170: Casey Beats John, 29–29
20 May 2016Three Apple users try to explain the Google I/O announcements.
Episode Description:
- Buy ATP 2016 T-shirts by June 3!
- Follow-up:
- Foodgate 2016
- Bing bans "tech support" ads
- Debunking an Apple/podcasting conspiracy theory
- App Store approval times
- Google I/O
- Keynote
- Google Home
- Google Allo
- Google Duo & Knock Knock
- Android N
- Vulkan
- JIT compilation
- Multitasking
- Instant Apps
- Android Wear 2.0
- Ending theme by Jonathan Mann
- Post-show: Compulsive app quitters
Sponsored by:
Chapters
- 2016 T-Shirts!
- #caseywasright?
- Tech-support ads banned from Bing
- Follow-up: Apple and podcasting
- Sponsor: Ring Video Doorbell
- Fast app review
- Sponsor: Automatic (code ATP0315)
- Google Home
- Sponsor: Pingdom (code ATP)
- Google Allo
- Google Duo, Knock Knock
- Android N, Instant Apps
- Android Wear 2.0
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Force-quitting apps
2016 T-Shirts!
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the challenge of pixel art, isn’t it? To make a picture look good using pixels. Or we
⏹️ ▶️ John can just rotate the pixels 45 degrees and pretend we’re in some crazy land.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey everyone, just me for a second. We just put up our 2016 t-shirts, finally. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only available until June 3rd. They won’t be delivered in time for WWDC because we took too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long to decide, but these are awesome and I think they’re going to be worth the wait. So see for yourself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at atp.fm slash shirt. Thanks a lot.
#caseywasright?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hashtag Casey was right, maybe? It’s, it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stunning watching the fallout from a fast food gate 2016, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just coined moments ago. Um, a lot of people have been on my side. I wouldn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, it’s overwhelming, but the fact that I think the feedback I’ve seen has been roughly 50 50.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m counting that as a win for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that’s how winning works. Exactly. Roughly 50 50 and I declare victory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that, John, if there’s one universal truth to the Internet, it’s that the Internet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believes that John Syracuse can do no wrong. That is not a universal truth. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is fact. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey projecting. Perhaps, but that’s neither here nor there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Internet is of the belief that John Syracuse can do no wrong, and parts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the Internet have said John Syracuse has done wrong. And actually, it’s funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because some people, and this is not a joke, some people have written in and said, and I don’t have an exact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey verbatim quote in front of me, but something along the lines of, I thought John could never be wrong, but he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong about this food conversation, which has made me so happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So to clarify, John being wrong means that people think Subway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is better than Sbarro’s? Is that what?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or is not an utter unequivocal abomination?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, as in all things, like the actual points that people respond to were only tangentially
⏹️ ▶️ John related to points made by either of us on the actual show. The most solid ones were, I felt like,
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who were just saying, I like or don’t like a particular restaurant’s
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s fair. That’s fair. Right? And because then you can go, all right, like we were talking about restaurants, and you could say, I love Subway,
⏹️ ▶️ John or I hate Subway. I love Sbarro, or I hate Sbarro. Right? But the ones who came away with the conclusion
⏹️ ▶️ John that there was, that the comparisons were made that were actually not made. For example, comparing Subway
⏹️ ▶️ John and Sbarro and what you would rather eat in a show in which I said I you know or McDonald’s even the show in
⏹️ ▶️ John which I said I eat Subway way more than McDonald’s and yet you have People saying that that meant that McDonald’s was better
⏹️ ▶️ John than Subway or Subway was better than McDonald’s anyway Lots of people latched on to their own particular
⏹️ ▶️ John competitions, but I would say in the realm of Subway is good Subway is bad Sbarro is good Sbarro
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad Where they didn’t try to compare the two of them It was about 50-50 and it’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ John which I just googled the 1968 yell versus Harvard football game which was listed in the newspaper,
⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta find this. Alright, here it is, the famous headline which they bury in the last sentence of the paragraph.
⏹️ ▶️ John The headline after this football game in 1968 was Harvard beats EL 29-29. Because it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a game that ended in a tie, so this is, yeah, Casey beats John 50-50. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair, I’ll take it, I’m good with that. You’re not gonna hear me complain.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I would just point out that literally all these issues are a matter of
⏹️ ▶️ John taste, in all senses of that word. So there can be no victory unless one of these food
⏹️ ▶️ John items is going to kill you, which I don’t think either one will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. These issues are a matter of taste, but my taste is better than your taste.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well that’s how taste works, doesn’t it? But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s not as if there is a definitive
⏹️ ▶️ John answer, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh goodness, yeah, but I will take the John loses to Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 50-50 or Casey beats John 50-50.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or you can do one to one. I don’t know, 50-50 We’re just using as a percentages, but since this was a football score its point.
⏹️ ▶️ John So maybe it’s one-to-one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’ll take me beating you with a tie that that is good in my
⏹️ ▶️ John book Anyway, just so you know since since you don’t read my at mentions every time I say anything Somebody says boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John I usually agree with what you say, but you’re really wrong about X that happens all the time That’s like 50% of my replies
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey people telling me that they
⏹️ ▶️ John usually agree with me But they disagree with me about insert whatever and whatever you can
⏹️ ▶️ John think of has been there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but to be fair people start from the position of Oh John is right about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whereas without turning this into analog, I’m not as convinced that people feel that way about me
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, then you’re spared all the all the tweets about how everyone is so disappointed in you every time
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually I agree with everything you say Casey but I’m very disappointed in your opinion on the window that XP bumper sounds or cars
⏹️ ▶️ John or the restaurants you want to go to or your choice of You know
⏹️ ▶️ John Any other thing you possibly anyway, yeah, you’re right those those Replies do show
⏹️ ▶️ John a sort of the baseline assumption But on the other hand if that baseline assumption doesn’t exist, I don’t get those tweets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but all I’m gonna say is I will take your struggle, which is oh so real over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, but no I’m really happy that we kept and we slash Marco kept
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that conversation in the show because I thought it was really funny and and As much as the bickering back and forth between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listeners and between us went on I still Appreciate the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone seemed to take it for what it was meant to be which was yes We were killing each other, but it was all in good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fun And and we got some good feedback about the the segment in general, which made me really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy So and like I said Casey beats John 5050, so I’m good with that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah massive over overwhelming agreement that that it was fun listening to us argue in the after show I think one person
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t like it and poor Marco had to say, you were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He was. We got literally one complaint.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it was funny. And that person, I believe, was like, I’m sure I’m not the first person to say this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that was not good. And as it turns out, individual, you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first person to say that and the only person to say that. Anyway, I thought it was a lot of fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even though I wanted to kill both of you, particularly John, because I think Marco kind of ended up as Switzerland
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the end of the conversation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why you focus all your anger on me because I really listen to that thing and Marco was the one constantly poking And
⏹️ ▶️ John prodding you and egging you on I was the one to bring it back to like Syrian V and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and then Margo’s like throwing these little bombs then walking away It was
⏹️ ▶️ John totally Marco’s fault. It was not me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but I I also was not really a hundred percent on either of your sides, but I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mostly just an instigator Yeah, but I was actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leaning mostly towards Casey side not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very good but that I thought that Subway was less terrible than Sbarro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I know at least, like, when we’re all at WBDC in a few weeks, we have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to that mall food court.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t have any of those brands there. They all have weird stuff. Yeah, well, here’s the one we can put
⏹️ ▶️ John in the after show. WBDC box lunch versus any fast food.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sometimes those box lunches aren’t bad. Sometimes they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes. Sometimes they are. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well the box
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem with the box lunches is that they basically all just taste like Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the salad dressing was they used to coat every ingredient that day
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s probably fair
⏹️ ▶️ John the ingredients themselves are often made of cardboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, so you’re basically tasting very chewy cardboard that tastes like salad dressing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently at Google I oh which we’re going to talk about quite a bit later They don’t serve you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lunch. It seems like well, they don’t even serve you a roof
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s on the Sun 90 degrees like lizards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh Goodness I can’t I can’t handle this already So a lean a friend of the show lean Sims
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote in and said in and out does not use frozen burger patties I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when or how that came up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I said that we regret the error Sorry, I’ve only been in out like four
⏹️ ▶️ John times I’m not into I’ve seen them cut the fries so I know they’re taking potatoes and running through machine cutting the fries, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John lumped them in with the Like that tastes more like a fast-food chain like the people who get frozen patties like McDonald’s
⏹️ ▶️ John and Burger King But in and out does not do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. Yeah in and out is very good. But I think as we said the last episode I wonder if the reason I like it so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just because I can never have it and if it was somewhere if it was like five guys where I could consume
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it all the time I’d be like well actually like five guys and I’d be yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah I had I had in and out two times in one week and by the second time I was like hmm all right novelty is wearing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep completely agree that’s what I did when I was in California and I felt the exact same way man this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no fun when we agree with each other. So yeah, screw Saburo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Give it time. We’ll get there.
Tech-support ads banned from Bing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me, John, about tech support ads being banned from Bing.
⏹️ ▶️ John A couple shows back, I talked to my mom falling for a tech support scam, where, by the way, the consensus
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to be that what these tech support scams really want is not to steal your information or put ransomware in your machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John although those are all definitely possible and I’m sure have happened. But percentage wise, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that most of them are doing is trying to scare you into thinking your computer has something wrong with it and getting you to sign up to a monthly
⏹️ ▶️ John fee for them to essentially do nothing. So they make your your computer seem like it’s haunted and say oh you have a serious problem here
⏹️ ▶️ John if you pay us five dollars a month we’ll make sure your computer stays clean so it’s a slightly different
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of fraudulent scam than the kind that installs a rootkit or malware but
⏹️ ▶️ John you can never know which one of those things you’re doing and my mother hung up on this person you know
⏹️ ▶️ John without before finding out exactly what the scam was and so wiping her computer was the best thing to do but anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John the story recently was that Bing Microsoft’s still existing apparently competitor to
⏹️ ▶️ John Google search is now banning all third-party tech support services
⏹️ ▶️ John from being ads like you know the ads they serve with the search results just because so many of them are fraudulent so
⏹️ ▶️ John as an entire category of business that is that cannot advertise on Bing now again advertising on Bing maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the biggest thing in the world but Google has done similar things and trying to find
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to get businesses that are fraudulent stop them from buying keywords or ads because as we
⏹️ ▶️ John all know in these search results a of the times the first few items are actually ads and not legitimate search results
⏹️ ▶️ John and most people I found are not good at distinguishing what’s an ad what’s not even though they’re like clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John labeled or in boxes or whatever and I have no doubt that the thing my mother clicked on was
⏹️ ▶️ John not actually a search result but an ad because I know she doesn’t know the difference between those two things just
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the top hits all right so anyway it’s sad that this entire what could be an entire legitimate
⏹️ ▶️ John category of businesses of like oh you have problems with your computer there’s a a market need we can help you with your problems instead they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all just scams and so they’re just banned completely. Pretty crappy.
Follow-up: Apple and podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And a lot of people wrote in with regard to our conversation about podcasting last episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Many many tinfoil hats were worn as emails were sent in saying oh Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is the source of that New York Times podcasting story. It’s so clear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Didn’t think that was the case, but I don’t know Marco. Did you have any thoughts on that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paint Apple in a very good light So I don’t think they would have been the source of that story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, things that are Apple-controlled leaks tend to read a certain way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, I can’t recall a time that the New York Times was publishing those. It seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s controlled leaks in recent years have gone to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually. So I think it’s pretty unlikely,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, and especially since the idea was that, like we were saying in the past
⏹️ ▶️ John show, all things that they’re suggesting would just give Apple tremendous amount of power and that’s bad for podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was what’s leading people to say oh well if it gives Apple tremendous power and it’s bad for podcasters don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John stop thinking about it as isn’t it weird that podcasters would say that think about it at all this is exactly what Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would want but if Apple wanted to grab power in the podcast market a it could have
⏹️ ▶️ John done that years ago and be it doesn’t need to leak anything to do it you would just have to do it so I don’t see the purpose of that leak
⏹️ ▶️ John even if that even the dastardly Apple did want to own podcasting, which they totally have seemed like they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t. They don’t need the New York Times to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seems like, you know, what we already knew, which is that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very, very big player in podcasting, but that it doesn’t it’s not really like top of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radar. It’s not like a huge priority for them. They have much bigger things to deal with. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t I don’t see that changing, you know, like seeing what Apple has to deal with with their other product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines, various market pressures, various internal and external needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Podcasting is just not very high-ranking on that list. And I don’t see that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changing for the foreseeable future. It might be way down the road, but I really wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume that it’s going to suddenly become a big thing for them. We are sponsored tonight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by Ring, the Ring Video doorbell. Go to Ring Video.com to get
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re home or not. So you can pretend like you’re home to maybe ward off burglars. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can tell a package delivery person, hey, leave it on the doorstep. I’m in the shower. Even if you’re like at work
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco decrease the rate of home break-ins in neighborhoods that have a bunch of Ring video doorbells installed. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home break-ins usually happen during the day. That’s when people aren’t home. So this can really help out a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Installing Ring is very easy, it takes only minutes. It can either work with your current wiring or they have a built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rechargeable battery model. So John, you have one of these, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I installed mine. I got the, they sent me one of the, just the camera ones that’s not the doorbell thing. Well, that’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is that? It’s just wrapped up with like a mounting bracket that you can kind of stick anywhere and aim up and aim down. And you know, so you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to put it where your doorbell will be. And it doesn’t have a button on it. It is basically just a camera. And I put it, I guess what, facing
⏹️ ▶️ John my driveway because that’s what I wanted to do with these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you caught anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John sneaking around your car yet? No, just us every time we come home and the kids go out
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. So I’m still observing it. I mean, it works fine. I’m amazed at how long
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery is lasting. I guess it’s basically off or asleep the entire time. And then when you trip the IR sensor, it turns
⏹️ ▶️ John on. I think it’s still like 90% battery. It’s been out there for like five days. And it sends alerts to my iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John when there’s motion. And I can look at it and I can see my daughter scraping her bicycle against the side of my
⏹️ ▶️ John car. It’s great. I kind of feel bad though for my kids because think about it. When you were a kid,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could get away with a lot of stuff if your parents didn’t see it. Now I literally have a video camera catching them, you know, scraping
⏹️ ▶️ John their bike against the side of my car. I feel kind of bad. They can’t deny it. I’m like, look, I’ve got video. Let’s come look at it
⏹️ ▶️ John together. See how the bike’s not supposed to touch the car? Bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, so I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. But yeah, that’s the non-front door product because, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John after my iPad, iPod being stolen out of my car, what I really wanted was to see
⏹️ ▶️ John what the deal is. And so far, no one has come to visit my car, as far as I’ve been able to determine. Also, my iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John has not been stolen from my car.
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbs up so far. Yeah. Maybe just the presence of the camera will deter people, kind of like those fake
⏹️ ▶️ John security signs that you put on your lawn or on your windows when you don’t actually have a security system. But this is a real camera. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it is mostly filming my family now, but it’s fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought a lot about what you were saying about getting away with things, because especially when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it came to driving, I did terrible things in my 1994.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually it was dad’s 1994 Saturn SL2 that really was not designed to do the terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things I did with it. Hold that thought, our next sponsor is Automatic. Fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough. But suffice to say, if Find My Friends or whatever was a thing, or Glimpse was a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing back when I was 16, I would have had a very different childhood than I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So our listeners get free F-Shattered FedEx shipping when you go to ring.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s ring.com slash ATP for free fast shipping.
Fast app review
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With the Ring video doorbell, you’re always home. Thanks a lot to Ring for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So this was discussed a bit on the latest Under the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Radar, which I almost accidentally called Under the Weather. But App Store approval
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco times- You’re always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making fun of me for being sick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I know. I was actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meant to ask you if you were sick right now. Are you sick right now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s on its way out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so on episode 27 of your Under the Weather program, you discussed fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app review, and it’s worth at least quickly touching upon here. App store review times,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which typically hovered at about a week, are now really, really fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Cable Sasser tweeted earlier tonight, Logan sent a non-Panic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app to the Mac App Store at 10.30. It was in review, I’m assuming that’s AM, it was in review at 3, rejected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a crash at 5.30. They fixed it, submitted at 6.30, approved at 8 o’clock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the span of, what is that, 10 hours? They made two submissions and got their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app approved. That’s impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in fact, I can also confirm that this morning, I submitted an Overcast update,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was approved and in the store nine hours later.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t listen to the Developing Under the Weather Perspective podcast about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John when I think about it, a lot of people are asking like, oh does this have to do with phil schiller maybe it does so on and so forth
⏹️ ▶️ John like how how is this possible um and there there are so many ways
⏹️ ▶️ John that it could be possible but the thing the ones that spring to mind to me are you can
⏹️ ▶️ John use heuristics to assess the risk of each
⏹️ ▶️ John application submission and what you can mix into those heuristics are uh
⏹️ ▶️ John how many apps does this developer put in have we we had any problems before is this a entirely new app
⏹️ ▶️ John or is this an update to an existing one? I mean, they can go down to the point where they’re doing like binary diffs or something, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a whole mess of heuristics you can do. And of course, they’re just hiring more people but but this dramatic decreased
⏹️ ▶️ John from like days to hours. I don’t think you can do that. By
⏹️ ▶️ John even like hiring 10 times as many people, they must they must be having better rules about
⏹️ ▶️ John like, how much do we have to scrutinize this? Or how much can we automate?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I mean, increased automation is another thing. But again, it seems like it would have to, you know, come out of nowhere. When
⏹️ ▶️ John a developer can, who’s never had any problem, this is what we’ve always been talking about, a developer who’s never had any problems, who’s conscientious,
⏹️ ▶️ John who’s submitting an app that looks fairly straightforward, to get them through in
⏹️ ▶️ John like this, you know, one day turnaround time where you pass it, it gets rejected, you fix it, you pass it, and it goes back out
⏹️ ▶️ John again. There’s just not enough time in there to do like a, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John to give it a huge amount of scrutiny go through every single screen and you know do all this stuff even automated
⏹️ ▶️ John testing tools could take you know you could run through automated testing for a certain amount of time and maybe that
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t even fit in this is almost like they’re saying this one’s probably fine right guys run
⏹️ ▶️ John the fast automated tests give it a once over for two seconds and let it sail through which is what developers
⏹️ ▶️ John have been asking me like and again this wasn’t a panic app but panic it was saying like look seriously apple
⏹️ ▶️ John you know are we bearing malware in our applications like you’re never going to catch it if we do anyway so you might as will just
⏹️ ▶️ John accept the reality that the only thing you can really do is assume good intent
⏹️ ▶️ John and punish after the fact, right? Because if you say, Oh, we don’t like that, that’s not a secure way to do we want to we want to stop that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John from getting to the store in the first place. A that’s not possible. And B, it just punishes everybody for the possibility that
⏹️ ▶️ John they might suddenly turn one day and panic becomes infected by malware, even through no fault of their own, like so they get hacked
⏹️ ▶️ John and someone sticks malware into the map app. There’s only so much that you can detect in review. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the calculus may be, you know, develop these heuristics so that most
⏹️ ▶️ John normal developers get their… we do less… we do less review basically for most normal developers
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll catch them after the fact because history has proven that you catch tons of stuff after the fact anyway. Tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of things get through, even obvious things that should have been caught, so why pretend that your entire system is
⏹️ ▶️ John predicated on the idea that we must catch bad things before they get through the store at all
⏹️ ▶️ John costs and then take a day or a week or whatever to do it. So this is definitely awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I have to think that it has been that it’s happening because they’re just getting there.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re working smarter, not harder, as they say, as the evil bosses say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it is, it’s dramatic. And we talked about it a lot on under the radar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week. The gist of it basically, I mean, for those of you who don’t know, app review used to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly a week. And throughout the entire history of the app going back to 2008, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have been a couple of ups and downs here and there, but for the most part it’s been pretty consistent at taking about a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When AppReview goes from taking a week to a day or less,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes a lot of AppReview problems less severe. It basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lets you iterate faster on your software. So, yes, it does create the potential to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play fast and loose and ship more bugs, but it also gives you the ability to fix bugs faster. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to imagine that’s going to lead overall to better quality software. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has certainly led to better developer morale and better developer feelings towards the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platform. And as the economics have gotten more challenging over the years, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that’s something that Apple is right to be apparently focusing on. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store, it’s pretty easy to become bitter after a while in the App Store when you’re trying to sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something or trying to make some money because it just gets harder and harder every year as there’s increasing competition from everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to have signs that Apple is trying to make our lives better as developers is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very promising. And this kind of thing is a huge improvement to being an iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer. It’s an improvement that I don’t think any of us were expecting to ever get. And all of a sudden, it’s just kind
⏹️ ▶️ John here. It’s going to be on the slide of WWDC, I would imagine. But yeah, like it’s still there. There are still remaining
⏹️ ▶️ John problems. The main one I can think of is you’ve been developing an app for a while, releasing updates to an irregular
⏹️ ▶️ John schedule. And then along the way, if you’re if you’re lucky, just a routine update. But if you’re unlucky,
⏹️ ▶️ John a bug fix update gets hung up, as they say, something fundamental about your app is against the rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’re like, I’ve been releasing this app for a year, I have this is like the 17th update. And all of a sudden, the major feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of my application is a violation of the guidelines. And that’s preventing me from getting this bug fix update or this routine update out the door.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fast review doesn’t help that because no matter how fast you iterate on that, you still the The second problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ John can I connect to a human being who understands the words that my mouth is making right now?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey nothing fundamental
⏹️ ▶️ John has changed about my app. This app has existed for a long time. Are you telling me that the end this
⏹️ ▶️ John app is no longer welcome in the store? Tell me now I will cease development or are you telling me you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand something basic about my app and I need to explain it to you and those type of situations with like the wall of silence
⏹️ ▶️ John and just trying to send it back again and again and getting computerized responses fast iteration time doesn’t help with that kind of frustration
⏹️ ▶️ John because then you’re like blocked on something like I don’t understand I’m trying to fix a crashing bug and you’re telling me
⏹️ ▶️ John my application that’s been on the store for a year is now like illegal for some you know so that frustration
⏹️ ▶️ John can still exist with fast iteration time but boy like Marco said having the time get faster
⏹️ ▶️ John whole messes of complaints and things that people like gnashed their teeth about the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John just go away when the time scale shrink to a single day then it’s like a mild annoyance
⏹️ ▶️ John versus like I have to plan my entire business about around allowing for a week to a month of review
⏹️ ▶️ John time, which is just just destroys your you know, your ability to like just
⏹️ ▶️ John go to market to compete to to to serve your customers. Like if there’s a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with the one point oh and you got to wait a week for the one point oh one boy this I hope really hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stick. What will be promising is if Apple publicly acknowledges this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any way at all. W W C man that
⏹️ ▶️ John you think they’re not going brag about this how can they not this is gonna be a graph
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right but if they if they don’t mention it at all it could plausibly be like a fluke
⏹️ ▶️ John it was an accident someone was just hitting the approve button like the little drinking bird from The Simpsons
⏹️ ▶️ John understood that reference me too I told you was from The Simpsons though
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah but again I keep giving you the references oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that from The Simpsons well you had I mean we know what the drinking bird is separately I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know I know I know so you kind of had to sound
⏹️ ▶️ John it just sounds weird to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re like a show business mom, man. You’re impossible to please. No wire hangers!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No that one I didn’t get.
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a show business mom though
⏹️ ▶️ John That was Mommie Dearest but I don’t think it was a showbiz angle. Yeah it went right over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my head. And everything is back to normal again.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So Google IOs keynote was today and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually watched it, which is the first time I think I’ve ever watched a Google I O keynote. But now that I’m in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole brand new world where I work alongside Android developers and they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really into it and they did what I usually do for Apple keynotes and we We all piled in a conference
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room, they put it on the big screen, and we watched it together. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was pretty good, all in all, and we’ll go through each thing in a moment, but I was impressed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had heard rumblings and descriptions of past Google IOs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they were meandering and long and often boring, much like the tail
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of the last WWDC keynote, and a total disaster,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of like the end of the last WWDC keynote.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And- Well, so I’m curious. I was talking about this recently with Tiff. Which do you think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the worst moment in recent Apple keynote memory? Was it the Apple Music introduction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the U2 album finger touch thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, well, finger touch was nothing compared to the end of last year’s WWDC. Are you kidding? Finger touch
⏹️ ▶️ John was a brief moment, kind of silly, excusable by celebrity. The other was just in terminal
⏹️ ▶️ John watching EDDQ vamp and then having to have Drake be up there and just ramble and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mind though I think contributing to the other side of the argument though is like the finger touch was part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very very awkward moment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also led into this giant thing nobody wanted which is everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting this album
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John pushed into their… It
⏹️ ▶️ John was fine. It was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You like you too. It doesn’t matter and even if you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t it was fine. It was a fumble but who cares. They They gave you free stuff and it took up space in your phone and they gave
⏹️ ▶️ John you a way to opt out of it and it was silly, but like you’re talking about the keynote itself. Finger touch is nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, man. I’m kind of with Marco on this. I think it was an approximately equivalent amount of awkward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just that the density in the finger touch was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John considerable. If we had
⏹️ ▶️ John to make you watch one of those things over again, if you have to watch the finger touch, you have to watch the entire Eddie Q and Drake segment,
⏹️ ▶️ John which do you choose?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Would I have to watch the YouTube performance before the finger touch?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think it’s included. I mean, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if you’re including the musical performance has been a long line of musical performance that people don’t care But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I was trying I put
⏹️ ▶️ John all these notes in here by Google I was trying not to talk about the showmanship or compared to Apple because
⏹️ ▶️ John The outdoor thing the set decoration on that stage was not good.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, hold on. Can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can we paint a word picture, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to paint the word picture. I got to bring up the I thought I had the video
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I don’t know what
⏹️ ▶️ John their decorating theme was. Was it like neither to material chaos? Was that the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stage? I can
⏹️ ▶️ John see the material design colors, kind of. I can see that theme. And you kind of saw
⏹️ ▶️ John it echoed in their slides, but the set design for the stage just was not aesthetically pleasing
⏹️ ▶️ John and didn’t enhance. They had these, it enhanced their presentation. They had these bright colored lights underneath the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. Like, I just want to focus on your content. The content I thought was pretty good. And I really
⏹️ ▶️ John liked a lot of the things they announced, but the set duration was gross. But anyway, my point is, I don’t want to talk about the set decoration
⏹️ ▶️ John or how posh the presenters were, or whether or not Drake wore a vintage Apple jacket while he
⏹️ ▶️ John said nothing of interest, or if Eddie Cue danced.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You have to give Google that and other people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey try to dance. He did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I want to talk about the products because I thought there was a lot of cool stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, there was Siri, there was the Echo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Oh, don’t even try
⏹️ ▶️ John to say they’re just doing things that other people are doing, because that is a ridiculous argument. The only thing I’d give
⏹️ ▶️ John you that on is split screen, because I was really expecting them to have something more than exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has split screen in picture in picture. But anyway, we’re getting ahead
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of ourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but yeah, that’s not an exact Apple rip. I actually, I give them an okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that. But we will go in the order of the show notes and it begins with Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Home, which is the Amazon Echo slash Alexa product,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See this actually, like I’m, this might be really good. It’s obviously a big risk, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, because first of all, it’s Google doing its own hardware and their record for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is about as good as Amazon’s record is for Amazon doing its own hardware. So like, they have had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some things that have worked, some of the Nexus’s have been decent, but a lot of their stuff has been flops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s a huge wild card.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s separate the flop from, as in they don’t sell a lot of them, from is the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John actually good? Because I think Google has probably done multiples of both. Like I think that ball thing, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if it ever shipped or whatever, but that was like not a good idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But a lot of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John they make don’t sell a lot, but it’s not like they’re bad. I mean, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John they sell, I don’t know, even like the Chromebook Pixel. How many Chromebook Pixels do they sell? I don’t know. But the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t terrible, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all. I thought the hardware looked great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the same thing, and you know, the tablets and all the Nexus phones, especially like the Nexus phones didn’t sell that many,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I think Google thought they were going to sell more than they did. and then the other vendors took over. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware they actually make, I don’t think is bad hardware. So I have some vague hope that this little,
⏹️ ▶️ John the squat little Weeble that’s their
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Amazon Echo competitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything is a Weeble to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s shaped like a Weeble. They wobble, they don’t fall down,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? How many times have you made that joke on our shows?
⏹️ ▶️ John But people need to know about the Weebles.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Please don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make me tell you again about the Weebles. But no, this is literally Weeble shaped, right? it’s fat on
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom and it like anyway. Oh my god. I have some faith
⏹️ ▶️ John that the hardware will be okay. I don’t think that’s been the problem with Google’s hardware products is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the hardware is bad. I feel like they’ve just you know fallen down another route like the Google TV
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. I mean maybe you know that ridiculous remote was it made badly? No, it was just
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad idea. So if it’s a good idea then I feel like they can make it you know reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ John well. I think I have seen no reason why this device shouldn’t sell
⏹️ ▶️ John just as well as the Amazon Echo unless the Amazon Echo has already tied up that entire market, which is possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John But other than that, the people who bought the Echo, why wouldn’t they buy this too? It’s like the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, really, like, this kind of thing is the kind of thing that Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be really good at. And again, this isn’t to say that they definitely will. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they clearly are likely to succeed here because it combines the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of things they’re really good at with the kind of market that they can get in and succeed in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, mostly a geeky market, a very tech-savvy market of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who have smart home stuff. The main problem they’re going to have is the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lack of retail presence. We’ve seen Amazon is so powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazon is the place where most people would go to buy this kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m sure Amazon’s not going to be too happy to carry it, or if they do carry it, they’re certainly not going to ever promote it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m guessing they won’t carry it at all. So this is going to be interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see how Google can try to market this and sell the crap out of this. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a technical perspective, Google should be better than Amazon at this stuff. I don’t know that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be, but they should be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I expect them to be better. Because, I mean, the only thing I feel like they might
⏹️ ▶️ John not be better at is maybe this is their first try at putting something out that has 10 microphones
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of noise canceling stuff. So maybe Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, it was Amazon’s first try
⏹️ ▶️ John and they got it right. I know, I know, but it’s been out for a while and the quality is really good. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John basically that Amazon hit it out of the park in that particular feature, right? So I don’t think that’s a given for your
⏹️ ▶️ John first try. I think Amazon did a really good job with does this thing understand me from across the room? Google says they do a good
⏹️ ▶️ John job with that, but they, like, Amazon had an exemplary first try, right? And they have the second and third try
⏹️ ▶️ John with the dot and all that other, whatever, the derivative products. But I think they did a really good job. But other than
⏹️ ▶️ John that, everything else about this, Google, I think, should be better and will be
⏹️ ▶️ John better. Like, things that you can say to it, natural language processing, back-end querying, the only thing Amazon’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be better at is buying stuff, right? Because, you know, damn, but every other part of it, Google
⏹️ ▶️ John damn well better be better than Amazon at it, because Amazon doesn’t have any of the
⏹️ ▶️ John strength behind it to do all the language processing and search querying and the deep hooks into all that type of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing that really blew me away about this demo was, well, A, thinking about why the
⏹️ ▶️ John hell does Apple not have one of these things yet? I guess maybe it’s beneath their concern. But B, when they did the thing, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the kids talking to it and doing the conversation, it says, show me on the TV. It’s like, that is an Apple move. How
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can we do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because we make a TV device. And of course our little weeble knows about the TV, the Chromecast attached to
⏹️ ▶️ John the TV, show me on the TV. Like that is the type of thing we used to have to be in the Apple ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ John for, which is, oh, I have tons of Apple crap around the house and they all know about each other and they all just work together.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like AirPlay to your Apple TV, the first time that worked, it was like, oh, it was amazing because I have these two Apple devices, they’re really
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to put video up on my TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, yeah. And it’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I know. I’m just kind of kidding. That was the first time, you know, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John impressive the first time. And yet this is Google saying, hey, we actually have stuff around here.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they put a little nest icon on there to say connect to your thermostat and third party to integrate
⏹️ ▶️ John with your third party lights and stuff like that. They’re not being like Apple, where it only would only work with your Apple lights
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. They’re all big on third party integration. They already announced an API, which we still don’t have for Siri for for
⏹️ ▶️ John developers. Unless unless Google Home less is the nest
⏹️ ▶️ John hub that we read about and all those tell all articles about nest about how nest was going down in flames and everything was breaking. I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope This is not the long delayed hub from the nest people because the dysfunctional organization
⏹️ ▶️ John is not gonna make a good product But assuming this is made by a functioning organization
⏹️ ▶️ John I I think this will be an impressive product and I think I might actually get one I’ve been holding off on the echo just because it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John first generation product or whatever But if this gets really good reviews, I think the reason I will buy it is because I
⏹️ ▶️ John basically I have more faith in Google than Amazon in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John of supporting and evolving this product and being good at the more interesting, sophisticated parts of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the downside, though, I mean, the kind of argument to that, first of all, there is the big privacy question which we should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco address, because a lot of people, like, you know, I was one of these people. I freaked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out when Amazon released the Echo, and I was like, you’re gonna let Amazon put a speaker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a microphone in your house that’s listening to everything you say all the time? And similarly, when Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bought Nest, Everyone’s like, you want Google to own this thermostat that can look in your house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff? And there’s a lot of people, my past self included, who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uncomfortable with that and they’re just not gonna want that product in their house and that’s fine. That’s your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decision. For me, what tipped the scale is what every Google fan usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco says when asked about privacy things, which is basically what tipped the scale for me with letting the Amazon Echo in my house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I saw how good it was at other people’s houses. I saw how good it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I decided, you know what? It’s worth the trade-off. I’ll take the risk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll put this thing in my kitchen because it is so good that it’s worth the trade-off. And this is the same thing that most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google people say when they say, if people like me ask them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why do you want Google to have access to all your data and to be analyzing everything you do and selling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads against it and everything? And the answer I get most commonly is, well, it’s worth it to me because it’s convenient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and these features are things that I want, so I’ve made that decision. And I can’t really argue with that. If you decide it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it to you, then it’s worth it to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have just to clarify where I fall on that. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see it as a trade-off as in like, okay, well, there are detriments, but there are benefits. I mean, I know the trade-off is
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but I would put it more succinctly for myself is that basically I trust Google.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I don’t trust them with everything. I don’t trust them implicitly. I don’t give them all of my trust, but in the
⏹️ ▶️ John grand scheme of things, I trust Apple and I trust Google to basically be companies that
⏹️ ▶️ John are trying to do the right thing and are not like just inherently evil, like I don’t know, insert the name of your
⏹️ ▶️ John favorite company, although it’s weird that I was just about to say Oracle, but don’t read anything into
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would trust Google before I trust Facebook.
⏹️ ▶️ John great example, right? Or even I trust Amazon, you know, for the most part, and again, I don’t trust them entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have to be vigilant and so on and so forth. Don’t say, oh, I just trust them to listen to everything in my house. They’re never gonna do anything evil, never gonna sell
⏹️ ▶️ John me the advertisers. Like I trust them in that I kind of, I know what they’re gonna do, I know what they’re about but in general still
⏹️ ▶️ John the company seems to me to be mostly trying to do the right thing and as long as you understand their business and how much
⏹️ ▶️ John advertising is a part of it and what is probably going to happen to all your data and the fact that the US government
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably going to have hooks into all this stuff and they’re not going to tell you but like as long as you go on with a clear head
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom line is that I I I trust that this is not I’m not like backdooring my
⏹️ ▶️ John entire house forever and ever and I you know and I wouldn’t install a device
⏹️ ▶️ John from a company that I trusted less or a company that was less competent or more likely to go out of business or more likely
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to do something in desperation for money. You know what I mean? Like there’s so many things
⏹️ ▶️ John for me in favor of Google. So yes, it is a tradeoff, but mostly what it comes down to is that, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I trust Google enough to put something like this in my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You know, um, I spoke about, I think, uh, that I am a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google photos user. And the more I use this app, both the web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app and the native apps, the more I like it and the more it amazes me. And quickly during the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keynote, they said, oh, and Google Photos does some incredible things. And I think it’s what, 200
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million active users on it or something like that, whatever the number is. But you can even search for something like hugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And of course, in the room I’m in, it was half Android developers or mostly Android developers and a couple of others. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I immediately hopped on Google Photos and typed in hugs. Sure enough, there are a bunch of people hugging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each other, like usually Aaron and me and Declan, that show up immediately. Like the stuff that Google Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does is amazing. And seeing how good it is makes me wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if they’re this good with photos, I wonder how good they would be with this Google Home thing. So I agree with you, John, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, the Google Photos has kind of been my gateway drug back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into Google. Like I still use Gmail for both work and personal mail, But that’s just kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing in the background. I don’t ever use the web app. It’s all just basically iMap to me. But man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Photos has really changed my tune as to how I think about Google these days. And I’m giving some serious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey positive side eye to this Google Home thing because it’s aesthetically pleasing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be it a Weeble or not, it still looks good. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tentatively interested in what this brings in a way that I haven’t really been in the
⏹️ ▶️ John And not to bring this back to food again, but they…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, here we go. One of the demos they
⏹️ ▶️ John did show was talking to… Maybe this was, yeah, I think this was in this one, talking about,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it gets into the Allo thing later, but it’s all tied up in the same sort of natural language
⏹️ ▶️ John processing type where they’re asking questions of these products and having it do things for you. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John always want to demo those because they always want to show… I think they had the video of like an entire family talking to the Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Home device, which is a little bit overblown because like, you know, The impression you get is this entire family spends its entire
⏹️ ▶️ John day living in the same house, but all their words are addressed towards the inanimate object instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of the other people. Which, you know, you kind of get that because you have to fit in lots of examples
⏹️ ▶️ John of uses in a single two minute commercial. Anyway, that aside,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of what the things are doing is trying to sell the fantasy that it’s like a personal
⏹️ ▶️ John assistant. Where a flight is delayed and you want to move your dinner reservations
⏹️ ▶️ John and you just to handle things for you and I think those make
⏹️ ▶️ John for good demos but also bad demos because I think they raise expectations on reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John levels because every time I do something like that I see sort of like scrolling down the side of my virtual screen
⏹️ ▶️ John like all the cascading number of assumptions that are in there that your restaurant has an open table reservation that it
⏹️ ▶️ John understands that you know that the restaurant thing you’re talking about that it knows about your flight that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know like that you didn’t use a different email address for this that it wasn’t sent to a a different person that like that
⏹️ ▶️ John just so many things have to go right for that to work and they make it seem like you don’t have to worry about or
⏹️ ▶️ John care about those but you do because if you’re flying on an airline that doesn’t have integration in the same way or you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John go to a restaurant that doesn’t support open table or you something was done on a spouse’s account
⏹️ ▶️ John and not yours so you’re talking to it but it doesn’t understand it doesn’t know anything about that flight because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John done through a different Google ID or you know like so many possible things can go wrong to make
⏹️ ▶️ John that not work and when they do go wrong, even in the slightest way, it’s like the old, you know, give up and
⏹️ ▶️ John use tables website. It’s like, if anything goes wrong at all, alright, forget it. I’ll just do it on my phone or I’ll sit down in front of the computer because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no way I’m trying to have an argument and getting into the text adventure syntax game with this thing. So it all
⏹️ ▶️ John looks magical and the same thing with like ordering food. Oh, the food will be waiting for you to get home. Food
⏹️ ▶️ John from where? You want curry? It found it in the restaurant? You’re just accepting the restaurant that it gave you? What if you don’t like that
⏹️ ▶️ John restaurant? Does it learn which restaurant you like? Does it like… They’re still, this is so primitive where it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t feel like it’s going to help me with my life unless I just don’t care where things come from, want the most
⏹️ ▶️ John generic things, like I wanted to know. I always get Indian food from this place. Or if
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not sure, or they should ask me, do you wanna get it from the place you got it last time? And this is all predicated on the fact that it can order from
⏹️ ▶️ John those places. You probably can’t because your favorite Indian place has no idea what computers are and they only take cash. And it
⏹️ ▶️ John just doesn’t, we’re not there yet. And these ads make it seem like they are there, I don’t know anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John except like Mike Mattis maybe who can actually live this life like where you just Talk into
⏹️ ▶️ John the air and everything you do is exactly integrated And well, he wouldn’t like either because he would have to know exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John where everything’s coming from You can’t you can’t just say order me Indian food. It’s a safe case. You can talk about any food You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John just say order me any food and I’ll be waiting for you and you’ll be happy order What what do you want to order from where like?
⏹️ ▶️ John It just it grinds my gears to see that But anyway, I do have confidence that Google
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to be better at this natural language stuff than Amazon, just because they have so many smart people
⏹️ ▶️ John doing this, and Amazon probably has a slightly smaller number of smart people doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but Amazon has, I think, two big strengths. I mean, number one, first of all, as I mentioned, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive retail power here to push these things. And by all accounts, the Echo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably already has a decent-sized install base. So that’s barrier number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one for Google to try to overcome. You can overcome the head start the Echo has gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a good product, but it’s going to be really hard to overcome the massive retail and promotional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advantage. Just ask anybody who has tried to make a successful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technically advanced e-reader in the last eight years or so.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Google has a big in there, because Google Home, who cares if the little turd,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s now turned down greater than we will ever sell. Because all this, this same thing is all powered by the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Assistant thing. And that’s going to be on all their phones. And they have a ton of phones. So that is
⏹️ ▶️ John their wedge, basically. Like, look, maybe the home never beats out the Echo. But if we can make this a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John on all of our phones so that the 50% plus of the world that has Android
⏹️ ▶️ John smartphones gets used to using this on their phones, then they’ll still win. Because again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone is going to swamp how many people bought a little silly cylinder. even if people are just shouting across the room to their phones and people
⏹️ ▶️ John start adding multiple microns on phones. So you’re right that it is a barrier, but Google already has
⏹️ ▶️ John like a beachhead there. They have a way around, like I think Google cares less whether Google Home succeeds
⏹️ ▶️ John than whether this assistive technology becomes sort of what Google is known for in the modern era instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of just web search.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s fair. Well, so the other I think advantage that Amazon has right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the Echo is not trying to be that kind of like super smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantasy California land, you know, order me Indian food and it just magically does exactly the right thing you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, the Echo is more like a really simple command line. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you learn the relatively small vocabulary and syntax
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it supports, it’s incredibly reliable at doing those things. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think while it might at first have a slightly higher learning curve for like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day one, two, three, I think once you get past the very, very initial part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, I would say the Echo’s actually easier to use because once you figure out the kind of things that work with it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things work incredibly reliably. And so that’s the challenge that anybody has come into this. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri doesn’t do as well at that because Siri tries to do more. Doesn’t have an API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That too. Siri tries to do more, but it doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do any of them reliably enough. And it’s hard to know before you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask Siri something, it’s hard to know whether you will succeed or not. Whereas with the Echo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you figure it out within a few days. You figure out, okay, this is the kind of thing that will succeed, this is the kind of thing that won’t. Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is obviously trying to be very ambitious with the kinds of things that their thing can do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Google Home can do. We will see if it works. I think if anybody can do that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity, it’s them. So it might work. To me, I think the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk for buying into the Google Home ecosystem is whether Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves will lose interest or it will fail within a few years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Their track record for that isn’t great either. If something is not working, they’re the first ones to kill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, usually. Just don’t tell them that FeedBurner is still running, because I think they forgot about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, you know, Google is, if you look at the history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of various initiatives they’ve had, various big platforms they’ve tried to launch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s littered, it’s a huge graveyard of stuff they’ve shut down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no different than Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s true, but if they try this out, if it doesn’t get very far in the market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they could choose to fight harder and to keep it going or to shut it down. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you, if you like bought the wrong hardware and they shut yours down, like that kind of sucks. It’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John format war going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John But don’t you think there’s, this has a big advantage in that the underlying technology, which is underlying this and Allo
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that stuff, the underlying sort of machine intelligence, natural language processing, speech
⏹️ ▶️ John interface, that I feel like is a core technological
⏹️ ▶️ John effort at Google that is not going away, like 100% guaranteed not going away, right? Now the individual
⏹️ ▶️ John products, you’re right, Maybe they get to Google Home and it ends up like, oh, we have the second version. It’s not compatible and you’re stuck
⏹️ ▶️ John with some bad hardware and they eventually stop supporting it. I could totally see that happening. That’s a danger in any sort of product like this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there, you know, historically, I guess I have not been particularly good about preserving that. But if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to have any faith in any kind of product efforts, it’s not going to be like the, the weather balloons that give you wifi
⏹️ ▶️ John or the self driving cars is going to be the natural extension of basically
⏹️ ▶️ John the Google’s core product, which is search, which is taking that to the next level. Also, because it ties into
⏹️ ▶️ John advertising if you’re gonna be honest like why would Google stick with this type of effort a they’ve been doing It for years
⏹️ ▶️ John right and be it totally fits with web search both web search and advertising So I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that this effort will continue to go on and if these products Like that they will
⏹️ ▶️ John iterate on them that they will they will make future versions of them We’ll keep going and there is a still a slim chance that
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy some hardware It might be orphan because they bail on that and have a new iteration with a new name or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John But I really think this is not not esoteric or
⏹️ ▶️ John in fear of being a flash in the pan simply because it just reads so much as Google to be not
⏹️ ▶️ John tangential. Like I feel like this is if you were to say, what is Google like 50 years in the future? It
⏹️ ▶️ John looks less like typing things in text boxes and more like a much better version of this because it’s just such a natural extension.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And certainly what was it? Machine learning was their version of customer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sat. Like if we were doing a drinking game and machine learning caused you to drink,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would have been under the table after the first 20 minutes because that’s all we heard about. And I mean, Apple has its own foibles
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in very similar ways like customer sat, but machine learning was all over this keynote. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with you, John, that that seems to be where they’re pushing as a company is trying to leverage that machine learning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any possible way that they can. And in some of those ways, like I’ve been talking about with Google Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and with Google Home, I think it looks really promising and really, really interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and like it’s it’s their was their their their logo or their motto or vision statement
⏹️ ▶️ John ever like organizing the world’s information. They’ve been slowly but steadily doing that over the course of many,
⏹️ ▶️ John many years trying to get semantics into the information. So it understands not just like, oh, this word
⏹️ ▶️ John appears there and these people link to that page, but understanding what the information is that is actually looking at. That’s how it can do
⏹️ ▶️ John that photo stuff. The photo stuff doesn’t just come out of nowhere because they did a one year project to do it. It’s based
⏹️ ▶️ John on years and years of research outside Google and within, and just working on it, working on
⏹️ ▶️ John their language parsing. They had to open source that big, you know, natural language processing thing, and
⏹️ ▶️ John image recognition and stuff with robotics. Like this is all about taking in information
⏹️ ▶️ John and then developing an understanding of it that can be encoded by computers so the computers
⏹️ ▶️ John can act on it. So it’s not just text so that they understand the meaning behind things. once you have
⏹️ ▶️ John even the barest meaning or the barest sort of sensory perception of like is this a car is
⏹️ ▶️ John this a hug what language is this in what are the words mean that previous sentence when I
⏹️ ▶️ John said he in the next sentence what are they talking about like it’s really basic stuff conceptually
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s really hard to do for computers and they’re doing it on such a massive scale that that that
⏹️ ▶️ John effort and that research just is gonna underlie all their products from from here going forward and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they’re gonna hit that inflection point where suddenly it becomes acceptable and and like
⏹️ ▶️ John it passes the barrier from tech curiosity that we’re all impressed by that but then only nerds really use
⏹️ ▶️ John to just a normal thing that everybody does we may be getting close to that if only because
⏹️ ▶️ John people don’t like typing stuff I saw someone tweeting when the I think was going on like how many people will
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll see interacting with their Android phones or their you know iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ John purely by speech even though a a computer nerd looking at them would just cringe
⏹️ ▶️ John at how incredibly inefficient it is to essentially be arguing with your phone and saying things over and over again and trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to type things just just just give me your phone let me show you how to do this but people prefer it even when
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s totally broken and crappy and doesn’t work right just because it’s more comfortable for them so
⏹️ ▶️ John i think we’re probably closer to the inflection point where most people use what will continue to be the most
⏹️ ▶️ John massively inefficient way to do anything especially when it has any sort of error simply because it’s just more comfortable for
⏹️ ▶️ John them than trying to figure out what things to tap on or what what to type.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our final sponsor this week is Pingdom.
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Google Allo
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about LO, Governor. Oh, geez.
⏹️ ▶️ John You so wanted to say that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know you so wanted to say it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is going to be the week of bad podcast British accents.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Hey, at least
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t put an apostrophe before the A.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John true. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John it reminds me a lot of LO, that weird social network that didn’t go anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still spams me every few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John with something. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got to unsubscribe for all those.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those. I have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, so Google Hello is the iMessage knockoff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but with a lot more. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John iMessage. It’s like a line knockoff or a
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s much more like the much more sophisticated messaging apps that are used outside the Apple ecosystem. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got stickers for crying out loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Fair enough. Big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey text. Yeah. So actually, that was a very interesting interaction. So they went, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forget which person was presenting. Was this the British woman that was presenting at this point? Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any case, somebody, whoever was presenting was talking about how, uh, there are times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when you want to kind of shout in a, in a text message conversation. There’s times where you kind of want to whisper.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so they allow you to change the font size within, uh, allo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which in and of itself doesn’t seem that impressive, but I thought the interaction was pretty cool where on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the messages app you have a little microphone icon and you can swipe up and down to like send an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio message. What they do is they if you tap and hold roughly where our
⏹️ ▶️ Casey microphone icon is it’ll let you kind of drag a slider up and down to change the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the size of the font which I thought again was a very clever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John interaction.
⏹️ ▶️ John So many things wrong with that from a usability perspective that I can’t like and from a taste perspective like this is just
⏹️ ▶️ John such a totally a Google thing to do where someone thinks is a cool feature and it seems like they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think quite enough about the implications both aesthetically where you can make really ugly look even the
⏹️ ▶️ John demo screenshots were looking really ugly and I was thinking to myself not there’s anything wrong with ugly and garish like if that’s the essay
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going for but I was thinking like this is the opposite of the Apple aesthetic
⏹️ ▶️ John and it can be more fun like the Apple aesthetic can be boring right you know oh everything is all Helvetica and everything’s the same size
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything is sort of clean and buttoned down like I you know I’m not I’m not slamming it I’m really not like but I
⏹️ ▶️ John saw it I’m like wow this is definitely something that Apple wouldn’t do and for the shouting fine fun make your text
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger it’s fun to shout so on and so forth whispering not good for usability you telling me I can make the text
⏹️ ▶️ John microscopic boy yeah my aged relatives will love to squint at that when I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco oh you don’t understand grandma I’m whispering
⏹️ ▶️ John no you can’t I mean maybe it’s overridable at the local level but it just doesn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John for a good demo because the obvious question which is really I can make text so small
⏹️ ▶️ John that my recipient can’t even read it and has to squint that’s the question in people’s minds if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at it from an accessibility perspective so just throw a sentence out there that says the thing that I really hope is true which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh and of course the recipient can set a minimum font size you know like whatever you have to say address the
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll get to this later with some more stuff from the the knock knock duo
⏹️ ▶️ John what do you call it video conferencing thing like if there’s an obvious there should be an obvious question in most
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s minds about feature you’re doing, throw out a sentence or two to reassure us that the feature that you
⏹️ ▶️ John surely added to account for this is there. Because if you don’t say it, we’re left to think that you haven’t thought of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if that’s not true, it gives a bad impression. And in this case, I don’t trust Google to think these things because they very
⏹️ ▶️ John often do things that like, you know, the company, the company’s persona
⏹️ ▶️ John is that of, uh, an individual that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t account for the variety of different kinds of people and lives that are out there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know they’re fighting very hard against that, and I know it’s kind of unfair, but a lot of times I see Google do things
⏹️ ▶️ John with obvious problems that I assume that they have accounted for, then they release a product and I say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, they didn’t account for that. In fact, it seems like they didn’t even think of that. And they’ll fix it after the fact to their credit. And it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re trying to do something wrong, but sometimes they drop the ball. So I’m saying Google, in your presentations
⏹️ ▶️ John for the foreseeable future, when you show a feature that has obvious problems
⏹️ ▶️ John throughout two or three, Apple does this all the time, show up two or three words to say, Oh, and of course, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John worry about this, because we handled it in an XY way, like in the obvious way, right? Because I don’t think for me, anyway, they
⏹️ ▶️ John get the past making me think that they thought of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s understandable. We should also talk about the predictive replies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or suggested replies with ding machine learning, ding. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seems weird to me. And I have very conflicting thoughts about this, which is actually kind of a theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for most of what I thought of Google I O. But it seemed odd to me to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey suggested replies on a phone or a tablet where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relatively easy to type. Like, I don’t have, I don’t really have a problem with it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Apple Watch partially because it’s so terrible and partially because, partially because you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly type on an Apple Watch. And we’re going to get to that later as well, hopefully. But But on a device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where there’s some reasonable approximation of a keyboard, it just seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insensitive. Like, one of the examples they used was like a picture of a kid. Oh, how cute was one of the replies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, I don’t know. That just seems insensitive or cold to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s an example, a great follow up from what I said. Here’s an example where they did realize what the
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious objection to this feature would be and address it with the sentence they chose. So the obvious objection from the
⏹️ ▶️ John demos is like, I would never tap any of those circles because all of them sound like inane
⏹️ ▶️ John things. Like that’s not how I communicate, right? Just like you were saying, it’s like, really, oh, how cute, am
⏹️ ▶️ John I gonna send that? Or it’s gonna look like a form letter, or it’s gonna look like I can reply,
⏹️ ▶️ John similar complaints about the inbox software that they have for auto-replying to emails and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the obvious objection to any sort of, hey, we’ll figure out what you were gonna reply and give it to you in a box, right? And they addressed it
⏹️ ▶️ John immediately with a single sentence, which may or may not actually address the issue in the product, but they’re saying, oh, and don’t worry,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will learn from what you actually reply and suggest things that are essentially things that you have said before that are
⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise in your voice. Now will they be successful at that? Will they just literally have replies they’ve had before
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’ll sound dumb and none of the boxes will look right? But at least they understand that they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John suggest replies without taking how you actually communicate as an input.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so they said, no, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Now, again, they can do a bad job of it, and it’ll still be a stupid feature that
⏹️ ▶️ John people will want to turn off, but if they do a good job of it, it’s like, yes, that’s exactly what I want. I want you to watch how
⏹️ ▶️ John I type to people, and preferably, how I communicate with different people. How do I reply to my mom versus my
⏹️ ▶️ John wife versus my friend? You know what I mean? That’s machine learning, and again, they keep leaning on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully, that’s what they’re aiming for. They’re not saying, oh, we’re just going to
⏹️ ▶️ John give you a bunch of canned replies like the Apple Watch does or probabilistically try to make a reply
⏹️ ▶️ John that would make some sense. You know, Apple Watch is not learning how to reply. It has no way to learn from Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have that information or whatever. But Google at least says this is what we’re trying to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I really hope they do because that’s that’s the dream, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s fair. They also have plenty of third party integrations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in LL. And I initially was really keen on this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I forget the exact example they used, but say you’re talking with your wife about where you want to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to dinner, and so I’m talking to Erin about it, and she says, oh, would you like pizza? And I say, yes, I’d love some Cicis.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then it will try to figure out some sort of contextually relevant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information, like if it’s something nicer than Cicis, oh, can I get you a reservation? Or perhaps here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey directions there, et cetera. And at first I thought, oh, wow, that’s super convenient,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I thought about it, and I thought, I don’t know if I’d really want that in an iMessage conversation, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously, you know, is approximately the equivalent with Aaron. Like that just seems Weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me and and I can’t I haven’t put my finger on which one I think more
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s great that they kept leaning on this and I think it is a great feature is that you don’t have to leave The app this frustrates me when I’m on
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone communicating with somebody that I have to like wait Let me go Google that or you know, wait Let me
⏹️ ▶️ John go to this other app to do the thing Having everything in line one aspect of it is like do I want the other person
⏹️ ▶️ John to see sort of the research? I’m doing here? Do I want to share these things? That’s questionable, debatable,
⏹️ ▶️ John although if you’re trying to decide in restaurants, maybe they do want to see them. So you don’t have to describe the restaurants or type them all in.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I can see the deciding what to share versus what’s your own. But the big advantage that Google was selling, and
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think is a real advantages, you know how to switch to 15 different apps, you can get it all done here, mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the power of Google is showing through inside this chat application. We will
⏹️ ▶️ John do all the searching and and the pulling of the search results in smart ways, and even the ordering and the making the reservation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, it falls back on like, that’s a silly scenario unless everything in your life is integrated with
⏹️ ▶️ John Google, and all the things you care about have third party integration. But hey, at least they have third party integrations. And if third parties
⏹️ ▶️ John really care about this, they can integrate it. And if a restaurant really cares and wants to sell to tech nerds in the San Francisco
⏹️ ▶️ John area, they can integrate with it. Doesn’t help most of the rest of the country, whose favorite restaurants are
⏹️ ▶️ John not integrated in this way, but at least maybe you can get directions to them, assuming that Google has accurate
⏹️ ▶️ John information for where they are. Um, so, uh, this one is a little bit fantasy, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Google is doing all the right things and I think making people not leave the app is actually the right
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. It’s just difficult to draw that line of how much crap do I need the other person to see versus how much
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff do I need to see to make a decision?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. They also allow you to play what they call the emoji game in line. So if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get bored talking to your spouse, you can play the guess the movie title by emojis game
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which strikes me as the what do they call it digital touch?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey features on the Apple watch
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s not though because this was just their sort of like hello world example program
⏹️ ▶️ John The idea is that again third parties can make actual fun games with this API.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is more like see it’s an egg It’s like making an echo server for demonstrating your
⏹️ ▶️ John simple server-side concurrency framework. It just echoes back whatever you put in. It’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John real thing. It’s an API, and they fully expect people to make real fun
⏹️ ▶️ John games out of this. Integrations with third-party products, games that lead you to third-party products.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are many opportunities for both advertising and commerce integrated into this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think showing that and by the way on stage essentially saying shall we play a game
⏹️ ▶️ John to your computer is not a good look so maybe stay away from that but
⏹️ ▶️ John the big thing I think they weren’t selling is that we didn’t just make a chat app that has some features in this version of Android
⏹️ ▶️ John this is now another platform for you to target all your stuff at you people out there
⏹️ ▶️ John who have products and applications and services can integrate with this and be integrated with it
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that you people can buy your stuff and find way to your thing and play your game that
⏹️ ▶️ John advertises your thing or whatever. Like, that’s the feature. The actual like emoji game.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that was I mean, it was probably clear to developers, but if a regular person saw that, it was like, Oh, I’m not interested in emoji
⏹️ ▶️ John games, like ignore the emoji game. That is just a proof of concept. Hello, world type thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Other integrations is what you’re looking for here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Then they made mention during the LO conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a couple other times about security, which I really, really liked that Google and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple seem to be quietly colluding in the good way to try to make their,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their platforms more secure. But that being said, I wasn’t entirely clear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on what the security situation is in LO. It seems that there’s kind of two modes. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the general normal use mode, which is encrypted-ish,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess. it’s encrypted enough to prevent snooping by anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Google because they need to have their equivalent of Slack, or yes, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Slack bot in there in order to offer all these suggestions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then there’s an incognito mode, which is just like Chrome in your messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, which is apparently encrypted E2E or end-to-end. That just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like it overall, but that just seems weird to me to have to think about whether or not you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this to be end to end encrypted.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and I wasn’t clear to I watched most of this presentation, but I didn’t get a chance to rewatch a
⏹️ ▶️ John segment in incognito mode. It doesn’t hide you as the sender, right? Like it’s it’s the other person still
⏹️ ▶️ John knows it’s you talking, right? You just initiated a new end to end encrypted
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey session. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. All right. So anyway, yeah, it’s, it’s I think you got exactly you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a difference between can, could Google encrypt this if they wanted to in theory or
⏹️ ▶️ John can nobody do it? And as has been discussed at length with iMessage, even though iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ John is end-to-end encrypted as well, because Apple has control over the key servers still technically if Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to be nefarious they could, you know, decrypt your conversations
⏹️ ▶️ John as they happen. They don’t do that and they don’t plan to do that and they say they’ll fight the government’s attempt to make them do
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but there’s so many other ways to get your information like the the unencrypted iCloud backups of your conversations
⏹️ ▶️ John and yeah it’s much more complicated than simply putting e2e up on a screen especially
⏹️ ▶️ John with it with the government climate the way it is but yeah the reason Google I think doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have iMessage style encryption from the beginning is because Google wants to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John see everything that you type and it wants to have a participant in the conversation who’s in on it even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you didn’t end in encryption one of your authenticated end to end recipients would be
⏹️ ▶️ John something on a Google server somewhere. Like I don’t think they’re anonymizing when they go back like apple is when they go back to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Siri stuff is they kind of have to know things about you and know who you are to do smart
⏹️ ▶️ John server side things because I don’t think all this is happening on the phone right there is a server side component. And so it’s the tension we’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about is like that Apple is trying to be good about privacy. And like I don’t even want to know your stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want personalized service from, you know, an intelligent agent with machine
⏹️ ▶️ John learning, The intelligent agent has to know who you are. I mean, I want it to know who I am, but now all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ John this intelligent agent is privy to my conversations, and it’s not a person, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially owned and controlled by Google. So end-to-end encrypting it with the agent
⏹️ ▶️ John is not really helping things if you’re worried about the government forcing Google to give
⏹️ ▶️ John it records. Anyway, I think in this day and age, if there’s something you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want the government to don’t send it through Google or any other service
⏹️ ▶️ John probably even Apple I mean Apple’s probably your best bet but in general you’d have to take encryption into your own hands
⏹️ ▶️ John if you actually want which is fairly easy to do like you know the math exists it’s out there you can get
⏹️ ▶️ John encryption software and use it yourself and communicate with somebody in a way that the government can’t subpoena anybody to get
⏹️ ▶️ John but again you’ll probably just screw it up and they’ll be able to social engineer something out of it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh, goodness.
Google Duo, Knock Knock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about duo and knock knock. So duo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is FaceTime, but not there’s more to it than that. And then what is knock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knock? That’s the intro mode in duo. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that that’s another this is another one of the demos where they didn’t say the obvious thing. It’s like, oh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John when someone’s calling you, look, I can see my daughter. And you know, it’s like your your phone is ringing, essentially, like the FaceTime ring,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And rather than just seeing the name of the caller, and maybe like a little picture of them
⏹️ ▶️ John from your contacts or whatever like you know your daughter is calling and you see that your daughter’s name and
⏹️ ▶️ John a still picture of your daughter what you instead see is video from
⏹️ ▶️ John the the caller side before you’ve decided whether you want to pick up or not right
⏹️ ▶️ John how can you do that demo on stage and not immediately say but don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John worry this only happens for known contacts that are in your address book that you communicated with.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Surely that is the case But
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to say that. You have to actually say the words. It takes two seconds to say the words, otherwise the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire audience is going, oh my god, naked people are going to be calling me constantly and I’m going to instantly see their video because
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t stop them. It’s like, do they not have women at the company?
⏹️ ▶️ John The women would say, I do not want to see a million guys junk as they randomly dial me and I have
⏹️ ▶️ John no choice and I see video of it immediately. And again, I don’t think that’s going to happen because surely this
⏹️ ▶️ John only works for your favorites or your known contacts. That’s gotta be a feature, but you have to say it on stage,
⏹️ ▶️ John because otherwise I think Google seriously, that
⏹️ ▶️ John really bothered me that that went unmentioned. I feel like even Apple would say, and don’t worry,
⏹️ ▶️ John this only works for your contacts. See how easy that is, Google? And again, surely that’s the case. I think there have
⏹️ ▶️ John to be engineers inside Google who understand the privacy implications
⏹️ ▶️ John of unsolicited video from strangers appearing on your phone screen, but they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say it in the presentation. They did and I missed it and I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John think they did. Boy, boy. Yeah. As someone put her in the chat room, junk time instead of face.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the thing that bothered me about the knock knock, to be honest, I didn’t think about that, but you’re absolutely right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the thing that bothered me about knock knock was they started from a good place, which was video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call or phone calls in general, but particularly video calls are extreme or an extreme interruption.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you have to really dedicate your entire attention to a video call. And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is not a convenient time for that. But then again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the other side of the coin, what if, what if Aaron is calling me to say, oh my God, Declan just took his first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steps or something like that. So they, what Knock Knock does is it lets you see what this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person is calling about. So I can see Aaron and Declan and I can see her freaking out and they, in their little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey demo reel video, they showed a guy who was holding up two ticket stubs, like he had gotten tickets to a concert or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. And then they showed another person who holded up their left hand to show I think it was their engagement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ring And so the problem I had with this and maybe I’m maybe I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being a jerk about it But it was like you have to earn your right for them to pick up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your phone call Like you have to earn it man. You can’t just call and be smiling. You got to perform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You got to put on a show or I’m not picking up the damn phone
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s a real problem because again, it’s only gonna be your actual people you know doing this, right? Who’s
⏹️ ▶️ John video calling you anyway? No one is cold video calling you, or in any case you wouldn’t pick up. It’s going to be people you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the only time they would video call you instead of regular call you is if they have something to show off or they’re an adorable
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey child. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Why else are they going to, no one’s going to video call you just to essentially have a phone conversation, because
⏹️ ▶️ John who wants people looking at them unless they have something to show or they are in an impressive place. So I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I guess it just depends on who you talk to, but I don’t feel like anybody who I would ever video
⏹️ ▶️ John call would deny my call because I was not sufficiently exciting in the video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the other thing is any FaceTime conversation I’ve ever had has almost always been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preceded by an iMessage conversation being saying, Hey, I’d like to FaceTime you, are you cool?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s, it’s, it’s your point, John. It’s almost never me cold calling or somebody cold calling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me saying, you know, with no for a previous warning. But is that perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because there is no knock knock like feature for me to kind of screen that call
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe I do get those by the way I do get a surprising number of not not phone calls,
⏹️ ▶️ John but FaceTime calls Randomly on my phone and of course on my Mac is integrated
⏹️ ▶️ John with my phone. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey answer any of them strangers
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s like an unknown. Yes
⏹️ ▶️ John and not a phone call and not a FaceTime audio call an actual FaceTime video weird I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if there’s like war dialers out there just trying every single number I’ve never answered one of them so I have no idea what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on but it’s annoying that it makes the FaceTime like bloopity bloop sound.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean like I’ve had like I have a few relatives who basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treat FaceTime like phone calls and so they will just call me on FaceTime like you know unannounced just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s their call. Yeah, I think my parents will do that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s fine. And but I you know I’ve never wished for this feature. I mean I’m sure it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s certainly going to be odd at first before anybody’s used to it because that’s not how things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have gone so far with these kind of video calling things. Like, so there’s there’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an expectation that you are not being broadcast before the person picks up. So I think you’re gonna see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of people picking their nose and adjusting their their hair and stuff like that. Like, just like, you know, embarrassing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prep before they think they’re being watched.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is something that people have to get used to. But I think they will get used to hopefully it’s an optional
⏹️ ▶️ John feature. Again, something that I didn’t mention, like, is this optional? It should be for only known contacts. And for known
⏹️ ▶️ John contacts, It should be an option because maybe you don’t want that to be the case of exactly the way you said it You’re just more used to like
⏹️ ▶️ John until they pick up. I’m not on camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah a couple of the quick notes about this it apparently does really really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well with Graceful degradation as the connection gets crappier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then whatever the Opposite of that is as things get better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the thing that I’m most excited about about this is that it’s multi-platform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and And I believe at one point or another, they had said that Elo and presumably Duo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operates where your phone number is kind of your user ID, if you will. And something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve struggled with is Aaron’s side of the family, with the exception of Aaron, is exclusively Android.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And there have been several times where we’d like to have a video chat with her mom, which her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mom only lives about 20 minutes away, but maybe Declan is doing something funny or maybe, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, we want to show her something in the house, we’d like to do video chat. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we don’t feel like we have a mechanism to do that. Now, yes, I know that Skype exists. Yes, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know that Hangouts exist. Yes, I know that there are many other video chat apps that exist,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s nothing that I personally have used that is as easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as FaceTime. And I hope that this Duo thing will be as easy as FaceTime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so we’ll be able to install this on our iPhones, and my in-laws will be able to install it on their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Android phones, and we’ll be able to do these very quick, very simple video chats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a whim, which would be really, really awesome, and I’m really looking forward to that hopefully working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can just wait for FaceTime to become an open standard, because they’re going to the standards bodies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today with that. It’s just a matter of time now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is another thing that’s Google’s strength, is that in my experience with Google Hangouts, for example, is
⏹️ ▶️ John it is the first and best sort of multiple people on a video stream thing that I’ve ever used.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was the quality great no, but they like like really good video games and good iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John applications and so many good things. They understand that the most important thing like they understand the hierarchy
⏹️ ▶️ John of of needs in a video call. Number one, audio,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have to drop the video to maintain the audio, do it because nothing is more annoying than not being able to to hear people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then number two, responsiveness of video rather than quality. If you have to drop the quality to an obscene
⏹️ ▶️ John level just to keep track of someone waving their hand, then do it like responsiveness and understanding the audio
⏹️ ▶️ John is the most important thing. And my frustration with faint FaceTime is often that the audio will start
⏹️ ▶️ John cutting out and makes it impossible to even communicate about the bad video and the video like will have
⏹️ ▶️ John higher overall quality when it’s working. But when my parents terrible internet connection
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropping things out and it becomes like a slideshow. I wish it would just degrade to a much uglier algorithm or
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean and FaceTime We’ll do this FaceTime will turn off the video entirely to go to the audio But in practice it does not
⏹️ ▶️ John do that soon enough it very often struggles with stuttering audio and I wish I could just
⏹️ ▶️ John Like just you know drop this entirely very often FaceTime calls have Been derailed by saying just call
⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone because we know the phone will work and I’ll be able to hear your words So I got I haven’t you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only thing I’ve used video from Google is you know, YouTube which of course is only Google acquisition
⏹️ ▶️ John and Google Hangouts. And I’ve always been impressed by the performance under pretty, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John dire conditions of so many people across the country doing one big giant multi-video
⏹️ ▶️ John conference call thing. So I, if this duo thing works and because it’s cross platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John it may end up being an easier, like, I’ll see if it ends up being like my go-to,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’ll probably still do FaceTime with my parents cause that’s just what they’re used to. But if it’s, but if FaceTime is messing up, I will
⏹️ ▶️ John have this app installed and I’ll make sure they have it installed too. And I’ll say switch to this app and we’ll just do a B testing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, FaceTime is dying because of you read internet weather over there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Try this other app that I showed you, and
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully it will be simple enough that they can figure it out and it will be connected up in a way. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I’m optimistic about this as being a decent product. And like like Marco was ridiculing Apple for
⏹️ ▶️ John the open standard, like this, you know, Apple could have done this, but hasn’t. How has FaceTime gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John appreciably better since it was rolled out? I’m sure it has. I’m sure it’s gotten more reliable and the algorithms have gotten
⏹️ ▶️ John better and the quality is probably better at the top end than Google’s thing is going to be. But that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter when I can only hear every fifth word that my parents are saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And also FaceTime notably does not support more than two people on a call yet. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope we get that at some point. Because like, you know, iChat had that before FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a thing. Like we had that 10 years ago. So I know it’s more challenging on mobile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on cell connections and everything. It’s not an easy problem by any means. But I do hope we get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but is Duo? I mean, Duo itself implies two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that Duo is going to be more than one person, is it? Or more than two people, I should say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, if nobody actually has like more than one other person, they know it’s an Android phone, right? What
⏹️ ▶️ John are you talking about? There are more than 50% of the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other thing is supposedly E2E encrypted always. Enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John That one is easy to get encrypted always. Well, they didn’t say always, they just said end-to-end encryption. They didn’t give a qualification,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m sure it just means always. Mostly because at this point, I wouldn’t say this is going to be true forever, but at this
⏹️ ▶️ John point, there is no Google bot equivalent that needs to see every frame of your video do something intelligent. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if there was sufficient bandwidth, both in terms of CPU and data throughput,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure, like under unlimited conditions in a local environment, experiment, Google would love to have an intelligent
⏹️ ▶️ John agent watching every frame of your video and doing intelligent things based on it. Because you know, you know, still image recognition.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s you can do that on video and then video recognition where you’re actually not just looking at individual frames
⏹️ ▶️ John of the actual video, and having something realize where you are, what you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about, being able to do hand gestures, seeing your facial expressions,
⏹️ ▶️ John then Google, you know, would need to see your video and on the local device, Maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ John could still be end-to-end encryption, but again there’s probably there’s almost certainly a server component to this And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know how long end-to-end encryption end-to-end encryption on on do only last until Google
⏹️ ▶️ John realizes that they can do intelligent helpful things by Looking at your video,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s probably still a ways off because of just bandwidth concerns and everything else but I wouldn’t expect it
Android N, Instant Apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so updates to Android.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was getting towards the end of the I was getting towards the end of this section. I had to skim some of this, but I tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John put some highlights in here. I’m sure there’s things that I’m missing. Vulcan Vulcan was kind of depressing because
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, Apple, Apple’s been so far ahead with graphics performance on their devices
⏹️ ▶️ John for so long, especially compared to like the average of Android versus just like the high end Android.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then Apple, you know, that open GL yes. And then they did the metal thing, thing which is a lower level thing and that was great
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m sure it’s good for iOS game developers and everything but on the
⏹️ ▶️ John other side of the coin is the sort of open standard OpenGL Kronos group thing which is Vulkan
⏹️ ▶️ John which is based on Mantle from AMD and a bunch of other stuff and it’s very much like Metal and you know all these
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas have been floating around the graphics community for a while. I don’t like to see Apple as the,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of like the FaceTime situation. Oh we’ve got our own thing. The only good thing about
⏹️ ▶️ John it is that Apple’s own thing is actually pretty influential because Apple a lot of games ship on Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms and they make a lot of money. So maybe they could quote unquote win just because
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the money in game development is happening on iOS. But I would really rather see
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple supporting the industry standards like let’s get everybody working together to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the low level graphics API that everybody’s going to use as opposed Apple having its own but having its own
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably kind of a competitive advantage and they are so big they can probably get away with it but it just depresses me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Let’s see what else. They did a lot with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just in time compilation, which is kind of exciting and even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just in time installation, which is weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, that the instant apps thing we’ve had a second but the just in time compilation is the flip side where I start to feel bad for Google.
⏹️ ▶️ John That they’re still dealing with the JIT and they’re like, oh, we’ll like profile the code and
⏹️ ▶️ John write the optimized version of it to flash to make a faster launch each time. And I know they have pre-compiled
⏹️ ▶️ John apps too, but just that technical decision to go with initially a weird Java-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John language and just-in-time compilation and everything, like they’re still kind of paying the price of like
⏹️ ▶️ John having to, having to try to match Apple, which is shipping pre compiled
⏹️ ▶️ John banner binaries, right? pre compiled pre optimized binaries that are you know, that are smaller that they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to have the the Yeah, that they’re doing plain catch up here. And
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe long term, they’re still doing the right thing. And maybe it’s still an advantage. But in the current stage, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of weird compromises that they’re digging out from underneath. And so there’s a whole section of the slides that are just things that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John just not concerned about, because they don’t have these problems, because they don’t have a jet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. They have multitasking.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that that was like, that was the part where it’s like, all right, you did pretty much what Apple did, which is not that imaginative
⏹️ ▶️ John when Apple did it. And it’s not that imaginative when you did it. Which part did you think was novel? I mean, split screen and picture and picture
⏹️ ▶️ John is like literally like word for word. The the, you know, iOS, iPad multitasking, they
⏹️ ▶️ John did it on the phone, which I think is something that Apple didn’t do. Like they wouldn’t does Apple didn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ John you do split screen on the mini does that yeah I don’t know what the limits of that features or anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPhone no but they showed it on the phone basically top-bottom split instead of from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side yeah well cuz you wouldn’t want like two inch wide apps like side-by-side
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah well I don’t know it depends on the app but yeah you can scroll the text sideways but
⏹️ ▶️ John what was and they had like the double tap to switch back really fast oh here’s here is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John they killed me in this presentation I kind of understand why they did it. So they showed their app switcher, which
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like all app switches look like these days, a bunch of little cards that look like web OS from many years ago, showing all your
⏹️ ▶️ John applications. I said by popular demand, they added a clear all button.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is essentially recognizing the fact that lots of people either based
⏹️ ▶️ John on superstition or bad reasoning related to the iOS multitasker, or
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Android side, probably both of those as well, but also on both sides
⏹️ ▶️ John based on just the idea that some people want to clean up messes and that having a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John quote-unquote open applications is visual clutter right and they
⏹️ ▶️ John just want to clear out so the newer version of Android does two things one they limit it to only seven so it just they go off the end
⏹️ ▶️ John you know they don’t they just don’t show them which is kind of nice for reducing clutter but I hope that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John adjustable somewhere probably is because what if you want to see more than seven and the second thing is the clear all button. He’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes I just want to clean everything up. I mean, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before. I’ve seen my son do it. I saw
⏹️ ▶️ John him using his iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and he goes into
⏹️ ▶️ John the app switcher and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey flicks all the applications up. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John whoa, whoa, whoa. It’s like, where did you learn this? Who’s teaching? It’s just, they pick it up
⏹️ ▶️ John on the streets. They pick it up like, force coding applications. So I had to explain to him, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole, we don’t talk about that much on the show, but the angle that I gave to him, I didn’t want to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John to him about multitasking, suspended processes and everything. I said, When you do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna actually exit the program. It’s going to I don’t know if I said force quit or whatever Which means the next
⏹️ ▶️ John time you launch it which will probably be two and a half minutes from now It has to launch from a completely fresh state
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas before it was just suspended in memory ready to go the next time you used it So you think you’re quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John saving battery, which is excuse he gave me But you’re probably not because launching from a fresh state
⏹️ ▶️ John takes more energy than unsuspending the application So just don’t worry about and don’t leave them but the other angle is, and I wish you
⏹️ ▶️ John had an argument, is like, I just don’t like seeing them there. Well, so Android users apparently have the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ John problems, so they gave them a big button that says clear all. What I hope the clear all button does is remove the graphics
⏹️ ▶️ John but do nothing else. Leave
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey them all suspended.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s what people want, they just don’t want to see the squares there. That’s what Apple should do. I mean, they’d have to add a new
⏹️ ▶️ John feature for actual force quit, but I wish flicking up the squares didn’t do anything except for remove them from
⏹️ ▶️ John the multitasking switcher, but everything else stayed the same, they just stayed suspended and were managed in a normal way. but
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, this ailment, this is like the zapping the PRAM of the mobile
⏹️ ▶️ John age or rebuilding the desktop, I don’t know how far back I can go, and repairing permissions, rebuilding desktops, all
⏹️ ▶️ John these voodoo solutions, but this one I think there’s a foundation, that people just don’t like to see the mess, so Android is giving them a
⏹️ ▶️ John clear all button. We need to have a summit, like a G8 summit for
⏹️ ▶️ John people who make computer devices to talk about pathologies related to the multitasking switcher.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the sad part with the Apple one is like, it would be nice if we didn’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that and if they remove the ability to do that so that people could stop doing this stupid thing. But unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does occasionally solve problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you do need a way to force
⏹️ ▶️ John quit things. You do need a way to do that. So you can’t take that away and just say, oh, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John worry, we’ll manage it all for you. But the obsessive need to do it every time. I’ve seen my son do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I’ve watched him. just like, it’s just part of his routine. It’s like, there’s no point in that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, especially because you just convince yourself that if I don’t do this, something bad will happen. Like, oh, I just wish
⏹️ ▶️ John I just wish that it just it just removed the graphics because I think I think that’s like 90% of it. People just don’t want to see the squares.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t want to see the little rectangles they want. They want to feel like everything is a clean slate. So fine, get rid of the
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangles, right. But then, you know, when the Facebook app starts going crazy, you do need some way to actually kill
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Or sometimes it when applications get all screwed up which happens as well like perfectly well-behaved applications
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s a bug in them all of a sudden and every time you bring them to the front they’re just not working that
⏹️ ▶️ John happens and you need a way to get rid of them get rid of them uh i
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco don’t know it’s a difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right i got it this is how i’m going to solve all the problems you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one free clear all a day and then if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you want You can unlock more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you can buy one for a dollar each if you want more after that. Their growth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue with iPhone revenue is solved.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s what he calls an energy-based mechanic where you exhaust your energy, you have to do an in-app purchase to get
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I wasn’t there in the crowd, but I wonder if that was a big applause feature. Because they did say, by popular
⏹️ ▶️ John demand. who works at Google, please tell me that doesn’t actually do anything except remove
⏹️ ▶️ John the graphics. It’ll make me so much happier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We should quickly talk about instant apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a really big, hairy, technical mess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might end up being really good, has a lot of potential risks, has a lot of potential ramifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good and bad. And we don’t really know enough about it yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think, to really say whether this is going to work. work, what the risks
⏹️ ▶️ John worried about security risks? Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking of? Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me kind of explain what’s going on here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, yeah, explain. Chief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey summarizer. Chief summarizer, summarizer, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chief. So… That makes it longer. Why’d you… You’re doing it… I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco a terrible job. I’m fired. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea with instant apps is you’re in a situation where you really want to consume some content
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is associated with an app. So, they gave an example of wanting to watch a BuzzFeed video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They gave an example of walking up to an NFC-enabled parking meter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marc, because critically, you want to do something with an app that you don’t have installed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, yes, yes. So you don’t have this installed, and you walk up to this parking meter, and the parking meter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has some NFC ID that some way, somehow Google and Android
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know are associated with such and such app in the Play Store. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instant apps will do is it will, behind the scenes, instantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey download the subset of the app that you need to perform the particular function you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to do, be that watch the BuzzFeed video or pay for parking or what have you. And it will do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and load it instantly or thereabouts so it’s available to you. So you walk up to the parking meter, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swipe your phone near it, the NFC thing kicks in, It will download the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parking meter app. You can put money into it. You can use your Android Pay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and walk away and everything’s good. And you haven’t downloaded the entire app. You’ve just downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pieces, I’m assuming the intents in the Android system that are required
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the operations you’re trying to perform. At first glance, it sounds kind of good because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like downloading apps just for single use events like this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually I have in the past downloaded a parking meter app in the DC area, specifically to park in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DC. And then I’ve never used it since. And so in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this sounds kind of good, but what happens then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I walk away from the meter, I didn’t pay close attention to what the brand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of meter was or what app I just got quietly installed for me and I need to add
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. Like, what do I do then? Does it say, oh, you’ve just installed the Parkminder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app? Does it allow you to download the Parkminder app from the Play Store because you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey instant downloaded it recently? Like, how does that all work? I’m actually less concerned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Android apps splitting themselves up into pieces because they tend to be, from what I gather
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from our Android developers, a lot more modular. But this whole, like, user
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interaction, I think it leaves a lot of questions in my mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, like with the machine learning and the context thing, like they said, oh, and you can add more time later. I
⏹️ ▶️ John thought the same thing, like how do I know what, how to add time? But contextually, basic machine learning
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff that they’ve already got, it knows what you’re talking about because you just did a parking meter
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And so if you just yell into your phone or type into your Google Assistant app,
⏹️ ▶️ John add another minute to the meter, it should know what the heck you’re talking about from context. And I think it can already do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think the idea is that from this is kind of like getting more
⏹️ ▶️ John into the open doc model from a phone users perspective for certain classes
⏹️ ▶️ John of things and perhaps a very large class of things. They don’t care so much about
⏹️ ▶️ John your app. Your app is important to you as the app developer. They just want to accomplish something in the world,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it’s paying for a parking meter or buying a movie ticket or, you know, making a reservation at a restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ John there in front of. they just want to accomplish that task. They don’t want to find
⏹️ ▶️ John the app that they need to download. I found myself in a position where I want to do something. And I’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can do something with the store that I know, like what is their app called? Or what was the name of that app that I heard or
⏹️ ▶️ John like, just based on other contextual clues and having an open API to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John from the user’s perspective, their phone will just do this something their phone couldn’t do before it suddenly can do
⏹️ ▶️ John and fairly quickly, without them having to search the App Store for an app and download it. I think that’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ John user experience and something they could be shooting for. Many problems exist in it. Security is probably one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John big ones, but like you said, like, is this just spamming my phone with apps that are
⏹️ ▶️ John installed as I walk past parking meters? Or even if I initiated, how do I keep track of all this crap that’s getting installed?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s a potential downside for this to be abused. But on the other hand, it is a very
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple like feature. I mean, Apple is the company that dreamed up OpenDock of like, I’m not so concerned
⏹️ ▶️ John with your application. I’m concerned with my task. And it’s like computers of the future. We’re like, how does that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing all of a sudden know how to work with this thing? It’s like magic. Are you like, oh, I’ve never used this thing before in my life,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it has Android integration. I don’t have to do anything. All of a sudden, my phone can do this thing that it couldn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John before. And I think that’s awesome. I’m not entirely sure Google is the company to pull
⏹️ ▶️ John that off based on the amount of weird things that go on in the Android ecosystem. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I endorse the idea like like Chromebooks, for example, and like the whole 30 year computer in a lake,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t matter because everything is in the cloud. I like the idea. I like it as a goal. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how close we’re going to get to it with this particular implementation, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Poyer Anything else on Android N? They didn’t actually announce a name. They’re soliciting names.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They made the joke about don’t call it something mix something face, but anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else on Android N?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tim Cynova I mean, I think it’s going to be interesting to see how much of this stuff plays out and develops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of us use Android really ever, so I think it’s funny that we just spent two hours talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff, but hey, it’s industry news. I think it’s also interesting to see, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of the commentary so far has been that this is a lot of underwhelming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. A lot of it is kind of just matching Apple features or giving their response
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Apple features. And that’s just how the industry goes. There are some years where Apple borrows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavily from Google features, and there are some years where the reverse happens. and this is a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mature market of these advanced smartphone OSes where I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we can really expect changes that are on a much bigger scale than this most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years because it just doesn’t, we’re to the point now where this stuff is mature and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the low-hanging fruit has all been picked and so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Is that really
⏹️ ▶️ John what you think after seeing this impression? You’re like, oh, low-hanging fruit, they’re doing kind of similar things, we shouldn’t expect big
⏹️ ▶️ John changes? That was not my impression I got of this at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean like at the OS level, like the stuff they’re doing with data services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and machine learning, ding, ding, ding, is like, that is where the advancement is happening for Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John now. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think Instant Apps is, like, I mean, implementation-wise, who knows? And by the way, this implementation will work all the way
⏹️ ▶️ John back to Jelly Bean, which was another kind of sad part of the presentation. It was like, oh, look how good we are about backward compatibility. No, it’s because
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t move your install base to your most recent OS. But anyway, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John is an admirable an interesting goal that no one else is even touching. Like that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John where have you seen something like that before? I think it’s an awesome idea. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John are the first big player to say, it’s a thing and you can try to do it. And you know, lots of caveats about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, but that’s, you know, OpenDoc didn’t work and maybe this won’t work either. But from a user’s perspective, I think it is significant.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. Like, and that’s, I would call that an OS feature. Like that’s, that’s, you know, what else is like launching and
⏹️ ▶️ John installing and launching and running apps. that’s that’s significant.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know it’s potentially so problematic like from just like a security and technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perspective like it not not to say it can’t be done but just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’s gonna be hard to do it well and correctly and
⏹️ ▶️ John safely. And it depends on support it’s like Apple Pay would be crap if I couldn’t use it anywhere but you
⏹️ ▶️ John know and it’s like the technology and the idea behind Apple Pay could be great but if I couldn’t use it in
⏹️ ▶️ John any of the stores it would be a total failure so there is the the infrastructure part of which is weird because you’re like, Oh, Android is the
⏹️ ▶️ John majority, they should be great on the infrastructure, but like, they’re the majority, but they’re not always
⏹️ ▶️ John where the money is. And that kind of tends to lead to what you know, so this is let’s put it this way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this is an idea that I think Apple should share. And I think my overwhelming impression of this entire presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John is so how incredibly far behind Apple is in so many of these areas, and how I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see any hope of them catching up, like all the things that Google emphasize all their strengths, machine
⏹️ ▶️ John learning, server side stuff, all of that. I just look at that and I feel like if it was at Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, we can’t do that. We’re terrible at this stuff. We’re so far behind them. I can’t even see them in the distance anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re this tiny spec like they, Apple’s just trying to take its basic services and make them reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John and have some sort of infrastructure for doing things that Google was doing reliably like five years ago. This all this
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is not a glimmer in anyone’s eye at Apple. They’ve got Siri and haven’t been able to advance it. This thing is dancing over
⏹️ ▶️ John series grave like, oh, I just, if you’re an Apple fan, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this makes me think is that the good old days when Apple and Google were working together on the iPhone, how awesome it would have been if they had like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, divided the labor and say, Apple, you make the hardware in the OS, and we’ll do the services and together we’ll make
⏹️ ▶️ John the awesome platform of the future. That didn’t happen, unfortunately. But now we have the
⏹️ ▶️ John situation where Google is just so much better at so many things than Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John and that it doesn’t seem like Apple is getting better. Not only getting not getting better fast enough, but some of them not getting better at all And it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John it depresses me I guess on the bright side as long as Apple continues to make Good quality hardware and a
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty good OS that sells a lot of copies Google will continue to be forced to make like it’s do application
⏹️ ▶️ John for iOS But the other features like instant apps we have to wait for Apple to copy and all
⏹️ ▶️ John the machine learning stuff I don’t have any real hope of Apple ever copying if their past history
⏹️ ▶️ John is any judge so Boy this I think this was it’s not like a giant victory
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that’s really astute.
Android Wear 2.0
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One other quick point I wanted to make and then we should probably wrap is they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about Android Wear 2. A couple of quick thoughts about that. Number one, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why the watch I carry on my wrist today and every day is a rounded rack but man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the circles look so much better. And number two, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had a couple of different means of input including like a swipe keyboard which strikes me as freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible, but they also had handwriting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where as you write, it scrolls to the left automatically, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I’d seen in like OneNote or something like that in years past, but it seemed like an incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clever way to handle text input on a watch because you can put, you know, about a character on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen at a time. And if it’s scrolling automatically, you know, under your finger, it looked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a glance like it worked really really well and I’m very curious to hear if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is implemented well and if it is then I want it on my watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still believe that anytime you’re doing text input on a watch you’ve lost.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree but in a pinch it would be nice to not have to use Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just use graffiti.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah totally. Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John just draw the same draw the same letter over the same spot you don’t need to scroll just keep drawing the same letter on the on the watch
⏹️ ▶️ John face. Yeah, the Android Wear, what it has going for it is they’re trying everything. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true. Right? Well, honestly, I mean, I’m not going to get too far into this now because we’re out of time, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I think, you know, Casey, you mentioned like, man, round looks so good. Android Wear can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different shapes than Apple can because the design of the platform from the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was in a very Android way to have a scalable system that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apply to any large set of different device sizes and shapes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and characteristics. That I think ultimately will prove to be the better way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for wearables to be designed, for wearable platforms to be designed. I don’t think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco current Apple Watch model of, we’re just going to make one type of watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one shape with one configuration basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They allow all the different bands and there’s two different sizes of the same shape, but it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one configuration of the watch. I think ultimately the Android version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of you can have all sorts of different sizes and shapes and different capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that will ultimately prove correct for wearables. Where it didn’t really necessarily prove correct for phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but because most people just want a rectangle phone with a decent size screen that has a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hardware in it and stuff but I think watches and wearables it’ll prove to be the opposite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco direction and I wonder I’ll be very curious to see if Apple takes the watch in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of direction because honestly I don’t think they are headed that direction and I that worries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me but we will see. Alrighty thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Ring,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Automatic, and Pingdom, and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Casey wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to Accidental, check my cast so long
Post-show: Force-quitting apps
⏹️ ▶️ John So somebody who shall remain nameless and who is too embarrassed to be named
⏹️ ▶️ John on this particular podcast tells me, tells us, or tells me specifically that I
⏹️ ▶️ John am wrong about quitting iOS. He says it’s his only salvation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Salvation from what? From my assuming his battery draining. He says you want a video it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John completely replicable. And I thought, I told him in the chat here, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John I I thought I covered all bases. Yes, sometimes it’s a badly behaving app that you have to force quit. Sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John an application is in a weird state that the only way you can get it to work again is force quitting it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And some applications, even when they’re working perfectly, you need to force quit right when you’re done with them if you don’t want them sucking your battery down.
⏹️ ▶️ John True. All true. And yet, I still say, the reflexive habit of force quitting every
⏹️ ▶️ John single application every time you’re done with it is crazy because you are draining your battery more because you’re just relaunching them fresh
⏹️ ▶️ John the next time you use them, which is going to be 30 seconds from now now when you launch your Twitter app again. Crazy. What I’m against
⏹️ ▶️ John is the reflexive routine force quitting of everything and that is the habit I see not the selective
⏹️ ▶️ John based on past experience that I have to force quit this application or drains my battery. No that’s not how people
⏹️ ▶️ John act. Most people it’s just like flick flick flick flick flick use flick use flick use flick they’re double tapping
⏹️ ▶️ John that home button like crazy. They cannot have a single they can only ever have one thing there when they’re done with it they flick
⏹️ ▶️ John it so they can go back to springboard and see nothing. It’s, you know, it’s…
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh. And he’s saying it’s not about that, it’s about apps that won’t launch. So he said sometimes they get into a state where you bring them to the foreground
⏹️ ▶️ John and they do nothing and you have to force quit them to be able to launch them again. I understand that. And yes, sometimes the OS gets
⏹️ ▶️ John so host that you got to reboot. But none of this argues for, you must
⏹️ ▶️ John reflexively force quit every single application on your phone every time you use it. And which again, is exactly what I see. And that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I see my son doing and trying to reason with him has not worked and he still does it and it’s an embarrassment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay. Good talk. No, I mean like any reason that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any legitimate reason that you’d need to force quit all these apps all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably either a bug or a shortcoming in the operating system. And so like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, Apple should fix those. Like, it is totally valid today to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need the ability to force quit apps because sometimes they don’t launch right or
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, you’re always gonna need the ability, but just for it to be a 100% blanket habit is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean like the Apple Watch, this is not a good example in general of how to design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a responsive and stable software platform, but the Apple Watch has a way to force quit apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without having an app switcher. Most people don’t know about it, but you can do it. It’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically you hit the sleep button and then you hit it again, you look it up. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has a way to do that. So it is possible to still have some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gesture involving the sleep wake button and holding it down in a certain way to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a force quit method without putting it in the switcher and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that be the method. But I don’t know. I think the whole design of the most handsome switcher itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs a lot of help in a lot of ways, not least of which is that conceptually everybody thinks all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are always running all the time and they need to clear them out. So that’s one of the many problems with the current iOS app switcher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is ultimately a design problem, not a technical one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and the technical problem is when, you know, an app gets stuck in that state where you have to kill it because it won’t launch again. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it will launch and you can, you know, run it and use it, but it’s useless, or like you’ll tap the
⏹️ ▶️ John icon and nothing will happen. Yeah, and then like, or just memory gets filled or corrupted or there’s an OS
⏹️ ▶️ John bug, that happens. But none of that argues for, it happens all the time. First of all, you’ve got a problem with your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s obviously not a widespread problem because plenty of people use their phones.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t force quit anything ever, essentially, because I don’t use the Facebook app, I don’t use anything, and I use
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS devices for years, not force quitting everything. So it’s obviously not an endemic bug that affects every single device.
⏹️ ▶️ John If it’s happening to yours, who knows what’s going on? Maybe you have a problem, but don’t accept it as the status quo as things working
⏹️ ▶️ John correctly. And even when you do have a problem like that, I feel like you can target it by figuring out which applications
⏹️ ▶️ John are the problem, when do I need to do this? Because if you can’t do that, But if you just give up
⏹️ ▶️ John and say I have to do this all the time. It’s just the easiest system that works Like I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John the total failure of the product like it’s not the users fault at that point It’s just the way the product is so frustrated the user
⏹️ ▶️ John that they can’t That this is their tool for dealing with it Which is blanket force quitting and they will never move
⏹️ ▶️ John away from it because it’s the only thing that’s given them a salvation on Whatever weird thing is going on on their phone or the apps they use
⏹️ ▶️ John and I feel like if Apple saw you do that they would feel that they have failed you as a as a vendor of a product, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want you to use it that way, and you shouldn’t have to use it that way, and if you feel like you do, whether it’s true or not, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to, if you feel like you do, that’s a breakdown there. But anyway, I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are listening to this and you were effectively forced to quit all your apps, consider
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to target your forced quitting, trying to target it better, and maybe if there’s an application
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a particular problem, get it off your phone. I know you can’t tell people to get rid of Facebook. It’s like telling people,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like give up their firstborn. But if that’s not an option for you and
⏹️ ▶️ John the Facebook is a problematic one, just try reflexively force quitting Facebook, but don’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John reflexively force quit your favorite Twitter app because it’s probably fine. Or maybe your Twitter app is a problem, I don’t know. Just all I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John telling you is that it’s not normal. Like you shouldn’t have to do this. And I know many
⏹️ ▶️ John people who spend years and years using iOS devices across multiple hardware models and
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple OS models with multiple apps who don’t even know how to force quit and they’re fine. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like a fact of life on iOS, and people should not be doing it.