2026-01-30 05:50:32
Mike Swanson:
What if your car worked like so many apps? You’re driving somewhere important…maybe running a little bit late. A few minutes into the drive, your car pulls over to the side of the road and asks:
“How are you enjoying your drive so far?”
Annoyed by the interruption, and even more behind schedule, you dismiss the prompt and merge back into traffic.
A minute later it does it again.
“Did you know I have a new feature? Tap here to learn more.”
It blocks your speedometer with an overlay tutorial about the turn signal. It highlights the wiper controls and refuses to go away until you demonstrate mastery.
Ridiculous, of course.
And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.
I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.
This post is about how we got here. Not overnight, but slowly. One reasonable step at a time.
If that lede pulls you in, like it did for me, you’re going to love the rest of the essay. This is one for the ages. It’s so good.
2026-01-30 04:18:48
When I wrote last week about the false narrative that iOS 26 is seeing bizarrely low adoption rates compared to previous years, I neglected one source: Apple itself. Apple’s Developer site publishes a page with iOS and iPadOS usage for devices that “transacted on the App Store”.
The hitch is that they only seem to update those numbers twice a year — once right around now, and once again right before WWDC. As of today, those numbers are still from 4 June 2025. Last year, going from the Internet Archive, the numbers were still from iOS 17 (June 2024) on 23 January last year, but were updated for iOS 18 on 24 January. Here are those iOS 18 numbers from one year ago this week.
iPhones released in the previous four years:
All iPhones:
iPads released in the previous four years:
All iPads:
(Apple itself manages to present these statistics without ever using the plurals iPhones or iPads, instead referring only to “devices”.)
I presume, or at least hope, that they’ll update these numbers for iOS 26 any day now.
2026-01-29 23:22:23
Jeremy Fuster, reporting for TheWrap:
But save for some theaters in Republican-heavy states, the film is unlikely to leave much of an impact at a slumping box office, with theatrical sources telling TheWrap that “Melania” is projected for an opening of around $3 million this weekend.
That would put it below the last right-wing documentary, the Daily Wire-produced Matt Walsh film “Am I Racist?,” which opened to $4.5 million from 1,517 locations in September 2024, finishing with a $12.3 million total that made it the highest-grossing doc that year. The highest projections are coming from NRG with an estimate of around $5 million, though audience interest polls from the company have 30% saying they are “definitely not” interested in watching the film, an unusually high count for any wide release.
These projections are with a $35 million promotional campaign, for a movie Amazon paid $40 million to purchase. (Via Taegan Goddard.)
2026-01-29 23:19:17
Nicole Sperling and Brooks Barnes, reporting for The New York Times:
Amazon paid Ms. Trump’s production company $40 million for the rights to “Melania,” about $26 million more than the next closest bidder, Disney. The fee includes a related docuseries that is scheduled to air later this year. The budget for “Melania” is unknown, but documentaries that follow a subject for a limited amount of time usually cost less than $5 million to produce. The $35 million for marketing is 10 times what some other high-profile documentaries have received.
All of which has a lot of Hollywood questioning whether Amazon’s push is anything more than the company’s attempt to ingratiate itself with President Trump.
This is a good story, with multiple industry sources with experience making political documentaries, but the Times’s own subhead downplays Amazon’s spending on the film: “The tech giant is spending $35 million to promote its film about the first lady, far more than is typical for documentaries.” They’re spending $35 million now, to promote it, but they already paid $40 million for the rights to the film, $28 million of which is believed to have gone to Melania Trump herself. A $35 million total spend would be a lot compared to other high-profile documentaries, but it’s a $75 million total spend. This is not just a little fishy — it’s a veritable open air seafood market.
Back to the Times:
To grasp just how uncustomary Amazon’s marketing push for “Melania” is, consider how Magnolia Pictures handled “RBG,” a portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg during her 25th year as a Supreme Court justice, in 2018.
CNN Films produced “RBG” for around $1 million. The promotional budget, including an awards campaign that helped it land two Oscar nominations, totaled about $3 million. The film debuted in 34 theaters and expanded into 432 locations over several weeks. It ultimately collected $14 million, enough to rank as the year’s No. 1 political documentary.
And:
On Friday, “Melania” will also be released in 1,600 theaters overseas, where FilmNation, a New York company, is handling distribution in more than 20 countries. International ticket sales are expected to be weak, according to box office analysts.
Shocker.
2026-01-29 23:01:43
Ged Maheux, The Iconfactory:
This week we announced a new Kickstarter that’s aimed at expanding the game offerings of Ollie’s Arcade, the fun, ad-free retro gaming app we introduced back in 2023. Ollie’s Arcade has always been a great way to escape doomscrolling, even if just for a little while, and now we have an opportunity to bring these retro games to even more people on iOS.
The Kickstarter aims to raise enough money to make all of the in-app purchase games in the app completely free for everyone to enjoy. We also want to bring our beloved puzzle game, Frenzic, to life once again. Frenzic was one of the very first games available on iOS back in 2008, then was reborn as Frenzic: Overtime on Apple Arcade. Since it left, people have been asking us for a new version that they can just pick up and play. We couldn’t agree more!
I linked to the Kickstarter for the original Ollie’s Arcade project back in 2023, which was a big success. And I first linked to Frenzic all the way back in 2008, when the App Store was only a few months old. It’s just a great concept for a casual game on a small screen, implemented with all of The Iconfactory’s exquisite attention to detail. That’s true for all the games in Ollie’s Arcade, but Frenzic is special.
This new Kickstarter for the Ollie’s Arcade expansion has already hit its funding goal, but it’s approaching the stretch goal for an additional game. There are a zillion games for iOS, but it’s sad how few are ad-free and don’t require a subscription. If you think well-crafted fun games that you can pay for once (for a very reasonable price) should be rewarded, you should join me (and others) in backing this Kickstarter.
2026-01-29 08:10:30
Adam Engst, back in November, at TidBITS:
Did you know that, regardless of view, you can now swipe left on any call to reveal a blue clock icon that lets you create a reminder to call back in 1 hour, tonight, tomorrow, or at any custom time (below left, slightly doctored)? Reminders appear at the top of the Calls list and in your default Reminders list. You can also touch and hold a call associated with a contact to connect with them in other ways (below right), or touch and hold a call from an unknown caller to add them to Contacts.
I did not know this, until I read Engst’s article.
One criticism I’ve seen a few times (but to be clear, not from Engst) ever since Apple debuted the new Unified interface for the Phone app back at WWDC, is that it’s somehow wrong that Apple offers it as option alongside the Classic interface. “When does Apple ever offer options like this?”
I’d argue that Apple used to offer options like this all the time. The Music app on the original iPhone (which app was actually named “iPod” for a while) let you customize all the tabs at the bottom. All of Apple’s good Mac apps (the AppKit ones, primarily) still let you customize the entire toolbar. The problem isn’t that Apple now offers two very different interfaces for the Phone app. The problem is that Apple stopped offering users ways to significantly tailor apps to their own needs and tastes — and the proof that they stopped is that so many people now think it’s so strange that they’re offering two options for how the Phone app should look and work.
Overall, I like the new Unified layout in the Phone app. But what I love is there remains an option for those who don’t, and that you can switch between the two in a very obvious, easily discoverable (dare I say, hard to miss) way right in the app itself. No need to dig two or three levels deep into the Settings app. You can just switch right there in the main screen of the Phone app itself. It’s things like this that keep me optimistic that Apple is still capable of great new work in UI design.
