ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Happy Vision Pro Week!

00:00:03 ◼   ► Sort of. Indeed.

00:00:04 ◼   ► Well, here's the thing — I would love to talk about the Vision Pro

00:00:08 ◼   ► because now all the press reviews and embargoes are lifted and the press reviews are all out

00:00:12 ◼   ► and everyone who got pre-release access got to tell everyone what they thought and show everyone

00:00:16 ◼   ► and everything. And because we didn't, we can't.

00:00:20 ◼   ► So even though Casey and I had lab experience we still can't talk about that

00:00:24 ◼   ► I think maybe ever. And so we just have to wait until we

00:00:28 ◼   ► can actually have our Vision Pros which is this weekend for both of us.

00:00:32 ◼   ► That's true. You know, even though we all three of us agreed not to

00:00:36 ◼   ► talk about it, I would like to say that we genuinely did not

00:00:40 ◼   ► get to have any experience with personas or anything like that.

00:00:44 ◼   ► And I probably am not even supposed to say that much, but I say that to indicate that

00:00:48 ◼   ► any of what I'm about to say is not informed by the lab because I genuinely have no experience with the whole

00:00:52 ◼   ► persona thing. Everyone seems to be slagging on two different

00:00:56 ◼   ► persona-related things. The eyesight, which is the thing

00:01:00 ◼   ► where it shows your eyes out the front of the display or the front

00:01:04 ◼   ► of the goggles such that... We're doing an amazing job of not talking about the Vision Pro.

00:01:08 ◼   ► I know, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's my fault this time. It's the first time for everything.

00:01:12 ◼   ► Everyone's slagging on the eyesight both in the terms of seeing

00:01:16 ◼   ► the wearer's eyes on the front of the headset and the

00:01:20 ◼   ► whole persona thing where you're like a fake version of you

00:01:24 ◼   ► in FaceTime and all the other places where you would normally use a front-facing camera on like a phone or an iPad.

00:01:28 ◼   ► I have zero real-world experience with this. Hand to god.

00:01:32 ◼   ► I really don't have any experience with this. I've seen

00:01:36 ◼   ► why... I see and understand why everyone is slagging on it, but

00:01:40 ◼   ► to me, I don't think it's that bad. I'm very

00:01:44 ◼   ► curious to see what I think when I actually have one that I can use in

00:01:48 ◼   ► front of me in person because it's not great. I'm not trying to sit here and say

00:01:52 ◼   ► it looks fantastic and it looks photorealistic or anything like that, but I like

00:01:56 ◼   ► the idea of those around me being able to tell if I'm looking at them

00:02:00 ◼   ► or paying zero attention to them or whatever the case may be. And I like the idea

00:02:04 ◼   ► of having some mechanism of representing myself that's not memoji

00:02:08 ◼   ► while I'm on a FaceTime call, which is not to say that I expect to do this often, but just

00:02:12 ◼   ► in the occasion that I do need a front-facing camera, I like the approach they've taken.

00:02:16 ◼   ► It is a little bit uncanny valley. I'm not trying to say it's perfect by any means, but everyone seems to

00:02:20 ◼   ► really hate it. There were a bunch of reviews here.

00:02:24 ◼   ► I'll tie it into what we were supposed to be talking about. There were a bunch of video reviews and text reviews that came out.

00:02:28 ◼   ► I think it was Jon put a bunch in the show notes in I Concur with Jon's List.

00:02:32 ◼   ► Nili Patel at The Verge. I personally think if you're going to choose

00:02:36 ◼   ► just one, that's the one I would choose. But also excellent are Joanna Stearns

00:02:40 ◼   ► of the Wall Street Journal, Brian Tong, who I'd not previously heard of, maybe I've been living under a

00:02:44 ◼   ► rock. He did a very long, hour-long review on

00:02:48 ◼   ► YouTube, which is very thorough if you're wanting something more along those lines.

00:02:52 ◼   ► And then Gruber obviously had his written review, which was excellent as well. Oh, and

00:02:56 ◼   ► MKBHD has posted, as of just an hour or two ago I think, has posted

00:03:00 ◼   ► an unboxing, which was interesting, but more importantly a

00:03:04 ◼   ► "Here's what the Vision Pro is." It isn't a review, it's a "Let me tell you

00:03:08 ◼   ► about what it is." - It's more like a tour. - Yeah, exactly.

00:03:12 ◼   ► - I liked MKBHD's video. I haven't read and seen all of these yet, but

00:03:16 ◼   ► obviously, as Casey said, we aren't allowed to tell you about the Vision Pro.

00:03:20 ◼   ► - And if you're wondering what we're going to talk about on this week's show, unfortunate

00:03:24 ◼   ► timing. Obviously the DMA stuff, EUDMA stuff,

00:03:28 ◼   ► came out after we had recorded last week's episode. For people who

00:03:32 ◼   ► don't know, we record our show on Wednesdays because Apple

00:03:36 ◼   ► usually announces stuff on Tuesdays. But you don't win them all. Sometimes

00:03:40 ◼   ► they announce something on a Thursday and we miss it. So

00:03:44 ◼   ► that's what happened. And it's just as well, because, like you guys said, you don't have your Vision Pros

00:03:48 ◼   ► yet. They're coming in a few days. Regular customers don't have them yet, although I do know someone

00:03:52 ◼   ► whose delivery date was one day earlier than it's supposed to arrive, so maybe

00:03:56 ◼   ► you might get lucky and get a day early. - No, we're in-store pickup for both of us, I believe.

00:04:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, okay, well you're not getting it early then, I guess. - Nope. - But yeah, so that's

00:04:04 ◼   ► we're going to be talking about the EUDMA stuff that a bunch of other people talked about last

00:04:08 ◼   ► week, if there are podcasts recording aloud for it. And then next week,

00:04:12 ◼   ► when two out of the three of us have Vision Pros, we will talk

00:04:16 ◼   ► a ton about it then. But for now, these reviews will tide you over. - Yeah.

00:04:20 ◼   ► And while we can't tell you anything that we think about the Vision Pro, I

00:04:24 ◼   ► can tell you that I would recommend Neil I. Patel's review with The Verge.

00:04:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, same. - In particular. Like Casey, I think if you're only going to watch

00:04:32 ◼   ► one, I'd say watch that one. It is very thorough. It

00:04:36 ◼   ► covers all of the major areas of different uses for it.

00:04:40 ◼   ► And I think he seemed to be very fair about

00:04:44 ◼   ► both what's cool, what's not, what has potential for the future,

00:04:48 ◼   ► maybe what doesn't have so much potential for the future, some of the things about

00:04:52 ◼   ► it that are really weird or really different or it takes some getting used to, and some of the things

00:04:56 ◼   ► about it that are really nice and really cool and really immersive. So I

00:05:00 ◼   ► would strongly recommend Neil I. Patel's review with The Verge. Either video or the written one.

00:05:04 ◼   ► I actually read the written one first, and then I watched the video, and

00:05:08 ◼   ► I found that I didn't really need to do both. So I would suggest reading the

00:05:12 ◼   ► written one if you pick only one. - Yeah, I agree. But anyway,

00:05:16 ◼   ► I bring all this up mostly to point to all these different reviews and whatnot, but

00:05:20 ◼   ► also to say I'm really excited about a few things with Vision Pro,

00:05:24 ◼   ► and maybe we'll talk about that later, but I'm excited and interested

00:05:28 ◼   ► to see what I think of eyesight and personas

00:05:32 ◼   ► for me. You know, like once I have them and see them in person,

00:05:36 ◼   ► or to the degree that you can see a persona in person, I'm very

00:05:40 ◼   ► curious because they don't, I don't feel like it's nearly as bad as everyone else seems to think it is.

00:05:44 ◼   ► And so it very well could be next week when we record I'll laugh at this moment and say

00:05:48 ◼   ► oh, how wrong I was, but sitting here now, I think it's reasonable.

00:05:52 ◼   ► - You realize like the three of us are gonna have to do a FaceTime call with me and you as

00:05:56 ◼   ► personas and Jon as the unfortunate like only one who's not, but the persona

00:06:00 ◼   ► videos I've seen so far of like people doing their FaceTime calls with the personas,

00:06:04 ◼   ► I do not like looking at them. It like bothers me

00:06:08 ◼   ► on a deep level. - This is the common opinion, and I mean again,

00:06:12 ◼   ► I don't think they're great, but as somebody in the chat said, you know, all

00:06:16 ◼   ► these YouTubers were immediately recognizable as who they were, which I think is an accomplishment.

00:06:20 ◼   ► It's not perfect, it's not great, but I don't think it's as bad as everyone else seems to think.

00:06:24 ◼   ► - I just, they kind of creep me out, like they make me feel uneasy, like I

00:06:28 ◼   ► look, I mean, we'll see when we get these and we'll see how, you know, because this

00:06:32 ◼   ► feature is in beta, we'll see how it develops over time, but my initial opinion,

00:06:36 ◼   ► which I am not sure is going to change that much anytime soon, is

00:06:40 ◼   ► if I'm gonna be on a FaceTime call with you, I'd rather you take your headset off

00:06:44 ◼   ► and actually be a FaceTime call, and if you're gonna be your fake persona,

00:06:48 ◼   ► I think I'd rather you have a phone call at that point.

00:06:52 ◼   ► - Alex Chan writes, "I've also been programming against YouTube API recently

00:06:56 ◼   ► and run into the same quota issues that Jon had described last week or the week before.

00:07:00 ◼   ► I don't think Jon is doing something daft. The quota isn't 10,000 requests,

00:07:04 ◼   ► it's 10,000 quote-unquote quota units.

00:07:08 ◼   ► A single request can use many units, there's a table of quota costs in YouTube's documentation,

00:07:12 ◼   ► which we'll link in the show notes. I don't know if that fully accounts for you burning through your quota so

00:07:16 ◼   ► quickly, but maybe it's a clue in the right direction, and I don't know if it was Alex or Jon, but somebody

00:07:20 ◼   ► pointed out that costs, some example costs, listing a playlist is one

00:07:24 ◼   ► quota unit, updating a video is 50 quota units, and inserting a video

00:07:28 ◼   ► or perhaps inserting something into a video, I'm not sure, is 1,600 quota units.

00:07:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, and this does account for it, because when I,

00:07:36 ◼   ► the video update thing is like if I'm updating the description, yeah, we have over

00:07:40 ◼   ► 500 videos, and if each of them costs 50 and I update all of them, you burn

00:07:44 ◼   ► through your quota real quick. In fact, I'm routinely going way over my quota,

00:07:48 ◼   ► relying on the fact that most API systems that have a quota

00:07:52 ◼   ► are essentially eventually consistent, and you can blow past your quota briefly

00:07:56 ◼   ► before the system realizes you've passed it and caps you, so

00:08:00 ◼   ► that's what I had been doing. So that explains it, it's kind of cruddy, but that explains it. Although

00:08:04 ◼   ► eventually Google did get back to me and they approved my request

00:08:08 ◼   ► for many more requests, or many more,

00:08:12 ◼   ► what are these called, quota units, so now instead of 10,000, I have 100,000,

00:08:16 ◼   ► I probably should ask for a million. Anyway, it doesn't matter because I'm already done with the development of the

00:08:20 ◼   ► script, so as predicted, this was all pointless, but the more you know, it's

00:08:24 ◼   ► quota units, not requests.

00:08:28 ◼   ► John, I'm assuming it's John and not Marco that wrote this, App Store versus Game Consoles.

00:08:32 ◼   ► Tell me about this. Yeah, I'm I guess for the third show in a row hitting the

00:08:36 ◼   ► same point, because people keep bringing up topics

00:08:40 ◼   ► that are related to it, the whole idea of developer

00:08:44 ◼   ► dissatisfaction with Apple and comparing that to other

00:08:48 ◼   ► developers who develop for other platforms that are kind of similar to the App Store and what their

00:08:52 ◼   ► satisfaction is like. And we brought up Game Consoles and I said it might seem

00:08:56 ◼   ► unfair to you that companies that develop for Game Consoles seem to be

00:09:00 ◼   ► more okay with the deal than a lot of App Store developers

00:09:04 ◼   ► are, and many people wrote in to tell us

00:09:08 ◼   ► that, well that's because the Game Console manufacturers sell their

00:09:12 ◼   ► hardware at a loss, and so they need the profit from the games to make up for the fact

00:09:16 ◼   ► that they're selling their hardware at a loss. And I have two things to say for that. First,

00:09:20 ◼   ► talk to Nintendo, they don't play that game, at least not as much as the other

00:09:24 ◼   ► companies do. Nintendo tends to want to either break even or actually make a profit

00:09:28 ◼   ► on its hardware pretty much all the time, and

00:09:32 ◼   ► even the other console makers eventually start breaking even and turning a profit on their consoles during the

00:09:36 ◼   ► lifetime of the things. But that's besides the point, because the second thing is, it

00:09:40 ◼   ► doesn't actually matter what

00:09:44 ◼   ► the reason is, unless that reason is convincing to developers, and I have to tell you

00:09:48 ◼   ► that App Store developers who are angry about Apple, A, they already know about Game Consoles

00:09:52 ◼   ► and how the world works over there, and B, it does not convince them to not be

00:09:56 ◼   ► resentful of Apple. And that's the whole deal here.

00:10:00 ◼   ► Most of the time, trying to explain to somebody

00:10:04 ◼   ► who thinks they're getting a not great deal doesn't change their mind.

00:10:08 ◼   ► Usually because you're not providing them with any new information. For example,

00:10:12 ◼   ► they would say, "Yeah, I know Game Consoles are so at a loss. Yeah, I know that they'll

00:10:16 ◼   ► get what they would say to you, but that doesn't make me feel any better

00:10:20 ◼   ► about giving Apple 15 or 30% or whatever." So you have to

00:10:24 ◼   ► work with the people and the opinions they have, even though if they "don't make

00:10:28 ◼   ► sense to you" or you think there's some reason otherwise. That's the situation

00:10:32 ◼   ► Apple is in. That is the fundamental issue at hand here.

00:10:36 ◼   ► Apple thinks that there are very good reasons for them to get what they want, and

00:10:40 ◼   ► App Store developers disagree, and that's where they

00:10:44 ◼   ► are. And I don't think at this point any amount of explaining why

00:10:48 ◼   ► is going to change either party's opinion.

00:10:52 ◼   ► All right, and then tell me about who owns the customer. Yeah, this is something we were talking about last time.

00:10:56 ◼   ► Like, well, why would somebody do this? This was back before the DMA stuff. We were talking about

00:11:00 ◼   ► the external links to payment methods. Why would anybody want to do that? And I said, well, one of the reasons is ownership

00:11:04 ◼   ► of the customer, as we've discussed many times in the past. And I talked about reasons why you might

00:11:08 ◼   ► want to own the customer, because then you get the customer information, which may be lucrative to you.

00:11:12 ◼   ► But I once again neglected to mention something that we had mentioned for many, many

00:11:16 ◼   ► years in the past, so I'll reiterate it again. There are other reasons that you might want to own the customer

00:11:20 ◼   ► that are not related to getting their information and selling it.

00:11:24 ◼   ► For example, one thing we've discussed many times is that developers in the App Store cannot issue

00:11:28 ◼   ► refunds. Only Apple can. If you own the customer, you

00:11:32 ◼   ► are now empowered to issue refunds, because you took their payment, you

00:11:36 ◼   ► can give their payment back to them. That is not something that developers can currently do.

00:11:40 ◼   ► Same thing with support. If a customer is having a problem,

00:11:44 ◼   ► there's no way for you to sort of connect the dots for them

00:11:48 ◼   ► in the generic App Store relationship, because they're Apple's customer, not yours.

00:11:52 ◼   ► You could put an email address on your website, you can have a contact form, you can do all that,

00:11:56 ◼   ► but there's a limited amount of stuff that you can do. Whereas if you own the customer, you can provide

00:12:00 ◼   ► better support. Giving them a refund yourself is one example

00:12:04 ◼   ► of better support. And then also, if the thing you're

00:12:08 ◼   ► providing, that application or service or combination of them, if it's on more than one

00:12:12 ◼   ► platform, you're on iOS, you're on Android, you're on PC, you're on Mac, right?

00:12:16 ◼   ► You can provide a unified experience if you own the customer,

00:12:20 ◼   ► because you can say, "Well, pay me one price and I'll give you it on all these platforms."

00:12:24 ◼   ► There are ways to do that with the App Store to try to figure out if they've

00:12:28 ◼   ► made a purchase on another platform and to give them the App Store thing and vice versa,

00:12:32 ◼   ► but it's so much easier if you have one unified account and one unified payment system

00:12:36 ◼   ► because you own the customer. So there are legitimate

00:12:40 ◼   ► non-nefarious reasons why you might want to own the customer, and like I said, we're talking about

00:12:44 ◼   ► the external payment things. That is the only benefit that you're getting given the

00:12:48 ◼   ► set of rules that Apple had provided, because you're not paying Apple any less money,

00:12:52 ◼   ► you're enduring much more hassle than you were before, it is much more difficult,

00:12:56 ◼   ► you have to allow Apple to audit you, and in exchange, the one and only

00:13:00 ◼   ► thing you get is customer ownership. I mean, that being said, there are

00:13:04 ◼   ► certain businesses where Apple's payment

00:13:08 ◼   ► system either doesn't have a feature that you need to do that kind of

00:13:12 ◼   ► business, or literally doesn't allow it. So for instance, if you

00:13:16 ◼   ► wanted to, say, have a few different payment plans for

00:13:20 ◼   ► your in-app purchase for your service, whatever your app service is that you're selling,

00:13:24 ◼   ► and the top one, if they paid $100 a year, you

00:13:28 ◼   ► sent them a free t-shirt. You can't do that with in-app purchase. In-app purchase can't be used for any kind of

00:13:32 ◼   ► physical goods. So you literally just aren't allowed to do that.

00:13:36 ◼   ► Or upgrade pricing is another great example. Like, you want to do upgrade pricing? You own the customer, you control the payment

00:13:40 ◼   ► system, you know what they paid, you know they own version 1.0, you can give them upgrade pricing

00:13:44 ◼   ► for 2.0. Exactly. And there's so many little, even just implementation

00:13:48 ◼   ► details. Like, I have talked before, you know, back when I had the idea

00:13:52 ◼   ► forever ago, and have continued to have it like once a year, and then

00:13:56 ◼   ► quickly talk myself out of it, of like, "Hey, why don't I make some kind of like overcast premium

00:14:00 ◼   ► thing that like pools money together and then pays the podcast that you listen

00:14:04 ◼   ► to?" You know, and to do that, you have to know

00:14:08 ◼   ► exactly how much money you got from each person.

00:14:12 ◼   ► Not how much money they were charged, you can figure that out, how much money you

00:14:16 ◼   ► received from them. Which becomes very tricky when you're dealing with

00:14:20 ◼   ► foreign currency exchange rates, or any kind of credit card charge back

00:14:24 ◼   ► or refund situation. So that kind of thing, like if you build your own

00:14:28 ◼   ► system, you can maybe do that a lot better. With Apple's system, it's

00:14:32 ◼   ► fairly impossible to know, like, "Did I actually receive that

00:14:36 ◼   ► $7.75 from this person in this month or not?" Because,

00:14:40 ◼   ► and that's by the way, that's why Spotify and YouTube

00:14:44 ◼   ► Premium and all these things, that's why they all do the big pool of money

00:14:48 ◼   ► approach, where like, your $10 a month doesn't get

00:14:52 ◼   ► split up between your artists that you listen to. Your $10 a month goes into the giant pool

00:14:56 ◼   ► of money, and then the giant pool of money gets split up based on

00:15:00 ◼   ► how much money there actually is in that pool, and then how many total plays there were in that entire month,

00:15:04 ◼   ► which creates all sorts of weird, you know, opportunities

00:15:08 ◼   ► for fraud and things like that, but it's just much easier. So like, again,

00:15:12 ◼   ► there are conditions like that where Apple's system

00:15:16 ◼   ► just might not support what you want to do, even if you are, you know,

00:15:20 ◼   ► tolerant of Apple's fees. So, that's what's

00:15:24 ◼   ► interesting about using other payment options, is it's not just

00:15:28 ◼   ► I'm trying to get away with giving Apple less or no money, but that's a big part of it,

00:15:32 ◼   ► but there's also legitimate reasons why you might want to do that.

00:15:36 ◼   ► Niru Maheswararanathan writes, "I recently stopped by an Apple store

00:15:40 ◼   ► to repair a cracked iPhone screen. Like any security-conscious iOS user, I had stolen device protection

00:15:44 ◼   ► turned on. The technician asked me, as part of the regular repair process, to turn off Find My.

00:15:48 ◼   ► When I went to do this, however, stolen device protection kicked in and forced me to wait an hour to turn

00:15:52 ◼   ► Find My off. There wasn't anything the technician could do to help. I ended up leaving, turning stolen device protection off,

00:15:56 ◼   ► and then coming back to complete the repair. I presume that Niru means

00:16:00 ◼   ► that they went home or what have you. Although it makes sense, I was still surprised that stolen device protection

00:16:04 ◼   ► kicked in when turning off Find My. Given how it can be tricky for folks to schedule

00:16:08 ◼   ► time to make it to the Apple store, it's worth keeping in mind that you might want to turn off stolen device

00:16:12 ◼   ► protection at least an hour before your appointment." That is interesting. I get exactly why

00:16:16 ◼   ► all this happened, but it's interesting, nevertheless.

00:16:20 ◼   ► You know, someone to be able to turn off Find My. That's kind of an important feature,

00:16:24 ◼   ► especially if your phone is stolen. So, yeah. Remember when you put that delay in,

00:16:28 ◼   ► that delay applies to you, too. Although it doesn't apply if you're in one of your safe

00:16:32 ◼   ► locations. So, if you do it at home, maybe you don't have to wait an hour, so just do it at home

00:16:36 ◼   ► before you leave for the Apple store. And I believe the upcoming new version

00:16:40 ◼   ► of iOS, I think 17.4, they're going to have a setting where if you don't want to have safe

00:16:44 ◼   ► locations, you can turn that off. So, it's up to you to decide how

00:16:48 ◼   ► much inconvenience do you want in your life. Yeah, and this is probably the kind of thing

00:16:52 ◼   ► you know, we were speculating when they introduced stolen device protection recently, we were saying like, "Why don't they

00:16:56 ◼   ► just enable this by default for everyone?" And maybe this kind of thing is, you know,

00:17:00 ◼   ► maybe this is part of the reason why. That maybe they figured this would cause too many support headaches

00:17:04 ◼   ► or whatever else. Because that's, anytime you're looking at like, why something in iOS

00:17:08 ◼   ► is a little bit insecure maybe, for instance, why can you reset your Apple ID

00:17:12 ◼   ► password with just your passcode to a phone, which is the whole root of this problem.

00:17:16 ◼   ► And the answer often to those questions is, it turns out

00:17:20 ◼   ► in real life, people forget this stuff all the time and they need support to help

00:17:24 ◼   ► them through this problem all the time. And so that's probably one of the reasons

00:17:28 ◼   ► why this is off by default. Indeed. Renee Schatzel writes,

00:17:32 ◼   ► "In Europe, or at least in UK and Germany, the opticians in the store are usually

00:17:36 ◼   ► equipped to measure your eyesight and essentially as part of the service of buying new glasses

00:17:40 ◼   ► they do just this beforehand for free. They are specifically trained for that

00:17:44 ◼   ► though as part of their apprenticeship. Obviously you can also go to the ophthalmologist

00:17:48 ◼   ► to get a prescription if you want, but it's not obligatory. Zeiss actually sells

00:17:52 ◼   ► a rather smallish device that measures your eyesight automatically. It takes about 10 seconds per eye.

00:17:56 ◼   ► Obviously having one of those in the Apple store for your Vision Pro fitting would provide a

00:18:00 ◼   ► perfect service experience. We'll see what happens when they come across the pond."

00:18:04 ◼   ► So this is one data point lending credence to the idea that there is no actual

00:18:08 ◼   ► medical reason for it to be as difficult as it is to deal

00:18:12 ◼   ► with eye prescriptions here in the US. But I'm still waiting for ophthalmologists

00:18:16 ◼   ► or optometrists to tell me otherwise. But right now it seems like in other countries you can just

00:18:20 ◼   ► walk in, they'll measure your eyes, you get a prescription and you're done. But in this country

00:18:24 ◼   ► Apple is a stickler for having a real prescription from a licensed

00:18:28 ◼   ► optometrist or ophthalmologist before you can get your Vision Pro.

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00:20:36 ◼   ► We were talking before the show about how best

00:20:40 ◼   ► to approach this. And what we're talking about is the Apple

00:20:44 ◼   ► European Union DMA, which is the Digital Markets Act compliance. And

00:20:48 ◼   ► Apple needs to be compliant with the Digital Markets Act by I think early March

00:20:52 ◼   ► if I'm not mistaken. And late last week, they announced how they're going

00:20:56 ◼   ► to do that. And just to review, the Digital Markets Act is what

00:21:00 ◼   ► the name kind of says. In Europe, they had decided that the market for

00:21:04 ◼   ► digital goods like the App Store and Google Store and everything

00:21:08 ◼   ► were insufficiently competitive. There were a small number of companies with

00:21:12 ◼   ► too much power. There was stifling competition and innovation. The EU

00:21:16 ◼   ► decided they wanted to change that. And so they passed

00:21:20 ◼   ► the Digital Markets Act. And they said big companies like Apple who have App Stores

00:21:24 ◼   ► need to comply with it. And so this is Apple's response of saying, "Here's what

00:21:28 ◼   ► we're going to do to comply with the DMA."

00:21:30 ◼   ► Indeed. So I think what I'm going to try to do, and all three of us have

00:21:34 ◼   ► agreed with each other, famous last words, to just let me plow through, we'll see how it goes.

00:21:38 ◼   ► But what I'm going to try to do is John has done us off

00:21:42 ◼   ► service and kind of summarized what Apple has said. Now this is

00:21:46 ◼   ► different than I think reality, which we will get to. But I'm going to try to get

00:21:50 ◼   ► through, here's what Apple says is going to happen and they're going to do.

00:21:54 ◼   ► And then we'll pick apart afterwards. And I think the reason we're

00:21:58 ◼   ► going through what Apple says is, the way Apple presents this is

00:22:02 ◼   ► also interesting. Their attempt to say, "Here's the deal, here's what we're doing."

00:22:06 ◼   ► The subcategories they break it down into. What each individual bullet

00:22:10 ◼   ► point actually is. And as we'll get to eventually, the stuff that we

00:22:14 ◼   ► actually care about and the stuff that is most relevant for the DMA is kind of hidden in

00:22:18 ◼   ► this giant stew of stuff. But they are actually making a lot of changes.

00:22:22 ◼   ► So to start, we'll go through what Apple says they're doing.

00:22:26 ◼   ► Right, so without further ado, for iOS, this is only

00:22:30 ◼   ► iOS, not iPad, not Vision, nothing else. For iOS, they're saying that

00:22:34 ◼   ► And only in the EU. Thank you, yes, and only in the EU. There are going to be new options for distributing

00:22:38 ◼   ► iOS apps on alternative app marketplaces. So

00:22:42 ◼   ► think of this as app stores not run by Apple, but they've understandably and I think reasonably

00:22:46 ◼   ► used the term app marketplaces. This includes APIs that enable

00:22:50 ◼   ► developers to offer their iOS apps for download from alternative app marketplaces.

00:22:54 ◼   ► There's new frameworks and APIs for creating alternative app marketplaces

00:22:58 ◼   ► on iOS. So cumbersome. I know they're not saying

00:23:02 ◼   ► app store because they trademarked app store and they call theirs app store, so I understand why.

00:23:06 ◼   ► My god, this is cumbersome. It is. So this enables

00:23:10 ◼   ► marketplace developers to install apps and manage updates on behalf of other developers from their

00:23:14 ◼   ► dedicated marketplace app. There are new frameworks and APIs for alternative browser

00:23:18 ◼   ► engines, so this is instead of WebKit. Let me back up even a step

00:23:22 ◼   ► further. There are other quote-unquote web browsers on iOS today,

00:23:26 ◼   ► but in order to actually convert HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

00:23:30 ◼   ► and what have you into something that you see on screen, you have to use the same rendering engine

00:23:34 ◼   ► as Safari, which is called WebKit. And now what Apple is saying in the future,

00:23:38 ◼   ► in the EU, on iOS, you'll be able to use browsers that

00:23:42 ◼   ► legitimately use their own rendering engines. What's the Chrome one? I'm drawing a blank.

00:23:46 ◼   ► So anyway, so you could have Chrome in the EU

00:23:50 ◼   ► starting March-ish, you could have Chrome running

00:23:54 ◼   ► its own Blink rendering engine in theory. So new frameworks or APIs for alternative browser engines

00:23:58 ◼   ► interoperability that enables authorized developers to use browser engines

00:24:02 ◼   ► other than WebKit for browser apps and apps with in-app browsing experiences.

00:24:06 ◼   ► New APIs to enable contactless payments in the EEA.

00:24:10 ◼   ► What's that? European Economic Area. Thank you, there we go.

00:24:14 ◼   ► This includes new APIs enabling developers to use NFC technology in their

00:24:18 ◼   ► banking and wallet apps throughout the, oh that's right there, I didn't read far enough, European Economic Area.

00:24:22 ◼   ► So instead of using Apple Pay, you could use the same hardware

00:24:26 ◼   ► to do some other payment scheme. And by the way, as we go through these bullet points,

00:24:30 ◼   ► don't think that Apple is doing any of these things out of the goodness of their heart. Every single

00:24:34 ◼   ► one of them is some specific thing that's part of the DMA. So this one, for example,

00:24:38 ◼   ► about the contactless payments, companies have been complaining

00:24:42 ◼   ► in Europe for ages that Apple essentially didn't allow access to

00:24:46 ◼   ► the NFC hardware, direct access to the hardware that was in the phones

00:24:50 ◼   ► to do contactless payments. You had to use Apple Pay or whatever. So they said

00:24:54 ◼   ► okay, we'll just pass a thing that says Apple, you can't stop people from doing that.

00:24:58 ◼   ► We want you to provide access to that. And that's this. Same thing with the browser engines.

00:25:02 ◼   ► There are expanded default app controls. This lets users select and manage an

00:25:06 ◼   ► app marketplace and/or contactless payment app as their defaults and settings and adds a

00:25:10 ◼   ► new way to choose a default web browser. Interoperability request form.

00:25:14 ◼   ► This, I think, is fascinating, but we're not going to talk about it right now. Let's developers submit

00:25:18 ◼   ► requests for interoperability with iPhone and iOS hardware and software

00:25:22 ◼   ► features. So you can ask Apple, hey, I would like to be able to do

00:25:26 ◼   ► whatever. And they will inevitably deny you, I'm sure. Safari user choice

00:25:30 ◼   ► screen provides users additional ways to choose a default web browser from a list of options.

00:25:34 ◼   ► And so this was, these were all the iOS changes, right? This is a

00:25:38 ◼   ► lot of changes. Like, these are one bullet point. Like, oh,

00:25:42 ◼   ► alternative browser engines. You might think that's just like a policy change.

00:25:46 ◼   ► Okay, developer, you can do a thing. But it's not. Like, if you

00:25:50 ◼   ► click through on these things and look at the APIs they added, the browser kit engine,

00:25:54 ◼   ► it's extensive plumbing to essentially allow third

00:25:58 ◼   ► parties to do what WebKit does on iOS, right? These are non-trivial

00:26:02 ◼   ► APIs that they are exposing and adding. So this is

00:26:06 ◼   ► actually a fairly large amount of work, especially since Apple seems to have wanted to do it

00:26:10 ◼   ► in the safest way possible. So rather than

00:26:14 ◼   ► just saying, fine, do whatever you want browser engines, that would, Apple doesn't want to do

00:26:18 ◼   ► that. It would be less work for them, but they don't want to do that. So they said, here's a new API. Same thing with

00:26:22 ◼   ► the marketplace kit that's like a new API for making third party marketplaces.

00:26:26 ◼   ► These are big, featureful, new frameworks that are surely

00:26:30 ◼   ► filled with bugs because they're 1.0 to comply with this. And

00:26:34 ◼   ► so, you know, and these, all these iOS changes, I'm pretty sure every single one we

00:26:38 ◼   ► read, all this is just EU only. So this is a large amount of work for

00:26:42 ◼   ► only a fraction of the planet. Indeed. Now there's App Store changes,

00:26:46 ◼   ► which as far as I know are still only in the EU and still only for iOS.

00:26:50 ◼   ► But either way, App Store changes. New options for using alternative payment service

00:26:54 ◼   ► providers. So within a developer's app to process payments for digital goods and services.

00:26:58 ◼   ► So hypothetically you could use like Stripe or something like that, while still

00:27:02 ◼   ► being an app within the App Store. There are new options for processing payments via link out to purchase,

00:27:06 ◼   ► where users can complete a transaction for digital goods and services on the developer's external

00:27:10 ◼   ► web page. Developers can include information in their App Store apps to inform EU

00:27:14 ◼   ► users of promotions, discounts, and other deals available outside of their app when presenting a

00:27:18 ◼   ► link out. So this is very similar to what's going on in America, but with a little bit more

00:27:22 ◼   ► features it seems. Analytics. And

00:27:26 ◼   ► this I believe is going to be applicable worldwide. Actually, yes it is. So this is not just the EU.

00:27:30 ◼   ► Expanded developer app analytics provides developers with additional and enhanced

00:27:34 ◼   ► metrics with more than 50 new reports from the iOS and App Store worldwide

00:27:38 ◼   ► in areas like engagement, commerce, app usage, and more. Additionally, there's

00:27:42 ◼   ► a new user data portability API to request and transfer App Store account data

00:27:46 ◼   ► that lets developers of app marketplaces request user authorization to retrieve

00:27:50 ◼   ► and import new data about their usage of the App Store. Then things get

00:27:54 ◼   ► really interesting. Business terms. Now we're back to EU only. New business terms

00:27:58 ◼   ► are available for apps in the EU to reflect the DMA's requirements for alternative

00:28:02 ◼   ► distribution and payment processing. Apple is also sharing new business terms for apps

00:28:06 ◼   ► in the EU. Developers have a choice to remain on Apple's existing terms

00:28:10 ◼   ► or adopt new terms that reflect the new capabilities. We're surely going to spend

00:28:14 ◼   ► just a couple of minutes on that in a moment. There are also terms for alternative

00:28:18 ◼   ► distribution and payments in the EU. There is reduced commission. So iOS

00:28:22 ◼   ► apps on the App Store will pay a reduced commission of either

00:28:26 ◼   ► 10% for the vast majority of developers and for subscriptions after their first year,

00:28:30 ◼   ► or 17% on transactions for digital goods and services

00:28:34 ◼   ► regardless of the payment processing system selected. So they're just making

00:28:38 ◼   ► it cheaper, is apparently what they're saying here anyway. There's a

00:28:42 ◼   ► payment processing fee. iOS apps on the App Store can use the App Store's payment processing

00:28:46 ◼   ► for an additional 3% fee. So suddenly that 10, 17

00:28:50 ◼   ► has now become 13 and 20. Developers can use a payment service

00:28:54 ◼   ► provider within their app or link users to a website to process payments for no additional fee from

00:28:58 ◼   ► Apple. So if you want to use Stripe, you'll save 3%, which you'll presumably be

00:29:02 ◼   ► giving to Stripe. This is where it gets really dodgy and we're almost done.

00:29:06 ◼   ► We're doing a great job. I'm proud of all three of us. It's so hard. It's so hard. I'm very proud

00:29:10 ◼   ► of you. I'm not kidding. I'm very proud of you. Core technology fee for very high volume

00:29:14 ◼   ► iOS apps distributed from the App Store and/or in alternative

00:29:18 ◼   ► app marketplaces. Developers will pay 50 cents. Is that

00:29:22 ◼   ► true for Euros? Half a Euro. 50 Euro cents. 50 Euro cents. So half a Euro.

00:29:26 ◼   ► For each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold

00:29:30 ◼   ► under the new business terms for EU apps, Apple estimates that less than 1%

00:29:34 ◼   ► of developers would pay a core technology fee on their EU apps.

00:29:38 ◼   ► Developers of alternative app marketplaces will pay the core technology fee

00:29:42 ◼   ► for every first annual install of their app marketplace, including installs

00:29:46 ◼   ► that occur before 1 million. So for regular

00:29:50 ◼   ► English moves like the three of us, it starts on a million and one people

00:29:54 ◼   ► or installs... The million and first person is the first one you pay for. Right.

00:29:58 ◼   ► Whereas for app marketplaces, it starts with one. And there

00:30:02 ◼   ► seems to be a lot of confusion, including with me, as to whether or not updates count as installs.

00:30:06 ◼   ► So we'll talk about that in a minute. They do. Alright.

00:30:10 ◼   ► Before we get to the discussion, is there anything else in summary?

00:30:14 ◼   ► We have one more thing here, which is the marketplace requirements.

00:30:18 ◼   ► Thank you. That's what I was asking. So marketplace requirements. To qualify for the marketplace

00:30:22 ◼   ► entitlement, you must be enrolled in the Apple developer program as an

00:30:26 ◼   ► organization incorporated, domiciled, and/or registered in the European Union

00:30:30 ◼   ► or have a subsidiary legal entity incorporated, domiciled, and/or registered

00:30:34 ◼   ► in the EU that's listed in App Store Connect. The location associated with your legal

00:30:38 ◼   ► entity is listed in your Apple developer account. You must also provide Apple a

00:30:42 ◼   ► standby letter of credit from an A-rated financial institution of a million

00:30:46 ◼   ► euros to establish adequate financial means in order to guarantee

00:30:50 ◼   ► support for your developers and users. And there's other stuff. Additionally,

00:30:54 ◼   ► third-party marketplace apps will not be allowed in the App Store. To install one, you'll need to go

00:30:58 ◼   ► to the web. Safari will be able to install the third-party marketplace app after you agree to a

00:31:02 ◼   ► scare sheet. And perhaps maybe third-party browsers, too, after they call the

00:31:06 ◼   ► same system scare sheet. Who knows? But that's the story. And very briefly, there

00:31:10 ◼   ► is a fee calculator, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute, that helps you allegedly talk about, or

00:31:14 ◼   ► figure out how much you're going to pay. So, yeah, so what we've gotten done reading here is

00:31:18 ◼   ► essentially a condensed summary of what Apple released.

00:31:22 ◼   ► And this happened like Thursday last week, unfortunately, after we recorded.

00:31:26 ◼   ► And I can tell you that we were all discussing it amongst ourselves, all the Apple nerds and people

00:31:30 ◼   ► with tech podcasts and websites and stuff. And I

00:31:34 ◼   ► was amazed at how difficult it was to understand. And the fee calculator

00:31:38 ◼   ► that Keesy just mentioned, you're like, "Oh, it's hard to understand, but

00:31:42 ◼   ► whatever your questions are, I'm sure you can just go to the fee calculator and click a bunch

00:31:46 ◼   ► of buttons, kind of like you do in AWS, to figure out, okay, but what about in this scenario?

00:31:50 ◼   ► How much would I pay? What about in this scenario? How much would I pay?" And let me tell you, the fee calculator

00:31:54 ◼   ► does not answer almost any of those questions. So we got all this

00:31:58 ◼   ► information, we tried to figure out what they meant, and it took

00:32:02 ◼   ► the entire community of, I think, pretty smart people who have been following Apple for decades

00:32:06 ◼   ► at least 24 hours to get a handle on this.

00:32:10 ◼   ► And so, if you just heard us read all that and you're like, "Wait,

00:32:14 ◼   ► what does this mean? So what's the deal?

00:32:18 ◼   ► Is this good? Is this bad?" You can be forgiven for not

00:32:22 ◼   ► being able to answer that question. And I don't know if Apple is intentionally

00:32:26 ◼   ► making it difficult to understand, because that doesn't make sense to me. We're going to figure it out.

00:32:30 ◼   ► We did, as we'll see in a second, figure out what the deal is. I think it just did a

00:32:34 ◼   ► really poor job of communicating it. And that fee calculator is a thing that annoys me the most

00:32:38 ◼   ► because the whole point of you putting that there is like, we know it's complicated,

00:32:42 ◼   ► but if you have some scenario in your mind, just use this webpage and it will give you

00:32:46 ◼   ► the answer. And it absolutely does not. You cannot answer tons of

00:32:50 ◼   ► really good important questions about this system using the fee calculator. But

00:32:54 ◼   ► thankfully, we all as a community figured it out. Gruber had a great summary

00:32:58 ◼   ► on his website, which we will link, and I think it is probably the most condensed version

00:33:02 ◼   ► of what, you know, what does all that mean?

00:33:06 ◼   ► And there's a lot of stuff in there that we went through. It's like, okay, I kind of understand that, but it's not a big deal.

00:33:10 ◼   ► But in the middle there, where Casey was talking about business terms in the

00:33:14 ◼   ► EU, that's the heart of it, and that's what Gruber

00:33:18 ◼   ► is summarizing here. And I don't think Apple has made this

00:33:22 ◼   ► artificially complicated and hard to understand. What

00:33:26 ◼   ► they're doing, first of all, is responding and

00:33:30 ◼   ► attempting to comply with a very large piece of legislation. Like, the DMA

00:33:34 ◼   ► is huge. There are tons of provisions in it. There's tons

00:33:38 ◼   ► of little details they have to comply with. And so

00:33:42 ◼   ► their submission of how they're going to do this

00:33:46 ◼   ► is kind of inherently going to be fairly complicated.

00:33:50 ◼   ► Just at all. Even if they did it in the most generous way possible,

00:33:54 ◼   ► it would still be fairly complicated. But also, again, this is

00:33:58 ◼   ► Apple, and this is the App Store. And it goes further than the

00:34:02 ◼   ► App Store, of course. And so they are only doing

00:34:06 ◼   ► what they need to to comply with this, and no more than that

00:34:10 ◼   ► for the most part. And so if the law says you have

00:34:14 ◼   ► to do this, this, and this, they're not going to make some general solution that's going to

00:34:18 ◼   ► make it easier to explain. They're going to say, fine, we're going to do exactly

00:34:22 ◼   ► that, that, and that in the most minimal way possible. So

00:34:26 ◼   ► that's, again, why this is a lot. There's a lot to digest here.

00:34:30 ◼   ► And they're going to make sure that they don't give away a cent more

00:34:34 ◼   ► than they have to. And so that's, again, why some of this is complicated.

00:34:38 ◼   ► But again, I don't think it's artificially so. I think they just

00:34:42 ◼   ► didn't do a good job communicating, though. Because, like, go ahead, start on Gruber summary.

00:34:46 ◼   ► Because Gruber summary makes sense. And you say, oh, that's what all that stuff you just

00:34:50 ◼   ► read means. Now I get it. And this summary we have in here, and it's linked on it,

00:34:54 ◼   ► it's on his website, is longer than his original summary when he was working on this.

00:34:58 ◼   ► It started off being 14 lines of text. Like 14

00:35:02 ◼   ► not complete lines. 14 bullet point lines of text. It was

00:35:06 ◼   ► less than a quarter of a page of text. And Apple released pages upon pages

00:35:10 ◼   ► upon pages of text, and all of us scratching our heads for an entire day trying to figure out

00:35:14 ◼   ► what the heck they were talking about. All right, so Gruber summary. Number one,

00:35:18 ◼   ► these are your choices. This is business terms. You're like, wait, but if I

00:35:22 ◼   ► have an app, like, what's the deal? Am I going to happen to you? What is the deal?

00:35:26 ◼   ► What are the choices? And this is essentially the flow chart. The choose your own adventure.

00:35:30 ◼   ► So you want to sell an app in the EU. Here are your choices.

00:35:34 ◼   ► Number one, you can stay in the App Store under the current

00:35:38 ◼   ► pre-DMA rules exclusively. Developers that take this option are not

00:35:42 ◼   ► permitted to use any of the new business terms available in the EU, but new iOS

00:35:46 ◼   ► platform options for the EU, such as alternative browser engines, are allowed.

00:35:50 ◼   ► Because they are required to be allowed. Again, none of the

00:35:54 ◼   ► goodness of Apple's heart. Right. Because nothing business-related changes under this option, the existing

00:35:58 ◼   ► worldwide rules apply for paid apps, subscriptions, and in-app purchases, including the 30

00:36:02 ◼   ► or 15 percent commission to Apple, and a requirement that apps exclusively

00:36:06 ◼   ► use Apple's App Store payment system. The core technology fee,

00:36:10 ◼   ► that's that half euro thing that we keep dancing around, is not collected

00:36:14 ◼   ► because the business terms haven't changed. Well, and just, so that's

00:36:18 ◼   ► choice number one. Choice number one is whatever the pill color that I always forget.

00:36:22 ◼   ► Like, take this pill and you'll stay in the matrix and nothing changes. Right?

00:36:26 ◼   ► It's like, it's the easiest to understand option. Even though Apple is doing all this stuff,

00:36:30 ◼   ► they are still saying, "Hey, all this stuff that we're doing, if you don't

00:36:34 ◼   ► understand it, or don't want it, or don't like it, you can keep things exactly

00:36:38 ◼   ► as they are." Which is the option that Apple would prefer that you take.

00:36:42 ◼   ► Indeed. So that's number one. Option two, you can opt into the

00:36:46 ◼   ► new EU rules, and all sub-options which we'll go through available

00:36:50 ◼   ► under this choice require paying the core technology fee,

00:36:54 ◼   ► that's the half euro thing, for each app with over a million downloads in the EU.

00:36:58 ◼   ► So, sub-bullet number one. After opting into the

00:37:02 ◼   ► new EU rules, developers can choose to remain in the App Store and

00:37:06 ◼   ► use Apple's App Store payment system at 20 and 13 percent

00:37:10 ◼   ► commission, plus the core technology fee paid to Apple automatically.

00:37:14 ◼   ► Or, they can use a custom in-app payment system, like Stripe,

00:37:18 ◼   ► at 17 and 10 percent, so that's a decrease of 3 percent, both ways,

00:37:22 ◼   ► percent commission, and the CTF is paid, the core technology fee is paid

00:37:26 ◼   ► to Apple by hand, if you will. Or, they can use external links

00:37:30 ◼   ► from inside apps to the web for payments and subscriptions, which is still 17 or

00:37:34 ◼   ► 10 percent, and they still have to pay the core technology fee to Apple by hand.

00:37:38 ◼   ► The latter two options, using your own payment system or linking out to the web,

00:37:42 ◼   ► those are similar to the things that happened in the US

00:37:46 ◼   ► last week, the announced last week external payment link entitlement policy

00:37:50 ◼   ► regarding the developers' obligation to track these payments, report sales

00:37:54 ◼   ► to Apple monthly, and submit to audits by Apple to ensure compliance.

00:37:58 ◼   ► So, the fork that we took on the road was, keep everything the same as they are,

00:38:02 ◼   ► and then the other choice, the other major fork you can take is, you get

00:38:06 ◼   ► the new EU rules. Now, once you have the new EU rules, what Casey just read is, okay,

00:38:10 ◼   ► so you've got the new EU rules. Next choice is, under the new

00:38:14 ◼   ► EU rules, do you want to still be in the App Store? And that's what he read here. It's like,

00:38:18 ◼   ► okay, if you're still in the App Store, you have a choice. Stay in the App Store, use Apple stuff, stay in the App Store,

00:38:22 ◼   ► use a different payment process, stay in the App Store, or just link out to a payment thing.

00:38:26 ◼   ► Those are the rules. And notice, if you choose the new EU rules,

00:38:30 ◼   ► and you want to stay in the App Store, every option under staying in the App Store

00:38:34 ◼   ► under the new EU rules is different than if you had not chosen the new EU rules

00:38:38 ◼   ► and stayed under the App Store. So, if you're like, well, I've just decided I'm going to stay

00:38:42 ◼   ► in the App Store. That's not your top-level choice. Your top-level choice is, keep everything the same

00:38:46 ◼   ► as it was, or take these new EU rules, and if you take the

00:38:50 ◼   ► new EU rules, you can still be in the App Store, but the deal is different.

00:38:54 ◼   ► In particular, as Rupert notes, every single one of the options under the new rules

00:38:58 ◼   ► adds the core technology fee to all the different things you can do.

00:39:02 ◼   ► And of course, you have new options, because under the EU rules, if you stay in the App Store,

00:39:06 ◼   ► you can do things like use an entirely different payment processor. And there's also a couple

00:39:10 ◼   ► of asterisks on that too. Like, for instance, if you choose to opt into the new

00:39:14 ◼   ► EU rules for an app, you can never change back for that app.

00:39:18 ◼   ► So, that's a big thing.

00:39:22 ◼   ► So, anyway, you take the new EU rules, you stay in the App Store.

00:39:26 ◼   ► Now, it's you take the new EU rules, and what's the next option, Casey?

00:39:30 ◼   ► So, then you can distribute apps in one or more third-party marketplaces.

00:39:34 ◼   ► You have no option to use the Apple App Store payment processing, because the apps

00:39:38 ◼   ► aren't coming from the App Store. The only money due to Apple is the core technology fee.

00:39:42 ◼   ► There's no commission percentage on in-app transactions or links to the web.

00:39:46 ◼   ► You're on your own, it's the Wild West, you just gotta pay us a half-euro

00:39:50 ◼   ► for the million and first, and so on, user and install,

00:39:54 ◼   ► and so on and so forth. Which actually, this is actually

00:39:58 ◼   ► I think pretty surprising. So, yes, if

00:40:02 ◼   ► you totally bail out of the App Store, and if you are only distributing

00:40:06 ◼   ► your app in a third-party App Store,

00:40:10 ◼   ► I'm not gonna say app marketplaces, so third-party App Store,

00:40:14 ◼   ► then you only pay the core technology fee. You only pay that half-euro

00:40:18 ◼   ► per user after a million. So, that's actually

00:40:22 ◼   ► I think surprisingly reasonable in context of like

00:40:26 ◼   ► what Apple even would consider doing. I would have guessed

00:40:30 ◼   ► that they would have done that whole like, you know, submit to us your financial reports

00:40:34 ◼   ► and pay us a commission kind of thing on this. I don't think that was allowed in the text

00:40:38 ◼   ► of the DMA, essentially. Probably not. I think that they were forced to

00:40:42 ◼   ► that's kind of, we'll talk about it in a little bit, that's kind of the reason CTF exists, is I think the option

00:40:46 ◼   ► that you're describing, even Apple didn't think they could pretend that that's

00:40:50 ◼   ► complying. So, yeah, so that's basically the

00:40:54 ◼   ► story, and... Well, now you forgot the exclusivity part. Options one and two

00:40:58 ◼   ► are exclusive. Options one and two being, do you want to stay in the App Store and do

00:41:02 ◼   ► everything the same the way it is now, or do you want to opt into the new EU rules? And that's what Margaret was talking about before.

00:41:06 ◼   ► Once you make that choice, it's irrevocable. Apple says

00:41:10 ◼   ► developers who adopt the new business terms at any time will not be able

00:41:14 ◼   ► to switch back to Apple's existing business terms through their EU apps. So, say you opt into

00:41:18 ◼   ► the new EU rules and you're like, "Ah, turns out it was a mistake. We don't like this new system.

00:41:22 ◼   ► We want to go back." Apple says, "Nope." It's a one-way

00:41:26 ◼   ► door. If you decide you want to use the new EU rules, whether you're under the new EU rules

00:41:30 ◼   ► in the App Store or whether you're under the new EU rules outside the App Store, there's

00:41:34 ◼   ► no going back. That is that. So, I don't know.

00:41:38 ◼   ► When I first read all this, it seemed super reasonable to me, surprisingly

00:41:42 ◼   ► reasonable to me, and then some people started doing the

00:41:46 ◼   ► mathematics on... Wait, this is Europe. I believe you mean the maths.

00:41:50 ◼   ► I'm sorry, yes. This is the EU after all, so they did the maths. Actually, I guess

00:41:54 ◼   ► the UK is not in the EU anymore, so you can say whatever you want. That's right. I don't know if they say maths

00:41:58 ◼   ► as any other countries. See, this is why I said mathematics, you big jerk.

00:42:02 ◼   ► Let it slide. Go ahead. Actually, before...

00:42:06 ◼   ► There's one more minor point of the things that Apple described. This is

00:42:10 ◼   ► the flow chart that Apple didn't provide that I have drawn here in the notes.

00:42:14 ◼   ► It isn't really in Gruber summary, but it's implied by Gruber summary, and there's a little bit more to know

00:42:18 ◼   ► here. What is the flow? What is the process diagram? You've got all these rules.

00:42:22 ◼   ► You can opt into this rule, opt into that rule, but say you are a developer.

00:42:26 ◼   ► Regardless of which path you chose on this little choose your own adventure. Option one, option two, EU rules,

00:42:30 ◼   ► not EU rules, App Store, not App Store, whatever. How does this all work?

00:42:34 ◼   ► And the way it works if you just have an app is you are a developer and you have an app,

00:42:38 ◼   ► you... Everybody, no matter what rule you choose, you

00:42:42 ◼   ► take your app and you send it to Apple. But you don't

00:42:46 ◼   ► send it directly to the people who review apps right now for the App Store.

00:42:50 ◼   ► Instead, you send it to this new process, which I don't know what Apple calls

00:42:54 ◼   ► it. I just call it the Apple review in this diagram. But this is a

00:42:58 ◼   ► a new process that is a very tiny subset of

00:43:02 ◼   ► App Review. Apple, you will send your app to Apple, presumably through

00:43:06 ◼   ► Xcode, and Apple will look at your app and they will do a bunch

00:43:10 ◼   ► of checks. And this is the list from Apple for the checks. They're

00:43:14 ◼   ► calling a notarization for iOS, although I feel like it's a little bit more than that because

00:43:18 ◼   ► they use it. Yes. Anyway, they will check for accuracy. Apps

00:43:22 ◼   ► must accurately represent the developer capabilities and cost to users. Functionality

00:43:26 ◼   ► binaries must be reviewable, free from serious bugs and crashes, blah, blah, blah. Like,

00:43:30 ◼   ► you know, does it work? The apps cannot manipulate software or hardware in ways that negatively

00:43:34 ◼   ► impact the user experience. Safety apps cannot promote physical harm of the user or public

00:43:38 ◼   ► security. Apps cannot enable distribution of malware or suspicious unwanted software

00:43:42 ◼   ► that cannot download executable code, read outside the container or direct users to lower the security of their

00:43:46 ◼   ► system or device. Apps must also provide transparency to allow user consent

00:43:50 ◼   ► to enable any party to access the system or device or reconfigure the system or software.

00:43:54 ◼   ► And privacy apps cannot collect or transmit private sensitive data

00:43:58 ◼   ► without a user's knowledge in a manner contrary to the stated purpose of the software.

00:44:02 ◼   ► And it kind of implied all this is you can't use private APIs, right? So

00:44:06 ◼   ► this is way less than App Store Review. This is like

00:44:10 ◼   ► just does your app work? Is it not a super

00:44:14 ◼   ► obvious scam? Does it not use private APIs? Every

00:44:18 ◼   ► single app under these rules goes through this phase, this very

00:44:22 ◼   ► limited, very strict phase. Importantly,

00:44:26 ◼   ► they don't care what's in your app. Is your app filled with porn? Is

00:44:30 ◼   ► it a Nintendo emulator? Does it have pictures of Star Wars

00:44:34 ◼   ► characters all over that you didn't license? This phase does

00:44:38 ◼   ► not care. It just wants to know, does it crash? Does it run? Does it do what it says it does?

00:44:42 ◼   ► Does it not use private APIs, which I think is a pretty big one? Does it not steal people's data?

00:44:46 ◼   ► Does it not direct them to lower the security of their iPhone? That's all they're checking for.

00:44:50 ◼   ► Every single app will go through this, presumably the ones that go to the App Store as well, because the

00:44:54 ◼   ► App Review is doing this stuff anyway. Then, after you clear that phase,

00:44:58 ◼   ► then there's a fork in the road and says, "Okay, well, were you submitting this to the App Store, or

00:45:02 ◼   ► were you submitting this to a third-party marketplace?" And if you submitted to a third-party

00:45:06 ◼   ► marketplace, the third-party marketplace receives the apps that are in it

00:45:10 ◼   ► from Apple. Developers don't submit their apps directly

00:45:14 ◼   ► to a third-party marketplace. And we'll get to, like, you know, who would make a third-party marketplace and why.

00:45:18 ◼   ► It still goes through Apple. So if you're making a third-party marketplace, you're

00:45:22 ◼   ► getting a funnel of app submissions from Apple, because by the time you get

00:45:26 ◼   ► them, Apple has done all these checks to make sure it's not

00:45:30 ◼   ► super-duper terrible. So if you're wondering, like, "Oh, this takes Apple out of

00:45:34 ◼   ► the equation, and now they're no longer a bottleneck for..." Everything

00:45:38 ◼   ► still has to go through Apple. Yeah, which is interesting. I mean, this

00:45:42 ◼   ► again is not how I would have guessed this would be done. And

00:45:46 ◼   ► again, like, you know, part of this, probably a big part of this is, you know, Apple

00:45:50 ◼   ► still wants to have some form of app review. Obviously the DMA

00:45:54 ◼   ► and whatever related legislation there might be in Europe, the DMA

00:45:58 ◼   ► is going to limit what they can review and what they can prohibit

00:46:02 ◼   ► in this way. So yes, they're allowed to interfere, basically, with their

00:46:06 ◼   ► third-party app stores and say, "Well, you still can't have, like, a virus in there."

00:46:10 ◼   ► Or, "You still can't have stuff that's misleading users."

00:46:14 ◼   ► But they can't say things like, "You can't have porn," or, you know,

00:46:18 ◼   ► as John was saying, like, you know, certain copyright issues. And I was thinking, too, like, you know,

00:46:22 ◼   ► all of the, you know, cryptocurrency scam apps

00:46:26 ◼   ► and scam companies, because they're all scams... Wait, I was going to say cryptocurrency

00:46:30 ◼   ► scam. That's redundant, isn't it? I mean, I think a lot of crypto stuff

00:46:34 ◼   ► would go through, because it doesn't technically violate any of these things, even though, like... That's what I'm

00:46:38 ◼   ► saying. Like, that's somebody else who might want to use this, because, like, you know, Apple's had

00:46:42 ◼   ► a lot of rules around certain types of content that they found either

00:46:46 ◼   ► objectionable or just too dangerous or messy to deal with. Things

00:46:50 ◼   ► like porn, you know, crypto stuff...

00:46:54 ◼   ► Real money gambling. Yeah, real money gambling, certain political apps, like, there are certain

00:46:58 ◼   ► things that Apple just has not allowed in the app store, just kind of, you know, content-based

00:47:02 ◼   ► decisions. And it seems like under the DMA, there...

00:47:06 ◼   ► Through the third-party marketplace process, they don't seem like

00:47:10 ◼   ► they're either allowed or even interested in policing that kind of

00:47:14 ◼   ► thing, because it's kind of out of their hands at that point. But they are allowed to,

00:47:18 ◼   ► at least so far, you know, we'll see what the European Commission says, you know, if they go back on any of this stuff,

00:47:22 ◼   ► but they see... It seems like they are allowed to at least do basic functionality

00:47:26 ◼   ► checks of, you know, basic, you know, representation and security matters.

00:47:30 ◼   ► Yeah, that's written right into the DMA. The DMA essentially has language that says,

00:47:34 ◼   ► you know, just because we're telling you you have to have third-party app stores,

00:47:38 ◼   ► that doesn't mean you can't check for, like, very basic,

00:47:42 ◼   ► you know, there's a whole bunch of language, I think it might be lower in the notes, so we'll get to eventually. It's like,

00:47:46 ◼   ► to ensure the integrity of the platform, like, you don't want someone to download an app

00:47:50 ◼   ► that's going to fry their phone or steal all their data, like, that is written into the... Because remember,

00:47:54 ◼   ► this is the EU, the same body that added all those annoying cookie

00:47:58 ◼   ► restrictions. So they're on board with trying to do these safety things, and

00:48:02 ◼   ► they explicitly say Apple's allowed to do it. And at the top when I said, like, what

00:48:06 ◼   ► is the DMA, it's, you know, it's the European Union thinking there's

00:48:10 ◼   ► insufficient competition in the market for digital goods and apps in the app store

00:48:14 ◼   ► and they think there should be more of it. I think that is the...

00:48:18 ◼   ► When looking at this giant list of rules before you get into the nitty-gritty details, it's worth

00:48:22 ◼   ► considering, does the DMA accomplish

00:48:26 ◼   ► that goal? Assuming what Apple has, you know, put forward

00:48:30 ◼   ► here is compliant, which remains to be seen. I

00:48:34 ◼   ► think in one way it does, and we were just touching on

00:48:38 ◼   ► that with this, with this, the Apple review process that they

00:48:42 ◼   ► do a minimal number of checks, right? Because previously, before the

00:48:46 ◼   ► DMA, there were certain kinds of apps that you just could not

00:48:50 ◼   ► get on your iPhone unless you were, like, a developer, did some weird enterprise thing or whatever, right?

00:48:54 ◼   ► Because Apple didn't want them, right? Under the DMA, even under Apple's

00:48:58 ◼   ► rules, there are kinds of apps that can now get on your phone

00:49:02 ◼   ► through a regular third-party app store that couldn't get there before, whether that's

00:49:06 ◼   ► porn apps or gambling apps or Nintendo emulators

00:49:10 ◼   ► or just, you know, there's so many kinds of apps that Apple just doesn't want. Oh, that's too much

00:49:14 ◼   ► like an Apple app. I don't like that because it looks too much like Springboard. The number

00:49:18 ◼   ► of different kinds of apps that Apple does not allow on the App Store is

00:49:22 ◼   ► vast. You might not know about them or think about them because they don't get through,

00:49:26 ◼   ► right? And if you don't see some story about it, you don't know that someone was thinking of making

00:49:30 ◼   ► an app like X and it got rejected for some reason and it doesn't make any sense to you. All we know is there are

00:49:34 ◼   ► apps that previously couldn't get through that under this new plan will

00:49:38 ◼   ► be able to. So that is one thing the DMA was trying to do, which is like, hey, it seems

00:49:42 ◼   ► unfair that Apple gets to decide what kinds of apps

00:49:46 ◼   ► are even allowed. And it's not just porn and bad things like that.

00:49:50 ◼   ► It's like I said, it's apps that, like, Apple decides, you know, have a picture of an iPhone

00:49:54 ◼   ► in them or mention iOS or look too much like

00:49:58 ◼   ► Springboard or like or look too much like an app store or just

00:50:02 ◼   ► so many things that Apple doesn't allow. It's all just going to be like

00:50:06 ◼   ► crypto farts and copyright infringement. I mean, there's going to be a lot of that.

00:50:10 ◼   ► But anyway, this provides that. The second thing of like,

00:50:14 ◼   ► okay, well, we don't think there's enough competition in the marketplace. The complaint that we

00:50:18 ◼   ► often talk about in the show is developers feel like Apple

00:50:22 ◼   ► takes too big of a cut of the money that is made through the app store.

00:50:26 ◼   ► They feel like Apple deserves maybe some, but they don't think

00:50:30 ◼   ► that the amount that they're giving to Apple seems like too much for what they're getting in return.

00:50:34 ◼   ► We've discussed this a million times, whether they're right or wrong about that, that's how they feel. And that is

00:50:38 ◼   ► the second leg of this thing. Does the DMA and these rules complying

00:50:42 ◼   ► with it allow, address that in any way?

00:50:46 ◼   ► And I think, to spoil my opinion that we'll get into the nitty-gritty

00:50:50 ◼   ► details of, I think that it doesn't. I think that

00:50:54 ◼   ► Apple has cleverly designed these rules such that it is not a clear

00:50:58 ◼   ► cut financial win to do this. And if that was one of the goals of

00:51:02 ◼   ► like there should be a way where you can get apps on the iPhone and pay Apple a lot less money,

00:51:06 ◼   ► I don't think overall this provides that. In some cases, yes.

00:51:10 ◼   ► In some cases, massively no. And we'll talk about

00:51:14 ◼   ► who's going to even run a third-party marketplace, because if nobody runs a third-party marketplace, this is moot,

00:51:18 ◼   ► right? For both of these things. And I think Apple has done a pretty good

00:51:22 ◼   ► job of making sure that financially speaking, it's

00:51:26 ◼   ► not a clear win to go with the EU rules. And that, I

00:51:30 ◼   ► think, is the biggest knock against their compliance.

00:51:34 ◼   ► Because you can say, okay, well, they are allowing apps that they weren't allowed before,

00:51:38 ◼   ► right? You can see a path for them to get through to users, I see that happening here.

00:51:42 ◼   ► But that is only one complaint that people had, one

00:51:46 ◼   ► aspect of competition. The other aspect is Apple is taking too much money. And Apple is like,

00:51:50 ◼   ► no matter what you do, no matter where you go, you will always be

00:51:54 ◼   ► paying us the same amount of money you are now or more. And no matter what laws

00:51:58 ◼   ► you pass, we're smarter than you, and we will make sure that

00:52:02 ◼   ► we get the same amount of money we're getting now or more. And

00:52:06 ◼   ► that, I think, is the absolute worst part of this thing. And you may be reading and you say, what do you

00:52:10 ◼   ► mean? Their cuts are lower and the other CTF thing, but it's only over a million, how

00:52:14 ◼   ► are they paying more money? And, you know, in the week that this story has been going on, people

00:52:18 ◼   ► have been starting to do the math, and in some cases, yeah, you can make more money. In other

00:52:22 ◼   ► cases, you will be paying Apple literally billions of dollars a year

00:52:26 ◼   ► for the privilege of distributing a free app.

00:52:30 ◼   ► That, I think, is, what I think will ultimately happen with

00:52:34 ◼   ► this is not a lot. Because,

00:52:38 ◼   ► again, Apple, as John said, Apple is very good at making sure they keep making

00:52:42 ◼   ► money. They are very good at that. The same amount of money or more?

00:52:46 ◼   ► Exactly. And yeah, there might be certain apps where that

00:52:50 ◼   ► won't be the case for, where they can figure out, you know, if they can squeeze a bit more money out by doing these new

00:52:54 ◼   ► terms. That's the one loophole that Apple left here. And it's not

00:52:58 ◼   ► really a loophole, but I think it's weird and perverse and it's strange to me that Apple didn't think of it.

00:53:02 ◼   ► If you look at the rules, Gerber's rules, not the fee calculator,

00:53:06 ◼   ► it may occur to you that if you sell a paid up-front app through a

00:53:10 ◼   ► third-party app store, you pay Apple nothing. You also earn nothing.

00:53:14 ◼   ► Right. So, Apple is so sure

00:53:18 ◼   ► that paid up-front apps are just a dud, like a relic of

00:53:22 ◼   ► the past that no one will ever do, that they left it open. So say you do

00:53:26 ◼   ► a paid up-front app that costs $20. That 50% CTF fee, you're like,

00:53:30 ◼   ► "I'm making $20 pure profit, minus 3% for my payment processor,

00:53:34 ◼   ► minus 50 cents for Apple? Who cares?" Minus whatever

00:53:38 ◼   ► the third-party app marketplace is going to charge you, which is not nothing.

00:53:42 ◼   ► Right. But whatever. The whole point of the third-party ad marketplace is, in theory,

00:53:46 ◼   ► they'd be competitive with Apple or whatever. But that's a loophole. And the reason that's there, I have to assume,

00:53:50 ◼   ► is, like Marco said, nobody buys paid up-front apps.

00:53:54 ◼   ► And I do wonder if this is compliant and goes through in any

00:53:58 ◼   ► way, if this will be a perverse incentive to say, "Everything old is new again! Pay up-front

00:54:02 ◼   ► apps for $10!" And you'd be like, "Why is this happening?"

00:54:06 ◼   ► And it's like, well, the rules that Apple laid out allow that

00:54:10 ◼   ► to be a way to safely make money. It always has been a way to safely make money,

00:54:14 ◼   ► just no one ever wants to do it. That's why it has essentially become almost extinct on the

00:54:18 ◼   ► App Store. Not extinct. I know there are apps out there that do that, but it is so much less popular

00:54:22 ◼   ► than it was in the beginning. Everything is free with in-app purchase,

00:54:26 ◼   ► and the CTF makes free with in-app purchase a potentially bankrupting thing.

00:54:30 ◼   ► Just to be clear why everyone is against the CTF.

00:54:34 ◼   ► For the CTF, after you're million and first user,

00:54:38 ◼   ► you pay 50 cents for every install per year, no matter what

00:54:42 ◼   ► that person does with your app. And if your app is free to download and that person never makes a purchase,

00:54:46 ◼   ► you're paying 50% for them year after year. If they leave it on their home screen, and if you

00:54:50 ◼   ► do more than one software update per year, that update counts it as an install,

00:54:54 ◼   ► and you're just paying 50 euro cents per user,

00:54:58 ◼   ► per install, year after year after year. So you better hope

00:55:02 ◼   ► the value of your customer is more than 50 cents

00:55:06 ◼   ► per year. And if you have a free app where you don't sell anything

00:55:10 ◼   ► or you have a free app with a conversion rate of in-app purchase that is too low to provide that,

00:55:14 ◼   ► you are just bleeding money left and right. So all these big companies that have hundreds of millions

00:55:18 ◼   ► of customers in the EU for a free app, that adds up to

00:55:22 ◼   ► millions or billions of dollars. Which may be worth it for these big rich companies, but if you are a

00:55:28 ◼   ► small developer and you have a, say you're WidgetSmith, and your app goes viral

00:55:32 ◼   ► and millions of people download your app, and you get like a 1%

00:55:36 ◼   ► conversion rate, and you're like, uh oh, now I have to, is that 1% conversion rate

00:55:40 ◼   ► equal average out to 50 euro cents per user? Because if it doesn't, I am now in the red

00:55:44 ◼   ► for my incredibly successful app. Which is just such a poison

00:55:48 ◼   ► pill. And I'm not the first to use the term poison pill, but it is such

00:55:52 ◼   ► a poison pill. And on the one side, you gotta give Apple credit

00:55:56 ◼   ► like, it's slimy, but they made it work, and they presented it

00:56:00 ◼   ► in a reasonably not slimy way, insofar as it seemed like

00:56:04 ◼   ► a good deal, for which I guess it's even more slimy, right? But it seemed like a good deal at first.

00:56:08 ◼   ► And then the more you eat into it, the more you're like, ew, oh, oh.

00:56:12 ◼   ► If I have more than a million users, surely I'm making money. And it's like, right. By the way, that's

00:56:16 ◼   ► not users, that's installs. Like, how many apps do you have on your phone

00:56:20 ◼   ► that you install? Yeah, exactly, not install. It's like, someone installed it and left it on their

00:56:24 ◼   ► home screen. Or if it installed directly to the app library.

00:56:28 ◼   ► Like, you'll never see it again. I'm just thinking like, on my own

00:56:32 ◼   ► phone, I probably have over a hundred apps on there that I installed at some

00:56:36 ◼   ► point in the past and don't actively use. And auto updates is on by

00:56:40 ◼   ► default every year. Again, if those developers release at least one

00:56:44 ◼   ► update per year, which let's be honest, if your app is actively maintained, you're releasing at least one

00:56:48 ◼   ► update per year, every year, you're costing that person 50

00:56:52 ◼   ► euro cents a year after you, and you never use their app. You're never going to buy anything

00:56:56 ◼   ► in it. It was a free download. Like, the current model of the App Store, where

00:57:00 ◼   ► the popular apps are free to download and they have in-app purchase, that

00:57:04 ◼   ► model, the CTF makes that model incredibly dangerous.

00:57:08 ◼   ► Or incredibly known, incredibly costly for the big apps,

00:57:12 ◼   ► Facebook, Spotify, you know, all these apps that are free to download and have a free

00:57:16 ◼   ► way to use them, and they are distributed in the

00:57:20 ◼   ► millions, that's going to cost those companies so much money if they want to be

00:57:24 ◼   ► at a third-party app store. And one of the things I'm not entirely clear about is

00:57:28 ◼   ► let's say Facebook decides they want to accept the EU rules

00:57:32 ◼   ► and distribute through a third-party marketplace and pay 50% per install,

00:57:36 ◼   ► Facebook can eat that cost because they'll pay 500 million dollars

00:57:40 ◼   ► per year every year to Apple, whatever, they'll do it because in exchange

00:57:44 ◼   ► they get more information about the user or they own the customer or whatever they want to do.

00:57:48 ◼   ► But if they do that,

00:57:52 ◼   ► do they have to remove Facebook from the regular App Store? We already know they can't go back

00:57:56 ◼   ► to the old rules. Can they have the app in both places? Do they have to

00:58:00 ◼   ► start a new subsidiary to do this, to isolate the actual meta from

00:58:04 ◼   ► this thing, and in that case, could they not use the Facebook... Or is there just like a new, like,

00:58:08 ◼   ► Facebook EU app? Yeah, like, can they use the Facebook name?

00:58:12 ◼   ► Like, can you have... All these people are talking about like, well, I'll just make a new legal entity

00:58:16 ◼   ► to do this so I don't have to worry about it, or is Apple going to frown upon that?

00:58:20 ◼   ► This gets back to the whole idea that Apple is the bottleneck for all of this stuff, and

00:58:24 ◼   ► although they've said they're not going to stop certain kinds of apps, what they might stop is, oh, I can see that you

00:58:28 ◼   ► incorporated a new legal entity to try to skirt our rules about you not being able to

00:58:32 ◼   ► have your cake and eat it too. So, remains to be seen if that'll work.

00:58:36 ◼   ► Also, one, as I've talked about in the past before we knew what Apple

00:58:40 ◼   ► was going to do here, I've mentioned how there was this kind of doomsday scenario

00:58:44 ◼   ► I really hoped wouldn't happen as a developer, which is

00:58:48 ◼   ► I was really hoping that Facebook wouldn't say, you know what,

00:58:52 ◼   ► once we have third-party app stores or sideloading, I was thinking, you know, Facebook would say, all right,

00:58:56 ◼   ► we're going to pull our apps from the app store, you know, these apps that have billions

00:59:00 ◼   ► of users around the world that everyone has to have on their phone, you know, the actual Facebook

00:59:04 ◼   ► app, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, like, these are like their core apps

00:59:08 ◼   ► that have just billions of users, and I was afraid

00:59:12 ◼   ► Facebook would say, all right, we're going to make our own app store, our apps will be exclusive to our app store,

00:59:16 ◼   ► therefore everybody will install our app store, and then all of a sudden you have

00:59:20 ◼   ► a very, very powerful third-party app store that

00:59:24 ◼   ► would start interfering with the market in ways that would, you know, kind of force me as a developer

00:59:28 ◼   ► probably to play ball with them. So that's like, that was my doomsday scenario, I really didn't want that to happen.

00:59:32 ◼   ► It seems like the way Apple has implemented this, so first of all, I can

00:59:36 ◼   ► strongly recommend, speaking of cases saying Poison Pill, the episode of

00:59:40 ◼   ► Upgrade that came out a couple days ago, which I believe was titled Poison Pill,

00:59:44 ◼   ► Jason went through a lot of these details on there, and there were some details that he had

00:59:48 ◼   ► that I didn't know, so for instance, on this point, on third-party app store

00:59:52 ◼   ► point, what Jason reported was that there was a clause in here, which I haven't had time to verify,

00:59:56 ◼   ► but there's a clause that if you run a third-party app store, you can't just

01:00:00 ◼   ► run it for your own company's apps, which is a pretty huge, you know, clause.

01:00:04 ◼   ► So what that means is Facebook can't run their

01:00:08 ◼   ► own app store that just has their apps. Now, I have no doubt

01:00:12 ◼   ► if Facebook is going to, you know, do something, do a move here,

01:00:16 ◼   ► I have no doubt that they could do something, because you know, what maybe a lot

01:00:20 ◼   ► of non-developers might not know is that Facebook is a huge

01:00:24 ◼   ► source of app install ads. Many apps that get installed

01:00:28 ◼   ► on many phones across the world get installed through Facebook ads in some

01:00:32 ◼   ► form. So Facebook would have a pretty strong incentive to build some kind of

01:00:36 ◼   ► integrated system where you can have, you know, you pay Facebook to advertise your

01:00:40 ◼   ► app, Facebook hosts your app, or you know, through the third-party marketplace

01:00:44 ◼   ► system here, Facebook then can directly install

01:00:48 ◼   ► your app directly from a user tapping an ad or whatever else it is. So there's, there are

01:00:52 ◼   ► reasons why Facebook might want to build like a larger store system here.

01:00:56 ◼   ► Fortunately for my goal of having that not happen,

01:01:00 ◼   ► I think the core technology fee will mostly kill

01:01:04 ◼   ► that, because the economics of it are so

01:01:08 ◼   ► rough. Like, cause first of all, the store itself

01:01:12 ◼   ► like the, whatever, you know, if you make a third-party app store, that is an

01:01:16 ◼   ► app that pays the CTF on every install, even below a million.

01:01:20 ◼   ► So, and how much money does your third-party app store make?

01:01:24 ◼   ► Right? So you have to make 50% per installed instance of your

01:01:28 ◼   ► app store for every single user who has it. I love that none of us know what 50 euro

01:01:32 ◼   ► cents are called. Like we just keep saying different things. We'll just say half euro.

01:01:36 ◼   ► We say 50 cents, it's fine. But it's not 50 cents. It's 50 euro cents.

01:01:40 ◼   ► Do they call it that? Probably not. I don't know, but that's what I'm calling it.

01:01:44 ◼   ► Anyway, like so, so suppose Facebook did this. They're gonna

01:01:48 ◼   ► pay 50 euro cents. Euro cents, it's fine. They're gonna

01:01:52 ◼   ► pay a half euro for every installation of the Facebook app store.

01:01:56 ◼   ► Then they're also, cause they have so many users, they're also gonna be way past a million.

01:02:00 ◼   ► So they have a half euro for the app store app itself. Then another

01:02:04 ◼   ► half euro for each of their installed apps on everyone's phone.

01:02:08 ◼   ► That's gonna add up to quite a bit. And all of

01:02:12 ◼   ► this would only be usable in the EU.

01:02:16 ◼   ► So it's not that they could do this worldwide and pull their apps from all of the

01:02:20 ◼   ► app store stuff. Like they would do all this and jump through all these

01:02:24 ◼   ► hoops and pay all these fees only for something that

01:02:28 ◼   ► works in the EU. So that's like, I can't imagine

01:02:32 ◼   ► this is going to be used by pretty much anybody

01:02:36 ◼   ► huge, like the big tech companies, like the big worldwide tech companies,

01:02:40 ◼   ► I can't really see doing this. What I foresee happening here

01:02:44 ◼   ► is the EU will have a couple of third

01:02:48 ◼   ► party app stores that are gonna be filled mostly with porn and crypto

01:02:52 ◼   ► and stuff like that, that is just not allowed in the regular app store. And

01:02:56 ◼   ► the economics of it won't be that beneficial to almost anyone

01:03:00 ◼   ► except Apple. And that'll be fine.

01:03:04 ◼   ► And I don't even know if those app stores will be sustainable though. Like I'm trying to think of who's

01:03:08 ◼   ► like we asked about who's gonna run the third, who's gonna use that linking, third party linking payment thing

01:03:12 ◼   ► we talked about before the DMA and it was like the only benefit was ownership to the customer

01:03:16 ◼   ► and some flexibility there. But this one's even worse because like lots of people

01:03:20 ◼   ► may think, I want to run a third party app store in the EU. But then you look at what

01:03:24 ◼   ► what's involved. First of all, you need a million euro line of credit, which is no problem for

01:03:28 ◼   ► any big company. But if you're just an individual user who thinks you want to have your own app

01:03:32 ◼   ► store, that's an immediate barrier to entry. And then

01:03:36 ◼   ► what you just said before, Margaret, like Apple's rules say you can't just have an app

01:03:40 ◼   ► store and like, OK, but the only apps allowed in the app store are my apps. You can't do that. You essentially

01:03:44 ◼   ► have to make an app store that allows submissions from anybody who wants to submit.

01:03:48 ◼   ► Now, I'm sure there are loopholes in there because you could say, OK, well

01:03:52 ◼   ► I'll be just like the Apple app store and I'll allow submissions from anybody.

01:03:56 ◼   ► But have you seen my set of rules? It's even more Byzantine than the real

01:04:00 ◼   ► app store. And I can reject things for any reason because I decided that you've included

01:04:04 ◼   ► a rectangle that is shaped like my grandma's house and oh, there's clause 13.3.1

01:04:08 ◼   ► if any rectangle is shaped like her grandma's house, I'm rejecting your app.

01:04:12 ◼   ► Like I don't think Apple can police the rules that each app store provides.

01:04:16 ◼   ► But you can't say like from day one, sorry, we're not accepting

01:04:20 ◼   ► submissions. You have to accept and process a submission. So now you are opening

01:04:24 ◼   ► the doors to accept and process submissions even if you're rejecting them based on lots of stuff.

01:04:28 ◼   ► So if you think you're like an individual developer who's going to run a store, are you

01:04:32 ◼   ► ready to accept and review app submissions? Maybe no one will submit to you.

01:04:36 ◼   ► Maybe a million people will submit to you. Now you're on the hook to do a lot of complicated stuff.

01:04:40 ◼   ► And of course, you have to pay 50 euro cents for every single person who installs your app.

01:04:44 ◼   ► And then you have to decide how much of a cut am I going to take? Am I going to take

01:04:48 ◼   ► 30% like Apple does? Am I going to demand 70%? Am I going to demand 1%?

01:04:52 ◼   ► Like what are the rules of your app store? Oh, now you have to hold all the accounting for dealing with those

01:04:56 ◼   ► rules. And are you going to have your own payment processing? It's part of the, like

01:05:00 ◼   ► building a third party app store, a third party marketplace on Apple's parlance

01:05:04 ◼   ► is non-trivial and it's very expensive to do

01:05:08 ◼   ► to have one at all. So it eliminates a lot of

01:05:12 ◼   ► people from doing it. Right? And then if you want your app store to be attractive

01:05:16 ◼   ► I feel like the whole point of this is you have to offer

01:05:20 ◼   ► something better than what the Apple's app store does. Because otherwise why would people

01:05:24 ◼   ► go to you? Maybe the better thing is, hey, I'll let you have porn apps. Right? But presumably

01:05:28 ◼   ► one of the better things is, I'll take less money than Apple. That's the whole point of one

01:05:32 ◼   ► big aspect of the competition. If you have third party app stores, A

01:05:36 ◼   ► they'll allow apps that Apple wouldn't and B, they'll take less money from you. And so

01:05:40 ◼   ► now you have to do that. So now you're already in a financially

01:05:44 ◼   ► advantageous situation. You're following the rules set by Apple who runs their own app store

01:05:48 ◼   ► and they set the rules up so that they know it's going to be really hard for you to

01:05:52 ◼   ► compete with them, but you have to compete with them otherwise your store isn't attractive at all.

01:05:56 ◼   ► Good luck making money there. And that's why the only people this probably makes sense

01:06:00 ◼   ► for are companies that can eat this. Like, you know, Facebook

01:06:04 ◼   ► will say, alright, so we're going to pay half a billion dollars to Apple

01:06:08 ◼   ► every year in perpetuity to have our

01:06:12 ◼   ► own app store, but it's worth it to us because we have those click through ads and now we can track who

01:06:16 ◼   ► bought the thing or it's more important for us to own the customer.

01:06:20 ◼   ► They have some strategic reason where it makes sense. But the reason is not

01:06:24 ◼   ► boy, we're going to make so much money off this meta app store in the EU.

01:06:28 ◼   ► Directly? You're probably not. It's probably going to be a cost center

01:06:32 ◼   ► and you're going to make it up in other parts of your business and it's strategic to you.

01:06:36 ◼   ► And it's still not entirely clear to me whether, if meta did that, whether they could

01:06:40 ◼   ► no longer have any of their apps in the plain old app store in the EU.

01:06:44 ◼   ► I don't think that's the case. I think they're allowed to have both, but they

01:06:48 ◼   ► might have to be separate apps. But they have to pay the CTF on the ones that are in the plain app store

01:06:52 ◼   ► because once they accept the EU rules, this is another thing in case it wasn't clear from before, once you accept the EU rules

01:06:56 ◼   ► even your apps that are in the Apple app store are subject to

01:07:00 ◼   ► the core technology fee. Oh, wait a minute. I don't think I knew. So it isn't per app?

01:07:04 ◼   ► Well, basically if you have an app in the app store and you accept the EU rules

01:07:08 ◼   ► you pay the CTF. Oh, well, let's clarify that.

01:07:12 ◼   ► It is. It's right up here. So, you know, option number two, you accept the EU rules and you remain in the app store

01:07:16 ◼   ► all the options have CTF. Oh, yeah, no, but I'm saying like, could Facebook

01:07:20 ◼   ► have the Facebook app for the rest of the world that stays the same, but then

01:07:24 ◼   ► Facebook EU over here. Oh, yeah, no, this is just within the EU. I'm saying within the

01:07:28 ◼   ► EU. Could you have the, you're living in the EU and you

01:07:32 ◼   ► launch the Apple app store, you see the Facebook app. You're living in the EU and you launch the meta app store

01:07:36 ◼   ► you see the Facebook app. Can the Facebook app be in both places as viewed by somebody in the EU?

01:07:40 ◼   ► No, I believe it has to be a different, I think it has to be a different bundle ID even, but

01:07:44 ◼   ► we'll see. And that's, yeah, so what I expect to happen

01:07:48 ◼   ► here, and by the way too, like your breakdown of the economics of the third party app store

01:07:52 ◼   ► is like two points in that. First of all, the CTF kills those economics

01:07:56 ◼   ► so for, you know, for everybody, for the app store owner itself and

01:08:00 ◼   ► for each individual developer, like, you know, if I wanted to submit my

01:08:04 ◼   ► app to a third party app store in the EU. First of all, again, like, you know,

01:08:08 ◼   ► I know they're going to turn me into something because like, the only reason people

01:08:12 ◼   ► want to run app stores is to make the same cut themselves.

01:08:16 ◼   ► Like, why do you think Epic is pushing so hard against Apple?

01:08:20 ◼   ► Epic runs their own game store and they take a percentage of all the sales in it. So, of

01:08:24 ◼   ► course, like, they just want it for themselves. That's why, well, it's not that they

01:08:28 ◼   ► want the cut of other people's, they just don't want to have to pay Apple. So, for example, when Apple distributes his

01:08:32 ◼   ► own apps through the app store, it doesn't pay itself 30%. Or if it did, it wouldn't make, it doesn't

01:08:36 ◼   ► make any sense, right? That's why the idea of an Epic app store that only sells Epic

01:08:40 ◼   ► apps, Epic loves that because like, sure, we'll pay ourselves 90%. We'll pay ourselves

01:08:44 ◼   ► 100%. Like, it doesn't matter. They're their own apps. It's their own company and that's why

01:08:48 ◼   ► Apple has in the rules, oh, so you want to have an app store? You can't just have your own apps

01:08:52 ◼   ► in there. Essentially, as a way to avoid paying anything because like, we run the app store

01:08:56 ◼   ► so we don't have to pay ourselves. That's the advantage that Apple has. They run the app store.

01:09:00 ◼   ► They don't have to pay 30% of all their, you know, so Apple has

01:09:04 ◼   ► made it so that that is not an attractive thing to do. Like, no, you have to accept submissions. You're like,

01:09:08 ◼   ► do I really want to run an app store to deal with other people's apps? I don't want

01:09:12 ◼   ► other people's apps. I just want to pay less. And then if you just want to pay less, you may be out there saying,

01:09:16 ◼   ► okay, I'm not going to run my own app store. I'll just wait to see the C of

01:09:20 ◼   ► third-party app stores that pop up and I'll pick the one that has the lowest rate. And what we're trying to say

01:09:24 ◼   ► is there's not going to be a C of third-party app stores because running a third-party app

01:09:28 ◼   ► store is not a great deal. And if any do exist, they're probably

01:09:32 ◼   ► going to be similar or worse deals than Apple for everybody involved, which I feel

01:09:36 ◼   ► like is not in the spirit of the DMA. We're just

01:09:40 ◼   ► trying to increase competition. And again, the only thing I feel like the DMA is

01:09:44 ◼   ► successfully accomplishing, if this is deemed to be compliant, is apps that you couldn't

01:09:48 ◼   ► get before now you can get in the EU. Everything else is just such a mess

01:09:52 ◼   ► that it is not helping anybody. Yeah, that's

01:09:56 ◼   ► the key. Because even as a developer, why would I submit my app

01:10:00 ◼   ► to a third-party app store? Because again, that means I'm going to start eating

01:10:04 ◼   ► the CTF for my app. That ruins economics.

01:10:08 ◼   ► Yeah, it ruins economics in the EU for me because it's a free app.

01:10:12 ◼   ► Yeah, so the economics of it are terrible.

01:10:16 ◼   ► The only reason, you're right, the only reason is if my app

01:10:20 ◼   ► type or business model or whatever, if something inherent about my app is just not

01:10:24 ◼   ► allowed in Apple's app store. And you somehow think you can get 50 cents

01:10:28 ◼   ► of value per customer per year. More than 50% of value per customer

01:10:32 ◼   ► per year. Because you have to be pretty confident. Plus whatever you're paying the app store.

01:10:36 ◼   ► Yeah, you have to be pretty confident that you can do that. Or you're just so confident that you're never going to be above a million

01:10:40 ◼   ► users or whatever. Yeah, so that's why I think this is

01:10:44 ◼   ► Apple has crafted this ingeniously so that

01:10:48 ◼   ► no one will use it, basically. It's going to be a very specialized

01:10:52 ◼   ► thing that almost no one's going to use and you're not going to hear

01:10:56 ◼   ► it. Because then the other thing too is like, suppose somebody

01:11:00 ◼   ► makes a third party app store. They jump through the hoops,

01:11:04 ◼   ► they actually create one, then they actually get developers to put

01:11:08 ◼   ► their apps in it and everyone somehow pays for the CTF and everything

01:11:12 ◼   ► else going along with this. You still have no users

01:11:16 ◼   ► for that app store. How does that get off the ground? And the more users you get,

01:11:20 ◼   ► it's 50 cents for every single one of those users starting from user number one.

01:11:24 ◼   ► So your idea of like, I'm running a third party app store, I need every single person

01:11:28 ◼   ► on Earth to install my... Oh no I don't. I really don't want that. Yeah, exactly.

01:11:32 ◼   ► The economics of it make no sense for any party involved except

01:11:36 ◼   ► Apple. Apple's going to keep making their money, of course. And no

01:11:40 ◼   ► developer, again, barring apps that are just not allowed,

01:11:44 ◼   ► no developer would or should enter this agreement

01:11:48 ◼   ► and no one's going to want to run the stores either. I do think it is significant

01:11:52 ◼   ► that Apple, everything still goes through Apple. Even though what they've said they're going to do

01:11:56 ◼   ► is, you know, like, okay, well they said they'll essentially

01:12:00 ◼   ► allow things through except for safety or whatever. The fact that there is a decision point, the fact

01:12:04 ◼   ► that everything still flows through Apple opens the door to so much abuse

01:12:08 ◼   ► of Apple just deciding, oh, we're not sure when we're going to get to that app,

01:12:12 ◼   ► we're really backed up right now. Oh, yeah, we found something

01:12:16 ◼   ► we think is a safety concern. Like, you know, the spirit of the

01:12:20 ◼   ► DMA, the idea that there shouldn't be this small number of companies with such out-sized

01:12:24 ◼   ► control, Apple still has all that control. They're just saying,

01:12:28 ◼   ► we won't use it in the same way as we did before. We'll only do the things that you allow

01:12:32 ◼   ► in the DMA. We're just checking for safety and stuff. And sometimes we might get a little backed up

01:12:36 ◼   ► and, oh, we might have a concern. Oh, because what's the recourse if

01:12:40 ◼   ► Apple rejects it at that app review phase before it gets to the third-party

01:12:44 ◼   ► app store? Apple's going to be like, oh, we thought there was a safety concern or it

01:12:48 ◼   ► falls under this letter of a thing. How long does it take to get that resolved?

01:12:52 ◼   ► What is the mechanism to get that resolved? It is like, you're not

01:12:56 ◼   ► cutting Apple out of this. You're just basically scolding them and

01:13:00 ◼   ► saying, no, you let through more apps than you did before.

01:13:04 ◼   ► And Apple says, okay, I guess we will. And if we don't,

01:13:08 ◼   ► something will happen. And that's, speaking of all of this, like, does this comply,

01:13:12 ◼   ► we keep referring to that. This is the somewhat delicious irony, although not so delicious

01:13:16 ◼   ► if it turns out that they're compliant. Apple has to submit this and say,

01:13:20 ◼   ► okay, we saw your DMA, here's what we're going to do to comply with it. And Apple did all this development

01:13:24 ◼   ► and made all these frameworks and wrote up all this documentation and did all this stuff.

01:13:28 ◼   ► But Apple doesn't know whether the thing they're proposing is actually

01:13:32 ◼   ► going to be deemed compliant. They only find that out after submitting it, which is

01:13:36 ◼   ► exactly how every developer feels when they spend a year developing an application

01:13:40 ◼   ► and they have no idea if it's going to get on the App Store until they submit it. I was reminded

01:13:44 ◼   ► of this today when I was looking at the Tapestry Kickstarter from the folks at Icon Factory.

01:13:48 ◼   ► Sort of like a grand unified timeline of all things

01:13:52 ◼   ► accessible on the net. We should put a link to it in the show notes. In the risks

01:13:56 ◼   ► section on the Kickstarter page, their number one risk, I believe, is we don't know

01:14:00 ◼   ► if Apple will allow this on the App Store. That is everybody's number one risk.

01:14:04 ◼   ► We talked about it before, how many people just choose not to develop an

01:14:08 ◼   ► application because they were afraid that Apple won't accept it. And is there a way to

01:14:12 ◼   ► get pre-clearance from Apple? Can you talk to Apple and say, "Hey, before we

01:14:16 ◼   ► spend a year and millions of dollars developing this app, can you just tell us whether you'll accept it on the App Store?" And Apple's

01:14:20 ◼   ► answer is, "Develop it, submit it to us, and we'll see." And that's kind of the EU's

01:14:24 ◼   ► thing here too. It's like, here's the rules, comply

01:14:28 ◼   ► with them and submit to us and we'll tell you whether you complied or not. I don't

01:14:32 ◼   ► know what the consequences are if they're not compliant or they just send it back to Apple and they keep going back and forth.

01:14:36 ◼   ► But anyway, Apple is in the same situation as developers. They're not

01:14:40 ◼   ► sure if this is going to comply. If the EU says this does comply, I think they're

01:14:44 ◼   ► not doing a good job because I feel like this does not comply with the spirit of

01:14:48 ◼   ► what the DMA is trying to accomplish in the way that it does. But if it doesn't comply,

01:14:52 ◼   ► I don't know what the rest of the process is. But it is, I do enjoy the fact that Apple

01:14:56 ◼   ► is in the same situation as we are. Of course, the difference is that they have a whole jillion dollars and we don't.

01:15:00 ◼   ► Indeed. Yeah, I mean, honestly, like, again,

01:15:04 ◼   ► because I really don't want third party app stores or sideloading

01:15:08 ◼   ► on iOS for lots of reasons, I'm actually on one level kind of

01:15:12 ◼   ► glad that Apple has found a way to cheat their way into this so that they

01:15:16 ◼   ► maintain all the control. Because like, you know, some of the things I was worried about with, for instance,

01:15:20 ◼   ► Facebook having, you know, less controlled access to the hardware

01:15:24 ◼   ► and software on so many people's phones. The way Apple has

01:15:28 ◼   ► wedged themselves into this kind of like half app review

01:15:32 ◼   ► process, even for apps that do this, I think that's good

01:15:36 ◼   ► to try to help prevent, you know, bad actors like Facebook

01:15:40 ◼   ► from doing the bad things that they do. And like I said, in the DMA, it says

01:15:44 ◼   ► that platform holders are allowed to do these

01:15:48 ◼   ► minimum things to essentially protect the integrity of the platform.

01:15:52 ◼   ► I'm glad overall, I'm glad that Apple has found a way

01:15:56 ◼   ► to seemingly still do a pretty thorough job of

01:16:00 ◼   ► protecting the basics of the platform and user experience and security and things like that.

01:16:04 ◼   ► One kind of downside to this though is like

01:16:08 ◼   ► now I feel like they will be able to

01:16:12 ◼   ► keep their current anti-competitive behavior

01:16:16 ◼   ► everywhere, including in the EU, and maybe even get

01:16:20 ◼   ► worse, get more severe at it, because now they can point to this and say, look, if you don't like it

01:16:24 ◼   ► we gave you an escape hatch. Yeah, if you don't like it, try one of these third party things.

01:16:28 ◼   ► Oh, there aren't any? I don't know why that happened. There aren't any except for the porn store?

01:16:32 ◼   ► Exactly. I mean, this is why regulation

01:16:36 ◼   ► is so difficult. Because, yeah, they identified a real problem.

01:16:40 ◼   ► I think the EU was right to look into this as a problem.

01:16:44 ◼   ► But the regulation they created has a lot of

01:16:48 ◼   ► loophole potential, as evidenced by what Apple was able to do here.

01:16:52 ◼   ► And as a result, the customer outcome, I don't think

01:16:56 ◼   ► will be that much better, and in some ways it could get worse, because

01:17:00 ◼   ► now they can even ramp up the abuses in their store that everybody will still be using.

01:17:04 ◼   ► So, it's tough to get regulation right, and in this case

01:17:08 ◼   ► it's hard to point to this and call this a victory. Well, we'll see if it's compliant.

01:17:12 ◼   ► Because I pulled out some, I was trying to look at the DMA text to see if there's anything that is clearly not

01:17:16 ◼   ► compliant. And the DMA tries in a wishy-washy kind of way to

01:17:20 ◼   ► avoid a situation where someone complies with the letter, but

01:17:24 ◼   ► then essentially the outcome is that no one would ever want to have a third-party marketplace, for example.

01:17:28 ◼   ► So here's some text from the DMA, we'll put a link in the show notes to this exact passage.

01:17:32 ◼   ► The Gatekeeper, Apple is the Gatekeeper here because they run the App Store in this example.

01:17:36 ◼   ► The Gatekeeper shall apply fair, reasonable, and

01:17:40 ◼   ► non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users

01:17:44 ◼   ► to its software application stores, online search engines, and online social

01:17:48 ◼   ► networking services listed in the designated decision pursuant to blah blah blah blah.

01:17:52 ◼   ► So they try to basically say, like, look, you can't just say, oh, you can have a third-party App Store,

01:17:56 ◼   ► but if you want to get a third-party App Store, you have to pay us $100 billion.

01:18:00 ◼   ► That doesn't pass the DMA. So they have fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory conditions, blah blah blah.

01:18:04 ◼   ► The question is, are the financial terms

01:18:08 ◼   ► set out by Apple fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory? They're probably pretty much

01:18:12 ◼   ► non-discriminatory, although you might say the million dollar line of credit is slightly discriminatory, right?

01:18:16 ◼   ► But by carefully calibrating the terms

01:18:20 ◼   ► to look more or less like the same deal as Apple, you could say,

01:18:24 ◼   ► well, it's fair and reasonable because it's kind of the same deal that we have,

01:18:28 ◼   ► but if your goal with the DMA is to foster competition,

01:18:32 ◼   ► if the only way anyone can have an App Store is to essentially match Apple's terms

01:18:36 ◼   ► in terms of the finances, that's not an option. Developers, it's like,

01:18:40 ◼   ► I want to, you know, what you want is competition to say, hey, here's somebody offering to take

01:18:44 ◼   ► less of my money than Apple. I'm going to go with them. And Apple set out the rules to say, yeah, it's going to

01:18:48 ◼   ► be pretty much impossible for you to take less money than we do. In fact, you'll probably have to take

01:18:52 ◼   ► more. But it's fair and reasonable because it's kind of like what we're doing, right?

01:18:56 ◼   ► It's not 100 billion dollars. It's not like, you know, like, for example,

01:19:00 ◼   ► to have a third party App Store, there's an entitlement you need to get,

01:19:04 ◼   ► and Apple gives that entitlement presumably in a fair, reasonable,

01:19:08 ◼   ► non-discriminatory manner, and you just need a million euro line of credit, and so on and so forth.

01:19:12 ◼   ► I think they probably passed this bar, but that's the fault of the DMA.

01:19:16 ◼   ► Again, if the goal of the DMA was let apps exist that couldn't exist before,

01:19:20 ◼   ► and allow there to be financial competition,

01:19:24 ◼   ► allow people to compete by saying, we're going to give you a better deal than Apple.

01:19:28 ◼   ► That is the only form of financial competition that is

01:19:32 ◼   ► valid or reasonable, is we're going to give you a better deal, better

01:19:36 ◼   ► terms, different financial arrangement. We'll take a smaller cut, we'll have a different

01:19:40 ◼   ► way that we make money from you. Like, that is competition.

01:19:44 ◼   ► And Apple is trying so hard to say, we will not allow competition

01:19:48 ◼   ► along that axis at all. And I kind of

01:19:52 ◼   ► blame the DMA. If they decide this is compliant, then the DMA was

01:19:56 ◼   ► very poorly written, because it's not accomplishing its goal.

01:20:00 ◼   ► Yeah, it's interesting. I read a blog post from, what was it,

01:20:04 ◼   ► Steven Sinofsky, and it was

01:20:08 ◼   ► very long. But it made some interesting points, and we'll put a link

01:20:12 ◼   ► in the show notes. But some of the stuff that was said was, look,

01:20:16 ◼   ► this is like, and Marco, it's been so long since you've

01:20:20 ◼   ► had a real job, you probably don't remember this, but if you go to a boss and you say,

01:20:24 ◼   ► "Hey, I've got option A, and it sucks because

01:20:28 ◼   ► of 1, 2, and 3, and I've got option B, and that

01:20:32 ◼   ► sucks because of 4, 5, and 6. You're the boss,

01:20:36 ◼   ► what do you want me to do? Which one of these do you want me to do?"

01:20:40 ◼   ► And most bosses will say, "Oh,

01:20:44 ◼   ► well let's do option C, which eliminates bad thing 1 and 2

01:20:48 ◼   ► and bad thing 5 and 6." And it's, no, that's

01:20:52 ◼   ► not how this works. And that's what the DMA is kind of requesting, is, you know,

01:20:56 ◼   ► I want something that's open, but it still needs to be super secure

01:21:00 ◼   ► and you need to consider user's privacy. Well, like,

01:21:04 ◼   ► that might be possible, but it's not

01:21:08 ◼   ► easy. And Sinofsky's post, in large part, was

01:21:12 ◼   ► saying, "Look, I think this is a very American point of view, and I

01:21:16 ◼   ► mostly share it, to be honest with you, but Stephen's point was,

01:21:20 ◼   ► look, this is kind of already a solved problem. Apple is

01:21:24 ◼   ► trading on, we have a

01:21:28 ◼   ► very discriminant approach to doing things. We don't allow

01:21:32 ◼   ► everything in the store, we are very upfront. I mean, whether or not you agree

01:21:36 ◼   ► with the terms, or if you think the terms are fair, is I guess what I should say, they're

01:21:40 ◼   ► very upfront about the terms, and I don't think anyone can really debate that. Apple has said, "From

01:21:44 ◼   ► the beginning, these are the terms, this is how you play in our playground." And

01:21:48 ◼   ► that is the Apple way. If you don't like those terms, or you don't want to play in that playground,

01:21:52 ◼   ► that's fine. That's why Android exists. And you can play in their playground.

01:21:56 ◼   ► And they counterbalance each other in the same way that Windows and Mac OS

01:22:00 ◼   ► did, you know, years ago. DMA applies to Android as well, obviously. Yeah,

01:22:04 ◼   ► yes, yes. But I mean, just in terms of like, the stereotypical open versus

01:22:08 ◼   ► close. And I know it's much more complicated than that. But for the person-- There's a lot of asterisks

01:22:12 ◼   ► in that open. There is. But nevertheless, the idea is,

01:22:16 ◼   ► look, it is comparatively easier to do the things that you want to do in

01:22:20 ◼   ► Google world, where you can sideload, than it is in

01:22:24 ◼   ► the Apple world, where you can't sideload. And it's just,

01:22:28 ◼   ► it's tough. And Apple's kind of in everyone, but Apple's in a no-win

01:22:32 ◼   ► scenario. And so, you know, to quote from his blog post, "In the over 60 pages

01:22:36 ◼   ► of the DMA, there's a little mention of privacy, seven times. Security, nine times.

01:22:40 ◼   ► Performance, three times. Reliability, once. Battery life, none. Or accessibility,

01:22:44 ◼   ► just three times." So that is where Apple finds itself today. It was told, essentially, to create a new iPhone

01:22:48 ◼   ► release that is as good as your old one for your existing customers, but do all

01:22:52 ◼   ► these things that run counter to every lesson and experience that you've had over decades.

01:22:56 ◼   ► Everything you've designed and architected. Everything you promised customers

01:23:00 ◼   ► you would deliver. That truly sucks. So Apple said...

01:23:04 ◼   ► I agree with them a little bit here, in that the way the DMA written puts

01:23:08 ◼   ► them in a difficult situation, but two things in that. One, the whole point is, the EU

01:23:12 ◼   ► decided that, unlike the US, they decided, we want

01:23:16 ◼   ► there to be more competition, and we're going to force you to do it. And it seems unfair to us, especially

01:23:20 ◼   ► if you don't think there's a thing happening. But they've already decided that. So that whole idea of like,

01:23:24 ◼   ► it's already fine. You can always pick Android. The EU said, yeah, that's not fine with us.

01:23:28 ◼   ► So you can disagree with them, but they've already decided that. Once they have decided that, and they've made

01:23:32 ◼   ► the DMA, them trying to decide along what access

01:23:36 ◼   ► they'll allow competition, I almost wish they had reversed it.

01:23:40 ◼   ► Where right now, yeah, you can get new kinds of apps, which

01:23:44 ◼   ► potentially induces all the problems that Marco doesn't want, and all the points that Sinofsky

01:23:48 ◼   ► is making of like, what about battery life performance and reliability? Like, you're essentially compromising

01:23:52 ◼   ► the iPhone platform by allowing other people to get their apps on it.

01:23:56 ◼   ► So you're not going to have apps that wouldn't fly on the app store that could make the iPhone

01:24:00 ◼   ► a worse platform, right? And the flip side of that is, okay, but what about the financial

01:24:04 ◼   ► terms? And I kind of wish they had said, the financial terms are

01:24:08 ◼   ► the more important thing to us. Allow Apple to maintain similar level

01:24:12 ◼   ► of control over, you know, battery life performance, security,

01:24:16 ◼   ► all that stuff or whatever, but just structure it such that there's a

01:24:20 ◼   ► way for competing app stores to exist that take a

01:24:24 ◼   ► lower cut of the money, right? Because the thing, the brand promise of the iPhone has

01:24:28 ◼   ► nothing to do with how much developers pay, right? That is not the brand promise of the

01:24:32 ◼   ► iPhone. It has entirely to do with the safety of the apps, how much you

01:24:36 ◼   ► can trust them, all that things. That level of trust

01:24:40 ◼   ► does not require Apple to take any specific percentage from developers, right?

01:24:44 ◼   ► When Steve Jobs rolled out the iPhone, he was like, we're just trying to break, or the

01:24:48 ◼   ► app store rather, a year after the iPhone, or whenever it was, and he's like, we're just trying to

01:24:52 ◼   ► break even on the app store. He actually said that on stage, or something to that effect.

01:24:56 ◼   ► It's not, it's not getting in that. Do you think he believed it? I don't,

01:25:00 ◼   ► I'm guessing even he knew it was a profit center. But either way, the whole

01:25:04 ◼   ► point is, that's not part of the brand promise. That financial arrangement

01:25:08 ◼   ► between Apple and developers, that specific cut, how much money Apple makes

01:25:12 ◼   ► from it, is not part of the brand promise or the user experience of the iPhone. It is a background

01:25:16 ◼   ► thing that is financially important to developers and Apple, but users,

01:25:20 ◼   ► users don't even know that Apple doesn't make all the apps half the time. Like, that's

01:25:24 ◼   ► not part of the promise. Everything else is part of the promise. What kind of apps are available?

01:25:28 ◼   ► How secure are they? Has someone checked them for something? Arguably, Apple has not been fulfilling

01:25:32 ◼   ► that brand promise in the app store itself with all the casino games for children and the scam apps. That's a separate

01:25:36 ◼   ► argument. But like, if at the end, you can imagine a different version of the DMA

01:25:40 ◼   ► that essentially would make Sanofsky happy to say,

01:25:44 ◼   ► we're not, Apple, we're not going to force you to break the brand promise of your phone. What we

01:25:48 ◼   ► are going to force you to do is allow competition on the business terms that developers get.

01:25:52 ◼   ► And the DMA does not do that at all.

01:25:56 ◼   ► Instead it says, we'll allow a bunch of porn and copyright violations, but

01:26:00 ◼   ► don't worry Apple, you'll still get your cut. And that is not, to Marco's point, it's not

01:26:04 ◼   ► satisfactory to anybody because even if you're in favor of third party app stores,

01:26:08 ◼   ► you'd be like, no, not like that. Like, we want, like, I want

01:26:12 ◼   ► the iPhone to continue to be good. I just want there to be financial

01:26:16 ◼   ► competition about, you know, in the marketplaces. And that's not what

01:26:20 ◼   ► the DMA is doing. And it's really sucky. Like, Sanofsky spends

01:26:24 ◼   ► so long essentially being angry about the fact that Microsoft was forced to make

01:26:28 ◼   ► their operating system worse to satisfy the EU. And Apple is now

01:26:32 ◼   ► being forced to make their platform worse to satisfy the EU. But it's all because

01:26:36 ◼   ► of this fight over Apple, like, you know, Apple and the EU saying, you know,

01:26:40 ◼   ► it's so important to us that we continue to make money off the app store. It's like, it's not, you make money

01:26:44 ◼   ► off the phones. Apple could break even, could actually literally break even

01:26:48 ◼   ► on the app store and still be making tons of money on the

01:26:52 ◼   ► iPhone. It is a profitable platform without any app store income whatsoever.

01:26:56 ◼   ► But they will not give that up.

01:27:00 ◼   ► Yep. I don't know. I don't have too much to add.

01:27:04 ◼   ► I don't want to be, I don't, I feel like

01:27:08 ◼   ► the spirit to a degree of what the EU

01:27:12 ◼   ► is trying to do, you know, make it better for their citizens. Like,

01:27:16 ◼   ► you know, I think that they come to it from a decent place. But just

01:27:20 ◼   ► like you said, Jon, I think the execution from the EU has been subpar

01:27:24 ◼   ► or naive maybe. They're just, they're

01:27:28 ◼   ► barking up the wrong trees. I couldn't agree more with what you said about let's change the

01:27:32 ◼   ► business agreements. Let's leave the platform alone.

01:27:36 ◼   ► And I don't know. I don't know a lot of people, maybe I'm living in a bubble, but I don't know

01:27:40 ◼   ► a lot of people that are like, man, all I want in the world is to be able to use Blink on my iPhone.

01:27:44 ◼   ► That's not a problem I feel like a lot of people have. And

01:27:48 ◼   ► I don't know. It just, this seems like a whole, much ado about

01:27:52 ◼   ► nothing to me. And I, it's just unnecessary in so many ways.

01:27:56 ◼   ► I kind of do like the browser engine and stuff like that. And by the way, there's a point

01:28:00 ◼   ► down lower that's, I don't think part of the DMA thing, but it's

01:28:04 ◼   ► like, it's essentially a hedge to appease some other companies

01:28:08 ◼   ► of them allowing like streaming games. Like previously Apple had said, hey, you can't put an app

01:28:12 ◼   ► on the app store that when you launch it has a bunch of streaming games that you like sell or

01:28:16 ◼   ► give access to or whatever. And Apple's changing the rules around that for worldwide, not just the

01:28:20 ◼   ► EU that now you can have a single app and inside

01:28:24 ◼   ► of that can be a whole library of streaming games because before Apple said that's too much like an

01:28:28 ◼   ► app store. We wanted to allow that, but now they're doing it specifically with streaming apps, mostly to satisfy Microsoft

01:28:32 ◼   ► and other companies that they want on their side during all this stuff like that.

01:28:36 ◼   ► Stuff like allowing browser engines and allowing streaming games and other stuff like

01:28:40 ◼   ► there are things that Apple could give on that I don't think will

01:28:44 ◼   ► hurt Apple and they're just so, they drag their feet on it so much, right?

01:28:48 ◼   ► The browser engine thing, especially what they've done with browser kit, technically impressive because you

01:28:52 ◼   ► might not be aware, but like to allow a different browser engine, Safari on iOS

01:28:56 ◼   ► does things so that iOS apps are not allowed to do.

01:29:00 ◼   ► Spawning multiple processes, having multiple threads, doing all, like they

01:29:04 ◼   ► do all sorts of stuff with just the process architecture and

01:29:08 ◼   ► what the app is doing in the background and how many things are running and are allowed to remain

01:29:12 ◼   ► alive and not get killed off like to implement all the various web standards

01:29:16 ◼   ► that regular apps are not allowed to do and they're sandboxing the right way so they're not security

01:29:20 ◼   ► holes. Whatever it's called, browser engine kit or whatever the

01:29:24 ◼   ► thing is that allows third party engines is a complicated framework that allows

01:29:28 ◼   ► third parties to implement a web rendering engine

01:29:32 ◼   ► "the right way", the way Apple does it, the safe way.

01:29:36 ◼   ► I think that's great. I think that's a thing they could have done at any time.

01:29:40 ◼   ► They just never had any motivation to do it until they were essentially forced to do it.

01:29:44 ◼   ► But things like that, I give a thumbs up. That doesn't break the brand promise.

01:29:48 ◼   ► That preserves the brand promise because Apple is saying, we've found a way

01:29:52 ◼   ► to safely have browser engines on iOS and you can do it too.

01:29:56 ◼   ► In fact, Blink is based on WebKit anyway so it's not that different, right?

01:30:00 ◼   ► Stuff like that I give a thumbs up. The streaming game thing, it's like, Apple just

01:30:04 ◼   ► it's no skin off your back if they do that. Honestly, I don't

01:30:08 ◼   ► let it happen. Take your cut of it.

01:30:12 ◼   ► That's again, not breaking the brand promise. I don't think people are going to be confused like

01:30:16 ◼   ► "What is this? A game store inside a game?"

01:30:20 ◼   ► People will figure it out. Roblox is allowed to do it because they have

01:30:24 ◼   ► "experiences" not games. No one is fooled. Everyone

01:30:28 ◼   ► can figure it out. Stuff like that should have been happening forever.

01:30:32 ◼   ► It getting tied up in all of this is basically

01:30:36 ◼   ► I don't know, it's a happy accident. It's nice that they're being forced to do it

01:30:40 ◼   ► but almost everything else having to do with this is unrelated to

01:30:44 ◼   ► that and is essentially asking, to Synopses point, Apple to break their brand

01:30:48 ◼   ► promise by making the iPhone a more dangerous and worse platform

01:30:52 ◼   ► in the hopes of providing a more competitive marketplace. But don't worry, Apple is going to make sure

01:30:56 ◼   ► that doesn't happen. It's a lot. We should also mention that

01:31:00 ◼   ► the official release, like the very broad

01:31:04 ◼   ► I think it was on the Apple homepage or whatever release about this, was

01:31:08 ◼   ► the crankiest piece of PR

01:31:12 ◼   ► or news release from a company that I have seen in a long

01:31:16 ◼   ► time. And Tennegate was probably crankier. That's true but this was close.

01:31:20 ◼   ► This was angry. I thought

01:31:24 ◼   ► they did a pretty good job. People, I mean, it could have been worse.

01:31:28 ◼   ► I think what they were saying was true. They were like, look, we're being forced to do this

01:31:32 ◼   ► we're doing it in the best way we can and all their language

01:31:36 ◼   ► was like, here's how we're doing it to

01:31:40 ◼   ► minimize the damage to our brand promise. I know I keep saying brand promise

01:31:44 ◼   ► as a marketing term. Essentially saying, the iPhone, it's a place where it's safe to install apps

01:31:48 ◼   ► and the apps probably aren't scams. Again, see all the asterisks about

01:31:52 ◼   ► how Apple does that in the app store. And there's one place to get everything and everything's simple and it all

01:31:56 ◼   ► goes through Apple and you get refunds from Apple. That is the brand promise of the iPhone and the EU

01:32:00 ◼   ► is saying you must right now break that promise and Apple's like, here's

01:32:04 ◼   ► how we're minimizing the damage. We've decided to do it this way because

01:32:08 ◼   ► this was the best possible way we figured out to do this while still

01:32:12 ◼   ► being compliant. Everything they say is like, this is bad

01:32:16 ◼   ► but we're trying to make it as less bad as we possibly

01:32:20 ◼   ► can. And that's why it sounds cranky because they don't sound happy about any of this. They're not

01:32:24 ◼   ► bragging about any of it. The only thing they're bragging about is, we think

01:32:28 ◼   ► this is the least bad option.

01:32:32 ◼   ► Just paragraph after paragraph of like, here's how we're trying to mitigate this

01:32:36 ◼   ► damage. And again, they never actually address the actual

01:32:40 ◼   ► point which is like, hey, how about allowing competition along the axis of business

01:32:44 ◼   ► terms. No, that's not a thing. Rest assured we're not doing that.

01:32:48 ◼   ► But within these other realms, here's how we're minimizing the damage.

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01:34:48 ◼   ► Darren Kelkoff writes,

01:34:52 ◼   ► "With AirPods Pro or Amateur," very well done,

01:34:56 ◼   ► as John still prefers, "Do you guys always wear them in both

01:35:00 ◼   ► ears or do you ever do a single ear? If you go single ear, is it always the same side or do you alternate?

01:35:04 ◼   ► I suppose that for some folks, charge level could play a role here, but I find myself

01:35:08 ◼   ► to never be low on AirPod charge. It's probably because the

01:35:12 ◼   ► super sad noise they play when they do get low is conditioning me to never let it happen."

01:35:16 ◼   ► I was actually talking to a friend of mine, Sam, about this recently

01:35:20 ◼   ► and Sam has kids who are a bit older than mine, actually roughly

01:35:24 ◼   ► your kids' age, John, just a little bit younger than yours, I believe, and

01:35:28 ◼   ► he was saying that both of his kids, they

01:35:32 ◼   ► pretty much always have one AirPod in. May or may not be playing anything, but it's almost like

01:35:36 ◼   ► an aesthetic choice at this point, which I found very fascinating.

01:35:40 ◼   ► But to actually answer the question, for me, I will use

01:35:44 ◼   ► two AirPods when I am either by myself or doing

01:35:48 ◼   ► something where I'm not expected to be talked to, you know, nobody's going to be talking to me, like

01:35:52 ◼   ► maybe I'm exercising or something like that. But if there's ever

01:35:56 ◼   ► a situation where I think someone might be talking to me, even though the transparency mode does

01:36:00 ◼   ► work pretty well, I typically will go one AirPod only and I

01:36:04 ◼   ► alternate which side depending on, you know, is the TV that the kids are watching

01:36:08 ◼   ► on my left-hand side, then I'll put the left one in. Am I in bed? Well, I

01:36:12 ◼   ► sleep on the right-hand side of the bed if I'm on my back, and so I'll put my right

01:36:16 ◼   ► AirPod in if I'm listening to something, but I want to leave the left ear available for Aaron to talk to me, or

01:36:20 ◼   ► whatever the case may be. So I do all of the above, and

01:36:24 ◼   ► I will do it all situationally. Marco, let's talk about

01:36:28 ◼   ► how you use your AirPods, and then John, you can wrap us up, please.

01:36:32 ◼   ► I use both of my AirPods Pros or neither of them. I don't

01:36:36 ◼   ► do the one in, one out thing. All right, and John? The only time

01:36:40 ◼   ► I do one ear is, as was alluded to in the question, if the battery

01:36:44 ◼   ► in one of them is bad, and this happens to me a surprising amount. Why does it happen? I don't know.

01:36:48 ◼   ► Sometimes I put both my AirPods in the case, and one of them doesn't charge, and "Oh, you've got

01:36:52 ◼   ► dirt in your case, make sure the contacts are clean, blah blah blah." I've tried so many

01:36:56 ◼   ► things. It's just sometimes, sometimes I take my AirPods out, one of them is 100% and

01:37:00 ◼   ► one of them goes "doop doop doop doop doop." It's a super sad sound they play

01:37:04 ◼   ► when they don't have battery. And when that happens to me, I put the sad one back in

01:37:08 ◼   ► the case, where for some reason it charges in the exact same case. Now

01:37:12 ◼   ► it's charging. And I use the one until the other one is charged

01:37:16 ◼   ► up a little bit. And when I do it, I, well, you don't have a choice

01:37:20 ◼   ► if the battery is low on one, that's the one I have to put back in the charging case. But

01:37:24 ◼   ► if I did have a choice, I would put the right one in. But yeah,

01:37:28 ◼   ► I'm on both of them in most of the time. Fair enough. Aaron Thomas writes,

01:37:32 ◼   ► "Are there any types of apps that you would have considered creating if not for an oversaturation

01:37:36 ◼   ► in the app store market? For example, camera app with manual controls,

01:37:40 ◼   ► to-do checklists, journals, etc. Subquestion, if you were to develop

01:37:44 ◼   ► a game, what type of game would you make?" For me, I have

01:37:48 ◼   ► thought about doing a to-do app and/or shopping app. Both of these

01:37:52 ◼   ► I feel like, even though I found options for both that I like,

01:37:56 ◼   ► there are things that I would have maybe done differently. But

01:38:00 ◼   ► A, the things that I've found that I like, AnyList for shopping apps

01:38:04 ◼   ► and DUE for to-do lists, those are

01:38:08 ◼   ► close enough to what I want that it's not compelling me to do something

01:38:12 ◼   ► different. And even if I wanted to do something different, it's such a saturated market that

01:38:16 ◼   ► I don't think I would touch it. Since we started with Marco first, let's go Jon first.

01:38:20 ◼   ► Wait, Casey, you don't have a game idea? Oh, no.

01:38:24 ◼   ► I don't know, like, maybe, I don't want to spoil it for people

01:38:28 ◼   ► who haven't heard it, but there's a Members Only special episode where I talk about an app I was considering

01:38:32 ◼   ► making, and one of the reasons I have not made that app is due to

01:38:36 ◼   ► oversaturation in the App Store market. I think a lot of

01:38:40 ◼   ► the ideas I have for apps

01:38:44 ◼   ► are rejected not because of oversaturation in the market, but

01:38:48 ◼   ► just because of what I said before, either fear that it wouldn't be accepted, or

01:38:52 ◼   ► sure knowledge that it would not be accepted. That

01:38:56 ◼   ► I think is my personal biggest concern, especially since one of my passions

01:39:00 ◼   ► is system extension type applications on the Mac,

01:39:04 ◼   ► and I don't sell enough copies of anything to sell

01:39:08 ◼   ► outside the App Store, just to deal with the hassle of accepting payments on my own

01:39:12 ◼   ► or whatever. So I'm kind of stuck in the Mac App Store for any of my

01:39:16 ◼   ► small apps, right? And the Mac App Store

01:39:20 ◼   ► disallows private API usage, for example, and tons of

01:39:24 ◼   ► useful kinds of applications that exist already

01:39:28 ◼   ► and sometimes they're in saturated markets. The door is closed to me

01:39:32 ◼   ► because if I wanted to make them, I'd either have to make them free, or I would have to

01:39:36 ◼   ► sell them outside the Mac App Store, which is

01:39:40 ◼   ► a fixed cost hurdle that I must overcome to get a system

01:39:44 ◼   ► up that does that, and I don't think I would ever sell enough copies to make it worthwhile.

01:39:48 ◼   ► As for developing a game, I know enough about game development to know that

01:39:52 ◼   ► I should never do it, because game development is a lot harder than you

01:39:56 ◼   ► think it is. If you're a programmer, you think game development is writing a cool game engine when game

01:40:00 ◼   ► development is actually like writing an essay. It's the creative content

01:40:04 ◼   ► of the game that takes all the time, talent, energy,

01:40:08 ◼   ► money. That's why AAA video games cost hundreds of millions

01:40:12 ◼   ► of dollars. That money is not spent on the people who are writing the game engine. 20

01:40:16 ◼   ► people are writing the game engine, or maybe 100 people, but 1000 people

01:40:20 ◼   ► are making content for the game, and that's what makes the game good.

01:40:24 ◼   ► The content. What happens in the game? How does the gameplay work?

01:40:28 ◼   ► Where are the different levels? That stuff takes so much longer

01:40:32 ◼   ► than you think it does, and it is so much harder than you think it is. Like, "Great, now I have an engine.

01:40:36 ◼   ► All I gotta do is make some levels, and I'll be done with my game." You haven't even started making your game.

01:40:40 ◼   ► I'll just make some levels. Really? Will you? Making some levels?

01:40:44 ◼   ► If it was that easy, everybody would be a millionaire game developer.

01:40:48 ◼   ► That is the hard part, not the programming part of it, which is sad news for lots of

01:40:52 ◼   ► developers who want to make a game and they think, "As long as I get a cool

01:40:56 ◼   ► game engine, I'll be ready to go." You are not. You are not ready to go. You are not ready to go anymore

01:41:00 ◼   ► than if you say, "I'm going to manufacture a film camera,"

01:41:04 ◼   ► and you manufacture the world's greatest film camera. You're like, "Now I'm ready for my Oscar."

01:41:08 ◼   ► No, now you have to make your movie. "I'll just shoot some stuff, and then I'll have a movie."

01:41:12 ◼   ► That's the hard part. Making the movie is the hard part. Making the camera is not the hard part.

01:41:16 ◼   ► Making the movie is. Lots of people have really good cameras.

01:41:20 ◼   ► Not a lot of people win an Oscar for their movies. So, no. I have not

01:41:24 ◼   ► considered making a game because I know I am not up to it.

01:41:28 ◼   ► But Marco has. I'm not quite as negative on the idea of making

01:41:32 ◼   ► a game as John is. Maybe you're better at it than I am. I just know it's a skill that I don't have.

01:41:36 ◼   ► I mean, I guess technically I've already shipped a game in the Overcast watch app, but

01:41:40 ◼   ► it's not much of one. I think I wouldn't shy away from making a

01:41:44 ◼   ► game because I don't think I could do it. I would shy away from a game because I wouldn't think

01:41:48 ◼   ► it would be very fun. One of the biggest challenges of game

01:41:52 ◼   ► development from the very little bit of it that I understand is that

01:41:56 ◼   ► you actually end up putting a decent amount of work into a game before you really know

01:42:00 ◼   ► whether it's even fun or not. And if it's not very fun,

01:42:04 ◼   ► it's kind of hard to recover from that.

01:42:08 ◼   ► I don't like developing that way where there's so much up front before you even know

01:42:12 ◼   ► is this concept even a good idea or not. But the

01:42:16 ◼   ► bigger problem is why I wouldn't make a game. I mean, I have a couple of ideas here and there

01:42:20 ◼   ► that I've had over the years. I've never been super motivated to make them in part because

01:42:24 ◼   ► I'm not that much of a gamer. And so I'd be the worst

01:42:28 ◼   ► person to try to make a game. Believe me, we know this from the world of podcasts

01:42:32 ◼   ► because there are so many people who have tried to bring into the world of podcasts

01:42:36 ◼   ► over the years who don't really like podcasts that much. But

01:42:40 ◼   ► they smelled money or opportunity and were like, "Oh, I hear podcasts are big. Let's bring it to that market."

01:42:44 ◼   ► And we see the results of that. It's people who make crappy podcasts and crappy podcast apps.

01:42:48 ◼   ► It's people who are in it for the wrong reasons.

01:42:52 ◼   ► If I made a game, I think I would be in it for wrong reasons also

01:42:56 ◼   ► because I'm not that much of a gamer.

01:43:00 ◼   ► No, but if you made a game, you'd be making a game that you had an interest in. That's the good thing about games. If you want to minimize all the things that I said,

01:43:04 ◼   ► let's say for example you want to bypass a lot of that. Make a solitaire game.

01:43:08 ◼   ► I know it's an oversaturated market, but you don't have to come up with the game. Solitaire already exists.

01:43:12 ◼   ► You don't have to make levels. You don't have to make content. You just have to make the engine that

01:43:16 ◼   ► runs solitaire and maybe do one or two vaguely innovative things and you've made a solitaire game.

01:43:20 ◼   ► And maybe you have an itch because you're like, "I've tried all the solitaire games, but they never do this

01:43:24 ◼   ► one thing that I'm interested in." And so you make a solitaire game.

01:43:28 ◼   ► There are ways to make a game without having to spend years making content or

01:43:32 ◼   ► even have to make any kind of levels or anything like that. And if that's your passion,

01:43:36 ◼   ► you have some idea for a game and you're like, "Oh, I'm not much of a gamer." But clearly there are some things

01:43:40 ◼   ► that you think, "This would be fun to do." And I haven't seen anything else out there like that.

01:43:44 ◼   ► You could make that and if it is a game idea that either is based

01:43:48 ◼   ► on something that already exists, like solitaire, or is simple enough that you don't have to

01:43:52 ◼   ► be an excellent level designer and make enough content to satisfy

01:43:56 ◼   ► users or whatever, it is possible to, as just a plain programmer

01:44:00 ◼   ► who's not a game designer, to come up with an idea that sort of hits that sweet spot.

01:44:04 ◼   ► And I think you would be interested in it, even though you're not a gamer, because you would have

01:44:08 ◼   ► had this idea for a game, right? I think you could be

01:44:12 ◼   ► successful in that. You really have to be careful with what you pick.

01:44:16 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a good point. Plus, I thought you were going to say total annihilation or whatever it is.

01:44:20 ◼   ► I mean, I don't have the skill to make anything like that. That is probably a game you should not try to make.

01:44:24 ◼   ► Because that does have a lot of content. Yeah, a lot of content. And that's a whole

01:44:28 ◼   ► RTS. First of all, the RTS genre appears not to exist anymore, which is very sad to me.

01:44:32 ◼   ► Oh, I'm sure it exists. Everything is out there in some sub-community.

01:44:36 ◼   ► No, didn't they all become DOTA's or whatever those things are?

01:44:40 ◼   ► They basically turned into RPGs, which is a totally

01:44:44 ◼   ► fine game genre, but it's not one that I'm interested in at all. Whereas RTS's

01:44:48 ◼   ► were wonderful. Anyway, so

01:44:52 ◼   ► the other half of the question of any other types of apps I've considered creating, if not for an oversaturation

01:44:56 ◼   ► on the market, I don't really have any massively strong ideas of things

01:45:00 ◼   ► I want to create at the moment that are not just overcast.

01:45:04 ◼   ► But one idea that I've been percolating in my head is

01:45:08 ◼   ► basically a music listening app specifically optimized

01:45:12 ◼   ► for jam band concerts. I was going to say it's a fish app.

01:45:16 ◼   ► Basically, and the problem is, I have lots of ideas on how

01:45:20 ◼   ► I could do this well in a way that would please me.

01:45:24 ◼   ► And the problem is the market for it would just be so small. Because there already

01:45:28 ◼   ► are lots of alternative music players on iOS. So like that

01:45:32 ◼   ► market is there. And that would be pretty crowded to try to break into.

01:45:36 ◼   ► And what I would want to do with my app would be more like optimized for

01:45:40 ◼   ► how you select what to play and how it is displayed

01:45:44 ◼   ► in the app and things like that if you have a large collection of jam band concerts like I do.

01:45:48 ◼   ► But again, the market for that is going to be like ten people. So

01:45:52 ◼   ► I don't know if I'm ever going to make it. Just because the amount of work it would take

01:45:56 ◼   ► to make that is way higher than the value even

01:46:00 ◼   ► I would probably get out of it. And there is not enough of an audience for that.

01:46:04 ◼   ► So it's actually not really a question of oversaturation as much as

01:46:08 ◼   ► insufficient demand. What about Audio Editor? Do you consider that

01:46:12 ◼   ► oversaturated or does that just seem like too much work? You know, breaking into people's professional

01:46:16 ◼   ► workflows is very difficult. If it was the only thing I was working

01:46:20 ◼   ► on, I think I could make that happen. And again, it wouldn't

01:46:24 ◼   ► have a big market, but I could at least make a decent one. But it's so much

01:46:28 ◼   ► work to make a decent one that I don't think I could do it while juggling

01:46:32 ◼   ► almost anything else in my life. Do you think that market is oversaturated

01:46:36 ◼   ► on the Mac specifically? Obviously we're not talking about Windows. On the Mac specifically

01:46:40 ◼   ► there is Adobe Audition, there's whatever that free one is, Audacity

01:46:44 ◼   ► I think. There's Logic obviously.

01:46:48 ◼   ► Reaper. The one that Snell uses. What is that one called?

01:46:52 ◼   ► Ferrite. Ferrite. I don't think it's oversaturated

01:46:56 ◼   ► but there are a lot of big competitors. Adobe is a big competitor, Apple

01:47:00 ◼   ► is a big competitor, and there's also, like Ferrite, there are some

01:47:04 ◼   ► indie, low, you know, there's some competition kind of at your level

01:47:08 ◼   ► as well. So I wouldn't say it's oversaturated, but it's not like

01:47:12 ◼   ► it's clear that it would be like, "Oh finally! A Mac Audio Editor! I've been waiting for one of these!"

01:47:16 ◼   ► Yeah, and also like, you know, what people want in an audio

01:47:20 ◼   ► editor is all over the map and there's lots of different directions that it's going.

01:47:24 ◼   ► Like for instance there's all these things like Descript, these text-based ones

01:47:28 ◼   ► where they transcribe the audio and then you kind of edit the text.

01:47:32 ◼   ► So there's all these, and some of them are web-based, some of them are native, some of them are

01:47:36 ◼   ► iOS only, some of them are Mac. So it's kind of all over the place. There's

01:47:40 ◼   ► a lot of options and because, you know, professional

01:47:44 ◼   ► tools, one of the reasons why pro tools like Logic

01:47:48 ◼   ► and like Pro Tools and like Photoshop and

01:47:52 ◼   ► things like that, one of the reasons why they tend to be large and bloated is that

01:47:56 ◼   ► everyone has some different need for their workflow or their

01:48:00 ◼   ► situation. That would happen with your Jamband app too by the way. If you made that everyone would be like, "I love

01:48:04 ◼   ► your app, but can you add this feature? Can you add that?" And these would all be the same Fish Fans, but

01:48:08 ◼   ► the union of all their feature requests? Like, "I'll buy your app as soon as you add my two

01:48:12 ◼   ► features!" So many, they would want so many features, just the Fish Fans

01:48:16 ◼   ► alone. Yeah, exactly. So anything

01:48:20 ◼   ► that, where you're serving, like, somebody's workflow

01:48:24 ◼   ► needs, like an audio editor, you're going to have very, very strong

01:48:28 ◼   ► pressure to make the app very broad.

01:48:32 ◼   ► To just add a whole bunch of features to satisfy, "Oh, well my company

01:48:36 ◼   ► would buy, you know, 15 licenses of your app. If only you added this one little

01:48:40 ◼   ► change over here." I mean, digital watermarking for more efficient

01:48:44 ◼   ► dynamic ad insertion, you'd be like, "What?" Even if you're making like a

01:48:48 ◼   ► podcast focused audio editor. What does the market for podcast

01:48:52 ◼   ► focused audio editors look like? It's not people with shows like ours. It's everybody else, and the things

01:48:56 ◼   ► they want out of a podcast focused audio editor, you are not going to be enthusiastic

01:49:00 ◼   ► about giving them. Right, it's, yeah, because the people who would buy it would mostly be

01:49:04 ◼   ► like the big podcast production studios, and like, they're not going to buy my app.

01:49:08 ◼   ► It has to work with Avid or whatever, like they have workflows that are alien. Yeah, they're

01:49:12 ◼   ► going to use like all the highest end stuff with their staff of 60 people producing a podcast.

01:49:16 ◼   ► They're not going to use my little indie Mac app that's optimized for making shows like this.

01:49:20 ◼   ► We need collaborative editing of the podcast by 7 people simultaneously through the way.

01:49:24 ◼   ► Right, yeah, exactly. So yeah, so that's one of the

01:49:28 ◼   ► many reasons why I'm still working on Overcast. First of all, I just, I like working on

01:49:32 ◼   ► Overcast, and I'm not really feeling any pressure to stop doing that.

01:49:36 ◼   ► But also, I don't really have any other better ideas right now

01:49:40 ◼   ► that I'd rather be doing. So, I'm going to keep doing this for a while.

01:49:44 ◼   ► I hear that. Christian Kent writes,

01:49:48 ◼   ► "What audio settings do you use on Apple Music?" And

01:49:52 ◼   ► it has a bunch of options here, and I'm happy to read them off, but

01:49:56 ◼   ► where am I looking to answer this question? Because I genuinely have no idea.

01:50:00 ◼   ► Go to the support article that's linked there. I did, but that didn't talk about, it talked about

01:50:04 ◼   ► like EQ, and I didn't see anything. Right, so this is the music app on the Mac.

01:50:08 ◼   ► You can see the equalizer thing. Mm-hmm. I think that's where a lot of these things

01:50:12 ◼   ► are. I don't think so. This is like spatialized stereo. This is all iOS

01:50:16 ◼   ► stuff, I thought. Yeah, I thought this was all iOS stuff. So anyway, so Christian writes,

01:50:20 ◼   ► "Spatialized stereo. Off or fixed or head tracked. Sound enhancer. Off

01:50:24 ◼   ► or 50% or high 100%. Sound equalizer.

01:50:28 ◼   ► Off or a preset or a personal one. Dolby Atmos. Automatic or always

01:50:32 ◼   ► on or off. High quality 256 or ALAC 2448 or ALAC

01:50:36 ◼   ► 24192. Lossless via headphone cable or AirPod Pro/Max Wireless." So, I mean,

01:50:40 ◼   ► to the ones that I can answer because I know the answer, I do

01:50:44 ◼   ► not spatialize stereo. I do use Dolby Atmos when

01:50:48 ◼   ► possible. I don't even know where to look for the sound enhancer and equalizer.

01:50:52 ◼   ► And I think I cranked up the Apple Music streaming quality

01:50:56 ◼   ► and Spotify streaming quality to whatever the max was. And I typically

01:51:00 ◼   ► use AirPod Pros. So those are my answers. I don't think that's going to be satisfying for Christian.

01:51:04 ◼   ► But I don't know where to look for these. I think I'm even more boring than that. Like,

01:51:08 ◼   ► on iOS I have everything set to the default except spatialized stereo, which I have set to off.

01:51:12 ◼   ► Because I believe the default is kind of the automatic thing. And I hate

01:51:16 ◼   ► it very much. So I turn off all of these enhancements on iOS.

01:51:20 ◼   ► And the main reasons why,

01:51:24 ◼   ► first of all, my iOS listening setup is almost always

01:51:28 ◼   ► either my car or AirPods Pro. And in both of those

01:51:32 ◼   ► cases, we are not talking about audio file grade setups. We're talking

01:51:36 ◼   ► about decent consumer level stuff but not audio file grade setups.

01:51:40 ◼   ► And that's what my phone is for. At my desk, I do

01:51:44 ◼   ► have an audio file grade setup. What I don't believe in though is all this

01:51:48 ◼   ► lossless high bit rate or high sample rate stuff.

01:51:52 ◼   ► I would challenge anybody out there, if you have any way to set up a blind

01:51:56 ◼   ► test between your lossless option

01:52:00 ◼   ► and decent compression, like 256k bits or higher,

01:52:04 ◼   ► I would challenge you to be able to tell the difference. I really don't think

01:52:08 ◼   ► you can. Now, if it makes you happy to turn on your lossless audio and

01:52:12 ◼   ► crank all these settings up and be playing at 24, 192,

01:52:16 ◼   ► which your ears cannot tell the difference, if it makes you happy to do that,

01:52:20 ◼   ► fine, no harm done. But you won't hear the difference between that

01:52:24 ◼   ► and regular bit rate, high quality compressed stuff.

01:52:28 ◼   ► You won't hear that difference. So I don't turn that kind of stuff on.

01:52:32 ◼   ► I think what matters a lot in your sound quality

01:52:36 ◼   ► is the mix of what you are listening to, which

01:52:40 ◼   ► you have very little control over because it typically comes from the record companies. So the

01:52:44 ◼   ► mix matters a lot, the recording matters a lot, and

01:52:48 ◼   ► the transducers, the headphones or speakers that you're listening on, matter a lot.

01:52:52 ◼   ► And everything else matters very very little or not at all.

01:52:56 ◼   ► So some of these options, things like Dolby Atmos,

01:53:00 ◼   ► that's actually selecting a different mix if available.

01:53:04 ◼   ► So it might sound better, but it's not really

01:53:08 ◼   ► because of the Atmos, it's because you're listening to a different mix. Spatialized

01:53:12 ◼   ► stereo is messing with the mix. So it might sound better

01:53:16 ◼   ► if it sounds better to you, great, it does not sound better to me. Same thing with sound

01:53:20 ◼   ► enhancer and sound equalizer. These are also just various ways to have the phone mess with the mix.

01:53:24 ◼   ► Listen to what pleases you, but for me

01:53:28 ◼   ► what I generally like is less processing on the audio

01:53:32 ◼   ► not more. So I tend to listen to things as flat as

01:53:36 ◼   ► possible. No EQ, no processing, no spatialization

01:53:40 ◼   ► and Atmos if available maybe, but most of what I

01:53:44 ◼   ► listen to is not available, so it's kind of a moot point. So I do the

01:53:48 ◼   ► spatialized stereo off because I also hate that. I hate the head track one,

01:53:52 ◼   ► I hate the fixed one, I hate it all. The John Syracuse story.

01:53:56 ◼   ► Right, so that's an example of the

01:54:00 ◼   ► phone or whatever taking the audio and

01:54:04 ◼   ► changing it in a way that it hopes will be more pleasing to you. So somebody

01:54:08 ◼   ► made a song and they mixed it and they recorded it and they put it down and the phone is like

01:54:12 ◼   ► on its way out we're going to do something different with it and whatever it's doing with it

01:54:16 ◼   ► I do not like. I don't find it pleasing so I always leave that off.

01:54:20 ◼   ► Sound enhancer and equalizer, I think sound enhancer

01:54:24 ◼   ► is off unless it's on by default, but this brings me

01:54:28 ◼   ► to, like equalizer brings me to the next thing which is the only thing that I do

01:54:32 ◼   ► on my phone specifically to mess with the sound on its way

01:54:36 ◼   ► out and it is based on a process that I performed on this show a year

01:54:40 ◼   ► ago or two years ago or whatever it was where we found

01:54:44 ◼   ► these apps that you can find on the app store, mostly not scammy

01:54:48 ◼   ► but not particularly high quality apps that will play

01:54:52 ◼   ► a series of tones for you and ask you if you heard them, do you remember when we did this?

01:54:56 ◼   ► Like the hearing test? Yeah, yeah, I remember that this was a thing

01:55:00 ◼   ► and I think I still have the app on one of my home screens because I've been meaning to do it for

01:55:04 ◼   ► literally years. I made one of these a long time ago. Yeah, there's a bunch

01:55:08 ◼   ► of apps on the app store that will do this, but essentially what they'll do is they'll, they're not great

01:55:12 ◼   ► apps I found. They don't, like you want it to be like a good app that's like, now you're

01:55:16 ◼   ► playing the tone, do you hear it, do you not hear it? Anyway, it's like a hearing test where they play a series of tones

01:55:20 ◼   ► to test what kind of frequencies you can hear. And if you're an older

01:55:24 ◼   ► person, as in older than 20, you should try this.

01:55:28 ◼   ► Because as you age past your 20s, you start losing

01:55:32 ◼   ► hearing in different frequencies, right? And the result of this

01:55:36 ◼   ► is a profile of here are the frequencies you can hear and how well you

01:55:40 ◼   ► can hear them. And you can, iOS supports

01:55:44 ◼   ► using that profile for all of its audio playback. You can say I

01:55:48 ◼   ► used this janky app and it came up with a profile for me. Now

01:55:52 ◼   ► iOS, please use this profile. It's essentially like an equalizer setting, but

01:55:56 ◼   ► it's based on how well each one of your ears hears certain frequencies.

01:56:00 ◼   ► So I enabled that way back then and it's still enabled.

01:56:04 ◼   ► All, as far as I'm aware, all audio that comes out of my phone to go

01:56:08 ◼   ► to whatever gets passed through that. And what that's trying to do is saying, okay,

01:56:12 ◼   ► you have trouble in your left ear, you can only hear like 95%

01:56:16 ◼   ► of this frequency. So I'm going to boost that frequency to hopefully

01:56:20 ◼   ► get it to the level that it should be, the 100% that everyone else

01:56:24 ◼   ► hears. And I enabled that years ago and I was

01:56:28 ◼   ► surprised to see when I looked up to answer this question that it is still enabled.

01:56:32 ◼   ► And like what you want, it's kind of like doing like parametric EQ for like home theater

01:56:36 ◼   ► setup. What you want is to like, okay phone, make it so my

01:56:40 ◼   ► old person ears hear closer to what a young person's

01:56:44 ◼   ► ears. But it can't solve everything. If you just can't hear this frequency because you're too old and it's too

01:56:48 ◼   ► high, boosting the volume of like 18,000 hertz

01:56:52 ◼   ► is not going to help you if you just literally can't hear it, right?

01:56:56 ◼   ► There's only so much it can do. But I feel like when I did the before and after, I'm like

01:57:00 ◼   ► yeah, I think that is an improvement. So that is

01:57:04 ◼   ► the only thing that I'm aware of that my phone is doing to mess with

01:57:08 ◼   ► the sound. With any individual apps, I will use Marco's voice

01:57:12 ◼   ► boost feature on podcasts that have bad audio mixes.

01:57:16 ◼   ► Like, you know, you can do it on a per podcast setting. I could say

01:57:20 ◼   ► this podcast, they don't know how to mix their audio, turn on voice boost. But that's just within

01:57:24 ◼   ► overcast. Voice boost doesn't apply to when I'm playing songs and Apple music, right?

01:57:28 ◼   ► In terms of the quality, I'm like Marco, as long as it is not

01:57:32 ◼   ► like, you know, an ancient MP3 from the 90s, it has a reasonable bit rate.

01:57:36 ◼   ► I don't care about lossless. I don't care about 24-bit

01:57:40 ◼   ► 192 kilohertz. My ears are too old to hear that. My audio equipment

01:57:44 ◼   ► is not good enough. Half the time I'm listening on AirPods 3rd gen.

01:57:48 ◼   ► Like, forget it. 24-bit 192 kilohertz.

01:57:52 ◼   ► No. My AirPods makes no, it's pointless.

01:57:56 ◼   ► Same thing with like lossless via cable and, no, I don't care about any of that.

01:58:00 ◼   ► So, in general, I don't want the phone missing with my audio with the one exception being

01:58:04 ◼   ► that thing. And I kind of wish Apple would build that into iOS. Like,

01:58:08 ◼   ► maybe it is. Maybe there's some accessibility setting where it will take you through the hearing test,

01:58:12 ◼   ► build your personal hearing profile, and then just

01:58:16 ◼   ► apply that. Because when I tried to reproduce this a little while ago, I'm like

01:58:20 ◼   ► what was that? I was just like, OK, so what was that app called? I can never remember

01:58:24 ◼   ► the names. And you search on the App Store. Mimi Hearing Test is the one

01:58:28 ◼   ► that we had suggested years ago that I think a listener suggested to us. Yeah, I downloaded

01:58:32 ◼   ► a bunch of them. I'm like, was this the app that I used? They're all not that great.

01:58:36 ◼   ► Sometimes they're even hard to use. Like, you have to be in a really

01:58:40 ◼   ► quiet place and you have to use, you know, whatever headphones you're

01:58:44 ◼   ► going to be using. You're like, am I not hearing this because my AirPods are too bad? Should I use better

01:58:48 ◼   ► headphones or should I use the headphones I'm going to be listening on? It is a fraught process

01:58:52 ◼   ► that I think I did an OK job of many years ago, so I'm keeping the

01:58:56 ◼   ► profile enabled, but I really wish I had more actionable advice for all of the people who

01:59:00 ◼   ► are, again, older than in their 20s listening to this who may be wondering what frequencies

01:59:04 ◼   ► they can no longer hear as well and they want to build themselves a profile.

01:59:08 ◼   ► And my answer is that Apple should add that in iOS 18 to be

01:59:12 ◼   ► something that everybody can do through an interface that's nice. No argument here.

01:59:16 ◼   ► Thank you to our sponsors this week, Green Chef and Adblock Pro

01:59:20 ◼   ► and thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at

01:59:24 ◼   ► atp.fm/join and we will talk to you next

01:59:28 ◼   ► week.

01:59:32 ◼   ► The show is over, they didn't even mean to begin

01:59:36 ◼   ► 'cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental

01:59:40 ◼   ► John didn't do any research

01:59:44 ◼   ► Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental

01:59:48 ◼   ► It was accidental

01:59:52 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at atp.fm

01:59:56 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter

02:00:00 ◼   ► You can follow them at

02:00:04 ◼   ► c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s, so that's Casey List

02:00:08 ◼   ► m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t

02:00:12 ◼   ► Marco Arment s-i-r-a-c

02:00:16 ◼   ► u-s-a-c-ra-c-u-za, it's accidental

02:00:20 ◼   ► They didn't mean to

02:00:24 ◼   ► accidental, accidental

02:00:28 ◼   ► So long

02:00:32 ◼   ► So I was watching all these video reviews and

02:00:36 ◼   ► I am excited to get my Vision Pro

02:00:40 ◼   ► on Friday and use it as a Mac monitor

02:00:44 ◼   ► Can you tell me about that, can you tell me, I saw some of the reviews that were like

02:00:48 ◼   ► "Oh, and you get a Mac monitor" and they rattled off the resolution and I'm like

02:00:52 ◼   ► "Wait a second, is that resolution, do you know the virtual

02:00:56 ◼   ► Mac screen, what is the resolution in both points and

02:01:00 ◼   ► pixels?" I think I understand this, but it's one of those things where my understanding

02:01:04 ◼   ► is hazy and I will probably not verbalize it well, but let me

02:01:08 ◼   ► give it a shot. So let me set a little more context. So I was thinking

02:01:12 ◼   ► about this a few days back, before all the reviews had come out, and it occurred to me

02:01:16 ◼   ► that, first of all, I think we had all been thinking the same thing

02:01:20 ◼   ► that it could be neat to have your laptop, and I presume this works with

02:01:24 ◼   ► a desktop, although I don't know. I think MKBHD made passing mention that it does, but

02:01:28 ◼   ► anyways, say you have a laptop, because that's what I'm used to, and because laptops are

02:01:32 ◼   ► superior, am I right Marco? So anyways, you have a laptop and

02:01:36 ◼   ► you're either at home but you're not at your desk, or perhaps you don't have

02:01:40 ◼   ► a second monitor at your desk, whatever the case may be, or maybe you're remote, and

02:01:44 ◼   ► you would like to have a bigger screen. Well, what you can do is

02:01:48 ◼   ► you can, using the Vision Pro, if you're all on the same

02:01:52 ◼   ► iCloud ID and whatnot, you can literally just look at your laptop screen,

02:01:56 ◼   ► and above your laptop screen in the virtual world

02:02:00 ◼   ► there'll be a connect button, and you cast your eyes onto the connect button,

02:02:04 ◼   ► you pinch, and you wait for a few moments, and suddenly the

02:02:08 ◼   ► physical real world laptop screen goes dark, and then

02:02:12 ◼   ► there is, I think it's powered by the same VNC

02:02:16 ◼   ► plus plus, if you will, that was new, and I think the most recent release of Mac OS, but

02:02:20 ◼   ► anyways, one way or another, a virtual screen appears

02:02:24 ◼   ► within the Vision Pro world, and then

02:02:28 ◼   ► and we'll talk about resolution stuff in a second, but you can use your

02:02:32 ◼   ► Mac, you know, with the Mac's keyboard, the Mac's mouse, on

02:02:36 ◼   ► this virtual screen in your Vision Pro world, and then presumably you can put the native Slack

02:02:40 ◼   ► and the native messages and the native Safari and the native this and that in like

02:02:44 ◼   ► an array all around your Mac screen, and additionally you can make that

02:02:48 ◼   ► Mac screen 50 feet tall if you want, and all of that is possible

02:02:52 ◼   ► because you're living in this virtual space, and I wrote a blog post about this a few days back

02:02:56 ◼   ► and what occurred to me, which was I think the more interesting thing that

02:03:00 ◼   ► obviously people at Apple seemed to have thought about, but I hadn't thought about, is okay, that's all well

02:03:04 ◼   ► and good, but I've understood

02:03:08 ◼   ► that typing on the Vision Pro is challenging, and so

02:03:12 ◼   ► and so it occurred to me it would be nice

02:03:16 ◼   ► if I could use universal control, which is the same technology where you can

02:03:20 ◼   ► control an iPad that's sitting next to your computer, if I could use

02:03:24 ◼   ► universal control to say cast my eyes at the Vision OS

02:03:28 ◼   ► Slack, so I'm not running Slack on my computer in this

02:03:32 ◼   ► hypothetical, I'm running it within the Vision Pro, adjacent

02:03:36 ◼   ► to my computer screen, but it's the native Vision OS, Vision Pro

02:03:40 ◼   ► Slack, well if I cast my eyes over there, can I clickity-clack

02:03:44 ◼   ► and type on the physical Mac keyboard that

02:03:48 ◼   ► is sitting in front of me and have it appear within Slack

02:03:52 ◼   ► and if I can, just chef's kiss, just perfect

02:03:56 ◼   ► that would be amazing. Yes, you can, you've seen the demos of it, right? Well, at the time

02:04:00 ◼   ► I wrote the blog post, I hadn't, but now, and this is why I bring this

02:04:04 ◼   ► up, is now we've seen the demos, and I don't recall any one video

02:04:08 ◼   ► that did a particularly satisfying job of it, but most of them, at least in passing

02:04:12 ◼   ► said, oh, and you can slide your mouse over, which I actually, MKBHD's

02:04:16 ◼   ► video did a good job of showing this. That's true, that's fair.

02:04:20 ◼   ► And so, anyway, you can slide your mouse over if you so desire, and then you get like an

02:04:24 ◼   ► iPad-style mouse. This is something we were thinking about a while back, where like

02:04:28 ◼   ► surely you can't have a mouse cursor just floating in the middle of nowhere, and you can't. Like the mouse

02:04:32 ◼   ► cursor is never going to appear like, just randomly like, floating

02:04:36 ◼   ► in, but it will appear within the windows of either

02:04:40 ◼   ► obviously your Mac where the mouse cursor lives, but also within

02:04:44 ◼   ► the, I don't know what you call them, the windows of a native Vision OS app, that is

02:04:48 ◼   ► the only place the cursor will appear, and when it's there, it looks like an iPad cursor with a little

02:04:52 ◼   ► translucent circle. When you pull it out of there, it does not

02:04:56 ◼   ► pop off and just be free-floating. It always has to go to, okay, it's on your Mac screen,

02:05:00 ◼   ► it's in your Vision OS thing or whatever, and that I thought was a

02:05:04 ◼   ► good way to solve this, because you really do not want that cursor to be like, where is it?

02:05:08 ◼   ► Is it up on the ceiling? Is it down on the floor? It's always going to be in one of the windows.

02:05:12 ◼   ► Yeah, and so, in this theoretical world, I could

02:05:16 ◼   ► be at the, again, leaving aside the, oh my god, this guy, can you believe

02:05:20 ◼   ► this guy? Leaving that aside, that's a really big asterisk, but

02:05:24 ◼   ► I could hypothetically be at a library or Wegmans or what have you, and,

02:05:28 ◼   ► or on a plane, and I have my computer open, and I connect

02:05:32 ◼   ► to the computer, and so now the computer screen goes black, nobody can see what the computer's doing,

02:05:36 ◼   ► except me, and I have a 10-foot-wide screen in front

02:05:40 ◼   ► of me, littered all around it with different Vision OS windows, and I can

02:05:44 ◼   ► control all of them via either my eyes, the keyboard, the mouse, or a

02:05:48 ◼   ► combination of the three of them. Now, Jon, coming all the way

02:05:52 ◼   ► back to your question, well, what resolution is that? And what was interesting was,

02:05:56 ◼   ► I had heard in the keynote

02:06:00 ◼   ► that it's a 4K screen. That's what Apple kept

02:06:04 ◼   ► saying. And Apple's been consistent about that, but if you read, I'm pretty sure it was in

02:06:08 ◼   ► Nielle's written review on The Verge, apparently

02:06:12 ◼   ► what it is, is that the Mac is

02:06:16 ◼   ► broadcasting, for lack of a better word, a 5K display.

02:06:20 ◼   ► So the Mac thinks it's connected to a 5K display,

02:06:24 ◼   ► but what's actually getting sent to the

02:06:28 ◼   ► Vision Pro is a down-sampled 4K version of that 5K display.

02:06:32 ◼   ► And when you say 4K, though, what is the resolution in pixels? That's what I'm getting at.

02:06:36 ◼   ► I heard everyone banning around 2560x1440, which is

02:06:40 ◼   ► the 1X version of 5K. Right, that's what I was getting at. Like,

02:06:44 ◼   ► 2560x1440 pixels is not 4K.

02:06:48 ◼   ► 2560x1440 points is also not 4K. It's bigger

02:06:52 ◼   ► than 4K. Yeah, that's 5K. So I'm like, okay, but like, the virtual

02:06:56 ◼   ► screen, like, what, you know, essentially if you, if you, uh, pull

02:07:00 ◼   ► it real close to you, like fat bits, get it real close and like look at a single pixel

02:07:04 ◼   ► and photo, a single retina pixel in some app that lets you do that, like, like how many

02:07:08 ◼   ► retina pixels across is that thing? 'Cause obviously you can make it bigger

02:07:12 ◼   ► and smaller, but you're not adding pixels when you do that, you're just literally making all the pixels bigger.

02:07:16 ◼   ► Well, and, and, by the way, I would argue that if you're doing

02:07:20 ◼   ► pixel-level work, the Vision Pro is the wrong tool for that job, because

02:07:24 ◼   ► nothing about the Vision Pro is pixel perfect. It's,

02:07:28 ◼   ► it is, the whole thing is like free-floating, everything's fluid.

02:07:32 ◼   ► Well, but, but the good thing about Vision Pro is you can literally shove it up to your

02:07:36 ◼   ► face. So the pixels get really big, and then something like, it's,

02:07:40 ◼   ► it's like fat bits, but it's like putting your, literally putting your face close to the monitor. We don't want to do that

02:07:44 ◼   ► 'cause it's uncomfortable and you'll get nose grease on your monitor, but with Vision Pro, none of those things are a problem.

02:07:48 ◼   ► So you can shove the screen right at your, rather than using, like,

02:07:52 ◼   ► you know, Option, scroll wheel in Photoshop to zoom in Photoshop, you can zoom in

02:07:56 ◼   ► in the Vision OS by literally pulling that window closer to you until the individual pixels

02:08:00 ◼   ► are the size of tennis balls, and then you, you could, if you wanted, look at them with your eyes,

02:08:04 ◼   ► or more likely, you're just gonna use your mouse or your trackpad, and now your targets with your mouse

02:08:08 ◼   ► or your trackpad are seven inches across for each pixel.

02:08:12 ◼   ► By the way, do you not use the accessibility zoom thing where you're holding down control and scroll on your

02:08:16 ◼   ► Macs? Oh, no, I do. Oh, I do all the time. Like, that's, I, I enable that on all my Macs, and

02:08:20 ◼   ► I use it constantly. Constantly. Right, but like, but within graphics apps, like when I'm

02:08:24 ◼   ► in Photoshop, I, this drives me nuts in Photoshop, Adobe, if you're out there listening,

02:08:28 ◼   ► for those that don't know, if you're using Photoshop, one of the shortcuts they have is instead of

02:08:32 ◼   ► control scroll wheel, which is what I have the accessibility thing bound to, which just takes the images

02:08:36 ◼   ► on your screen and blows it up, like it doesn't add any more pixels, it gets blurry, you know, whatever.

02:08:40 ◼   ► That's great, and everyone should enable that, it's an amazing feature as your eyes get older, right?

02:08:44 ◼   ► But in Photoshop, if you hold down the Option key and hit your scroll wheel or swipe

02:08:48 ◼   ► or whatever on your mouse, or two finger swipe on a trackpad, it will zoom

02:08:52 ◼   ► within Photoshop, as in, it will change the magnification of the pixel-based

02:08:56 ◼   ► image that you're seeing. So instead of being 100%, it'll be 200%, 3%, right,

02:09:00 ◼   ► you know, so the images on your screen are getting, but you're just zooming in Photoshop, and I wish,

02:09:04 ◼   ► I wish so badly that when I did that, it zoomed

02:09:08 ◼   ► centered on where my cursor is. But it doesn't. It just

02:09:12 ◼   ► zooms based on how the, essentially the crop

02:09:16 ◼   ► of your current view is showing, like it's centered, because often there's a little

02:09:20 ◼   ► section I want to zoom in on, and I'll put my cursor over it, and I'll hold down Option, and I'll swipe

02:09:24 ◼   ► my scroll wheel, and that part that I want it to go will go flying off the edge of the

02:09:28 ◼   ► crop area, because it doesn't zoom where my cursor is, but, anyway.

02:09:32 ◼   ► Alright, so reading from The Verge, there's a lot of very complicated

02:09:36 ◼   ► display scaling going on behind the scenes here, but the easiest way to think about it is that you're basically getting a

02:09:40 ◼   ► 27-inch retina display, like you'd find on an iMac or a studio display, well, an older iMac,

02:09:44 ◼   ► or a studio display. Your Mac thinks it's connected to a 5K display with a resolution

02:09:48 ◼   ► of 5120x2880, and it runs macOS at a 2 to 1 logical resolution

02:09:52 ◼   ► of 2560x1440, just like a 5K display. You can

02:09:56 ◼   ► pick other resolutions, but the device warns you that they'll be lower quality. That virtual display is then

02:10:00 ◼   ► streamed as a 4K, here you go John, 3560x2880

02:10:04 ◼   ► video to the Vision Pro, where you can just make it as big as you want.

02:10:08 ◼   ► The upshot of all this is that 4K content runs at native 4K resolution,

02:10:12 ◼   ► it has all the pixels to do it, just like on an iMac, but you have a grand total

02:10:16 ◼   ► of 2560x1440, I guess, points to place windows

02:10:20 ◼   ► in, regardless of how big you make the Mac display in space, and you're not

02:10:24 ◼   ► seeing a pixel-perfect 5K image. So that says to me

02:10:28 ◼   ► the Mac, again, is rendering everything at a pixel-doubled

02:10:32 ◼   ► 5K, but it's streaming, if you will, a video stream,

02:10:36 ◼   ► I don't think that's literally how it works. Yeah, it's like the iPhone 6 Plus. Yes. I wonder if that's like an

02:10:40 ◼   ► M2 limitation, I do wonder why they chose to do that.

02:10:44 ◼   ► I mean, it could just be like the bandwidth of that stream,

02:10:48 ◼   ► like, you know, because whatever they're doing to

02:10:52 ◼   ► have super low latency screen sharing, I'm sure there is

02:10:56 ◼   ► some kind of upper bound to how, you know, what the resolution that they're sending can

02:11:00 ◼   ► actually be, while still keeping it that low latency and that reliable over

02:11:04 ◼   ► whatever wireless connection it's using. Yep, so I am super stoked

02:11:08 ◼   ► for this, I genuinely think if I can get over myself, which

02:11:12 ◼   ► is a humongous if, if I can get over myself, you know, just

02:11:16 ◼   ► today I went to Wegmans, because I typically like to go somewhere on Wednesday mornings, so I think I've said before, to do

02:11:20 ◼   ► my research for ATP and prep for it and whatnot, and I

02:11:24 ◼   ► can do that just fine without having a silly thing strapped to

02:11:28 ◼   ► my face, but it would be so much nicer if I had this silly thing strapped to my face.

02:11:32 ◼   ► And so, yeah, I'm really excited to try this, and I hope

02:11:36 ◼   ► I can build up the self-confidence to do this outside of the house, which I'm not sure if I can,

02:11:40 ◼   ► but I'm so excited. If we don't mention this, people are going to send it to us,

02:11:44 ◼   ► I'm hoping I'm saving us here. There is an app that someone put up,

02:11:48 ◼   ► I think it's on GitHub, that will essentially allow you to take

02:11:52 ◼   ► Windows from your Mac, individual Windows, and make them appear as

02:11:56 ◼   ► floating, independent Vision OS windows in Vision OS.

02:12:00 ◼   ► I forget what that app is, but we'll try to find it. I have it, I have it, it's called Ensemble.

02:12:04 ◼   ► I have no idea the mechanism by which this works, but yes, I'm aware

02:12:08 ◼   ► of this as being a thing. Yeah, and we're getting to the point

02:12:12 ◼   ► of the resolution and how this app works versus how Apple's thing works,

02:12:16 ◼   ► I think the limiting factor is going to end up being what is

02:12:20 ◼   ► your bandwidth and latency between Vision OS, which is not

02:12:24 ◼   ► connected in any physical way to your Mac, like it's radios, right?

02:12:28 ◼   ► We know that trying to drive a very large

02:12:32 ◼   ► number of pixels with low latency without any quality loss requires

02:12:36 ◼   ► a very fast bus. For years,

02:12:40 ◼   ► having external retina 5K display was difficult because none of the display buses that were available

02:12:44 ◼   ► were up to the task, the one in the 5K iMac was split into two, right?

02:12:48 ◼   ► Obviously we have display stream compression, and you could

02:12:52 ◼   ► do H.264 encoding or H.265 encoding to it, but then you have problems with

02:12:56 ◼   ► latency and quality, and so that I feel like is the limiting factor here. Whatever

02:13:00 ◼   ► Ensemble is doing, it's like, well, I just want it to be good enough, but already