MacsWithPenguins

Coalition for App Fairness profile reveals organizational efforts against Apple

December 2021

narwhal said:

Well, I had Tiles for a couple years -- but they were expensive and not great. Seemed nobody was running the Tile app, so your lost stuff stayed lost. I bought a bunch of Apple's AirTags when they came out and they work better and are cheaper. Tile and now Life360 are a business with no future. And to hear that Life360 sells customer data -- they've slit their own throat.

I get that Epic doesn't like to pay 30% commission to Apple, but Amazon and Netflix didn't want to either and they found a solution that works for them. I'm thinking Epic would be better off negotiating with Google and Apple, not suing them. Make some money while their product is hot. By the time the Epic trial is over, they may not have a product anyone wants. Or more likely they'll get bought out by someone, someone who doesn't want to participate in a multi-year lawsuit.

As for Spotify, I think they have a case. Since Apple competes in music streaming, Spotify should NOT be charged a commission. It gives Apple an unfair advantage. Same with other categories. If the host OS competes, they need to eliminate commissions for competitors in that product category. Probably should do the same for video streaming and audiobooks. Apple's not making money from Netflix and Audible anyway.

Apple not making money from Audible — are you sure about that? I remember seeing some kind of collaboration between them and Apple on the iTunes Store several years ago, where it looked like every audiobook you could buy outright for money was sourced from Audible (downloads equivalent to a digital copy of an audiobook MP3 CD back in the day). Maybe it’s not a thing anymore these days, where most people use subscription-based audiobook streaming apps.

Apple debuts new Open Source website, will release projects on GitHub

MacsWithPenguins

December 2021

There have been a lot of open source projects maintained by Apple, for well over a decade and even longer than that (I just don’t have a timeline in my head to refer to right now). The fact they are promoting this now is promising, though.

It could mean they are going to add something significant to the list of projects which weren’t published in the open previously. Perhaps it will be related to ARKit to try increase interest in their upcoming big push for AR, or when pigs starts flying: releasing a portable GUI toolkit to make it easier to build Swift GUI apps for Windows 11 on ARM64 and Linux aarch64 (something dull-looking and simplistic that doesn’t compete with the powerful AppKit and SwiftUI frameworks).

The best notes apps for iPhone and iPad

MacsWithPenguins

December 2021

Goodnotes for iDevices and Mac is great for people who want to do analog note taking in a digital world, if that’s your preferred way to organise your notes with an Apple Pencil. Mostly used by students, but should be ideal in company meetings too, if you need to jot down things and draw shapes or symbols next to your notes — and preserve the notes digitally. Given that it is a pandemic going on, those meetings are likely to be through videoconferencing.

FTC sues to block Nvidia's $40B acquisition of Arm

MacsWithPenguins

December 2021

darkvader said:

rob53 said:

If this acquisition is allowed it makes no sense why Apple’s App Store is being forced to open up. Apple has every right to run its products the way it wants to. Nvidia owning ARM affects multiple computing companies not just its own.
Nvidia owning ARM is a terrible idea, and should be stopped.

[…] And that has NOTHING AT ALL to do with Apple and their app store. Apple has NO right to run MY iPhone the way it wants. It's MY iPhone, not Apple's iPhone. […]

I see a solution that Apple might be okay with: customers can either run the iPhone as is, the way Apple intended, or switch out the bootloader to run another OS like Linux (Ubuntu touch or another variant) or Android …which would instantly disable access to everything in iOS such as Apple App Store first-party access, no iCloud, fingerprint reader on Touch ID iPhones stops working, Face ID is disabled, no Apple Pay, no Apple Music, etc. Then, it would just be your smartphone without Apple on it.