Link Log

Wishing for a More Flexible Apple Display Strategy ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I’ve been thinking about Apple’s relationship with computer displays lately. Maybe it was the report that the iMac Pro might somehow return, combined with John Voorhees of MacStories detailing how he gave up the Studio Display for an ASUS monitor? And, of course, there’s the prospect that we may be seeing new Apple-made standalone displays in 2026.

I don’t want to go back to a world where Apple no longer makes standalone displays. But that said, I think the company’s approach to display technology needs a serious upgrade.

Co-signed. When I bought my iMac 5K in early 2019,1 it was the only big desktop display Apple sold. Now, as I think about an update, I am dismayed I will not officially be able to use it as an external display, though it seems like Luna Display might be worth a shot over Thunderbolt 3. If that does not work, it is gutting to me that I will have to effectively re-purchase this same 5K panel for my desk. And then there is the question of what I should do with my otherwise-good-just-outdated iMac.

I have been keeping an eye on Michael Tsai’s posts about displays, particularly those regarding non-Apple 27-inch 5K models. I know I have to adjust my expectations. Even so, these all look pretty tacky. Imagine being from Asus or ViewSonic and thinking I want to look at an ugly logo all day long. Still, a near-thousand-dollar difference is hard to dismiss, especially since Apple’s expensive display continues to have software problems.

And, of course, the only other display Apple sells is a 32-inch model that is over-engineered for most people, costs nearly eight thousand dollars in Canada with a stand, and has not been updated in over six years. Asus’ comparable 6K display is under $2,000, though it is not as bright and it looks pretty tragic.

  1. Arguably the worst time in modern Apple history to be shopping for a new Mac. Butterfly keyboards in all the laptops, stale desktops, and on the verge of the last batch of Intel-based Macs. ↥︎

Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai Are Cowards ⇥ theverge.com

Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge:

Less than five years ago, I sat through the interminable Epic v. Apple antitrust trial. Real heads will remember that Apple’s lawyers heavily implied that a naked bananaman called Mr. Peely was somehow inappropriate for court. This came after a week where Apple argued that an indie storefront that users could install via Epic was a problem because it hosted porny games, calling games on Itch.io “offensive and sexualized.”

You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs, and of children with so-called “donut glaze” on their faces — which, by the way, were being generated at a rate of one per minute. I’d also call that “offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste” and *especially *“just plain creepy”! Do you need a back brace to stand up straight, buddy? Because at this point, I am certain you haven’t got a single vertebra.

Correctly righteous anger. That there has barely been any reckoning with this from Apple, Google, or even xAI despite at least a week of mainstream media coverage shows a callous indifference to the ongoing effects of the victims of this abuse. The best argument I can imagine — and it is a terrible argument — is that Apple’s lawyers advised the company against doing anything that looks anticompetitive since it is currently being sued by xAI. This is why it is a bad idea to rely on private corporations to do the job of regulators and law enforcement — but, still, Apple and Google should not be carrying apps from this company for as long as it continues to be a mass-scale abuse generator.

Third-Party Browsers Report Different iOS Version Numbers Than Safari ⇥ macrumors.com

Hartley Charlton, MacRumors:

In the first week of January last year, 89.3% of MacRumors visitors used a version of iOS 18. This year, during the same time period, only 25.7% of MacRumors readers are running a version of iOS 26. In the absence of official numbers from Apple, the true adoption rate remains unknown, but the data suggests a level of hesitation toward iOS 26 that has not been seen in recent years.

The numbers being reported — 15% from StatCounter, 26% from MacRumors, and 55% from TelemetryDeck — are all over the place, but there is a clear-ish direction: people are not updating to iOS 26 like they have previous versions of iOS. There are lots of possible reasons why. Liquid Glass is the most visible explanation, but it is also possible the growing size of iOS plays a role. Apple Intelligence alone consumes nearly 7 GB of disk space on my iPhone.

Even so, the differences in these numbers are wild, especially compared to previous years where there was tighter agreement between different reports. For example, in January last year, TelemetryDeck reported about 78% were running iOS 18, StatCounter said it was 63%, and Apple itself said it was 68% of all iPhone users, rising to 76% adoption among users of devices four years old or newer. That is a fifteen point spread between. This year, with only third-party data so far available, it is a forty point spread between StatCounter’s 15% and TelemetryDeck’s 55%. Something is not adding up.

Update: My iPhone running iOS 26.3 is detected by StatCounter’s user agent detection tool as an iOS 18.7 device. This reflects how StatCounter says is how it collects its figures. Two other devices running iOS 26 were also detected by StatCounter as iOS 18.7 devices; however, on one of them in the Chrome browser, StatCounter correctly detected it as iOS 26.1. I also see this effect in my own limited analytics, where the only reports of iOS 26 versions are non-Safari browsers. If an analytics package relies on the OS version string in the user agent, it will also misreport iOS 26 Safari users.

Possible Inaccuracies in StatCounter’s Safari-Based Version Number Reporting ⇥ webkit.org

Yesterday, I linked to a report from Ed Hardy, Cult of Mac, pointing to a shockingly low iOS 26 adoption rate compared to previous years. Hardy relied on date from StatCounter, which uses web traffic at massive scale to measure all kinds of stuff, including operating system versions.

Given that StatCounter’s data has been similar to Apple’s own reporting of version adoption in previous years, I wrote:

[…] StatCounter’s figures might be off, but it would be shocking if they were out by 40-plus percent. That would point to a serious measurement error that, somehow, did not impact previous reporting.

Well, it turns out there is likely a measurement difference that would not have impacted iOS 18 or before.

Jen Simmons and others who work on WebKit, in September:

Also, now in Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS 26 the user agent string no longer lists the current version of the operating system. Safari 18.6 on iOS has a UA string of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.6 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

And Safari 26.0 on iOS has a UA string of:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

In both, you will notice iPhone OS is set to “18_6” despite only one of them actually running iOS 18.6. If StatCounter was relying on this part of the user agent string for calculating operating system version number, it could be inaccurate. There is still a Safari version number that could be a proxy for the operating system version in the latter part of the user agent string, however. On my iPhone, running iOS 26.3, the relevant section reads Version/26.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari. The iPhone OS string also reads “18_7”, which is also true for users running iOS 26.2.

It is not like StatCounter has no data for iOS 26. It shows traffic from iOS 26.1 and 26.2, indicating it likely updated its tracking metrics. It is possible some of the 18.6 and 18.7 traffic is also iOS 26 — we just do not know how much.

Data from TelemetryDeck seems more robust, and suggests about 55% of iOS users have updated to iOS 26, compared to about 78% of users one year ago running iOS 18. Not as bad as StatCounter’s figures, but still a twenty-point gap between latest version uptake last year and this year.

Thanks to Sam Gross for pointing me in this direction.

The Telegram Group Jailbreaking Grok ⇥ 404media.co

Emanuel Maiberg, of 404 Media, has been following a Telegram group in which members find workarounds to guardrails in generative A.I. products. Instead of finding interesting exploits to do clever things, though, the loopholes are being harnessed mostly to harass, abuse, and bully women. It is pretty revolting.

Maiberg:

It’s good and correct for people to be shocked and upset when they wake up one morning and see that their X feed is flooded with AI-generated images of minors in bikinis, but what is clear to me from following this Telegram community for a couple of years now is that nonconsensual sexual images of real people, including minors, is the cost of doing business with AI image generators. Some companies do a better job of preventing this abuse than others, but judging by the exploits I see on Telegram, when it comes to Grok, this problem will get a lot worse before it gets better.

It is clear Maiberg is just as disgusted with this as any person should be, so I am not trying to um, actually this, but I am not sure treating it as a “cost of doing business” is correct. The design and capabilities of these products matters immensely and, by permitting a relatively open-ended environment, xAI allows for experimentation to find its weak points. This is true of any generative A.I. product with a text box as its input. (As opposed to, say, a generative object removal tool in an image editor.) The degree of impact may also vary depending on the quality or style of the image — though, personally, I would still be alarmed if someone were harassing me with images even if they were cartoons.

Matt Burgess and Maddy Varner, Wired:

Unlike on X, where Grok’s output is public by default, images and videos created on the Grok app or website using its Imagine model are not shared openly. If a user has shared an Imagine URL, though, it may be visible to anyone. A cache of around 1,200 Imagine links, plus a WIRED review of those either indexed by Google or shared on a deepfake porn forum, shows disturbing sexual videos that are vastly more explicit than images created by Grok on X.

Caroline Haskins, Wired:

Over the past two years, Apple and Google removed a number of “nudify” and AI image-generation apps after investigations by the BBC and 404 Media found they were being advertised or used to effectively turn ordinary photos into explicit images of women without their consent.

But at the time of publication, both the X app and the stand-alone Grok app remain available in both app stores. Apple, Google, and X did not respond to requests for comment. Grok is operated by Musk’s multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence startup xAI, which also did not respond to questions from WIRED. In a public statement published on January 3, X said that it takes action against illegal content on its platform, including CSAM. “Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content,” the company warned.

X’s threat of “consequences” would be more convincing if it had functional site moderation generally.

Apps have been kicked off the App Store for far less than what X is today. Removing it — and the rest of xAI’s apps — would be a good start, but we should not expect private companies to do the job of law enforcement and regulators. There is a good case for banning X as long as it continues to permit this poorly-moderated image generator. People should be criminally charged, too.

iOS 26 Adoption Reportedly Lagging iOS 18 in Same Timeframe, According to StatCounter ⇥ cultofmac.com

Ed Hardy, Cult of Mac:

Nevertheless, iOS 26 adoption is extremely low. Roughly four months after launching in mid-September, only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed. That’s according to data for January 2026 from StatCounter. Instead, most users hold onto previous versions.

For comparison, in January 2025, about 63% of iPhone users had some iOS 18 version installed. So after roughly the same amount of time, the adoption rate of Apple newest OS was about four times higher.

As far as I can tell, Apple updates its own iOS version stats twice annually — once with summer numbers, and again in the winter. Last year, it updated its stats on January 24, and it indicated 68% of iPhone users who transacted with the App Store on January 21 were using iOS 18. This is pretty close to StatCounter’s 63%. In February 2024, 66% were using the then-newest iOS 17; as Hardy writes, StatCounter reported it was around 54% at the time. A greater gap, to be sure, but it was clear well over half of iPhone users had updated. StatCounter’s figures might be off, but it would be shocking if they were out by 40-plus percent. That would point to a serious measurement error that, somehow, did not impact previous reporting.

Update: Turns out there might actually be large measurement differences that did not impact previous years’ reporting.

Update: Relying on StatCounter’s data could be flawed because Safari and third-party browsers report different iOS version numbers due to a change in iOS 26.

Duolingo Displayed Ads in Live Activities, Dynamic Island ⇥ macrumors.com

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Language learning app Duolingo has apparently been using the iPhone’s Live Activity feature to display ads on the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island, which violates Apple’s design guidelines.

According to multiple reports on Reddit, the Duolingo app has been displaying an ad for a “Super offer,” which is Duolingo’s paid subscription option.

I saw this, too.

Clover points to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, which once advised “avoid using a Live Activity to display ads or promotions”, but now explicitly say “don’t use a Live Activity” to show ads. But the HIG is not the App Store Guidelines, and there is nothing in there expressly prohibiting this behaviour, as far as I can see. Tacky.

CSAM Generator xAI, Run by Elon Musk, Raises $20 Billion ⇥ nytimes.com

Kate Conger, New York Times:

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, said on Tuesday that it had raised $20 billion from investors to fund its expansion in the race to train the most intelligent chatbot.

[…]

Investors in xAI’s latest funding included Fidelity, the Qatar Investment Authority and Valor Equity Partners, a firm led by Mr. Musk’s friend and former Tesla board member Antonio Gracias. Nvidia, the maker of A.I. chips, also participated. In total, xAI has raised more than $42 billion, according to PitchBook.

Twenty billion dollars is a ghastly sum of money to give anyone, let alone someone who, in his official capacity, cut funding and killed over half a million people. This feels less like an investment for direct financial gain, and more like a way for a select group of people to find influence through a company connected to a transparently corrupt government.

If you are wondering about the timing — immediately after a wave of coverage about xAI’s Grok generating a flurry of abusive and heinous imagery — it turns out this is not the first time Grok’s output has not affected major investment news. In July, shortly after Grok began parroting praise of Adolf Hitler, the U.S. government’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced xAI would be one of several A.I. companies receiving up to $200 million. As of today, Grok’s stream of replies on X are still full of it generating sexualized images of real women, mostly without their consent. People with lots of money seem to think all of this is completely fine.

Grok Is Being Used to Depict Horrific Violence Against Real Women ⇥ futurism.com

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

Over the last week, users of X realized that they could use Grok to “put a bikini on her,” “take her clothes off,” and otherwise sexualize images that people uploaded to the site. This went roughly how you would expect: Users have been derobing celebrities, politicians, and random people—mostly women—for the last week. This has included underage girls, on a platform that has notoriously gutted its content moderation team and gotten rid of nearly all rules.

Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World:

On January 2, India’s IT ministry issued a 72-hour ultimatum to X over its artificial intelligence chatbot generating “obscene” content — specifically, sexualized or manipulated images of women and, in some cases, minors.

Maggie Harrison Dupré, Futurism:

In addition to the sexual imagery of underage girls, the women depicted in Grok-generated nonconsensual porn range from some who appear to be private citizens to a slew of celebrities, from famous actresses to the First Lady of the United States. And somehow, that was only the tip of the iceberg.

When we dug through this content, we noticed another stomach-churning variation of the trend: Grok, at the request of users, altering images to depict real women being sexually abused, humiliated, hurt, and even killed.

It is extraordinary yet, sadly, predictable to me that xAI is not treating this as a problem. Setting aside the fundamentally offensive capability that any user can tell Grok to generate photorealistic images based on someone else’s likeness — something it should be prohibited from doing — there appears to be no rush to fix this high-res misogyny on demand. A basic corporate response would be to turn off image generation capabilities until better safeguards are in place. Yet I just opened the Grok account on X, switched to the Replies tab, and it took almost no scrolling at all to find it generating images like these mere seconds ago.

The kinds of images Grok is generating should be criminal, and the people who oversee it should be held liable as should those who are prompting Grok. In my eyes, though I am not a lawyer, it is no less a case of harassment when a robot is directed by a user than when the user does it themself. I know A.I. is a nascent industry and there are things people are worried about over-regulating, but this should not be one of them. xAI is clearly overseen by adolescent-brained people who think it is sufficient to make it against company policy for users to make heinous requests, rather than sufficiently restricting its own software.

A Viral Reddit Post About Food Delivery Apps Was an A.I. Scam ⇥ hardresetmedia.com

Elissa Welle, the Verge:

A viral Reddit confessional about a “major food delivery app” posted January 2nd is most likely AI-generated. The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers “human assets,” and exploits their “desperation” for cash, among other indefensible actions. Nearly 90,000 upvotes and four days later, it’s become increasingly clear that the post’s text is probably AI-generated.

The link from “viral Reddit confessional” is not to the thread itself, but to a link post from the Verge. That post, from Andrew J. Hawkins, still asks “[w]hich company do you think this is about?” and has not been updated to reflect the fictional status of this story.

Alex Schultz, Hard Reset:

But the allegations in the Reddit thread are not true. They are fabricated. The original post was generated by AI and was intended to defame Uber Eats. I know as much because I traded Signal messages with Trowaway_whistleblow, who additionally used AI to prepare a fake-but-sophisticated-looking “internal document” of other supposedly damning allegations; Trowaway_whistleblow circulated the document to journalists, hoping someone would take the bait and publish a libelous “scoop.”

I was shocked to see so many people posting a link to this thread credulously. I write that not to scold anyone, only out of genuine surprise that an evidence-free anonymous Reddit post with clear inconsistencies was being spread so widely. There is so much existing evidence that so-called “gig economy” workers are exploited, underpaid, and endangered, and that food delivery platforms specifically are bad for restaurants, that we simply do not need to add questionable Reddit posts to the mix. This scam played into that reputation perfectly. If anything, that is why it makes sense to be even more skeptical. Being too credulous undermines the documented failures of these platforms through the confusion it creates.

MacOS Tahoe Menu Icons Are Inconsistent, Confusing, and Illegible ⇥ tonsky.me

You may remember Jim Nielsen’s exploration last month — previously linked — of the various icons in MacOS Tahoe menus, and comparing them to Apple’s long-time recommendations for icon use.

Nikita Prokopov went even further:

In my opinion, Apple took on an impossible task: to add an icon to every menu item. There are just not enough good metaphors to do something like that.

But even if there were, the premise itself is questionable: if everything has an icon, it doesn’t mean users will find what they are looking for faster.

And even if the premise was solid, I still wish I could say: they did the best they could, given the goal. But that’s not true either: they did a poor job consistently applying the metaphors and designing the icons themselves.

This is a gallery of elementary problems. None of this should have shipped if someone with power internally had a critical eye for consistency and detail. If Apple deems it necessary to retain the icons, though I am not sure why it would, it should be treating this post as one giant bug report.

Update: Speaking of illegible, I think Prokopov should reconsider both the automatically-enabled snow animation and the searing yellow background.

Google Adds Generative Features to T.V. Sets, For Some Reason ⇥ blog.google

Shalini GovilPai, Google:

At CES 2026, we’re previewing how Gemini is making Google TV even more helpful, and bringing more ways to interact with your TV across more brands and surfaces like projectors. Here’s what we announced:

[…]

  • Use Nano Banana and Veo to reimagine your personal photos or create original media directly on your TV.

I guess I am the dumb one because I cannot see any reason why I would want Google to generate new scenes from my photos — let alone “original media”, whatever that means. This seems like something that would be fun for about ten minutes, once, and then would never be touched again.

Hidden Dangers of Age Verification ⇥ eff.org

Rindala Alajaji, the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Age-verification mandates create barriers along lines of race, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, immigration status, and socioeconomic class. While these requirements threaten everyone’s privacy and free-speech rights, they fall heaviest on communities already facing systemic obstacles.

This is a compelling list of reasons why age verification laws are bad for all of us. I have mixed feelings about their need and implementation so far. In theory, I think checking user ages can be justified in a number of circumstances. Many apps and websites have some boilerplate text claiming they have no interest in serving children, and rely on kids self-authorizing. This is obviously insufficient. Also, Apple wants your iPhone to replace your wallet, but is somehow uninterested in using the information you provide, which is bizarre.

But giving tech companies even more information and control seems similarly fraught. Existing operating system-level options for parents are frequently broken, so why would we entrust them with some form of valid identification? And the current patchwork of laws and proposals could mean a worst-of-both-worlds situation: depending on where the company is governed, you might have to provide documentation to centralized app distributors, and to individual websites and apps. And, as Alajaji writes, the people who will struggle most to satisfy these requirements are already discriminated against.

I have written posts in which I am swayed by proposals for age verification. I am also convinced by the ten arguments Alajaji lists, many of which feel U.S. specific but are probably even more burdensome in developing countries. These problems seem to be varying degrees of insurmountable. But the great freedom created by the web has not yet been met with commensurate responsibility, either.

Liquid Glass Whiteout Conditions ⇥ eclecticlight.co

Howard Oakley:

In real life, whiteouts are dangerous because they’re so disorienting. There’s no horizon, no features in the landscape, and no clues to navigation. We see and work best in visual environments that are rich in colour and tonal contrasts. Tahoe has continued a trend for Light Mode to be bleached-out white, and Dark Mode to be a moonless night. Seeing where controls, views and contents start and end is difficult, and leaves them suspended in the whiteout.

Oakley reviews several lingering problems with Liquid Glass in MacOS, but the above remains the most — and I use this word intentionally — glaring issue I have with it. It is a problem that becomes entirely clear as you scroll to the bottom of Oakley’s post and find a screenshot from — I think — Mac OS X Mavericks with evident precision and contrast. I do not think Apple should have frozen this interface in time, nor that there are no changes made since which have been an improvement. However, though the exact same elements remain in today’s MacOS, they lack a similarly rigorous structure and care. It is notable how many translucency controls have been added in the intervening years.

Blacksky Algorithms Announces One-Click PDS Deployment Coming Soon ⇥ blackskyweb.xyz

Rudy Fraser, founder and CEO of Blacksky, made two big announcements on the occasion of it being the first anniversary of its launch. The first is online cash payments in USD, which I am a little unclear about, but relies in part on the trust implicit in AT Protocol connections.

The second, though, is easier for me to understand:

As Mozilla has been saying, we need to decentralize the internet. Decentralization necessarily requires running your own servers and as mentioned above by Moxie, founder of the beloved Signal protocol, no one wants to run their own servers, and never will. If you take seriously that both are true, how do you square the two?

[…]

I’m excited to say: promises made, promises kept. Clinton has built a mobile-friendly web app that will allow users to create a new PDS [Personal Data Server] that is truly one-click and will be hosted on Blacksky’s infrastructure. […]

I am intrigued by the possibility of announcements like this one. It offers a meaningful layer of self-governance beyond monolithic social platforms, made possible only by open standards like AT Protocol and the rival ActivityPub.

Meta Effectively Cancels Horizon O.S. Third-Party Headsets ⇥ roadtovr.com

Meta, in an April 2024 press release:

Today we’re taking the next step toward our vision for a more open computing platform for the metaverse. We’re opening up the operating system powering our Meta Quest devices to third-party hardware makers, giving more choice to consumers and a larger ecosystem for developers to build for. We’re working with leading global technology companies to bring this new ecosystem to life and making it even easier for developers to build apps and reach their audiences on the platform.

Ben Thompson reacting:

Motivations, of course, aren’t enough: unlike AI models, where Meta wants a competitive model, but will achieve its strategic goals as long as a closed model doesn’t win, the company does actually need to win in the metaverse by controlling the most devices (assuming, of course, that the metaverse actually becomes a thing).

The first thing to note is that pursuing an Apple-like fully-integrated model would actually be bad for Meta’s larger goals, which, as a horizontal services company, is reaching the maximum number of people possible; there is a reason that the iPhone, by far the most dominant integrated product ever, still only has about 30% marketshare worldwide. Indeed, I would pushback on Zuckerberg’s continued insistence that Apple “won” mobile: they certainly did as far as revenue and profits go, but the nature of their winning is not the sort of winning that Meta should aspire to; from a horizontal services company perspective, Android “won” because it has the most marketshare.

Ben Lang, Road to VR:

Meta specifically named Asus and Lenovo as the first partners it was working with to build new Horizon OS headsets. Asus was said to be building an “all-new performance gaming headset,” while Lenovo was purportedly working on “mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment.”

But as we’ve now learned, neither headset is likely to see the light of day. Meta say it has frozen the third-party Horizon OS headset program.

I link to Thompson’s article not to dunk on it, but to ask the natural followup question: if an Android-like operating system licensing model is a good indication of the potential for Meta’s metaverse vision, what does its effective cancellation suggest? This and the deep personnel cuts forecast what has seemed obvious from the start: the company’s vision of the metaverse is simply not compelling.

You will notice I am leaving open a door for somebody or some company to make a truly interesting metaverse-like thing. I am skeptical it will exist, but I can see the potential. Wherever it emerges, though, I would bet against Meta itself making this stuff viable. It does not do interesting and cool new things.

‘Fetch’ Is Not Happening on Android ⇥ app.sensortower.com

Here is something strange: while Meta’s Threads placed second on Apple’s most popular apps of 2025 list, it appears to matter far less to Android users.

I could not find a similar list to Apple’s as provided by Google, but Sensor Tower scrapes those charts regularly. In the last ninety days — all I can see without paying — Threads has danced around the top ten free apps on the U.S. App Store, as one might expect for one of the most popular apps of the year. On Android, however, it never cracks the top ten. This is not solely a U.S. phenomenon; Threads seems to be less popular in Canada, but its App Store ranking is dramatically better than its Play Store ranking.

Also, it is not like Android has a radically different list of popular apps. Right now, like on iOS, ChatGPT is at the top of the U.S. Play Store chart, two different versions of TikTok take third and fourth place — second place is Fortnite — and the top ten also includes Instagram and WhatsApp. The main differences between iOS and are the lack of Google apps on the Play Store ranking, presumably because they are preinstalled. This chart is only a snapshot of today’s rankings, but even over the last ninety days, TikTok and Instagram show durable popularity, while Threads struggles.

I previously compared Threads’ ranking in Mexico and Taiwan. So, for completeness’ sake, Threads has been pretty popular in the Mexican App Store, but is not even in the top fifty on Android. In Taiwan, Threads has spanned the top twenty free apps on iOS but, at a glance, it is easily putting in the best Android performance here.

What is going on here? Perhaps Apple and Google use different measurements to calculate their app ranking charts, so any comparison between the two is flawed from the jump. Neither company publishes its methodology for calculating those rankings. Maybe Threads is a worse app on Android than it is on iOS.

But the seeming disparity in popularity between the two platforms is a curiosity. I would assume social apps should, all else being equal, attract similar audiences across both platforms. That is true for apps like TikTok and Instagram. It is not true for Threads, which seems to attract a greater share of iOS users than Android. Strange.

I Guess ‘Fetch’ Is Happening ⇥ theverge.com

Alex Heath, the Verge:

By all measures, Meta’s Threads app had a very good year. The app was Apple’s second-most-downloaded iOS app of the year, trailing only ChatGPT. Threads now has 400 million monthly and 150 million daily active users.

It is interesting to see how much this varies by region. In Canada, Threads was third, behind ChatGPT and Temu, as it was in Taiwan where Threads made something of an impact last year. In Mexico, it was twelfth. Top app charts for 2025 are not available for every country, but even this limited range is kind of curious. ChatGPT is huge everywhere, and you can feel it; TikTok continues to be a cultural force.

Yet, even though Threads is apparently incredibly popular, I still do not know anyone in real life who actually uses it. I have never once heard the phrase hey, did you see that post on Threads? from a friend. To be fair, it is not as though the charts are packed with the social apps I like: neither Bluesky nor any Mastodon client is on any of those regional charts. But a couple of years into Threads, my local news broadcasters and municipal authorities are not pushing me to follow their accounts there, either. Perhaps as this style of social media splinters into multiple competing networks, its draw on the public conscience may fade.

Heath:

That growth is still coming mainly from Meta’s other platforms. “We do a lot of work in Instagram and Facebook to show off what’s going on in Threads,” Connor Hayes, the head of Threads, told me this week. The playbook: surface personalized Threads content in your Instagram and Facebook feeds, get you to download the app, then wean you off needing those nudges to check it consistently. “We do a bunch of work to get people off of being dependent on those promotions and wake up in the morning and just want to open the app,” Hayes explained.

I think I know what Hayes means by this. I use the web version of Instagram because I cannot stand the app. Until earlier this year, there was a persistent red dot on my notifications icon and, when I clicked on it, told me that there was a notification on Threads. However, when I clicked the notification, I saw no such updates on Threads. I fell for this growth hacking trick a few times before I realized it was just a lie.

Heath:

Threads still supports federation with other apps like Mastodon, but Hayes was clear that it’s not a top priority for the current roadmap. “It’s something that we’re supporting, it’s something that we’re maintaining, but it’s not the thing that we’re talking about that’s gonna help the app break out,” he said.

Two years ago, Tom Coates attended a large meeting held by Meta to discuss Threads’ enthusiasm for the fediverse. With that in the rear-view mirror, it seems Meta has gotten all it needs from integrating with an open protocol.

Google Sues SerpApi ⇥ seroundtable.com

Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable:

On Friday, Google announced it had filed a lawsuit (PDF) against SerpApi for scraping the Google search results. Google alleges that SerpApi is running an “unlawful” operation that bypasses Google’s security measures to scrape search results at an astonishing scale.

[…]

Google claims SerpApi uses hundreds of millions of fake search requests to mimic human behavior. This allows them to bypass CAPTCHAs and other automated defenses that Google uses to prevent bots from overwhelming its systems.

In October, as part of its lawsuit against Perplexity, Reddit sued SerpApi and a couple of other scraper companies. Figuring out the difference between the ostensibly bad kind scraping practices of SerpApi and the good ones of Google seems like it will require a narrow definition, one Google is happy to provide.

Halimah DeLaine Prado, Google’s general counsel:

Google follows industry-standard crawling protocols, and honors websites’ directives over crawling of their content. Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override those directives and give sites no choice at all. SerpApi uses shady back doors — like cloaking themselves, bombarding websites with massive networks of bots and giving their crawlers fake and constantly changing names — circumventing our security measures to take websites’ content wholesale. This unlawful activity has increased dramatically over the past year.

This explanation is not wrong, per se, though it is quite self-serving. The way many people begin their search for a product, service, or local business is with Google. A typical website owner is therefore desperate for a Google link, to the extent that they will reconstruct their site on a regular basis to suit its shifting ranking criteria. That means Google has broad power to do basically whatever it wants to the web. If publishers wanted to rank highly in search results, they were required to adopt the company’s proprietary fork of HTML. It can inject links, scrape third-parties, and build a self-preferencing silo — and website owners have to be okay with it or lose valuable referral traffic from Google users.

All of that is nominally ethical in Google’s view. What is not, apparently, is a company using workarounds to get a window into Google’s practices. I sympathize with that argument. The only tool we have is robots.txt and, regardless of SerpApi’s intent, I do not think circumvention efforts should be tolerated, though that should be paired with aggressive antitrust action to prevent incumbent powers from abusing their position.

Recent actions taken by U.S. courts, for example, have found Google illegally maintained its search monopoly. In issuing proposed remedies earlier this year, the judge noted the rapidly shifting world of search thanks to the growth of generative artificial intelligence products. “OpenAI” is mentioned (PDF) thirty times as an example of a potential disruptor. However, the judge does not mention OpenAI’s live search data is at least partially powered by SerpApi.

TikTok’s Future in Canada Looks Red, White, and Blue ⇥ bnnbloomberg.ca

Ritika Dubey, Canadian Press:

A cybersecurity expert says Canadian TikTok users likely won’t notice any changes to the social media app as major American investors sign a deal to form a new TikTok joint venture.

“This deal happens to be based on U.S. law only and it’s really not that impactful for Canadians on a day-to-day basis,” said Robert Falzon, head of engineering at cybersecurity firm Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.

Canadians will continue to use the international version of the app that’s owned and influenced by Chinese owner ByteDance Ltd., he said.

There is a kind of implied for now which should be tacked onto the end of its impact on Canadians. This U.S.-specific version lays the groundwork for a political wedge issue in Canada and elsewhere: should people use the version of the app run by a company headquartered in Beijing and mostly owned by a mix of American, Chinese, and Emirati investors, or should they use the app run by a company based in the U.S and mostly owned by a mix of American, Chinese, and Emirati investors? Or, to frame it in more politically expedient terms, should people be allowed to use the “Chinese” app or should they be pushed into the “American” app? Under that framing, I would not be surprised to see the U.S. version become the dominant client for TikTok worldwide.

Our government under the previous prime minister forcibly closed domestic TikTok operations on national security grounds, though it did not ban the app. Perhaps that would have been too much, too soon. Now, though, politicians do not need to endure voters’ wrath if they banned a popular social platform, since there is another version with less scaremongering attached to it.