Month: February 2022

Apple’s Rules for External Payment Mechanisms in iOS Apps ⇥ developer.apple.com

After millions of Euros in fines for its delinquency, Apple has announced its rules for developers of dating apps who wish to use external payment mechanisms in the Netherlands. While ostensibly straightforward, they are not easy to comply with, but likely form a template for other circumstances where apps will be permitted to use non-IAP mechanisms.

Developers are required to apply for the entitlement allowing them to use a non-Apple payment flow. This includes fields for the payment processor’s information. Apple says developers must “demonstrate that your PSP meets the criteria of having a secure payment processing system and an established track record of protecting user privacy”. Apple lists several other privacy and security requirements for payment processors. Then, in the separate app binary developers must produce solely for the Dutch App Store, they must also include a message which “must exactly match” the following (shown in English and Dutch on Apple’s website; I am only quoting the English here):

Title: This app does not support the App Store’s private and secure payment system

Body: All purchases in the <App Name> app will be managed by the developer “<Developer Name>.” Your stored App Store payment method and related features, such as subscription management and refund requests, will not be available. Only purchases through the App Store are secured by Apple.

Learn More

Action 1: Continue

Action 2: Cancel

Just look at the striking twist in language here. The title and final sentence the body text literally say that the app’s payment mechanism is different from Apple’s, and that Apple’s is “private and secure”. But it implies the payment standard used by the developer is less private and has inferior security to Apple’s own — even though Apple requires all developers to use a private and secure payment processor. Apple is selling asbestos-free cereal, while requiring all other cereals to be asbestos-free but not allowing them to label themselves as such.

I wonder how Dutch regulators will feel about that.

Apple also says that it is entitled to a commission of 27% on all sales, which is about what I expected. The App Store commission is not solely a payment processing fee and never has been. It is a profit margin for Apple, plain and simple. I am not for a moment arguing that this is a good thing or that it is acceptable, but I do not think developers should hope for a dramatically different commission unless lawmakers intervene.

Update: If I am reading this right, Apple’s 27% commission does not appear to differ for third-party subscriptions after the first year, while subscriptions sold through the App Store drop to a 15% commission.

Facebook Blames Apple, So the New York Times Blames Apple ⇥ nytimes.com

Here is a fascinating lesson in framing, courtesy Kate Conger and Brian X. Chen in a New York Times article headlined “A Change by Apple Is Tormenting Internet Companies, Especially Meta” (via Karl Bode):

Apple’s vision of a more private web is not necessarily a more profitable one for internet companies that depend on advertising revenue.

[…]

Meta’s warning and its cratering stock price were reminders that even among tech giants, Apple holds extraordinary sway because of its control of the iPhone. And the tech industry received a clear notice that a long-planned shift in how people’s information may be used online was having a dramatic impact on Madison Avenue and internet companies that have spent years building businesses around selling ads.

This alarmist story is accompanied by a chart illustrating the year-over-year declines in the prices of shares in Meta, Pinterest, Snap, and Twitter. It gives enormous credence to Mark Zuckerberg’s claims that App Tracking Transparency, which rolled out last spring in iOS 14.5, is to blame for a forecasted decline in advertising revenue.

But Facebook has made the same claim before, even as earnings grew. Also, it is not like a negative impact by App Tracking Transparency is some sort of universal truth, as implied by the Times. Here is what Conger and Chen report later in the same story:

Shares in Snap, which reported its fourth-quarter results on Thursday afternoon, fell about 17 percent earlier in the day. But prices bounced back in after-hours trading after the company said it made its first profit. The share prices of Twitter and Pinterest also dropped after Meta’s earnings report, but recovered in after-hours trading Thursday after Pinterest also reported better-than-expected earnings.

So shareholders in other companies that depend on advertising — like Pinterest and Snap — got spooked by Facebook’s earnings and forecast, but re-invested when they realized that both companies are adapting to these changes with far less grumbling. Conger and Chen also report in this very same story that Facebook is allowed to keep tracking iOS users in aggregate, which I think is pretty crappy, but should be a boon for Facebook.

Facebook should take a lesson from Pinterest and Snap in adapting to this changes rather than whining about them. The Times should do better than treat them as a reliable narrator of the current ad climate.

Facebook’s Faltering Relevance Is Worldwide ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Will Oremus and Elizabeth Dwoskin, Washington Post:

For the average Facebook user, this may not mean much in the short run. The social network remains massive, indispensable for many, and isn’t going away anytime soon. This is not Facebook’s “Myspace moment,” at least not yet.

Rather, it’s a harbinger of a shift already well underway in Menlo Park, one in which Facebook is no longer the center of Meta’s attention or the locus of its most important innovations, but a profitable legacy product to be maintained. That diminished stature may reassure people who worry about Facebook’s impact on discourse and democracy, but it could cut both ways: It may mean that building increasingly sophisticated content policies and moderation systems becomes less of a strategic priority over time.

Meanwhile, it underscores that Instagram, WhatsApp and, increasingly, Reality Labs — the division tasked with developing virtual and augmented reality hardware and software — are the company’s future. Meta will do everything it can to keep them growing, to fend off rivals, and to find ways to squeeze more time from their users and more money from their advertisers.

I sort of buy John Gruber’s spitball theory, that social networks are inherently fleeting products. I can see how we may desire something new and different, and how network effects compel us — in the broadest sense — to move from a dying platform to one finding its stride. But I do not think it had to be this way for the Facebook “blue site”.

I wonder what it is like in an alternative universe where Facebook attempted to keep innovating and preempt the privacy and content moderation problems of its own making, instead of digging in and hoping to ride its existing successes as long as it could. Remember when it tried to fly internet access drones? That was with the hope of getting people to keep signing up for Facebook. I think that is a strange style of innovation: instead of trying something new, they worked on implausible ways to keep the old growing.

Meta’s Sad Slide Whistle of a Day ⇥ bnnbloomberg.ca

Thyagaraju Adinarayan and Jan-Patrick Barnert, Bloomberg:

Meta Platforms Inc.’s one-day crash now ranks as the worst in stock-market history.

The Facebook parent plunged 26 per cent Thursday on the back of woeful earnings results, and erased about US$251.3 billion in market value. That’s the biggest wipeout in market value for any U.S. company ever.

If that sounds bad because maybe you own stock in this company or something, maybe hearing it in VoiceOver will cheer you up.

It was only earlier this week that CNBC reported with a straight face that “real estate” sales in the “metaverse” reached half a billion dollars in the last year. Perhaps most embarrassing for Meta Inc. is that it was not listed as one of the “big four” platforms selling pixels on a screen as land. But surely Meta’s association with this new medium would boost investors’ morale, right?

Well, Meta is already spreading the blame around. It says App Tracking Transparency is finally going to hit the company’s revenue to the tune of $10 billion. And it also says that its investments in 3D meetings will take time to pay off. So what can it do in the meantime?

Naomi Nix and Kurt Wagner, at a different flavour of Bloomberg:

At a company-wide virtual meeting, Zuckerberg explained that the historic stock drop was a result of Meta’s weak forecast for revenue in the current quarter, according to a person who attended and was not authorized to speak about it. It is important to focus on growing Facebook’s short-video product, he said.

A real-life pivot to video — in 2022.

TrackerZapper ⇥ github.com

Do you copy URLs? Do you hate when there is a bunch of tracking junk at the end that you feel compelled remove before passing along that URL to a friend or pasting it into a blog post?

You need Robb Knight’s TrackerZapper. It is an excellent, silent, and lightweight menubar utility that strips common trackers off the end of URLs. I’ve been using it for months and even contributed a little bit to the latest version — only, like, eight characters, so please do not worry.

Also, it is open source, so you can see for yourself that it is doing nothing sketchy with your keyboard entry or clipboard.

BlackBerry Sells Mobile and Messaging Patents to Newly-Formed ‘Catapult IP Innovations’ ⇥ arstechnica.com

Ron Amadeo, Ars Technica:

If the name “Catapult IP Innovations” didn’t give it away, weaponizing BlackBerry patents is the most obvious outcome of this deal. According to the press release, Catapult’s funding for the $600 million deal is just a $450 million loan, which will immediately be given to BlackBerry in cash. The remaining $150 million is a promissory note with the first payment due in three years. That means Catapult is now a new company with a huge amount of debt, no products, and no cash flow. Assuming the plan isn’t to instantly go bankrupt, Catapult needs to start monetizing BlackBerry’s patents somehow, which presumably means suing everyone it believes is in violation of its newly acquired assets.

Is being a patent troll really an “IP innovation”?

Lux Looks at the iPhone 13 Pro ⇥ lux.camera

Every year, I look forward to the explanation of the new iPhones’ camera systems from the good people at Lux. That is in no small part thanks to the breathtaking sample photos from Sebastiaan de With, and this year’s article is no exception.

Like de With, I think Apple’s processing choices are often too aggressively tuned for noise removal, even on my iPhone 12 Pro. A little grain is fine for my tastes and even more is acceptable in darker images.

I recommend reading this in full, but it is worth your time just for the pictures. Some variation of this has been said way too many times, but the iPhone — and modern smartphone cameras generally — are less of a telephone that happens to have a camera, and more like a compact camera with networking capabilities.

Life360 Says It Will Stop Selling Precise Location Data ⇥ themarkup.org

Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng, the Markup:

The family safety app Life360 announced on Wednesday that it would stop selling precise location data, cutting off one of the multibillion-dollar location data industry’s largest sources. The decision comes after The Markup revealed that Life360 was supplying up to a dozen data brokers with the whereabouts of millions of its users.

Good. But Life360 says it will keep selling precise data to Arity, and “aggregate” data to Placer.ai. This is all at the company’s behest — there is nothing legally preventing it from beginning similar data marketing agreements.

Enough About Joe Rogan ⇥ talkingpointsmemo.com

Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo:

This may sound like I’m “bothsidesing” this, putting the quackish cranks on an equal footing with those trying to rebut them. I’m not. Or at least I hope I’m not. But this is all part of some larger collapse of public trust and cultural disintegration which transcends the offenders and those trying to police them. It’s not disinformation. It’s more mundane. Rogan is just a meathead who has a knack for entertaining and interesting conversations — clearly on the basis of his massive listenership — who should do better but won’t. And that refusal to do better, to sweat some details, and the trouble it gets him into is a significant part of his attraction to many listeners.

[…]

There are limits to what we can do to prevent people from lying to people who want to be lied to.

This is all true, and I agree with the overall thrust of Marshall’s argument. I just wonder how we are able to begin climbing out of this trust hole? Societal problems with confidence in institutions and experts are decades old and worse in some places than others, and progress on countering it will be slow when there is still a voracious and lucrative market for those who take advantage of it.

Software Paper Cuts ⇥ matthewbischoff.com

Matthew Bischoff (via Michael Tsai):

The more insidious thing about these bugs is that they’re rarely reported by users or caught by automated testing tools because they’re too small to complain about or too obscure to write tests for. Great QA testers can find and file these types of bugs, but they usually flounder at the end of a long backlog of new features. This means that if you’re an engineer on a piece of software, you’re the person who’s best able to notice and fix these bugs. Yes, you might have to convince your boss or your product manager to set aside some time every so often to do so, but I promise your users will be grateful, and your product will improve in meaningful ways if you do.

I promise that users notice these bugs all the time and, especially in products that do not have a more technically literate audience, they become sources of confusion and dissatisfaction. They make software feel brittle. Product managers, please encourage your developers to hunt down and resolve these bugs every single day. Chip away at the list until nothing remains, and you will end up with software that feels like users can rely on it.