Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 01/29 - Apple Has More Active Devices Than Microsoft

Episode Date: January 29, 2020

Apple earnings, Google is testing another chat app, we know Uncle Sam is wary of Huawei but did you know he doesn’t trust DJI either, Lime is testing AI scooters and the new app that will let you skip the ads without screwing over publishers. Sponsors: Metalab.co Links: Apple shares rise after company reports better-than-expected revenue of $91.8B (TechCrunch) Apple could see some impact from coronavirus in China, Cook says (CNET) Google Developing New ‘Unified’ Communications App for Businesses (The Information) Interior Department Adopts Restrictions Aimed at Chinese Drones (WSJ) Facebook's 'Clear History' Tool Doesn't Clear Shit (Gizmodo) Ring Doorbell App Packed with Third-Party Trackers (EFF) Lime knows when you're riding on a sidewalk, and will warn you if you do (CNET) Here’s how to stop seeing ads on the internet without screwing over publishers (recode) 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 Tech Memeh ride home for Wednesday, January 29th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple earnings. Google is testing another chat app. We know that Uncle Sam is wary of Huawei, but did you know he also doesn't trust DJI? Lime is testing AI scooters and the new app that will let you skip the ads without screwing over publishers. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Earnings, y'all. Apple reported Q1 revenue of $91.8 billion up 9% year over year, of which $79.1 billion came from products and $12.7 billion came from services. Services were up 19% year over year. The company also had net income of $22.2 billion and is estimating a range of between $63 and $67 billion for Q2 revenue, a bigger range than it normally forecasts. We'll come back to that in a second. But let's drill down more first. Apple reported $10 billion in revenue from its wearable and home

accessories bucket where it puts the likes of AirPods and Apple Watch. That category was up 37% year over year and notable that that means the category generated more revenue than the Mac category for the first time ever. The Mac category was down 3% year over year. Also notable that Apple reached one and a half billion active devices up from $1.4 billion a year ago, as Benedict E.E. Evans noted on Twitter, that means that Apple now has more active devices in use than Microsoft does, mainly because of iPhones, of course. Breaking out iPhone sales, Apple reported $56 billion worth, up 8% year-over-year. On the earnings call, Tim Cook said that the three newest iPhones were the best-selling Apple phones every week of the quarter.

As for the China question, Apple claims it was responsible for three of the top four best-selling smartphones in the Chinese market in Q1. But back to that range in revenue guidance for the next quarter, Apple hung the uncertainty there directly on the Wuhan coronavirus. Apple has suppliers in the Wuhan area of China, but it says it is working on mitigating any disruptions to supply chains. The question is, will the virus overall affect sales in China overall, quoting CNET? The situation is emerging and we're still gathering lots of data points and monitoring it very closely. Tim Cook said during a call with analysts after the company reported record earnings. He noted that as of last week, Apple had limited employee travel to affected areas to business-critical situations. Apple also closed a store in China because of the coronavirus and a number of its retail partners have also closed their locations, Cook said.

Many of the stores that remain open have also reduced operating hours, Cook said, and the company is taking extra precautions for its staff and customers. It's deep cleaning its stores frequently and conducting. and conducting temperature checks of retail workers to make sure they remain healthy. While our sales within the Wuhan area itself are small, retail traffic has also been impacted outside of this area across the country in the last few days, Cook said, end quote. As for Apple TV Plus, no word on subscriber numbers, which might be telegraphing something, just not sure what. Apple merely said that Apple TV Plus did not materially contribute to earnings this quarter, although they do expect it will start contributing to the growth of the services business in the near future.

There are 480 million subscribers across all Apple devices, and the company did boost its estimates for subscribers this year to reach 600 million people from a previous estimate of 500 million. Look, I swear I do not like to drag companies overly, but, you know, sometimes reputations are earned. And what does Google have a reputation for? Well, launching a million different products and initiatives only to shut them down. We touched on that again yesterday. But what are they also known for? Launching a million different chat and video and just general communication apps that often overlap and seemingly are redundant. And so, you know, why not another one? Sources are telling the information that Google is testing a new communications app for businesses that will bring together functions from genomes. email, Google Drive, Hangouts Meet, Hangouts Chat, and more. They're throwing the whole kitchen sink at this one. The new app is expected to be a part of G Suite. So your guess is as good as mine. Is this Google's version of Slack? The return of Google Wave, maybe Google Plus Plus,

quoting the information. The new application could provide Google a new tool in its efforts to win share in the giant market for workplace communications and productivity apps. The biggest player in that business is Microsoft with its Office 365 suite of apps. A part of that suite is Microsoft Teams, which combines a number of functions in a single app, including workplace chat, video conferencing, internet telephony, and productivity offerings. A spokesperson for Google Cloud declined to comment. It couldn't be learned whether and how the new app will affect Google's current lineup of standalone communications apps. For years, Google has had one of the more confusing collections of communications apps in the tech industry, many with overlapping functions. It killed one of its

mobile email client's inbox, along with a WhatsApp-like messaging service called Allo. The company has announced plans to end its classic hangouts app and transition its users to two new apps, hangouts meet and hangouts chat by June, end quote. So, yeah, a new messaging app that will basically incorporate and repackage at least two of its other existing messaging apps, as Dasomegabit said on Twitter, you mean the same effing idea as Hangouts meet, but with a tweaked UI, a couple different buttons, a lack of at-launch features,

and of course, the product of a completely different siloed team from any other Google product dealing with messaging. Stay away, end quote. Sorry, Google. You've suddenly become a parody of yourself. The U.S. Department of the Interior has introduced a no-fly rule for China, Chinese-made drones or drones made with Chinese parts amid espionage concerns. To be clear, this ban is

for the department's own use of drones. They're not grounding Chinese-made drones generally for the rest of us or anything like that. And the department will be making exceptions for tracking wildfires and other emergencies such as search and rescue operations. The department grounded all of its drone fleet last year for similar espionage concerns, after it found that all of its roughly 800 drones were made in China or had Chinese parts. And quote, in 2017, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned that it believes Chinese drone manufacturer DJI is, quote, selectively targeting government and privately owned entities to expand its ability to collect and exploit sensitive U.S. data, end quote.

DJI officials have disputed that claim. DJI said users can prevent their drones from transmitting data back to the company or connecting to the internet and that the Chinese government has never sought the data that it has stored. The U.S. military has largely stopped buying Chinese-made drones as well, end quote. So I guess the implication here is that there might be some sort of software backdoor that would send data somewhere where the government wouldn't want it to go. I mean, they're not afraid of Chinese-made screws or anything, right? Now, I knew that the government was afraid of Huawei, but today I guess I learned they're afraid

of DJI, too. By the way, on the Huawei front, like the British government news came down today that the EU has told its member states that they should also limit high-risk vendors like Huawei, but the EU did not recommend a total ban when building out 5G networks like the U.S. government was pressuring them to do. Quick follow-up to something from yesterday. I was quite impressed and spoke well of Facebook's off-Facebook activity tool, but, according to Shoshana Widenski at Gizmodo, the tool won't actually clear the data collected about you from other apps and sites. It only actually clears the third-party connections to your Facebook account. Quote, by using this tool, you're just telling Facebook to put the data it has on you into two

separate buckets that are otherwise mixed together. Put another way, Facebook is offering a one-stop shop to opt out of any ties between the sites and services you peruse daily that have some sort of Facebook software installed and your own platform activity on Facebook or Instagram. The only thing you're clearing is a connection Facebook made between its data and the data it gets from third parties, not the data itself, end quote. I.E. Facebook still has the data. The third parties still have the data. They're just no longer actively connected if you use this tool. And another segment that I don't really want to do, but feel obligated to anyway, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says it is found that the Ring app on Android covertly sends personally identifiable information of users to third parties including Facebook and Mix Panel.

Or as the EFF puts it, Ring isn't just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers. Quote, an investigation by EFF of the Ring Doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers personally identifiable information or PII. Four main analytics and marketing companies were discovered to be receiving information such as the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers. The danger in sending even small bits of information is that analytics and tracking companies

are able to combine these bits together to form a unique picture of the user's device. This cohesive hole represents a fingerprint that follows the user as they interact with other apps and use their device. In essence, providing trackers the ability to spy on what a user is doing in their digital lives and when they are doing it. All this takes place without meaningful user notification or consent and in most cases no way to mitigate the damage done. Even when this information is not misused and employed for precisely its stated purpose, in most cases marketing, This can lead to a whole host of social ills, end quote. Now, grain of salt to add in here on Twitter, Daray Obasanjo tweeted this, quote, practically every mobile app uses analytics packages for their telemetry and conversion

tracking of app install ads they run on ad networks. EFF framing this as a ring-specific privacy is misleading and just jumping on the ring negative press bandwagon, end quote. Lime is testing new AI-based technology on its scooters, which it claims will warn riders when they are on sidewalks. The pilot program will roll out first to scooters in San Jose, California. Writing on the sidewalk is the biggest no-no of e-scooter usage, and frankly, the scooter companies probably have a big incentive to crack down on this, because the biggest complaint about scooter riders is sidewalk riding, so if Lyme can get you to break the habit, it is far more likely that municipalities and the general public will warm up to scooter usage.

Quoting CNET. Using artificial intelligence, an accelerometer, and speed data on each ride, Lyme said it can determine with up to 95% accuracy the type of road a person may be scooting on. If the company determines the rider is on a sidewalk 50% or more of the time, it'll send them a push notification saying to abide by the law. Electric scooters go up to 15 miles per hour, and city officials around the world have complained the vehicles in danger pedestrians when used on sidewalk. One woman in Barcelona was killed after a scooter collided with her on a sidewalk, and there have been hundreds of other accounts of people being injured in such accidents.

Regulators in Denver originally allowed scooter riding on sidewalks, but revised the law in August to ban such activity because of the danger to pedestrians, end quote. Have you heard about the scroll app? It launched yesterday. It's a new news app that gives you ad-free access to around 300 websites, including BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, and Fox. just $2.49 a month for the first six months, then $4.99 a month after that. Ad-free web browsing. Don't we already have that with ad blockers? Actually, this is more interesting because, along with blocking the ads, the publishers who have partnered with Scroll get a cut of your monthly subscription to Scroll. Scroll was founded by Tony Hale, who previously led Chartbeat. Here's how he described it to TechCrunch. Quote, he noted that every reader's payment

is dispersed separately based on their own engagement and loyalty rather than putting all of the subscription revenue into a single pool. So your money will never go to a site that you've never visited, and you'll even get a monthly report showing which publishers your money is supporting. The startup estimates that a normal page view brings in only 0.011 of a dollar through advertising versus 0.016 with scroll. And the startup also offers a revenue calculator to help publishers confirm that they won't be losing money. Speaking of publishers, Hale says he's trying to bring a broader range of sites into Scroll, representing a similarly broad range of viewpoints, again, because the money isn't going to a single pool, you don't have to worry about supporting a site that you don't like,

unless you're doing a lot of hate clicking and reading, end quote. And in his processor newsletter this morning, Dieter Bone was impressed with how they're pulling this off, quote, scroll's entire method of stopping ads is an absolutely ingenious repurposing of third-party cookies. You log into scroll, it sets a cookie, and then the websites you visit see that special cookie and don't serve you ads. It's not even ad blocking. They just don't get served. It's actually quite elegant. But if you take a second to think through the chain of communications and deals that are required to make it that elegant, it seems like a halacious hack. Although you have to constantly have scroll email you a magic link and then ensure you open it in the right browser,

it means that you are getting your paid-for ad-free experience in the app of your choosing. Unlike Apple News, you aren't forced into a not-especially great app. You don't get a link that seems like it goes to a webpage but actually just goes to Apple's app. You can also use it on any device you own, not just Apple's products. Also, unlike Apple News, this subscription isn't really a subscription for publications that put articles behind paywalls, scroll won't get you in. It's a much easier solution for websites to get paid than asking each of them to roll their own subscription. It tracks where you visit and automatically divvies up payment between those partner sites. I could and eventually will quibble about the percentage scroll is taking, about a

$1.50 out of every $5 or 30%. As an independent startup, I'm not going to begrudge scroll its revenue, though, and it likely needs a bigger cut to stay in business than Apple or Google do on their app stores. If the company hits scale, though, I'd like to hope that it will find a way to reduce that cut, end quote. This whole idea of sustainable platforms being the ones that take over some part of what I'm calling the frustration stack for businesses is something that I've been thinking a lot about lately. The classic case is how credit cards basically took over the entire back-end accounting and credit hassles for small businesses, or how AWOLS. WS took over the roll your own server racks headache for startups. It's something actually that I hope we'll be talking about on a weekend bonus episode shortly, hint, hint. But yeah, taking over the headache of each and every publisher having to create their own subscription revenue system, that seems pretty powerful.

By the way, speaking of apps I'm bullish on, I mentioned a couple days ago that the stay app for MacOS has solved that problem I was having with my, external monitors swapping the windows that were open on them every time I unplugged my laptop. Stay has fixed that, and I thank the listeners who turned me onto it, but it occurred to me when you find an app that works beautifully that solves a real problem for you and is made by an indie developer. It's worth showing that developer some love if you have a platform to do so. So I wanted to let you know that the Stay app is created by Cordless Dog. This is not a paid advertisement. This is literally just me saying thanks to what clearly looks to be an independent developer. Check them out at cordlessdog.com. They have two other cool apps as well. Air volume

and knit counter. Talk to you tomorrow.