On this week’s episode of AppStories, we consider the pros and cons of competing with, and what it takes to succeed against, Apple’s free, built-in system apps and highlight some of their favorite alternatives.
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Recovering from San Jose, the boys wade through an ocean of follow up, then talk about the new iPads and review Planet of the Apps.
On this week’s Connected, a lot of WWDC follow-up and more about Apple’s new iPad Pros. You can listen here.
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Manton Reece’s assessment of the redesigned App Store coming to iOS 11 is spot on:
The old App Store was designed like a database. Databases are good at showing grids and lists from an algorithm. But the App Store should tell a story about new apps. A blog-like format is the best way to do that.
This plays to Apple’s strengths in design and taste. Where Google might hire more engineers to improve their store, Apple should hire more writers.
Three years ago, Reece argued that Apple should invest heavily in App Store curation, which is precisely what it appears to be doing. The depth and breadth of the new App Store content that Apple has planned is unclear, but during a WWDC session on the changes to the App Store, product manager Pedraum Pardehpoosh declared Apple’s intent to ‘double down’ on editorial curation. If the initial content included with the iOS 11 beta is any indication, Apple may be on track to make the App Store a regular destination for users instead of a place people go to only when they have a specific need.
The Verge has a lengthy excerpt from Brian Merchant’s upcoming book, ‘The One Device: the Secret History of the iPhone.’ Merchant’s book chronicles the development of the iPhone from the recruitment of engineers, designers, and others at Apple, through the battles over its hardware and software implementation. What’s unique about the excerpt of ‘The One Device’ is that it doesn’t try to fit the story of the iPhone’s development into a neat and tidy straight-line narrative. Instead, the excerpt embraces the messy, twisted path the product took from inception to launch.
The first battle was over hardware and whether the iPhone would be a multitouch device or an adaptation of existing iPod hardware. According to Merchant, an iPod-based Apple phone made the first calls:
The first calls from an Apple phone were not, it turns out, made on the sleek touchscreen interface of the future but on a steampunk rotary dial. “We came very close,” Ording says. “It was, like, we could have finished it and made a product out of it… But then I guess Steve must have woken up one day like, ‘This is not as exciting as the touch stuff.’ ”
Once it was decided that the iPhone would be a multitouch device, the battleground shifted to whether the operating system would be based on OS X or the iPod’s OS:
“At this point we didn’t care about the phone at all,” Williamson says. “The phone’s largely irrelevant. It’s basically a modem. But it was ‘What is the operating system going to be like, what is the interaction paradigm going to be like?’ ” In that comment, you can read the roots of the philosophical clash: The software engineers saw P2 not as a chance to build a phone, but as an opportunity to use a phone-shaped device as a Trojan horse for a much more complex kind of mobile computer.
Ultimately, the iPhone was released as a touchscreen device that sported a stripped-down version of OS X, and has proven to be the mobile computer that its creators envisioned. What I like most about the excerpt, and why I immediately purchased the book, is that it tells the story of the iPhone from the perspective of the people who worked on it, which provides details that only the engineers and designers working on the front lines can bring to life.
‘The One Device: the Secret History of the iPhone’ by Brian Merchant will be released on June 20th and is available for pre-order on the iBooks Store and Amazon.
Alongside the introduction of a revamped Podcasts app in iOS 11, Apple is making a few tweaks at the podcast feed level that will improve the way shows can be organized and displayed inside podcasting apps. Jason Snell shares the details on Six Colors:
New extensions to Apple’s podcast feed specification will allow podcasts to define individual seasons and explain whether an episode is a teaser, a full episode, or bonus content. These extensions will be read by the Podcast app and used to present a podcast in a richer way than the current, more linear, approach. (Since podcast feeds are just text, other podcast apps will be free to follow Apple’s lead and also alter how they display podcasts based on these tags.)
Users will be able to download full seasons, and the Podcasts app will know if a podcast is intended to be listened to in chronological order—“start at the first episode!”—or if it’s more timely, where the most recent episode is the most important.
As the world of podcasting has grown, there is now a more diverse selection of shows than ever before, leading to the need for more nuanced formatting of those shows. I appreciate how Apple is implementing these changes at a feed level so that third-party apps can take advantage of them as well.
The full array of podcasting changes, including a brief walkthrough of the redesigned Podcasts app in iOS 11, were first covered in a session from WWDC.
Apple’s famous reputation for secrecy continues to morph. While much of the company’s upcoming products remain shrouded in mystery – as evidenced by the numerous surprises at WWDC last week – other works in progress have voluntarily been thrust into the public eye. Alex Webb and Emily Chang report for Bloomberg on the latest big disclosure:
After years toiling away in secret on its car project, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has for the first time laid out exactly what the company is up to in the automotive market: It’s concentrating on self-driving technology.
“We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” Cook said in a June 5 interview on Bloomberg Television that amounted to his most detailed comments yet on Apple’s automotive plans. “It’s a core technology that we view as very important.” He likened the effort to “the mother of all AI projects,” saying it’s “probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.”
Apple’s car-related work has been a loosely kept secret to this point due to the various permits and regulatory approvals required to test self-driving vehicles on public roads, but that doesn’t make today’s news any less surprising. It’s one thing to announce a product six months out, or even a year or more out as happened recently with the Mac Pro, but publicly disclosing an entrance into a huge new market – potentially a long while before the product is ready to ship – is a different thing entirely.
Cook at least isn’t giving away the whole story yet. The end of the Bloomberg story notes:
Cook was hesitant to disclose whether Apple will ultimately manufacture its own car. “We’ll see where it takes us,” Cook said. “We’re not really saying from a product point of view what we will do.”
Live from San Jose, the trio talk about the news from a little event known as WWDC.
Last week’s Connected, recorded in person during WWDC, is all about Apple’s announcements and our reactions to pro updates for Macs and iPads. You can listen here.
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Steven Troughton-Smith played around with the first beta of iOS 11 and discovered that inter-app drag and drop – one of the marquee features for iPad this year – could in theory be used on the iPhone as well.
At WWDC, Apple explained that the same drag and drop API that powers iPad apps can be used on the iPhone to move content inside the app you’re currently using. So while on the iPad we’re going to get a wide array of gestures to transfer content between different apps, on the iPhone drag and drop will be limited to rearranging content in the current app only.
I want inter-app drag and drop to come to the iPhone eventually (it’s such a better solution than extensions and share sheets), but I could see a couple of reasons why Apple might want to wait for now.
First, giving the iPad exclusive access to the functionality is a great marketing move as Apple “relaunches” the iPad line this year. But more importantly, while the iPad supports multi-hand drag and drop, the same system would be awkward, if not downright impossible, on the iPhone’s screen. And if I had to guess, I’d say that Apple would prefer iPhone drag and drop to work well with one-handed operations – which makes me wonder if the company is waiting for a future software solution (a Shelf, a spring-loaded virtual Home button, or a new Dock) to enable more powerful drag and drop on the iPhone.
Apple made several changes to the App Store Review Guidelines during WWDC this week, including an easing of the prohibition against downloading and executing code on an iOS device. The ban on executable code remains intact, but rule 2.5.2 now also provides that:
Apps designed to teach, develop, or test executable code may, in limited circumstances, download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the Application completely viewable and editable by the user.
The change to the guidelines is limited, but it’s an important signal to third-party developers that Apple will accept certain educational apps and developer tools on iOS, which brings the promise of app development on iOS one step closer to reality.
