Day: 12 September 2022

Apple Releases iOS 16 ⇥ apple.com

Apple is, I think, rightly proud of the new Lock Screen options, which is a little funny because the best part of this update is how much it permits users to customize for themselves.

Federico Viticci in his usual longform review:

To be fair, we’ve always been able to customize the Lock Screen, even in the very early days of the iPhone and iPhone OS 1.0.

The customization we have in iOS 16 includes wallpapers – and in fact goes above and beyond anything Apple ever offered for wallpapers on iOS – but that’s only one component of a larger system. A good way to think about it is the following: customizing the Lock Screen is now very similar to customizing your watch face on the Apple Watch.

Apple insists on calling different Lock Screen variants a “Wallpaper Pair”. If you add a widget to your current Lock Screen, it will ask whether you want to “set [it] as a Wallpaper Pair”, which never feels normal no matter how often I have seen it the past few months.

Speaking of widgets, there are some baffling limitations. The widget row below the clock can best be thought of as four cells, and widgets for it can be one or two cells wide. But a widget two cells wide must live in the first two cells; a user cannot place a one-cell widget to the left of a two-cell widget.

That said, this is a phenomenal update. My iPhone feels more like my own iPhone, not just any one of a billion. I can finally launch the camera app I actually use from the Lock Screen. There are many smaller changes in iOS 16 that are worth this update — and many that I find questionable, like the new scrubber bars, and the many widths of Lock Screen elements — but these customization options are an impressive achievement. They allow more individual personality without losing a sense of iOS-iness.

At Code, TikTok Unites Primarily American Tech Factions Against It ⇥ axios.com

Ina Fried, Axios:

While TikTok had no official presence at the Code Conference, the Chinese-owned firm was the talk of the annual gathering of tech world notables this week — serving as the foil of choice for a parade of tech executives, pundits and even some government officials.

[…]

[Scott] Galloway, who took every chance to call out the dangers of TikTok, was the sharpest critic in calling for it to be banned, but others were happy to join in.

Galloway repeated that demand on “Real Time with Bill Maher”. In fairness to Galloway, his disagreement with TikTok’s practices is not unique. He has repeatedly treated Facebook with disdain and dislikes surveillance advertising. But his claims about the control impressed by TikTok is on another level.

Taylor Lorenz on Twitter [sic]:

“Tiktok is flooding our children with Chinese propaganda all day” mf have u been on tiktok like once ever please stop. And before ppl come and twist my words, I’m not saying tiktok is “good” just that there’s no evidence of what he’s constantly alleging

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

As we’ve noted several times, you could ban TikTok tomorrow with a giant patriotic hammer and the Chinese government could nab all the same U.S. consumer data from just an absolute parade of companies and dodgy data brokers. And they can do that because U.S. privacy and security standards have been a trash fire for decades, especially when it comes to things like sensitive user location data.

And they’ve been a trash fire for decades because most of the same folks crying about TikTok prioritized making money over consumer privacy standards. None of these folks, nor the operators of conferences like Code, seem particularly keyed in to any of this.

I am certain some people are truly concerned about an internet where an autocratic state has an increased presence. I get it. I do not think everyone with these worries is xenophobic. I also do not believe an American-dominated internet is a universally acceptable variant. But it is the status quo, and a lot of the world’s private data is held by U.S. companies with few regulations and little oversight.

It would be worrisome for TikTok fears to be used as an excuse against U.S. privacy regulations on competition grounds. Unfortunately, that is the case being made by advocacy firms working on behalf of big American technology companies.

Instagram Users Are Avoiding Reels ⇥ wsj.com

Salvador Rodriguez, Meghan Bobrowsky, and Jeff Horwitz, Wall Street Journal:

Instagram users cumulatively are spending 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, less than one-tenth of the 197.8 million hours TikTok users spend each day on that platform, according to a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that summarizes internal Meta research.

The document, titled “Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022,” was published internally in August. It said that Reels engagement had been falling — down 13.6% over the previous four weeks — and that “most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever.”

This is particularly impressive as Reels are being pushed into all parts of Instagram, making them almost impossible to ignore. Brutal.

Meta is a scatter-brained company. Its few near-term ideas are alienating users, and the long-term prospects of its virtual reality projects are not compelling. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe Instagram simply looks like it is frantically chasing TikTok’s clout, and its parent company actually has really great plans for a virtual world which even the most Facebook averse person will want to explore. Maybe what looks like its blunder years will actually prove to be a decade of growth and reinvention.

Or maybe all of this is just as it seems: Meta’s best products are the things it can easily duplicate or acquire, and the well is dry.