they can launch immediately and be instantly responsive,” said Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi during Monday’s keynote. “Rosetta 2 can also can also translate code on the fly when needed, like web browsing. It even handles the most complex pro apps and their plug-ins.”
And:
There’s also a question of at what point certain apps, in particular those that aren’t actively maintained, simply stop working on ARM-based Macs.
Terrific article. I’ve been watching developers download and install macOS 11 Big Sur (yes, it’s macOS 11), then jump through the hoops to build ARM versions of their existing apps. Without the actual Mac mini Developer Transition Kit in hand, hard to know if the ported apps actually work, but (grain of salt) assuming the ports do work on ARM hardware, this looks like a reasonably pain free port for mainstream apps.
I’ve got an app in the hopper, waiting to try for myself.
Today at WWDC20, Apple surprised audiences with a first look at “Foundation,” the highly anticipated Apple Original drama series based on the internationally revered and award-winning Isaac Asimov novel series of the same name.
In the teaser trailer, showrunner and executive producer David S. Goyer unveils a glimpse into the making of the epic saga, which chronicles a band of exiles on their monumental journey to save humanity and rebuild civilization amid the fall of the Galactic Empire.
For folks new to Isaac Asimov’s all-time great science fiction series, spend a bit of time on the Foundation Wikipedia page.
This Apple TV+ series has vaulted to the top of my can’t wait list.
Lots of interesting comments, but this one struck me:
People who rely on running Windows apps on their Macs, however, will not find a comforting story. Apple made a point of highlighting virtualization features that are built into macOS Big Sur running on Apple Silicon, but these seem to be for virtualizing operating systems built for Apple’s processors, not for emulating an operating system built for a different processor. I would imagine that, eventually, there will be a way to run Windows on ARM Macs–but it may take a while and it may be a slow, frustrating experience when it does arrive.
The fact that Apple demoed Linux running on an ARM Mac, and showed off Office apps but not Windows, was certainly noticeable. I’d love to know if there’s a plan in place to install Windows on an ARM Mac, or if that’s a dead path.
iOS 14 brings a fresh look to the things you do most often, making them easier than ever. New features help you get what you need in the moment. And the apps you use all the time become even more intelligent, more personal, and more private.
Check out some of the goodies Apple has in store for iOS 14.
Today Apple kicked off its all-online Worldwide Developers Conference bringing together millions of developers and fans from across the globe for the Special Event Keynote and Platforms State of the Union. The day was filled with announcements and innovations that will push the experience of Apple platforms and products even further. From macOS Big Sur, featuring the biggest design upgrade since the introduction of Mac OS X, to watchOS 7, the new App Library in iOS 14, and enhanced handwriting capabilities with Apple Pencil in iPadOS 14, here are some of the most groundbreaking features and app development tools unveiled at WWDC20.
How many of these are not necessarily innovative (that can be subjective) but features you want to use?
