A few high-profile app updates have recently gone down like a lead balloon. I have a lot of sympathy for the developers involved, and today I wanted to explain what I think happened with Overcast specifically.
John Gruber: Nick Heer on Patreon Creators Paying the Full 30 Percent App Store Rate for New Subscriptions The whole notion of a platform like Patreon just doesn’t fit with the App Store’s model of taking a fee out of every single transaction for digital goods or services.
Not going to make a big deal of it, but today I decided to officially close my Twitter (sorry, X) account. I know, I know, someone could take my username if they want and yes I know this means I’ll have to start a new account if somehow I
John Gruber: The Mac Is a Power Tool Safety by default, but don’t get in the way of power users doing their jobs. And when the user needs an override for the safety features, there is an override, and the situation will make clear to the user that needing
From the Patron blog today: As we first announced last year, Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024. This has two major consequences for creators: 1. Apple will be applying their 30% App
M.G. Siegler: A Time to Kill... Xitter This has all been instituted under the guise of free speech, but that is, of course, bullshit. If Xitter wants to be the haven of truly free speech, it should be a completely open source and un-monetized network that no single company
Ezra Klein back in February 2024: Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden Everybody I have talked about this, literally everybody, has brought up the same fear. Call it the Kamala Harris problem. In theory, she should be the favorite. But she polls slightly worse than Biden. Democrats don’t
M.G. Siegler on his relatively new Spyglass blog (running on Ghost, which always makes me happy): Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Fees for EU Developers Basically it feels like Apple is making the changes that the EU clearly is angling for, but doing so in the most pedantic way possible,
Apple: Updates to the StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement Developers can communicate and promote offers for purchases available at a destination of their choice. The destination can be an alternative app marketplace, another app, or a website, and it can be accessed outside the app or via a web view
Jason Snell on Six Colors: Apple’s permissions features are out of balance But what Apple’s testing in the latest macOS Sequoia betas is brutal because there’s no end to it. It’s a subscription you didn’t buy and can’t cancel. Yesterday, I was prompted to
Benj Edwards: Major Shifts at OpenAI Spark Skepticism About Impending AGI Timelines The moves have led some to wonder just how close OpenAI is to a long-rumored breakthrough of some kind of reasoning artificial intelligence if high-profile employees are jumping ship (or taking long breaks, in the case of Brockman)
Samantha Cole on the always lovely 404 Media: Leaked Documents Show Nvidia Scraping ‘A Human Lifetime’ of Videos Per Day to Train AI When asked about legal and ethical aspects of using copyrighted content to train an AI model, Nvidia defended its practice as being “in full compliance with the
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…a Mac user wants to use an iPad but they can’t because of some list of requirements that iPadOS simply doesn’t achieve. They love the iPad hardware and think it’s more than powerful enough, but the software holds
What makes a product last forever? What tech products do you own that you'll never have to replace?
David McCabe writing for the New York Times: Google Violated Antitrust Laws in Online Search, Judge Rules The government argued that by paying billions of dollars to be the automatic search engine on consumer devices, Google had denied its competitors the opportunity to build the scale required to compete with