00:00:20 ◼ ► Because in the state of the world, I think that's the right decision, and also not surprising.
00:00:26 ◼ ► which actually I'm looking forward to, because even though there are certain things about the online only format
00:00:38 ◼ ► as we discussed last year, there were a lot of things about the online only format that were better
00:00:45 ◼ ► and way less disruptive even to the people who were previously attending the conference in person.
00:00:58 ◼ ► I mean, it's probably fair to say it has been announced, and it is June 7th through 11th,
00:01:09 ◼ ► It's not like they ever announced a date, but typically it had been sort of the first full week of June,
00:01:21 ◼ ► I was sort of slightly stealing myself for the reality of having to decide if they had announced an in-person conference,
00:01:29 ◼ ► whether I would have gone, whether that's a really complicated calculus from, you know,
00:01:33 ◼ ► sort of the professional and business reasons to be there, but the personal and just general safety reasons,
00:01:45 ◼ ► I think it's the right choice, but especially given how last year's one went, I think this is the way forward.
00:01:54 ◼ ► I think it was a very effective tool for communicating what they needed to communicate,
00:01:58 ◼ ► and like the reasons to have an in-person one are mostly kind of the vague, amorphous, kind of soft things,
00:02:14 ◼ ► and means that the majority of your developer community is not actually getting the prime experience.
00:02:20 ◼ ► You know, like in their press release for W2C, they say there's, you know, 28 million developers,
00:02:25 ◼ ► and so like the 5,000 who are there in person, or maybe it's 10,000 who are in San Jose that day,
00:02:36 ◼ ► it's a tiny, tiny fraction of the actual developer community, and so having an event that is online first
00:02:50 ◼ ► I cleared my schedule for that week and expect to spend a lot of time, you know, watching videos,
00:02:56 ◼ ► diving into the new stuff, and, you know, learning, and it'll be, I think, my 12th WWDC, something like that.
00:03:03 ◼ ► I think it's like since 2009, I think was my first one, so it's, you know, it's just a tradition.
00:03:10 ◼ ► My family knows that it's like if it's somewhere in June, there's going to be this week that I just disappear,
00:03:15 ◼ ► and previously I would actually disappear and go to California, but now I'll just like disappear into my office
00:03:20 ◼ ► for the week, and, you know, they'll just sort of pass food under the door to me to keep me going.
00:03:25 ◼ ► Yeah, I honestly, there's so much about this that works better for me selfishly, like I don't have to leave the beach.
00:03:35 ◼ ► There's so much about this that I like, and even though I do miss the social interaction,
00:03:43 ◼ ► and I do miss like being in the auditorium for the keynote and like being part of that crowd, that was always fun,
00:03:49 ◼ ► but the rest of the week I don't really miss, you know, and the rest of the logistics and, you know,
00:03:56 ◼ ► spending the obscene amount of money, as you previously noted, it's an Apple Watch a day, basically, to stay there.
00:04:04 ◼ ► And, you know, you'd be spending thousands of dollars on hotels, thousands of dollars on ticket and flight and everything,
00:04:11 ◼ ► and it's just like, it's so much money, and it's such a big time commitment that it really pushes so many people out.
00:04:18 ◼ ► And, you know, the limited capacity, as you mentioned, compared to the size of the developer community,
00:04:22 ◼ ► there's no way that can ever be that inclusive just because of the nature of making people travel at all,
00:04:30 ◼ ► let alone to an expensive place like San Jose or San Francisco. So, I'm all for the new format,
00:04:36 ◼ ► and if I'm honest, I know this is maybe unpopular, but if I'm honest, when and if they ever return to in-person versions of this,
00:04:49 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think that's fair, and I think there was a, I think I saw something that Mark Gurman was saying,
00:04:54 ◼ ► that their hope is to return to in-person next year, I think was something that he had heard from his various sources in Apple,
00:05:02 ◼ ► which I think, from a general safety perspective, I can see that being a reasonable kind of like,
00:05:08 ◼ ► "Huh, that seems about right, that hopefully by then things will settle down and be safe."
00:05:12 ◼ ► And it isn't unrealistic to imagine that, but yes, I too will be kind of, like, I'll be happy, but also kind of sad,
00:05:19 ◼ ► and I like that it's not a big stress in my life. Like before, they would announce, like I used to have alert systems of many kinds,
00:05:27 ◼ ► and systems that were all trying to make sure that as soon as WWDC was announced, I was notified,
00:05:32 ◼ ► because I would need to book a whole bunch of stuff. There was a time when it was, I also would need to buy a ticket,
00:05:39 ◼ ► and thankfully, it's been more like, now it's just a lottery, so there's not that pressure,
00:05:43 ◼ ► but it definitely was very kind of weird that it was announced, I put it on my calendar,
00:05:47 ◼ ► and I just kind of moved on for the rest of the day, it wasn't like, "Okay, now I'm booking travel and hotels,
00:05:55 ◼ ► and all the things that I previously would have to do." It's nice that it's just a thing that I can just add to my calendar,
00:06:01 ◼ ► and look forward to, and it doesn't have the associated stresses and kind of logistical nightmares that used to be associated with it.
00:06:07 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think, and we know now, from last year's version of it, that this format works.
00:06:18 ◼ ► and we're going to miss the social experiences at the mostly terrible restaurants and bars,
00:06:24 ◼ ► we're going to miss hanging out in the very, very expensive hotel's lobby, and seeing people here and there,
00:06:39 ◼ ► But all of those things are things that are only applicable to a very small percentage of the developer community.
00:06:46 ◼ ► Like when you go, and when you have in-person labs, and if you try to meet people from the community in hotel bars and stuff,
00:06:59 ◼ ► And even if they actually go to the conference, what percentage of those 5 or 6 thousand people that are there
00:07:07 ◼ ► will actually have that kind of interaction? And it's not zero, and that has benefited the two of us quite a lot over the years,
00:07:16 ◼ ► but it's also not very high. And so what this is doing is, it evens out the playing field for a lot of people.
00:07:24 ◼ ► And it forces Apple to scale what they're doing to be accessible to more of their developers.
00:07:31 ◼ ► From what I heard, the labs were actually pretty accessible last year, like the online labs capacity was pretty good,
00:07:40 ◼ ► and it was available to a lot of people. Certainly the conference material itself, they've been making available for years,
00:08:01 ◼ ► I think they were actually a better experience than the in-person labs. And for two reasons primarily.
00:08:08 ◼ ► One is that it is a dedicated, scheduled appointment that you have, which was very just helpful in terms of like,
00:08:17 ◼ ► "I got whatever it is, I can't remember how long they were, 20, 30 minutes, something like that."
00:08:36 ◼ ► I think it was a 15 minute slot maybe, and then once I got a double slot, because I had a long lot of questions,
00:08:46 ◼ ► But I thought the labs were the thing that I was most worried were going to be missing.
00:08:54 ◼ ► I usually got a huge amount out of them, and I would spend hours every day when I've been in person at WBC in the labs.
00:09:16 ◼ ► and once they talk to this person and then this person, then they come and talk to you.
00:09:20 ◼ ► It was very much more like, when you make your booking, you put in what your questions are.
00:09:28 ◼ ► And it seemed like every time that I went and had a lab, I was talking to the right person.
00:09:33 ◼ ► It was never this sort of situation where, you know, like the person who built the thing in Clock Kit
00:09:47 ◼ ► usually when I go to the labs, it's kind of like I would block off, you know, an hour to go and ask,
00:09:53 ◼ ► you know, I'm going to spend an hour in the labs, and I'm probably actually only spending 15 minutes
00:09:57 ◼ ► actually productively engaged with someone because the rest of it is the waiting around and things.
00:10:04 ◼ ► And then also, I kind of liked that it was, like, the online format made it much more natural.
00:10:10 ◼ ► They did screen sharing. I think it was done over WebEx or one of those kind of, like, corporate things.
00:10:17 ◼ ► And it's like I was able to just, on my own computer, I shared my--there's a few times I can, like, share my screen
00:10:22 ◼ ► and show them what the problem I'm having or see what it is, and it felt, in a weird way,
00:10:34 ◼ ► And so it felt much more natural, and I felt more able to prepare to effectively be useful in a way that,
00:10:47 ◼ ► but even that, like, this can be kind of a weird and awkward interaction with, like, handing your laptop to someone you don't know.
00:10:53 ◼ ► Like, it's just weird in a way that it felt much more, like, you know, here's my code, here's my question,
00:11:01 ◼ ► Because in some ways, all that's left, I think, that is a benefit of in-person WWDC is the social aspect of it
00:11:07 ◼ ► and, like, the kind of spectacle part of it, but the actual--like, that was--labs were the last thing that I thought would be where,
00:11:13 ◼ ► you know, would have been, oh, you know, in-person, they'll be better, and it's like, I think this is better.
00:11:23 ◼ ► but they kind of continued this online version of it, you know, so it's kind of like a dual conference,
00:11:32 ◼ ► I could imagine going to the online labs from my hotel room because I like the feeling and the flow of it better,
00:11:39 ◼ ► and I like that it's a scheduled appointment, and all of those benefits that mean that it's kind of silly in some ways,
00:11:44 ◼ ► but I could imagine being in San Jose, having a labs appointment with some other Apple engineer,
00:11:49 ◼ ► you know, sitting in San Jose at their computer, and, like, all that we're left with is, you know, the social part,
00:11:56 ◼ ► which is no small thing. It's not like it's nothing, but it's definitely a hard thing to overcome.
00:12:01 ◼ ► I mean, even I was thinking how previously they've had some, like, fitness events in the mornings of WWDC,
00:12:12 ◼ ► I would be very surprised if this year there is not an Apple Fitness track, like the Apple Fitness Plus videos for WWDC.
00:12:21 ◼ ► Like, it seems like a perfect fit that they should have, you know, one video, they'll have, like, four videos, you know,
00:12:27 ◼ ► with different Apple Fitness Plus instructors that they can just sort of add to the feed,
00:12:32 ◼ ► and it's just a special event, and it's something about, you know, it's like they could totally even replace that part of it,
00:12:37 ◼ ► which was kind of fun, and, like, they have an entire mechanism and thing that they can do to, you know,
00:12:47 ◼ ► So, like, almost everything can be done online, and if, you know, sort of either approximated or improved by being online.
00:12:56 ◼ ► That's a really good idea. Yeah, so I'm all for it, and I think Apple made definitely the right call in doing this this year,
00:13:06 ◼ ► Yeah, and it's funny, they're continuing to do their student challenge, which used to be the student scholarship program,
00:13:13 ◼ ► where you'd get a free ticket to WBC, so it was rather significant in terms of its actual, in terms of the monetary value,
00:13:26 ◼ ► and I think obviously the bigger thing you get is kind of the resume builder of, you know,
00:13:35 ◼ ► and my suspicion is it also puts you on Apple's radar, and there are benefits if you are a student,
00:13:40 ◼ ► if you're someone who is eligible to participate in that, to go ahead and do it, and if not, even just for the experience of it,
00:13:46 ◼ ► of going through kind of that experience and, you know, kind of coming up with an interesting self-conscious,
00:13:51 ◼ ► you basically build a Swift playground file that does something cool, and you show that to Apple,
00:13:57 ◼ ► and, like, that's never going to be a bad thing to have on your resume or to show a future employer or even to show Apple.
00:14:03 ◼ ► Like, I've definitely heard of several people who were hired or at least offered interviews at Apple
00:14:16 ◼ ► it's just a way to get on Apple's radar for all the benefits that that could potentially have for your life or your career.
00:14:22 ◼ ► Yeah, that's pretty cool. Way more than the actual, like, you know, $60 jacket and pin set.
00:14:28 ◼ ► I mean, it is much more exclusive, I will give you that. Previously the jackets were given to, you know, a few thousand people,
00:14:36 ◼ ► and now you've got to imagine, you know, the people who win these jackets, it's a few hundred people at most,
00:14:41 ◼ ► distributed all over the world. So if you do have one of those jackets or one of those pin sets,
00:14:46 ◼ ► it is much more exclusive, but perhaps not as significant in terms of its monetary value.
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00:16:38 ◼ ► The two biggest podcast players in the world are Apple Podcasts by a pretty big margin, followed by Spotify.
00:16:48 ◼ ► And Spotify, when they introduced podcast support, I don't know, maybe a year or two ago, whenever that was,
00:16:54 ◼ ► they didn't use the word subscribe to talk about the action of adding a podcast to your collection
00:17:07 ◼ ► Now at that point, any other podcast app used the word subscribe because it was based on RSS feeds
00:17:27 ◼ ► subscribing to a feed, adding this feed to your specialized RSS reader that happens to be a podcast player.
00:17:31 ◼ ► So Spotify used the word follow, which was much more inspired by modern social media things
00:17:38 ◼ ► where following an account shows you every new thing from that account by default, which makes sense.
00:17:50 ◼ ► But Apple Podcasts has switched their terminology from subscribe to follow in the iOS 14.5 beta,
00:17:59 ◼ ► So the biggest two podcast players in the world, which together represent probably about three quarters of the market,
00:18:22 ◼ ► And I was wondering kind of what you thought about this because, I mean, and there's two different ways to look at it.
00:18:28 ◼ ► Number one is like from some point of view I think it makes sense because the word subscribe,
00:18:43 ◼ ► "Oh, my so and so friend or relative thought that podcasts were all paid because they thought they had to subscribe to them."
00:18:58 ◼ ► Another theory is that Apple is going to launch a paid podcast premium subscription service
00:19:04 ◼ ► and they're going to need the word subscribe for that and therefore they have to like free it up by changing the other word to follow.
00:19:11 ◼ ► And that may or may not be true but whether or not that's true I don't think has any bearing on whether people will start expecting this to be the word everywhere.
00:19:19 ◼ ► And so my theory is that I should change as soon as Apple does because people will start expecting that
00:19:27 ◼ ► even though it will probably confuse and possibly annoy large parts of my existing user base, which is a tricky balance.
00:19:36 ◼ ► But like do I optimize for my existing users or do I optimize for what people expect if they're coming from the other 75% of the podcast market?
00:19:47 ◼ ► It reminds me in a weird way of I remember a while back where Apple changed in the App Store, they changed from free to get.
00:19:57 ◼ ► It was because it was like, which is the term you use for acquiring something has meaning, has power, is important.
00:20:07 ◼ ► In that case they were making it clear that free apps weren't free, that they were free initially and then you'd have in-app purchases and things.
00:20:15 ◼ ► And so they didn't want to, I think they were actually getting in regulatory trouble for saying it's free but then it's not free.
00:20:21 ◼ ► But I think in this case it is certainly an interesting thing and I think a lot of it comes down to also just the way that people communicate.
00:20:31 ◼ ► Because I think while there is I'm sure some confusion about subscribe having costing money, I think of one of the most popular,
00:20:38 ◼ ► probably the most popular media platform in the world, YouTube, which is constantly full of like and subscribe.
00:20:54 ◼ ► The one thing that makes sense to me is that they're creating space for essentially differentiating between for-pay podcasts and free podcasts,
00:21:09 ◼ ► And they're creating that space and in some ways Spotify created an obvious place for them to do that.
00:21:15 ◼ ► And so I think what is going to be interesting is are podcast producers going to start switching to that terminology themselves?
00:21:25 ◼ ► And they probably will because if the vast majority of where you'll actually go and sign up for something,
00:21:31 ◼ ► if they're going to say, "Oh, follow us in Apple Podcasts," like if that's the phrase that you're going to hear in the advertisement for a new podcast that's launching,
00:21:42 ◼ ► they always say it's like, "Right now it's subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts," is a phrase I hear many times on a podcast.
00:21:49 ◼ ► Then if they're going to change it to "follow us wherever you get it," then people are going to go looking for the follow button.
00:22:03 ◼ ► And I think what's also interesting is that you currently, in your main subscribe thing, you already call it "add podcast."
00:22:17 ◼ ► And in some ways I think that's a much clearer term, I think "add" rather than "follow" or "subscribe."
00:22:24 ◼ ► I think "add" is actually a very good word there, and I think it fits with the, you have a plus button in the top corner, plus addition.
00:22:32 ◼ ► I think there's a consistency there, and it kind of also I think gives you that flexibility to not necessarily be tying yourself to one or the other.
00:22:45 ◼ ► I think subscription is increasingly becoming, and especially because you offer a subscription inside of your application,
00:22:52 ◼ ► the place that you also say "subscribe" is if you want to be an Overcast premium person,
00:22:58 ◼ ► then you have "would you like a subscription," and you're using that term for two different things inside of the own app.
00:23:31 ◼ ► because what you don't want is for a user to be going in your app, they see, "Oh, there they go, they hit plus."
00:23:46 ◼ ► And you don't want them to not push that button because they're worried it's going to pop up a pay sheet or something.
00:23:57 ◼ ► but potentially it gives you a benefit of get one more user who, and it may even be a small percentage,
00:24:05 ◼ ► but that one extra person who's like, "Let me try this out," and then they do, and then it works out better for them.
00:24:11 ◼ ► And then now you have someone who's listening inside of Overcast, which is great and exactly what you want.
00:24:16 ◼ ► So that's, I think, where you are. I think what you're saying makes sense, but I think it's only one place you'd have to change it,
00:24:24 ◼ ► mostly, in Overcast. It's not like you have a complicated sort of thing where this terminology comes up over and over.
00:24:31 ◼ ► So I would just change these. For me, I would change the subscribe button to add and move on.
00:24:36 ◼ ► Well, the problem is there's this, and first of all, the actual cost of changing things.
00:24:41 ◼ ► I'm not too concerned about that because, yeah, it's just me. The app is, it's a big app, but I'm not changing Photoshop here.
00:24:50 ◼ ► It's not that big. And I think it is good to have the right terminology even if there is some work required to get there.
00:25:01 ◼ ► Like, for instance, I was recently doing a whole bunch of database migration stuff for the first time in a couple of years, probably.
00:25:07 ◼ ► And I was able, because of the new version of MySQL I was using, I was able to change all of the replication terminology
00:25:15 ◼ ► from the old and pretty bad master-slave terminology to the new source replica terminology.
00:25:21 ◼ ► And so my policy was every time I was editing any kind of script that was touching the database that had the old terminology,
00:25:26 ◼ ► I would change to the new one. And that added a little bit of extra work, but it wasn't that much. It was a few minutes.
00:25:30 ◼ ► And then it was done. And I'm really happy I did that because every time I would see the old terminology, I would really cringe and just kind of be ashamed of that.
00:25:37 ◼ ► And so in this case, you know, obviously this has different reasons, but in this case, you know, I think I should get there,
00:25:45 ◼ ► get to whatever the newest terminology should be here because that's what everyone else is going to be doing,
00:25:53 ◼ ► But there are some areas where it's a little bit odd, but in some ways it was always odd.
00:25:58 ◼ ► So for instance, the weirdest case for me to deal with is a podcast that you have added to your Overcast account,
00:26:09 ◼ ► So there is that toggle on the podcast settings page for each podcast that says "subscribe to all new episodes."
00:26:14 ◼ ► Now this distinction I think already confuses people, and I think I already need to rethink it,
00:26:24 ◼ ► and then what do I do with podcasts that you have on your account, that exist in your account,
00:26:34 ◼ ► And right now they all just sit there dimmed out in the bottom of the list once they're empty,
00:26:38 ◼ ► and it kind of sucks, and I've been wanting to rethink that for a while, and maybe this is a separate discussion.
00:26:43 ◼ ► But it is, like there are areas of the app like that that I have to consider, but I think you're right.
00:26:49 ◼ ► Add is a good word to use in many of these contexts, but it might not matter if add is a better word
00:26:57 ◼ ► if Apple Podcasts and Spotify are using follow. I might have to just match what they are using,
00:27:11 ◼ ► "subscribe to new episodes." It's like, "follow to new episodes" doesn't make any sense.
00:27:15 ◼ ► That feels really, like follow is, in that case, subscribe works better. I think add does work there.
00:27:23 ◼ ► But ultimately, this may just be something that's overcome by events, but I think you'll still have flexibility about this
00:27:32 ◼ ► in terms of, if they call it follow, I don't know if you have to, but I think getting away from subscribe
00:27:38 ◼ ► is the thing that is the bigger change. But yeah, it is kind of a weird thing, and it's interesting
00:27:44 ◼ ► because it deals with these kind of historical roots of something that, you know, podcasting is a strange technology
00:28:03 ◼ ► And once it starts to become something, like you were saying, even just a phrase you used earlier,
00:28:10 ◼ ► you imagine a world where podcasting isn't that and is more algorithmic and is more, like when I think of follow,
00:28:16 ◼ ► if I was using an overcast, if I was following something, in some ways you kind of increasingly have an expectation
00:28:24 ◼ ► that you're seeing an algorithmically driven timeline, which is different than what you would see
00:28:29 ◼ ► if you have an overcast or in most podcast plans, but I think it's very similar to how Spotify does it,
00:28:34 ◼ ► where it isn't the sense of, like, when I open overcast, all I want is a reverse chronological list of every episode,
00:28:41 ◼ ► of every show that is on my subscription list, and increasingly that's not what you get.
00:28:47 ◼ ► Increasingly, I imagine it's somehow algorithmically generated that, oh, you listen to this show at this time,
00:28:56 ◼ ► So there's a lot of external things pushing on you there, but I definitely do think they are kind of forcing your hand,
00:29:03 ◼ ► and you're going to have to make some change. Whatever that is is not easy, but it's something you're going to have to navigate.
00:29:10 ◼ ► Yeah, it's like, and I don't love that I have to do the amount of work to do this and to think about it and test it and everything,
00:29:17 ◼ ► but I do actually think, like, oh, this is a good point, we should have dropped this word a while ago