Spotify will begin showing in-app pricing information for iPhone users in the European Union starting today, following a yearslong legal battle against Apple. In an update to an old blog post, Spotify says that EU iPhone users will now see things like promotional offers and pricing information for each subscription tier — including how much a plan costs once a promotion ends.
Patreon, with an army of devoted creator fans on its side, should call Apple on this bluff. I don’t think they could lose.
I don’t mind Apple getting into the services business. My only concern is that the company keeps its priorities in order. Apple’s services business exists because of its products business. It’s our attachments to our iPhones, Macs, and iPads–and the ecosystem that connects them together–that make Apple’s services so desirable.
That’s why Apple needs to be very careful in figuring out how to expand Services revenue. The last thing Apple wants is for the public to believe that buying a new Apple product is somehow lesser or incomplete unless you pungle up for an ongoing subscription. Buying an iPhone can never, ever feel like you’re buying an empty box with a subscription sign-up form inside.
Apple Watch owners can earn an Apple Watch activity award by doing a workout that lasts for 20 minutes or more on August 25, 2024.
An interactive music player, a place to trigger shortcuts, or some nifty utility? NotchNook is an app that makes all of that possible.
When you want to bring only a few cards, snap your wallet on and go. It won’t replace your regular wallet, be it luxury or RFID blocking. Think of this as your night-out wallet. It keeps everything together and carries the essentials alone, typically three to four cards.
When you watch this year’s English Premier League soccer games, there’s a high chance you may get mad at some of the offside calls. However, unlike past seasons, your anger won't be because the call, or the lack thereof, was obviously lousy. That’s because the League's new offside-detection system is apparently able to spot a player's position on the field, and call them offside, with more accuracy than ever—and it’s all powered by iPhones.
In this case, the leaking helium from the MRI machine infiltrated the iPhones like a “tiny grain of sand” and caused the MEMS clocks to go haywire. This isn’t news to Apple, however, which explicitly mentions that “exposing iPhone to environments having high concentrations of industrial chemicals, including near evaporating liquified gasses such as helium, may damage or impair iPhone functionality” in the phone’s manual.
Whenever you hear some developers proclaiming they are rewriting their apps from scratch, and the new apps with the new codes will be so much better than ever, start your plan B. Chances are, the new rewrite-from-scratch apps will have tons of missing functionalities, loads of edge cases failing, and a whole bunch of new bugs and resurfaced old bugs. What can you, as a customer, do? Start making sure you have back-ups of all your stuff, start searching for alternate apps that you can switch to, and start testing you can migrate all your stuff to the new apps. If the new rewritten app is bad, you can straight away execute plan B.
If you are a developer and you have the itch, go re-read (I assume you have already read?) Joel Spolsky's old article on Things You Should Never Do. This article is from the early 2000s, and nobody learnt anything since then.
And if your excuse is Apple switching from Objective C to Swift, and you feel that you have no choice but to rewrite everything from scratch, go read the very first paragraph of this Apple documentation, where you are explicitly warned: You don't need to rewrite your entire app in Swift at once.
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Thanks for reading.