The Vergecast - Huawei announces HarmonyOS, Apple's bad battery week, and smart ovens turning on overnight

Episode Date: August 16, 2019

Stories discussed this week: Smart ovens have been turning on overnight and preheating to 400 …June Oven competitors want you to know their smart ovens can't ...Apple explains the new iPhone warning for 'unauthorized' battery …Apple is locking iPhone battery repair, says iFixit - The VergeThe FAA has banned recalled MacBook Pros from all flights — like any ...Spotify takes Spotify for Podcasters out of beta Apple and Spotify are reportedly in talks to let Siri play your Discover …Spotify is testing a new Favorite Device feature for handing off music toSonos is making a Bluetooth speaker, and here are some of its ...Snap announces Spectacles 3 with an updated design and a second …Facebook now lets anyone make an Instagram face filterSecurity researchers find that DSLR cameras are vulnerable to ransomware attackHuawei delays Mate X launch beyond SeptemberHuawei's new operating system is called HarmonyOSThe Honor Vision TV is Huawei's first HarmonyOS device  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on The Vergecast, Ashley joins us to talk about ovens that turn themselves on when you don't want them to. We got a bunch of Spotify news and also Harmony OS from Huawei. Stick around. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing. what you need. Prompt something like

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What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories. in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom,

a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast. It is a flagship podcast of the Verge shenanigans. Shenanigans is an act. It's not a place.

Anyway, hi, I am Dieter Bone. I am not Nilai Patel. He is off. I am joined this week by Paul Miller, of course. Hello. And special guest, Ashley Carman. Hello. How is it going, everybody?

Fantastic. It's very well. It's very well. It's hot in San Francisco and it makes me very unhappy. It's just the worst. Anyway, speaking of heat, Wow. See what I did there?

Wow. Really good. A bunch of stuff happened this week. It's sort of a grab bag of news, but I think the scariest slash most fun news of the week by far was owned by Ashley, so we had to have her on. What is going on with smart ovens? All right. So there is this smart oven called the June oven.

It is Wi-Fi enabled, connected. All of these owners that have June ovens congregate in a closed Facebook group that I was added to by a PR person, which was a mistake. And I saw a post from a woman freaking out about how her oven had turned on overnight while she was asleep. and heated up to 400 degrees and started cooking. And it ran like that. She got a push notification. The push woke her up. So I did a little back searching because I was like, that's weird.

And it turned out that this had happened twice before. Oh, my God. Okay. So other owners had posted in this group saying that they woke up and found that their smart ovens had turned on overnight and preheated to like 400, 425 degrees Fahrenheit. And none of them had any idea until they woke up in the morning. and noticed somehow. I don't know about you, but when I wake up in the morning and I, like, go make coffee

and, like, check the news and take shower and then leave, the number of times I, like, glance at my oven is zero. Yeah. Like, if this thing popped on in my kitchen, it would be on for, like, a week before I'd noticed it. The best thing is that one of the guys who discovered this had a nest cam in his kitchen, and he had the exact moment the oven turned on. And so it's just, like, pitch black room with a little kitchenade in the,

in frame and all of a sudden you just see this oven's life just turn on. It's so scary. It's so scary. Back up. So for people that don't know what a June oven is, can you just like, it's not like a, it's not a pod-based food creation thing, but it's in that zone, right? Yeah. So let me, so they debuted in 2015 with a $1,500 countertop oven, Wi-Fi connected.

Then they raised $30 million in funding. overall. And they released a second generation last year for $600, so more affordable. Yeah, okay. And it's seven appliances and one. So they promise you an air fryer, dehydrator, slow cooker, broiler, toaster, warming drawer, didn't know that was an appliance, and the convection countertop of it. I mean, this is some ronco shit right here. Actually, nobody's old enough to know what I might mean by that, but that's okay.

Look it up, kids. But wait, there's more? Yeah, but wait, there's more. Before we're super, super mad at them for almost killing people in house fires. Isn't this the dream that you wake up and your breakfast is already prepared by your oven? I mean. Isn't this the future? This is just like jet packs and flying cars.

Well, I haven't even given you the kicker yet. So these people woke up, they all noticed their ovens were on. They had no idea why the oven was on. And someone thought maybe, you know, it had to do with the Alexa skill, blah, blah, blah. So I reached out to June, and I was like, hey, you know, there's now been three people. This seems like a thing that maybe we should talk about. What happened? Oh, man.

And this CEO, Matt Van Horn, says that the reason all of these ovens turned on overnight has nothing to do with the oven and everything to do with bad customers who just made a mistake and accidentally turned on their ovens without really. realizing it. While they were asleep? That's the thing. So one guy I talked to said, well, you know, it's possible that I force clothes all my apps before I go to bed. So maybe somehow I tapped something, which seems like, okay, that seems a little crazy. And then another guy said, and June confirmed, that he somehow accidentally issued an Alexa

command that turned down the oven without him realizing. In his sleep. Again, who knows? Like, who knows what happened? But it was just crazy to me. And so obviously, this suggests me that they have bad UI. Like, something is wrong here. You should have to double tap and press a yes or something in order to get the oven to turn on.

But the CEO compared these ovens turning on and these customers doing this on accident to someone butt dialing someone else. It's like a butt dial. Except that you're turning on your outfit. Yeah, that's... Okay, I live in California, and apparently there's like a law here where I'm not allowed to use an app to turn on a heater.

Like my Dyson app has a thing that I can, like, remote control my Dyson fan. I'm a sucker. I bought a really expensive Dyson fan heater thing. But anyway, it's great, but the app won't let me turn on the heater part of it that pops up a warning saying, UL, something, something you're not allowed to use it.

But apparently it doesn't apply all states, but it seems to me that anything that has a heating element that can get over, you know, 400 degrees, whatever, pick your temperature, there should be like an extra step, right? Yeah. I mean, that's definitely, you know, so the oven does have a camera in it so you can live stream your food, obviously. Of course, yeah.

And uses computer vision to recognize what food is in the ovens that can automatically start cooking it, of course. And so the selling point is like, oh, if you're on the way home from work or something like that, or if the kids, I don't know, are home and need you to do something, you can turn the oven on or turn it off. I understand the turning off. It's like, oh, I need to just make sure my oven's off. I can't understand that compulsion. But yeah, if you're going to turn the oven on, it really seems like that should not be a tap on a screen on your phone.

Or a voice command. That's worse, actually. Is it the tap on the screen or the voice command or is it the vague fear that something in the cloud, a software glitch will do it? Because I don't know. I was thinking about it. Like, I have a gas oven and stovetop. And you know the cliche in the movies. If you want to, like, kill somebody and not get caught, don't do this.

But, you know, you turn the gas on and then, you know, find a way to light a little match. And then the apartment explodes, right? And like, boom. My house, everybody's house is just full of murder gadgets. It's just some of them moved around for 100 years instead of. And so how much of this is that, like, the June oven is, you know, you shouldn't connect anything that could kill you to the internet because the internet might make it kill you. And how much of it is just there's like, we keep inventing new things that are potentially dangerous and don't know how to deal with them yet. I just think really getting rid of the remote start is the move here.

You talk to other manufacturers that do require a physical button press, right? Yeah. So June has competitors, including Tovala, which does sell meals. pods, thank you very much. Yes. And Bravo, which is another company that's just like classic Silicon Valley, they use lights instead of a convection oven. Is that just an easy bake oven? You know, I'll let you have that argument with them.

There's zones, okay? Oh, my God. So when this story came out, naturally the internet went a little crazy about it because it's just like everyone's nightmare come to life. And these oven makers, I reached out. to them, but then one of them got back to me, it was like, hey, a few of our customers are actually reaching out to us because they're concerned. And I just want to put it out there that we don't, neither of them allow people to remotely start the rubins. They have to push the button physically.

No app tap. None. Just seems smarter. And I don't think they have voice skills. So it does seem smarter, but I'm not convinced. I want to both live in a world where this is safe to do, and I can't accidentally do it while I'm sleeping. Yeah. But also that I could if I wanted to. Because otherwise, we're not progressing as a society. Yeah, just like a confirmation. Are you sure?

Right. Is there a roll of paper towel sitting inside or next to your smart oven that could potentially light on fire? Right. Like sometimes I accidentally tap my phone and it skips the next YouTube video. I was like, oh, man, and I tap back. Right. So it shouldn't be on that level.

And yeah, maybe some sort of like, yeah, zone verification. Like, are any of your pets inside of the oven? Is the paper towel leaning precariously close? You know, is the wire frayed? I don't know how we can get this sort of verification. But I want to get there. The remote start isn't advancing society. I mean, I was always taught you don't leave the oven out when you're not home.

I feel like my parents have made me moved away from that rule now that they cook beets in there for like 10 hours a day. but I still have that ingrained to me. Can I confess something? There is a space heater in our house that is plugged into a Wimo switch. No, that's bad. It's true. Space heat isn't really scary. I thought you said that was illegal in California.

It is. It's super not safe, super not cool. I'm super unhappy about it. But it has happened. We'll see if I, you know, I sometimes burn my apartment down. Anyway, the other thing, I know, what do you think is going to happen next, Ashley? Like, are they going to turn off the button? Are they just going to ride this out?

I don't. Well, so June is issuing two updates. One is that next month they'll issue an update where users can actually turn off the remote start, but it'll still be on by default. So if you're really paranoid about it, you can turn off. The second update is that their cameras are going to be able to recognize when there's no food in the oven. and then if it's on for a certain amount of time, picks up that there's no food,

it'll send kind of like that Netflix push that's like, hey, are you still wanting to do this? And then turn it off. Right. So I don't think those are fixes. Honestly, I don't. Well, if there's nothing in it and it's on, that's kind of a fix.

Can the cameras detect a fire? Can they see that things are going from bad to worse? Like if there's smoke? They have not advertised that function. That would maybe push things. in the right direction. I mean, the thing is, one of the guys who discovered his oven on overnight had potatoes in his oven that he forgot to take out. I mean, no judgment, but okay. But yeah, he was just like, oh, yeah, I forgot. I left them to cool in the oven.

And so in that case. Okay, that's a normal thing to do. Like, oh, I baked potato. Oh, it's too hot. I'll leave it there for a minute. I'll come back to it. And then, like, you watch a YouTube video, and then you skip to the next one. And they're like, ah, and then, you know, you forget that it was there. That's fine. Yeah. And then you fall asleep. And while you're sleeping, you talk to Alexa and you turn on your oven. That's literally exactly what June is saying happened in his case. So, yeah, there's actually been another update. I cannot believe it.

But now June is saying that it's actually going to immediately update its iOS and Android apps to further prevent users from accidentally turning on the oven. So the iOS app will no longer open to the oven page by default, which is where you can adjust your temperature and cook settings, but rather to the cookbook page, which is just exactly what it sounds like. The Android app and the iOS app for sure are also going to lose a couple presets for baking.

So that makes things really easy. It's unclear if the Android update is going to also open up to the cookbook or not. It wasn't clear from June statement, but presumably they would not require you to open it to the oven. I mean, yeah, sure. Paul, the other thing that's happened this week with regard to, like, I don't know, this is vaguely related just because it has to do with, like, fire. There's been a couple of weird stories about batteries and Apple products. Can you walk us through?

Let's start with the iPhone. Apple, because they love doing this, we're sneaky, and they have apparently added some technology to the iPhone so that if you have your battery replaced, by a non-authorized Apple battery replacer. There's some sort of chip that is not correctly configured by that non-authorized replacer. And so when you go into your settings and check your battery health, it says, unable to verify this iPhone has a genuine iPhone battery. And it doesn't show you the battery health information anymore.

Right. How many cycles you've used, how long it thinks it's going to last, et cetera. And so this is just a classic Apple situation. This is, you know, Apple wants to keep its users safe. It's obvious that there are a lot of bad batteries out there. A lot of people have gotten bad batteries. People have been harmed by bad batteries. It's not smart to have a bad, unauthorized battery in your phone.

While at the same time, this is stripping functionality from someone who wants to replace their own battery themselves. Right. I don't really know if the solution is because this is every Apple. story, it's up kind of like this. Yeah, I mean, they put out a state, like, this turned into a kerfuffle, and they put out a statement, and the statement basically was like, yeah, we did, if the battery's unauthorized, we don't know if it's, like, how to measure, if we can trust that our measurements are accurate, so we don't give you the battery health. Oh, by the way, there's over 1,800 authorized service centers in America, and Best Buy just got signed on. So it's very easy to go find an authorized repair person if you want. So it's like, I'm super torn, because on the one hand, you're right.

you should be able to do whatever you want with the thing you buy and not be punished for it. On the other hand, batteries explode. Right, which is a convenient segue into Apple's other battery situation is that its batteries explode. Well, specifically some of its last generation MacBook Pro 15-inchers. Yeah. Certain model sold between, I think it's 2015 and 2018. explode. They've been added to FAA's ban list.

Right. And so there's like some confusion. It sounded like FAA was banning MacBooks, but FAA has a standing policy. If you have a recalled battery, then you can't fly with your recalled battery. And since a bunch of these MacBook Pros have been recalled, they were added to this list. There's a site you can go to, check the serial number. But the question is, if you're in line and you have a laptop that looks like, like millions of other Apple laptops, are you going to open it up and, like, run the serial number

while you're standing in line? I mean, I sincerely doubt it. Also, Apple's so aggressive at, like, pushing update warnings, like, literally every computer in our office has a, do you want to update notification in the upper right-hand corner of your screen? Can't they just put one of those permanent warnings up for people that, like, have a laptop that should be recalled? Like, you can get your battery replace for free and you should because it might explode and

just that's always there no matter what. They should just do that. Yeah. Do they not do that? I don't know if they do that. They should do that. I mean, it sounds like they make you check the serial number. It's up to you if you want your laptop to explode.

Okay, so the FAA has a standing policy. They'll, whatever, but there's no way they're going to check these things. So it'll be fine. Like, I do not think that a laptop is going to explode on a plane because there's not that many. And people that have it probably got the news. They got an email from Apple. They'll get their stuff replaced.

There's a parishly small number of these things. things. But I'm still sort of hung up on, both with like the June oven and this, like, we carry around tiny little bombs in our pockets and it's like, okay, shrug. And I don't know, it's like, like, double A batteries were like, you know, super safe, but they're pretty safe. Like, they, they won't hurt you. But ever since the note eight, was it the note eight or the note seven? It was note seven. And then they skipped eight. That was it. They skipped eight because it was a whole thing. I just, it just, it's super weird, right? Like, we've got tiny little bombs in our pockets all the time, and we just kind of don't think about it.

Well. We're carrying a lot of energy around. They don't. Sure. They don't have bombs. They don't explode like bombs. They get really hot. I've seen some videos of phones kind of kind of, not quite like boom, but like little boom.

A little pop. Yeah. And the thing is, it's not over. None of this has been super solved. and we're moving technology, charger technologies, to GAN, which might be able to charge batteries even faster. Yep.

Which I don't know how that quite relates to batteries. Samsung claims that they're going to be able to switch to graphene in a couple years for the batteries themselves, which may be a stabler, but it's also able to charge faster than lithium ion. This specific iPhone thing with unauthorized batteries, it seems like if you want to go and install your own battery, you can. And the punishment, the quote-unquote punishments you get is Apple takes away the battery health feature.

But it won't stop the phone from working. It doesn't do like a phone home lock you out sort of thing. It won't put you on a ban list with the FAA. I guess not, yeah. It voids your warranty, but that's because you open the phone up yourself, which voids your warranty full stop. am I weird to not be like super mad about it? In a perfect world, they would have ways to do diagnostics on a battery no matter who installed it. And I like the idea of being able to fix my own thing myself, order a battery kit from I fix it, take it apart myself, feel like, oh, I fix this thing myself.

Now it belongs to me more than it did before. Like, I love all of that. But I'm also like not super mad at Apple. Am I like becoming the man? Am I a cop now? I kind of feel the same way. Like, I have, my display has been replaced far too many times now. So every time I turn on my phone, I get a pop up that says that touch ID doesn't work anymore.

Oh, and my home button has been replaced as well. Everything has been replaced on my phone. And I'm just like, okay, thanks for the notification. I knew what I was getting into. Like, dope. And then I just move on. Like, I lost functionality. Okay.

I didn't want to pay your prices. And that's that. They made me know. I think kind of going back to, I think we were talking about this last week with these terms of service. There is the implicit terms of service that's just based on how well you know a company, how well you know this type of product. And just the implicit terms of service with the iPhone is if you try to mess with it, it's broken. And you might get lucky and it's not broken, but expected to be broken. And like this is just what this is what you signed up for by being a customer of Apple and buying an iPhone.

And other phone manufacturers, they're sort of on a gradient. Like slowly we've become, you know, there was a time when it's like, oh, yeah, I like Android because I have replaced, like, easy replaceable batteries where you can slide the back off the phone and then swap the battery. A vanishingly small number of phones now allow you to do that. But that was something that you sort of expected, like, oh, this, I'm an Android person because I like this type of thing. Yeah.

I also can see why Apple would be maybe spooked by the idea. of, you know, potentially dangerous batteries. That's bad PR for them. If an iPhone explodes, that is a bad look for them. So I can see them wanting to be like, oh, well, we made it clear. We let you know. Although, who's checking their battery health menu? Yeah, not me.

Although it's a thing because your battery health starts degrading. Well, you remember how iPhones were like slowing down and like Apple didn't tell anybody? And it turned out that it was because they, you know, they were trying to adjust for aging batteries and now you have the choice to like age your battery even faster by keeping your iPhone fast. It's the whole thing. Yeah, but still, I just assume my battery is crap. It is crap. I literally keep my phone plugged in so much. Like, it's terrible. All the rules about when you're supposed to plug your battery in or not or how charge it or whatever. My advice is ignore it. It's like it's too much effort. Your battery's going to suck after a year no matter what you do. But iPhones and I think

Samsung phones do this now? They're all starting to realize that you shouldn't fast charge your phone overnight because fast charging can hurt a battery's longevity. So when you plug it in at night, what they'll do is they'll like charge it up to 80% slower than usual. And then they won't hit that last 20% to bring it up to 100 until it thinks you're about to wake up. So it's actually easier on the battery when you charge.

And they're basing this on like the time of day or like it's AI. Observed. It's just AI. Okay. There's AI. There's a contractor somewhere who knows when I go to sleep and when I wake up. Yeah. You think it's AI, but technically it's a contractor who's listening to you speak.

Okay, good. All right, we are going to go take a break. Before we do, I want to point out that there was an emergency pod podcast earlier this week. Nelai and Julia talked to Matt Muddweig, who is the owner of Automatic, which makes WordPress, which is about Tumblr. And I wanted to talk about this WordPress Tumblr tie up a bunch on this show. but they kind of just covered it all. In fact, I asked all my questions on the show that I sent him.

So if you haven't listened to that, I highly recommend you go check that out because it touches on a bunch of the stuff we usually rant upon on the Vergecast. So check that out, but don't do it now. Right now, you're going to pull over and listen to this ad, and then you're going to drive again, and we're going to talk about Spotify.

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Upwork.com. We're back. And I hope that you had a restful time on the side of the road. I hope you didn't disrupt traffic. Ashley, there's just been a bunch of Spotify news this week. And I can't make a story out of it. But to me, the biggest one is this podcast. thing, the podcast dashboard or whatever? What is this?

Yeah. So last year, Spotify introduced something called Spotify for podcasters in beta. And essentially what it is is a dashboard of analytics that gives podcasters the ability to learn a lot about their audience. And this is, and so this week, they announced that they are now making this public. So the goal is basically that every podcaster, and there's over 400 100,000 podcasts on Spotify, the goal is that these podcasters will start using the dashboard. So that specific news is maybe not super relevant to the listeners as far as if you don't publish a podcast. But it is actually very interesting from a data perspective because up until now, podcasters have

had little to know information about their listeners. It's RSS. You can usually get IP addresses where they're listening from and what device people are listening on in the app. But definitely not demographics information, definitely not what music they listen to. And this is legit, all-new territory because Spotify knows a lot about what you're doing, who you are, who you're friends with, where you're listening, all of these things. And it's starting to feed that information back to podcasters now.

So the context here is like podcasting was like the last true class. RSS-based, early 2000s, open web, free-for-all, we don't do creepy ad things medium, right? Like, we put it an RSS feed, you hit it, you download a file, the end. And everyone's like, oh, this is terrible. We can't track you. And like, the advertisers want to know more and blah, blah, blah, blah. It was shockingly primitive, which is why you heard about promo codes and surveys for listeners, like through SurveyMonkey, is because there was just no way to learn about listeners.

unless you went out of your way to type in a promo code so we know that we can attribute that sale back to the show. Right. So Apple started turning out a little bit more analytics. It seems like Spotify is turning the dial way up. And if they're providing this much information to us, the podcasters, they must be providing equal or more to advertisers, I assume. All we know about their advertising right now as far as...

So regular podcasts, like Vergecast on Spotify. First of all, it's not RSS. We let them do their own thing with the show. But we have our own ads, and that's that. Spotify doesn't touch it. It's great. But for Spotify's own shows and for their free users who get ads, what we know now is that advertisers can now target their ads against people's podcast listening habits. So whereas before, and this is where it starts to get interesting because you realize how sensitive podcast information can really be.

Oh, yeah. Like if I all of a sudden I start listening to like new parent podcasts, like y'all know I'm about to have. a kid, right? Yeah, exactly. Wow. And we can get into this now. But like, for example, the Vergecast and why'd you push that button the show I do, have, we can see our listeners and what music they like.

I think both of our listeners like Drake. Okay. So here are the artists that you, the Vergecast listener, are listening to. Okay. So Kanye West, sure. Maybe, maybe you could update some of your listening habits. Kanye West, that's fine. Drake, of course.

Great, Drake. Post Malone, I'm with you. Cool. All right. Ed Shearin? Sure. That's me. So here's the thing.

I firmly believe that you should never, ever look down on someone for the things that they like for their aesthetic preferences. Do you? Because it sounds like that's a caveat that's about to be contradicted. If I'm drinking, like, crappy coffee and you're like, hmm, you're a bad person because you like that coffee and it's bad coffee. Like, no, screw you, man. Like, this is fine. I'm happy with this. And like I used my pin tweet used to be it's okay to like things and to like that other people like things.

This is like the thing that drove me still drives me crazy about like the fanboy wars between iPhone and Android. Like if people like the thing that they have, then why would you like tell them they suck because they like that thing? Stop it. But there's a line. And I draw that line at the chain smokers. I just, and the worst part is the listeners of why'd you push that button, and they've got Ed Shearren and Drake, of course, but they've got Billy Eilish, they've got Ariana Grande, they've got Taylor Swift.

But, man, the Polygon show, they have Billy English, Panic at the Disco, Carly Ray Jepson and Lizzo, which is like, man, that's a good set of music right there. They also have Fallout Boy, which is fine. But Vergecast listeners, I beg you, I want to see, like, weird stuff in this thing where we can look at what music you're listening to. Like, we should pick a band, and all the Vergecast listeners that listen to us on Spotify should go listen to this band and start messing with the data of what Spotify thinks they know about you. What's a good band that everyone should go listen to, like, right now, after the Vergecast, not right now? The Wiggles. The Wiggles?

Really? At one point I had my Spotify link to my Tinder profile. A friend of mine who I had shared my Spotify login with started listening to the Wiggles so that the Wiggles would show up as my like top listens. Yeah, that's not good. But there's like a real chance that if we pull this off that Spotify will see this data and then start recommending the Vergecast to people that listen to that artist. We could really juke the system here.

Okay, so basically what we've learned about your listeners is that that's who they listen to. And the commonality here among everyone is Drake. Everyone likes Drake. But as an advertiser... Ed Shearin, apparently. Well, you have to think about it like this. As an advertiser, if I was advertising against music taste, everybody likes Drake. Like, how does that help me better sell Samsung phones?

I know Samsung is one of their clients. How does that better help me sell my Samsung phones? This is what I'm saying. If we pick an obscure band... then Samsung will know to advertise against that obscure band. Spotify beat you to it because now Samsung can just advertise against tech shows, people who listen to technology shows. And you can just see how this is really brilliant for Spotify as far as advertising ambitions go.

And it also just shows you and makes you think about how much people can learn about you going off your podcast habits. Wait, I've become completely confused because if you're making an ad and you want it to run on podcasts that are listened to by people who listen to tech shows, wouldn't you just put it on tech shows? That's what she's saying. I mean, sure, you could reach out to the Vergecast and be like, hey, we want to buy ads here. But Spotify has an entire ad platform. I'm pretty sure it's automated.

Yeah, you just go and click tech. Yeah, it's like a Facebook marketplace type thing where it just plays for the free users. So if I'm Samsung, I'm way better off targeting towards the podcast than targeting off of music taste. But you could do that without collecting any user data. You just look at what category the podcast is listed on and then put those ads on those podcasts, right? I mean, you could, but that's way more expensive. It's really expensive to take out a host read on a podcast. So thank you to everyone for listening to this show.

Promocode is promo code. I am going to say One of us has to pick a band. I'm going to say go listen to Starcrawler. If you haven't heard a Starcrawler, totally worth a listen. Go check them out. I want to see Starcrawler

on our Spotify data soon. So go do it. And if you're not, if you're not subscribe to us on Spotify, subscribe to us on Spotify, then click play on Starcrawler, put it on mute. Then go over to Apple Music and rate us five stars there.

Then walk away from your computer because you're done for the day. Give us all your data. But this is the thing is now Apple is totally set up to compete with Spotify on privacy as far as podcasts go. Because Apple doesn't give the analytics like Spotify does. They'll tell you how far people listened in the show. They're not giving you this super precise data. And it could come down to like, oh, I really care about my privacy.

So I'm going to start listening to my podcast on Apple Podcasts. Maybe. Right. Okay. Speaking of Apple and Spotify, there is a rumor that they're actually talking to each other to allow Siri to turn on Spotify and you can play songs from Spotify. This comes from the information. We don't know a ton about it. And there's a little bit of confusion because it may be that iOS 13 was like going to make this kind of possible in the first place.

But Spotify has been very angry in, you know, filing an antitrust complaint against Apple and the EU. just let them, just do it. Like, what else is Siri good for? Honestly. Apple music. I was worried about this, like, digital assistant lock-in issue like three or four years ago when they first started coming out. And no one believe me, but here it is.

And it's real. I hope that they do. I genuinely hope that they do what Google lets you do, which has set a default music player. So you don't have to be, listen to, what's the band? Chain Smokers. No, no, Starcrawler. Listen to Starcrawler in Spotify.

You could just say listen to Starcrawler. Right. I don't know. I don't think they're going to do the default thing necessarily. But I do hope they, I mean, I don't have a horse in this race. I don't have any smart assistance that I use regularly. if it would help you, Deeter, I hope they do it. So you don't care because you never use a smart assistant, not because you don't use Spotify.

Okay. I use Spotify, but I do see how Spotify on the HomePod would be very helpful. Yeah. And being able to issue commands like that for all the people who own Homepods. All six. I just think, aren't they still an uphill battle against, like Ashley said, like just, why do I need to use this, right? This smart assistant thing is of marginal utility and requires, like, learning how to use it to use it effectively.

So why bother? And a good reason to bother is if it did the things you want it to do. And one of those things is Spotify. So I feel like I understand that these companies are so in a habit of using their platforms as a hammer to attack their customers. into doing what they want them to do. But if they thought for a second about how delighting their customers might actually help them in the long run, I feel like we could have some better products out there. So, man, the whole theme here is like, do you trust Apple's motivations, right?

So Alexa and Google lets you set Spotify. Siri doesn't. But do you think that they're doing it because they're trying to use Siri like a hammer to force you to Apple Music? Or do you think they're doing it because they don't fully trust Spotify to do the right thing with your data? They don't want to make sure, they want to make sure that Siri doesn't pass along too much information, something, something, something. It's completely feasible or believable, plausible. It's completely plausible that Apple has, like, genuine, ethical, like, heartfelt reasons to not want to talk to Spotify with Siri. I don't know what they are, but it's possible.

I am almost positive if they said, hey, Spotify, we're going to hand you this deep link that includes the command play. If you respond to this deep link, the response to the command play, and the name of your favorite chain smoker's song, play it, and the integration is solved, you know? The worst part is I'm going to go listen to chain smokers on my way home just to verify that I'm right that I don't like them. Well, I was just saying, I think the difference between the battery case where I'm like, oh, I can actually see Apple's reasoning here

versus not allowing Spotify to be the default player, in which case I'm like it doesn't make any sense is because it's like let me give me a pop-up window if you really want give me your sales pitch Spotify sells your data or gives your data away or gives people information we don't use Apple music

give me that pop-up I'll read it and I will ignore it and then I will set Spotify as my default like let me make that decision I made my decision with the battery it does have potential consequences it could explode making Spotify my default

if I don't care about my default If I don't care about my data, I don't care about my data. I don't need Apple to protect me in that case. Spotify is also like they're nerfing their Android app. They got rid of the widget. I have many feelings about Android widgets. I don't think anybody cares to hear them. But if you want to know what I think about the state of Android widgets, listen to my new show, Deuteron Widgets.

All right. All right. That's coming. This just did. We have a 30-second clip from Deeteron Widgets. And it goes in. as follows. I really want to hear the

Dear Emergits clip, honestly. Okay. Apple's a walled garden, right? It's beautiful and you're stuck in the wall, but all the flowers are pretty and they smell good and they look good. Android is the opposite. It's still a garden, but it's a mess

and no one's watered it or tended to it for years. And so there's weeds, and you have to dig through the stuff and get, like, nettles and briars attached to you to, like, just get to the thing you want. And that is the state of Android widgets. Nobody updates their stuff properly except for like, you know, maybe 30, like, really cool indie developers. And sometimes the one that you like gets sold to a company that collects data than the way you don't like. And that sucks. And

like, it's all a mess. And if Google would just, like, put a little bit, a tiny amount of actual product focus on making widgets better on Android, then you could have like a pretty nice garden without giant walls around it. And it turns out the iPhone actually did this pretty well by making that left to home screen thing where it's just a vertical scrolling list of widgets, which if you try and get that on Android, you basically can't unless you use Microsoft's thing.

There's a couple others, but getting good widgets on Android is a huge pain, and it's really sad, and I don't blame Spotify for turning theirs off because why would you want to participate in that mess? That was more than 30 seconds, wasn't it? What a great show. That's one of my favorite shows.

Spotify, now that you know. Oh, man. It's so true, though. It's so true. Everything you just said is so true. I just decided to like, I'm really embracing Android and I was going to, I'm dedicated a whole screen of my phone to widgets. I've got like two that I really like.

And then a one that's like just to fill up the rest of the screen. So it looks nice. But what if you found three that you really like? You'd have to make another screen over to the. Right. You can't just swipe over and scroll, right? Well, and then, like, two of these widgets are like two thirds wide, so they won't fill up the whole width. So now I have this little pocket that I can't find a widget that fits. So now I have two random apps in that. It's great.

Or if you have, like, auto show up on the home screen turned on when you install an app, like, it finds that one little corner of your last screen where your widgets are. And you have to, like, you have to, like, scroll over to find it and then move it from there. Super aggravating. See, Ashley doesn't have this problem. She just has a great app. That's it. Yeah, my phone is really organized and beautiful, I gotta say. This widget screen sounds like my hell.

But the thing that you can do on Android that you can't do on an iPhone is you can have a blank space at the top of your screen instead of at the bottom. It's wild. I get it. I get it, kind of. But, you know, I made my deal with the devil. Here I am. What do you guys think of this rumor?

It's actually not a rumor. It's a fact. Chris Welch went and looked at all of the stuff. at the FCC that Sonos is making a Bluetooth speaker. About time? Right? Yeah. I guess.

Yeah. They had to eventually, right? Like, they couldn't just keep churning out Wi-Fi speakers, could they? Like, they had to eventually be like, okay. I mean, they tried that. They tried that for a while. No, I think they need to. I think it's about time.

It looks like they're doing it right because it looks like it's coming with like a base station. And so when it's plopped on the base station, then it's like, I'm a Sonos speaker. And when you take it off the base station, it switches to Wi-Fi, or to Bluetooth. I kind of want the ability to still have it show up as a proper Wi-Fi Sonos speaker whilst attached, you know, just on battery power and not plugged in. So hopefully they allow that because the idea that I could, like, grab a speaker and, like, just take it outside and still have it participate in the Sonos world would be great.

But we'll see. But it's like, yeah, it's about time. Well, yeah, because my roommate has a Sono speaker in his room, and his room is attached to the living room. And there's been so many times where we have a deck. So I'm like, I want to bring your Sono speaker, which sounds great, easy to use, love it. I just wish it could be Bluetooth, and I could take it onto the deck because your room's right there. Let's just move that speaker over. But instead, it has to be plugged in on Wi-Fi.

So annoying. This literally solves that problem. There is a button on the back that apparently lets you toggle between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so we might get what we want here. Why is it a button and not a switch? What does everybody have against switches? No Bluetooth headsets come with switches anymore. You've got to, like, hold the button down for, like, three or five seconds to get the thing you want.

Just make it a switch. Oh, wow. It is a button. I thought it was the one where you, like, toggle it, like you push it to one side. Yeah. A switch. A switch. Switches are great.

I've already forgotten the word for switch. I don't use them ever. You have a ringer switch on your phone, but no one knows that because no one ever turns the ringer switch on, except for me and I have good reasons for it. even though Bejahn, who works for The Verge, makes fun of me for it. But I'm not going to get into that. But yeah, like, this should be a switch. Yes.

And I don't know why every company hates switches. They're like, they cost like a half a cent more to make than a button, I guess. I don't know. Do they break more easily? Probably. Can we just get a new thing that's Bluetooth, but totally not Bluetooth? I'm at this point where as tech support to my aging parents, Bluetooth is

one, their devices are slowly being replaced by Bluetooth. Yeah. And two, it's impossible for them to use. Because every Bluetooth device, yeah, it's a button and it is some

arbitrary amount of time that you hold it down or you double press or you triple press and then you go up, it's just I don't, I think we're, I think we need a completely new standard. And it's like, based on, it can be NFC for pairing.

It could have, it could be 2.4 gigahertz, but it needs to not be called Bluetooth. And we just need a total do-over because the current ecosystem is a horrible, impossible to use mess. I don't know, Paul. I mean, Bluetooth will be better next year. But isn't it amazing when Bluetooth works well? Yeah. You feel so powerful. Sometimes I'm just like it worked.

And it's awesome. And it just turned on and my phone knew to pair. I think that feeling is like, I'll never touch this again. I will never unpaire these two devices because it was so hard. I have an $1,100 phone in my pocket. Three feet away, I have like the most advanced wireless headphones you could possibly get one for each year or altogether if you like don't trust that. And yet, no matter what, no matter what, when I walk through an intersection. in a city, it just like doesn't work.

I have learned at a particular intersection outside my office that I shouldn't look both ways. If I look left, it's fine. But if I look right, my headphones crack out. So I'm just like taking my life in my own hands every time I cross the street because I don't want my sound to drop out when I look right. Wow. That sounds totally reasonable. Please look both ways. It's annoying, though.

Please. For your health. Yeah. You're worried about carrying around a small little bomb, but you're not looking both ways in the street. For giant monster. Okay, that's fair. All right, we're going to take another break. And then we've got some Snap stuff and we've got some Huawei stuff.

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dot AI slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. Hey, Paul. How you doing?

I'm doing very well. I heard that we have this segment. I don't really remember what it's called and I don't think we do it that often. But do you know what I'm talking about? It's strange because it has the same name every week. Okay. It's called Nice Boca you've got there.

It would be shame. No, let me try it again. Sorry, sometimes I forget. Even myself, I forget what it's called. It's called Nice Boca you've got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. And it's about some... I just wanted to preface this because this could be confusing from the headline.

As far as I know, no DSLRs have been truly harmed out in the wild. But some security researchers have deviated. developed a way that you could do a ransomware attack on a Wi-Fi-enabled DSLR camera. And so you could hack the camera and then you encrypt all the files and, I don't know, demand Bitcoin for the decryption key. That's dark. The thing is, what if they make you, like, enter your Bitcoin password using the camera's interface? What if you're trying to find your way around any camera, even if it has a touchscreen, is impossible. They're all different.

They change every couple of years. I never know how to do anything. You know, the way to you do it is you actually fire up the camera and you have them take a picture of a QR code, which I've actually, having delved into some of the QR code, like libraries as to do the programming stuff. And very straightforward technology. As weird and as arbitrary as QR codes look like, it's very well specified, as it turns out. Anyways, this is just continuing the theme of if it's connected to the internet,

it's probably completely vulnerable to being hacked. Yeah. And we're all going to die. You know, the worst part is we all learned this lesson in the early 90s with printers. And as soon as they became Wi-Fi enabled, we learned it again with printers. Like, they're the original internet of things, screw up your network vector for attack. And we learned all those lessons, saw all that happen, and we're like, cool. Let's make a billion different kinds of things just like that.

And that's where we live now. This makes me think of just a sad tourist, like, traveling and all of a sudden in there on, like, a shady hotel Wi-Fi network. That's just sad. That's honestly just sad. Like the hospital ran somewhere. That's also sad. I'm like, I get it. They're like a billion dollar corporations actually.

Yeah. But the sad tourist DSLR. Think of your parents? Just like that. They've been saving up for this trip. The kids are finally out of the house off to college. There's only one Wi-Fi network. Your kids bought you this fancy camera and showed you how to have the pictures

transferred to your iPad automatically over Wi-Fi. And so you left that on. and then just gone. Wow. Dark. Yeah, it really is. And then you'll just have to use your phone and snap. See, this is a transition.

Was it good? That was gorgeous. It was not good. All right, so there's new spectacles. Spectacles three. Legitimately unbelievable. For real. When I saw this, I was like, what?

Like, why? Why? Snapchat, yeah, so this week they announced they're going to, to be coming out with the third version of their sunglasses that have cameras in them. They're the Spectacles 3. They're coming out in November. Now, you would think, Snapchat has not sold many of these, apparently. They wrote down nearly $40 million in costs associated with the first version of the glasses.

And supposedly they were sitting in warehouses. Like, they didn't sell from what we can tell. But no, they're still pushing through a version 3, and they made them more expensive. This time they're $380. It's just like, come on. Which I guess is a move. I don't know. So they added an extra...

So why are they more expensive? Yeah. So they're more expensive because they added an extra camera, an HD camera, so now it has depth perception. So you can take the content that you capture and add augmented reality effects to them. And maybe you guys remember, but Snapchat, I believe it was earlier this year, introduced landmark effects where you can make the flat iron building in New York

puke a rainbow I don't know this is the stuff teens like I guess and the idea is you can apply these filters to your content that you're capturing so it's like AR it's a little bit of AR without having a computer screen in front of you when you're capturing the content I don't even know how to describe these they're definitely trying to be like a little

1960s sort of fashionable they did a piece with Vogue or they had Vogue take photos with them like they're definitely going for the fashion audience. Yeah, it's got this like bar across the top and then it's like it's very straight across the top and then the glasses themselves are rounded. And I look at it and I'm like, oh, this is clearly high fashion even though I have no idea why. Like I'm dumb about fashion, but I get that vibe off. This is the kind of high fashion that if you are very attractive,

you can make this look good and it was horrible on anybody else. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, the funny thing though is with their second version, they went really hard for the fashion audience. And this was one of my favorite lawsuits that ever happened was Lucas Sabat, who is a very popular model. I think he acts as well. Snap had a deal with him as an influencer where he would have to go

to a fashion week wearing spectacles. And he and then he, they made a deal that he could just post that content anywhere, like on Instagram, but he never did it. But it was just funny because even Snapchat was like, we know you're not going to post on Snapchat. Like we just know that's not going to happen

for you. I don't actually know how that lawsuit I'll have to look into that. But anyway, so they're still doing this, and it's interesting only because of the AR effects. Like, I think that is actually snapped. One thing that they do so well over Facebook slash Instagram is their AR effects. They're really, really good. They've had viral hits, the hot dog filter, the puppy dog filter. Like, these were moments in our culture that the whole internet participated in.

The gender swap filter as much as that maybe was problematic. Still a moment, though. These are all moments. So is it... You say that the teen... You guess the teens like, you know, puking flat eye or... Rainbow peaking flat iron buildings.

Isn't what the teens like TikTok? Yeah, I mean, for sure. There's a lot of TikTok memes where they tell you capture this. A lot of TikTok memes are trying to trick you into double tapping the like button or whatever. Yeah. But there's a lot of TikTok memes

where they try to get you to take the video from TikTok, import it into... Snapchat and like reverse it or whatever. Some Snapchat feature to unlock the hidden message in the TikTok. Yeah. And also a lot of people who make TikToks use filters. So I do kind of view these sunglasses as platform agnostic. I mean, they don't automatically upload your content to Snapchat.

So I think maybe it's smart that Snap is like, hey, we recognize that we have these really powerful AR filters. People like putting filters on their content. And this is literally just a new form of camera that maybe could change people's TikTok game or just change content for however they want. And I mean, maybe this is smart. But again, $380 is not a teenager's budget. Right. So that's why I'm like, I don't get it.

I don't get it. Well, what's funny is like the thing that makes TikTok compelling. I mean, one, it's like, it's just like it's the popular thing. But the interface is really, really easy to like get into. You get content right away without doing any work. And then, you know, the music thing gives you, like, something to do. Like, you know what to do and how to make a TikTok, even if, you know, you don't know how to make something that is super viral. And it's funny because if you look at – remember the giant redesign a snap of a couple years ago, three years ago, however long it was?

Like, that, like, Evan, like, got on a plane and, like, landed and, like, made – blew up the whole company. Like, we're doing it. Like, I think he saw that they need to, like, continually innovate on the interface of the app in order to, like, try and land. on a thing that becomes like, you know, I don't know if addictive is a right word, but super, super sticky for users. And I want to say that this stuff is just a distraction. But I guess if you want to bet the company on AR because you're like ahead on AR, like, cool, go for it.

I'm sure Facebook won't try and steal any of that and do anything. I mean, but, you know, Facebook did the portal. And people were like, eh, I don't like this idea of Facebook having this access. So maybe Snap is in a better position to be. able to pull something like this off. That's fair. Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, which is a division of Facebook and makes VR, but not AR, but it's all in this slurry of stuff.

I have now disclosed. But Instagram is doing an AR thing, right? Yeah, so Facebook and Instagram also see AR as a big area that they can focus on. Facebook has had AR filters for a while now. Instagram had a beta program where creators that they approved, could create face filters that would go on the app. They just this week opened up that program to everybody. So, like, The Verge actually is putting out a face filter

if you go to our Instagram page at Verge. Yeah, it's really cool. So that's actually a really big deal for a couple of reasons. One is that the more people you have creating, maybe the higher the chances are that you'll hit it big with, like, the hot dog filter. Like, someone out there maybe will come up with the thing that sticks and makes Instagram AR filters.

a moment that everyone wants to participate in. Hasn't happened yet? Maybe it will now. The second reason why is because Snapchat has allowed people to create filters for its platform for a while now. And they're full businesses. People have brand deals. They work with brands to help them create filters.

It's a whole thing. They make tons of money. Instagram now that everybody can submit, you're going to probably be seeing a lot more branded filters on Instagram. Right. I'm sorry, Ashley. you're only allowed to refer to it as Instagram from Facebook.

That's the official name of the app now. What a nightmare. Why would they want to remind anybody that Instagram is on my Facebook? Let us pretend. This is the obligatory moment in every podcast that mentions AR where I bring up Werner Vinji's excellent novel, Rainbow's End.

Because I do love it as like this self-expression. Like, I'm not, I quit Instagram and Facebook a while ago, but, but I was still on. Some people would do, I don't even know if it was part of the beta program or just something that they were doing on their own, but there was this sort of like AR makeup kind of stuff where they're like crying glitter and stuff like that. It's just, it's such a cool form of self-expression because it's, it's like fantasy. It's like, here, it's not just modifying my looks, but it's, it's, it's, here's the copy. costume I would wear in the far future when this, you know, nanotechnology could make me literally cry glitter. Like, here's what I would look like then.

Oh, yeah. I love, I absolutely love this stuff. I think it's so cool. And I think seeing it used actually in more high fashion or at least influencer photos where, because we're so used to seeing these filters from a selfie perspective. And it works fine then. But sometimes it kind of feels like people are just using them to have an excuse to take a selfie. which no hate. Like, I totally get it. Fine with it. But it's cool when you see it, the rear camera and the filters applied to people in a actual place where you're like, oh, you're in a setting.

This is a really nice photo. And here is you with this filter. It's a whole different message. And I totally agree with you. I think it's awesome. I'm happy AR is getting this attention. I think it's very promising. Anything else about AR or?

But no, nothing else to add. All right. One last thing before we run two over. one, Huawei is delaying the Maidex, which is perfect. Madex, if you're not familiar, is their version of the folding phone. It folds on the outside, not on the inside.

Samsung insists they're going to be launching the Galaxy Fold. I think it was September. They said it was coming out. They're saying September. The MaidX was going to launch in June. They bumped it to September, and now they're just saying this year. That'll be fun if it ever gets released.

But then they also, Huawei, you know, company that can't sell phones in the US and may not have access to Android, depending on what happens with the trade war, has announced that it does, in fact, have an operating system. In English, it's known as Harmony OS. Paul, what is it? Well, Dieter, it is a microkernel-based operating system. I'm so excited.

Okay. We're going to be here for another three hours, aren't we? So, first, Huawei's not, like, Huawei's been working on its own, like, IoT-ish operating system for a long time. It's not like been a super secret project or anything like that. There's tons of like developer documentation about their like IoT operating system that is based on a microkernel. They have like serious like researchers like thinking about these sorts of things.

And so obviously famously, Google's fuchsia operating system is a microcernel based operating system and it also supposedly, according to Google, targeted at IoT. So now Huawei is bringing Harmony OS to this new TV, the honor smart screen TV. And so now there's a user interface. Obviously, like if you're a smart oven, for instance, you don't necessarily need, you know, all the user interface stuff. You don't need all the connectivity stuff of a phone. But a TV has a lot of user interface, has a lot of connectivity. So like this TV has a pop-up camera for video chat. It's got like this integration with the phone where you like tap your phone on the remote with NFC.

And now you can like Chromecast your phone to your TV, that kind of stuff. So it's not it's not like they have no functionality. This is a decent amount of functionality. the user interface is pretty minimal, and this is still a long ways seemingly from a phone. They're saying that, well, one, because they're not sure about Android, right? Like, it's not that they're not sure what to tell us.

They don't know. Like, the statement was that they are unclear as to whether Huawei can still use Android, and the company is waiting on an update to find out. But they're saying that they could have this, on the Harmony OS on other devices within the next few years, next three years or so. It's very Tyson-esque, right? Because Tyson, they made a couple phones, but really what it's for is for smart watches and TVs.

This is like that, but it's like the 2019 version of it that's, like, more advanced because it's based on a microcolonel, because microcolonels are so hot right now. Yeah, and I think that what's interesting. So Tyson is Linux, is based on the Linux kernel, right? As is Android. the kind of the hot new thing to do is that you just make Linux an app. So this is what Microsoft is done with Windows. Linux is an app now, and that's unlocked for them,

a lot of access to developer tools. That's very important, stuff like running Docker and things like that. And then, you know, ChromeOS is running Linux kind of as an app to get access to desktop applications. Here, there's a micro kernel, but then it also has this ability, they call ARC, the ARC compiler, so that they can cross-compile Android apps to run on this phone. And so while there's a microcernel at the heart,

this phone will also run Linux. This is as far as I'm understanding. And I'm sorry, I'm saying this phone, this operating system, we're to run on the phone. This is how it would work. It runs Linux. They say the ARC compiler can make Android apps faster.

There's obviously, The biggest obstacle is obviously Google Play services, right? A lot of app developers, you know, assume that they will have Google-type parts of the operating system. But even if you have managed to make your phone run on fire, FireOS or another Android open-source thing that's not Google Play infused, I'm guessing there's still going to be edge cases. I'm sure this will not be a perfectly smooth transition. But it just seems like they are,

Huawei seems capable. They don't really want to go this way, but it's like, if you make us, we will move to this operating system. We will run Android apps, and we will try to get developers to develop directly for their,

they have this thing called LightOS that I really can't figure out how it's part of Harmony OS. I don't know if it's the front end or what. Is Huawei's arc the same thing as Android runtime for Chrome, which is the original way Android was running on Chrome OS back of the day, or they just happen to have the exact same acronym?

I have no idea. Is it Arc with a K? Yeah, it's Arc with a C because it's Android runtime for Chrome. Don't think it's that same. If you know the answer to that question, you should tweet at Paul. He's at Future Paul. This is, most of this information I'm getting is from this thing. There's a page on GitHub called Awesome Harmony OS that someone has gathered a ton of the information, including the source code to Light OS, which is sort of their iot platform i don't think all the harmony os stuff that's like running on this tv is open source yet the other thing that's interesting and this kind of ties back to the the iot stuff is is that they're

trying to do a thing walley's little twitter ad for their harmony OS is all these different devices with brick walls in between them like your watch and your phone and the car and things like that and then in the little clip the walls dissolve oh of course because you can write once and run anywhere. That never goes wrong. Well, there's this concept. I've seen, I don't know how focused Fuchsia is on this anymore, but I know that they did a lot of this stuff early on.

We're like, we have an expectation when we like open up a Google Doc or Trello, that we're going to collaborate in real time. It's synced across devices because it's not really even synced. It's all just in the cloud and we are accessing it all.

But if you like open up text edit on a Mac or notepad on Windows, and you type something and save, you're just saving to a hard drive. There is work being done that's kind of in the computer science realm that is sort of trying to be brought to more mainstream use

that makes data more portable, sort of magically. I think that we're always calling this their distributed capability kit. And so I'm not certain, but this might be sort of the thing that's behind the way that they're making the phone, and sync information and show up on the TV.

I think we're all aware of these frictions between moving devices from our devices to the cloud to another device or directly from device to device. And so a file that just sort of magically copied itself to all the places you needed to be and settings and bookmarks and things like that that all moved around seamlessly sounds really cool. And I think that's, it sounds like that's something, I know that something Google's kind of worked on a little bit with fuchsia, sounds like there's stuff like this in Harmony, US. I have no idea if that will really come to fruition.

Technically interesting in lots of different ways. But I don't know if we ever are going to need to worry about this in the U.S. anyway. Like, what are the chances that this stuff is going to become available for purchase, for a regular person in America anytime soon? Because literally Huawei itself doesn't know if they're going to be allowed to use Android. Huawei, like, you know, someone's like the biggest Android, you know, company on the planet

doesn't know if they get to continue to use Android. It's a lovely situation we're in. That's my take. I mean, we should look at it as like an academic exercise and maybe it'll like, you can see what the trends are, but like you should not be excited about Harmony OS because it's going to be running your next TV because who knows if you're ever going to be able to buy anything

from Huawei ever again, right? Yeah, yeah, and I guess it is mostly academic. I think one thing that excites me about it is that theoretically, if a truly open source operating system, if it was really good and really useful, you can get some smart people, audit the code, make sure it's not phoning home to the Chinese government, and then you run it on whatever hardware you want to run it on.

I mean, that is really what makes Linux so great. You know, it doesn't matter who contributes to Linux up to a point because other people are contributing to Linux, auditing the code and making sure that it is generally good. And so, you know, there's also this Wall Street Journal story this week about Huawei helping countries in Africa spy on their citizens maybe. There's obviously so much possibility for really for any technology company to do harm with the products it offers.

But if it makes it open source, you are mitigating some of that potential. There's a way to draw a line from that back to the smart oven. I'm too tired to do it, but you leave that as an exercise for the listener. All right, that is the Vergecast. Thank you very much for listening. Ashley, thank you for coming on this week. Thank you. We are definitely going to have you back.

Paul, thank you for micro-colonels. You are personally responsible for them. You're welcome, Dieter. You're welcome. Anytime. There are other great Vox Media podcast. There's Rico DeCode with Kara and Scott Galloway. There's Rico Media with Peter Kafka.

There is also Land of the Giants, which this season is hosted by Jason Del Rey, and it's about Amazon. You should definitely check that out. A couple other plugs. You can binge listen to all the why'd you push that button, because that season's done, right, Ashley? Yeah, it's done. Please listen. You should go and listen to the whole thing. It's a very, very good season.

There will, of course, be a Verge cast interview episode next week. Nelai will be back. And one other thing real quick. Pull over in your car and tweet at me. I'm at Backlon and tell me what you want to know about the Note 10 plus because I am currently reviewing it. It's in my pocket right now, not exploding. Do you have the pretty one? I do have the pretty one.

It's iridescent, glowy, mirrors everywhere. It's the best. We could have talked about that, but we talked about it a bunch last week. We'll talk it about it again next week after the review goes up. But let me know what you want to know about that note by tweeting at me. I'm at Backlon. Paul is Future Paul. Ashley is Ashley R. Carmen.

Yeah. Yeah, good job. I'm always worried about the forgetting about the R. I know. I need to hunt down Salesforce, Ashley Carmen, and make her give me a handle. All right, that's it. Rock and roll. Well, wait.

If any of your listeners work as Salesforce, find Ashley Carmen on Slack and tell her I need that handle. I'm not getting. Wow. Have you tried to DMing her? Please, there has to be a Salesforce listener out there. This would be like a gift. Truly a gift. Just ask your friends at Spotify, Ashley.

I bet they could track her to them. Find her. Through the network of speakers. All right. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul.

Kesney.