95: The Bear Wakes Up and Bites You

11 Dec 2014

App Store drama, detecting push-notification spam, and obligations to maintain your old apps and open-source projects.

Episode Description:

• Follow-Up:
  • Ad income isn't included in Top Grossing (Joe F.)
  • Crossy Road added a coin doubler (Steve Lubitz) and developer response
• Daniel Jalkut's idea for Push Notification Traps
• This week's App Store drama
  • The phone call to Launcher's developer
  • Apple's questionable decisions recently
  • Friction within Apple?
  • Stratechery: App Store Anguish, Old Apple's Last Stand, Time for a Change? (membership required)
• Obligations to maintain your apps
  • Why Casey discontinued Fast Text
  • Open-source time commitments
    • Casey's Accidentalbot and Camel
    • John's CPAN modules
    • Marco's FCModel and BugshotKit
• Post-show:
  • John has some opinions on his PS4 so far.

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like everything in life, it is one FFmpeg command, but it’ll take you three

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hours to figure out what that command actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} is. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah, yeah. Alright, so you want to do a little follow-up?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Follow-up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey As soon as I said that, I was like, oh god, that sounded a lot like the prompt. Just the way you said it. I know. Alright,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey let’s do that again. Hey, so you want to do a little bit of follow-up? Follow-up. God, I did it again! God!

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is the worst. Alright, somebody else

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talk. Don’t phrase it as a question, Casey. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, let’s do some follow up. Ah, see, you’re right. That’s the key. John, you’re so smart. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so let’s talk about Crossy Road and in-app purchases

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and top grossing lists. And I’m not sure which one of you put this in the show notes, but it was not me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was me. We were talking about the financial prospects for Crossy Road, indirectly talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about the financial prospects. And Joe F. tweet was one of the first people to tweet that when we’re looking at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the top Top grossing lists, he says those ads won’t show up as part of the top grossing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only in-app purchases will. And I think it’s also because they appear to be third-party ads and not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ads through Apple’s iAds system. I don’t know if you did Apple’s iAds if that would contribute

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to your top grossing, but certainly if you’re getting paid through a third-party for the ads in your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing, that won’t contribute. Although, isn’t it kind of interesting that Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t, as far as I know, ask for a a 30% cut of ads that you run that are not through Apple?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I’m actually kind of surprised they allow that at all. I think the only reason they do is because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people were doing ads in their app before iAd existed. And then, and I think Apple just doesn’t really care

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that much about iAd to really force that to be the case. But yeah, it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of weird. Like you can’t do a third party credit card processing thing for in-app purchase,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they allow you to have third party ads.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that does make a lot of sense. Not that that ever happens with Apple and their rules.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And then would you like to talk about our friend of the show, Steve Lubitz, and what he had to tell us?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. So shortly after we recorded last week’s show, we talked a lot about Crossy Road and its monetization

⏹️ ▶️ ^John strategy. The game has changed a little bit of its monetization strategy. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Steve wrote in with one aspect of that, that you could buy what they call a coin doubler.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You get your earned coins at a faster rate and you get a bonus 1000 coins for 3.99. That’s buying the piggy bank.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So there is something that doesn’t change the gameplay and you know, sort of getting an extra

⏹️ ▶️ ^John life or walking on water or slowing down time when the train is coming or anything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It changes the monetization. It changes parts of the game that are part of monetization.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So when I saw this, I said, okay, this is, you know, this is like a power up earned coins

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faster, right? But what can you do with those coins? You’re just, you know, using them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get more chances at the gumball machine to get your characters. And one thing we didn’t mention on the last show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speaking of the characters, is that the gumball machine is random and it doesn’t care, like any gumball machine, doesn’t care what things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you already have. So as you accumulate players from the gumball machine, you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John end up getting duplicates. Like, you know, you get another crazy old Ben for the 15th time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s not like you’re going to inevitably get all the characters, and I don’t even know if the gumball machine vends all the characters. of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them maybe purchase only. They added a bunch of new characters, they added a thing where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can try out a new character for a short period of time and then at the end of that time they let you buy it at a discounted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rate. All sorts of new things are showing up in updates of this thing. They’re further emphasizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the the thing that was always there I think the little share sheet lets you share like a screenshot of your score and your death

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now that is much more prominent and makes you notice it. It’s either more prominent or it didn’t exist before. I certainly didn’t even know it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John existed before because I’m looking for a share button and now it’s more in my face and not only do I see it in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John game but I see things that other people post. So anyway, the monetization strategy of Crossy Road

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is fluid and is moving more towards things that are slightly more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John aggressive about getting you to buy things than it was before. And I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think that’s because the developer is desperate for money, because all these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are still pretty mild in the grand scheme of things. They’re not They’re not punitive. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still entirely for fun and not pay

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to win type of gameplay. Even with the Coindel, but nothing affects the actual game, which is avoiding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John being hit by cars and falling in the water and being hit by trains. If it ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John makes that turn, I’m sure we will note it on the program. But I’m pretty confident now, especially with seeing Crossy Road climb

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the charts, that they’re doing just fine with this game.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, in fact, I mean, it’s been a pretty big difference So I would say the changes they’re making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are working to bring them more money, because they’ve made a pretty large jump

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the top grossing chart since last week. Like when we were talking, they were somewhere around the 200 range

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of top grossing, and now they’re like in the 60s. So whatever they’re doing, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco changes they’re making are working to bring them in more money that’s more proportional to the actual downloads

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re getting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know the timing, though. I don’t know if they started climbing the charts before or after they rolled out these changes. I don’t know the specifics.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it could just be, you know, gaining traction from word of mouth and, you know, it’s so hard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s still a good game. You should still check it out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Tiff is now totally hooked and- Yeah, I hopped over her name earlier. Yeah. Oh!

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} Yeah, she’s very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mad at you for continuing to move your score forward past hers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just stopped moving it forward once I became the number one in my game center list. So I beat my son’s score,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I beat Jason’s score, and now I haven’t really played that much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh goodness, what is your current score?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My score is depressing, I was trying to be Jason’s score like I, you know, I couldn’t get him to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accept my son’s friend request. So maybe he didn’t want to accept the request of someone who’s scoring now would be above

⏹️ ▶️ ^John his. So I’m like, all right, I’m gonna have to beat it. And his score was like 193. And I got 191. And I had that for a while. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then I got 192. I had that for a while. And boy, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing worse than than seeing yourself die when you’re like one hop away from tie and two

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} hops away from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway. I eventually got 216 and I’m depressed by the 216 because when I got the 216,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my death was super stupid. I just got, I was just so happy that I had won. It was like, okay, now I don’t really need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to go any farther. And I could have gone much farther. It was just a stupid death. So I’m kind of off that I’ve gone back to desert

⏹️ ▶️ ^John golf, golfing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, whatever. I still haven’t tried that one, but I am enjoying crossy road more than I probably should. It is a good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey game. So we should probably talk about what Daniel Jalka said about push

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey notification, spam filtering. Marco, did you get a chance to read this earlier today? I read this 10 minutes ago. Yeah. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what we were talking about last episode and what Daniel was kind of replying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was what, especially Marco had talked about with regard to push notification spam

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and how the three of us really didn’t come up with a terribly awesome way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for Apple to filter the spam or take action on the spam. And so one of the things we talked about was, well, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we could, they could enlist users to, to help filter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the spam and notify Apple of it. And so Daniel had an interesting point, and I’m going to read from this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey post that we’ll put in the show notes. Apple can still use its unique role as the creator of all things iOS to devise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a system through which they would themselves be virtually subscribed to all unremarkable notifications from a particular

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey apps developer. Think about the worst notification spam you’ve seen. In my experience, it’s not super personalized. In

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fact, it’s liable to be an inducement to keep using the app to advance in a game, to become more engaged,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey etc. I think Apple would collect a ton of useful information about spammy developers if they simply arranged that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey every app on the App Store is capable of sending push notifications included among its list of registered

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey devices a pseudo-device in Cupertino whose sole purpose was to receive notifications,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey scan them for spammy keywords, apply Bayesian filters, and flag questionable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey developers. I think it’s a really good idea. That seems like it would be hard as crap to put together,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it is a very interesting point. I mean, when you are in control of the entire ecosystem, you probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can get away with doing something like that. And I was curious to hear what you guys thought.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco See, it’s a really good idea. So what he said earlier in the post is like one of the problems is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they can’t just run these kind of filters server-side because everything’s encrypted end-to-end. So in order

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to see the content of a message, you have to be one of the recipients of the message. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s actually not entirely true. When you send a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco push notification request, you send it over SSL, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the server on the other side has the decryption key and you’re just sending a JSON dictionary. So like your server

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not encrypting that data separately from SSL. You know, that encryption is happening

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco after it gets into Apple’s hands. So Daniel’s assumption early on is actually not correct,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they could be doing this server side they wanted to without having this big pseudo device.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think there’s two problems with it. Number one, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would almost certainly be abused and worked around very quickly. For instance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco developers could start using different schemes. For instance, background refresh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can just send whatever you want as the payload of a silent notification for background

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco refresh that doesn’t show any text to the user. you can have your app generate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a local notification based on whatever you want that says whatever you want from that. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually how I send all of mine. Every overcast notification is messageless. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a content available notification and then the app wakes up, performs a sync, and then for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any new podcast episodes it finds, it shows a notification from their title.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So all of the text that is being shown to the user in a push notification is not going through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple servers and will require the app to be launched to generate. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of course, you know, developers would very quickly work around this kind of system if it was in place.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They would, you know, just they would show the text in different ways. They would respond to silent notifications or they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would, you know, encrypt the messages and then decrypt them with a custom scheme with the app or whatever. So that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco method wouldn’t entirely work. work, what would work better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and what would actually be a prerequisite to having that kind of setup at all,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is if Apple cared. That’s the biggest problem here, is that it really seems like Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t care about this problem by their complete inaction and complete

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seeming inability and unwillingness to enforce this rule, and then to even break it themselves with one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of their teams. I think it’s very clear that Apple simply doesn’t think this is a problem. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when Apple thinks something is a problem, it tends to get attention. It tends to get addressed. And then when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple, you know, Apple has kind of this tunnel vision sometimes, where whatever they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco care about, whatever the hot thing is at that moment, it gets this laser focus. They do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco crazy things, it gets remade or gets massive progress made on it, and then it gets left alone,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco untouched for 10 years. And I think this is one of those things where like, Like, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is an area of the App Store that they just don’t care about. Like much of the App Store, honestly. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the App Store does not see rapid change. The policies sure don’t. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s just very clear this is a problem. This is a problem to geeks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like us and people who are as picky as me. But Apple does not think this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a problem because if they thought it was a problem, they would be doing more to enforce the rule. And they’re not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another reason why the Jogged Proposed Solution, ignoring encryption, ignoring

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fake local notifications, stuff like that, even if all those workarounds didn’t exist,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you would still, this would still require Apple to do two things. One thing that Apple doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like to do, and one thing that they’re not very good at. The thing they don’t like to do is this would require them to essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John log all push notifications,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And or store them in some way so that you could verify that they were sent for some, you know, they would have to store some window

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of time. And the reason they would have to store them is because the second thing that I don’t think they’d be very good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at is figuring out if something is in violation of the guidelines by looking at the content,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer-wise, you know, spam detection. And to do that well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not easy to do that well and do it fast at the same time. So it’s not like they could watch up all the traffic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as it goes by, categorize it as spam or not spam, and then discard it because what if they got it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wrong want to retrain their filter or whatever. So it would have to be stored for some period of time. So even if they could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John man in the middle, everything decrypt everything because they control the key servers and all this other stuff, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John undo all their end and encryption, look at the content. Great. Now you’re looking at all the push note. Oh, and by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John simulate user activity so that you get the push notifications that are that are in response to you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using the application or not using the application or having used it within a certain period of time, of having you know all the you’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to do a hell of a lot to make a fake thing that behaves in a way that is sure to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John trigger all of these spammy push notifications then you’re just left with a pile of push notifications that you have to look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at and determine which ones are legitimate and that’s hard for humans to do I mean app reviewers can’t even determine if an app

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is legitimate and you’re expecting a computer in a few milliseconds to figure out if a push notification

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is in violation of the no promotions rule so that’s why I keep going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back to the only solution to this has to involve some kind of reporting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by recipients. I have received this spam push notification. Report

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this application or disable notifications. And maybe like, I was trying to think of all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John less intrusive UIs for doing this that wouldn’t bother regular people. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you turn off push notifications for an app, it may ask you if that app has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ever sent you push notifications or if it had sent you push notification recently, like within the past five minutes, it may ask you,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are you disabling notifications? Because for one of these five reasons, and you can say spam, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like some kind of thing like that, that only some nerd will see that’s heavily gated on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing that we all do, which is something sends you notification, you realize you forgot to turn it off, you immediately

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go to system preferences, whatever the hell they call it on iOS settings. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a gear icon, it’s killing me. It’s in both places now. and you immediately go to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John turn it off. And, you know, iOS can detect that sort of pattern and can throw up something that says,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, kind of like those annoying unsubscribe things like you’ve successfully unsubscribed. Did you unsubscribe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because, and you never wanna answer the questions? Well, if you’re angry because something sent you spam, I know I would click the little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing or tap the little thing that says, yeah, I just disabled it because it sent me an ad or something that looked like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an ad. And that’ll have tons of false positives from people who are just angry they got notifications, period. But the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John volume of hundreds of millions of iOS users is enough that they could do these in graphs and say, all right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this looks like a spammy app. Let’s maybe investigate it and have five people a week. Just run that up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on their phone and see if it sends them an ad. And, you know, yeah, and I’m talking about this last show. Apple has all the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here. They can totally stop this. Like, they’re not powerless to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all they have to do, like Margo said, is care about it a little bit. And then like they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can at their leisure do almost anything, almost any possible sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of end user solution, really, really lightweight. And their volumes will make it such that it’ll become super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clear what the popular app that is spamming people is. You’re never going to get the obscure app that’s spamming people because seven

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people have installed, but you’ll get the popular app that’s spamming people. And then you send them a nice little note and say, Hey,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I noticed your app is spamming people. Maybe stop that and they will stop. And if they don’t, their app has gone out of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John store. It’s just, you know, having having such incredible power of everything that’s in the app store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just like they’re wasting it by not using it for good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, I mean this is, you know, as we get into the after discussion I’m sure I’ll bring this up again, but there are so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many areas in which they could use this for good. For example, the way the new Twitter app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco scans URL schemes and maybe process listing, I don’t know, but they scan for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps you have installed and they send that list of apps that you have installed to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Twitter and Twitter uses that to advertise to you. This is a pretty big privacy violation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on iOS generally expect, because the way iOS works in most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways is that apps are sandboxed and can’t read data from other apps. They can’t even see other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps. They can’t even tell what you have installed, conceptually at least. In practice there are two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ways to tell if you have an app installed. One is if the app registers for any URL schemes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then you can check for those, whether they’re registered or not. And the second is there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco low-level, some kind of assist control function, something like that. I don’t know which exactly one it is, but there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a low-level POSIX function to get the list of running process names. And so if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pull that list on a regular basis, the chances are you’re gonna catch a lot of apps the user has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco installed in their currently running state, and so you’ll eventually build up a list of what apps they have installed based on their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco process names. That function, I’m not sure there’s a good reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for that to exist in iOS, or to return valid data. It wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco surprise me if in the future, similar to the way that Apple basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco removed MAC address access from those low-level system calls in iOS 7, where the call is still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there, you can call it, but it just returns

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all zeros for a MAC address now. Similar to that, I don’t think there’s a reason why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iOS needs this function to return valid process names to the app that’s calling it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s no XPC that’s app-controlled or anything like that. So if there’s a good reason, please

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco let us know once.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how this works. Yeah, I know. I don’t think there’s a reason for that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think Apple should care about this problem because I think the list of apps you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have installed should be considered private information, personal information,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that any one app shouldn’t be able to get a list of apps on your phone. URL schemes though,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s a trickier one. So some apps, they have URL schemes in place for various workflow things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, there’s various reasons why you’d want to have and publish a URL scheme, and if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to do that, I guess it, there’s no real way around that, around your app being discovered.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco On the other hand, there’s a lot of apps that have URL schemes in place for other reasons, like some OAuth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco SDK thing, the Facebook login thing, like some some plugin or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco component of your app requires some kind of workaround like where it kicks you to some other app you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sign in and it kicks you back to the back to your app and so you have to have a URL scheme to make that work and so a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco apps have URL schemes that really aren’t using them for any other purpose besides that sort of thing. iOS 8

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the new extension system makes a whole lot of that unnecessary. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would actually suggest and I say this as one of the designers of xcallback URL,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would suggest that URL schemes possibly be deprecated in the future and removed later after that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think that there are better ways around that problem that they’ve designed in iOS 8. If Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seems to think that it’s okay for apps to have a list of 10,000 known URL schemes and scrape

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all your apps and send them to a server and advertise to you based on that, which is what they’re currently permitting Twitter to do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if Apple thinks that’s okay, that’s going to continue. And that’s going to be in every analytics package and every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco scammy ad package for iOS. it’s going to become very standard of practice

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for apps to spy on your other apps and report those back to their shady companies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And that’s really not good. I really don’t like that at all. And so I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as URL schemes become dramatically less necessary with iOS 8, maybe the way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco forward is not to have them to remove that possible area of abuse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Secondarily, Apple could just have a rule that they actually enforce that says you can’t collect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lists of apps from your device and send them to your servers. Like, that could just be a rule.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They don’t seem to care though. Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get the feeling, like, again we have no visibility into what anyone is actually thinking so we just have to guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and there’s void information, but that like, there’s this tiered system

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in terms of developers. Externally you’re all the same, but internally to Apple, if the Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app starts doing something spammy. Apple’s reaction, I would imagine, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not to send a generic email from some person that says

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your app’s going to be pulled in two weeks if you don’t stop doing this, like what they do to other people. You know what I mean? Instead,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone at a much higher level has a nice, friendly phone call with someone higher level on Twitter and they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a discussion about it. Because it’s Twitter, what are they going to do? Pull the Twitter app? I mean, yeah, eventually they would if there was some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of actual disagreement. I totally believe they would pull the Twitter app. But you get handled a little bit differently when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re Twitter. I mean, I know they pulled path for pulling all your contacts and everything, but path was not as big as Twitter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And like, I mean, they’re nice to everybody. Like they’re, it’s not like they’re mean to other people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and nice to Twitter, but I just get the feeling based on nothing other than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seeing their actions externally without knowing what’s going on in the box and maybe hearing a little bit about sort of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John treatment and who gets picked to, you know, come two weeks early and do a demo for a keynote or whatever. However,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not every not every developer is treated the same. And I think this is appropriate in general, but it goes against the sort of egalitarian

⏹️ ▶️ ^John idealistic story of the App Store where, you know, anybody can play and all the rules are the same for everybody.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not quite it doesn’t seem like from the outside that it’s quite the same for everybody. So I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for all we know, Apple has already talked to Twitter and say, we would really prefer you not to get a list of apps.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not like we’re going to pull you from the store. We know you have schedules. tell us that in the next version you’ll fix this and give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us a rough timeline and we’ll say okay and then we won’t say anything about it publicly and everything will be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s totally plausible to me that that could be happening inside Apple, but of course we don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So why don’t you tell us about something we do know, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We do know that we were sponsored this week by a new sponsor. It is Oscar. Oscar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a new kind of health insurance company. They use technology to guide you to better care. It’s at hioscar.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash ATP. It’s hi, like, you know, hi. Hi, oscar.com slash ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So most health insurers have, you know, other big corporations as their primary customers, not individuals

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and families, and it really shows. Oscar only offers plans for individuals and families.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re focused on the needs of the individual. They put people first, and they’ve transformed health insurance from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco scary and overwhelming to friendly and simple. Buying health insurance for yourself is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a pretty intimidating process. I’ve gone through it myself a number of times. some of which were before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Affordable Care Act. And let me tell you, that was terrifying. Because before the Affordable Care Act,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there were all these risks that you would take that aren’t there anymore, where it’s like, you have to understand all these different numbers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and all these different conditions, and you always have to ask yourself, like, well, in which ways could this bankrupt me? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fortunately, most of those things are now illegal, but there’s still a whole bunch of like crazy numbers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you gotta understand and everything. Oscar makes it as easy as possible. Oscar, they have these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco clear, honest language around their plans. There’s only a few plans to choose from and they’re all pretty much the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plan, just like how much deductible do you want. And they had this beautifully designed website that’s easy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to use, full of information, and very, very clear. You would not believe how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad other health insurance websites are, unless you’ve used them, in which case, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And Oscar also offers great customer service via phone or email, which again, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco extremely unusual for health insurance companies. Oscar plans include

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco benefits like free checkups, some free generic drugs, free primary care doctor visits,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco specialists without referrals, you don’t have to go to a referral first, huge time saver. But the coolest benefit that they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, they have a 24-7 doctor on call service. So anytime

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco day or night you can request a phone call and a board certified practitioner

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will call you in a few minutes who can help you with many questions and ailments right over the phone and they can even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issue common prescriptions all right over the phone and that service is free. There’s no copay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s no limit. That service is free for Oscar members. You can get 24 seven doctors

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to $240 a year for reaching daily walking goals. These goals are tailored to you based on your previous level of activity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you wanna participate in this, Oscar will give you a little wearable thing and then you track your progress right in their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app. Whether you’re entirely healthy or you or someone in your family has a complicated medical condition, Oscar’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco plans will cover you. You can buy their insurance through the new health insurance marketplaces if you’re in most of

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because of the way the healthcare marketplaces work, you can only sign up from now through February. So hurry up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s these tier deadlines. So if you sign up in the next couple days, by December 15th,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can get insurance for January 1st. If you sign up by January 15th, you’ll get insurance for

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buy health insurance for yourself and or your family, this is a great way to do it. Oscar is a novel approach

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco slash ATP, or call, they have a special number just for ATP listeners, 1-844-OSCAR-98.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So thanks a lot to Oscar for sponsoring our show. Man, buying health insurance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does suck.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It sucks even if you’re employed at a regular job, like John and I are. It’s still a pain in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John butt. So the self-employed thing is definitely more difficult and usually more expensive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the one big downside of employer-provided is that you usually have little

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or no choice. So you don’t get to shop around. What if I like the Oscar and think it’s awesome? Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tough luck. You can’t forego the employer-funded one because it’s always so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much cheaper because they contribute some money to it. But you have so few choices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You should grit your job.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, yeah. All right. So anyway, so we’re still not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey happy with the App Store, are we, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I thought we were past all this. I really did. I, you know, there was a time when the App Store first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco came out, and over the first couple of years it was out, we had a bunch of bumpy rejections

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from Apple figuring out its policies, developers figuring out what Apple wanted, Apple at first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco being pretty bad about communicating their policies, and then later getting less bad at it. Overall, App Review

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is a good idea. Overall, I support App Review. and overall I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it has benefited customers and developers and Apple. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there are still these dark patches and there are still times when it seems like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple is a little bit too… I wouldn’t necessarily say power hungry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they seem to be too strictly or overreaching

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in their rule enforcement in a way that doesn’t seem to benefit anybody, possibly even including Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That like they’re not, they’re not seemingly looking out for any kind of clear user benefit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re not like, there’s no major reason why, at least that we can see why Apple needs to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enforce certain rules or wants to enforce certain rules. And there are a lot of rules they enforce

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are unwritten. And this is the biggest problem. This is one of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things that’s going on now with around these notification center widgets. And there seems to be this disconnect.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco These are two different parts of Apple, two very, very distantly separated parts of Apple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So on one end you have Craig Federighi and his organization making the software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and making the SDKs and adding these great abilities to the OSs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But developer relations and all parts of developer relations, including app review,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are all buried deeply in Phil Schiller’s organization. So these are very separate parts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Apple. And I think what we’re seeing here, we’ve seen some speculation over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the last couple days from a couple of blogs. In fact, I’m a Stratechery

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco member, Ben Thompson’s site, Stratechery. I’m one of his premium members.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I get his daily updates. And I highly recommend these daily updates. They’re extremely good. He is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of the smartest writers in our business right now. And he wrote one today basically saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco saying along with a few other things he’s seen recently that it sure seems like maybe there’s some friction here between Schiller’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco organization and Federighi’s organization. And I don’t know enough about it to say any more than that, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think looking from the outside, it does certainly seem like these two different parts of Apple are not on the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco page on everything. And something is going wrong there. There’s some kind of friction or communication

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco breakdown or different priorities. Something is going wrong there because we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the massive, you know, as we said this past summer at WBDC, the massive love letter to developers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that Apple basically had this past summer, saying, look at all this great new stuff. All these walls we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lifting, all these things you thought we’d never do, well, we did them. All these things you thought your apps could never do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now you can do them. Now, months later, after this stuff is out and in consumers’ hands

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and these OSs are out, and people actually start trying to do things with them, we’re seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so many problems and rejections from the app review side of things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, and by the way, also a third division is the App Store Editorial Team,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is under ADQ. So you have the people who make the SDKs, the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who pick which apps are featured to be great examples of what apps should be doing, and then the people making

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the policies of actually enforcing those rules. Those are all three different organizations under three different SVPs inside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple, and who apparently have different viewpoints on things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if you could say that the development is on is in conflict with any of those other two. You could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say that AppReview and App Store Editorial are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at best just not communicating with each other and doing embarrassing things. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engineering, like their responsibility is, you know, in cooperation with whatever their, you know, sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of product design thing or, you know, whoever’s designing what the product is going to do. Engineering’s job is to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, implement it. maybe I don’t know if the product design is under that umbrella, but probably anyway, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John create the API’s and every API they create, there’s some expectation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like, we’re just going to make something possible. But although you may be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do a thing with these API’s, for example, read all the context and email them to your server, like the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who made those API’s, it’s not their fault that they you can do that. It’s like we’re, we’re going to implement these features, we’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going to make these API’s that make features possible. I don’t know if, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think Craig Federighi sees it as his responsibility to worry about, and you know, whatever APIs we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make, obviously some developer is going to use those APIs to do something that AppReview is going to reject.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that does not necessarily imply a conflict between Craig Federighi and the AppReview

⏹️ ▶️ ^John section of the organization. I don’t think he would say that he sees it as his role to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those decisions because they aren’t his decisions. There are features that they want developers to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John able to add to their products that are made possible by his APIs. There are also things that people can do with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John APIs that the engineering side makes that are going to be against that review. And that is the way it’s always been.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Um, anecdotes about like, well, I showed this to an engineer in the, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the labs that WWDC and they thought it was awesome. Yeah, they probably do think it’s awesome, but again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they, they, they know they’re not in charge of app review and they’re excited to see someone doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John using their API to do something cool. But I also but I still don’t think that implies a conflict

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between engineering and the rest of the organization. I think the only thing we can say for sure is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John embarrassing lack of communication between editorial and app review in terms of promoting an application

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then pulling it while it’s under promotion. Like, that’s just that’s the type of thing that shouldn’t happen if those things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John communicate with each other better. So. There could be a conflict between it’s a natural,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like we’re geeks out here. And we’re like, if something is possible and, and we can’t think of a reason why we shouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it, it should be allowed. And that’s sort of a,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a sort of Apple engineers mindset, a true engineers mindset would be like, you know, well, the Linux thing, if it’s possible, everyone should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be allowed to do it as free, you know, anarchy

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the Apple mindset, if it’s possible, and if we think about it and we can’t think of a reason to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stop it, uh, then it should be possible. So it’s probably true that if you were to pull the entire organization,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the vast majority of the people who work in engineering and Apple would say, yes, that should be possible. No, I would never pull

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the peak, you know, thing for putting a calculator in that today view. But.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, I I’m I’m hesitant to turn it into a vice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John president versus vice president, internal turf war type battle.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, yeah. That’s why I mean, I’m careful to say that it’s under these people’s organizations. I mean, there’s like we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know if Schiller is involved with these decisions personally or Federighi is mad about these decisions personally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or anything like that. But what we what we can clearly see is that these parts of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are are not working together correctly. Like and it’s so bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that it’s leaking out that it’s publicly visible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, but do you think like I said, I don’t know. I think this is the correct working of engineering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and app review and that engineering makes the APIs and app review decides if the things developers are using them for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are allowed. Our complaint is that AppReview is making decisions that we don’t agree with.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right, and that conflict with editorial. Yeah, and that’s, like I said, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John willing to chalk that up to lack of communication.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but that’s a pretty big thing, because, see, and this is coming at a particularly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad time for Apple, because right now, in this time, you know, late 2014, in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the last couple weeks of 2014. The Apple Watch is coming out soon.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad sales are not that great. It is harder than ever to make money in the App Store. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Android is massive. And Android just released a major update, the whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco paper thing, whatever they call it, material design, all like the Android 5.0, that’s actually getting pretty good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reviews from people. So what we have is, you know, Apple is enforcing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all these rules. They’ve been enforcing all these rules for years, and they have this crazy position of power because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there was really no other place to go if you wanted to make any reasonable money developing apps. I mean, some people make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco money on Android, you know, it’s possible to, but it’s historically been harder.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco As hard as you think it is on iOS to make money, it’s historically been even harder on Android. And a lot of things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just weren’t as good on Android. But that gap is closing, and I’m not sure it ever will close,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco period. I don’t think it will anytime soon, but it’s a lot smaller than it’s ever been before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Meanwhile, at the exact same time, you have the iPad not doing particularly well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco relative to how it was doing. You have immense competition in the App Store that drives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco prices way, way down and makes it very hard to make any money. And you have this new platform,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Watch, that you’re expected to develop for in parallel. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is combining to make it a tougher sell than it previously has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be an iOS developer. You have now more platforms you need to target, there’s more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work for you to do. You might have to do adaptive layout to make resizable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPads, if that ever ships, like we talked about before. So there’s more and more work to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be like a current, up-to-date, responsible iOS developer. There’s more and more work than there’s ever been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before. The alternative of Android development is less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bad it used to be relative to iOS development, and you’re making less money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on iOS than you’ve ever made before, this is not a good time for Apple to add more reasons

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for developers to become disillusioned with the platform. This is strategically a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really terrible time for that, because Apple needs fantastic developers to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do two big things for it. It needs good developers to push the boundaries to make the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPad a better general computing device than it is, and it needs developers to make great apps for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this new watch coming out in the spring. And on some level, there’s always going to be more developers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can always say, well, there’s more people waiting. When you guys all leave, more people will come in. There’s always going to be a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fresh batch. The entertainment industry, lots of industries work that way. That’s true,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but if you want the best developers making the best apps, and if you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the boundaries to be pushed. If you want people, you know, what Apple said in WBDC, they said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on a number of occasions, we can’t wait to see what you do with this stuff. And then they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see what we do with it and they tell us, oh you can’t do half of that. As long as you do what they want you to do. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, they need good developers to push the boundaries and to make fantastic software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is sustainable and that takes advantage of the platform and that pushes it and makes it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco useful for people and it makes people buy their devices and stick with their ecosystem. They need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us right now more than their actions say.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, if we had to pick out things that are in conflict, it’s not that the that engineers conflict

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with any of the non-engineering parts, but it’s the broad trends within Apple in sort of the post

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Jobs era is that in the recent the recent years, and especially in this most recent year, 2014, engineering’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reorganization, which is, you know, has gone through a lot of growing pains and change of leadership and Steve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Jobs goes and Forrestal goes and things are realigned under new people and Johnny Ives elevated and all that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. All of that rejiggering has culminated in an engineering organization

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, like you said, Marco, and like I said, in my Yosemite review and everything. The engineering organization

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that does things that previously it had refused to do, but that had been widely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, desired by their their constituent developers and indirectly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by their customers. That is the overall trend in engineering in the last year or so. And it’s the result of all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the you have to think it’s the result of all these reorganizations that whoever was opposing this is either not in power, not in the company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anymore or lost an argument. Right. And now suddenly engineering is doing things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are that are directly beneficial to developers and indirectly beneficial

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so far to customers, because customers one of these things, too. Whereas AP review.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Has not undergone, as far as I know, such an organizational change, And is instead acting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way it has always acted sort of in cycles where a lot of time it’s dormant and sleeping

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then sometimes the bear wakes up and bites you and We’ve had we’ve had fits of that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, it’s gone in cycles and why why is it awake now? Why is it sleeping other times hard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to say but one thing you can say is it has not undergone the same Transformation that the engineering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John organization has gone through its app store is not suddenly letting in things that a previous didn’t let it let in It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not suddenly Being more reasonable being more transparent, you know Explaining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John itself better like the only thing you can say for the app review organization is that they have cut down on wait times that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Consistently the trend has been you know Don’t have ridiculous wait times for things With

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a few bumps in the road for like releases where the Mac apps have to be delayed forever and stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} that But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually it’s about a week still and it’s it’s you can you be able to say like it’s it’s about a week for like the Last five years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So like the overall trend like if you look the entire history app store is that they have moved that metric to be sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of better in a way that developers like and that indirectly benefits customers, which is the same sort of yardstick

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was using in engineering. And so it’s all the more glaring when engineering is suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing things that seem, you know, that everyone would have said are no blame to doing them in a cautious way, doing them a good app,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John way, but making positive progress where we say, you know, iOS eight is better for developers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than iOS seven was and so on and so forth, whereas App Review just does not seem to be making any progress.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I don’t I’m not familiar with the internal organization of AppReview or that side of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John organization. But if it has undergone any sort of transformation or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John change in leadership that is. The sort of parallels the engineering one, I’m not aware of it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and if it hasn’t undergone that, then that entire organization looks like it looks to me like a typical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John corporate organization with people who are in power, who are stubborn, who are wrong and who can’t be convinced by their underlings.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right. Like and you just suck. It’s like, well, I disagree with you and I’m your boss. the end.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The other interesting thing to go back just a half step to what Marco was saying is that not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey only are developers feeling like we got a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of a bait and switch from WWDC because I believe Marco you did and I know I wrote a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey blog post on the way back from WWDC about how we finally got all the things we’ve been asking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for. We finally got all the things we wanted and it’s so I don’t remember who was that said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at first, but it’s like Lucy and, uh, and Charlie Brown with the football, you know? And so here it is, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey got all the things we want. Oh, uh, just kidding. And, and so developers are obviously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey furious, but a lot of users that I speak to just regular people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who are not developers, they’re getting more and more frustrated with Apple too. It started with Apple maps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey being crap and, and Google maps not being available. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it continued to buggy iOS seven that all of a sudden looks different. And people keep telling me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how iOS eight is buggy. And to be honest, I haven’t really had any particular issues, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that being said, it seems like a lot of people I know who used to be really into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all things, Apple maybe aren’t. And, and that’s a tough place

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to be. And so here it is. Apple is the, is in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a position where they really shouldn’t be pissing off their developers. Not only for the developer’s sake, but also for users sake.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do you see any do you have actual any non-geeky user friends who talk to you about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John applications? Are you just talking about like the luster of Apple’s gone off? Are you talking about users who notice the transmit can’t send

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things to iCloud drive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anymore? No, no, no, no, no. The former where the luster that how it’s always infallible. They always were.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But but but that luster goes in cycles, too. That’s just the typical, you know, celebrity type. Build them up, tear them down. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I don’t I don’t attach anything particular to that because I mean, that goes the cycle for that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John practically yearly at this point. yearly everybody loves Apple and yearly everybody hates it. Like it’s, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be getting faster, you know?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah. Although, you know, to be fair, one thing that does definitely impact customers is when an app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is approved with a certain feature, they buy it, they use that feature, and then they have to remove that feature because of Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco policy after the fact.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s why I was asking. I was asking if people, if people notice that, like, do they read the release notes? Do they just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get mad at the developer? Like, does that blame even land on Apple? Or do people, do the type of features that get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John removed in that way, are they below the notice of people? because, you know, the feature that was removed from transmit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people who use transmit are already probably kind of geeky, and maybe they read the release notes. I’m trying to think of this like a mass

⏹️ ▶️ ^John market example, like if the Facebook app could do something that everybody thought was great, and then Apple removed it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe that would get some notice. But I, I have never heard any person who uses iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John complained to me that an app was updated in a feature was removed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have, but it was not at all because of Apple. Everyone I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is furious about you not being able to send messages in the standard Facebook app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anymore. And you have to download a different Facebook Messenger app in order to send messages.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh yeah, no, I remember that. Yes. And that was, and that blame landed on Facebook and that totally was Facebook because they decided

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to split their own stupid app. So whatever. But yeah, I guess they would notice that because that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a, that’s sort of cutting an application in half into two pieces. But for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for features that are banned because of App Store rules,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know. Like I mean, it just may just be the people I come in contact. It’s not that big of a deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like again, a lot of these issues are magnified for us because of the circles we travel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in. The Apple losing its luster type thing is more likely a tertiary effect of what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Barker was talking about, where it’s like Apple needs developers to help drive its platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forward. And developers are trying to drive it forward. And every time they go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John take a step too far, Apple snaps the whip and says, whoa, not that far. We don’t want you to make this app too useful.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But we had to think about this for six months or nine months. Or we have some senior VP who really thinks we should never, ever do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. So we’re never going to let you do that. It’s like, how do you become gun

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shy? You become sort of like, there’s many, many articles from developers expressing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their reservations about using new APIs. Like even in best case, it’s just like, let’s lay

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off this new API for a year and see how many people invest in it for a year and get their app rejected. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then maybe we’ll get the lay of the land and sort of divine with chicken bones and other, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dice and stuff and figure out, I think this will probably be okay. We’ll work on this for six months and see, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s making developers more cautious and really they should be blazing their way forward and making apps that, you know, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the stupid line, you know, the apps that Apple hasn’t even thought of before. Show us your amazing apps. It’s just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get the feeling that in some Apple executives mind, they’re like, make amazing apps exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way I’m envisioning in my mind that I’m not going to tell you about. Yeah, I have a picture in my mind of what an amazing app would be like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not going to tell you what that picture is. Go make it. And if you don’t, I’m going to reject your app. Like that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a chilling effect on development. And so like if if customers are going to notice anything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s going to be this multi year delayed thing from developers being more cautious to use APIs and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bring out laps apps later and without more interesting features. And all you need is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I’m I was thinking of Marko already brought this up, but like, what does it take

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for someone to switch? What does it take for someone to say, well, screw this? I’m going to develop for Android now. They need to be able

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make money doing it. And some structural issues probably need to be sorted out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so they become less of a deterrent, like for an iOS developer, even with all the devices that are out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there now, you have to think fragmentation and install base of the most recent version

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are a huge drag on switching over to Android because you just have to wait for so long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the 5.0 to be everywhere. And then you have to deal with so many more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John devices that you have to wait for some sort of consolidation.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even that is not nearly as bad as it used to be though. Like they did this crazy thing. I don’t know the crazy details of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it, but they did this crazy thing a couple of years ago where they started bundling all the APIs together into the Google Play

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco services, which can self update.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was thinking like hardware fragmentation of screen sizes and CPU and GPU combinations.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So again, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem for really just games. Like for apps, it’s a lot less of a problem because the GPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stop mattering as much for apps than games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I know, but like the reason, I’m not just thinking of games. What I’m thinking of is in terms of what kind of applications

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are going to drive the platform forward and do amazing things that no one had ever thought of. And those are always the ones that push

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the system. And it’s easier, right now it’s easier to make those on iOS because you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a better idea of what you’re going to be aiming at and the installed basis on a more recent version. So if you’re going to do something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amazing and advanced, you can make more money doing it on iOS, and it will be easier. What will it take for those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people to bail and go to Android and try to do the same thing? Because that’s what you don’t want to happen, is someone to come up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a new app idea that hasn’t existed. Let’s take BitTorrent as an example, because pretend BitTorrent didn’t exist,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and someone came up with that idea, and all our phones were, this is a terrible idea, because it would kill your battery. But anyway, some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type of application that does something that would not be allowed on the App Store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but that has a user benefit like users really like this application and this application would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not be possible on iOS. And it happens to land on Android first. And everybody’s like, well, I would get an Apple phone, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only Android has insert whatever this killer app is. That’s Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worst nightmare. Like if Twitter came out today and was only available in Android because Apple didn’t allow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something, didn’t allow like SMS access or some crazy thing that, you know, whatever you don’t want,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You don’t want you you want to have that app you want to have like even if it’s something as stupid as Flappy Bird and Even though I’m sure there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was and on Android 2 and everything like you want to be The platform where the great

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new thing happens and you can’t plan for the great new thing and you don’t know where it’s gonna come from And you don’t know who’s gonna make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and you don’t know when it’s going to appear But you do know that the more you restrict your platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The higher the chances that this thing will appear only someplace else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, and it has a lot to do with also who is using your platform. You know, like somebody in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chat pointed out, it was Hi Endian in the chat pointed out, like, you know, a lot of times the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco gotta have it apps that are only on one platform, a lot of times that’s not because of technological

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco limitations, it’s because the developer happened to use that platform or the most early adopters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are on that platform. And for the most part, that platform today is iOS and it has been iOS for a while,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I I think since the iPhone was launched, it’s been iOS. But that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco guaranteed to always be the case. Like Instagram launched on iOS first because that’s just what you did in 2010

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or whenever it launched. Today, I don’t think anything would launch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Android first, but it would be increasingly difficult for a service to get really big and be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco iPhone only today. Because the expectation gets higher every year that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you should be on both of those platforms at the same time. I’m still fine being iOS only because I’m just one guy and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not trying to take over the world and make a billion dollars from Facebook stock. But I couldn’t recommend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to a big VC backed company that wants exclusive growth, I couldn’t recommend to them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you should go iOS only necessarily. I think at this point you’ve got to have both. And it’s only a matter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of time. Once you reach this point where we can say, well you really should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be looking at both platforms. It’s only a matter of time before something big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happens on Android first. And I don’t think we’re near that point yet. I think we’re still a few years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off from that being very likely. But the direction we’re going, that will eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happen. And I don’t think Apple really cares about that. Or that I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think they’re in denial, or I think they either they don’t think it will happen, or they don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it will be very important. And I think they’re wrong on both of those if they’re making those assumptions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, the other thing Apple has going for it in that area, and it seems to be their strategy so far, this is, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of a game consoles analogy is that they just got so a lot of consoles, like no matter how annoying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your platform is, one, one lever, one knob that can always turn is let’s just sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bazillion frigging iOS hardware devices, right? Because if we sell, we need to keep selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those because if we don’t sell enough, those would be like Windows phone and I’ll make anything for us. And we just need to maintain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some kind of within some kind of striking distance of Android’s market share so that it doesn’t become

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that big of a deal, because if Apple had 15% market share, wouldn’t matter how awesome their platform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is, wouldn’t matter how permissive their app review rules are. They’d be like Windows Phone. It’d be like, yeah, that’s nice, whatever. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have some good developers, you make some good apps, but it’s not enough. So they need to make good hardware and sell a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of it. And so far, they’ve been doing pretty good on that. So it’s giving them giving them the room to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to screw up an app review without as many consequences, because it’s just like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, like I said, with Android, no matter how annoying it is, Android has such a massive market share that if you are going to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a one of the biggest companies in the world you have to address it because it doesn’t matter how bad or it is you just have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like it’s more than half the market you’ve got you got to go do it and Android is all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is only a contender because it’s got a lot of market share a big market share and it’s perceived as being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better and having customers who are more willing to spend money and so on and so forth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah I mean Apple definitely has a larger share of of the most desirable customers for most people right now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And they have for a while. But I think the percentage share of that goes down every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco year for Apple. I don’t know that for sure, I’m just guessing. I still think they have a pretty healthy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lead, but again, it’s like, if you look at the sum of all of this, of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why somebody would develop for iOS only or first, there used to be a lot of very

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco strong reasons. There were a bunch of apps out there. There were a bunch of, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is where people look to get apps, there was a bunch of money to be made potentially, all the early adopters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use this platform, you personally use this platform, you like this platform, there are so many great things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can do only on this platform or easiest on this platform. All those advantages,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or at least most of those advantages still exist today. All of them are weaker though than they used

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be. Every time Apple does a chilling effect kind of thing like with AppReview,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it drops that barrier lower and lower and lower. And again, it’s a slow progression.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No single one of these factors is totally collapsing suddenly. They’re all just lowering slowly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over time. I fear that this is going to catch Apple by surprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if one day there starts to be some spillover and Apple just misses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it or they didn’t see it coming. And then what happens after that? What happens when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a few prominent iOS developers really do switch to Android and really start making really good stuff on Android

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and not on iOS? I don’t think we’re very far away from that happening. I think that starts to happen this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco coming year. And I don’t know what happens after that. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the barriers that Apple built around itself are substantially lower and weaker than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think Apple thinks they are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You think in the next year, someone’s prominent developer is gonna bail?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Definitely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yeah. Like who? I don’t think so. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think with the watch coming, there’s a lot to distract people.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I agree. You know, that happened with the iPad. I remember right before the iPad came out

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was when the Nexus One came out, and a whole bunch of iOS developers were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, oh man, the Nexus One, that’s kind of interesting, and then Google sent a bunch of them for free to a lot of people, including

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me, I should disclose. And I started to think, I wonder if I should make Instapapers website work better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on this. Maybe eventually I’ll make an app for it someday. And then Apple announced the iPad like a month later,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then we all got distracted by the iPad for three years. That might happen with the watch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe Apple’s banking on that, maybe Apple’s assuming that will happen with the watch. I’m not entirely sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it will. I think, first of all, WatchKit in year one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is gonna be pretty limited in what you can even do with it and what kind of apps even make sense to have a watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco app. Not to mention, if you think Apple is being, you know, controlling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and arbitrary and capricious with the App Store rules with Today widgets, you haven’t seen anything yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because wait till the watch comes out and they start denying apps for that for things that we consider

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco invalid or stupid reasons or they start enforcing inconsistent rules for that. Believe me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s gonna be a lot of that going on. I’m actually honestly a little,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and this is another thing too, I think a lot of developers are gonna draw that same conclusion, and they’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see this stuff that Apple’s pulling now with the iOS 8 things and today with just this stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they’re gonna look at this new SDK we got with WatchKit and be like, well, should I really spend the next three months developing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a WatchKit thing, or should I just wait and see how the market shakes out? Because we’re gonna see a whole bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of app review BS next spring when this comes out, we’re gonna see a lot of Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco VBS over the first few months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, but when the watch first comes out though, there’s the gold rush thing, like you said with the iPad. If you’re one of the first apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^John available that does X on the watch, you get a massive, a massive leg up on everybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else. You always wanna be there when a new device, especially a new category of device, like the iPad, like the iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I don’t think that’s gonna dissuade many people who think they have a shot at being there on launch.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Maybe, but again though, there’s also, There’s not a whole lot you can do with the watch kid apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quite yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It doesn’t matter. You can charge 99 cents for your app that has watch integration and you get 99 cents

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or 70, whatever. Sixty nine point nine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, it’s it’s not really that cut and dry, though, right? Because you need to have your a standalone app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey first in order to have a watch kid app. And presumably many of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey watch kid apps will be built upon standalone apps that presumably you’ve already paid for unless you pull

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a Tweety two. So, I don’t know. In any case, let’s talk about something else that’s really cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s Backblaze. We are sponsored once again by Backblaze, our friends that are in the online backup business.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, let me tell you about online backup. You need this. Your family needs this. Everyone you know needs this.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco take out your data with it. Even just like human error sometimes. There’s a lot of human error you can do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If your backup is a RAID array, you’re so screwed. Remember, RAID is not a backup. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you want online backup, trust me. If you’re visiting your family

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this holiday season, if you see your parent or grandparent or sibling’s computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco without online backup, give them the gift of installing Backblaze for them. Online

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco backup is really, really important. To use John Gruber’s words, if you don’t have it, you’re nuts. You should really, really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get online backup. Backblaze is by far the best one that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have tried. I used it long before they were a sponsor of the show. I’ve been using it for years. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tried two other ones recently and was very disappointed in both of them

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco files that way. Backblaze runs natively on your Mac. It is not like a weird Java app or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything. It’s a native Mac OS X app, founded by ex-Apple engineers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Runs native on your Mac, runs native on Yosemite. They’re always up to date with new OS releases. I’ve never

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had Backblaze break on me with an upgrade. There’s no add-ons, there’s no gimmicks, there’s no extra charges.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Really, five bucks a month for unlimited, unthrottled, fully native online backup for the Mac.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go to your loved ones, install Backblaze. Someday they will thank you for that. Maybe not immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re gonna wonder what you’re doing immediately. Someday they will thank you for that. Thanks a lot to Backblaze for sponsoring our show once

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, any other thoughts on the App Store stuff before we move along?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s always, it’s like follow up. It’s like, there’s always gonna be thoughts on the App Store. Never ending

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pit of thoughts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My final thought I think is that, it’s within Apple’s power, and they have done it before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to smooth over the worst of these misfires by talking directly to the affected developers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until they’re roughly satisfied. And that is simultaneously the best and the worst

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing that can happen. the best thing in that people come out of it happy. We get the features

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we want. We serve the everyone comes to a compromise. Everyone walks away satisfied. It’s the worst thing that could happen and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it doesn’t address the structural problem which causes these bear attack flare ups from app review

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and has for years and years. So I don’t know if we should just be hoping for a larger crisis

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which will become a crisis attunity for us to for Apple to actually fix the problems that ail

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, or we should be hoping for just for, you know, the, the bad decisions to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reversed and to go back to the sleeping bear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, we’ll see. I mean, I don’t know. It’s just, it seems like such a silly problem to have, but whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Speaking of silly problems to have, let’s talk about time commitments. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I wanted to talk about a couple things. First is FastText

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is not for sale anymore. What? I pulled it today. There goes your M3. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know, right? Tens of people a day are going to be disappointed by this. Haha, that’d be a good day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now, I pulled it for a handful of reasons, and there’s a point here, but it’s going to take me a second

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to get there. I pulled it because… Aquahire? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s totally it. I pulled it because I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m kind of kidding myself in thinking that I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey going to find the time to get it updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for iOS 7. And given that we’re already months into iOS 8, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of getting ridiculous. I’m getting to the point that I’m feeling guilty every time I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey see a sales day of more than zero, which is most days, although if it’s more than five, I’m doing a happy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dance. Um, I’m getting guilt or I’m feeling guilty about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey selling someone, something that’s so dated and knowing deep down in my heart of hearts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that the likelihood of me updating it is not good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And as John Chigi assumed in the chat, I’m really getting over

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that being a joke now. And to be honest, it deserves to be a joke. It is kind of ridiculously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey funny. And it’s absurd that we are on iOS 8 and I have not yet updated for iOS 7.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But in the end of the day, it occurred to me that it’s really serving no good purpose.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It served its purpose, which was for me to prove to myself that I could get something in the App Store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I did. And I am still proud of that accomplishment, but I’m no longer really proud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the way the app is today. And it’s a little better on my phone because I’ve updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey most of the issues for iOS 7 innate. I still have a couple of lingering bugs that I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had time to look at. But I was talking to Aaron about it earlier today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t I can’t imagine a time where I’m going to look at her and now we’re getting a little into analog territory.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But I can’t imagine a time I’m going to look at her and say, you know what, rather than spending time with you and Declan, let me go

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and hold myself up in the office and fight with auto layout.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That is that is a bar that you can apply to almost anything else in life and decide that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something that you shouldn’t do. But anyway, why not just leave it there and have it be free?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I could, but then it’s still it’s still going to be, oh, haha, you still haven’t updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it yet. And I’m just I’m over that because it’s true and ridiculous. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m grumpy about it, I think, because I know it’s true. Like if it was like the who the hell is Casey joke,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I still find that kind of funny because it’s hopefully not really true anymore. And so I’ve gotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey past it. But you’re more famous than us now. I don’t know about that, but anyway, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in this case, it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that’s just, I’m feeling super guilty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Have you done a lot of open source development or contributing to open source projects?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Not really. I mean, I have Camel out on GitHub, which I actually wanted to talk about as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But in terms of contributing to like massive open source projects, I haven’t, mostly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because The couple times I have and Pidgin is an example, which is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey multi protocol I am client or library if nothing else. This is the library

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that runs idiom, adiom, whatever you call it on the… Idiom. Yeah, that on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is that the name of the library? I thought it was lib purple. It was the AIM library and Pidgin is the client.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You are correct. It’s lib purple and Pidgin is the client. You’re absolutely right. Anyways, I looked into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey contributing to, I actually may not have even been lib purple. might have been ADIM.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I started looking at this code and went, I have no idea what the hell’s going on here.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I found that in a couple of open source projects I’ve briefly considered contributing to, the code

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was so crazy complex that, and I feel like I’m pretty good at what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I do, but it was so esoteric and wild that I realized

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was not even worth jumping in. And so I have in short, I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really contributed to any established open source projects now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I bring that up because in this implied time commitments of open source projects, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the subheading here under this topic, what I was thinking of is my open source

⏹️ ▶️ ^John projects that I started myself or published somewhere or contributed to that I did years and years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ago, and most of them are all still out there and they are far worse off than fast text, me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} far, far

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like things that I haven’t worked on in a decade or more and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were never very good because they were written by, you know, the much younger version of myself. Right. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I mean, before I even get into the time commitment things like that, there’s code out there with my name

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it. That’s terrible that I’m embarrassed by, but I don’t pull it because it’s like, that’s sort of part of the open source thing. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I write the source code. Uh, I put it up there and it’s free for anyone to grab

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and use. Am I working on it? No. Am I adding features? No. Am I fixing bugs?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s a bigger discussion. But it’s super low priority, but it would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never occur to me to take it down. And maybe it’s like Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, where he doesn’t have enough distance from it either, like the Who is Casey thing where it’s not true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or you feel that these complaints are founded. If someone complained to me that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one of my CPAN modules is a piece of crap, I would agree with them, as Casey seems to agree that FastTax

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is out of date at this point. But it wouldn’t drive me to pull

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. I don’t think there is an implied commitment for me to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John continue to maintain for free this open source code that I wrote in 1997, right? I mean, although

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be fair, the context is different of having an app in the app store versus having a CPAN module available.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if it’s free, if it’s for charge, I understand that. But if you’re charging people money you feel bad about that, but if it’s free,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then you know, it’s exactly like the open source code and the sense that like, well, you know, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get what you paid for. You didn’t like it. It was a crappy app. Delete it from your phone. You didn’t pay a dime for it, right? If you don’t like the software, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looks great to you and you download it and delete it from your desk. Fine. You know, it’s, it’s the same type of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s, and the reason Casey said he was pulling it is because he felt, he felt bad or guilty

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when people would complain that the Apple is an updated and it’s like, yeah, the app’s not updated. I’m not doing fast text anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But fast text that I did do is there. If it stops working on iOS, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, pull it or market is only working as older, like eventually it will age out if you don’t modify it, right? Unlike most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open source software, because Unix never changes, like it’ll,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} it’ll more or less

⏹️ ▶️ ^John continue to work, right? Or if it doesn’t, people just stop complaining about it. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anyway, that’s how I feel about my older projects is that I feel the same way as Casey does, embarrassed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by them embarrassed by they’re not being not being updated you know and and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel the same way about future putting more time into it am I going to know because I have many other things that I’m doing with my time these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John days but I but my decision given all those things is not to pull but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just to leave it there festering I guess on the internet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no I mean like I totally get this I mean I went through some of the same things with bug shot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bug shot does not work on the new iPhones for some reason and I I don’t even know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why I never really looked into the I haven’t I haven’t spent five minutes on it it could be a five minute

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fix I don’t know the reason why it doesn’t work is less important than the reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco why I’m not working on it which is that it made no money like it basically no money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it made I think $3,500 the vast majority of which was the very first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco month

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s no money oh you’re adorable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no well let me tell you how much money my C-band modules.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Let

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me tell you how much money Fastext has made. I don’t think I’ve…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I win! I win at zero dollars.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} You do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you do, but I don’t have the numbers in front of me so I don’t want to lie, but I am extraordinarily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey confident it’s less than a thousand dollars and I’m pretty confident it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at or less than 500 over the course of I think four years it’s been in the store. Okay

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well, regardless, I feel like a jerk, but you know it made a whole it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco made that amount of money up front, and then it just stopped making money. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco remember there was even a brief time when we were comparing Bugshot to Fast

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Tech sales

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they were fairly comparable. So it had a good month and then it was over.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So the fact is, it didn’t work on iOS 8 on these new devices. And whether it’s the OS or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco devices, I don’t even know. It wasn’t even worth spending 15 minutes on because if I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to make Bugshot continue as a product. I would want to do a proper

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco update to it for iOS 8, which would mean full photo library integration

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so that you could, for instance, annotate a screenshot and then delete it from your camera roll, which you can’t do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the current version because you couldn’t do that with your old SDK. Things like be an extension so that you could, you know, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have the photo editing extension type. Why isn’t Bugshot a photo editing extension? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like I would want to do that to it. I would want to make it like a proper updated app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I’m going to keep it in the store and keep it working and keep it running as a product. And the fact is, it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t make enough money. It never made enough money to make that really worth doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so, when I look at how do I want to spend this time, which is what you were saying, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m getting back to, when you look at like, do I want to spend this evening of coding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fixing bugshot, which should really be, you know, at least a couple of weeks of coding to really do what I would want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with it. So, you know, do I want spend the next two weeks of coding time fixing bugshot or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco improving overcast, which is making money and which is seemingly a more deserving

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco source of my time? Or if I’m throwing around two weeks of coding time, should

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I even try a whole different app, maybe some crazy thing for the watch? Should I try a whole new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco product to give that a chance to succeed? So I made the decision. It was not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worth me putting any more time into it. I didn’t want to put any more time into it because it simply wasn’t interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it wasn’t going to pay off. And the things I wanted to do with it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco were never going to be worth doing with it. And so Casey, first of all, I feel like a jerk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for ever making fun of you now. But second of all—

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey CASEY MOORE But it was deserved. Well, deserved is maybe a poor choice of words, but it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco accurate. DAVID POGUE It was. I mean, it wasn’t meant to be insulting. It was meant to be funny, you know. So now I feel like a jerk and I’m sorry. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t make you feel bad. But I totally understand what you’re saying, which is like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can’t foresee a time where you’re gonna choose to spend your time doing that instead of anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else with your work or family. And I get that. I totally get that. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if that’s your reason, I totally support it. Because I’ve made those same kind of decisions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I think you should be making those kind of decisions. Did you pull Bugshot or is it free?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I pulled it. I made it free a few months after I released it, when it was clear,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe six months after I released it, it became very clear after a while, it was making like between zero

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and three sales a day, even at a dollar. It was doing very badly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I eventually, I’m just like, I screw it, I’ll just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} make it free.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So why did you pull it after it was free?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It stopped working.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, well, so there you go. That’s the Marco strategy I endorse. Make it free, when it stops working, pull

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Because then you’re basically, you’re not putting any more time into it. But like, for something like Bugshot, just because Marco is not interested

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in putting a time and it doesn’t make it all of a sudden not a useful application, especially for the poor, like someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying, you know, this idea of when your app when you’re not going to put any more time in your apps, leaving them on the store is free as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bag that clutters a store. No, that’s exactly the kind of clutter I want when I’m looking for an app. And like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just want something quick and free. I want it to be an app that a good developer has abandoned. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not the best app, maybe it’s an iOS six, but it’s not going to be filled with ads, it’s actually going to do something useful, it’s not going to be filled with, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, spammy reviews that somebody paid for. I would love to stumble upon bugshot as a free

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screenshot annotation app that I needed in a pinch, then stumbling on the 8000 other free apps, which are probably not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even screenshot apps at all, but some kind of like secret portal to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some sort of online gambling thing or something, who knows. So I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would say that you should consider putting fast text back is free until it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stops working, then pull it don’t put any more time into you don’t want to, but if someone is looking for an app that does what FastText

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does, and they stumble upon FastText, it’s not filled with ads, it’s not filled with malware, they’ll download it for free,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’ll do what it does. If they don’t like it, they’ll delete it. Fine. Like, I think, you know, you did put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work into it. It does do something. It is functional. Why not let people benefit from it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Even though you may feel bad about not updating or whatever, but I don’t, you know, I wouldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spend time feeling bad about that because you’re just making a choice about what to do with your time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So one of the reasons is I feel like it’s calling attention to something that isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey my best work, which I know you talked about with your CPAN modules, but I don’t know. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just, as I’ve gotten older and as I’ve gotten to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey some kind of internet persona, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey take a lot of pride in the things that I put out into the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And, and while camel, for example, the, the blogging software that I wrote,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that powers Casey list.com, it’s not terribly great code,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it’s not terribly bad code and it works. And honestly, I’m pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey proud of my website and maybe some people read it. Maybe they don’t, maybe some listeners will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey read it and be like, why is he proud of this? And that’s okay. I mean, if you don’t get it, that doesn’t matter to me because I’m proud

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of it. And I’m not proud of fast text anymore. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but see, don’t you think that’s the way it should be? Like I’ve always considered it a a badge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of honor, a desirable trait that if you are a programmer, you should always look back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the code you wrote in the past and think it’s bad because if you don’t, that means you’re not getting any better. So if you look at the code

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you wrote last year, you should find problems with it now that you didn’t find. Then if you look at the code that you wrote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John five years ago, it should look disgusting If it

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} was 10 years

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ago, it should look like nonsense. And you can’t even believe you were the same person who wrote it. Like that should be true

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the life of a working program. So the fact that you are no longer proud of fast tech as a product,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a as a pile of source code, as a whatever shows that you are making progress, that if you were to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it now, you would do it better. You would see things in it now that that are, you know, that are more wrong or that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could be done. You know what I mean? Like that, I don’t think that should dissuade you. Like and yes, it’s not your best work. Yes, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bad that someone might Google your name and stumble across this thing and not see the date on it And like it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same thing with a c-pan module someone stumbles across you know, there’s My largest giant pile of public

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pro code and looks at it as all crap and decide that I’m a crap programmer That’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I guess I’m willing to take that risk that they don’t see the dates and or whatever Especially since it this is all other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John topics Maybe we can get to and a bit of especially since I am still actually maintaining that code I’m like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re deciding not to maintain fast X But I don’t think you should feel bad about just because you’re not proud of it. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think all your applications, all your endeavors, you should look back on and say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is no longer up to my standards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I do. And I mean, I was and here’s the comedy of all this, how I know I made the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right call is I had like half an hour to fiddle around tonight. And I ended up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey adding a feature to camel rather than futzing with fast text. And so that’s how I knew

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I probably made the right call. But I agree with you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And even as I was looking at Camel earlier tonight, I looked at it and thought, oh, God, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey should really refactor like half of this. But I feel like with fast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey text, it’s sort of advertising that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not good at what I’m sort of supposed to be good at to be a part of this

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Same thing as my C-band modules. What Pearl code of mine can you see? You can see old code that’s bad. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^John code can’t you see? All the code I write for my employers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh, I think it’s a little different to, well, to me, I find it a little different though, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your Pearl code does not directly relate to the things that you’re known for on the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s not like you’re, I mean, the best analogy I can think of is like old crappy system

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seven reviews that are still out on, which I know you never wrote, but just hypothetically. that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you if you want to go for that, my old OS 10 reviews are terrible. The writing is terrible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I cannot even look at them. I just I’ve said this before, and I don’t know why I’m the only person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the Internet pointing this out, because it’s the worst thing I’ve ever said. But people don’t seem to notice. I use smileys

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in in some of them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Colon, close parentheses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the middle of the text. Do you understand that? That’s and that’s what I’m known for. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always interviews and they’re out there and the writing is terrible. The content is terrible. It’s just.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t even want to think about it, but am I going to pull those reviews? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can release special editions that have all the crap removed and a bunch of new crap added.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} People

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keep asking for a, you know, a collection of them. And I’m like, that would mean that I would have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make hard decisions about, you know, it’s like George Lucas special edition. Do I take out the smileys

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what order of the line clean up the lines and the dust and scratches?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The smileys count as Matt lines. I think so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Goodness. So, I mean, I understand your point. I don’t know. To me, it just seems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It seems different probably because it’s me and not you. And so I just look

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey at it differently, but I understand your point about making it free and that’s actually something I hadn’t really thought about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Um, and maybe I’ll do that. Maybe, maybe I won’t, I don’t know, but it just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I feel like, I feel like it calls attention to something. I guess what I’m trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to say is the CPAN modules, you have to kind of seek out. Whereas I think if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I were a random person looking to figure out who the three of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey us are, for you, they would find your OS X reviews, which granted the older ones may

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not be great, but the newer ones are just freaking phenomenal. And for Marco, they’ll find a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey laundry list of successful applications and projects. And Business Insider blog posts.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, there’s that too. But, um, but, but for me, I don’t want someone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to stumble upon fast text and judge me based on that. And I guess in summary, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s just plain pride, but I don’t know. I just, I felt like the right answer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was to pull it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got bad news for you, Casey. In several years, you’re, you’re going to say the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing about the podcast we’re recording right now. And it will be the thing you’re known for most

⏹️ ▶️ ^John widely in the internet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s very true. That’s very true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, I feel like this is true of everything. Like that if you’re getting better at things, which most of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us do continue to get better things as we get older, especially things not having to do with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John physicality, you will look back on what you’ve done previously, even if it’s the thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re most known for and think it is not up to your standards and that you could do better now or find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things wrong with it that you didn’t find wrong with it. Now, I think you should be proud of FastX. If I had an app on the app store,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would leave it there until it broke. I think making it go free is entirely understandable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I would definitely, I would leave it out there just to sort of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John prove to the world that, like you said, I did make an iOS app once, and it does work, and it did do things, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John here it is. And maybe you just change how you refer to it on sort of your online resume,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John same way that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} say like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in my little section on my website, like retired podcasts, podcasts that I’m no longer doing, right? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know. I don’t think you should feel as bad as you do, But, uh, you know, got to do what you got to do. I also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think, uh, you should put feet on the icon, put it back in for a day and then pull it. Do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me to sell it for you? Fast text. Yeah, sure. If you can get me more than 20 bucks. Sell it to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Marco. We need a reversal here. I mean, he needs to buy something instead of selling it. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right. Um, well, why don’t you tell us Marco about something that’s awesome. And then I’d like to talk a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey little bit about, um, like what John was referring to earlier, which is the implied, um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time commitment of open projects, which is a kind of different animal.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So the other thing I wanted to talk about is the implied time commitments

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of open source software. And I first became affected

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey by this when I open sourced Caml, which again is the Node.js

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey based blogging platform that I use to power my website. And I got

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enough attention from it that a handful of people had forked it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had issued pull requests and or made various comments on GitHub.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I noticed that a lot of times I just didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have the time to handle these in a timely manner. And apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m trying to squeeze the word time into the sentence 34 times. Anyway. Nice. See what I did there? Meow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So anyhow, occasionally there were instances where people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would issue a pull request, wait a day or two and then like pull

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or rescind the pull request saying, Oh, I guess you didn’t like this. Those people are jerks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of. Yeah. But nevertheless, at the same time, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or felt, especially when there was a little more activity a couple of months back, a few months back, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey felt this like overwhelming burden put on me to get through

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey these pull requests in a timely manner. And I probably shouldn’t have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and this comes back to what John was saying earlier, but nevertheless, I felt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey huge amounts of guilt and this burden because I wasn’t getting through these poll requests quickly enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it was something I totally did not expect. And it’s a wonderful, wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey thing in that people care enough to be issuing these poll requests. But at the same time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was not prepared for it. I kind of thought in my head that I was going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just throw it out into the internet and then kind of walk away and never look back and turns

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out that’s. Not really the case.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. So the thing that I’m struggling with is similar only over a longer timeline. And now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, you can tell me what you think I should do about this. So I’ve got these C-band modules out there. Most of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them, nobody uses anymore, which is kind of the ideal that Casey was looking for. you like you throw it out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there and you know and no one looks at it again and I have something like my first

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one actually from the 90s probably doesn’t even work anymore but no one downloads it so nobody knows that so it’s fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I do have a couple that people are still using and what you did back in the day and what you probably still do today

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you had a CPM module that became popular is you made a website for it you hosted the source code somewhere where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people could you had where you had a bug tracker you put it in version control, you gave out commit bits

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the repository for people who you wanted to contribute to the project, you started a mailing list, and like you just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you built up this ecosystem around it. Pre GitHub. Yeah. Yeah, well, this is, this is, yeah, way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before GitHub, like this is before SourceForge, like when SourceForge came, it was like, wow, this whole website does all this stuff for you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So one of the actual time commitments of having an open source

⏹️ ▶️ ^John project like this is that I have had to move those things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to new places when the old places go away or become crappy like SourceForge has. So I moved

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from SourceForge to Google Code. I’ll probably move from Google Code to GitHub. Move version control

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from CVS to Subversion. Now I’m starting to show my age here. I should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably move from Subversion to Git, which I probably will do eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And those are things it’s like, at the time you have those decisions, it’s like, well, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could just leave it there forever, but maybe the mailing list broke, or maybe something’s not working, or maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nobody uses CVS anymore. So do I not put any more time in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and just, you know, like remove it from the internet or just like let it die? Or do I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put in the day or two to move these things? And historically, I’ve decided that it’s worth putting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the time to do these conversions and to move the stuff around, or whatever. And the second part of it is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, so you’ve got this, especially with like the mailing list, you’ve got a mailing list is kind of like an implicit support channel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where people will post questions and the man was a solo volume of the only person on the man was who can answer them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is me. And over the course of a decade, literally, this is this man list there, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is degenerated to I give free support for a module that I haven’t worked on in years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? So people ask a question and literally the only person who will answer is me. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do I should I spend time answering these people? They’re not my customers. They’re not giving me any money. Do I have any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John commitment to help these people with their programming problems, which often have nothing to do with my module? Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really. And so I struggle with the guilt of like, do I just not answer anyone’s questions anymore?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s how this mailing list dies. Do I shut down the mailing list? Or do I spend the five minutes to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John answer a question? And then the final thing which Casey was getting to is the equivalent in you know, the Google Code

⏹️ ▶️ ^John world and using subversion and Google Code instead of getting GitHub, a pull request and bug

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reports. Someone reports a bug. Someone reports a bug and provides a patch. Someone makes a feature request.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Feature requests I’m pretty okay with just ignoring at this point. It’s like, well, yeah, if you want, then implement it. But then what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they go off and implement it? If they implement it and send me a patch, then I have to get with like, like Casey, where it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, I probably wouldn’t add that feature myself, or maybe I would add it, but I would do it in a different way.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the same thing with bug fixes. They’ve sent, they send a patch with a bug fix and a test

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and everything else and documentation. And it’s like it just always takes some time to clean those things up put them in test

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them cut a new release so on And so forth and my decision so far has been I will incorporate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bug fixes if you report a bug that’s reproducible And you have a test case I will fix that bug or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John figure out what it takes to fix it So I won’t add features For the most part

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unless you send a feature and tied up in a little bow I’ll spend the you know 15 minutes half an hour an hour

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to get it integrated All for a module that I myself don’t use anymore, that is terrible and that no one should really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John use. That, you know, that is really old, that has source code that I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John barely look at anymore. But I mean, I don’t know what’s driving me to put any time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into it. And yet I am. And so I, I almost feel like that I’m like a slave to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lingering popularity of a once popular set of Perl modules

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I just, I don’t know how to, like, sometimes I find myself thinking when I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get a message in the email list and someone makes some demand or whatever, I’m like, why don’t you just implement it yourself? Like if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re so hot and bothered to do this, like, you know, I really say, why should I answer this question for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you? Why should I fix this? But you get you get resentful. Like it’s not their fault. Like I don’t I don’t act on these instincts, but you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like and I’m your free servant. Why? Like it’s like a stack

⏹️ ▶️ ^John overflow of one, like a stack overflow. But I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} the only person giving answers. Right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And and like I said, a lot of the time, it’s, you know, it’s for me, there’s something simple where they don’t understand something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically about programming or like the insanely most complex thing. I’ve got this and that and the other thing and they’re all tied together

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like this and I’m doing this and that and that and I would like to be able to do this and you think of a way I can do this it’s like are you kidding that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what I do for a job I get paid to do that that is a very complicated problem that we have to have a whiteboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like days to sit down to figure out and it’s like I’ll answer for free for me in this mailing list.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just so I’m in a bad situation with these things and I’m mostly dealing with it by doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the minimum work necessary to make myself not feel guilty, which means actually fixing bugs because, hey, people are using these things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if I don’t want to fix bugs, like my final out is to hand off this module to someone who cares. Like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, it’s the equivalent of Marco selling his stuff to someone who wants to continue the thing. Is there somebody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who wants to take over a maintainership of this? Here you go, go with it. And I won’t do that because I still have some tiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bit of pride and like this was once a pretty good thing. I spent a long time implementing and running tests and documentation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it still kind of works, sort of. And, you know, I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just don’t feel like I want to give it up because I don’t know. So anyway, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know how to deal with that situation. And it’s a constant source of guilt and potential time suckage.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now, Marco, how have you dealt with FC model? Because that’s probably the most active of anything we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey described, I would guess.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Um, well, recently, I mean, probably the most used thing I’ve ever done is BugshotKit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which I haven’t touched in a long time. And again, for many of the same reasons I haven’t touched Bugshot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In fact, much of Bugshot’s code is in BugshotKit. But it’s mostly because, you know, I did it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it worked, I used it for a while, I no longer use BugshotKit in my own app, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just don’t really need that kind of integration of testing and stuff anymore. And that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I haven’t talked to you in a long time. And it doesn’t really need anything. It generally works and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the code is pretty simple. And if you need it to do something, you can just do it yourself in your own app. I do occasionally get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pull requests on BugShotKit. If it’s something really trivial that’s an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco obvious minor improvement or minor bug fix, I’ll just accept it. If it’s more than that, I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually just sit on it and forget to do it for a month. And then eventually it’ll become so ridiculously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco outdated that there’s no point in accepting Kind of like old emails. With FCModel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s different though. So there really isn’t a group of people out there wandering around looking at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like your open source library that does some really specific thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they don’t need to do. Or that does some really general thing like your utility library. Like I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my utility library open source like so many people do. Nobody uses it. Nobody looks at it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I get no pull requests on it. it gets no activity because there’s not a whole lot of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco looking around for your utility library. So it just like there’s not a lot of value to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that for most people. To get pull requests, you know, they don’t just come from the pull request

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fairies, like they come from people who are using your code, people who need the code you’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco written, who value it, the code for which there aren’t a lot of alternatives or there aren’t a lot of big

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco well-known alternatives and that they need to be modified

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in some way and then the percentage of those people who actually go through with the modification or at least

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco filing a bug report with you or asking you about it rather than just ripping it out and doing something else or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fixing it quietly themselves and never submitting it back to you. So for most projects, most open source projects,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the reason why you probably get no pull requests because like just having open source something doesn’t inherently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make it like useful to enough people that they will start using it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco submitting improvements to you. I do completely agree with john that it is kind of annoying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco though when somebody submits a pull request that is like, well intentioned, but either something that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wouldn’t do or something I would have done differently.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, ignoring even pull requests, what if someone sent you an email because you don’t have a mailing list for FC model or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any of these things, as far as I know, sent you an email and said, Hey, I was using your whatever your utility library FC model,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bug jacket, whatever. And I was trying to do x and I couldn’t quite figure out a way to do it. I tried to to this and it didn’t quite work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I thought maybe you could do that. But I’m not sure if I’m using your own. Can you help me? What would you do with that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John email?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wouldn’t respond, probably, unless it was a really quick response.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You would not respond at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all. I would treat it like any other support email. I mean, I get so much email. I can’t I can’t spend

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like a half hour responding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to that. I know that’s what I’m saying. Like that type of email. All right. So and imagine if you got like maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John three of those a week for a decade. Like it starts to wear on you. I just feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like like because you feel so bad, like I’m the king of ignoring people’s emails,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I don’t know what that. But even even I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even I start to feel bad because it’s like, especially with programming questions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It happens on Twitter, too. It’s like I could get the answer to this question often by at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this point. I might as well be someone else’s code because I don’t remember it anymore. Like you could figure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out you could. The answer to the question could be you can’t use my utility library to do that because it doesn’t work that way. And then you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like now you’re in a conversation with them. They’re gonna be like, well, can you add that feature? And then your only answer is like, no, because I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not spending time on that and I don’t want it. And then it’s like, it’s like you just wasted. You already wasted more time than you want to spend on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this. And and that’s the best case, trying to get out as fast as possible. The worst case is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t know the answer and you’d have to investigate. And you’re like, why am I investigating this guy’s programming problem? You know what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean? Like, are you just because you wrote FC model, does that mean that you there is implicit support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John contract with everyone who tries to use FC model? Do you have to provide them support? No, like I don’t think you do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if you don’t, you end up looking like a jerk. If you reply and say, sorry, this library is not supported. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, I demand my money back. Like, what are they going to say? But they will think you’re a jerk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco FC model is actually a really good example of everything working very, very well. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the quick version is it’s it’s a very thin, lightweight model layer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Instead of using something like core data, it’s basically sticking a very thin layer on top of SQLite. and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can do things like the database would. I use this because I’m a jerk and I don’t like core

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco data and I like to write everything myself. So I wrote this thing. FC model

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has what appears to be very few users. I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would guess the number of people building apps with it is probably less than 10. It is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very small group of people. But of those, like three

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or four of them actually actively submit pull requests. And they’re actually really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good. And usually we’ll discuss something, like before a substantial change, we’ll discuss

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it in an issue and then I’ll write the fix, you know, because I’m a control freak. But you know, when people have submitted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so many like little tiny bug fixes and little improvements here and there, they’re only a few lines long, and that’s all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But you still are supporting it then, because when someone says, hey, I was trying to do this thing and it didn’t work, or it’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be cool if it did this, you are providing support, because your support is engaging in a discussion with them about the feature,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John getting at the heart of what it is that they want, and then you maintaining ownership by essentially saying, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this is how I would do it, and this is what I would do, and then implementing that. So it’s a support function. You’re essentially

⏹️ ▶️ ^John implementing features at their request, maybe just not exactly the way they did, and talking to them and answering their questions about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I am. Well, but if it’s like a how does this work question, usually I don’t answer those. And sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco somebody else will, which is really nice. But I don’t get a lot of those. is again, not a lot of people use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the people who use it know what they’re doing. Like it’s not a bunch of beginners flooding in who like, I just started writing my first iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app and I stumbled across your thing. Can you tell me how to use it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right, because they’re not gonna be looking for something like this. They’re gonna be using Core Data because that’s what all the tutorials use. And that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They shouldn’t be using something like this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably. And Core Data is much simpler than your module, so it’ll be fine. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so yeah. What’s great about this though is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the reason why I’m engaged with it, The reason why I react to the pull requests

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I improve it, it’s purely selfish. It’s because I use it in Overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I will probably use it in any near future apps that I would write as well. Like not that I’m starting anything, this is not a product

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco announcement, just if I would start something new, I’d probably use it again. That’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I pay attention because it’s improving my app too. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my needs for Overcast drive FC models development. development. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bugs I run into, I fix in FCModel, etc. The performance issues I run into, I fix there, everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} gets it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, see, this is the honeymoon period when you’re still using it for your own work. I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} several years of that too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was like my CPAN modules, for the most part, were written for jobs I had at the time so that I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John write them, put them up, and then get the benefits I was able to convince the various people who I work for that there is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John benefit in open sourcing this part of the product because I will get usage from other people, reports

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from other people like, you know, the open source model, and it worked for the years that the software was relevant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But as it became less relevant and sort of aged out, I stopped using it, other people stopped using it. Now it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in zombie form right now FC model is new, relevant, extremely relevant in light of the various

⏹️ ▶️ ^John weird, you know, I cloud core data things that were going on, right, and which motivated his existence.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that, you know, so it’s, it’s definitely in the period where you are reaping the benefit of, of this being

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a module that is, I mean, it’s not widely used, you said like 10 active people, but it’s, it’s useful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to you, even if you were the only user, you would like to have it out there just in case someone happens to stumble across it because,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and find some bug or, you know, whatever, like even the, you know, the talking to the, to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bear thing where say nobody ever looks at the source code, but the mere act of you publishing it, like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the mere act of you publishing a blog post will suddenly cause you to find a typo that you didn’t see when you had been staring at it for the previous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hour when it was in your, you know, unpublished state.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, I mean FC model is probably the best code in Overcast by a long

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And would you say that’s because of the contributions?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, because he had to show it to people, so he had to clean it up to make it look not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco embarrassing. I mean, it’s both. I mean, like one thing the contributions have really helped with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is like the contributions will often be by very good Cocoa programmers who have been around much longer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than I have at this, or just better than me at it. And they will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use a convention that I didn’t even know existed. Like instead of doing preprocessor

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco defines for string constants, they’ll do the extern thing. Or like using NSEnum

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco instead of defining an enum the old C way so that some autocomplete thing works better. Like there’s little things like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that I pick up from the pull requests. Then I start doing that everywhere. So it’s like I’m working with a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smart people who are slowly and subtly improving my own skills by showing me cool things I could

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do that I didn’t even realize I could do or showing me better ways of doing things in very, you know, oftentimes in very small ways,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but over time that builds up. I mean, FC Model is really, like, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is by far the only successful open source thing I’ve ever done, and the most successful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco open source thing I’ve ever done. Everything else I’ve ever open sourced has been really minimally benefited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anybody, including me. And, you know, John, you’re right. FC Model is in the honeymoon phase now because I’m using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. I stopped using BugshotKit, and so BugshotKit is languishing and it will probably never get an update again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If I ever stop using FCModel, the project will probably die at that point. Or somebody else can take it over if they want to, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably nobody would want to. And that would be it. But right now I’m still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using it and I suspect I’ll be using it for a while. So yeah, so right

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now I’m fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so I guess my way out is I just have to get better at ignoring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know if I can never ignore bug reports though. I can probably ignore, I can

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} probably ignore

⏹️ ▶️ ^John questions, feature requests, you know, stuff like that. Although that’ll be sad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because that’ll, you know, people will, I don’t know, it just, it’ll be sad. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bug reports, like how can, how can I ignore them? I can let them just pile up. Like, this bug,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just feel like I have to fix it. Especially because like, you know, it’s, but it still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John works though. Like it’s still working software. It’s like, it’s a shame to let working software become unworking just because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of one minor thing. I don’t know. I will probably just continue to limp along with the stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I keep hoping that people will lose interest entirely, but they don’t. People still sign up for the mailing list

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and, like, you know, I don’t understand.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m conflicted. Thanks a lot to our

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sponsors this week. Oscar, Backblaze, and Igloo. And we will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And if you’re into Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and T. Marco Armin,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental, they didn’t mean to Accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental, tech broadcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So John, you got a PS4.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I got it last week sometime. I knew I was going to get one eventually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I kept telling myself I will get one when there’s a game that I want to play. And of course, I would love for that game to be Last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Guardian. But I figured surely there’ll be some other game that I want to play before that. When The Last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Us Remastered came out, I thought that might be the game. I just very recently played the non remastered

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one in PS3, so that didn’t make me buy a PS4. And I don’t know what made me buy one now. I think it’s kind of my,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my tradition, uh, pre Christmas present to myself that I give myself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before Christmas. So I don’t have to wait for Christmas so I can play with it in the vacation before Christmas. That’s a long title, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} that has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John become a tradition

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} in my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John family and that I buy myself something that I wanted and, and give it to myself before Christmas morning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I can play with it while I’m on vacation. And so the PS4 fit the bill for that, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was going to get one anyway. But I didn’t really know what kind of games I was going to get for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, so I just got a mix of downloadable titles, because I didn’t want to bother getting discs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shipped to me or whatever. And I still think that they load faster off the hard drive. If that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not true, please don’t tell me, because I like to keep my illusions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I downloaded a bunch of stuff. And what am I playing? I’m not playing anything all that exciting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I got Destiny, my son is already addicted to that. Destiny is exactly what I thought it would be, it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The controller just destroys my hands playing Destiny. The analog sticks are still in the wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^John spot, you gotta use all four triggers at the same time, it is an ergonomic nightmare for me. I really need to limit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my time playing the game, which is a shame because I find it fun. I think Destiny is pretty well done. I don’t know why I got such terrible reviews,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I guess people have higher expectations, but I consider it more of a long-term investment and my son is really enjoying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, so. When I saw reviews like 6.5 out of 10 for Destiny, maybe it was buggier on launch, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just people have higher expectations, but it fully satisfies everything that I thought it would be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not really my type of game, but anyway. But what mostly is annoying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about the PS4 is, and I knew this going in, is that it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not going to be a drop-in replacement for my PS3 because Sony concentrated so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heavily on the game features that they’re seemingly like obstinately opposed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to doing media center type stuff. Like they don’t sell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a Bluetooth like remote for it, not you know like a remote remote that looks like a TV remote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So you have to use the game if you want to use it as your your own uh blu-ray

⏹️ ▶️ ^John player like my ps3 has always been my blu-ray player. If you want to use your ps4 as your blu-ray player you have to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the controller and that is ridiculous I’m not going to have the controller sitting there on the end table so I can just I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just won’t do that. There are third party remotes that you can buy, but all of them had terrible reviews and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lot of them use an IR interface connected to the USB thing. And I was like, Sony, can you just make a remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like charge some stupid, ridiculous amount for it? I’ll buy it. I just want a remote. They used to, didn’t they?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John For the PS3? Yeah, the PS3 has a Bluetooth remote that works with the PS3. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work with the PS4.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If someone if it does work with the PS4, someone in the chat room, tell me, I will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I control my PS3 with the Logitech Harmony thing because that has a Bluetooth interface and that can do it. And it works great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, if I can find, if anyone knows and they want to send feedback to the show, a Bluetooth remote that works with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the PS4 natively without any weird drivers and that works well, that’s fine. And as someone in the chat room just pointed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out my very next point, no DLNA support for, you know, streaming video off all the various

⏹️ ▶️ ^John devices in my house that can do that. And so, you know, forget about like having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a Plex app or anything like that. Just the basic media center type stuff. It can play Blu-ray,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so you can play Blu-ray movies on it, and I bet it’s a pretty okay Blu-ray player, although when I was researching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this, I saw a lot of people complaining with the very first version of the PS4 software that the Blu-ray player wasn’t even as good as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the PS3 one. So I still have my PS3 attached, I still use it as my Blu-ray player,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t really use it for DLNA that much because my TV does it now natively, so I don’t want to turn it on the PS3 if I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t have to, but depending on where video comes from and what format it’s in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sometimes I have to use PS3 media server. Sometimes I have to use the PS3 to stream from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someplace else. Sometimes I can stream to like from my TV. But I got a lot of things attached

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to my TV now. Like if I can’t get rid of my PS3 when I get rid of my PS4 and I can’t get rid of my Wii

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when I get my Wii U because the Wii still plays GameCube games as GameCube connectors. Like I got five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John game consoles connected to my TV plus Apple TV, you know, plus TiVo plus I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John running at inputs here. So as I really hope that the media center

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type capabilities of the PS4 get better, but right now it’s disappointing to me that I can’t make a clean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John upgrade. It’s also disappointing that the shape of the PS4, if you put

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a PS3 on top of a PS4 it doesn’t look right to me, it looks like the front of the PS4 is all slanty,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it doesn’t make a pleasing shape, and of course you can’t put the PS4 on top of the PS3 because it’s curved like a George

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Foreman grill so it’ll skitter off. And the PS4 doesn’t have feet on the bottom, it has these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John three little rubber curve things and a kind of a tripod that elevate the PS4

⏹️ ▶️ ^John barely off the surface but because the air and the air intakes are not on the bottom so you could have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the thing flush but if you put it on top of another piece of AV equipment it will be blocking the holes more or less on the thing that it’s on top

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of so I had to buy some clear rubber feet to elevate it to let air get to the devices underneath it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh and I’m out of Ethernet ports by the TV so I had to buy a new switch and it’s just you know at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John least I’m not out of plugs in the power

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} strip

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yet But I’m getting close.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Do you have a thing with missing feet?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was just about to say that. Get out of my head. What? Missing feet? What do you mean? Fast text icon, dude.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Oh, yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right. Fine. Yeah. So anyway, the controller is an improvement over the PS3

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one, but the button layout is still wrong. The sticks are still in the wrong spot. The triggers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are better, but not that much better. And those controllers are expensive, like 50 bucks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John each. Oh, and the touchpad thing that they added is not a good touchpad, But it does make text

⏹️ ▶️ ^John input slightly less painful because you can use a touchpad to move the little cursor around onto the key things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Would you ever consider? stacking the ps4 With a non Sony

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco system to make it stack better with your stuff or does it have to be stacked with the ps3?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, I would stack it with anything that I could stack it, but you’ve seen my setup There’s not a lot of room in that little shelf there There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only two possible places you can go under the ps3 or on top of my receiver and under the ps3 It looked weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and on top of my receiver is where it is now But but I get some feet to elevate it up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco second question Would you consider daisy-chaining two receivers to get like seven more HDMI

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco inputs?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, I don’t daisy-chain them You can just get a switching box So the switching box are terrible is why I got that I got this this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John receiver because I was trying to find a balance of I would have got the Sony receiver that had 10 HDMI inputs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but all there’s just this huge thread of horror stories about it blanking out and having all sorts of problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so like I I should link to that thread, it’s gone on for like 40 pages of people complaining to Sony and them trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to fix it. Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t get that one. So I got this one that had all the features that I wanted and it had 6 HDMI

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ports, but one of them is on the front. Awww. My TV has, what, 4 or 3?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like I still have options. Like I try to connect the consoles directly to the TV to reduce input lag, so I have,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I still have enough options for the devices I have. I’m not out of ports. Like I’m close to being out of ports

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the receiver, but I can connect both of the consoles, of the consoles, the current gen consoles,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well, the PS4 and the Wii U, directly to the TV and the Wii U is connected directly to the TV

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for input lag reasons, so I’m not really out of ports, but next generation of consoles

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m going to have to make some hard decisions about what to do because I won’t be getting a new TV by then if I can help it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, but that’s probably going to be how many years away though. It’s probably a while off,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} right? Yeah, I know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was pleasantly surprised by the general speediness and UI of like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, I mean, I think the ps3 ui is i mean it’s not good but it’s it’s understandable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the ps4 ui is a mild evolution of that it looks a little bit more spammy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and in my face but it’s fast it works got on my wi-fi nicely it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could use the land port like i didn’t have any weird problems with anything it pretty much just worked download

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speeds were reasonable you know downloading stuff from the store worked fine i guess like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is much better at this stage in its life than the PS3 was at this stage is like, I can tell you that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I still endorse it over the Xbox one as a game system, and not just because I have late in Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tape, but also because I.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} And for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people, the doubters in the chat room, I still believe last Guardian will ship. I still believe, you can’t stop me.