Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 08/27 – Another Crack In The App Store

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the tech meme right home for Friday, August 27th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Another brick is taken out of the app store wall as Apple blinks on letting devs inform users of outside purchase options.

Starting point is 00:00:46 Ticketed spaces start rolling out on Twitter. Waymo is having second thoughts about a business model. NFTs are cool, but what if you could earn royalties? And of course, the weekend long-rate suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Or maybe I should have searched for a sound effect. use there, but another crack in the App Store wall this morning, as Apple has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit, and will let developers directly contact customers in aid of informing them

Starting point is 00:01:21 about purchase options outside of iOS, quoting protocol. The would-be shift was proposed after negotiations with developers in the Cameron et-all versus Apple suit, which is before federal district judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers. She will now decide whether to approve it. The announcements come, however, as Apple also awaits a verdict from Gonzalez-Radgers in a separate lawsuit brought by Epic Games. During the trial in that lawsuit earlier this year, Gonzalez-Radgers repeatedly questioned the logic behind stopping apps from communicating with their own customers, and Apple told reporters on Thursday evening that her statements had influenced what it was willing to accept. We would like to thank the developers who worked with us to reach these

Starting point is 00:02:01 agreements in support of the goals of the app store and to the benefit of all our users. Apple's Phil Schiller, who oversees the App Store said in a statement. Users will have to opt in to receive outside messages from apps. In addition to the communication changes, the proposed settlement also includes a $100 million fund for small developers, which will grant them between $250,000 and $30,000. The fund will be available to those apps that are earning less than $1 million annually. The settlement also proposes that Apple will increase the number of possible prices for an app from less than 100 potential price points to more than 500. Apple also said that it had agreed to keep its app search results, quote, based on objective characteristics like downloads, star ratings, text relevance, and other

Starting point is 00:02:46 user behavior signals for at least three years, and to try to help apps better understand the appeal process for rejected apps. The settlement would also see Apple put in place a new transparency report that will include information about, quote, the number of apps rejected for different reasons, the number of customer and developer accounts deactivated, and other data like app removals, end quote. But here is a small bit of clarification from the verge. Apple's $100 million settlement lets devs tell users about alternative payment options using contact info from an iOS app, but still won't allow adding the info inside of the app itself. Quote, the change, while potentially important for developers, isn't quite as significant as it may seem.

Starting point is 00:03:28 In an update to the App Store guidelines in June, Apple already changed its rules to allow developers to communicate with customers outside of their apps, but at that time, they weren't allowed to contact users about alternate payment options using information obtained inside the app. They would have had to figure out how to obtain their contact info another way. If this proposed agreement is approved, that restriction would no longer be in place, which should make it easier for developers to reach out to users. Still, it's not what many developers have been asking for, which is a way to let users know inside their app that they don't have to pay using Apple's in-app payment system and incur its up to 30% toll, end quote. Twitter has begun officially rolling out ticketed spaces.

Starting point is 00:04:16 For some iOS users, hosts can charge between $1 and $999 for their ticketed spaces, and set a room size cap, and remember, Twitter only takes a 3% cut, quoting the verge. hosts can charge between a dollar and $999 for their ticketed rooms and can also set a room-sized cap for them. These test group participants will initially keep 97% of the money they make after the fee Apple and Google charge for in-app purchases, but Twitter will increase its cut from 3% to 20% if a user makes a total of $50,000 across their earnings on the app. This fee will also increase when the feature is more widely available. In a preview of the feature in May, Twitter said hosts would instead keep 80% of their revenue after App Store fees. In the months since,

Starting point is 00:05:02 Twitter announced and previewed ticketed spaces. It's also made changes to how people can find these live audio rooms. They now show up for some users at the top of the mobile Twitter app. If someone a user follows is only listening to a space, they used to have to be hosting. You can hide this activity from your own account through the settings menu. It also updated its API so third-party apps can point users to spaces, end quote. More conflicting signals from the self-driving space and from one big player in that space in particular, Waymo is apparently ending a two-year effort to sell LiDAR sensors to other companies as it rethinking its overall business strategy after failing to generate significant revenue for over a decade now,

Starting point is 00:05:50 quoting TechCrunch. Waymo confirmed the decision to Reuters, adding that it's now focusing on deploying its Waymo driver tech across its Waymo I ride-hailing and Waymo Via trucking divisions. The decision comes in the wake of long-term CEO John Craftchick's departure, who was replaced at the helm by Waymo execs Tecadra Makawanna and Dimitri Dolgov. Some suggested that Craftchik's deliberate approach was hindering the company's push toward commercialization. Earlier this month, Waymo hit a milestone of 20 billion miles driven in simulations with 20 million on public roads. Just days ago, it brought its road. to vetted riders in San Francisco. Waymo began selling LiDars, the tech that measures distance with

Starting point is 00:06:34 pulses of laser light, to companies other than its autonomous vehicle rivals in 2019. It initially planned to sell its short-range sensor, known as Laser Bear Honeycomb, to businesses in the robotic, security, and agricultural technology sectors. A forum on its website also lists drones, mapping, and entertainment as applicable industries. Waymo's fifth-generation driver technology uses an array of sensors, including radar, lightar, and cameras to help its cars see 360 degrees during the day and night, and even in tough weather conditions such as rain and fog. While its simulated and real-world driving tests have helped it to amass a massive data set that is crunched using machine learning-based software, according to anonymous sources cited

Starting point is 00:07:14 by Reuters, Waymo intends to use in-house tech and external suppliers for its next-gen Lydars, end quote. DJ Blow has launched Royal, which lets users trade shares of song royalty rights as crypto tokens, with $16 million in seed funding led by Founders Fund and Paradigm, quoting the block. Royal gives fans the chance to co-own music in the form of a digital asset and potentially a way to earn royalties alongside artists. Quote, culture and investing are bleeding together, and crypto is where that's happening fastest. Justin and J.D. Ross, Royal's other co-founder, both live in that intersection, said Fred

Starting point is 00:08:00 Ersham, co-founder and managing partner of Paradigm in a statement. Royal is the future we are headed to. Creators go direct to fans and fans share in the success of creators, end quote. An early adopter of NFT Technology Blouse sold a tokenized album in March of this year for a whopping $11.7 million. He is also a former co-founder of the real estate platform Open Door and, formerly a general partner at the investment firm Atomic. Blau, CEO, and co-founder of Royal, said that Royal aims to change the status quo by turning music, quote, into an asset and creating an incentive for fans to be aligned financially and emotionally with their favorite artists, end quote. I'm for the weekend long read suggestions, and first up, for years now.

Starting point is 00:08:49 Every time Matthew Ball does an essay, be it on Netflix in the streaming wars, or more recently on the Metaverse, I read it right away. way, and then I try to share it with you right away. So I point you to Matthew's most recent output looking at how and why Netflix is getting into games. Quote, the most threatening problem for Netflix is the generational changes that are making where to watch, the second question, not the foundational one. For hundreds of millions, the question is now what to do. Leisure, in other words, defaulted to TV for decades. It no longer does. This means that fighting for leisure time via video means losing share one way or another, and it's likely this share is lost to gaming. Every generation

Starting point is 00:09:32 plays games more than the one that preceded it. Generation Y, games more than X, Z more than Y, and alpha more than Z. Everyone born today is a gamer, which means there are 140 million new gamers every year, and every year more games run on more devices at higher quality visuals, with greater capabilities and more sophistication. Every constraint is relaxing. The most important might be the very definition of gaming, which seems to be devouring all other forms of media. Is a Fortnite concert, a concert, a video? Is it streaming music? What if you watch a short film inside a fortnight or a live event or walk a museum inside of it? What is Twitch or VR chat, for that matter? End quote. Speaking of gaming, IGN has a really interesting article where they interviewed a bunch

Starting point is 00:10:19 of game developers and asked them what's something in games that seems simple to do to outsiders, but is actually extremely hard to create inside of games. Fascinating revelations here, because it turns out that almost everything in gaming is harder than you think. Quote, A seemingly boring feature such as usable doors can be absolute hell for developers to put into their games for numerous reasons.

Starting point is 00:10:41 Everything from physics to functionality, from AI to sound, comes into play while making a single door in a single video game work, and not just work, but work in such a way where the player never has to think about it. Building a working forgettable door is an incredible, game-developing undertaking. The team at Skydance Interactive behind the Walking Dead Saints and Sinners ran into problems with doors and in a VR game, no less. Fortunately, they were able to turn a challenging collision problem into a fun new feature. Quote, one of the bugs I had was when a

Starting point is 00:11:11 walker was trying to get through the door at the same time a player was trying to open it, said Bill Ferrer, Skydance Senior AI Gameplay Engineer. This is sort of like a situation when two opposing forces come against each other, immovable object versus unstoppable force. Our solution was every time the player would try to open the door and a walker was trying to go through that same door, was to break the door. As a result, this actually created a jump scare moment. The result was basically a happy mistake, end quote. Next, let's move on to a different theme, which is crypto. Before China cracked down on its tech companies, they cracked down on crypto, especially crypto mining. So the Wall Street Journal looks at how

Starting point is 00:11:50 a multi-billion-dollar industry is fleeing China virtually overnight in what is being called the Great Crypto Migration. Bit Digital and other cryptocurrency mining operations now face many hurdles as they move their machines out of a country that had previously used two-thirds of the global energy dedicated to harvesting Bitcoin. The machines are prone to damage if shaken, which makes packing and shipping them internationally an arduous task. A single new computer can cost about $12,000.

Starting point is 00:12:17 Companies have had to decide whether to move their computers by air or, and or C, factoring in the cost and the length of transportation. Bit Digital said it had 9,484 mining machines, or almost a third of its computers, in China's Sijuan province as of June 30th. The company has hired large international logistics companies to help move the hardware and hopes they will all be in North America by the end of September, said Samir Tabar, BitDigital's chief strategy officer. The company is sending machines to locations in Nebraska, Georgia, Texas, and Alberta, Canada. The whole process can cost millions of dollars. Oil prices have risen in recent months, and shipping bottlenecks created by the coronavirus pandemic have caused freight costs to skyrocket. Computers from China entering the U.S.

Starting point is 00:13:00 are also subject to a 25 percent tariff. Aside from figuring out how to pack and ship the machines carefully, companies need to find facilities with ample power to move them to. It's a pretty big financial impact on the miners in China, said Fred Thiel, chief executive of Las Vegas-based cryptocurrency mining company Marathon Digital Holdings. It's kind of like GM having to shut down a plant and build a new one elsewhere, he said, drawing an analogy to Detroit automaker General Motors, end quote. And remember, the greatest cryptocurrency experiment yet is scheduled to begin in less than two weeks. The sovereign nation of El Salvador is switching to Bitcoin as its national currency. Again, the journal looks at how things are going, quote,

Starting point is 00:13:40 The government of the impoverished Central American nation aims to spend up to $75 million as part of a plan to hand out $30 to people who sign up to an e-wallot called Chivo or Cool. That software-based system would allow an estimated 2.5 million Salvadorans to buy goods or pay for services in U.S. dollars or Bitcoin, El Salvador's two official currencies as of September 7th. The foray into Bitcoin risks wrecking El Salvador's $26 billion economy, the indebted nation's central bank. bank could be forced to spend hard currency reserves to buy Bitcoin if the value of the crypto asset craters and consumers rush to the safety of the dollar. The government can't print its own money. Al Salvador ditched the cologne in favor of the Greenback two decades ago and is struggling to earn dollars, end quote. Then I know I've shared something similar in the past, but Ars Technica has an exhaustively researched history of the last decade and a half of Google's various

Starting point is 00:14:37 messaging app products all the way from the original, which was Google talk all the way through. To be honest, I don't even remember what Google's current flagship messaging product even is. Anyway, not going to quote from the piece directly, but if you're even halfway interested, give it a glance just to get a real visceral sense of what product sprawl can look like when nobody has overarching strategic vision, and seemingly every corner of the company is empowered to take a stab at solving a problem at the same time. And finally, this is definitely not tech, but the HBO show Succession is returning next month, and that premiere, along with the Dune movie, are the two things this year that I will absolutely be there for from minute one.

Starting point is 00:15:19 So, from The New Yorker, a profile of Succession creator and showrunner, Jesse Armstrong, quote, given the care that Armstrong puts into making Succession, a complex viewing experience, he is reluctant to explicate the show too much, as if it were reducible to a tidy set of themes and intentions. Nevertheless, his ambitions in succession are driven not by a voyeuristic fascination with the rich, or by a righteous desire to expose the perfidies of inequity, but by a wish to tell through the specific medium of contemporary media dynasties a more universal story about power and family relations and to show how these forces can torque an individual's humanity. It's not so much billions as it is Budenbrooks, but with more money and less grain. In one of a

Starting point is 00:16:05 series of conversations during the making of season three, Armstrong told me, quote, one of the things that strikes me when I've read about these families, whether it's the Maxwell's or the Redstones or the Julio Claudians, is that when you get that combination of money, power, and family relations, things get so complicated that you can justify actions to yourself that are pretty unhealthy to your well-being as a human being. Or you don't even need to justify them because the actions are baked into your being. The infighting can become so darkly satisfying that it consumes one's life. Quote, for people who come from powerful families, there is nothing in life quite as interesting as being at court, end

Starting point is 00:16:39 quote. Indeed, almost nobody in a rich family steps away from the drama. Quote, for these people to be excluded from the flame of money and power, I think, would feel a bit like death, Armstrong said, end quote. So do look for the Twitter space bonus episode this weekend, as we talk about the only fan situation, talk to the Otter AI founders about some cool new news that they came on to partially break on our show. And about halfway through the episode, we celebrate 1,000 episodes of this podcast by Chris interviewing me about how I do this show every day. As I did when he interviewed me, let me also here take the time to thank each of you sincerely for getting us to a thousand episodes, for listening to this show every day, making me a habit

Starting point is 00:17:34 in your daily routine. As I think I say a couple of times when Chris is talking to me, it still blows my mind, that so many of you listen, but believe me, I'm very glad you do. Here's to the start of another thousand episodes, at least, starting now. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 08/27 – Another Crack In The App Store

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