It’s no surprise that SoundHound has been looking to expand beyond song recognition, but their latest update to the original SoundHound app for iOS is interesting for a couple of reasons.
Earnest: Take Control of Your Student Loans [Sponsor]
Did you know you can refinance your student loans, save thousands, and make your new loan incredibly easy to manage? Our sponsor this week, Earnest, has created the most flexible refinancing experience to help financially responsible grads take control of their student loans, at earnest.com.
Their product helps clients save an average of almost $18,000, with variable rates starting as low as 2.13% APR. Earnest never charges any fees — so no fees for origination, and no penalties for paying off your loan quickly or changing your terms down the line. They let you customize your payment to match your budget and timeline, and their simple dashboard makes it easy to manage your loan – even from your phone.
Earnest can do this because they’re a new kind of lender — one that looks at things traditional banks don’t, like your savings habits and earnings potential — to give you the lowest possible rates. And even better, their expert in-house customer service team is available via phone, email, and chat for the life of your loan.
It takes less than two minutes to find out how much you could save, and they even have a special offer for our readers: get a $150 bonus when you refinance through earnest.com/macstories.
Don’t get stuck paying more than you have to — check out earnest.com/macstories and take two minutes to see your personalized rate estimate today.
Our thanks to Earnest for sponsoring MacStories this week.
Google Introduces Spaces→
Google announced a new app/service today to share media and links with friends. From their blog:
Group sharing isn’t easy. From book clubs to house hunts to weekend trips and more, getting friends into the same app can be challenging. Sharing things typically involves hopping between apps to copy and paste links. Group conversations often don’t stay on topic, and things get lost in endless threads that you can’t easily get back to when you need them.
We wanted to build a better group sharing experience, so we made a new app called Spaces that lets people get people together instantly to share around any topic.
With Spaces, it’s simple to find and share articles, videos and images without leaving the app, since Google Search, YouTube, and Chrome come built in.
I like how they’re going to use it at Google I/O this week to connect developers with technical sessions, but I don’t have a lot of faith when it comes to social apps from Google. Pretty clever to bring the smart search of Google Photos (which is amazing) to Spaces too, but I don’t see how I could use this aside from occasional, topic-based events.
Google has a point that most group conversations are endless threads of stuff, but am I going to switch to Spaces just for better search/sharing? I doubt it.
I’ll still be checking out Spaces when it launches later today on the App Store (the app isn’t out yet, but it should be at this link eventually).
Apple Releases iOS 9.3.2→
This isn’t a major update to iOS, but it has one nice tweak – you can now use Low Power Mode and Night Shift simultaneously. In my experience with the betas, that’s been perfect when it’s 2 AM and I’m too lazy to get off the couch and get my iPhone’s charger. Seems like a good reason to update.
On the Limitations of iOS Custom Keyboards
Somewhat buried in a good Verge piece on iOS custom keyboards is a reiteration by Apple on why they don’t allow dictation for third-party keyboards:
Apple has long been a stalwart for erring on the side of caution when it comes to keeping your data private and asking you to make sure you know you’re sharing something. The company’s policy is to not allow microphone access for extensions (like these keyboards) because iOS has no way to make it clear that the phone is listening. Giving third-party keyboards access to the microphone could allow nefarious apps to listen in on users without their knowledge, an Apple spokesperson says.
As far as I know, it’s not just custom keyboards: no kind of app extension can access the microphone on iOS (plus other APIs). This has been the case since 2014 and it appears Apple still thinks the privacy trade-off would be too risky.
The principle doesn’t surprise me; at a practical level, though, wouldn’t it be possible to enable dictation1 in third-party keyboards by coloring the status bar differently when the microphone is listening?
I also have to wonder if, two years into custom keyboards, it would be time for Apple to lift some of their other keyboard restrictions. To recap, this is what custom keyboards on iOS can’t do:
- Access the system settings of Auto-Capitalization, Enable Caps Lock, and dictionary reset feature
- Type into secure text input objects (password fields)
- Type into phone pad objects (phone dialer UIs)
- Access selected text
- Access the device microphone
- Use the system keyboard switching popup
Aside from microphone access, secure input fields, and phone pad objects, I’d like to see Apple add support for everything else in iOS 10. More importantly, I’d like to see their performance improve. Here’s an example: when you swipe down from the Home screen to open Spotlight, Apple’s keyboard comes up with a soft transition that’s pleasing on the eye; if you do the same with a custom keyboard, the transition is always jarring, and it often doesn’t work at all.2
I struggle to understand the position of those who call custom keyboards “keyloggers” because, frankly, that’s a discussion we should have had two years ago, not as soon as Google launches a custom keyboard. Since 2014, hundreds of companies (including Microsoft and Giphy) have released custom keyboards, each theoretically capable of “logging” what you type. That ship has sailed. Apple has featured Microsoft’s Word Flow on the front page of the App Store and the entire Utilities category is essentially dominated by custom keyboards (and has been for a while). Every few weeks, a new type of “-moji” celebrity keyboard comes out and sits at the top of the Top Paid charts.
I think it’s very unlikely Apple is going to backtrack on custom keyboards at this point. It’s not just Google – clearly, people find custom keyboards useful, and Apple is happy enough to promote them.3
The way we communicate and work on iOS has grown beyond typing. Despite their limitations, custom keyboards have shown remarkable innovations over the past two years. With more privacy controls and some API improvements by Apple, they have the potential to work better and look nicer going forward.
- Not necessarily via Siri, so Google could use their own dictation engine in Gboard, for instance. ↩
- I’ve had multiple instances of iOS being “stuck”, unable to load a custom keyboard or switch back to the Apple one. ↩
- Unless, of course, it’s Gboard, which got no feature whatsoever this week, though it’s currently the #1 Free app in the US App Store. ↩
App Debuts
...
SongShift
...
Q&A
...
Apple Invests $1 Billion in Chinese Ride-Hailing Service Didi Chuxing→
Major Apple news this evening:
Apple Inc said on Thursday it has invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing, a move that Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said would help the company better understand the critical Chinese market.
[…]
The investment gives Apple, which has hired dozens of automotive experts over the past year, a sizeable stake in Uber Technologies Inc’s chief rival in China. Cook said in an interview that he sees opportunities for Apple and Didi Chuxing to collaborate in the future.
According to Apple, they’re doing this to understand “certain segments of the China market”. Didi Chuxing is similar to Uber – it offers taxi services and designated drivers through smartphone apps.
See also: yesterday’s article by Neil Cybart on Apple’s R&D spending and the rumored Titan car project.