There’s a lot of reasons governments would want a personal handle on running contact-tracing, but Apple at least has the tools to see it done well.
Impacted locations include six stores in Arizona, two in Florida, another two in North Carolina and one in South Carolina.
“Due to current COVID-19 conditions in some of the communities we serve, we are temporarily closing stores in these areas. We take this step with an abundance of caution as we closely monitor the situation and we look forward to having our teams and customers back as soon as possible,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch.
And, referring to the now defunct browser that ran right into another tech giant’s cross hairs, Mr. Heinemeier Hansson sent a text to me later: “The wheels of legislative justice turn slow. It didn’t help Netscape any that Microsoft got some penalties years after its air supply had been cut off.”
It goes without saying that this is not how Apple sees itself, having spent years brandishing its image as the breaker and not maker of chains — see the famous 1984 Apple Macintosh commercial.
The question is whether anyone throwing a hammer at power these days can throw it hard enough to make a difference.
Fried says that money is certainly a big part of all of this but that it’s really about “the absence of choice” and that “Apple forcibly inserts themselves between your company and your customer.”
So, just a few days before heading into WWDC, Apple chooses to effectively tell developers of free apps that they contribute nothing to Apple. That if Apple graciously chooses to let them into its App Store, they should appreciate that fact, and keep any complaints to themselves.
I guess the company at least won’t have to face the glares of unhappy developers this year.
The world doesn't need another rehash of the complaints from developers over Apple's App Store rules or the sometimes ostensibly arbitrary and capricious enforcement of those rules. But we do need to remember what a world without the App Store and all of Apple's various rules would look like. It's an ugly place.
When you set a photo as a wallpaper in iOS, sometimes the system automatically applies alignment adjustments that make the photo not look as good as you expected. That’s why developer Jonathan Ruiz created Lockne, a different kind of camera app that lets users create and test iPhone wallpapers in real-time using the camera.
According to Apple’s website, 92% of iPhones introduced in the last four years are running iOS 13, while 7% are still running iOS 12 and only 2% are running previous versions of iOS.
I’m not claiming that new languages are inherently superior, obviously they can have their own shortcomings that lead them to fall out of favor. But at the very least new languages are coming up with practical solutions to serious software development challenges from the past. 15 years ago Joel Spolsky figured out how to articulate a general principle of software design, today we have compilers that understand how to enforce some of those principles.
Every incarnation has been slow and far less pleasant and useful than Stack Overflow, both because the site doesn’t work very well and because most questions remain unresolved. This new version is even less information dense than before and drops support for e-mail and RSS.
Even at its enormous size, Apple has figured out how to continue to grow, by vertically integrating, tempting us with more devices, accessories and apps, and selling lots and lots of phones, albeit at a lower margin. But it can't do it alone: The golden goose depends on the cooperation of software and content partners, regulators -- and more than a billion loyal customers.