Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 02/20 - What’s a Pirate’s Favorite Business Model? ARR…

Episode Date: February 20, 2020

Apple might let users choose third-party default apps, Twitter further embraces tweet storms, Morgan Stanley buys E*Trade, a rundown of all the stuff in the new Android developer preview, and if anything, it looks like cord cutting is just accelerating. Sponsors: Metalab.co Netgear.com/bestwifi Links: Apple Weighs Letting Users Switch Default iPhone Apps to Rivals (Bloomberg) Microsoft plans antivirus software for Android and iOS devices (CNBC) Twitter rolling out new ‘Continue thread’ option for connecting multiple tweets together (9to5Mac) Blue Chip Morgan Stanley to Buy Discount Broker E-Trade (NYTimes) Google launches Android 11 Developer Preview ahead of schedule for Pixel phones (9to5Google) Cord-Cutting Accelerated in 2019, Raising Pressure on Cable Providers (WSJ) Classified Ad info: Email: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 TechMeme Right Home for Thursday, February 20th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Apple might let users choose third-party default apps. Twitter further embraces tweet storms. Morgan Stanley buys E-trade, a rundown of all the stuff in the new Android developer preview. And if anything, it looks like cord cutting is just accelerating. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Apple is considering letting users choose third-party browsers and e-mail. app, among others, as their defaults for those functions on iPhone and iPad. Not only that, they're considering opening the HomePod to third-party music services like Spotify. Sure seems that

antitrust scrutiny, even a whiff of it, can really move the needle at even a company like Apple. Quote, the company currently pre-installs 38 default apps on iPhones and iPads, Bloomberg News, has reported, including the Safari web browser, maps, messages, and mail. Last year, Stockholm-based Spotify submitted an antitrust complaint to the European Union saying Apple squeezes rival services by imposing a 30% cut for subscriptions made via the App Store. Apple responded that Spotify wants the benefits of the app store without paying for them. As part of its complaint, Spotify singled out the inability to run on the HomePod and become the default music player in Siri, Apple's voice-activated digital assistant.

Now Apple is working to allow third-party music services to run directly on the HomePod, said the people. Spotify and other third-party music apps can stream from iPhone or iPad to the HomePod via Apple's Airplay technology, though that's a much more cumbersome experience than streaming directly from the speaker, end quote. Really, though, it's the mail app and the browser and things like the calendar app that are the big deal here. If Apple were to open those up to third parties, as Tom Warren tweeted, quote, if Apple allows default browsers and mail clients on iOS 14, you can bet it's related to increasing pressure from US and EU regulators. Also, I bet messaging, i.e. i.e. i message, is not included, end quote. But maybe though, I'm underplaying the whole music angle. As Ranjan Xroy

said on Twitter, quote, sometimes I feel my entire passion for antitrust is around just wanting Spotify as my Siri default, end quote. Microsoft is planning to make its Defender antivirus software available for Android and iOS later this year. The Defender program is largely designed to prevent malware and fishing attacks, which obviously have been moving to mobile more often than not these days. Quoting CNBC, the offering is Microsoft's latest effort to sell products to consumers using other company's mobile products. Apple and Google have sought to police their app stores from instances of malware. That hasn't stopped Microsoft from jumping in, however. Quote, they're pretty safe,

but pretty safe is not the same as safe, Rob Leffertz, a Microsoft corporate vice president said in an interview at company headquarters in Redmond, Washington last week, malware does happen on these platforms, he said, end quote. Microsoft already offers the in-tune software that IT administrators can use to manage employees PCs, smartphones, and tablets. The Defender software coming to Android and iOS is about security rather than management, however. It's designed to prevent people from visiting online destinations that Microsoft deems unsafe, Leffert said.

Microsoft sees an $80 billion total addressable security market, General Manager Andrew Conway said during a media briefing at corporate headquarters, end quote. The app stories just keep rolling on. Twitter has announced a new converseal. continue thread option, a feature that will link tweets together while they are being composed. Here's how 9 to 5 Mac describes it. When you're composing a new tweet, you can now slide up to view your previous tweets, including your most recent post as well as older ones.

Once you pick an older tweet, you'll see a continue thread button. Once you pick that continue thread option, your tweets will be connected to one another. Tap the compose icon, pull down from the compose window, and tap continue thread, to add to your latest tweet. Add content and tap tweet to add to your thread. To add a thread to an earlier tweet, click the three dots to select another tweet. Essentially, this is Twitter's way of making it easier for users

to create topic threads and tweet storms. In the past, Twitter has offered the ability to connect multiple tweets together while you're composing them. Today's new feature, however, makes it more straightforward to connect a new tweet to a post from the past, end quote. Embracing tweet storms. something users had to do by hand in the not too recent past. The product renaissance at Twitter continues.

Morgan Stanley is acquiring online discount brokerage e-trade for about $13 billion, marking the largest takeover by an American lender since the 2008 financial crisis, quoting the New York Times' deal book. The deal would give Morgan Stanley, long one of Wall Street's blue-chip names, whose asset management business caters to the wealthy, a big share of the market for online trading, an additional 5.2 million customer accounts and $360 billion in assets. The deal highlights the increasing convergence of Wall Street and Main Street. Elite bastions of corporate finance are increasingly seeking to cater to customers

with smaller pocketbooks, and online brokerages that once hoped to overthrow traditional trading houses are instead suffering from a price war that has slashed their profits. It also reflects Morgan Stanley's strategy of focusing on asset management rather than investment banking and high stakes trading, betting on steady fees over bigger paydays and bigger risks, end quote. It also marks a new stage for E-Trade, one of the biggest names of the dot-com era that actually survived that era. Here's Matt Levine from his Money Stuff newsletter in Bloomberg opinion this morning. One thing to say about E-trade is that its name starts with E-Trad, not even E-hyphen, E asterix. It's a throwback to a very specific 1990s vintage of corporate naming, a time when

typography was weird. E signified the internet and the internet was enormously promising but not yet ubiquitous. We're a brokerage firm, E-trade's name implied, but we've got an E, so you know we're on the internet. Other brokerages had names that were just stodgy, dead rich people's last names with no asteriskses at all, suggesting, often accurately, that they were less online, end quote. And quoting the Times one more time, E-Trade has struggled amid a price war among brokerages, begun in earnest last fall when Charles Schwab eliminated fees for the trading of stocks and exchange-traded funds. Schwab later agreed to buy TD Ameritrade for $26 billion. In striking Thursday's deal, Morgan Stanley is betting that regulators in Washington will approve what is perhaps the most

consequential acquisition by a systemically important American bank since the financial crisis, end quote. A couple of interesting pieces of commentary about this from finance folks that I trust. Here's downtown Josh Brown, who tweets at at Reformed Broker. They'll be writing a big chunk of this down in the coming years. There's nothing here. Imagine acquiring customers who don't plan to pay you for anything. We'll sell the order flow to Citadel and then default customer cash balances into the world's worst money market fund. Synergy.

Whatever you do, don't look up the customer acquisition. costs for online brokerages, end quote. And back to Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter, quote, big banks these days love to say that they're really tech companies. What they usually mean by that is that they employ a lot of software engineers and talk a lot about machine learning and blockchains. But the other thing that it often means is that they'd rather be in the business of selling software subscriptions, building electronic platforms and charging people recurring fees to

use the platforms, then be in the business of financial intermediation. The historical business, much of the historical purpose of the big investment banks, using their own capital to facilitate financial transactions, is just not that appealing these days. The money these days is in websites, end quote. Something something, annual recurring revenue is eating the world. Quick dad joke for you. What is a pirate's favorite business model? Arr. Late yesterday, Google launched the end.

Android 11 developer preview. This is the earliest Google has ever released the dev preview for Android. And the surprise of the release is probably down to the sheer number of changes involved in Android 11. Devs will need some time to work with all these new things, including new display types, improved messaging, biometrics, and a lot more. First of all, note that this is Android 11. The desserts naming convention is out. Also note that this is a developer preview, not a beta. So unless you're an actual Android developer, don't install this on your phone because it wipes your device of all its data.

And it's also kind of hard to install anyway. At a high level, here's what 9 to 5 Google says is important in Android 11, at least for devs, organized into four main ideas. Quote, helpful innovation. This unsurprisingly starts with 5G and Google frames it as a way for developers to extend their Wi-Fi app, experiences to mobile users. Existing APIs have been updated to let applications determine what kind of connection they have access to. Also part of this tent pole is support for new display types, with one API letting devs use the entirety of a waterfall screen, including edges. To improve messaging, there's a new dedicated conversation section of the notification shade while Google is pushing

bubbles and letting you paste images into apps and replies. Privacy and security. Building off the ability to limit location to while app is in use, which is selected by half of users, are one-time permissions for location, microphone, and camera. Scoped storage will likely also go into effect this year. Meanwhile, Android 11 improves biometrics and features platform hardening, as well as secure app data storage and sharing. Users should also be excited by electronic ID slash driver's license support. Updates and compatibility.

Android 11 is expanding project. mainline, visible to users as Google Play System Update, with 12 new modules that can be updated without OS releases. A new permissions module standardizes user and developer access to critical privacy controls on Android devices. Meanwhile, Google is giving developers a new platform stability milestone in July that will include final SDK, NDK APIs, internal APIs, and system behaviors. Polishing Quality. There are various improvements to the connectivity stack low latency video codecs, and for images slash cameras. Highlights for the latter include H-E-I-F animated drawables that are drastically smaller than

GIFs and API to mute vibration while capturing images, end quote. And then if you're a non-developer, here's what Hyam Gartenberg says are the best new features he's uncovered so far. Quote, bubbles. Reminiscent of Facebook's chat heads, the Bubbles feature was originally meant to be part of Android 10 last year. It's a new UI for messaging apps that lets you keep several conversations easily accessible anywhere through a floating bubble. Right now, it seems that just Google's own messaging app has support, but the idea is that any app like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Signal could take advantage of the feature. Conversations. To go along with the bubbles, there is a new conversation section of the notification shade that breaks out new messages into their own area ahead of all your emails, Instagram likes, and app updates. The idea is to make the communication parts of your phone more accessible because, well, it's a phone, and that's what it does, help you talk to people.

Better app permissions. Taking a page out of iOS's book, Android 11 is adding the option to just give apps temporary permission to your camera, microphone, and location data. It's a simple addition, but one that makes Android a lot more secure. Screen recording. Google already had a version of this in Android 10's betas that didn't make its way to the final. version, but screen recording is back and has a whole fancy UI this time, which means that the feature may be finally shipping in Android 11. It basically does what it says on the can.

Records your screen. Smaller tweaks and changes. Automated dark mode toggles, a new motion sense gesture for the pixel 4 to play or pause music, an increased touch sensitivity setting for the pixel 4 meant for use with screensavers. The option to pin apps to the top of the share sheet is back from the Android 10 beta. Turning on Airplane Mode no longer disconnects Bluetooth audio connections, and XDA developers reports that there's also a hidden new screenshot UI, but it's not enabled by default or fully functional yet, end quote.

Future developer previews are coming, and the public launch of this is slated for Q3 of this year. Finally, today, all of the content companies have raced to embrace digital video and thus dive headlong into the streaming wars, mainly because they all feared they'd miss out since everyone else is doing it. But also, you know, the industry was pushed. Cordcutters have been a concern for media companies for a while now. To hear Bob Iger describe it on the Bill Simmons podcast, it was the declining viewing numbers for ESPN that pushed Disney to go whole hog with Disney Plus. Well, maybe all of this was not a moment too soon, because if anything,

It seems that cord cutting is accelerating. Large cable and satellite companies lost 5.5 million traditional pay TV subscribers last year compared with the 3.2 million subscribers they lost in 2018, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The pace at which people are abandoning traditional pay TV packages accelerated by more than 70% last year, as prices continue to rise and consumers gravitated to more affordable streaming options, Traditional pay TV customers are expensive for cable companies to keep between installation and equipment costs and the ever-rising price of programming, which has led cable and satellite providers to raise their rates. Analysts predict more American households will cut the cord this year. Quote, cable companies have made peace with the idea of customers leaving if they want to, said Craig Moffat, an analyst at Moffat-Nathanson.

The companies will accept programming price increases and pass it on to consumers, accelerating the down. spiral of pay TV, end quote. Yeah, that's the interesting thing about this. It's basically just a classic innovators dilemma style death spiral. The content companies and the cable companies had huge cash cows that they had no reason to disrupt, allowing a window of time for the disruptor, in this case Netflix, to step in before the incumbents could do anything about it. Now that they have tried to do something about it, they still have to keep the cash cow job. generating money because they need that to fund their experiments dealing with the disruption. But they have to raise prices to do that, to squeeze out more cash, and thus they make the legacy

product worse, and thus they will just accelerate driving customers away, customers who now have other options, and then the decline just feeds on itself. It's like Indiana Jones sliding under that shutting door, except the floor is also collapsing underneath them at the same time, that giant boulder is coming down the shoot. Of course, you still need internet access to do any of this new streaming. So for the cable companies at least, there's a silver lining, quoting again. In some cases, cutting the cord is leading to higher average revenue per user in broadband. Recently, Altees said that when a customer ditches its cable TV subscription or switches to a lower price TV offering, the money being saved often goes towards a more expensive, higher speed

tier of broadband. Comcast in particular, has pivoted away from chasing unprofitable cable TV customers and instead is focusing on its broadband customers and higher-end traditional TV customers. The company recently began providing flex, its streaming device, free for its broadband-only customers, end quote. That is all for today. Once again, check out our newest podcast. The Gaming Ride Home. On the Slack channel today, I see the headlines over there are a potential new VR controller from Sony, the continuing troubles at GameStop, and why Tiger's retro LCD handheld games are actually making a comeback. Please do search for and subscribe to The Gaming Ride Home.

And also hit me up on Twitter or our subreddit at R-slash Ride Home for any feedback on the Gaming Ride Home show. Kyle is traveling right now, so his audio is slightly less good than normal. But I'm loving the show so far. I'm literally a fan myself because it catches me up on a space that I should know more about in order to produce this show. Talk to you tomorrow. The founder of a wellness startup and stealth mode, which is on a mission to eradicate the obesity epidemic and reduce the insane sugar consumption in the U.S., is looking for a visionary data scientist

to join as a co-founder. Ideally, you would be a nutrition and health-conscious person, aghast at the way Americans consume unhealthy food, have at least 10 years of experience in data science at either an e-commerce, food, or retail company, are familiar with fuzzy logic, deployed services and apps on the cloud, and have an advanced degree in mathematics, statistics, or a similar field. You would lead the development of proprietary machine learning, optimization algorithms, natural language processing, and elastic search, and build a scalable and modern database with as many, as half a billion, that's billion with a B, data points. Moreover, you would help bootstrap this company, develop a POC, and raise capital to take it to the next level. As the co-founder, you would receive substantial equity in the company rather than hired on as a regular employee on payroll.

Your hands are probably full with your full-time job right now, just like the person behind this classified ad is. But this is a revolutionary idea for a true visionary, an individual who dreams about making a big time social impact. If you think you are this person, email co-founders at iCloud.com. That's C-O-F-O-U-N-D-E-R-S at iCloud.com.