2025-08-02 00:41:52
Special guest Louie Mantia joins the show to talk about Liquid Glass, the various OS 26 updates, and the worrisome state of Apple’s UI design overall. Also: sandwiches.
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2025-07-31 22:57:26
Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:
Apple has voiced its opposition to the case many times over the last year. Now, it has officially filed its answer to the DOJ’s antitrust complaint, pushing back forcefully against the allegations.
As a refresher, the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit focuses on five major aspects of the iPhone experience: super apps, cloud streaming games, third-party messaging apps, third-party smartwatches, and third-party digital wallets. In today’s filing, Apple says the DOJ “fundamentally misunderstands” those five things.
Apple outlines:
- DOJ says Apple stifles the success of “super apps,” despite the fact that Apple’s rules allow and support such apps, and indeed a multitude of “super apps” exist on the App Store today.
- DOJ says Apple blocks cloud streaming games, even though Apple allows streaming games both over the web and in the App Store where they can stream games directly to users.
- DOJ says Apple degrades third-party messaging apps, even though they are widely available and enormously popular on iPhone already.
- DOJ says Apple limits the functionality of third-party smartwatches, even though they can effectively pair with iPhone, share data to and from the iPhone via a companion app, and take advantage of certain functionalities Apple has developed, which are expanding over time.
- DOJ says Apple withholds access to iPhone hardware necessary for third-party digital wallets to use tap-to-pay technology; however, Apple developed and provides a mechanism that protects user security.
One part of Apple’s defense that seems mostly proven already is that this industry moves fast and the competitive landscape is always changing. I’d say three of the DOJ’s five main arguments are already stale: Apple has since opened up cloud gaming; third-party messaging apps can now be set as default; and tap-to-pay has been opened up. And I think the other two points, on “super apps” and third-party connected devices like watches, are nonsense. Especially the “super apps” thing.
Miller, of course, embeds Apple’s full response at the bottom of his post. The argument is worth a read — it’s very cogently and plainly written.
2025-07-31 22:49:22
Mark Zuckerberg, concluding a 600-word essay ostentatiously typeset in the style of web pages circa 1994*:
Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products. I’m excited to focus Meta’s efforts towards building this future.
What about the metaverse? Wasn’t that the thing? What Zuckerberg, and thus Meta, actually believe strongly in is jumping on whatever trend becomes a hype bubble. The company’s soul is empty.
* Actual web pages from 1994 didn’t include nearly a megabyte of JavaScript to display 3 kilobytes of text.
2025-07-31 02:17:13
Tea remains #3 overall in the US iPhone App Store. Here’s a screenshot of the top free iPhone apps today, and a list of the current top 10, using the full names the apps choose to display:
I might be forgetting or unaware of previous similar situations, but I can’t recall anything like this before, where an app riddled with outrageous security/privacy vulnerabilities remains virally popular. A Hacker News thread from earlier today debates why the app is even still available on the App Store.
So is it Apple’s place to yank the app? It feels wrong to me that Apple should completely remove Tea from the App Store, but it’s also true that one of Apple’s fundamental pitches for the App Store — and the App Store’s exclusivity for app distribution in most of the world — is that iOS users can trust any and all apps in the App Store because they’re vetted by Apple. But here’s Tea, sitting at #3, providing a service that many women want, and the entire thing is shockingly untrustworthy. (I fully expect more vulnerabilities to be found and exploited.)
Tea, unsurprisingly, has almost nothing on their website about the security violations their users have suffered, nor any mention in their App Store listing. Their only public acknowledgement of the fiasco is a series of three Instagram posts on July 26, 27, and 29 (the most recent of which acknowledges that they’ve completely disabled the DM feature “temporarily”), and this FAQ on their website, that, as far as I can tell, is only discoverable through the “links in bio” on their Instagram profile. Their FAQ only addresses the initial discovery from last week, not the more significant one that 404 Media publicized Monday that included the exposure of DMs.
Also fascinating to me is that Tea, though available on both iOS and Android, is seemingly not popular at all on Android. It’s not even listed in the Play Store’s top free apps. (The Play Store website lists only the top 45, but I scrolled through the entire top 200 on my Pixel.) The current Play Store top 10:
More tellingly, Tea doesn’t even crack the Play Store top 200 list for the “Dating” category. (On iOS, it’s in the “Lifestyle” category, but on the Play Store it’s in the “Dating” and “Casual” categories. Perhaps Apple requires apps in the “Dating” category to be full-fledged dating app services, not dating-app-adjacent like Tea.)
I’m not sure what explains the disparity in Tea’s popularity by platform. One assumption is that dating is more of a young person’s game, and young people skew slightly more toward iPhone than the US population overall. But from what I can tell, that skew is only about 10 percent. Also, surveys suggest women are more likely to be iPhone users. But I can’t believe that age or gender demographics alone explain why Tea is #3 in the App Store but doesn’t even crack the top 200 on Android.
I strongly suspect that, although Google hasn’t removed Tea from the Play Store, they’ve delisted it from discovery other than by searching for it by name or following a direct link to its listing. That both jibes with what I’m seeing on the Play Store top lists, and strikes me as a thoughtful balance between the responsibilities of an app store provider. As egregious as Tea’s security exploits have been, removing the app entirely doesn’t seem called for. But delisting it from popularity lists seems like a measured way to discourage new users from trying it unless they’re specifically looking for it. If this is what Google is doing, Apple should follow their lead. (I’ve put in a question to Google’s PR inquiring about this; if/when I get an answer, I’ll update this article.)
2025-07-30 23:24:39
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:
YouTube on Tuesday announced it’s beginning to roll out age-estimation technology in the U.S. to identify teen users in order to provide a more age-appropriate experience. The company says it will use a variety of signals to determine the users’ possible age, regardless of what the user entered as their birthday when they signed up for an account.
Well-intentioned though I think this is, it still feels more than a little dystopian.
2025-07-30 04:41:18
Reuters:
Sony released the first game in the Horizon series, Horizon: Zero Dawn, on its PlayStation 4 in 2017. The games follow a red-headed woman named Aloy as she navigates a post-apocalyptic world populated by human tribes and robotic animals.
Sony said in its complaint that it declined an offer from Tencent to collaborate on a new Horizon game last year. Tencent later announced Light of Motiram, which Sony said features identical gameplay, story themes and artistic elements to Horizon as well as many other similarities.
Sony said that video game journalists have characterized Light of Motiram as a “knock-off” of Horizon, including one who called the game Horizon Zero Originality.
Tencent is the Chinese software giant behind, amongst many other things, WeChat, China’s “everything app”.
