The Macalope has to agree with Sandofsky here, it seems pretty straightforward. You downloaded a camera app. It needs access to the camera. To take the photographs. Photographs are much less fun without the lenses and such. Sandofsky could, of course, add more verbiage to the prompt — “The camera will be used to take photographs for the app that you just downloaded to take photographs for. Photographs are images created and stored by interpreting light waves digitally. Also, they steal your soul. A lot of people think that’s just a superstition expressed by stereotypical backward tribal cultures in movies but, yeah, they actually steal people’s souls. Sorry you have to find out this way, in a prompt. Are you still reading this? Just tap ‘OK’ for crying out loud.” — but the Macalope’s not sure how that actually makes the prompt or the user experience any better.
The very odd thing here is that Halide was featured in Apple’s “It’s Glowtime” keynote. And is an Apple Design Award winner. And is just incredibly popular and well-known. And, finally, what are you doing, App Store review? Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up?
The fact that I do not need an iPhone 16 is a testament not so much to the iPhone’s failure as to its resounding success. A lot of the digital software we rely on has grown worse for users in recent years; the iPhone, by contrast, has become so good that it’s hard to imagine anything but incremental improvements. Apple’s teleological phone-design strategy may have simply reached its end point, the same way evolution in nature has repeatedly resulted in an optimized species of crab.
But the downside to capturing every moment is that it creates a mountain of those moments to save for the future. Those photos can be easily lost if they’re not archived properly. All it can take is one accidental dip in the toilet for your phone, and all that data is lost forever.
So what’s a practical backup strategy for the average person? Here are a few ways to make sure memories are never lost.
Come October, listeners will need to subscribe to The Times' audio content to unlock older episodes of The Times' hit shows, such as "The Daily," "The Ezra Klein Klein Show,""Modern Love," or "Hard Fork."
There are some minor protections built into Apple and Google’s current systems — you can display an encrypted ID without fully unlocking your phone, and various authorities can scan your ID wireless if they have special readers. But you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re searching the web for the technical and policy details of your digital ID system when a cop demands your phone — you’re much better off handing over your license.
I am not in favor of having regulators forcing Apple to do alternate app stores and side-loads and what-have-you, but this doesn't mean Apple's existing App Store is good enough for developers.
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Thanks for reading.