 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Ms. Music Teacher, James C. Smith, Miranda Janell, and our new patron, Stephen. On this episode of DTNS, how does the Epic vs. Google decision affect developers? Android faithful Swen Tweedow is here to tell us. Plus, Apple has to stop selling its watches and might get investigated for blocking Beeper. It's a bad week for Apple if it's only Monday. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, December 18th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, Android developer and host on Android faithful Swen Tweedow, welcome. Good to be here. Good to be representing Android from, like, the consumer and the Dev side, as usual. You're friendly and we're good with Android Dev. Yes. And we have some Android news and a lot of Apple news. So a lot of times when we do Apple news, people are like, what about the Android perspective? Well, here you go. It's good. We got it covered. Got you. All right. Let's start with the quick hits. Last month, the EU sent letters to multiple social media companies requesting details about their moderation practices. The first to receive a letter X is now the first to come under investigation, possibly not the last. European Commission says it will particularly focus on, quote, the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel, end quote. It will investigate X's community note system of moderation, the effect of blue check verification, advertising transparency, and whether researchers were able to get access to data. This is the EU's first investigation under the new digital services act. The investigation does not have a timeline or any deadlines. Knoxville, Tennessee has wrapped up the first phase of its rollout of fiber internet service with 50,000 customers now having access to fiber. The network is being built by the Knoxville utility board and rolling out wherever electric cables are installed. Gigabit service costs $65 a month. 2.5 gigabit service is $150 a month and 10 gig service is $300 a month all symmetrical. Knoxville follows Chattanooga Tennessee in installing community fiber in the state. And how much is a house there? Exactly. Okay. Apple is testing a new feature for app developers called contingent pricing. This lets a developer bundle subscriptions together. Developers could offer a discount when you subscribe to two or more of their own apps. But the program also lets different developers cooperate together to offer discounts in partnership. So if you were to subscribe to both their app services, they could both give you a discount. That doesn't fix the problem that most users absolutely abhor subscriptions, but that's a problem for another day. No, it doesn't. Adobe and product design company Figma have called off plans to merge after investigations by regulators in the EU and UK. Adobe will pay Figma a $1 billion termination fee. Regulators worried that Adobe would abuse its monopoly position in the market if allowed to acquire the fast growing Figma. The UK would have required Adobe to divest assets, source code, and engineers in order to approve the merger. And scientists from MIT and University of California campuses say they have worked with a company called AI Zip to create a process where a large AI model can create smaller, more specific models without needing human intervention. You do have to have a human start the process. I'm just going to go off and do these. But you just say make this model and it can make the model. Those kinds of models are called tiny MLs. They're designed for specific purposes like hearing aids, like working on the hearing aid because they're small. They can be on device or sensors like wildlife, checking, etc. All right, this is a big one. Apple says it will halt US online sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra II starting Thursday, December 21st at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. So that's the online sales. In-store sales will end on December 24th. And after that, the Apple Watch SE will be the only watch you can get directly from Apple. Third parties, Best Buy, Amazon, etc., can continue to sell any of the Apple Watches they have in stock as long as they can get them. But there'll be a point where Apple won't be able to ship any to them either. A medical technology company called Massimo has accused Apple of violating its patents related to the Oximeter, the blood oxygen sensors on the watch, and the International Trade Commission upheld a judge's ruling last January that Apple violated two patents of Massimo and sent that decision to the US president for review. It's a 60-day review standard procedure. If the president does not veto the decision, Apple will be prevented from importing any watches that use that sensor, so the two watches we mentioned, the Series 9 and the Ultra II, as of December 25th. These kinds of things happen regularly in the sense of people will go to the ITU, the ITU will rule in their favor, but they often happen around older products that really aren't selling that well anyway, or they get appealed fast and they get overturned, etc. The only one that we've seen recently go to the president was not vetoed, though, and I don't think Apple would be making these preparations if it wasn't thinking that it's going to have to comply with this ruling, at least temporarily. Gwen, what do you make of this? I mean, it's not great news for Apple, especially because it's their flagship series. I mean, it kind of just drives, you know, and I'm just a poor developer over here, but it is interesting kind of the state at which this is in and how we're seeing it. I mean, just don't try to buy any flagship Apple watches in those after Christmas sales, but I think it is interesting. It does seem to be, it does seem to fit the zeitgeist, at least as far as, again, just a developer can tell from kind of like where, you know, government and regulators are kind of feeling about, you know, big companies and things like other things that we might talk about later and kind of like having them, you know, anti-competitive, anti-competitive practices, monopolies and good old patent system, you know, adherence. I think it makes sense and I think it jives that, you know, things like this are just kind of normal these days and we're trying to kind of figure out, I guess it just seems like, I don't know, I don't want to say like a trend and that doesn't sound quite the right way, but it just seems that like regulators and and government folks are kind of looking to, I don't know, let big companies like Apple take their licks. So I don't, I mean, I would be surprised if they actually made the decision just from observation. Yeah, no, that's interesting. It's an interesting point because the ITU itself is fairly uncontroversial. It doesn't blow with the wind. So it just looks at the patent and says, yep, that's the patent or no, that's not the patent. And then the rules kick in from there. I think you're absolutely right that the president is certainly under the sway of the winds of a public opinion and the anti-company thing. So I would not expect them to veto it. I do think it's interesting that Apple is not doing work arounds for this already. They've had since January to prepare for that. And a lot of times that's the other thing you'll see. I've seen Samsung do it a couple of times where they start shipping a version that gets around the patent, especially if it's a software thing. In this case, you've got a little bit of a hardware redesign as well. So that makes it trickier. But I would expect Apple to do that. They say they're pursuing technical remedies to this. And Apple also has two patent lawsuits against Massimo. One filed in 2020, one filed in 2022 that are working their way through. So I expect that they will try to use that as leverage against Massimo to try to force a deal, although they've had that leverage and it hasn't worked up till now. And of course, Apple will appeal this and say, no, our implementation of this doesn't violate the patent. Look again. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, like with the hardware, that obviously it's a much of a bigger move to retrofit, recall, or remedies for hardware are a lot harder than software. Software is kind of easier the way. It still costs them money to do any software remedies, but the hardware is just as it is. And I think, I mean, to give Apple credit, they are at least saying that they will fully support any of these devices out in the wild. You won't have to worry about being left with a unsupported device. And I guess that does lead to it. I mean, it's Apple and the Apple watch is kind of like, I mean, they basically are dominating the smart watch space. So I think between their market position and all that lovely capital they have to play legally, I feel like they, it kind of might behoove them to just kind of wait and see if they can get an appeal through. And I mean, I don't, I mean, to be fair, they don't really have a lot of competition in the smart, like any real competition in the smart watch space. People are, you know, if they can't buy their flagship Apple watches in Christmas sales, they'll just wait to, you know, whatever the next opportunity is. I think that they're in a good enough position to kind of wait and see how it goes. And hopefully they won't have to do the more expensive remedy of hardware and, you know, they like patents. We have big companies like patents. So it's just more whether it kind of ends up flipping on their side when the coin finally stops. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you'll probably be surprised. It'll be easier to get an Apple watch than you might think after the 25th because there are a lot of them in stock at Best Buy and Amazon. I'm sure those companies are stocking up right now. It'll be weird to not be able to go into an Apple store and buy one and have an Apple employee go like, why don't you head across the street to Best Buy? Maybe they probably have one on the shelf over there. And Larry in Atlanta asked a good question. Couldn't Apple just pay the royalties? Like why not just pay the royalties? Usually that's not just because they don't want to pay the money because this is costly to go through this fight, but because they don't want to encourage others to come at them either. So they want to make it as painful as possible for you to sue them. All right. On to our next governmental intervention in Apple's business. A group of two U.S. senators and two U.S. representatives, one from each of the major parties, have requested that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate Apple's attempts to block the Beeper and Beeper mini-services from interacting with Apple messages. If you've been following DTNS, you've been following this as well. Android Faithful has been covering it as well. Beeper has countered at least two efforts to block its service. They are trying to let an Android user use Beeper mini to get end-to-end encrypted messaging from Apple messages, originally without even needing an Apple ID. In the latest workaround, you do need to have an Apple ID, but you can still do it, except Apple seems to be blocking around 5% of the cases. And now at least Congress people feel like it will be a good notch in their corner to see it like they're fighting Apple, and they're asking the Department of Justice to investigate. That doesn't mean the Department of Justice will look at this and see that they have a case. Yeah, that's always the kind of thing I think that, in a sense, when you first hear that, you know, you know, like senators are taking interest or the government's taking interest, especially as someone who's probably on Beeper's side of the case. It kind of feels, there's a sense of confidence that does arise, but at the same time, it does more feel like a notch in the butt and like, oh, let's just hop in on this, again, anti-competitive, anti-trust campaign. And I always worry because of the, you know, there's not a lot of engineers in Congress. And so there is a lot of nuance to the story. And obviously, we've been covering it. I've been updating Beeper because I have a little bit of skin in the game. So I do think it's interesting. I don't, I honestly, to be a little bit skeptical or cynical, I do think the attention and the press is good. I don't know what, you know, what lawmakers can actually do in this case, because it's still, I think there's a lot of nuance to this. And we'll just kind of have to see how things shake out. But we did have Eric Mijakowski, co-founder of Beeper on the show like two weeks ago. And I will say at least that from a consumer perspective and a user perspective, and as someone who just has it installed, it does seem like it's an uphill battle, right? You know, when will Apple ever allow this to, you know, to allow Beeper to exist, especially since a, they're basically more or less paying off of, you know, Apple servers. So there's something to be said there about, hey, you're stealing or usurping our server time, which, you know, again, multi-billion dollar conglomerate doesn't really matter. But also that, you know, it's their protocols of proprietary technology. What right does anyone have to reverse engineer it? Although I think a couple of weeks ago, Kari Doctro on Twitter slash X had a really good, you know, take on it in that, well, a little company called Apple reverse engineered, you know, Microsoft Office proprietary formats, and we're able to make, you know, their suite of office products, pages, numbers, you know, interoperable. And it's kind of weird. And I think it's always like, there's always two sides with technology, especially when technology comes to business. As a developer, I feel like oftentimes we tend to live in a little more idealistic space, especially those of us that work in areas where open source interoperability are kind of a thing. And you kind of get the sense that interoperability and providing more choices for users is an inherent good, is the inherently right thing to do. But that often runs counter to its dang business, you know, they have, you know, specific drives, they have their own specific strategies. And in our, you know, for better, for worse, capitalistic society, that's kind of just how it goes. And you can't necessarily blame a company for wanting to, you know, meet their financial responsibilities to stakeholders. So I think it's really interesting. And I think that if you want to look at it really, you know, positively, you know, the press is good, you know, having, you know, senators and people that ordinary mainstream folks that aren't kind of inundated in like, in the stuff that we are paying attention and draw attention to it is good. And I do believe that Beeper is fighting a good fight in that interoperability is probably a good thing. And just at least putting pressure on, but it does feel just like piggybacking on the cool thing. It's like, Oh, what are the cool kids like, you know, hopping on? Oh, well, you know, Beeper and picking on Apple. So yeah, yeah. I mean, I think Beeper's right, because I've heard Mijakowski say this, that, you know, their best bet is public pressure. Yeah. And so getting a couple senators and a couple representatives across party lines to come out on your side doesn't hurt in that effort. And that is kind of their best bet. When I look at it from Apple side, the only justification I can see for them blocking it is, and I don't think this is reasonable. I don't think it's their only motivation, but I think it would be reasonable to say, well, whatever Beeper has done, albeit in a good cause could be abused by somebody in a bad cause. It's a weakness in our system. We didn't design it to be interoperable. So if they found a way to do that, someone else could use that for bad. So we need to button it up. And that's fair. If it were interoperable by design, then you wouldn't have to worry about it, you know, as much and it wouldn't be a problem to button up security because everybody would be trying to make sure it was secure, including Beeper. So in this case, I feel like it is, Apple is keeping it not interoperable for reasons that I don't find terribly justifiable, because we've seen those emails where they're like, I don't know, but it seems like a really good advantage to have people locked out. We sell a few more iPhones that way. And to me, it's like, okay, but you would still sell, I don't know that, I just don't believe that's an appreciable amount of iPhones. And I think interoperability would actually probably have just as much effect of bringing Android people over to iOS once they were able to do regular messaging with iOS people versus feeling entrenched, like, oh, but if I go there, I could never escape. I do agree with that. And I think that in that's the case they keep making, right, that it's a security issue. And that it's for this, we're fighting for the users as opposed to fighting for our bottom line. And as you said, there is some merit in that as well, you know, that that's not a totally BS statement. But I do agree with you. And I think that at least, you know, just kind of pulling stuff out my butt and as my kind of observations again, as a cog in the wheel, or a cog in the machine, that generally interoperability isn't necessarily just a, you know, public good, but that it gives people freedom and kind of, and that freedom to basically try stuff out and see, you know, what product, what experience do I prefer, and still be able to again, communicate with other people is generally has been good for users. And I think unfortunately, without getting too much into it, is kind of where also the kind of negative, you know, the, the, the tendency for Apple to encourage like the negative campaign, you know, the negative, sorry, a perception of security of Android in general, or just, you know, let, you know, Android just inherently inferior and handling insecure kind of helps to drive the conversation the other way, because that interoperability, or the lack of interoperability is not a bog put a feature. You know, and so I think that, I think that kind of goes along with it. Like, yeah, I do agree interoperability generally, it's just better giving people freedom just gives them the choice, the freedom to choose. And if your product is better, isn't that the idea that they'll choose you instead? Yeah. And Europe's going to make you try to interoperate possibly, you're going to have to keep fighting that just feels easier to have some kind of interoperability, right? Like, I know, and I guess they, they finally agreed to implement RCS. So there's some amount of that. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. I mean, like, I think I definitely said, oh, did heck freeze over, but there's still some question about what that, that implementation will look like, whether it's performative or actual. But yeah, it actually reminds me of a story we covered a little bit ago. And I think this came out in Google V, was it Google, I think it was USB Google where they were going to make the Apple watch interoperable with Android. But and they, I think they got really close, it was like Project Fennel, and they got so close to releasing it. But then finally someone dropped like the business, you know, strategy hammer like, Oh, no, Apple Watch really drives iPhone sales. So let's pull it back a little bit. And I guess, I mean, to me, that's, that's the different case that again, the different product and probably you could argue just it's still a different, you know, there's a lot that's different between like a service and a protocol versus a product. But I, it just, you know, especially as someone with an Android chip on their shoulder, it just feels like that, well, that kind of jives with how I think Apple approaches things. And it makes me a little more sympathetic to Eric and Beeper's mission. So well, folks, this is just one of the stories out there today. We always have tons of stories to talk about. And we love to hear what you would like to hear us talk about on the show, because we're trying to in 30 minutes, give you the most important stuff. So let us know, go to our subreddit, you can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot Reddit.com. Last week, a jury found Google at fault on 11 antitrust claims related to Epic and keeping Epic from using an independent way of charging and offering apps outside of the Google Play Store. Keep in mind, of course, that Google is going to appeal that ruling. So it's we're not all said and done. But we were curious to talk about what this ruling might mean for Google and Android developers. When does anything change for you yet? You know, how are you looking at this decision? I mean, not yet, but it is something of a lot of interest when, you know, in the case where we would actually be open to it kind of so it has a lot. There's a lot of things that have to happen in different ways. I guess, depending on how things go and how this gets resolved, you know, assuming that Google isn't able to appeal this and then keep, you know, Google Play Store to be like the really the one store to rule them all. And there's like a number of different things. So basically like this, this kind of jives a little bit with some other things that Google has had ruled not in their favor. And I think in India, for example, generally speaking, when you're an OEM and you want to, you know, kind of like play nice with Google, there's this program called Google mobile services, which is basically a bunch of agreements that's kind of like, I think, um, hardware compliance and also kind of basically agreeing to, you know, have, oh, what's your favorite default search engine? Is it Google? And a bunch of other things like, you know, kind of adhering to like using Google Play Services, which is basically this proprietary set of SDKs, which provide things like maps. And, um, I think assistant and a few other of these, like, you know, the Google specials that have become increasingly, increasingly proprietary and a lot of kind of like adjacent cases have kind of opened this up. Like I think in India, for example, GMS is going to be less restrictive. You can like, you know, it offers, I think, I might be getting this wrong, but I think it's, it's opening up, for example, the default search engine. So there's a lot of other pieces that fall into this, but even just having and making it viable to have other stores will have a huge impact. Kind of like one example I had from my days working at Trello was for some time, we had, you know, the Google Play, you know, store instance of our app, but we also supported for some time the Amazon App Store. But because the Amazon App Store was its own thing and it did not actually, you know, I assume did not, I know, jive with Google mobile services and you couldn't use again this kind of like Google, you know, Google bundle of SDKs that had things like maps and other, you know, very useful kind of almost table stakes level, you know, services, because you couldn't include that a lot of times when you would have a, an app in the Amazon App Store, you would need to basically block functionality. You would need to either gracefully or ungracefully, you know, try to like omit things from your app. And it ended up being an inferior experience. And not only that, not only was that app more, you know, an inferior experience on the Amazon Store, it also was just more load for us to, you know, update, making sure that it actually ran. So it's really interesting because, you know, and I think this actually lends to, you know, this kind of practical experience lends to the idea that, yeah, like, you know, even, even as much as Google is insisting that they are competing, in all practicality, you know, for us, for example, we just totally ditched our Amazon, you know, Amazon Store version after all, because it just wasn't, it wasn't practical for us. And even though, you know, they, you know, they, you know, even though there wasn't like, you know, a, you know, like a, you know, a, you know, kind of underhanded way of doing this, that's like the practicality of it. And that's like kind of like the actual, you know, pragmatic, you know, or end result of having this much power and having so much proprietary and so much locked into the Play Store. So I would like to see that if this does not get appealed and things open up, that this kind of forces their hand into making other app stores not just available, but more viable as experiences. And that's like true competition by being able to have your app in other stores. And I mean, like between that and then also kind of like our experiences as Android devs and the big kind of cloudy nebulous that is the Chinese market in terms of Android, and even just being able to have like full experiences and something that kind of kind of, I kept thinking about also is that the Play Store itself is not a devs best friend. And, you know, as an Android dev, I chose this platform because I'm like a big engineering nerd. I like the idea of like openness and interoperability. And I think to give the Android original, the Android OG engineering team credit, they wanted to create an open platform. But again, that comes into, you know, a little bit of you know, sorry, conflict with the business side. And that's kind of actually what Google Play Store has felt like as a developer. So a lot of times, you know, in terms of the platform itself, the engineers that we talked to, DevRel, like our day to day life experience as Android developers, it's very open, it's very family, like there's a lot of like kind of give and take. When it comes to the Play Store, it honestly feels like a wall, like a wall, like you've you may hear stories about, you know, because the Play Store has just an incredible, you know, millions and millions of apps, there's very little human intervention possible. So a lot of times in Play Store, you might get caught by, you know, a review policy where you know, oh, by the way, your, your account is suspended and there's not a lot you can do about it. And there's very little human intervention. It's actually frightening. I think in the last five years, I've had tons of like other dev friends in our community kind of come across and say, Hey, does anyone have a friend in the Play Store division? Like we need help. And so it in that sense, you know, it stops being the open, you know, you know, user slash developer friendly platform into the very, you know, monolithic, you know, unfriendly business side. That's like Facebook, YouTube, et cetera. If you get if you get suspended there, good luck trying to find a person. And I think, you know, it's it's weird because it is the business side of it. And it is like maintaining this monopoly, a policy that I really absolutely just totally hated that came out recently was that if you are a independent developer, so if you're just someone like me, I, you know, I'm currently fun employed and I want to start building my own app. The current requirement is that all new personal developer accounts in order for you to release your first app, you have to have a, you have to have 20 beta testers beta test your app for two weeks. And the reaction that I got to that to most of my deaf friends was like, well, that's basically killing indie doubts. And I know that sounds really it's that that's the kind of policy that tends to come out of Play Store a lot. Like there's pressure on them to, you know, increase security and privacy to reduce malware and bad actors. And so there's a lot of pressure on them, especially now as a 10, you know, almost 15 year old, you know, entity to grow up to, hey, like, you know, Apple doesn't have these problems. They have a walled garden. So it's starting to kind of the feeling is that we need to shift to be more adult, to being more secure. And so in my opinion, a lot of these policies are coming out of that. But again, this is a policy that hurts personal debt. It is really hard to find as a personal death, like one person, 20 people to test your app for two weeks. And then you can actually and that kind of again, runs counter and a foul of the original, like, you know, fun, open, interoperable, like, you know, kind of bootstrapping feeling. It's like, like there's no there's no security gate. But there's a huge like speed bump. And you're driving a very low slung 1985 Toyota. And you're not sure if you're going to make it over the speed bump or not. Yeah. Everybody else's in Land Rover's as they fly by you. Yeah, there's nothing we can do because really Google Play Store, if you want to make money as an Android dev, that's, that's where you're going to be. And that's where again, and that's if you want, you'd use Google Maps, you have to be on Google Play services. So what I would like to see is that this to not be appeal and for there to be an actual examination of what all this means and to actually, I don't know, for if anything for Google to just be straight on, okay, here's where the platform ends. And here's where the business begins. And, you know, I mean, and for it to be, I don't know, just give developers an actual choice, because these are not choices. Like, these are not choices. I think you pointed out very, very correctly. And folks should pay attention to this that it's not just whether there is a decision, whether it's by regulation or this court case, that that Google has to allow third party app stores. It's also can apps use Google mobile services, can actually use Google Play services. And if so, with what restrictions versus somebody in the Play Store, that that's more important than just letting there be a third party app store. It's absolutely. And that was always the thing that I think I remember the week I remember the week that Google Maps became a proprietary SDK, rather than an open API. And that even that felt very on Android like and that, you know, and again, like, yeah, they can say that they're they're competing and they can say that other, you know, that there's no, you know, monopoly of the Play Store. But let's face facts, if you are, you know, some kind of service, like a ride share, if you're, you know, any kind of any kind of apps that need location, Google Maps is the thing. Like, like to be fair, most other solutions are, you know, not bad, but it's what people rely on is what people are used to. And it's, it's not, yeah, it's, it's, it's not a decision. So I would love to see, and I do, there are hints that some of these proprietary APIs are getting loosened. Part of it is kind of a fragmentation thing. It makes it easier. But I would like to see some of these proprietary services and things that, again, while not to the letter restrictive, but practically restrictive to devs be kind of set free again. Yeah, yeah. Google Maps. Whether and whether they, they win or lose the case, there is going to be pressure for them to change behavior. So something is probably going to change. We just have to wait and find out what it is. One great place to find out what is happening in this sort of situation is Android Faithful. When I know you're doing that and a lots of other stuff, where can folks go to find out what you're doing? Well, you can find us actually here on DTNS. So we stream Android Faithful rather every Tuesday night at 5 p.m. Pacific and 8 p.m. Eastern. And we are your weekly source for the latest news hardware and apps in the wide wonderful of Android. We talk about Beeper. We talk about all of these various cases that Google is going through and how it affects us as Android Faithful. And you can find us here on Twitch and on YouTube live. Yeah, twitch.tv slash good day internet youtube.com slash daily tech news show and androidfaithful.com. I'm so bad. I'm a terrible host, but androidfaithful.com and you can find us on your favorite pod catcher. Indeed. Just put it in that little search box. If you're a patron of Daily Tech News Show, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. 2023 was kind of the year of the foldable. We've had went on talking about that before, but it's not all Samsung. We're going to talk about who else is doing foldables well. Maybe some names you haven't heard of and what to expect from the form factor in 2024. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more Daily Tech News Show dot com slash live back tomorrow. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.