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Apps as Services

John Gruber, writing on the App Store changes Apple announced earlier today, makes a good point about app sustainability:

Developers have been asking for a way to do free trials and to sustain long-term ongoing development ever since the App Store opened in 2008. This is Apple’s answer. I think all serious productivity apps in the App Store should and will switch to subscription pricing.

You might argue that people don’t want to subscribe to a slew of different apps. But the truth is most people don’t want to pay for apps, period. Nothing will change that. But for those people willing to pay for high quality apps, subscriptions make sustainable-for-developer pricing more palatable, and more predictable.

The ideal scenario after Apple’s new subscription APIs: users will be able to try out different apps for free thanks to subscription trials, see which one suits their needs, and then subscribe, optionally choosing from different subscription levels. The best app wins. Developers don’t have to worry about new versions of apps to sell users on a major upgrade, and customers can keep using the app they like.

The problem, as I see it today, is that Apple is being (intentionally?) vague about which kinds of apps will be able to adopt this new pricing model. On their new Subscriptions webpage, Apple refers to “successful auto-renewable subscription apps” as the ones that offer content or “services”. They also mention that apps will soon be “eligible” for subscriptions – a wording that might suggest increased scrutiny on Apple’s part to see whether an app can implement a subscription or not.

Today’s changes have been reported as Apple’s answer to the requests of developers who have been asking for paid upgrade pricing, but, as far as I can see, nothing on Apple’s website indicates that any type of app – regardless of its functionality – will be able to switch to subscription pricing. As with most App Store changes, it’s probably best to take a wait-and-see approach here – there will be sessions at WWDC to clarify many of the aforementioned questions.

Subscription pricing is not for everyone or every app. I don’t see myself “subscribing” to an image cropping app that I might need once a year – and Apple is saying as much, too. But I also wouldn’t mind becoming a paid subscriber of the apps that I rely on to get work done on my iOS devices, even if they don’t offer a service in the traditional sense. Apps like Workflow, Ulysses, or Copied save me time every day. Their continued development is the service for me – I want them and need them to exist, no matter Apple’s classification of their “service”. I’m willing to pay a subscription to keep using the best tools for me, and I don’t think I’m alone.

I’m optimistic about subscription pricing for App Store apps. Not every app is a good fit for a subscription, but increasingly more of them are.1 Apple’s new subscription tools should help developers sell their software to their best customers on a regular basis, and I’m curious to see how the indie developer community will react. It’s great to see excitement around the App Store again.

  1. Case in point, Sketch. ↩︎

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.

  1. Not necessarily via Siri, so Google could use their own dictation engine in Gboard, for instance. ↩︎
  2. I’ve had multiple instances of iOS being “stuck”, unable to load a custom keyboard or switch back to the Apple one. ↩︎
  3. 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. ↩︎

A Watch That Makes You Wait

It’s hard for me to disagree with the premise of Nilay Patel’s piece on Circuit Breaker about the Apple Watch: it’s slow.

If Apple believes the Watch is indeed destined to become that computer, it needs to radically increase the raw power of the Watch’s processor, while maintaining its just-almost-acceptable battery life. And it needs to do that while all of the other computers around us keep getting faster themselves.

I know what you’re thinking – you’re using the Apple Watch primarily for notifications and workouts, and it works well. I get that. But when something is presented as the next major app platform for developers and then every single app I try takes seconds to load (if it loads at all), you can understand why enthusiasm is not high on my list of Apple Watch feelings.

I didn’t buy the Watch for notifications. I bought it with the belief that in the future we’re going to have computers on our wrist. Patel is right here: the slowness of the Apple Watch is undeniable and it dampens the excitement for the Watch as the next big Apple platform.

I disagree, however, with his idea for another “choice” for Apple:

The other choice is to pare the Watch down, to reduce its ambitions, and make it less of a computer and more of a clever extension of your phone. Most of the people I see with smartwatches use them as a convenient way to get notifications and perhaps some health tracking, not for anything else. (And health tracking is pretty specialized; Fitbit seems to be doing just fine serving a devoted customer base.)

I’ve seen similar comments elsewhere lately. Even with the flaws of the first model, I think you’d be seriously misguided to think Apple would backtrack and decide to make the Apple Watch 2 a fancier Fitbit.

I still believe that, a few years from now, a tiny computer on our wrist will be the primary device we use to quickly interact with the outside world, stay in touch, glance at information, and stay active. All of these aspects are negatively impacted by the Watch 1.0’s hardware today. Looking ahead, though, what’s more likely – that Apple shipped a product a bit too early and then iterated on it, or that the entire idea of the Apple Watch is flawed and Apple should have made a dumber fitness tracker instead?

If anything, Apple’s only choice is to continue to iterate on the original Watch idea: your most personal device. Faster, more sensors, faster apps, smarter apps, a lot more customization options. Gradually and then suddenly, we’ll realize the change has been dramatic.

That, of course, doesn’t soften my disappointment for the state of the Apple Watch as an app platform today. But knowing how Apple rolls, it makes me optimistic for its future.

Microsoft Launches ‘Flow’ Preview for Web Automation

Microsoft has entered the web automation space with Flow, a new service currently in public preview that aims to connect multiple web apps together. Microsoft describes Flow as a way to “create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and more”.

From the Microsoft blog:

Microsoft Flow makes it easy to mash-up two or more different services. Today, Microsoft Flow is publicly available as a preview, at no cost. We have connections to 35+ different services, including both Microsoft services like OneDrive and SharePoint, and public software services like Slack, Twitter and Salesforce.com, with more being added every week.

I took Flow for a quick spin today, and it looks, for now, like a less powerful, less intuitive Zapier targeted at business users. You can create multi-step flows with more than two apps, but Flow lacks the rich editor of Zapier; in my tests, the web interface crashed often on the iPad (I guess that’s why they call it a preview); and, in general, 35 supported services pales in comparison to the hundreds of options offered by Zapier.

Still, it’s good to see Microsoft joining this area and it makes sense for the new, cloud-oriented Microsoft to offer this kind of solution. Flow doesn’t have the consumer features of IFTTT (such as support for home automation devices and iOS apps) or the power of Zapier (which I like and use every day), but I’ll keep an eye on it.

Day One Adds IFTTT Integration

Great change for those who want to populate their journal entries with content from the web: Day One has launched their IFTTT channel today, which will let you create all sorts of automated recipes such as saving Instagram pictures to a journal, emailing a new entry to yourself, or logging check-ins from a third-party service.

Much as Day One 2 was criticized for ditching iCloud and Dropbox in lieu of its own sync, integrations like this are always better when the developers can fully control the sync platform they’re using. Thanks to Day One Sync and support for multiple journals, you can connect to IFTTT and set your recipes to save data into a dedicated journal separate from your main thoughts (something that bugged me a few years ago with a similar solution).

I’ve been playing around with the beta of Day One + IFTTT, and it works well. I have recipes to save liked tweets and YouTube videos to an ‘Internet’ journal, and I’m planning to build more soon. If you use Day One and IFTTT, this is a fantastic addition.

On Google’s iOS Apps

MacStories readers and listeners of Connected are no strangers to my criticism towards Google’s Docs suite on iOS. For months, the company has been unable to properly support the iPad Pro and new iOS 9 features, leaving iOS users with an inferior experience riddled with a host of other inconsistencies and bugs.

Earlier today, Google brought native iPad Pro resolution support to their Docs apps – meaning, you’ll no longer have to use stretched out apps with an iPad Air-size keyboard on your iPad Pro. While this is good news (no one likes to use iPad apps in compatibility mode with a stretched UI), the updates lack a fundamental feature of the post-iOS 9 world: multitasking with Slide Over and Split View. Unlike the recently updated Google Photos, Docs, Sheets, and Slides can’t be used alongside other apps on the iPad, which hinders the ability to work more efficiently with Google apps on iOS 9.

Today’s Google app updates highlight a major problem I’ve had with Google’s iOS software in the past year. One of the long-held beliefs in the tech industry is that Google excels at web services, while Apple makes superior native apps. In recent years, though, many have also noted that Google was getting better at making apps faster than Apple was improving at web services. Some have said that Google had built a great ecosystem of iOS apps, even.

Today, Google’s iOS apps are no longer great. They’re mostly okay, and they’re often disappointing in many ways – one of which1 is the unwillingness to recognize that adopting new iOS technologies is an essential step for building solid iOS experiences. The services are still amazing; the apps are too often a downright disappointment.2

No matter the technical reason behind the scenes, a company the size of Google shouldn’t need four months (nine if you count WWDC 2015) to ship a partial compatibility update for iOS 9 and the iPad Pro. Google have only themselves to blame for their lack of attention and failure to deliver modern iOS apps.

  1. I could mention the slowness to adopt iOS 9 across their other apps, or the lack of Picture in Picture and background audio in YouTube, or the many problems with rich text in Google Docs, or the lackluster iOS extension support across all their apps. ↩︎
  2. And for what it’s worth, Apple’s services still leave a lot to be desired, too – especially Siri. ↩︎

Twitter’s Algorithmic Timeline Option

Following a BuzzFeed report from last week, Twitter has announced today a new option to view a summary of relevant tweets on top of the regular timeline. Unlike the traditional reverse chronological order of the timeline, tweets will be reordered algorithmically in this view, which Twitter describes as a way to not miss “the best tweets”.

You follow hundreds of people on Twitter — maybe thousands — and when you open Twitter, it can feel like you’ve missed some of their most important Tweets. Today, we’re excited to share a new timeline feature that helps you catch up on the best Tweets from people you follow.

Here’s how it works. You flip on the feature in your settings; then when you open Twitter after being away for a while, the Tweets you’re most likely to care about will appear at the top of your timeline – still recent and in reverse chronological order. The rest of the Tweets will be displayed right underneath, also in reverse chronological order, as always. At any point, just pull-to-refresh to see all new Tweets at the top in the live, up-to-the-second experience you already know and love.

For now, the feature will be opt-in, meaning you’ll have to visit the Settings of the Twitter app and, if available, you’ll be able to turn on the option. “In the coming weeks”, the feature will become opt-out (it’ll be on by default) but you’ll still be able to turn it off from the Settings.

Put it another way: for now, only die-hard Twitter users will check out the new timeline option (and complain about it). In the future, most Twitter users will end up with an algorithmic summary of tweets at the top of their timeline and they won’t bother to turn it off.

I’m not particularly opposed to the idea of an algorithmic addition to the standard Twitter timeline. In fact, Twitter has been testing one for several months now, and it’s one of my favorite touches in the app:

From Twitter’s description, it sounds like the new algorithmic option is an expansion of the ‘While you were away…’ recap. I’ve found plenty of value in these summaries: especially after I’ve been away for a few hours, they come in handy to see a collection of interesting tweets that don’t necessarily contain links (and that therefore can’t be monitored by Nuzzel).

I don’t want the traditional Twitter timeline to be supplanted by a completely algorithmic feed, but I’m also in favor of testing new tools to help people use Twitter more and more easily. As I wrote before, the majority of Twitter users don’t spend hours carefully scrolling their timeline to read every single tweet; a summary is an obvious idea to show them interesting content they may have not seen.

Right now, I don’t have access to the timeline option yet, but it should be rolling out soon. It’s too bad that this option won’t likely be exposed to third-party clients via the Twitter API, but, alas, I’m not surprised by that anymore.

Low Power Mode: Perfect for Vacations

I just returned from a two week vacation1 in which I used my iPhone 6s to take hundreds of photos and videos, find places to eat, and get public transit directions to and from various places in unfamiliar cities. It was also the first time I had no concerns about my iPhone battery running out of juice before I returned to my accommodation at night, and it is all thanks to Low Power Mode.

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Apple Music Launching on Sonos Tomorrow – Some Beta Impressions

With a press release, Sonos announced today that Apple Music integration, first released as beta late last year, will be available publicly tomorrow, February 10:

Sonos announced today that Apple Music will be available on Sonos systems worldwide starting Wednesday, Feb. 10. Music fans worldwide will have access to Apple Music features like For You, New, Radio, and My Music, and will also be able to stream the entire Apple Music catalog through Sonos smart speakers tuned for great sound in every room of their homes.

Apple Music on Sonos was tested by hundreds of thousands of listeners through a successful beta program that started in early December. To stream Apple Music on Sonos, customers simply select “Add Music Services” from any Sonos controller app, scroll down to the Apple Music icon, and login.

“The feedback from Apple Music members on Sonos during the beta period has been great,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “Sonos plus Apple Music provides an amazing listening experience at home – and we’re excited to offer it to all Sonos customers starting tomorrow.”

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