So, Apple have now posted their response to Spotifys long list of complaints against them.

It’s pretty huge, and they go against nearly every point they made. I’m hugely biased as I’m an Apple fan, but to me, everything they said makes a lot of sense.

Here are some of the sections that I found the most interesting:

What Spotify is demanding is something very different. After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace. At the same time, they distribute the music you love while making ever-smaller contributions to the artists, musicians and songwriters who create it — even going so far as to take these creators to court.

That’s a dig at Spotify already, and they also go a bit further than their complaints, by mentioning their relationship with artists.

One thing that surprised me, was their response to Spotifys claims about Apple restricting them from platforms such as the HomePod or Apple Watch:

• When we reached out to Spotify about Siri and AirPlay 2 support on several occasions, they’ve told us they’re working on it, and we stand ready to help them where we can.
• Spotify is deeply integrated into platforms like CarPlay, and they have access to the same app development tools and resources that any other developer has.
• We found Spotify’s claims about Apple Watch especially surprising. When Spotify submitted their Apple Watch app in September 2018, we reviewed and approved it with the same process and speed with which we would any other app. In fact, the Spotify Watch app is currently the No. 1 app in the Watch Music category.

That all sounds like Spotify have actually been working with Apple successfully already.

They then went into detail on the number of free apps in the App Store, how different apps make money while Apple not taking a cut (free, ad-supported, external subscriptions, and physical good sales). They turned this at Spotify by stating that only a small fraction of their subscriptions are going through their payment platform, and that their target is to reduce that to zero. So in effect, reducing their contribution to the platform to zero.

They end with a statement about what it means to music, and also how Apple’s approach is to help grow opportunities for artists, businesses, and every person with a big idea:

We share Spotify’s love of music and their vision of sharing it with the world. Where we differ is how you achieve that goal. Underneath the rhetoric, Spotify’s aim is to make more money off others’ work. And it’s not just the App Store that they’re trying to squeeze — it’s also artists, musicians and songwriters.

Just this week, Spotify sued music creators after a decision by the US Copyright Royalty Board required Spotify to increase its royalty payments. This isn’t just wrong, it represents a real, meaningful and damaging step backwards for the music industry.

Apple’s approach has always been to grow the pie. By creating new marketplaces, we can create more opportunities not just for our business, but for artists, creators, entrepreneurs and every “crazy one” with a big idea. That’s in our DNA, it’s the right model to grow the next big app ideas and, ultimately, it’s better for customers.

We’re proud of the work we’ve done to help Spotify build a successful business reaching hundreds of millions of music lovers, and we wish them continued success — after all, that was the whole point of creating the App Store in the first place.

This is going to be really interesting to watch play out. Especially the EU court case.

There is one thing that I agree with Spotify on, and that’s the 30% cut Apple take. But I wouldn’t class that as being anti-competitive, as it’s a rule for the entire App Store. I just want it to be lower.

In general, I’m against Spotify on this one. I was unsure on a few things after the complaint was published, on things like the App Store rejections, their claim that Apple dismissed their Apple Watch app proposals, and Apple apparently not letting them on the HomePod. Apple cleared a lot of this up. And while both sides of the argument will include biases, I feel that Apple have quashed a lot of Spotifys claims.

Today was quite a slow day at work, we wrapped up our last sprint (2 weeks of work), and all the teams in the department came together to do a huge demo to each other. Mine was obviously the most interesting 😜. Seeing as I demoed a complete app that I released, and other people were demoing a lot less.

I spent some time at lunch working on some of Text various bits of copy for Text Case, and I feel like I now have a basic idea of how I’m planning the release, and also a few things afterwards.

On the blog, in linked to an article from the developer of Spectre, about how the release went, and what they have planned for the future. I’ve got a few extra things lined up that I want to share, but I didn’t find the time today.

Tonight has been spend watching things. First of all I watched the Arsenal vs Rennes game, we (Arsenal) played very well, and we came away with a 3-0 win. Which was enough to secure qualification into the Europa League quarter finals!

After that, me and my girlfriend have been continuing with After Life. We’ve managed another three episodes tonight, they’re just so funny and easy to binge watch.

Ben Sandofsky, the developer of the popular app Halide, and now Spectre, shared an update on how the Spectre launch went, and also their plan for future releases:

He also shared some photos taken on Spectre, which look amazing. The hashtag they’re using is #SpectreShot, so I may have to share some myself.

The section I found most interesting was about the initial release:

To say our launch was a success would be an understatement. On day 1, Spectre instantly rose to the first place in the App Store. We had features on The Verge, The Daily Mail, Lonely Planet, Macstories, CNet, Macrumors, 9to5Mac, Uncrate and more.

It was a bit too much success: We rose up the charts so fast that one of Apple’s fraud detection systems kicked in. For a half a day, we were missing from the charts. Yikes! We were panicking and got in touch with Apple.

Fortunately, after Apple’s fine people verified we weren’t gaming the system, we were back at #1, where we stuck it out for almost a whole week.

I had never heard about these “fraud detection systems”, but the people at iA (iA Writer Developers) wrote about it last year. It’s a huge piece of writing, and there’s a ton of great investigation as well, but essentially they found that an increase in traffic to the App Store, can negatively affect the apps ranking. That sounds pretty weird to me.

Fortunately/Unfortunately for me, none of my apps have managed to be affected by the fraud detection systems.

 

I was doing some interesting things at work today! We’re about to start a web project in Java, so I’ve been investigating loads of things about the frameworks we’re going to use. I’m finding it really fun!

After work I made a lot of progress to Text Case. I added in a text to Emoji format, that attempts to parse any words as emoji, and also does it’s best to randomise them if multiple options are available. I also finished up the rest of the app, so I fixed a few issues with the icon, fixed an issue with text-wrapping in the app, and then some more optimisations.

There’s a possibility that something else is added/fixed in the next few days (not a very high one though). But otherwise, I have the final build of Text Case 2.0, and I’m just about to try to work on the release process.

One thing I have to mention, is my little tweet storm earlier about Spotify taking Apple to court. That was fun.

It wasn’t as fun as the series I started watching tonight though! Me and my girlfriend started watching Ricky Gervais’ new series, After Life, on Netflix. It’s really great, and we watched three episodes back to back.

I shared just the one thing on the blog today, and that was an announcement from Twitter about the changes to the camera in the iOS app. Since then, Sean Thompson, a product designer at Twitter, shared some more of the thinking behind the changes, and also some previews.

Twitter have announced (on Twitter) that an updated camera interaction is on its way. So you’ll be able to access the camera with just one swipe:

See it? Tweet it! Our updated camera is just a swipe away, so you get the shot fast. Rolling out to all of you over the next few days. pic.twitter.com/moOEFO2nQq

— Twitter (@Twitter) March 13, 2019

This is a really good improvement. I’ve even downloaded the official Twitter app again, so I’m ready to try it out.

I’ll skip talking about my day job today, as there really isn’t anything exciting to talk about.

However, on my blog, I published three different pieces today. Not three major articles, but three different things. Firstly, I shared a story from Laurie Voss (Co-founder and Chief Data Office of NPM) about a major bank that accidentally pushed private code to the public NPM registry. Then I found this headline – “Amazon’s Alexa has 80,000 Apps—and No Runaway Hit” on Bloomberg and had to link to it. And I also saw that Professor Stephen Hawking is being commemorated on the new 50p coin, so I had to share that as well.

From a developer perspective, I pushed another build to the Text Case beta. There’s no new features in this build, but I worked on a lot of optimisations to how the UI is drawn. Especially as all content needs to be updated every time a user types in the input field, or uses the “Use Copied Text” button. Before there was some weird glitch-like behaviour, where the coloured headings would flash different colours. This is because the interface elements are “reused”, so when they’re reloaded, old components would be cleaned and configured to load the list from scratch. That wasn’t exactly necessary though, as it’s only the text content inside the interface that needs to be updated, so I’ve got a lot of manual UI handling for that now.

Another thing I did notice in the Text Case build I shared recently with custom icons, is that they’re not that optimised for all screen sizes. And for some reason the edges on the “TC” seem quite harsh. I plan on getting that fixed very soon.

Then it will be time to implement a “Text to Emoji” format, because I’m 80% sure I’m going to add it. After that I may start wrapping up the 2.0 version. Although I want as much to be in the update as possible, I really want users to use the new app. And simply adding useless things to the app is not going to benefit anyone.

Photo Credit: Royal Mint

BBC:

Prof Stephen Hawking has been honoured on a new 50p coin inspired by his pioneering work on black holes.

The physicist died last year at the age of 76, having become one of the most renowned leaders in his field.

He joins an elite group of scientists to have appeared on coins, including Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

Designer Edwina Ellis said: “I wanted to fit a big black hole on the tiny coin and wish he was still here chortling at the thought.”

I’ve always liked the fact that we place very important people on our money, such as Charles Darwin, James Watt, and Michael Faraday. It signifies their reverence to the entire world.

It also reminds me of a talk that Neil Degrasse Tyson made at The Tanner Humanities Center, where he spoke about what some countries place on their money, from the perspective of America not having a lot of scientific achievements on theirs.

What a headline.

Laurie Voss, a Co-founder and Chief Data Office of NPM(A package manager for JavaScript, and a huge database of public and private JavaScript packages), had an interesting story to tell on Twitter:

A major international bank accidentally published a private package of their own to the public npm Registry, took *3 years* to notice, and then sent DMCA takedown notices to Amazon and Cloudflare for hosting "stolen code". Now I have to pay a lawyer to explain this to them.

— Laurie Voss (@seldo) 11 March 2019

We sell a thing that prevents this kind of mistake, it is called npm Enterprise, you should all really look into it instead of making me spend money to explain how npm publish works to your lawyer.

— Laurie Voss (@seldo) 11 March 2019

(I should make clear that this kind of legal confusion happens ALL THE TIME and is a genuine source of overhead in running the registry)

— Laurie Voss (@seldo) 11 March 2019

Our lawyer is also going to need to explain to a bank why a React package does not constitute "Stolen Financial Credentials" oh lord

— Laurie Voss (@seldo) 11 March 2019

My first reaction was something akin to "How the hell do you do this by mistake?". Surely publishing a package to NPM has just enough friction that you don’t publish private IP to a public repository.

You have to also keep in mind thatNPM have supported private repositories since 2014, and also offer a full enterprise solution already, NPM Enterprise.

The daily grind started again. But luckily it wasn’t exactly a stressful day at work, so I can ease into the week a bit easier.

One thing I did do today, was share a few things on my blog. I linked to a pretty funny tool called Jeffsum, which is like Lorem Ipsum, but with Jeff Goldblum.

I also wrote a piece about the latest news on Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. It’s by no means a full review, and that would be weird anyway, as the game isn’t released. But, it’s a type of post that I used to do all the time when I had a blog called App Recap. I used to write massive reviews of apps, games, and general Apple news, and sadly that has dropped off over the years. But I want to get back into writing bigger pieces, and in general reviewing cool things that I think others will enjoy. I’ll steer clear of topics that will be covered in high quantities elsewhere, because sometimes there’s not much more else I can add, but expect a bit more content on my blog soon!