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The Anonymised-and-Aggregated Edition Thursday, December 9, 2021

Apple Reaches Quiet Truce Over iPhone Privacy Changes, by Patrick McGee, Financial Times

Apple has allowed app developers to collect data from its 1 billion iPhone users for targeted advertising, in an unacknowledged shift that lets companies follow a much looser interpretation of its controversial privacy policy.

[...]

[C]ompanies including Snap and Facebook have been allowed to keep sharing user-level signals from iPhones, as long as that data is anonymised and aggregated rather than tied to specific user profiles.

Inside Apple Park: First Look At The Design Team Shaping The Future Of Tech, by Jonathan Bell, Wallpaper*

In the distance is a rectangular frame of foliage. In the foreground, a conference table, placed with architectural rigour so that the focal point is dead centre of the screen. The scene is a tiny cross section through Apple Park, the tech giant’s mighty circular HQ in Cupertino, by Foster + Partners. There are 12,000 employees on site here, including the Apple Design Team. This agile but hugely significant department thinks in terms of scope, not scale.

Working side by side to guide this division are Evans Hankey, Apple’s VP of industrial design, and Alan Dye, VP of human interface design. Both close colleagues, confidants and friends of Jony Ive, they effectively took the helm of the Design Team after his departure from the chief design officer role in 2019.

On App Stores

Apple Granted Delay In Complying With App Store Changes Required By Epic Ruling, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

Apple’s request for a delay App Store changes required by the Epic Games vs Apple ruling has been granted. This comes after Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers denied Apple’s request for a delay last month, but Apple immediately announced plans to appeal to the Ninth Circuit court.

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The decision today: “Apple has demonstrated, at minimum, that its appeal raises serious questions on the merits of the district court’s determination that Epic Games, Inc. failed to show Apple’s conduct violated any antitrust laws but did show that the same conduct violated California’s Unfair Competition Law. ”

Epic V. Apple Ruling Put On Hold After Appeals Court Grants A Stay, by Russell Brandom, The Verge

“Our concern is that these changes would have created new privacy and security risks, and disrupted the user experience customers love about the App Store,” said Apple spokesperson Marni Goldberg in a statement. “We want to thank the court for granting this stay while the appeals process continues.”

Appeals Court Grants Apple A Delay On Injunction Mandating Changes To App Store In Epic Case, by John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Basically, Apple’s argument for a stay was that — as per Gonzalez Rogers’s own ruling — they were entitled to collect a commission even on digital content purchases that didn’t use IAP, but that doing so would require significant effort, and if they eventually won on appeal — which, as stated above, they expect to — they’d have no recourse to recoup the costs of that effort. The Ninth Circuit appeals court clearly agreed.

Stuff

Apple Giving Customers A Second Chance To Buy AppleCare+ After Their iPhone Or Mac Is Repaired, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

In an internal memo this week, obtained by MacRumors, Apple said customers who had an iPhone or Mac repaired at an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider are now eligible to purchase AppleCare+ for the device, so long as the device was purchased less than one year ago and passes a physical inspection and diagnostics after repair.

Apple Launches Support For Keys In Apple Wallet, Starting With Six Hyatt Hotels, by Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac

Apple has today launched one of the few outstanding iOS 15 features first demoed at WWDC. In partnership with Hyatt Hotels, Apple users will be able to use their iPhone, or Apple Watch, as their room key in the initial rollout of six hotels.

ScreenKit, The Popular Home Screen Customization App, Goes All Christmassy, by Oliver Haslam, iMore

ScreenKit is an app that helps people customize their Home screens and now it's been updated to include more than 20 new Christmas icon packs, more than 25 new Christmas widgets, and more.

Develop

Apple Officially Launches New App Store Product Page Features For Developers, by Chance Miller, 9to5Mac

In a post on the Apple Developer website today, Apple announced that it is now rolling out two new features for App Store product pages. With these new tools, developers can now create and test different versions of their app’s product page in the App Store.

Apple Launches Redesigned Website With Its Open Source Projects And Others From The Community, by Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac

Apple today launched a redesigned version of its Apple Open Source website, on which the company provides access to open source data. The new website highlights not only Apple’s open source projects, but also those of third parties.

Notes

Apple’s Car Project Loses Three More Key Engineers To Startups, by Mark Gurman, Bloomberg

The exodus shows the challenges Apple faces in expands into a new industry. A self-driving car could represent a massive new sales opportunity for the tech giant -- one of its famous “next big things” -- but perfecting such technology has bedeviled engineers for years. And the seven-year-old project has been marked by frequent turnover and strategy shifts, along with rivals poaching its talent.

Bottom of the Page

Steve Jobs, 2007: "You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers."

2021, as reported by Androidpolice: "An 'unintended interaction' between the [Microsoft Teams] app and Android prevented emergency calls from being placed properly."

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Personally, there are two things that I will demand the iPhone not to fail:

a) Make a phone call when I want to make a phone call; and
b) Wake me up at the correct time when I set an alarm.

And, yes, Apple did have a couple of bugs that caused the alarm clock to fail back in 2010 and 2011. If I remember correctly, thankfully, the bugs didn't affected me back then.

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Thanks for reading.