 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Rodrigo Smith-Chapada, John and Becky Johnston, and Chris Benito, and also our new boss, Bo, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Bo, and welcome. On this episode of DTNS, Reddit third-party apps face uncertain fates. WhatsApp goes the news route with a new channel feature. And the more we learn about Apple Vision Pro, the more we say, what is it good for? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 8th, 2023. From Studio Where Are My XLR Cables, I'm Sarah Lane. From Lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. From Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And on the show is producer Roger Cheng. So in yesterday's GDI, we talked about the Twitch backlash over its new ad restrictions. Now in response, Twitch has decided not to implement them as they were originally laid out. The new rules would have prevented streamers from showing pre-recorded audio and video sponsors, as well as limiting the size of sponsored graphics to 3% of the screen. After several streamers threatened to leave, or actually did leave the platform, Twitch announced, these guidelines are bad for you and bad for Twitch, and we are removing them immediately. Well, Adobe announced Firefly for Enterprise, which lets employees in an organization use generative AI to write prompts to create images or text. Enterprise users can access Firefly from its app, Creative Cloud, or Adobe Express, so you have options. And admins can train their instance of Firefly on corporate assets. Things like brand logos, styles help get really those nailed down in the models. Firefly was launched in March and the Enterprise version will not launch until it comes out of beta. Kind of breaking news here. The Verge reports that meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has addressed the Apple Vision Pro headset in a note to employees on Thursday. He said, it could be the vision of the future of computing, but like it's not the one that I want. Take that as you will. We will talk more about that if there is more to talk about on tomorrow's show. But moving on in the quick hits, Google will launch its news showcase product in the US. You might say, didn't it already have a new showcase? Yeah, it launched back in 2020 in Brazil and Germany, but has since expanded to over 22 countries. New showcase offers a dedicated space within search designed to drive traffic to high quality partnered publishers. In the US, Google will provide funding to 150 news publishers across 39 states, 90% of which are regional and local. SK Hynex announced Wednesday it has begun mass production of its 238 layer 4d NAND memory for high performance SSDs. PC enthusiasts will note the fast 2400 mega transfers per second data transfer rate. And if you keep in track, that's about a 50% increase over the previous generation. These can be used to build solid state drives with read and write speeds of 12 gigabytes per second or higher, taking advantage of new PCI Express Gen five capacity. SK Hynex expects the memory to show up first in smartphones or is adding a new community feature to its smart ring where users can now create or join circles to share things like readiness, sleep and activity scores from the past two weeks with their friends, whereas sleep staging algorithm is also out of beta for Android and iOS. The order ring sells for $300 and it comes with a monthly subscription. All right. Well, over the years, the extremely popular app once app has added a lot of features, but at its core, it remains a chat app. That means you're in a conversation, whether one on one or you're in a group, it's kind of a two way street you can send and receive stuff. Well, that might be changing a little bit with a new feature for the app called channels. Meta calls this a private way to follow what matters designed so that channel operators can broadcast to people in the conversation one way. So you can't reply to your just, you're just kind of following a feed there. Meta definitely see this as a creator tool with plans to build in payment and monetization services. Privacy is a mixed bag for the service on the one hand only stores 30 days of channel history and admins can block screenshots and forwards trying to keep, you know, what's in that channel to that channel. On the other hand, though, channels are not and encrypted a big selling point for, you know, the rest of WhatsApp's chatting. Yeah. So others have experimented with us. For example, you might recall Telegram had a similar channels feature for years and you might say, well, okay, is this just WhatsApp keeping up with, you know, what folks are doing within quote unquote, you know, two way conversations within apps, or do we feel like it's part of a grander design for how, you know, an app like WhatsApp delivers news. Justin, what are your thoughts? I'm so glad we finally started talking about journalism. Yeah. I think that this is a very, very interesting week to talk about this because there was a profile from the Atlantic that essentially was the straw that broke the camel's back and getting the CEO of CNN fired. And that was remarkable because it was behind a paywall. And it makes you think the New York Times behind a paywall, the Atlantic behind a paywall, the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall. What we think of as the standard of news is increasingly becoming and increasingly stricter about not letting free users read their content. And so what we used to think of back in the day as the elements to pick up the slack of that was blogs, but blogs don't really exist in the same way anymore. And we've seen sub stacks sort of take that position, but also sub stack are soft paywall, or at least they want people to be able to monetize their work. The point of all of this is to say that free media is in flux. The way that we on a very sampling level can interact with the news is something that we are still trying to figure out exactly how and what that means. The fact that WhatsApp is doing this is just another place where they are saying, well, look, Telegram, it works there. Obviously, we already have community functions like Discord. Why don't we build out different ways that people can send the news to places where people read a lot? And on WhatsApp, you read a lot. Yeah. And seeing this announcement, it's got me thinking like usually, I don't want to mischaracterize Meta's product strategy or anything like it, but usually when a new feature comes out, you're like, all right, what are they, what is popular that they are trying to bring into their platform and draw eyeballs on? Meta? Never. I know. I hate to besmirch their clean and completely original product development strategy. However, this actually does seem like it kind of is a unique vision or at least is not a direct copy, right? Because I've seen some coverage of this saying, oh, it's like Twitter, except there's no replying and stuff like that. And that doesn't really hold water. I see some elements of Discord in there because it is in this chat interface. I definitely see a lot of sub stack in there. And that plays into some code references that WhatsApp beta info has discovered that there are actually like newsletter features and tools being developed by Meta as well. That seems to be the most direct to me. But what is interesting to me is that this seems at least like a somewhat novel or at least a more organic way, I guess, to build out this type of product as opposed to we slapped it into the main Facebook app or something in Instagram. I don't know. This seems like an organic extension of what people are already using WhatsApp for in a way that just builds monetization that then Meta can also make money off of as well. 100%. I mean, there are a lot of WhatsApp users. I mean, every time I go out of the U.S., for example, it's like, okay, let's get on the WhatsApp channel. Let's figure out the WhatsApp group or even if enough of us get together, people say, yeah, what's up? That's the better group texting option kind of thing. If you're in there to talk with your friends, great. If you can stay in there to get news updates and learn about stuff and even news organizations can disseminate news to you, all Apple news or some other options, also great. There's no reason that WhatsApp shouldn't experiment with this. I think it's a good call. I don't personally use WhatsApp all that much probably because I should travel more. I'm just sort of sitting in California wasting away. But yeah, I think this, I have friends who say, oh, anything I want to find out about on the news, I just like search on TikTok and I eventually figure it out. I'm like, that is a very strange way to gather news, perhaps. But also we used to say that about people searching things on YouTube. And now that's very, very, you know, the status quo. So, you know, here we are. One quick thing about WhatsApp. It is an app that a lot of people already have alerts turned on for because they don't want to miss a message from friends. So, it will already skip to the front of the line in terms of breaking news where if you develop a trust with somebody who's going to be able to tell you a thing when it is happening, that matters a lot. Well, the third-party Reddit app Apollo, their developer Christian Selig announced his third-party iOS app will shut down June 30th. This is in response to Reddit now requiring developers to pay to access its API, which many devs have called financially unfeasible. Selig said last month that Reddit is charging $12,000 per 50 million requests. And because of Apollo's popularity, that would add up to $20 million per year for Apollo. Yeah. So, for anybody who's not familiar with Apollo or other third-party apps that work the same way, Apollo has added new features and updates on a regular basis. It is a third-party iOS app that is designed for hardcore Reddit users who would prefer this third-party app over the native app. That might sound familiar to anybody who's gone through this with other apps. Now, Selig claims he's tried to work out a deal with Reddit to no avail because Reddit claimed at one point that Selig tried to extort money from the company because of how he was accessing the former API. Even so, going forward, Selig says he thinks he could rewrite the code to make Apollo more efficient in the long run and be part of the Reddit TOS, but not within the 30 days that Reddit has given him to switch to a subscription model and migrate his users and make other updates. So, we've got Twitter and Twitch and YouTube and now Reddit. Many third-party devs have fallen afoul of this exact type of thing. It is hard out there for the third-party dev. So, Justin, what do you think the solution is when you build on a platform that you really have no jurisdiction over? Put one in the sky for modernity sweeping over you. There's nothing to do. Whistle into the breeze, I guess. Look, the song remains the same. These apps are being deliberately killed by Reddit. Let's dispel with this fiction that this is just them setting a price for the API. No, they are deliberately trying to kill this and they are making it so expensive that these apps will likely die. And I guess for them, they look at it as a better solution than just saying, no API access for you. They're saying, like, I guess if you want to offer to your users a $300 a year subscription plan, then sure, keep using this app. The reality is, is that all of these websites that are extremely popular and rely on advertising want to control their end-to-end user experience for a lot of different reasons, but advertising is certainly one of them. We're in a very, very slippery decomposing advertising world and, you know, much like we saw, even Sarah, you mentioned in the Quick Kits, which was looking to do with their stuff. That's all so they can protect their ability to sell ads on their own platform. And I think that moves like this are part of it as well. I would also say specifically in Reddit's case, but we're seeing this in other platforms, too, not just the advertising tightening up, but I think a lot of these platforms have been having trouble consistently growing kind of on that, you know, used to being on that constant growth curve, and that is smoothing out, or in the case of a lot of pandemic-related growth. We're seeing a regression across some platforms in terms of that. And so when you have that, the emphasis is, we've seen this with the Netflix, for example, the emphasis on like extracting more value from your existing subscriber base as opposed to bringing in new users. And this, of course, plays into what you were saying, Justin, about wanting to control the entire experience, because that allows you to, you know, maximize monetization, not as much of a concern when you can count on, you know, consistent growth or you have in the past, when platforms like this are kind of seeing, hey, we don't necessarily, you know, Reddit had a lot of ambitions to grow into more video services, you know, bring on different extensions to grow itself, audio platforms and stuff like that. And it's kind of returning to a core functionality and being, like, we need to maximize what we are getting out of our user base and not assume that we're going to be seeing, you know, crazy growth forever. Well, it's also a fundamentally different business model. If you are building a service for which you are asking other people to develop apps for, then it limits what you're able to do in terms of the services that you will offer to your users. If you control and to end from the very, very beginning of it to the very end experience, then you have more ability to make changes because you're not worried about those features being broken or inaccessible on third-party apps. And this is where I'll play the role of Tom Merritt and say, you know, if you are building your third-party apps on services that use open protocols, this can't happen to you. It turns out, but again, these are private companies. You're not building an email client. You are building a Reddit client. You're not building a Mastinata client. You were building off of Reddit's platform and they set those rules, fair or not, for a third party who have given, to be fair, given a ton of value to Reddit over time and made a lot of their users very happy. I'm not saying I'm happy to see this. I use the official app anyway, whatever. Yeah. I actually don't use Apollo. I understand that Apollo was well loved. It reminds me of Tweetbot, which was, you know, my Twitter client of choice on mobile and even on a Mac, Mac OS client for, I don't know, 15 years. I mean, what year is it anymore? And, you know, when that all sort of went to heck, I thought, well, they'll work something out. They have to well, they didn't. And these things happen. And so it goes. So that, you know, as a developer, not that you shouldn't, you know, create really great products for people who want them. But it is, it is the unfortunate situation when a company wants to go in a different direction because they are not beholden to you at all. All right. Well, if you are feeling social on Reddit, but you are feeling social, I want to get ahold of us. We are on the socials. We are on at DTNS show on Twitter and at Massadon. Look for us at mstdn.social. And we're also on TikTok at Daily Tech News Show and at DTNS pics on Instagram. Well, as WWDC continues on this week, we keep getting more intel on the Vision Pro headset. That was the big keynote. That was on Monday. We're now at Thursday, depending on where you are and when you're listening, but the entire week is built for developers. Now one is through an Apple developer session, which showed off how a virtual keyboard would look inside the Vision Pro as you type on it mid-air. Remember, you're not holding controllers. You're just typing in air. Initially, Apple touted the headset as a way to look at UI elements, make small hand gestures, and it had some fanfare there. But the developer session that is of note focused more on tasks that need to use more tactile interaction, reaching out, touching UI elements, using physical keyboards and track pads, or game controllers. So the virtual keyboard was a big one because it's definitely not tactile. Apple designer Eugene Kriver Kucho showed off how this is designed to work, noting, while the finger is above the keyboard, buttons display a hover state and highlight that gets brighter as you approach the button surface. Then it provides a proximity cue and helps guide the finger to target. At the moment of contact, the state change is quick and responsive and is accompanied by matching spatial sound effect. Now Rich, this all sounds pretty fun, pretty exciting. We're getting more information about this, but not everybody is super pumped, right? Yeah, we are definitely seeing some reactions, not all enthusiastic for the Vision Pro, including from Wired's Kate Nibbs has a very different vision for this. Indeed, writing, this is not a revolutionary gadget, no matter how confident Tim Cook looks when he says it is. It's a rare misfire and a sign that Apple is losing its ability to turn tech geek novelties into normie must haves. She goes on to say every successful Apple product of the past two decades has disappeared into our lives in some way, the iPhone into our pockets, the iPad into our purses, the Apple Watch living on our wrist and the AirPods resting on our ears, you know, there's, you know, that's a big headset, right? The Vision Pro is not necessarily going to disappear. You're wearing it or you're not. It's just going to be there. But Justin, I'm curious, what are your thoughts? We're getting some looking to the UI and some of the, maybe some of the contrarian backlash here. How did Dvorak not write this column? Like what is going on? Somebody wake up Dvorak. This is the classic Dvorak column, right? Like, like this is maybe, maybe it's good. It's a sign of his legendary status that this is now more of a mainstream take to have. I think it's off base. I do think that if, if, if, and let me also say this, that the world of AR and VR has been filled with, and I don't say this lightly, Theranos grade lies for the last 10 years, like overstating, if not totally fabricating technology that has led us to believe that a level of experience was possible when it was not. So Apple is making these claims. We've known that they've worked on this for a long time. We've understood that the tech has existed in our iPhones for a long time. If what they are saying, and I mean two claims specifically, the vision of being able to see small words and making it a, if not a readable experience, an enjoyable or more efficient experience to read in this. And if that UI without any controllers is as smooth as they are selling, then this is a transformational device. What they are expecting is for this to not even be in the world of AR and VR. That's haunted tech to them. The reason why they use the term spatial computing was because they wanted to be a cut above, much in the same way that the iPhone made the sidekick, then an extraordinarily cool phone that I owned look antiquated the day that it came out. That is what the Vision Pro aims to do with the Oculus, whether or not Mark Zuckerberg thinks that it's for him. You know, one of the, you know, the comparison to, you know, you got the iPhone, you can put in your pocket, you know, the iPad, you could put in a purse or a bag, you know, something a little bit or maybe a large pocket. I don't know. Apple watch, it's on your wrist. AirPods, it's, they're on your ears. They just sort of go away and become part of you. That is not false, but I feel like saying, well, we need the, the, this new Vision Pro headset to also somehow be in the background. There's simply no way. I mean, until we have like weird contacts that we can put into our eyes to do the same thing that this, the, the idea that people only want technology that just sort of goes into the background, that is just, I think that's silly. It's, it, or if that's what you want, then you're not, you're never going to embrace any sort of technology like this. No, I know it's a big sell. It's a big sell to put something on your face. I mean, I've been telling people how much I love VR for years and most people are like, not for me. Got it. You know, but, but, but, but, but that's not, that's not what Apple's going for. Apple's not just trying to pretend that you just sort of like put it in your backpack and all of a sudden you can see, you know, you know, some augmented reality version of your, of your universe. Rich, Rich, I apologize for stepping on you here, but, but also the general idea that we have not had culture bend around the concept of Apple devices is absurd. If you were to do a time travel movie where you went from the seventies to anywhere after 2007, the immediate visual way that you would demonstrate that is people looking at their phones. Like it has become a part of society. Yeah, we have reoriented boredom around phones. They have not disappeared into the background. We have changed to adapt to them because they provide a utility to us and we enjoy them. And honestly, like, like that's the most off base thing for me. What, what actually to me where this feels revolutionary, probably the biggest swing is that this is not a thing that's tied to the iPhone, which is the, the, the, the Delta from which all of their other tributaries of wealth have come, like all of their successful product categories are spinoffs of, of the iPhone. The iPhone is their big money maker. The iPad is for the longest time a big iPhone. The AirPods are the, the headphones for the iPhone. The Apple watch only works with an iPhone. They're unsuccessful product carriers are the ones that don't make them all of the bags of money are Apple TV, which you can use with anything and isn't part of necessarily the iPhone ecosystem and the Home Pot, which again is not a part of that ecosystem. So that to me is more the where I would be like, this is not a guaranteed success for Apple and they are going to have to, you know, they have to, they are counting on making the right compromises with this product in to, to kind of reach a more mass audience over the course of years. But it is not, yeah, this idea of, of disappearing into the background, I think is, is a little bit of a mythology that we're telling ourselves just, I love that analogy of someone from the 70s is showing up in like any place where anyone is waiting and being like, who are you weird people with all of your weird little slabs? Shout out to DeVore. Could have been you, John C. Could have been you. He's a legend. He deserves a rest. Well, maybe he's on a cruise and if he is, you might want to look at the Norwegian cruise company, her to Gruten that has a new concept design for a zero emission cruise ship called C zero, what the company calls the world's most energy efficient cruise ship, featuring a 60 megawatt hour battery bank that will be charged with renewable energy while import wind and solar energy from retractable sales with solar panels are designed to charge the batteries while cruising, extending to a maximum height of 15 meters with 1500 square meters of photovoltaic panels and a wind surface of 750 square meters. C zero has a few other bells and whistles, you know, stuff, some niceties like AI maneuvering, contra rotating propellers, though sound fun and multiple retractable thrusters. And since we're talking about some solar and other solar news, the solar energy industries association or SEI a and wood McKenzie issued an estimate that solar capacity in the US is expected to triple in size to 378 gigawatts by 2028. Man, I know that crew, I have been on a cruise in quite some time, but I know that they are notorious carbon emission nightmares. You know, everybody loves a cruise. Well, people love a cruise, right? Yeah, maybe not everybody. But, but it is this is not, you know, this is not a carbon neutral situation. You know, there's there's a lot of energy and a lot of gas, a lot of oil and a lot of stuff that goes into the atmosphere that comes along with this. I know this is simply a concept design. And it sounds like for Herty Gruten, the the ship would be relatively small, 500 guests, 270 cabins, a crew of 99. That's, you know, if, if, if all goes well, and they can set sail in, you know, in a few years. So that's that is not a huge cruise. But hey, we're getting somewhere, right? If this is a proof of concept that, that can, that can make folks that love a good cruise feel better about being on that good cruise. I am all for it. And if it brings back ship, I mean, come on. That's kind of cool. I'm going to need, I'm going to need some backup gas. Well, I don't know if I'm in international waters. So I don't, I don't know. What the full of panels and wind surface. Nice. Nice. I'm not saying, look, great, great project. Again, concept for me, we're just, we're, we're going to hang out in Norway for a little bit and see how it goes. Let's have a point, and then we're, you know, wider availability coming, coming soon to you. Exactly. All right. So let's check, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes in from Doug, who says, I'm not sure if I'm right, but I wonder if the, in my opinion, useless edition of being able to create animated stickers and messages from photos is a way for Apple to say, we'd love to do RCS, but it just didn't support all our functionality. Of course, Doug is talking about the keynote from Monday. Doug says, I couldn't find an equivalent method in Android for what Apple showed off on Monday. And it's the kind of move I could just see a big company making. A daily reminder that some people have iPhones and other people don't. Oh, I'd never. Like, sure. Yeah. Apple will always keep that creed text bubble going there. So you know that this is a cultural marker. And it also speaks to the fact that RCS is old tech. Like it's, the implementation is taken forever to roll out. But this, the reason it's not supporting cutting edge stuff is because it was developed a while ago and we're only just starting to see, you know, mass industry adoption outside of a certain company in Cupertino. Well, just from Robert Young, thank you as always for being with us. What would you like to tell folks about today because you do so many things? I would like to tell people about Know a Little More, which is hosted by Tom Merritt and produced by Amos, who also works on this show, Daily Tech News Show. And I helped as a executive producer with Dog and Pony Show Audio. I really, really enjoyed working on this season. And I hope everybody goes back and listens to it. If you haven't given it a shot, then please consider it. Know a little more where all podcasts are found. All right, remember people of the Patreon, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We'll be talking about deep fakes. And as we get closer to the next US presidential election, how they're cropping up, they're to confuse people on which politicians did what and when. Oh, can you imagine anyone doing such a thing? Impropriety and politics. I know. Wow. But anyway, you can catch the show, whether we're talking politics, tech, you know, cruise ships. Well, we do all of those things. Monday through Friday, we are live, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow with Shannon Morris joining us and Len Peralta joining us as well, drawn the top tech stories. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Bob hopes you have enjoyed this program.