While it’s easy to say that apps and the App Store helped make Apple what it is, and therefore, the company will always be inclined to maintain the status quo… the fact is that if Apple thinks the best way for it to survive and flourish is to atomize app functionality into App Intents and drive it all with a user-driven AI assistant, it’ll do that. And it won’t think twice about it, no matter the consequences for app developers.
Apple decided not to move forward with formal Meta discussions in part because it doesn’t see that company’s privacy practices as stringent enough, according to the people. Apple has spent years criticizing Meta’s technology, and integrating Llama into the iPhone would have been a stark about-face.
Apple’s new podcast series, ‘My Divo’, will be released first behind a paywall, accessible via the Apple Podcasts app when the user connects their Apple TV+ subscription. For non-subscribers, the episodes will be released on a weekly basis.
What does the casual visitor see? Big, uncluttered rooms with masterpieces hanging on the walls. You don’t have to navigate around other people or feel watched by guards—you always have the place to yourself. The museum is, as advertised, immersive: while you may be sitting on your sofa in the real world, in the virtual world, you’re standing in the museum surrounded by artwork. You can approach any artwork using simple eye and hand gestures or physically walk up to one.
This is a big one, and this would be something I would be less lighthearted about if this was how I paid rent and put food on the table. But pinning your business to someone else is pretty risky, especially when it's something that is, there's no contract involved, there's no relationship, there's no any sort of guarantees that anything will be around forever.
Apple has permitted third-party browsers on iOS for over a decade, but requires all browsers to use the system’s WebKit rendering engine. One take on Apple’s longstanding prohibition against third-party rendering engines is that they’re protecting their own interests with Safari. More or less that they’re just being dicks about it. But there really is a security angle to it. JavaScript engines run much faster with JIT compilation, but JITs inherently pose security challenges. There’s a whole section in the BrowserEngineKit docs specifically about JIT compilation.
I hope app developers not only pay attention to actions that can be performed by App Intents, but they also provide App Intents that return data.
For example, the last time I tried out a lot of the existing podcast players, I found that a lot of them does provide shortcuts that allow me to, say, resume playing podcasts in a particular playlist. None of them, as far as I can tell, provided any shortcuts to query the number and duration of podcast episodes in any particular playlist.
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Thanks for reading.