Cryptofarts and Copyright Infringement
Happy Vision Pro week!
Sort of.
Well, here's the thing.
I would love to talk about the Vision Pro because now all the press reviews and embargoes are lifted and the press reviews are all out and everyone who got pre-release access got to tell everyone what they thought and show everyone and everything.
And because we didn't, we can't.
So...
Even though Casey and I had lab experience, we still can't talk about that.
I think maybe ever.
And so we just have to wait until we can actually have our Vision Pros, which is this weekend for both of us.
That's true.
You know, even though we all three of us agreed not to talk about it, I would like to say that we genuinely did not...
get to have any experience with personas or anything like that, and I probably am not even supposed to say that much, but I say that to indicate that any of what I'm about to say is not informed by the lab, because I genuinely have no experience with the whole persona thing.
Everyone seems to be slagging on two different persona-related things.
The eyesight, which is the thing where it shows your eyes out the front of the display, or at the front of the goggles, such that... We're doing an amazing job of not talking about the Vision Pro.
I know.
It's my fault this time.
It's the first time for everything.
Everyone's slagging on the eyesight both in the terms of seeing the wearer's eyes on the front of the headset and the whole persona thing where you're like a fake version of you in FaceTime and all the other places where you would normally use a front-facing camera on like a phone or an iPad.
I have zero real-world experience with this.
Hand to God.
I really don't have any experience with this.
I see and understand why everyone is slagging on it, but to me, I don't think it's that bad.
I'm very curious to see what I think when I actually have one that I can use in front of me in person because it's not great.
I'm not trying to sit here and say it looks fantastic and it looks photorealistic or anything like that, but I like the idea of those around me being able to tell if I'm looking at them or paying zero attention to them or whatever the case may be.
And I like the idea of having some mechanism of representing myself that's not Memoji while I'm on a FaceTime call, which is not to say that I expect to do this often, but just in the occasion that I do need a front-facing camera.
I like the approach they've taken.
It is a little bit uncanny valley.
I'm not trying to say it's perfect by any means, but everyone seems to really hate it.
There were a bunch of reviews here.
I'll tie it into what we were supposed to be talking about.
There were a bunch of video reviews and text reviews that came out.
I think it was John put a bunch in the show notes, and I concur with John's list.
Neelay Patel at The Verge.
I personally think if you're going to choose just one, that's the one I would choose.
But also excellent are Joanna Stearns of The Wall Street Journal.
Brian Tong, who I'd not previously heard of.
Maybe I've been living under a rock.
He did a very long, like hour-long review on YouTube, which is very thorough if you're wanting something more along those lines.
And then Gruber obviously had his written review, which was excellent as well.
Oh, and MKBHD has posted, as of just an hour or two ago, I think, has posted a...
an unboxing which was interesting but more importantly a like here's what the vision pro is it isn't a review it's a here's let me tell you about what it is from like a tour yeah exactly exactly i like 10kpc's video i haven't read i haven't read and seen all of these yet uh but obviously as casey said we aren't allowed to tell you about the vision pro and if you're wondering what we're going to talk about on uh this week's show uh you know unfortunate timing
Obviously, the DMA stuff, EU DMA stuff came out after we had recorded last week's episode.
You know, for people who don't know, we record our show on Wednesdays because Apple usually announces stuff on Tuesdays.
But you don't win them all.
Sometimes they announce something on, you know, a Thursday and we miss it.
So that's what happened.
And it's just as well because, like you guys said, you don't have your Vision Pros yet.
They're coming in a few days.
Regular customers don't have them yet.
Although I do know someone whose delivery date was one day earlier.
then it's supposed to arrive.
So maybe you might get lucky and get a day early.
No, we're in-store pickup for both of us, I believe.
Okay, well, you're not getting it early then, I guess.
Nope.
But yeah, so we're going to be talking about the EU DMA stuff that a bunch of other people talked about last week, if their podcast recording allowed for it.
And then next week, when two out of the three of us have Vision Pros, we will talk a ton about it then.
But for now, these reviews will tide you over.
And while we can't tell you anything that we think about the Vision Pro, I can tell you that I would recommend Nilay Patel's review with The Verge.
Yeah, same.
In particular.
Like Casey, I think if you're only going to watch one, I'd say watch that one.
It is very thorough.
It covers all of the major areas of different uses for it.
And I think he he seemed to be very fair about both what's cool, what's not, you know, what has potential for the future, maybe what doesn't have so much potential for the future.
You know, some of the things about it that are really weird or really different or takes some getting used to.
And some of the things about that are really, really nice and really cool and really immersive.
So.
I would strongly recommend Neil Patel's review of The Verge, either video or the written one.
I actually, I read the written one first and then I watched the video and I found that I didn't really need to do both.
So I would suggest reading the written one if you pick only one.
Yeah, I agree.
But anyway, I bring all this up mostly to point to all these different reviews and whatnot, but also to say I'm really excited about a few things with Vision Pro, and maybe we'll talk about that later, but I'm excited and interested to see what I think of Eyesight and Persona's focus.
For me, you know, like once I have them and see them in person, or to the degree that you can see a persona in person.
I'm very curious because they don't, I don't feel like it's nearly as bad as everyone else seems to think it is.
And so it very well could be next week, when we record, I'll laugh at this moment and say, Oh, how wrong I was.
But it's
Sitting here now, I think it's reasonable.
You realize the three of us are going to have to do a FaceTime call with me and you as personas and John as the unfortunate only one who's not.
But the persona videos I've seen so far of people doing their FaceTime calls with the personas, I do not like looking at them.
It like bothers me on a deep level.
This is the common opinion.
And I mean, again, I don't think they're great.
But as somebody in the chat said, you know, all of these YouTubers were immediately recognizable as who they were, which I think is an accomplishment.
It's not perfect.
It's not great.
But I don't think it's as bad as everyone else seems to think.
They kind of creep me out.
They make me feel uneasy.
Look, we'll see when we get these.
Because this feature is in beta, we'll see how it develops over time.
But my initial opinion, which I am not sure is going to change that much anytime soon, is if I'm going to be on a FaceTime call with you, I'd rather you take your headset off and actually be a FaceTime call.
And if you're going to be your fake persona, I think I'd rather just have a phone call at that point.
Alex Chan writes, I've also been programming against YouTube API recently and run into the same quota issues that John had described last week and the week before.
I don't think John is doing something daft.
The quota isn't 10,000 requests.
It's 10,000 quote-unquote quota units.
A single request can use many units.
There's a table of quota costs in YouTube's documentation, which we'll link in the show notes.
I don't know if that fully accounts for you burning through your quota so quickly, but maybe it's a clue in the right direction.
And I don't know if it was Alex or John, but somebody pointed out that costs, some example costs, listing a playlist is one quota unit, updating a video is 50 quota units, and inserting a video or perhaps inserting something into a video, I'm not sure, is 1,600 quota units.
Yeah, and this does account for it because when I – the video update thing is like if I'm updating the description.
Yeah, we have over 500 videos, and if each of them costs 50 and I update all of them, you burn through your quota real quick.
In fact, I'm routinely going way over my quota relying on the fact that most API systems that have a quota –
are essentially eventually consistent and you can blow past your quota briefly before the system realizes you've passed it and caps you.
So that's what I had been doing.
So that explains it.
It's kind of cruddy, but that explains it.
Although eventually Google did get back to me and they approved my request
for uh many more requests or many more what are these called uh quota units so now instead of 10 000 i have 100 000 i probably should ask for a million um anyway it doesn't matter because i'm already done with the development of the script so as predicted this was all pointless but the more you know it's quota units not requests
Indeed.
John, I'm assuming it's John and not Marco that wrote this app store versus game consoles.
Tell me about this.
Yeah, this is I'm I guess for the third show in a row hitting the same point because people keep bringing up topics that are related to it.
The whole idea of developer dissatisfaction with Apple and comparing that to other developers who develop for other platforms that are kind of similar to the app store and what their satisfaction is like.
And we brought up game consoles, and I said it might seem unfair to you that companies that develop for game consoles seem to be more okay with the deal than a lot of App Store developers are.
And many people wrote in to tell us that, well, that's because the game console manufacturers sell their hardware at a loss, and so they need the profit from the games to make up for the fact that they're selling their hardware at a loss.
And I have two things to say for that.
First, talk to Nintendo.
They don't play that game, at least not as much as the other companies do.
Nintendo tends to want to either break even or actually make a profit on its hardware pretty much all the time.
And even the other console makers eventually start breaking even and turning a profit on their consoles during the lifetime of the things.
But that's besides the point, because the second thing is it doesn't actually matter what
like what the reason is unless that reason is convincing to developers and i have to tell you that app store developers who are angry about apple a they already know about game consoles and how the world works over there and b it does not convince them to not be resentful of apple and that's the whole deal here
you know most of the time trying to explain to somebody who thinks they're getting a not great deal uh doesn't change their mind usually because you're not providing them with any new information for example they would say yeah i know game consoles are social laws yeah i know that you know they'll but like but they what they would say to you but that doesn't make me feel any better about giving apple 15 or 30 or whatever so
You have to work with the people and the opinions they have, even though if they quote unquote don't make sense to you or you think there's some reason otherwise.
That's the situation Apple is in.
That is the fundamental issue at hand here.
Apple thinks that there are very good reasons for them to get what they want and game developers and App Store developers disagree.
And that's where they are.
And I don't think at this point any amount of explaining why is going to change either party's opinion.
All right.
And then tell me about who owns the customer.
Yeah, this is something you talked about last time.
Like, well, why would somebody do this?
This is back before the DMA stuff.
We were talking about the external links to payment methods.
Why would anybody want to do that?
And I said, well, one of the reasons is ownership of the customer, as we've discussed many times in the past.
And I talked about reasons why you might want to own the customer because then you get the customer information, which may be lucrative to you.
And but I once again neglected to mention something that we had mentioned for many, many years in the past.
So I'll reiterate it again.
There are other reasons that you might want to own the customer that are not related to getting their information and selling it.
For example, one thing we've discussed many times is that developers in the app store cannot issue refunds.
Only Apple can.
If you own the customer, you are now empowered to issue refunds because you took their payment.
You can give their payment back to them.
That is not something that developers can currently do.
Same thing with support.
If there's if a customer is having a problem, there's no way for you to sort of connect the dots for them in the generic app store relationship because they're Apple's customer, not yours.
Uh, and you could put an email address on your website or you can have a contact form.
You can do all that, but there's a limited amount of stuff that you can do.
Whereas if you own the customer, you can provide better support, you know, giving them a refund yourself is one example of better support.
Uh, and then also if you, if the thing you're providing that application or service or combination of them, if it's on more than one platform, you're on iOS, you're an Android, you're on PC, you're on Mac, right?
Uh,
you can provide a unified experience if you own the customer because you can say well pay me one price and i'll give you it on all these platforms and there are ways to do that with the app store to try to figure out if they've they've made a purchase in another platform and to give them the app store thing and you know and vice versa but it's so much easier if you have one unified account and one unified payment system because you own the customer so
There are legitimate non-nefarious reasons why you might want to own the customer.
And like I said, we're talking about the external payment things.
That is the only benefit that you're getting given the set of rules that Apple had provided because you're not paying Apple any less money.
You're enduring much more hassle than you were before.
It is much more difficult.
You have to allow Apple to audit you.
And in exchange, the one and only thing you get is customer ownership.
I mean, that being said, though, there are certain businesses where Apple's payment system either doesn't have a feature that you need to do that kind of business or literally doesn't allow it.
So, for instance, if you wanted to, say, have a few different payment plans for your in-app purchase, for your service, whatever your app service is that you're selling, and the top one, if they paid $100 a year, you sent them a free T-shirt.
You can't do that with in-app purchase.
In-app purchase can't be used for any kind of physical goods.
So you literally just aren't allowed to do that.
Or upgrade pricing is the other great example.
Like you want to do upgrade pricing?
You own the customer.
You control the payment system.
You know what they paid.
You know they own the version 1.0.
You can give them upgrade pricing for 2.0.
Exactly.
And there's so many, even just implementation details.
Like I have talked before, you know, back when I, when I had the idea forever ago and have continued to have it like once a year and then quickly talk myself out of it of like, Hey, why don't I make some kind of like overcast premium thing that like pools money together and then pays the podcast that you listen to, you know, and to do that, you have to know exactly how much money you got from each person and
not how much money they were charged, you can figure that out, how much money you received from them, which becomes very tricky when you're dealing with foreign currency exchange rates or any kind of credit card chargeback or refund situation.
So that kind of thing, like, if you build your own system, you can maybe do that a lot better.
With Apple's system, it's fairly impossible to know, like, did I actually receive that $7.75 from this person in this month or not?
Because
and that's by the way that's why spotify and youtube premium and all these things that's why they all do the big pool of money approach where like your ten dollars a month doesn't get split up between your artists that you listen to your ten dollars a month goes into the giant pool of money and then the giant pool of money gets split up based on how much money there actually is in that pool and then how many total plays there were in that entire month which creates all sorts of weird you know
opportunities for fraud and things like that but it's just much easier so like again there are conditions like that where Apple's system just might not support what you want to do even if you are tolerant of Apple's fees so that's what's interesting about using other payment options it's not just I'm trying to get away with giving Apple less or no money but that's a big part of it but there's also legitimate reasons why you might want to do that
Niru Maheswaranathan writes, I recently stopped by an Apple store to repair a cracked iPhone screen.
Like any security conscious iOS user, I had stolen device protection turned on.
The technician asked me as part of the regular repair process to turn off Find My.
When I went to do this, however, stolen device protection kicked in and forced me to wait an hour to turn Find My off.
There wasn't anything the technician could do to help.
I ended up leaving, turning stolen device protection off, and then coming back to complete the repair.
I presume that Niru means that they went home or what have you.
Although it makes sense, I was still surprised that stolen device protection kicked in when turning off Find My.
Given how it can be tricky for folks to schedule time to make it to the Apple Store, it's worth keeping in mind that you might want to turn off stolen device protection at least an hour before your appointment.
That is interesting.
I get exactly why all this happened, but it's interesting nevertheless.
It totally makes sense.
You don't want someone to be able to turn off FindMine.
That's kind of an important feature, especially if your phone is stolen.
So yeah, remember when you put that delay in, that delay applies to you too.
Although it doesn't apply if you're in one of your safe locations.
So if you do it at home, maybe you don't have to wait an hour, so just do it at home before you leave for the Apple Store.
And I believe the upcoming new version of iOS, I think 17.4, they're going to have a setting where if you don't want to have safe locations, you can turn that off.
So it's up to you to decide how much inconvenience do you want in your life?
Yeah, and this is probably the kind of thing, you know, we were speculating when they introduced stolen device protection recently.
We were saying, like, why don't they just enable this by default for everyone?
And maybe this kind of thing is, you know, maybe this is part of the reason why that maybe they, they figure this would cause too many support headaches or whatever else.
Cause that's anytime you're looking at like why something in iOS is a little bit insecure, maybe for instance, why can you reset your Apple ID password with just your passcode to a phone, which is the whole root of this problem.
And the answer often to those questions is it turns out in real life, people forget this stuff all the time and they need support to help them through this problem all the time.
And,
And so that's probably one of the reasons why this is off by default.
Indeed.
Rene Schatzel writes in Europe, or at least in UK and Germany, the opticians in the store are usually equipped to measure your eyesight and essentially as part of the service of buying new glasses, they do just this beforehand for free.
They're specifically trained for that, though, as part of their apprenticeship.
Obviously, you can also go to the ophthalmologist to get a prescription if you want, but it's not obligatory.
Zeiss actually sells a rather smallish device that measures your eyesight automatically.
It takes about 10 seconds per eye.
Obviously, having one of those in the Apple Store for your Vision Pro fitting would provide a perfect surface experience.
We'll see what happens when they come across the pond.
So this is one data point lending credence to the idea that there is no actual medical reason for it to be as difficult as it is to deal with eye prescriptions here in the U.S.
But I'm still waiting for ophthalmologists or optometrists to tell me otherwise.
But right now it seems like in other countries you can just walk in, they'll measure your eyes, you get a prescription and you're done.
But in this country, Apple is a stickler for having a real prescription from a licensed optometrist or ophthalmologist before you can get your Vision Pro.
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We were talking before the show about how best to approach this.
And what we're talking about is the Apple European Union DMA, which is that Digital Markets Act compliance.
And Apple needs to be compliant with the Digital Markets Act by, I think, early March, if I'm not mistaken.
And late last week, they announced how they're going to do that.
And just to review, the Digital Markets Act is what the name kind of says.
In Europe, they had decided that the market for digital goods like the App Store and Google Store and everything,
or were insufficiently competitive.
There were a small number of companies with too much power.
There was stifling competition and innovation.
The EU decided they wanted to change that.
And so they passed the Digital Markets Act and they said big companies like Apple who have app stores need to comply with it.
And so this is this is Apple's response of saying, here's what we're going to do to comply with the DMA.
Indeed.
So I think what I'm going to try to do, and all three of us have agreed with each other, famous last words, to just let me plow through.
We'll see how it goes.
But what I'm going to try to do is John has done us off service and kind of summarized what Apple has said.
Now, this is different than I think reality, which we will get to, but I'm going to try to get through.
Here's what Apple says is going to happen and they're going to do, and then we'll pick it apart afterwards.
And I think the reason we're going through what Apple says is Apple has the way Apple presents this is also interesting.
Like their attempt to say, here's the deal.
Here's what we're doing.
The subcategories, they break it down into what each individual bullet point actually is.
And as we'll get to eventually, like the stuff that we actually care about and the stuff that is most relevant for the DMA is kind of hidden in this giant stew of stuff.
But they are actually making a lot of changes.
And so we're just to start, we'll go through what Apple says they're doing.
Alright, so without further ado, for iOS, this is only iOS, not iPad, not Vision, nothing else.
For iOS, they're saying that... And only in the EU.
Thank you, yes, and only in the EU.
There are going to be new options for distributing iOS apps on alternative app marketplaces.
So think of this as app stores not run by Apple, but they've understandably and I think reasonably used the term app marketplaces.
This includes APIs that enable developers to offer their iOS apps for download from alternative app marketplaces.
There's new frameworks and APIs for creating alternative app marketplaces on iOS.
It's so cumbersome.
I know they're not saying App Store because they trademarked App Store and they call theirs App Store, so I understand why.
My God, this is cumbersome.
It is.
So this enables marketplace developers to install apps and manage updates on behalf of other developers from their dedicated marketplace app.
There are new frameworks and APIs for alternative browser engines.
So this is instead of WebKit.
Let me back up even a step further.
There are other quote-unquote web browsers on iOS today.
But in order to actually convert HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and what have you into something that you see on screen, you have to use the same rendering engine as Safari, which is called WebKit.
And now what Apple is saying in the future, in the EU on iOS, you'll be able to use browsers that legitimately use their own rendering engines.
What's the Chrome one?
I'm drawing a blank.
Blink.
So anyway, so you could have Chrome in the EU starting in March-ish.
you could have Chrome running its own Blink rendering engine in theory.
So new frameworks or APIs for alternative browser engines, interoperability that enables authorized developers to use browser engines other than WebKit for browser apps and apps with in-app browsing experiences.
New APIs to enable contactless payments in the EEA.
What is that?
European Economic Area.
Thank you.
There we go.
This includes new APIs enabling developers to use NFC technology in their banking wallet apps throughout the... Oh, that's right there.
I didn't read far enough.
European Economic Area.
So instead of using Apple Pay, you could use the same hardware to do some other payment scheme.
And by the way, as we go through these bullet points...
don't think that apple is doing any of these things out of the goodness of their heart every single one of them is some specific thing that's part of the dma so this one for example about the contactless payments uh people companies have been complaining in europe for ages that like apple essentially didn't allow access to like the nfc hardware and like direct access to the hardware that was in the phones to do contactless payments you had to use apple pay or whatever so this you know they said okay well we'll just pass a thing that says apple you can't stop people from doing that uh we want you to provide access to that and that's that's this
Same thing with the browser engines.
There are expanded default app controls.
This lets users select and manage an app marketplace and or contactless payment app as their defaults and settings and adds a new way to choose a default web browser.
Interoperability request form.
This, I think, is fascinating, but we're not going to talk about it right now.
Let's developers submit requests for interoperability with iPhone and iOS hardware and software features.
So you can ask Apple, hey, I would like to be able to do whatever, and they will inevitably deny you, I'm sure.
Safari user choice screen provides users additional ways to choose default web browser from a list of options.
And so this was, these were all the iOS changes, right?
This is a lot of changes.
Like, these are one bullet point.
Like, oh, alternative browser engines.
You might think that's just like a policy change.
Okay, developer, you can do a thing.
But it's not.
Like, if you click through on these things and look at the APIs they added, the browser kit engine,
It's extensive plumbing to essentially allow third parties to do what WebKit does on iOS, right?
These are non-trivial APIs that they are exposing and adding.
So this is actually a fairly large amount of work, especially since Apple seems to have wanted to do it
in the safest way possible so rather than just saying fine do whatever you want browser engines that would apple doesn't want to do that it would be less work for them but they don't want to do that so they said here's a new api same thing with like the marketplace kick that's like a new api for making third-party marketplaces these are big featureful new frameworks that are surely filled with bugs because they're 1.0 to comply with this
And all these iOS changes, I'm pretty sure every single one we read, all this is just EU only.
So this is a large amount of work for only a fraction of the planet.
Indeed.
Now there's App Store changes, which as far as I know are still only in the EU and still only for iOS.
But either way, App Store changes.
New options for using alternative payment service providers.
So within a developer's app to process payments for digital goods and services.
So hypothetically, you could use like Stripe or something like that while still being an app within the App Store.
There are new options for processing payments via link-out to purchase, where users can complete a transaction for digital goods and services on the developer's external web page.
Developers can include information in their app store apps to inform EU users of promotions, discounts, and other deals available outside of their app when presenting a link-out.
So this is very similar to what's going on in America, but with a little bit more features, it seems.
Analytics.
And this, I believe, is going to be applicable worldwide.
Actually, yes, it is.
So this is not just the EU.
Expanded Developer App Analytics provides developers with additional and enhanced metrics with more than 50 new reports from the iOS and App Store worldwide in areas like engagement, commerce, app usage, and more.
Additionally, there's a new user data portability API to request and transfer App Store account data lets developers of app marketplaces request user authorization to retrieve and import new data about their usage of the App Store.
Then things get really interesting.
Business terms.
Now we're back to EU only.
New business terms are available for apps in the EU to reflect the DMA's requirements for alternative distribution and payment processing.
Apple's also sharing new business terms for apps in the EU.
Developers have a choice to remain on Apple's existing terms or adopt new terms that reflect the new capabilities.
We're surely going to spend just a couple of minutes on that in a moment.
There are also terms for alternative distribution and payments in the EU.
There is reduced commission.
So iOS apps on the App Store will pay a reduced commission of either 10% for the vast majority of developers and for subscriptions after their first year, or 17% on transactions for digital goods and services, regardless of the payment processing system selected.
So they're just making it cheaper, is apparently what they're saying here anyway.
There's a payment processing fee.
iOS apps on the App Store can use the App Store's payment processing for an additional 3% fee.
So suddenly that 10, 17 has now become 13 and 20.
Developers can use a payment service provider within their app or link users to a website to process payments for no additional fee from Apple.
So if you want to use Stripe, you'll save 3%, which you'll presumably be giving to Stripe.
This is where it gets really dodgy and we're almost done.
We're doing a great job.
I'm proud of all three of us.
It's so hard.
It's so hard.
I'm very proud of you.
I'm not kidding.
I'm very proud of you.
Core technology fee.
For very high volume iOS apps distributed from the App Store and or in alternative app marketplaces, developers will pay 50 cents.
Is that true for euros?
Half a euro.
50 euro cents.
50 euro cents.
So half a euro.
Yeah.
For each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold under the new business terms for EU apps, Apple estimates that less than 1% of developers would pay a core technology fee on their EU apps.
Developers of alternative app marketplaces will pay the core technology fee for every first annual install of their app marketplace, including installs that occur before 1 million.
So for regular schmoes like the three of us, it starts on a million and one people or installs.
The million and first person is the first one you pay for.
Right.
Whereas for app marketplaces, it starts with one.
And there seems to be a lot of confusion, including with me, as to whether or not updates count as installs.
So we'll talk about that in a minute.
They do.
All right.
Before we get to the discussion, is there anything else in summary?
We have one more thing here, which is the marketplace requirements.
Okay.
Thank you.
That's what I was asking.
Okay.
So marketplace requirements.
To qualify for the marketplace entitlement, you must be enrolled in the Apple Developer Program as an organization incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the European Union, or have a subsidiary legal entity incorporated, domiciled, and or registered in the EU that's listed in App Store Connect.
Okay.
And there's other stuff.
Additionally, third-party marketplace apps will not be allowed in the App Store.
To install one, you'll need to go to the web.
Safari will be able to install the third-party marketplace app after you agree to a scare sheet.
And perhaps maybe third-party browsers, too, after they call the same system scare sheet.
Who knows?
But that's the story.
And very briefly, there is a fee calculator, which I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute, that helps you allegedly talk about or figure out how much you're going to pay.
So, yeah, so what we've what we've gotten done reading here is essentially a condensed summary of what Apple released.
And this happened like Thursday last week, you know, unfortunately, after we recorded.
And I can tell you that we were all discussing it amongst ourselves, all the Apple nerds and people with tech podcasts and websites and stuff.
uh and i was amazed at how difficult it was to understand and the fee calculator that uh casey just mentioned you're like oh it's hard to understand but whatever your questions are i'm sure you can just go to the fee calculator and click a bunch of buttons kind of like you do in aws to figure out okay but like what about in this scenario how much would i pay what about in this area how much would i pay and let me tell you the fee calculator does not answer almost any of those questions so
We got all this information, we tried to figure out what they meant, and it took, like, the entire community of, I think, pretty smart people who have been following Apple for decades, at least 24 hours to get a handle on this.
And so, like, you know...
If you just heard us read all that and you're like, well, wait, what does this mean?
So what's the deal?
Is this good?
Is this bad?
You can be forgiven for not being able to answer that question.
And I don't know if Apple is intentionally making it difficult to understand because that doesn't make sense to me.
We're going to figure it out.
We did, as we'll see in a second, figure out what the deal is.
I think it just did a really poor job of communicating it.
And that fee calculator is the thing that annoys me the most because...
The whole point of you putting that there is like, we know it's complicated, but if you have some scenario in your mind, just use this webpage and it will give you the answer.
And it absolutely does not.
You cannot answer tons of really good, important questions about the system using the fee calculator.
But thankfully, we all as a community figured it out.
Gruber had a great summary on his website, which we will link.
And I think it is probably the most condensed version of what...
What does all that mean?
And there's a lot of stuff in there that we went through.
It's like, okay, I kind of understand that, but it's not a big deal.
But in the middle there, where Casey was talking about business terms in the EU, that's the heart of it.
And that's what Gruber is summarizing here.
And I don't think Apple has made this artificially complicated and hard to understand.
What they're doing, first of all, is...
responding and attempting to comply with a very large piece of legislation.
The DMA is huge.
There are tons of provisions in it.
There's tons of little details they have to comply with.
And so their submission of how they're going to do this is kind of inherently going to be fairly complicated, just at all.
Even if they did it in the most generous way possible, it would still be fairly complicated.
But also, again,
This is Apple, and this is the App Store.
And it goes further than the App Store, of course.
And so they are only doing what they need to to comply with this and know more than that, for the most part.
And so if the law says you have to do this, this, and this, they're not going to make some general solution that's going to make it easier.
Yeah.
to explain they're going to say fine we're going to do exactly that that and that in the most minimal way possible so that's again why this is uh a lot there's a lot to digest here and they're going to make sure that they don't give away a cent more than they have to and so that's again why some of this is complicated but again i don't think it's artificially so
I think they just didn't do a good job communicating, though.
Because, like, go ahead.
Starting Gruber's summary.
Because Gruber's summary makes sense.
And you say, oh, that's what all that stuff you just read means.
Now I get it.
And this summary we have in here, and it's linked on his website, is longer than his original summary.
When he was, you know, working on this, it started off being 14 lines of text.
Like, 14 not complete lines.
14 bullet point lines of text.
It was less than a quarter of a page of text.
And Apple released pages upon pages upon pages of text, and all of us scratching our heads for an entire day trying to figure out what the heck they were talking about.
All right, so Gruber's summary.
Number one, these are your choices.
This is the business terms.
You're like, wait, but if I have an app, like, what's the deal?
I have an app in the EU.
What is the deal?
What are the choices?
And this is essentially the flowchart, the choose your own adventure.
So you want to sell an app in the EU.
Here are your choices.
Yeah.
Number one, you can stay in the App Store under the current pre-DMA rules exclusively.
Developers that take this option are not permitted to use any of the new business terms available in the EU, but new iOS platform options for the EU, such as alternative browser engines, are allowed because they are required to be allowed.
Again, none of the goodness of Apple's heart.
Right.
Okay.
well and just so that's that's choice number one choice number one is whatever the pill color that i always forget like take this pill and you'll stay in the matrix and nothing changes right it's like it's the easiest to understand option even though apple is doing all this stuff they are still saying hey all the stuff that we're doing if you don't understand it or don't want it or don't like it you can keep things exactly as they are which is the option that apple would prefer that you take
Indeed.
So that's number one.
So, sub-bullet number one.
After opting into the new EU rules, developers can choose to remain in the App Store and use Apple's App Store payment system at 20% and 13% commission plus the core technology fee paid to Apple automatically.
Or they can use a custom in-app payment system like Stripe at 17% and 10%, so that's a decrease of 3% both ways, percent commission, and the CTF is paid, the core technology fee is paid to Apple by hand, if you will.
Or they can use external links from inside apps to the web for payments and subscriptions, which is still 17% or 10%, and they still have to pay the core technology fee to Apple by hand.
The latter two options, using your own payment system or linking out to the web, those are similar to the things that happened in the U.S.
last week.
The announced last week external payment link entitlement policy regarding the developer's obligation to track these payments, report sales to Apple monthly, and submit to audits by Apple to ensure compliance.
And so this was like, so this is the fork that we took in the road was keep everything the same as they are.
And then the other the other choice, the other major fork you can take is you get the new rules.
Now, once you have the new rules, what Casey just read is, OK, OK, so you've got the new rules.
Next choice is.
Under the new EU rules, do you want to still be in the App Store?
And that's what he read here.
It's like, okay, if you're still in the App Store, you have a choice.
Stay in the App Store, use Apple stuff.
Stay in the App Store as you use a different payment process.
Stay in the App Store to just link out to a payment thing.
Those are the rules.
And notice, if you choose the new EU rules and you want to stay in the App Store...
Every option under staying in the app store under the new EU rules is different than if you had not chosen the new EU rules and stayed under the app store.
Right.
So if you're like, well, I've just decided I'm going to stay in the app store.
That's not your top level choice.
Your top level choice is keep everything the same as it was or take these new EU rules.
And if you take the new year rules, you can still be in the app store.
But the deal is different.
In particular, as Rupert notes, every single one of the options under the new rules adds the core technology fee.
to all the different things you can do.
And of course, you have new options because under the EU rules, if you stay in the app store, you can do things like use an entirely different payment processor.
And there's also a couple of asterisks on that too.
Like for instance, if you choose to opt into the new EU rules for an app, you can never change back for that app.
So that's a big thing.
That's down at the bottom of the thing.
So anyway, that was if you take new EU rules, you stay in the app store.
Now it's you take the new EU rules and what's the next option, Casey?
So then you can distribute apps in one or more third-party marketplaces.
You have no option to use the Apple App Store payment processing because the apps aren't coming from the App Store.
The only money due to Apple is the core technology fee.
There's no commission percentage on in-app transactions or links to the web.
You're on your own.
It's the Wild West.
You just got to pay us a half euro for the million and first and so on user and install and so on and so forth.
Which actually, this is actually, I think, pretty surprising.
So yes, if you totally bail out of the app store, and if you are only distributing your app in a third-party app store, I'm not going to say app marketplaces, so third-party app store, then you only pay the core technology fee.
You only pay that half euro per user after a million.
So that's actually...
I think, surprisingly reasonable in context of, like, what Apple even would consider doing.
I would have guessed that they would have done that whole, like, you know, submit to us your financial reports and pay us a commission kind of thing on this.
I don't think that was allowed in the text of the DMA, essentially.
Probably not.
I think that they were forced to – that's kind of – we'll talk about it in a little bit.
That's kind of the reason the CDF exists is I think the option that you're describing –
Even Apple didn't think they could pretend that that's complying.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So, uh, that's basically the story.
And now you forgot the exclusivity part.
Options one, option one or two are exclusive.
Options one and two being, do you want to stay in the app store and do everything the same the way it is now?
Or do you want to opt into the new EU rules?
And that's what Marco was talking about before.
Uh,
Once you make that choice, it's irrevocable.
Apple says developers who adopt the new business terms at any time will not be able to switch back to Apple's existing business terms through their EU apps.
So say you opt into the new EU rules and you're like, oh, turns out it was a mistake.
Well, we don't like this new system.
We want to go back.
Apple says, nope.
It's a one-way door.
If you decide you want to use the new EU rules, whether you're under the new EU rules in the App Store or whether you're under the new EU rules outside the App Store, there's no going back.
That is that.
So I don't know.
When I first read all this, it seemed super reasonable to me, surprisingly reasonable to me.
And then some people started doing the mathematics on... Wait, this is Europe.
I believe you mean the maths.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Yes, this is the EU after all.
So they did the maths.
Actually, I guess the UK is not in the EU anymore, so you can say whatever you want.
I don't know if they say maths as any other countries.
See, this is why I said mathematics, you big jerk.
Should have let it slide.
Go ahead.
Actually, there's one more minor point of the things that Apple described.
This is the flowchart that Apple didn't provide that I have drawn here in the notes.
isn't really in Gruber summary, but it's implied by Gruber summary, and there's a little bit more to know here.
What is the flow?
What is the process diagram?
Like you got all these rules, you can opt into this rule, opt into that rule, but say you are a developer, regardless of which path you chose on this little choose your own adventure, option one, option two, U rules, not U rules, app store, not app store, whatever.
How does this all work?
And the way it works if you just have an app is you're a developer and you have an app,
use everybody no matter what rule you choose you take your app and you send it to apple but you don't send it directly to the people who review apps right now for the app store instead you send it to this new process which i don't know what apple calls it um i just call the apple review in this diagram but this is a a new process that is a very tiny subset of app review um
Apple, you will send your app to Apple, presumably through Xcode, and Apple will look at your app and they will do a bunch of checks.
And this is the list from Apple for the checks.
They're calling it notarization for iOS.
Although I feel like it's a little bit more than that because they've used it.
Yes.
Anyway.
They will check for accuracy apps must accurately represent the developer capabilities and cost to users Functionalities binaries must be reviewable free from serious bugs and crashes blah blah blah like you know Does it work?
The apps cannot manipulate software or hardware in ways that negatively impact the user experience
Safety, apps cannot promote physical harm of the user or public.
Security, apps cannot enable distribution of malware or suspicious unwanted software that cannot download executable code, read outside the container or direct users to lower the security of their system or device.
Apps must also provide transparency to allow user consent to enable any party to access the system or device or reconfigure the system or software.
And privacy, apps cannot collect transmit or transmit private sensitive data without a user's knowledge in a manner contrary to the stated purpose of the software, right?
and it kind of implied in all this is you can't use private apis right so this is way less than app you know the app store review this is like just does your app work is it not a super obvious scam does it not use private apis every single app under these rules goes through this phase this very limited very strict phase importantly
They don't care what's in your app.
Is your app filled with porn?
Is it a Nintendo emulator?
Does it have pictures of Star Wars characters all over it that you didn't license?
This phase does not care.
It just wants to know, does it crash?
Does it run?
Does it do what it say it does?
Does it not use private APIs, which I think is a pretty big one?
Does it not steal people's data?
Does it not direct them to lower the security of their iPhone?
That's all they're checking for.
Every single app will go through this, presumably the ones that go to the App Store as well, because the app review is doing this stuff anyway.
Then after you clear that phase, then there's a fork in the road and says, OK, well, were you submitting this to the App Store or were you submitting this to a third party marketplace?
And if you submitted to a third party marketplace, the third party marketplace receives the apps that are in it from Apple.
developers don't submit their apps directly to a third-party marketplace and we'll get to like you know who would make a third-party marketplace and why it still goes through apple so if you're making a third-party marketplace you're getting a funnel of app submissions from apple because by the time you get them apple has done all these checks to make sure it's not super duper terrible so if you're wondering like this takes apple out of the equation and now they're no longer a bottleneck for there's still everything still has to go through apple
Yeah, which is interesting.
I mean, this, again, is not how I would have guessed this would be done.
And again, part of this, probably a big part of this, is Apple still wants to have some form of app review.
Obviously, the DMA and whatever related legislation there might be in Europe, the DMA is going to limit what they can review and what they can prohibit in this way.
So yes, they're allowed to interfere, basically, with third-party app stores and say...
Well, you still can't have a virus in there, or you still can't have stuff that's misleading users.
But they can't say things like you can't have porn or, as John was saying, certain copyright issues.
And I was thinking, too, all of the cryptocurrency scam apps and scam companies, because they're all scams.
I was going to say, cryptocurrency scam, that's redundant, isn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, I think a lot of crypto stuff would go through because it doesn't technically violate any of these things, even though like that's what I'm saying.
Like that's that's somebody else who might want to use this because like, you know, Apple's had a lot of rules around certain types of content that they found either objectionable or just too dangerous or messy to to deal with things like porn, you know, crypto stuff or real money gambling.
Yeah, real money gambling, certain political apps.
There are certain things that Apple just has not allowed in the App Store, just kind of content-based decisions.
And it seems like under the DMA, through the third-party marketplace process, they don't seem like they're either allowed or even interested in policing that kind of thing, because it's kind of out of their hands at that point.
But they are allowed to...
Yeah, that's written right into the DMA.
The DMA essentially has language that says...
you're you know just because we're telling you you have to have third-party app stores it doesn't mean you you uh you can't check for like very basic you know there's a whole bunch of language i think it might be lower than it so we'll get to eventually it's like to ensure the integrity of the platform like you don't want someone to download an app that's going to fry their phone or steal all their data like that is written into the because remember this is the eu the same uh body that uh added all those annoying cookie restrictions like so they they all they're on board with trying to do these safety things and they explicitly say apple's ought to do it
Um, and at the top, when I said like, what is the DMA it's, you know, it's the European union thinking there's insufficient competition in the market for digital goods and apps in the app store.
And they think there should be more of it.
I think that is the, uh, when looking at this giant list of rules before you get into the nitty gritty details, it's worth considering, uh, does the DMA accomplish that goal?
Assuming what Apple has, you know, put forward here is compliant, which remains to be seen.
Um,
i think in one way it does and we were just touching on that with this with this uh the apple review process that they do that minimal number of checks right because uh previously before the dma there were certain kinds of apps that you just could not get on your iphone unless you were like a developer did some weird enterprise thing or whatever right because apple didn't want them right under the dma even under apple's rules uh
There are kinds of apps that can now get on your phone through a regular third-party app store that couldn't get there before.
Whether that's porn apps or gambling apps or Nintendo emulators or just, you know, there's so many kinds of apps that Apple just doesn't want.
Oh, that's too much like an Apple app.
I don't like that because it looks too much like Springboard.
The number of different kinds of apps that...
Apple does not allow on the App Store is vast.
You might not know about them or think about them because they don't get through, right?
And if you don't see some story about it, you don't know that someone was thinking of making an app like X and it got rejected for some reason that doesn't make any sense to you.
All we know is there are apps that previously couldn't get through that under this new plan will be able to.
So that is one thing the DMA was trying to do, which is like, hey, it seems unfair that Apple gets to decide what kinds of apps are even allowed.
And it's not just porn, bad things like that.
It's like I said, it's apps that like Apple decides, you know, have a picture of an iPhone in them or mention iOS or look too much like Springboard or like or look too much like an app store or just so many things that Apple doesn't allow.
Yeah.
It's all just going to be like crypto farts and copyright infringement.
I mean, there's going to be a lot of that.
But anyway, this provides that.
The second thing of like, okay, we don't think there's enough competition in the marketplace.
The complaint that we often talk about in the show is developers feel like
Apple takes too big of a cut of the money that is made through the App Store.
They feel like Apple deserves maybe some, but they don't think the amount that they're giving to Apple seems like too much for what they're getting in return.
And we've discussed this a million times, whether they're right or wrong about that.
That's how they feel.
And that is the second leg of this thing.
Does the DMA and these rules complying with it
allow address that in any way and i think to spoil my opinion that we'll get into the denigrated details of i think that it doesn't i think that apple has cleverly designed these rules such that it is not a clear-cut financial win to do this and if that was one of the goals of like there should be a way where you can get apps on the iphone and pay apple a lot less money
I don't think overall this provides that.
In some cases, yes.
In some cases, massively no.
And we'll talk about who's going to even run a third-party marketplace because if nobody runs a third-party marketplace, this is moot, right, for both of these things.
And I think Apple has done a pretty good job of making sure that financially speaking, it's not a clear when to go with the EU rules.
And that, I think, is the...
biggest knock against their compliance because you can say okay well they are allowing apps that they weren't allowed before right you can see a path for them to get through to users i see that happening here but that is only one complaint that people had one aspect of competition the other aspect is apple's taking too much money and apple's like
No matter what you do, no matter where you go, you will always be paying us the same amount of money you are now or more.
And no matter what laws you pass, we're smarter than you.
And we will make sure that we get the same amount of money we're getting now or more.
And that, I think, is the absolute worst part of this thing.
And you may be reading and you say, what do you mean?
Their cuts are lower.
And yeah, the CTF thing, but it's only over a million.
How are they paying more money?
Yeah.
And, you know, in the week that this story hasn't been going on, people have been starting to do the math.
And in some cases, yeah, you can make more money.
In other cases, you will be paying Apple literally billions of dollars a year for the privilege of distributing a free app.
Yeah, that I think is... What I think will ultimately happen with this is not a lot.
Because...
Again, Apple, as John said, Apple's very good at making sure they keep making money.
They are very good at that.
The same amount of money or more.
Exactly.
There might be certain apps where that won't be the case for, where they can figure out if they can squeeze a bit more money out by doing these new terms.
Speaking of that, that's the one loophole that Apple left here.
It's not really a loophole, but I think it's weird and perverse and it's strange to me that Apple didn't think of it.
If you look at the rules, Gruber's rules, not the fee calculator, it may occur to you
that if you sell a paid upfront app through a third-party app store, you pay Apple nothing.
You also earn nothing.
Right.
That Apple is so sure that paid upfront apps are just a dud, like a relic of the past that no one will ever do, that they left it open.
So say you do a paid upfront app that costs $20.
That 50% CTF fee, you're like, pfft.
I'm making $20 pure profit, minus 3% for my payment processor, minus 50 cents for Apple.
Who cares?
And Apple's... Minus whatever the third-party app marketplace is going to charge you, which is not nothing.
Right.
But, like, whatever.
Like, the whole point of the third-party ad marketplace is, like, in theory, they'd be competitive with Apple or whatever.
But, like... But that's a loophole.
And the reason that's there, I have to assume, is, like Marco said, nobody buys paid-up-front apps.
And I do wonder if this...
is compliant and goes through in any way if this will be like a perverse incentive to say everything old is new again pay up front apps for ten dollars and you'd be like why why is this happening it's like well the rules that apple laid out allow that to be a way to safely make money it always has been a way to safely make money just no one ever wants to do it that's why it has essentially become
almost extinct on the app store, not extinct.
I mean, I know there are apps that are out there that do that, but it is so much less popular than it was in the beginning.
Everything is, you know, free within app purchase.
And the CTF makes free within app purchase a potentially bankrupting thing.
It's just to be clear why everyone is against the CTF.
For the CTF, after your million and first user, you pay 50 cents for every, you know, install per year, no matter what that person does with your app.
And if your app is free to download and that person never makes a purchase, you're paying 50% for them year after year.
If they leave it on their home screen,
And if you do more than one software update per year, that update counts it as an install.
And you are just paying 50 euro cents per user per install year after year after year.
So you better hope the value of your customer is more than 50 cents per year.
And if you have a free app,
where you don't sell anything or you have a free app with a conversion rate of in-app purchase that is too low to provide that, you are just bleeding money left and right.
So all these big companies that have hundreds of millions of customers in the EU for a free app, that adds up to millions or billions of dollars.
which may be worth it for these big, rich companies.
But if you are a small developer and you have a, you know, say your widget Smith and your app goes viral and millions of people download your app and you get like a 1% conversion rate and you're like, oh, now I have to, is that 1% conversion rate equal average out to 50 euro cents per user?
Because if it doesn't, I am now in the red for my incredibly successful app.
which is just such a poison pill.
And I'm not the first to use the term poison pill, but it is such a poison pill.
And on the one side, you got to give Apple credit.
Like it's slimy, but they made it work and they presented it in a reasonably not slimy way.
And so far as it seemed like a good deal for us, I guess it's even more slimy, right?
But it seemed like a good deal at first.
And then the more you eat into it, the more you're like, oh, oh, oh.
If I have a more than a million users, surely I'm making money.
It's like,
right by the way that's not users that's installs like how many apps do you have on your phone that you install exactly not install it's like if someone installed it and left it on their home screen or or just or if it installed directly to the app library like you'll never see it again have like i'm just thinking like on my own phone i probably have over a hundred apps on there that i installed at some point in the past and don't actively use
and auto updates is on by default every year again if those developers release at least one update per year which let's be honest if your app is actively maintained you're releasing at least one update per year every year you're you're costing that person 50 euro cents year after year and you never use their app you're never going to buy anything in it it was a free download like that the current model of the app store or the popular apps are free to download and they have in-app purchase it's
That model, the CTF makes that model incredibly dangerous or known incredibly costly for the big apps, Facebook, Spotify, all these apps that are free to download and have a free way to use them.
And they are distributed in the millions.
That's going to cost those companies so much money if they want to be a third-party app store.
And one of the things I'm not entirely clear about is, let's say Facebook decides they want to accept the EU rules
And distribute to a third-party marketplace and pay 50% per install.
Facebook can eat that cost because they have, you know, they'll pay $500 million per year every year to Apple.
It's, you know, whatever.
They'll do it because in exchange they get more information about the user or they own the customer or whatever they want to do.
But if they do that, do they have to remove Facebook from the regular app store?
We already know they can't go back to the old rules.
Can they have the app in both places?
Do they have to start a new subsidiary to do this to isolate the actual meta from this thing?
And in that case, could they not use the Facebook?
Is there just like a new like Facebook EU app?
Like, you know.
Yeah, like, or can they use the Facebook name?
Like, can you have all these people are talking about like, well, I'll just make a new legal entity to do this.
So I don't have to worry about it.
Or is Apple going to frown upon that?
This gets back to the whole idea that Apple is the bottleneck for all this stuff.
And although they've said they're not going to stop certain kinds of apps, what they might stop is, oh, I can see that you incorporated a new legal entity to try to skirt our rules about you not being able to, you know, have your cake and eat it too.
So remains to be seen if that will work.
Also, as I've talked about in the past, before we knew what Apple was going to do here, I've mentioned how there was this kind of doomsday scenario I really hoped wouldn't happen as a developer, which is I was really hoping that Facebook wouldn't say, you know what, once we have third-party app stores or sideloading, I was thinking Facebook would say, all right, we're going to pull our apps from the app store.
you know, these apps that have billions of users around the world that everyone has to have on their phone.
You know, the actual Facebook app, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, like these are like their core apps that have just billions of users.
And I was afraid Facebook would say, all right, we're going to make our own app store.
Our apps will be exclusive to our app store.
Therefore, everybody will install our app store.
And then all of a sudden you have a very, very powerful third-party app store that would start interfering with the market in ways that would kind of force me as a developer probably to play ball with them.
So that was my dooday scenario.
I really didn't want that to happen.
it seems like the way Apple has one of this.
So first of all, I can strongly recommend speaking of Casey saying poison pill, the episode of upgrade that came out a couple of days ago, which I believe was titled poison pill.
Jason went through a lot of these details on there and there were some details that he had that I didn't know.
So for instance, on this point on the third party app store point,
What Jason reported was that there was a clause in here, which I haven't had time to verify, but there's a clause that if you run a third-party app store, you can't just run it for your own company's apps, which is a pretty huge clause.
So what that means is Facebook can't run their own app store that just has their app store.
Now, I have no doubt...
If Facebook is going to do something, do a move here, I have no doubt that they could do something.
What maybe a lot of non-developers might not know is that Facebook is a huge source of app install ads.
Many apps that get installed on many phones across the world get installed through Facebook ads in some form.
Facebook would have a pretty strong incentive to build some kind of integrated system where you can have – you pay Facebook to advertise your app.
Facebook hosts your app or through the third-party marketplace system here.
Facebook then can directly install your app directly from a user tapping an ad or whatever else.
So there are reasons why Facebook might want to build like a larger store system here.
Fortunately for my goal of having that not happen, I think the core technology fee will mostly kill that because the economics of it are so rough.
Because first of all, the store itself, if you make a third-party app store, that is an app that pays the CTF on every install, even below a million.
And how much money does your third-party app store make?
So you have to make 50% per installed instance of your app store for every single user who has it.
I love that none of us know what 50 euro cents are called.
We just keep saying different things.
We'll just say half euro, I guess.
When we say 50 cents, it's fine.
But it's not 50 cents.
It's 50 euro cents.
Do they call it that?
Probably not.
I don't know, but that's what I'm calling it.
Anyway, so suppose Facebook did this.
They're going to pay 50 euro cents.
Euro cents, it's fine.
They're going to pay a half euro for every installation of the Facebook App Store.
Then they're also, because they have so many users, they're also going to be way past a million.
So they have a half euro for the App Store app itself.
Then another half euro for each of their installed apps on everyone's phone.
That's going to add up to quite a bit.
And all of this...
would only be usable in the EU.
So it's not that they could do this worldwide and pull their apps from all of the app store stuff.
They would do all this and jump through all these hoops and pay all these fees only for something that works in the EU.
So that's like, I can't imagine...
This is going to be used by pretty much anybody huge.
The big tech companies, the big worldwide tech companies, I can't really see doing this.
What I foresee happening here is the EU will have a couple of third-party app stores that are going to be filled mostly with porn and crypto and stuff like that that is just not allowed in the regular app store.
The economics of it won't be that beneficial to almost anyone except Apple.
And that'll be fine.
And I don't even know if those app stars will be sustainable, though.
Like, I'm trying to think of who's... Like, we asked about who's going to run the third... Who's going to use that linking, third-party linking payment thing we talked about before the DMA.
And it was, like, the only benefit was ownership to the customer and some flexibility there.
But this one's even worse because, like...
Lots of people may think, I want to run a third-party app store in the EU.
But then you look at what's involved.
First of all, you need a million euro line of credit, which is no problem for any big company.
But if you're just an individual user who thinks you want to have your own app store, that's an immediate barrier to entry.
And then what you just said before, Margaret, like Apple's rules say, you can't just have an app store and like, okay, but the only apps allowed on the app store are my apps.
You can't do that.
You essentially have to make an app store that allows submissions from anybody who wants to submit.
Now, I'm sure there are loopholes in there because you could say, OK, well, I'll be just like the Apple app store and I'll allow submissions from anybody.
But have you seen my set of rules?
It's even more Byzantine than the real app store.
And I can reject things for any reason because I decide that you've included a rectangle that is shaped like my grandma's house and up.
There's clause 13.3.1.
If any rectangle is shaped like your grandma's house, I'm rejecting your app.
Like, I don't think Apple can police the rules that each app store provides.
But you can't say, like, from day one, sorry, we're not accepting submissions.
You have to accept and process a submission.
So now you are...
Opening the doors to accept and process submissions, even if you're rejecting them based on lots of stuff.
So if you think you're like an individual developers who goes around a store, are you ready to accept and review app submissions?
Maybe no one will submit to you.
Maybe a million people will submit to you.
Now you're on the hook to do a lot of complicated stuff.
And of course, you have to pay 50 euro cents for every single person who installs your app.
And then you have to decide...
how much of a cut am I going to take?
Am I going to take 30% like Apple does?
Am I gonna demand 70%?
Am I gonna demand 1%?
Like what are the rules of your app store?
Oh, now you have to hold all the accounting for dealing with those rules.
And are you gonna have your own payment processing as part of like, building a third party app store, a third party marketplace in Apple's parlance is non-trivial and it's very expensive
to have one at all.
So it eliminates a lot of people from doing it, right?
And then if you want your app store to be attractive, I feel like the whole point of this is you have to offer something better than what the Apple's app store does.
Because otherwise, why would people go to you?
Maybe the better thing is, hey, I'll let you have porn apps, right?
But presumably one of the better things is I'll take less money than Apple.
That's the whole point of one big aspect of the competition.
If you have third-party app stores, A, they'll allow apps that Apple wouldn't and B, they'll take less money from you.
And so now you have to do that.
So now you're already in a financially disadvantageous situation.
You're following the rules set by Apple who runs their own app store and they set the rules up so that they know it's gonna be really hard for you to compete with them, but you have to compete with them.
Otherwise your store isn't attractive at all.
Good luck making money there.
And that's why, you know, the only people this probably makes sense for are companies that can eat this.
Like, you know, Facebook will say, all right, so we're going to pay half a billion dollars to Apple every year in perpetuity to have our own app store.
But it's worth it to us because.
we have those click-through ads and now we can track who bought the thing or it's more important for us to own the customer.
They have some strategic reason where it makes sense.
But the reason is not, boy, we're going to make so much money off this meta app store in the EU.
Directly, you're probably not.
It's probably going to be a cost center and you're going to make it up in other parts of your business and it's strategic to you.
And it's still not entirely clear to me whether if Meta did that, whether they could no longer have any of their apps in the plain old app store in the EU.
I don't think that's the case.
I think they're allowed to have both, but they might have to be separate apps.
But they have to pay the CTF on the ones that are in the plain app store because once they accept the EU rules, this is another thing in case it wasn't clear from before.
Once you accept the EU rules, even your apps that are in the Apple app store are subject to the core technology fee.
Oh, wait a minute.
I don't think I knew.
So it isn't per app?
Well, basically, if you have an app in the app store and you accept the EU rules, you pay the CTF.
Oh, well, let's clarify that.
It's right up here.
So, you know, option number two, you accept the EU rules and you remain in the app store.
All the options have CTF.
Oh, yeah.
No, I'm saying like, like, could Facebook have the Facebook app for the rest of the world that stays the same, but then Facebook EU over here?
Oh, yeah.
This is just within the I'm saying within the EU.
Could you have the you're you're you're living in the EU and you launch the Apple App Store.
You see the Facebook app.
You're living in the EU and you launch the Meta App Store.
You see the Facebook app.
Can the Facebook app be in both places as viewed by somebody in the EU?
No, I believe it has to be a different – I think it has to be a different bundle ID even, but we'll see.
And that's – yeah, so what I expect to happen here – and by the way, too, like your breakdown of the economics of the third-party app store is like two points on that.
First of all, the CTF kills those economics.
So for everybody, for the app store owner itself and for each individual developer, like if I wanted to submit my app to a third-party app store in the EU –
First of all, again, I know they're going to charge me something, because the only reason people want to run app stores is to make the same cut themselves.
Why do you think Epic is pushing so hard against Apple?
Epic runs their own game store, and they take a percentage of all the sales in it.
So, of course...
They just want it for themselves.
Well, it's not that they want the cut of other people.
They just don't want to have to pay Apple.
So, for example, when Apple distributes its own apps through the App Store, it doesn't pay itself 30%.
Or if it did, it doesn't make any sense, right?
That's why the idea of an Epic App Store that only sells Epic Apps...
Epic loves that because, like, sure, we'll pay ourselves 90%.
We'll pay ourselves 100%.
Like, it doesn't matter.
They're their own apps.
It's their own company, and that's why Apple has in the rules.
Oh, so you want to have an app store?
You can't just have your own apps in there, essentially as a way to avoid paying anything because, like, we run the app store, so we don't have to pay ourselves.
That's the advantage that Apple has.
They run the app store.
They don't have to pay 30% of all their, you know, so...
Apple has made it so that that is not an attractive thing to do.
Like, no, you have to accept submissions.
And you're like, do I really want to run an app store to deal with other people's apps?
I don't want other people's apps.
I just want to pay less.
And then if you just want to pay less, you may be out there saying, okay, I'm not going to run my own app store.
I'll just wait to see the sea of third-party app stores that pop up and I'll pick the one that has the lowest rate.
And what we're trying to say is there's not going to be a sea of third-party app stores because running a third-party app store is not a great deal.
And if any do exist...
they're probably going to be similar or worse deals than Apple for everybody involved, which I feel like is not in the spirit of the DMA, which is trying to increase competition.
Again, the only thing I feel like the DMA is successfully accomplishing, if this is deemed to be compliant, is apps that you couldn't get before now you can get in the EU.
Everything else is just such a mess that it is not...
helping anybody yeah that's that's the key is like because even again as a developer like why would i submit my app to a third-party app store because again like that that means i'm going to start eating the ctf for my app that's you know that's that ruins economics forever and ever yeah it ruins economics in in the eu for me because it's a it's a free app you can't change back
Yeah, so the economics of it are terrible.
The only reason, you're right, the only reason is if my app type or business model or whatever, if something inherent about my app is just not allowed in Apple's app store.
And you somehow think you can get 50 cents of value per customer per year, more than 50% of value per customer per year, because you have to be pretty confident.
Plus whatever you're paying the app store.
Yeah, you have to be pretty confident that you can do that, or you're just so confident that you're never going to be above a million users or whatever.
Yeah, so that's why I think Apple has crafted this ingeniously so that no one will use it, basically.
It's going to be a very specialized thing that almost no one's going to use, and you're not going to hear about it.
Because the other thing, too, is suppose somebody makes a third-party app store.
They jump through the hoops.
They actually create one.
Then they actually get developers to put their apps in it and everyone somehow pays for the CTF and everything else going along with this.
You still have no users for that app store.
How does that get off the ground?
And the more users you get, it's 50 cents for every single one of those users starting from user number one.
So your idea of like, I'm running a third-party app store.
I need every single person on earth to install my app.
Oh, no, I don't.
I really don't want that.
Yeah, exactly.
The economics of it make no sense for any party involved except Apple.
Apple's going to keep making their money, of course.
And no developer, again, barring apps that are just not allowed, no developer would or should enter this agreement.
And no one's going to want to run the stores either.
I do think it is significant that Apple, everything still goes through Apple, even though what they've said they're going to do is, you know, like, okay, well, they said they'll essentially allow things through except for safety or whatever.
The fact that there is a decision point, the fact that everything still flows through Apple opens the door to so much abuse.
of apple just deciding oh we're not sure when we're going to get to that app we're really backed up right now oh yeah we found we found something we think is a safety concern like you know the spirit of the dma the idea that there shouldn't be this small number of companies with such outsized control apple still has all that control they're just saying we won't use it in the same way as we did before we'll only do the things that you allow in the dma we're just checking for safety and stuff and
Sometimes you might get a little backed up and, oh, we might have a concern.
Because what's the recourse?
If Apple rejects it at that app review phase before it gets to the third-party app store, Apple's going to be like, oh, we thought there was a safety concern or it falls under this letter of the thing.
How long does it take to get that resolved?
What is the mechanism to get that resolved?
It is...
Like you're not cutting out of Apple out of this.
You're just basically scolding them and saying, no, you let through more apps than you did before.
Okay, I guess we will.
And if we don't, something will happen.
And that's speaking of all of this, like, does this comply?
We keep referring to that.
this is the somewhat delicious irony although not so delicious if it turns out that they're compliant uh apple has to submit this and say okay we saw your dma here's what we're going to do to comply with it and apple did all this development and made all these frameworks and wrote up all this documentation and did all this stuff uh but apple doesn't know whether the thing they're proposing is actually going to be deemed compliant they only find that out after submitting it which is exactly how every developer feels
Yeah.
In the risk section on the Kickstarter page, their number one risk, I believe, is we don't know if Apple will allow this on the App Store.
That is everybody's number one risk.
How many people just choose not to develop an application because they were afraid that Apple won't accept it?
And is there a way to get pre-clearance from Apple?
Can you talk to Apple and say, hey, before we spend a year and millions of dollars developing this app, can you just tell us whether you'll accept it on the App Store?
And Apple's answer is develop it, submit it to us, and we'll see.
And that's kind of the EU's thing here, too.
It's like, here's the rules.
Comply with them and submit to us, and we'll tell you whether you complied or not.
I don't know what the consequences are if they're not complying.
Do they just send it back to Apple and they keep going back and forth?
But anyway, Apple is in the same situation as developers.
They're not sure if this is going to comply.
If the EU says this does comply, I think they're not doing a good job because...
I feel like this does not comply with the spirit of what the DMA is trying to accomplish in the way that it does.
But if it doesn't comply, I don't know what the rest of the process is.
But I do enjoy the fact that Apple is in the same situation as we are.
Of course, the difference is that they have a whole jillion dollars and we don't.
Indeed.
Indeed.
Honestly, because I really don't want third-party app stores or sideloading on iOS for lots of reasons, I'm actually on one level kind of glad that Apple has found a way to cheat their way into this so that they maintain all the control.
Some of the things I was worried about with, for instance, Facebook having less controlled access to the hardware and software on so many people's phones...
The way Apple has wedged themselves into this kind of like half app review process, even for apps that do this, I think that's good to try to help prevent bad actors like Facebook from doing the bad things that they do.
In the DMA, it says that platform holders are allowed to do these minimum things to essentially protect the integrity of the platform.
I'm glad overall, I'm glad that Apple has found a way to seemingly still do a pretty thorough job of protecting the basics of the platform and user experience and security and things like that.
One kind of downside to this, though, is now I feel like they will be able to
keep their current anti-competitive behavior everywhere including in the eu and maybe even get worse get more severe at it because now they can point to this and say look if you don't like it we we gave you an escape hatch yeah if you don't like it try one of these third-party things oh there aren't any i don't know why that happened there aren't any except for the porn store
Exactly.
I mean, this is why regulation is so difficult.
Because, yeah, they identified a real problem.
I think the EU was right to look into this as a problem.
But the regulation they created has a lot of loophole potential, as evidenced by what Apple was able to do here.
And as a result, the customer outcome...
I don't think will be that much better, and in some ways it could get worse, because now they can even ramp up the abuses in their store that everybody will still be using.
So it's tough to get regulation right, and in this case, it's hard to point to this and call this a victory.
well we'll see we'll see if it's compliant because i pulled out some i was trying to look at the dma text to see if there's anything that is clearly not compliant and the dma tries in a wishy-washy kind of way to avoid a situation where someone complies with the letter but then essentially the the outcome is that no one would ever want to have a third-party marketplace for example so here's some text from the dma we'll put a link in the show notes to this exact passage the gatekeeper apple is the gatekeeper here because they run the app store in this example right
The gatekeeper shall apply fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory general conditions of access for business users to its software application stores, online search engines and online social networking services listed in the designated decision pursuant to blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
So they try to basically say, like, look, you can't just say, oh, you can have a third party app store.
But, you know, if you want to get a third party app store, you have to pay us 100 billion dollars.
Like that doesn't pass the DMA.
Right.
So a fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory conditions, blah, blah, blah.
The question is, are the financial terms set out by Apple fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory?
They're probably pretty much non-discriminatory, although you might say the million-dollar line of credit is slightly discriminatory, right?
But by carefully calibrating the terms to look more or less like the same deal as Apple, you could say, well, it's fair and reasonable because it's kind of the same deal that we have.
But if your goal with the DMA is to foster competition –
If the only way anyone can have an app store is to essentially match Apple's terms in terms of the finances, that's not an option.
Developers, it's like, I want to, you know, you want competition to say, hey, here's somebody offering to take less of my money than Apple.
I'm going to go with them.
And Apple set out the rules to say, yeah, it's going to be pretty much impossible for you to take less money than we do.
In fact, you'll probably have to take more.
But it's fair and reasonable because it's kind of like what we're doing.
Right.
It's not it's not a hundred billion dollars.
It's not like, you know, like, for example, to to have a third party app store, there is an entitlement you need to get.
And Apple gives that entitlement, presumably in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory manner.
And you just need a million euro line of credit and so on and so forth.
I think they probably passed this bar, but that's the fault of the DMA.
Again, if the goal of the DMA was let apps exist that couldn't exist before and allow there to be financial competition, allow people to compete by saying, we're going to give you a better deal than Apple.
That is the only form of financial competition that is very...
valid or reasonable is we're going to give you a better deal, better terms, different financial arrangement.
We'll take a smaller cut.
We'll have a different way that we make money from you.
Like that is competition.
And Apple is trying so hard to say we will not allow competition along that axis at all.
And I kind of blame the DMA.
If they decide this is compliant, then the DMA was very poorly written because it's not accomplishing its goal.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I read a blog post from, what was it, Steven Sanofsky, and it was very long.
But it made some interesting points, and we'll put a link in the show notes.
But some of the stuff that was said was, look, this is like in Marco since, you know, it's been so long since you've had a real job.
You probably don't remember this.
But if you go to a boss and you say, hey, I've got option A, and it sucks because of one, two, and three.
and I've got option B, and that sucks because of four, five, and six, you know, you're the boss.
What do you want me to do?
Which one of these do you want me to do?
And most bosses will say, oh, well, let's do option C, which eliminates bad thing one and two and bad thing five and six.
And no, that's not how this works.
And that's what the DMA is kind of requesting is, you know, I want something that's open, but it still needs to be super secure and you need to consider users' privacy.
well, that might be possible, but it's not easy.
And Sanofsky's post, in large part, was saying, look, I think this is a very American point of view, and I mostly share it, to be honest with you, but Stephen's point was, look,
this is kind of already a solved problem.
Apple is trading on, we have a very discriminant approach to doing things.
We don't allow everything in the store.
We are very upfront.
I mean, whether or not you agree with the terms, or if you think the terms are fair is I guess what I should say, they're very upfront about the terms.
And I don't think anyone can really debate that.
Apple has said from the beginning, these are the terms, this is how you play in our playground.
And that is the Apple way.
If you don't like those terms or you don't want to play in that playground, that's fine.
That's why Android exists.
And you can play in their playground.
And they counterbalance each other in the same way that Windows and macOS did years ago.
DMA applies to Android as well, obviously.
Yeah, yes, yes, yes.
But I mean just in terms of like the stereotypical open versus closed.
And I know it's much more complicated than that.
There's a lot of asterisks on that open.
There is.
But nevertheless, the idea is, look, it is comparatively easier to do the things that you want to do in Google world where you can sideload than it is in the Apple world where you can't sideload.
And it's just...
It's tough.
And Apple's kind of in everyone, but Apple's in a no-win scenario.
And so to quote from his blog post, in the over 60 pages of the DMA, there's a little mention of privacy seven times, security nine times, performance three times, reliability once, battery life none, or accessibility just three times.
So that is where Apple finds itself today.
It was told essentially to create a new iPhone release that is as good as your old one for your existing customers, but do all these things that run counter to every lesson and experience that you've had over decades.
Everything you've designed and architected, everything you promised customers you would deliver, that truly sucks.
I agree with him a little bit here in that the way the DMA written puts them in a difficult situation.
But two things on that.
One, the whole point is the EU decided that unlike the U.S., they decided we want there to be more competition.
We're going to force you to do it.
And it seems unfair to us, especially if you don't think there's a thing that, but they've already decided that.
So that whole idea of like, but like we are, it's already fine.
Like you can always pick Android.
The EU said, yeah, that's not fine with us, right?
So you can disagree with them, but they already decided that.
Once they have decided that and they've made the DMA, them trying to decide along what axis they'll allow competition
I almost wish they had reversed it, where right now, yeah, you can get new kinds of apps, which potentially induces all the problems that Marco doesn't want and all the points that Sanofsky is making of like, what about battery life performance reliability?
Like you're essentially compromising the iPhone platform by allowing other people to get their apps on it, apps that wouldn't fly on the app store that could make the iPhone a worse platform, right?
And the flip side of that is, okay, but what about the financial terms?
And I kind of wish they had said,
The financial terms are the more important thing to us.
Allow Apple to maintain similar level of control over, you know, better life performance, security, all that stuff or whatever.
But just structure it such that there is a way for competing app stores to exist that take a lower cut of the money.
Right.
Because I think the brand promise of the iPhone has nothing to do with how much developers pay.
Right.
That is not the brand promise of the iPhone.
It has entirely to do with the safety of the apps, how much you can trust them, all that things.
That level of trust does not require Apple to take any specific percentage from developers.
Right.
And when Steve Jobs rolled out the iPhone, he was like, we're just trying to bring the app store rather a year after the iPhone or whatever it was.
They're like, we're just trying to break even on the app store.
He actually said that on stage or something to that effect.
Do you think he believed it?
I'm guessing even he knew it was a profit center.
But either way, the whole point is that's not part of the brand promise.
That financial arrangement between Apple and developers, that specific cut, how much money Apple makes from it,
is not part of the brand promise or the user experience of the iPhone.
It is a background thing that is financially important to developers in Apple, but users don't even know that Apple doesn't make all the apps half the time.
That's not part of the promise.
Everything else is part of the promise.
What kind of apps are available?
How secure are they?
Has someone checked them for something?
Arguably, Apple has not been fulfilling that brand promise in the App Store itself with all the casino games for children and the scam apps.
That's a separate argument.
But you can imagine a different version of the DMA that...
essentially would make Sanofsky happy to say, we're not Apple, we're not going to force you to break the brand promise of your phone.
What we are going to force you to do is allow competition on the business terms that developers get.
And the DMA does not do that at all.
Instead, it says, we'll allow a bunch of porn and copyright violations, but don't worry, Apple, you'll still get your cut.
And that is not
to marco's point it's not satisfactory to anybody because even if you're in favor of third-party app stores you'd be like no not like that like we want like i want the iphone to be continue to be good i just want there to be financial competition about you know in in the marketplaces and that's not what the dma is doing and it's it's it's really sucky like sanofsky spent so long essentially being angry about the fact that microsoft was forced to make their operating system worse to satisfy the eu
And Apple is now being forced to make their platform worse to satisfy the EU.
But it's all because of this fight over Apple, like, you know, Apple and the EU saying, you know, it's so important to us that we continue to make money off the App Store.
It's like, it's not.
You make money off the phones.
Apple can break even, could actually literally break even on the App Store and still be making tons of money on the iPhone.
It is a profitable platform without any App Store income whatsoever.
But they will not give that up.
Yep.
I don't know.
I don't have too much to add.
I don't want to be... I feel like the spirit, to a degree, of what the EU is trying to do, make it better for their citizens...
I think that they come to it from a decent place.
But just like you said, John, I think the execution from the EU has been subpar or naive, maybe, that they're barking up the wrong trees.
I couldn't agree more with what you said about let's change the business agreements.
Let's leave the platform alone.
Yeah.
i don't know i don't know a lot of people maybe i'm living in a bubble but i don't know a lot of people that are like man all i want the world is to be able to use blink on my iphone like that's not a problem i feel like a lot of people have and i don't know it just this seems like a whole much much ado about nothing to me and i i it's just unnecessary in so many ways i kind of do like the browser engine stuff like that and um and by the way there's a point down lower that's
I don't think part of the DMA thing, but it's like, uh, it's, it's essentially a hedge to appease some other companies of them allowing like streaming games.
Like previously Apple had said, Hey, you can't put an app on the app store that when you launch it, it has a bunch of streaming games that you like sell or give access to or whatever.
Right.
And Apple's changing the rules around that for worldwide, not just the EU that now you can have a single app, uh,
And inside of that can be a whole library of streaming games, because before Apple said that's too much like an app store.
We wanted to allow that.
But now they're doing it specifically for streaming apps, mostly to satisfy Microsoft and other companies that they want on their side during all this stuff like that.
Stuff like allowing browser engines and allowing streaming games and other stuff like there are things that Apple could give on.
that I don't think will hurt Apple.
And they're just so, they drag their feet on it so much, right?
The browser engine thing, especially what they've done with BrowserKit, technically impressive because you may not be aware, but like to allow a different browser engine, Safari on iOS does things that iOS apps are not allowed to do.
spawning multiple processes having multiple threads doing all like they do all sorts of stuff with just the process architecture and what the app is doing in the background and how many things are running and are allowed to remain alive and not get killed off like to to implement all the various web standards that regular apps are not allowed to do and they're you know sandbox in the right way so they're not security holes whatever it's called browser engine kit
or whatever the thing is that allows third party engines is a complicated framework that allows third parties to implement a web rendering engine, quote unquote, the right way, the way Apple does it, the safe way.
I think that's great.
I think that's a thing they could have done at any time.
They just never had any motivation to do it until they were essentially forced to do it.
But things like that, I give a thumbs up.
That doesn't break the brand promise.
That preserves the brand promise because Apple's saying, we found a way to safely have browser engines on iOS, and you can do it too.
In fact, Blink is based on WebKit anyway, so it's not that different, right?
Stuff like that, I give a thumbs up.
The streaming game thing, it's like, Apple, just...
It's not, it's no skin off your back if they do that.
I don't, honestly, I don't, you know, it's like, let it happen.
Take your cut of it.
Like let, let it's not, that's again, not breaking the brand promise.
I don't think people are going to be confused.
Like, what is this?
A game store inside a game?
Like people will, people will figure it out.
It's like Roblox is allowed to do it because they have quote unquote experiences, not games.
Like no one is fooled.
Everyone can figure it out.
Stuff like that should have been happening forever.
And it getting tied up in all of this is,
basically like i don't know it's it's a happy accident it's a nice that they're being forced to do it but almost everything else having to do with this is unrelated to that and is like essentially asking to sanofsky's point apple to break their brand promise by making the iphone a more dangerous and worse platform uh in the hopes of providing a more competitive marketplace but don't worry apple's gonna make sure that doesn't happen
It's a lot.
We should also mention that the official release, like the very broad, I think it was like on the Apple homepage or whatever release about this, was the crankiest piece of PR or news release from a company that I have seen in a long time.
It was probably crankier.
That's true, but this was close, man.
This was angry.
I thought they did a pretty good job.
People, I mean, it could have been worse.
Because I think what they were saying was true.
They're like, look, we're being forced to do this.
We're doing it in the best way we can.
And all of their language was like...
here's how we're doing it to minimize the damage to our brand promise i know i keep saying brand promise it's a marketing term essentially saying the iphone it's a place where it's safe to install apps and the apps probably aren't scams again see all the asterisks about apps how apple does that in the app store like and there's one place to get everything everything's simple and it all goes through apple and you get refunds from app like that is the brand promise of the iphone and the eu is saying you must right now break that promise and apple's like
here's how we're minimizing the damage.
We've decided to do it this way because this was the best possible way we figured out to do this while still being compliant.
Everything they say is like, this is bad, but we're trying to make it as less bad as we possibly can.
And that's why it sounds cranky because they don't sound happy about any of this.
They're not bragging about any of it.
The only thing they're bragging about is we think this is the least bad option.
and just paragraph after paragraph of like and here's how we're trying to mitigate this damage and again they never actually address the the actual point which is like hey how about allowing competition along the axis of business terms like no that's not a thing we're rest assured we're not doing that but within these other realms here's how we're minimizing the damage
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Darren Kelkoff writes, with AirPods Pro or amateur, which, very well done, as John still prefers, do you guys wear them in both, always wear them in both ears, or do you ever do a single ear?
If you go single ears, it's always the same side, or do you alternate?
I suppose that for some folks, charge level could play a role here, but I find myself to never be low on AirPod charge, probably because the super sad noise they play when they do get low is conditioned to mean to never let it happen.
Um...
I was actually talking to a friend of mine, Sam, about this recently.
And Sam has kids who are a bit older than mine.
Actually, roughly your kids' age, John, just a little bit younger than yours, I believe.
And he was saying that both of his kids, they pretty much always have one AirPod in.
May or may not be playing anything, but it's almost like a...
aesthetic choice at this point, which I found very fascinating.
But to actually answer the question, for me, I will use two AirPods when I am either by myself or doing something where I'm not expected to be talked to, you know, nobody's going to be talking to me, like maybe I'm exercising or something like that.
But if there's ever a situation where I think someone might be talking to me, even though the transparency mode does work pretty well, I typically will go one AirPod only and I alternate which side depending on, you know, is the TV that the kids are watching on my left-hand side, then I'll put the left one in.
Am I in bed?
Well, I sleep on the right-hand side of the bed if I'm on my back, and so I'll put my right AirPod in if I'm listening to something, but I want to leave the left ear available for Aaron to talk to me or whatever the case may be.
So I do all of the above, and I will do it all situationally.
Marco, let's talk about how you use your AirPods, and then, John, you can wrap us up, please.
I use both of my AirPods Pros or neither of them.
I don't do the one-in, one-out thing.
All right, John.
The only time I do one ear is, as was alluded to in the question, if the battery in one of them is bad.
And this happens to me a surprising amount.
Why does it happen?
I don't know.
Sometimes I put both my AirPods in the case and one of them doesn't charge.
And, oh, you've got grit or dirt in your case.
Make sure the contacts are clean.
I've tried so many things.
It's just sometimes, sometimes I take my AirPods out.
One of them is 100% and one of them goes doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.
the super sad sound they play when they don't have battery and when that happens to me i put the sad one back in the case where for some reason it charges in the exact same case now it's charging um and i use the one until the other one is charged up a little bit um and when i do it i well you don't have a choice if the battery is low on one that's the one i have to put back in the charging case but if i did have a choice uh i would put the right one in uh but yeah but i i want both of them in most of the time
Fair enough.
Aaron Thomas writes, For me...
I have thought about doing a to-do app and or a shopping app.
Both of these, I feel like even though I found options for both that I like, there are things that I would have maybe done differently.
But A, the things that I found that I like, any list for shopping apps and DUE for to-do lists, those are close enough to what I want that it's not like compelling me to do something different.
And even if I wanted to do something different, it's such a saturated market that I don't think I would touch it.
Since we started with Marco first, let's go John first.
Wait, Casey, you don't have a game idea?
Oh, no.
I don't know.
Maybe, I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't heard it, but there's a members-only special episode where I talk about an app I was considering making, and one of the reasons I have not made that app is due to oversaturation in the App Store market.
I think a lot of the ideas I have for apps...
Are rejected not because of oversaturation in the market, but just because what I said before, either fear that it wouldn't be accepted or sure knowledge that it would not be accepted.
That I think is my personal biggest turn, especially since one of my passions is system extension type applications on the Mac.
Uh, and I don't sell enough copies of anything to, uh, sell outside the, uh, the app store just to deal with like the hassle of accepting payments on my own or whatever.
So I'm kind of stuck in the Mac app store for any of my small apps, right?
And the Mac app store.
that disallows private API usage, for example, and tons of useful kinds of applications that exist already, and sometimes they're in saturated markets, the door is closed to me because if I wanted to make them, I'd either have to make them free, or I would have to sell them outside the Mac App Store, which is a fixed cost hurdle that I must overcome to get a system up that does that, and I don't think I would ever sell enough copies to make it worthwhile.
As for developing a game, I know enough about game development to know that I should never do it because game development is a lot harder than you think it is.
If you're a programmer, you think game development is writing a cool game engine when game development is actually like writing an essay.
It's the creative content of the game that takes all the time, talent, energy, money.
Uh, that's why, uh, you know, AAA video games cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
That money is not spent on the people who are writing the game engine.
20 people are writing the game engine or maybe a hundred people, but a thousand people are making content for the game.
And that's what makes the game.
Good.
The content, what happens in the game?
How does the gameplay work?
Where are the different levels?
Like that stuff takes so much longer than you think it does.
And it's so much harder than you think it is.
Like,
great and now i have an engine all i gotta do is make some levels and i'll be done with my game you haven't even started making your game i'll just make some levels really will you making some levels if it was that easy everybody would be a millionaire game developer that is the hard part not the programming part of it and which is sad news for lots of developers who want to be who want to make a game and they think as long as i get a cool game engine i'll be ready to go you are not you're not ready to go you're
Then if you say, I'm going to manufacture a film camera and you manufacture the world's greatest film camera, you're like, now I'm ready for my Oscar.
It's like, no, now you have to make your movie.
Like, I'll just shoot some stuff and then I'll have a movie.
That's the hard part.
Making the movie is the hard part.
Making the camera is not the hard part.
Making the movie is.
Lots of people have really good cameras.
Not a lot of people win an Oscar for their movies.
So, no, I have not considered making a game because I know I am not up to it.
but marco has i'm not quite as as negative on the idea of making games john is maybe you're better at it than i am i just know it's a skill that i don't have i mean i guess technically i've already shipped a game in the overcast watch app but it's not much of one i i think i wouldn't shy away from making a game because i don't think i could do it i would shy away from a game because i don't i wouldn't think it would be very fun
One of the biggest challenges of game development from the very little bit of it that I understand is that you actually end up putting a decent amount of work into a game before you really know whether it's even fun or not.
And if it's not very fun, it's kind of hard to recover from that.
And I don't like developing that way where there's so much up front before you even know is this concept even a good idea or not.
But the bigger problem why I wouldn't make a game...
um i mean i have a couple of ideas here and there that i've had over the years i've never been super motivated to make them in part because i'm not that much of a gamer and so i'd be the worst person to try to make a game like believe me we know this from the world of podcasts because there are so many people who have tried to bring into the world of podcasts over the years who don't really like podcasts that much
but they smelled money or opportunity and like, oh, I hear podcasts are big.
Let's bring it to that market.
And we see the results of that.
It's people who make crappy podcasts and crappy podcast apps.
It's people who are in it for the wrong reasons.
If I made a game, I think I would be in it for wrong reasons also because I'm not that much of a gamer.
No, but if you made a game, you'd be making a game that you had an interest in.
That's the good thing about games.
If you want to minimize all the things that I said, let's say, for example, you want to bypass a lot of that.
make a solitaire game.
And I know it's an oversaturated market, but you don't have to come up with the game.
Solitaire already exists.
You don't have to make levels.
You don't have to make content.
You just have to make the engine that runs solitaire and maybe do one or two vaguely innovative things.
And you've made a solitaire game.
And maybe you have an itch because you're like, I've tried all the solitaire games, but they never do this one thing that I'm interested in.
And so you make a solitaire game.
Like there are ways to make a game without having to spend years making content or even have to make any kind of levels or anything like that.
And if that's your passion,
You have some idea for a game.
You're like, oh, I'm not much of a gamer.
But clearly there are some things that you think, this would be fun to do.
And I haven't seen anything else out there like that.
You could make that.
And if it is a game idea that either is based on something that already exists, like Solitaire, or is simple enough that you don't have to
be an excellent level designer and make enough content to satisfy users or whatever it is possible to as just a plain programmer who's not a game designer to come up with an idea that sort of hits that sweet spot and i think you would be interested in it even though you're not a gamer because you would have had like you had this idea for a game right and i you know i think you could be successful in that it's just you really have to be careful with what you pick
yeah that's a good point but plus i thought you were gonna say total annihilation or whatever it is i mean i don't have the skill to make anything like that that is probably a game you should not try to make because that does have a lot of content yeah a lot of content and you know that i mean that's a whole rts like that's first of all the rts genre appears not to exist anymore which is very sad to me oh i'm sure it exists everything is out there in some sub community
Didn't they all become DOTAs or whatever those things are?
They basically turned into RPGs.
It's a totally fine game genre, but it's not one that I'm interested in at all.
Whereas RTSs were wonderful.
Anyway, so the other half of the question of are there any other types of apps I've considered creating if not for an oversaturation of the market?
I don't really have any massively strong ideas of things I want to create at the moment that are not just overcast.
But one idea that I've been percolating in my head is basically a music listening app specifically optimized for jam band concerts.
I was going to say it's a fish app.
Basically.
And the problem is I have lots of ideas on how I could do this well in a way that would please me.
And the problem is the market for it would just be so small.
Because there already are lots of alternative music players on iOS.
So that market is there.
And that would be pretty crowded to try to break into.
And what I would want to do with my app would be more like optimized for how you select what to play and how it is displayed in the app and things like that if you have a large collection of jam band concerts like I do.
But again, the market for that is going to be like 10 people.
So...
I don't know if I'm ever going to make it just because the amount of work it would take to make that is way higher than the value even I would probably get out of it.
And there just is not enough of an audience for that.
So it's actually not really a question of oversaturation as much as insufficient demand.
What about audio editor?
Do you consider that oversaturated or does that just seem like too much work?
Breaking into people's professional workflows is very difficult.
If it was the only thing I was working on, I think I could make that happen.
And again, it wouldn't have a big market, but I could at least make a decent one.
But it's so much work to make a decent one that I don't think I could do it while juggling almost anything else in my life.
Do you think that market is oversaturated on the Mac specifically?
Obviously, we're not talking about Windows.
On the Mac specifically, there is like Adobe Audition.
There's whatever that free one is.
Audacity, I think.
Yep.
There is Logic, obviously.
Reaper.
The one that Snell uses.
What is that one called?
ferrite ferrite ferrite yeah i mean i don't think it's oversaturated but there are a lot of big competitors adobe is a big competitor apple is a big competitor and there's also like the ferrite there are some indie lower you know there's some competition kind of at your level as well so i wouldn't say it's oversaturated but it's not like it's clear they'll be like oh finally a mac audio editor i've been waiting for one of these
And also, what people want in an audio editor is all over the map, and there's lots of different directions that it's going.
For instance, there's things like Descript, these text-based ones, where they transcribe the audio, and then you kind of edit the text.
Some of them are web-based, some of them are native, some of them are iOS-only, some of them are Mac.
So it's kind of all over the place.
There's a lot of options.
And because professional tools, one of the reasons why
pro tools like logic and like pro tools um and and like photoshop and you know things like that one of the reasons why they tend to be large and bloated is that everyone has something some different need for their workflow or their situation that would happen with your jam ban app too by the way if you made that everyone would be like i love your app but can you add this feature can you add that and these would all be the same fish fans but the the union of all their feature requests like i'll buy your app as soon as you add my two features
They would want so many features, just the Phish fans alone.
Yeah, exactly.
Anything where you're serving somebody's workflow needs, like an audio editor, you're going to have very, very strong pressure to make the app very broad, to just add a whole bunch of features to satisfy, oh, well, my company would buy 15 licenses of your app if only you added this one little change over here.
I mean, digital watermarking for more efficient dynamic ad insertion.
Even if you're making like a podcast focused audio editor, what is the market for podcast focused audio editors look like?
It's not people with shows like ours.
It's everybody else.
And the things they want out of a podcast focused audio editor, you are not going to be enthusiastic about giving them.
right it's yeah because the people who would buy it would mostly be you know like the big podcast production studios and like they're not gonna buy my app has to work with avid or whatever like they they have workflows that are alien yeah they're gonna use like all the highest end stuff with their staff of 60 people producing a podcast like they're they're not gonna use my little indie mac app it's optimized for making shows like this
We need collaborative editing of the podcast by seven people simultaneously through the web.
Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah, so that's one of the many reasons why I'm still working on Overcast.
First of all, I just I like working on Overcast and I'm not really feeling any pressure to stop doing that.
But also, I don't really have any other better ideas right now that I'd rather be doing.
So I'm going to keep doing this for a while.
I hear that.
Christian Kent writes, what audio settings do you use on Apple Music?
And it has a bunch of options here.
And I'm happy to read them off, but where am I looking to answer this question?
Because I genuinely have no idea.
Go to the support article that's linked there.
I did, but that didn't talk about, it talked about like EQ and I didn't see anything else.
This is the music app on the Mac.
You can see the equalizer thing.
I think that's where a lot of these things are.
I don't think so.
This is like spatialized stereo.
This is all iOS stuff, I thought.
Yeah, I thought this was all iOS stuff.
So anyway, so Christian writes, spatialized stereo, off or fixed or head tracked.
Sound enhancer, off or 50% or high 100%.
Sound equalizer, off or a preset or a personal one.
Dolby Atmos, automatic or always on or off.
High quality 256 or ALAC 2448 or ALAC 24192.
Lossless via headphone cable or AirPod Pro slash max wireless.
So, I mean, to the ones that I can answer because I know the answer, I...
Do not spatialize stereo.
I do use Dolby Atmos when possible.
I don't even know where to look for the sound enhancer and equalizer.
And I think I cranked up the Apple Music streaming quality and Spotify streaming quality to whatever the max was.
And I typically use AirPod Pros.
So those are my answers.
I don't think that's going to be satisfying for Christian, but I don't know where to look for these.
I think I'm even more boring than that.
On iOS, I have everything set to the default except spatialized stereo, which I have set to off.
Because I believe the default is kind of the automatic thing, and I hated it very much.
So I turn off all of these enhancements on iOS.
And the main reasons why... First of all, my iOS listening setup is almost always either my car or AirPods Pro.
And in both of those cases, we are not talking about audiophile-grade setups.
We're talking about decent consumer-level stuff, but not audiophile-grade setups.
And that's what my phone is for.
At my desk, I do have an audiophile-grade setup.
What I don't believe in, though, is all this lossless high sample rate stuff.
I would challenge anybody out there, if you have any way to set up a blind test...
between your lossless option and decent compression, like 256K bits or higher, I would challenge you to be able to tell the difference.
I really don't think you can.
Now, if it makes you happy to turn on your lossless audio and crank all these settings up and be playing at 24, 192, which your ears cannot tell the difference, if it makes you happy to do that...
Fine.
No harm done.
But you won't hear the difference between that and regular bitrate, high-quality compressed stuff.
You won't hear that difference.
So I don't turn that kind of stuff on.
I think what matters a lot in your sound quality is the mix of what you are listening to, which you have very little control over because it typically comes from the record companies.
So the mix matters a lot.
The recording matters a lot.
And the transducers, the headphones or speakers that you're listening on, matter a lot.
And everything else matters very, very little or not at all.
So some of these options, things like Dolby Atmos, that's actually selecting a different mix if available.
So it might sound better, but it's not really because of the Atmos.
It's because you're listening to a different mix.
Spatialized stereo...
is messing with the mix.
So it might sound better.
If it sounds better to you, great.
It does not sound better to me.
Same thing with sound enhancer and sound equalizer.
These are also just various ways to have the phone mess with the mix.
Listen to what pleases you.
But for me, what I generally like is...
Less processing on the audio, not more.
So I tend to listen to things as flat as possible.
No EQ, no processing, no spatialization, and Atmos, if available, maybe, but most of what I listen to is not available, so it's kind of a moot point.
So I do the Space Life stereo off because I also hate that.
I hate the head track one.
I hate the fixed one.
I hate it all.
The John Syracuse story.
That's an example of the phone or whatever taking the audio and changing it in a way that it hopes will be more pleasing to you.
So somebody made a song and they mixed it and they recorded it and they put it down and the phone is like, on its way out, we're going to do something different with it.
And
whatever it's doing with it i do not like i don't find it pleasing so i always leave that off sound enhancer and equalizer um i think sound enhancer is off unless it's on by default uh but this brings me to like equalizer brings me to the next thing which is the the only thing that i do on my phone specifically to mess with the sound on its way out and it is based on a process that i performed on this show a year ago or two years ago or through whatever it was
where we found these apps that you can find on the app store, mostly not scammy, but not particularly high quality apps that will play a series of tones for you and ask you if you heard them.
Do you remember when we did this?
Like the hearing test?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I remember that this was a thing, and I think I still have the app on one of my home screens because I've been meaning to do it for literally years.
Where is that?
I made one of these a long time ago.
Yeah, there's a bunch of apps on the App Store that will do this, but essentially what they'll do is they're not great apps, I found.
You want it to be like a good app that's like, now you're playing a tone.
Do you hear it?
Do you not hear it?
Anyway, it's like a hearing test where they play a series of tones to test what kind of frequencies you can hear.
And if you're an older person, as in older than 20...
You should try this because as you age past your 20s, you start losing hearing in different frequencies, right?
And the result of this is a profile of here are the frequencies you can hear and how well you can hear them.
And you can... iOS supports...
using that profile for all of its audio playback.
You can say, I used this janky app and it came up with a profile for me.
Now iOS, please use this profile.
It's essentially like an equalizer setting, but it's based on how well each one of your ears hears certain frequencies.
So I enabled that way back then, and it's still enabled.
As far as I'm aware, all audio that comes out of my phone to go to whatever gets passed through that.
And what that's trying to do is saying, okay, you have trouble in your left ear.
You can only hear like 95% of this frequency.
So I'm going to boost that frequency to hopefully get it to the level that it should be, the 100% that everyone else hears.
And I enabled that years ago, and I was surprised to see when I looked up to answer this question that it is still enabled.
And like what you want, it's kind of like doing like parametric EQ for like home theater setup.
What you want is to like, OK, phone, make it so my old person ears hear closer to what a young person's ears would.
It can't solve everything.
If you just can't hear this frequency because you're too old and it's too high, boosting the volume of like 18,000 hertz is not going to help you if you just literally can't hear it, right?
It's only so much it can do.
But I feel like when I did the before and after, I'm like...
Yeah, I think that that is an improvement.
So that is the only thing that I'm aware of that my phone is doing to mess with the sound.
Within individual apps, I will use Marco's voice boost feature on podcasts that have bad audio mixes.
Oh, yeah.
Like, and I, you know, you can do it on, it's a per podcast setting.
I could say this podcast, they don't know how to mix their audio, turn on voice boost.
But that's just within Overcast.
Voice boost doesn't apply when I'm playing songs at Apple Music, right?
In terms of the quality,
i'm like marco as long as it is not like you know an ancient mp3 from the 90s it has a reasonable bit rate i don't care about lossless i don't care about 24 bit 192 kilohertz my ears are too old to hear that my audio equipment is not good enough half the time i'm listening on airpods third gen like forget it for you know 20 24 bit 192 kilo no my airpods it makes no it's pointless
Same thing with like lossless via cable.
And no, I don't care about any of that.
So in general, I don't want the phone missing with my audio with the one exception being that thing.
And I kind of wish Apple would build that into iOS.
Like maybe it is.
Maybe there's some accessibility setting where it will take you through the hearing test, build your personal hearing profile, and then just apply that.
Because
When I tried to reproduce this a while ago, I'm like, what was that?
I was just like with Casey.
What was that app called?
I can never remember the names.
And you search on the App Store.
Mimi Hearing Test is the one that we had suggested years ago that I think a listener suggested to us.
Yeah, I downloaded a bunch of them.
I'm like, was this the app that I used?
They're all not that great.
Like...
they're sometimes they're even hard to use like you have to be in a really quiet place and you have to use uh you know whatever headphones you're going to be using you're like am i not hearing this because my airpods are too bad should i use better headphones or should i use the headphones i'm going to be listening on it is a fraught process that i think i did an okay job of many years ago so i'm keeping the profile unable but i really wish i had more actionable advice for all the people who are again older than in their 20s listening to this who may be wondering what frequencies they can no longer hear as well
And they want to build themselves a profile.
And my answer is that Apple should add that in iOS 18 to be something that everybody can do through an interface that's nice.
No argument here.
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Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
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So long.
So I was watching all these video reviews and I am excited to get my vision pro on Friday and use it as a Mac monitor.
Can you tell me about that?
Can you tell me, I saw some of the reviews that were like, Oh, and you get a Mac monitor and they rattled off the resolution.
I'm like, wait a second.
Is that resolution?
Do you know, like the virtual Mac screen?
What is the resolution in both points and pixels?
I think I understand this, but it's one of those things where my understanding is hazy, and I will probably not verbalize it well, but let me give it a shot.
So let me set a little more context.
So I was thinking about this a few days back before all the reviews had come out, and it occurred to me that...
First of all, I think we'd all been thinking the same thing, that it could be neat to have your laptop, and I presume this works with the desktop, although I don't know.
I think MKBHD made passing mention that it does.
But anyways, say you have a laptop, because that's what I'm used to, and because laptops are superior.
Am I right, Marco?
So anyways, you have a laptop, and you're either at home, but you're not at your desk, or perhaps you don't have a second monitor at your desk, whatever the case may be, or maybe you're remote, and you would like to have a bigger screen.
Well, what you can do is you can, using the Vision Pro, if you're all in the same iCloud ID and whatnot, you can literally just look at your laptop screen.
And above your laptop screen in the virtual world, there'll be a connect button.
And you cast your eyes onto the connect button, you pinch, and you wait for a few moments, and suddenly the physical, real-world laptop screen goes dark.
And then there is, I think it's powered by the same, like, VNC++, if you will, that was new and I think the most recent release of macOS.
But anyways...
One way or another, a virtual screen appears within the Vision Pro world, and we'll talk about resolution and stuff in a second.
But you can use your Mac with the Mac's keyboard, the Mac's mouse, on this virtual screen in your Vision Pro world.
And then presumably you can put the native Slack and the native messages and the native Safari and the native this and that.
in like an array all around your Mac screen.
And additionally, you can make that Mac screen 50 feet tall if you want.
And all of that is possible because you're living in this virtual space.
And I wrote a blog post about this a few days back.
And what occurred to me, which was, I think, the more interesting thing that obviously people at Apple seem to have thought about, but I hadn't thought about, is okay, that's all well and good, but...
I've understood that typing on the Vision Pro is challenging.
And so it occurred to me it would be nice if I could use universal control, which is the same technology where you can control an iPad that's sitting next to your computer.
If I could use universal control to say, cast my eyes at the Vision OS Slack.
So I'm not running Slack on my computer in this hypothetical.
I'm running it within the Vision Pro.
adjacent to my computer screen, but it's the native Vision OS, Vision Pro Slack.
Well, if I cast my eyes over there, can I clickety-clack and type on the physical Mac keyboard that is sitting in front of me and have it appear within Slack?
And if I can, just chef's kiss, just perfect.
That would be amazing.
Yes, you can.
You've seen the demos of it, right?
Well, at the time I wrote the blog post, I hadn't.
But now, and this is why I bring this up, is now we've seen the demos.
And I don't recall any one video that did a particularly satisfying job of it.
But most of them, at least in passing, said, oh, and you can slide your mouse over, which I actually.
MKBHD's video did a good job of showing this.
That's true.
That's fair.
And so anyway, you can slide your mouse over if you so desire and then you get like an iPad style mouse.
This is something we were thinking about a while back.
We're like, well, surely you can't have a mouse cursor just floating in the middle of nowhere.
And you can't.
Like the mouse cursor is never going to appear like...
just randomly like floating in, but it will appear within the windows of either obviously your Mac where the mouse cursor lives, but also within the, I don't know what you call them, the windows of a native vision OS app.
That is the only place the cursor will appear.
And when it's there, it looks like an iPad cursor with a little like translucent circle.
Exactly.
When you pull it out of there, it does not pop off and just be free floating.
It always has to go to, okay, it's on your Mac screen.
It's in your vision OS thing or whatever.
And that I thought was a good way to solve this because you really do not want that cursor to be like, where is it?
Is it up on the ceiling?
Is it down on the floor?
It's always going to be in one of the windows.
Yeah, and so in this theoretical world, I could be at the line, again, leaving aside the, oh my God, this guy, can you believe this guy?
Leaving that aside, and that's a really big asterisk, but I could hypothetically be at a library or a Wegmans or what have you, or on a plane, and I have my computer open,
And I connect to the computer.
And so now the computer screen goes black.
Nobody can see what the computer's doing except me.
And I have a 10-foot wide screen in front of me littered all around it with different Vision OS windows.
And I can control all of them via either my eyes, the keyboard, the mouse, or a combination of the three of them.
Now, John, coming all the way back to your question, well, what resolution is that?
And what was interesting was I had...
heard in the keynote that it's a 4K screen.
That's what Apple kept saying.
And Apple's been consistent about that.
But if you read, I'm pretty sure it was in Nile's written review on The Verge.
Apparently what it is, is that the Mac is broadcasting, for lack of a better word, a 5K display.
So the Mac thinks it's connected to a 5K display, but...
But what's actually getting sent to the Vision Pro is a down-sampled 4K version of that 5K display.
And when you say 4K, though, what is the resolution in pixels?
That's what I'm getting at.
I heard everyone banning around 2560 by 1440, which is the 1X version of 5K.
Right, that's what I was getting at.
Like 2560 by 1440 pixels is not 4K.
2560 by 1440 points is also not 4K.
It's bigger than 4K.
Yeah, that's 5K.
So I'm like, okay, but like the virtual screen, like...
what you know essentially if you if you uh pull it real close to you like fat bits get it real close and like look at a single pixel and photo a single retina pixel in some app that lets you do that like like how many retina pixels across is that thing because obviously you can make it bigger and smaller but you're not adding pixels when you do that you're just literally making all the pixels bigger
well and and by the way and i i would argue that if you're doing pixel level work the vision pro is the wrong tool for that job because nothing about the vision pro is pixel perfect it's it is the whole thing is like free floating everything's fluid well but but the good thing about vision pro is you can literally shove it up to your face
so the pixels get really big and then something like it's it's like fat bits but it's like putting you literally putting your face close to the monitor we don't want to do that because it's uncomfortable and you'll get nose grease on your monitor but with vision pro none of those things are a problem so you can shove the screen right at your rather than using like you know option scroll wheel and photoshop to zoom in photoshop you can zoom in vision os by literally pulling that window closer to you until the individual pixels are the size of tennis balls and then you you could if you wanted to
look at them with your eyes, or more likely you're just going to use your mouse or your trackpad.
And now your targets with your mouse or your trackpad are seven inches across for each pixel.
By the way, do you not use the accessibility zoom thing where you're holding on control and scroll on your Macs?
Oh, no, I do.
Oh, I do all the time.
like that's i i enable that on all my macs and i use it constantly constantly right but like but within graphics apps like when i'm in photoshop i this drives me nuts in photoshop there'll be if you're out there listening uh if for those that don't know if you're using photoshop one of the shortcuts they have is instead of control scroll wheel which is what i have the accessibility thing bound to which just takes the images on your screen and blows it up like it doesn't add any more pixels it gets blurry you know whatever but
That's great, and everyone should enable that.
It's an amazing feature as your eyes get older, right?
But in Photoshop, if you hold down the option key and hit your scroll wheel or swipe or whatever on your mouse or two-finger swipe on a trackpad, it will zoom within Photoshop, as in it will change the magnification of the pixel-based image that you're seeing.
So instead of being 100%, it'll be 200%, 3%.
So the images on your screen aren't getting, but you're just zooming in Photoshop.
And I wish, I wish so badly that when I did that, it zoomed centered on where my cursor is.
but it doesn't it just zooms based on how the uh the essentially the crop of your current view is showing like it's centered because often there's a little section i want to zoom in on and i'll put my cursor over and i'll hold an option and i'll swipe my scroll wheel and that part that i wanted to go will go flying off the edge of the crop area because it doesn't zoom where my cursor is but anyway
All right, so reading from The Verge, there's a lot of very complicated display scaling going on behind the scenes here, but the easiest way to think about it is that you're basically getting a 27-inch Retina display like you'd find on an iMac or a studio display.
Well, an older iMac or a studio display.
Your Mac thinks it's connected to a 5K display with a resolution of 5120 by 2880, and it runs macOS at a 2 to 1 logical resolution of 2560 by 1440, just like a 5K display.
You can pick other resolutions, but the device warns you that they'll be lower quality.
That virtual display is then streamed as a 4K, here you go, John, 3560 by 2880 video to the Vision Pro, where you can just make it as big as you want.
The upshot of all this is that 4K content runs at native 4K resolution.
It has all the pixels to do it, just like on an iMac.
But you have a grand total of 2560 by 1440, I guess, points to place Windows in, regardless of how big you make the Mac display in space.
And you're not seeing a pixel-perfect 5K image.
So...
That says to me the Mac, again, is rendering everything at a pixel-doubled 5K, but it's streaming, if you will, a video stream.
I don't think that's literally how it works.
Yeah, it's like the iPhone 6 Plus.
Yes.
I wonder if that's like an M2 limitation.
I do wonder...
I do wonder why they chose to do that.
It could just be the bandwidth of that stream.
Whatever they're doing to have super low latency screen sharing, I'm sure there is some kind of upper bound to what the resolution that they're sending can actually be while still keeping it that low latency and that reliable over whatever wireless connection it's using.
So I am super stoked for this.
I genuinely think if I can get over myself, which is a humongous if, if I can get over myself, you know, just today I went to Wegmans because I typically like to go somewhere on Wednesday mornings, as I think I've said before, to do my research for ATP and prep for it and whatnot.
And I can do that just fine without having a silly thing strapped to my face.
But it would be so much nicer if I had this silly thing strapped to my face.
And so, yeah, I'm really excited to try this.
And I hope I can build up the self-confidence to do this outside of the house, which I'm not sure if I can.
But I'm so excited.
If we don't mention this, people are going to send it to us.
I'm hoping I'm saving us here.
There is an app that someone put up, I think it's on GitHub, that will essentially allow you to take windows from your Mac, individual windows, and make them appear as floating independent Vision OS windows.
In Vision OS.
I forget what that app is, but we will try to find it.
I have it.
I have it.
It's called Ensemble.
I have no idea the mechanism by which this works.
But yes, I'm aware of this as being a thing.
Yeah.
And we're getting to the point of the resolution and how this app works versus how Apple's thing works.
i i think the limiting factor is going to end up being like or what is your bandwidth and latency between vision os which is not connected in any physical way to your mac like it's it's radios right um we know that trying to drive a very large number of pixels with low latency without any quality loss requires a very fast bus
for years it was having external retina 5k display it was difficult because none of the display buses that were available were up to the task the one in the 5k iMac has was split into two right um obviously we have display stream compression and yeah you could do h.264 encoding or h.265 encoding to it but then you have problems with latency and quality and so that i feel like is the limiting factor here whatever ensemble is doing it's like well i just want it to be good enough um
But already the Apple thing, which is only one Mac at a time and one screen on that one Mac at a time, even that is not the full resolution that is actually being rendered at, presumably for bandwidth and latency related reasons.
Would it be cool if you could hook up your Mac with a wire to Vision Pro and essentially using Vision Pro as, you know, the world's fanciest display for your Mac with less quality loss and more bandwidth to have more screens?
Yes, that would definitely be cool.
Maybe a future version will do that wirelessly.
We'll see.
But right now I feel like that is...
That is one limitation to keep in mind.
And to Marco's point, if you're doing something where it's really important for you to be able to see those retina with hairlines, you're probably not going to be able to see them in Vision OS to start because you're not even seeing the 5K resolution that the Mac is rendering at.
You're seeing a squished down version of that.
And then on top of that, whatever, you know,
compression algorithm or latency you know like i i'm not sure entirely sure it is 100 quality all the time at least dynamically maybe it stabilizes to 100 quality but in motion i don't know how they can produce a zero latency pixel perfect image of even a 4k screen wirelessly but maybe i'm not doing the math right but
Anyway, it's something considering.
But I do think the ability to pull the virtual window close to your real nose, I guess, without getting nose grease on it, is a potential advantage for doing pixel-precise work with an input method that is less precise than a mouse.
Or with a mouse, because again, to get your point, Casey, you can use your Mac trackpad or mouse and your Mac keyboard as input devices in Vision OS apps.
It'll look like an iPad cursor, but you do have that precision.
Don't forget too, by the way, like, you know, for all that, all that display, you know, compression of having the Mac render itself to the 5k, then having it compressed down to 4k, then having it apply some kind of lossy compression algorithm to actually make it enough data to, you know, to work over the connection, then being displayed in vision OS window on 4k displays where the vision OS window you're looking at is not taking up the full display.
Well, it is if you pull it close to your nose, and if you pull it real close to your nose, you're using more than 4K for an eighth of the display.
No, but I'm saying the physical displays inside the Vision Pro are themselves only about 4K each.
Oh, yes, that's a good point.
I know, but if you're only seeing a tiny corner of the display, you're using all 4K pixels in that one eyeball to show one sixteenth of the virtual display.
Yeah.
Anyway, regardless, there are so many layers of compression and loss here and interpolation and skewing potentially.
There are so many layers of processing going on with these pixels.
That's why I'm saying this is not a pixel-precise device.
It is not designed for that in any way because it's so many little tricks here and there of like,
Well, we're going to take this image here and blur it over here and composite it over here and render this over here and then project it onto your eyes at this thing through this lens and this angle.
There is so much going on there.
This is not a pixel perfect work device, and that's fine.
There's lots of other things that we'll be able to do, but that's not one of them.
david chop is asking the chat room is it actually possible to pull the virtual mac screen so close to you that you're only seeing a tiny portion of it i assume so i don't know i've never tried it and i didn't see anyone any of the demo videos tried either uh because they always like that when they always demonstrate look you just grab the thing on the bottom of the window and you move the window farther and closer and what they end up doing it is moving it from four feet to five feet to three feet to four feet but they never go
I'm going to pull this thing up as you know, like, so it's totally filling your field of view.
I said, it's gotta be possible because you can leave the window.
Like the, if the idea of a group was talking about this in his review, I think if you arrange all your windows around you and you get up out of your seat and you walk to another room, the windows stay.
Yeah.
Yeah, because you can play with that in the simulator because you can take your PS5 controller with the simulator and kind of walk around the windows.
They start to fade away as you get too close, though, I think.
I haven't done it in a while.
That may be the thing.
Maybe you can't actually get that close to them because they become so transparent.
You can't see anything anymore.
I believe that.
I think that happens.
I can't pull it up right now, but I think that's what happened.
that'll be interesting thing to see but yeah like the the uh the other thing that i have not actually got an inclusive answer is like oh it's more than 4k for each eyeball and and people think they're going to see a 4k display it's like well not unless it fills every pixel of that display which it probably won't because it's not even the right aspect ratio to begin with right i don't even know if it can like i don't even know if the os allows like a window to project one-to-one onto the output pixels
yeah yeah you know like i said because you maybe you can't zoom it that far because it comes translucent but the thing i never got the answer to is does having a more than 4k display for each eye offer you more effective resolution than having uh a single display in front of you not in a headset that has as many pixels as one of the eyeballs you know what i mean like do you get more resolution from each eye having 4k pixels than two eyes looking at a real 4k screen and i don't know
there could be some weird interpolation tricks you could do maybe but i don't yeah i don't know i i mean it seems to me that you should especially when things are in motion because they're seeing two different images but maybe i'm wrong maybe i'm just not thinking it through but anyway yeah that limitations like the window fading are considerations that have to do with vision os that may prevent you from ever getting close enough ever ever being able to see the window in an opaque manner filling your field of view in that way