This week Fraser and Federico take a look at a leisure activity on iOS: watching video.
On the latest episode of Canvas, Fraser and I covered the best options for watching video on iOS. Whether you want to watch movies, TV shows, online video, or something else, there are plenty of options on iOS. You can listen here.
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David Smith is an independent developer who launched his first iOS app in 2008. He’s seen a lot of change in the App Store since then, which he chronicles in an insightful post on his blog. Smith examines the revenue his apps have generated since 2012 and the pattern is unmistakable. Around 2013, the majority of his revenue flipped from being primarily from paid sales to advertising.
Looking back, Smith concludes that:
…the change is mostly been in the App Store market, rather than in my own attitudes. In many cases adding advertising to my apps has been something I’ve fought and resisted as long as possible. But in the end the pragmatic answer has been to not swim upstream and instead follow where my customers have moved to.
The market has been pulling me along towards advertising based apps, and I’ve found that the less I fight back with anachronistic ideas about how software “should” be sold, the more sustainable a business I have.
Smith readily acknowledges his experience is just one data point in a large App Store. If you’ve followed the fortunes of independent app developers over this period though, his conclusion rings true.
Be sure to visit Smith’s website to see the charts breaking down the components of his apps’ revenue. The short-term impact of app launches on overall revenue is an interesting footnote to the post’s main focus.
Pastebot by Tapbots was an early iOS clipboard manager that facilitated copying text, links, images and more. Today, Tapbots announced that it is bringing Pastebot to the Mac. As Tapbots did with Tweetbot for Mac, Pastebot is available as a public beta. As Tapbots explains:
We have been wanting to do a full blown Pastebot for Mac long before we first released it on the iPhone. Paul wrote a fantastic little utility app called PTH Pasteboard Pro on the Mac which I had always wanted to rewrite as a Tapbots app, but we were just too busy with iOS. After the release of Tweetbot 2 for Mac, it only made sense to have Todd start on Pastebot for his next big project. So we are very excited to release Pastebot for Mac…as a public beta.
I have been testing Pastebot for Mac for several weeks and it’s got some great features like the ability to create custom filters that allow you to transform clipped text in various ways.
If you are interested in joining the public beta, head on over to tapbots.com/pastebot.
The Remaster trio are reunited to give their thoughts and experiences of playing No Man’s Sky, and also take a look at why there’s such a backlash against the game.
We had a good discussion on No Man’s Sky, its strengths and shortcomings, and managing expectations on this week’s Remaster. You can listen here.
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With a week to go before Apple’s fall event, the Connected Trio gather from their respective lands to discuss the possibilities of new Apple Watch models, new Macs and Apple’s situation in Ireland.
On this week’s Connected, we start the speculation on what next week’s Apple event could bring. You can listen here.
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Dara Doyle and Stephanie Bodoni, writing for Bloomberg:
Apple Inc. was ordered to repay a record 13 billion euros ($14.5 billion) plus interest after the European Commission said Ireland illegally slashed the iPhone maker’s tax bill.
The world’s richest company benefited from a “selective tax treatment” in Ireland that gave it a “significant advantage over other businesses,” the European Union regulator said Tuesday in its largest tax penalty in a three-year crackdown on sweetheart fiscal deals granted by EU nations.
The European Commission is not saying that Apple has not paid its taxes. Rather, they have said that two tax rulings handed down to Apple by the Irish government in 1991 and 2007 had “no factual or economic justification” and constituted illegal state aid. That’s a problem in the eyes of the European Commission because profits from Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India were attributed to Apple’s corporate entity in Ireland.
“Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years,” EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in an e-mailed statement. “This selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 percent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 percent in 2014.”
The European Commission now wants the Irish government to claw back 13 billion Euros from Apple. Whilst this ruling is a significant development, it is far from the end of the story, Apple and the Irish government have already signaled their intentions to appeal the decision of the European Commission. If they do appeal, it is likely to take years for a final decision to be reached.
Update: Apple has posted an open letter from Tim Cook on their website, responding to today’s European Commission decision.
The European Commission has launched an effort to rewrite Apple’s history in Europe, ignore Ireland’s tax laws and upend the international tax system in the process. The opinion issued on August 30th alleges that Ireland gave Apple a special deal on our taxes. This claim has no basis in fact or in law. We never asked for, nor did we receive, any special deals. We now find ourselves in the unusual position of being ordered to retroactively pay additional taxes to a government that says we don’t owe them any more than we’ve already paid.
The Commission’s move is unprecedented and it has serious, wide-reaching implications. It is effectively proposing to replace Irish tax laws with a view of what the Commission thinks the law should have been. This would strike a devastating blow to the sovereignty of EU member states over their own tax matters, and to the principle of certainty of law in Europe. Ireland has said they plan to appeal the Commission’s ruling and Apple will do the same. We are confident that the Commission’s order will be reversed.
This week Fraser talks with Ben Brooks about the third major task manager on iOS, 2Do.
I couldn’t be on the latest episode of Canvas, but we had an excellent guest to continue our series on task managers. You can listen here.
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Federico’s back, so the power of The Prompt Curse has been restored. Picturelife is dead, Ping is in headlines and iOS 10 is closer than ever.
On this week’s episode of Connected, I check back on the status of my iOS 10 review as we move closer to September. You can listen here.
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Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, writing for Motherboard:
This is the first time that anyone has uncovered such an attack in the wild. Until this month, no one had seen an attempted spyware infection leveraging three unknown bugs, or zero-days, in the iPhone. The tools and technology needed for such an attack, which is essentially a remote jailbreak of the iPhone, can be worth as much as one million dollars. After the researchers alerted Apple, the company worked quickly to fix them in an update released on Thursday.
The question is, who was behind the attack and what did they use to pull it off?
It appears that the company that provided the spyware and the zero-day exploits to the hackers targeting Mansoor is a little-known Israeli surveillance vendor called NSO Group, which Lookout’s vice president of research Mike Murray labeled as “basically a cyber arms dealer.”
A great story from Motherboard that is equal parts fascinating and absolutely terrifying. The malware from NSO is able to effectively steal all the information on your phone, intercept every message and add backdoors to every method of communication on your phone. Evidence suggests that NSO has likely been able to hack iPhones since the iPhone 5.
The security researchers who first became aware of the security bugs notified Apple about 10 days ago, and Apple today released iOS 9.3.5 which fixes the bugs. Suffice to say, you should immediately install the update onto your iOS devices.
