Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. I'm John Voorhees, and I've got Federico Vittici right over there in Rome with me. How are you doing, Vittici? Hello. How are you doing, John? I'm doing great. I'm doing well. I have Rome on the mind, you know. You've got your conclave. They're putting up the chimney at the...
the Sistine Chapel, you know, there's all kinds of stuff going on there. White smoke, black smoke, you know, you gotta... Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. What's the over-under on the Pope? I don't suppose people take bets on the Pope, do they? Who's gonna be the cardinal? People are. People are taking bets on the Pope. It's so funny.
to see, this is a Pope election in the social media era. So lots of memes, lots of AI generated videos. I've noticed. Oh gosh. Yeah. I saw a video, like obviously an AI generated video of the Pope election as if it were like a big brother contest. Yeah.
yeah like who's gonna be nominated like that right that was so funny that was so funny it's a it's a use of ai video for the laughs that i will semi-accept
Got it. But we're not here to talk about the Pope, surprisingly, I know, on App Stories. I know. I know. You know, we are here to talk about a topic, but I'm going to, before we even get to our topic, I do want to hit you with a little bit of our feedback that we got. This is very much teachy feedback because we heard from a couple of different people about Claude and the way you use it. And one person asked, they said that they had listened to the April 20th App Stories Plus podcast.
And, you know, they wanted to know, and we'll put this in the main show, because they wanted to know what you're doing with Claude. Because you had mentioned, I think, that Claude you were using partly because of privacy, and they wanted to get a sense for privacy.
your thoughts on using OpenAI and Gemini and your personal data and how you're kind of juggling those things. - Yeah, so in theory, all of these companies say that your data is not used for further training, although some queries may be reviewed by humans, may or may not be reviewed by humans,
to sort of make sure that you're not using the LLMs for illegal use cases. I have a kind of a weird unpopular stance on privacy with these things compared to the AppStories audience, maybe, because a lot of my use for LLMs is for content that will eventually be public.
Because I'm a writer, I'm a blogger. And so I don't really care if part of my article that I'm researching eventually gets used for training because that's on the open web anyway. And I don't really use... And I mean, your mileage may vary. This is where you got to draw a line for your personal usage. Like I'm not asking for medical advice. I'm not asking for relationship advice. I'm not putting in my passport number or my travel info. Right now, at least...
So I mostly, these are research tools for me. I use them a lot for like scripting, automations, shortcuts, coming up with ideas, understanding regular expressions, JavaScript, that sort of thing. So it's not really private information. So I don't really think about it too much. And right now,
things in the AI space are changing so quickly, but right now my usage is mostly consolidated around, uh, uh, chat GPT and, uh, Gemini, uh, specifically Gemini for coding and chat GPT and the different models for everything else. Um, mostly because like I, uh,
I need a guarantee that I need to have API uptime from those services. And I've had so many problems with the Anthropic API stability, speed, you know, different outages over the past month. And so I've decided to mostly consolidate my workflow around GPT and
Specifically 4.0, the regular one for chat. 4.1 and 0.3, depending on what I'm doing. And Gemini 2.5 Pro for like the heavy duty coding tasks or transcription tasks. So that's what I'm doing, yeah. All right. The other question we got was from Nicholas, who has been using Cloud to do things like organize notes for work and also for...
to become a better barista, which I thought was kind of an interesting use for Claude. But Nicholas was curious whether those kinds of projects in Claude could be replicated in either ChatGPT or Gemini. And
Yeah, mostly you can. ChargerPT has projects. Gemini has gems. I think projects on ChargerPT are a better UI, especially now that you can do a project and use O3 or O4 mini. So you can have these reasoning models that have your project reference material, both text instructions and reference content, so PDFs, text files, whatever, as a source of information.
quote-unquote truth for the model to ground its responses on. Gems, you can now use 2.5 Pro with Gems. I don't really like the UI of Gemini Gems. Supposedly, those are going to be much better after Google I.O. I think Google has a lot of updates in store for Gemini Gems. But I think you can... I have replicated my cloud projects with ChaiGPT projects, and they're fine, especially...
Now that ChugGPT can do a better job at following directions. So if you have a highly structured prompt with multiple sections, multiple instructions, multiple directions, I think you can replicate what Cloud does. And then it's just a matter of taste. A lot of people prefer the aesthetics and the stylistic language of Cloud. I really like, for example, GPT 4.1.
and the way he talks, the way he writes. So I'm mostly using that. But 4.1 is API only. So you cannot use 4.1 in projects. But that said, I use O3 in projects and it does an excellent job at things like proofreading, you know, finding like previous material, like, you know, coming up with ideas for new shortcuts, like that sort of stuff.
I think you can do a lot of interesting things if you combine a reasoning model with your own reference material. And then, of course, there's also, you know, Notebook LM, which is the, I think for many, many use cases, the indisputed king of being able... I mean, you wrote about this in Mac Stories Weekly a few days ago, like using Notebook LM to make sense of the judge's decision regarding the Epic versus Apple case. Yeah.
and finding information in that 80-page PDF from the judge, that's an excellent use case for Notebook.LM.
Yeah, yeah. It really helped me stay focused on the writing and not get lost in the research and to find things more quickly. I think the other thing worth noting that's a difference when it comes to projects in Claude is that Claude allows you to have team accounts and share projects among other people, which we were doing for a while. We actually have stopped doing that and moved back over to ChatGPT. So to the extent that we have shared Mac Stories projects, we simply just...
share the details with each other you know Federico will send me the instructions and maybe the backup material for a project and I'll just upload it to my account and we'll we'll do it that way it's it's you know there's a little more friction there but it's not that bad really yeah yeah all right that being said now begins the annual tradition just before WWDC of the app stories wish list episodes we
We've been doing this for many years and we're going to do another series for all of the operating systems that we think are going to ship at WWDC. iOS and iPadOS 19, WatchOS 11, tvOS 19, macOS 16, and VisionOS 3.
Yes, I think I got it right. I'm not sure about watchOS, but you got the other ones. Yeah, yeah. Today, we're going to start with the big ones, iOS and iPadOS 19. We're going to do this round-robin style as usual. John, I will go first this time. I usually let you go first. This time, I will go first. All right, do it. All right, what do I pick here? I'm going to pick iOS. iOS.
And I'm going to say that I think it's about time for people on iOS, on their iPhones, to have some kind of multitasking, to have some way to use more than one app at a time. Now, multitasking on iOS, I know what you're thinking. Oh, but it's a phone. It's small. Do you really want to use it two apps at the same time? Well, let me tell you, folks, I have, as I mentioned on Connected, this is the first time.
Then I'm going to show it off on App Stories. Oh, nice. So for the past few months, I have been using, I'm unlocking it now. For the past few months, I have been using a Pixel 9 Pro Fold. In addition, see, that's a big phone. But it's also, at the same time, it's also a small phone because you can fold it. I've been using Android as my secondary device. I actually carry around an iPhone and a Pixel 9 Pro Fold.
And I can tell you that the many times I've used Split View on a phone screen, it's so useful. Like whether you are quickly taking notes, like I have a video open and an Obsidian open, or I have Vivaldi, which I have been using as my browser everywhere.
Did I tell you, John, that I have a new car and my new car... I got a Volvo. My new car has Android... It does have Android Auto and CarPlay, but it also has the proper Android automotive service installed. Oh, interesting. I've never seen that. It's basically an Android tablet in portrait mode. I don't even need to use my phone and I can actually install Vivaldi on it. I can have my web browser...
I knew you had a new car. I didn't know that you were doing alternative browsers in your car. You cannot browse while driving. The apps are actually grayed out because you got to pay attention to the road. But yeah, I've been using Vivaldi because I think it strikes a nice balance of being Chromium based while having a tab UI that makes sense for me and sync.
Anyway, I've been using things like split screen on Android to do Vivaldi on one side, like above, and Obsidian below. It's been so nice to just be able to... And it's not like I multitask all the time, but this is why I think Apple should do. I think it's about time for iOS to get a multitasking system so that next year, in preparation for a foldable phone...
Apple will have a system in place that kind of works like Android, where if you're using your phone in phone mode, you have a vertical split view. But the moment you open it up, you have a regular traditional horizontal split screen. And I think...
And I think knowing Apple and their excellent design skills, I'm sure there are plenty of ways for Apple to make it look nicer than Android. Make it usable. Make it usable. Take advantage of all the animations and transitions that iOS supports. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple does it and it's like...
Swift UI only, even. I think, you know, whether it's the actual split view or some other system, like a brand new system that Apple ships this year, I think it would be wise to have multitasking on the phone this year in preparation for the foldable in 2026. Yeah, I think that makes sense. That makes sense. Can you use an external keyboard with your Android Auto in your car? Can you like...
sit in the front seat parked and write an article. You can install a subset of apps from the Google Play Store. Vivaldi is one of them. Um, yeah. And I installed Pocket Casts. I installed Spotify. You can install YouTube. Uh,
uh obviously you know you can drive while watching youtube but like i don't know if you're waiting in the car you can just tap on the dashboard and open youtube and watch i don't know chris lolly in your car if you want why not who wouldn't want to do that of all the places to watch chris lolly why not in the car you know front seat of the car with chris lolly yeah i like it i like it
All right, I'm going to start off with a big one, and I think it's one of the things that holds the iPad back in particular more than anything else. But it's also something that should be on the iPhone on iOS, which is a clipboard manager. I think a clipboard manager at this stage, this many years into the life of both the iPhone and the iPad, that it's kind of a travesty that it doesn't exist. It really needs to exist.
That is, I mean, when I'm on my Mac, I use Raycast Clipboard Manager constantly. I mean, I'm always, you know, writing a little bit of text in Obsidian and then copying and pasting it into a social media app or into an email or into a text message or, you know, finding something on the web and copying and pasting that somewhere. I mean, it's just...
It's just part of what you do. And it really holds back those platforms not having a clipboard manager that you can use in both places. And I think especially when it comes to the iPad, if we're thinking about ways that Apple could take the iPad to the next level and really make better use of its incredible hardware,
It's by having more of these system level things that are going to make it easier to be productive between multiple apps. I mean, we can talk about other ways that that can be done, too. But a clipboard manager is the glue that goes between those other methods to move data from one place to another. You know, Apple's got so many great.
technologies, you know, whether it's airdrop or whatever to move text and images and things between different devices, it needs to have better ways to move things within a single device that isn't the share sheet. It's not an import output export type of idea. It's more of a clipboard manager, temporary resting space sort of thing. So that's what I want. I want a clipboard manager finally this year. Yeah.
I'm going to continue with iOS. This is a quick one. I just want to have the ability to always invoke the dock.
I have my four most used apps in my iPhone's dock. And it's a shame that I can only access the dock when I'm on the home screen. So many times, especially in the context of split view, if the iPhone gets multitasking, imagine being able to invoke the dock somehow and drag one of your most used apps out of the dock and into whatever you're doing. I would even be okay with the dock being visible, but...
when you're opening the app switcher. So, you know, when you swipe up and you wait a second for the app switcher to lock in, now the dock is invisible there. And I would like it to be instead. I just want to be able to always have my four most used apps, which if I'm going out of memory, they should be Spotify, Pocket Casts, Todoist,
and ChatGPT. So those four apps that I'm opening all the time, I just would like them to be more easily accessible. And this will go hand in hand with another pick that I will share later in terms of like another UI element that I always want to be able to access on my phone. But I'll talk about that in a couple of minutes.
Hmm. All right. Well, I think that that's a good idea. I wonder how you would go about doing it because so much is resting on gestures at the bottom of the screen on an iPhone right now that it's very, I mean, I think that your idea of doing it with the app switcher is probably the best one I can think of too, because it's, it's an existing thing that maybe could be expanded. Yeah. All right. Well, let me, let me move on to something else. Um,
I'm going to go with another big one. I'm going to go with system level support that will enable things like Raycast and other launcher apps. Yeah, okay. All right. That to me goes hand in hand with clipboard managers, which I just talked about. Because part of what I did when getting ready for this episode was think about what are the things that I can do on my Mac that
that feel like impediments when I'm using my iPhone or my iPad. And that's one of them. I mean, the fact that I can't just from a keyboard launch what I want as easily as I can on my Mac is kind of a problem. And it goes beyond just launching apps. It's having access to settings and other aspects that
that are system level that an app like Raycast can control, whether it's, you know, toggling between light and dark mode or doing whatever other things I want to do. Now, I mean, some of that, you know, the response might be, why don't you use shortcuts? And, you know, I do. You can use shortcuts for some of these things. But,
I feel like having more direct access will enable more that third-party developers can do beyond just the typical launching things and allow plugins, allow other utilities that we have on the Mac that you can't do on iOS or iPadOS. Things like Better Touch Tool, for instance, or Keyboard Maestro. So that's what I'm going to go with. Okay. I will go with the other item that I...
that I would like to always be accessible on the iPhone, and that is Spotlight Search. Ah, yes. Specifically, I want Apple to fully rethink Spotlight for the age...
supposedly, of Apple intelligence and AI. But just in general, I want to see some consolidation and some new features for Spotlight. In terms of consolidation, I think Apple should really consider unifying Spotlight search and type to Siri. Obviously, people are now very much used to the idea of typing in a text field and having a conversation with a chatbot. I think, you know,
Half a billion people use ChatGPT every week. Can't be wrong. I mean, there must be something to the idea. And Apple does have a similar system that is type to Siri. And then they also have Spotlight, which also lets you type in search queries. But these are two separate features. I think they should become one. There should be one chat or search UI that lets you either find your stuff or have a conversation about whatever you want. And Spotlight,
You know, I was taking a look at Raycast, which launched on iOS this week. And while I'm not fully sold on what Raycast is doing on iOS, if anything, because of system limitations, I think there is something to the idea of it's one place where you can search, you have AI, or you have your favorite launcher.
because Raycast on iOS, it's kind of like Launch Center Pro from that point of view. It lets you customize your favorite shortcuts, your favorite launchers. And I think the idea of a single spotlight that combines a spotlight with Type 2 Siri and maybe is even a little bit customizable so that you can pin your favorite shortcuts or you can pin your favorite apps, I think it would be pretty awesome as a thing to have on iOS and also,
Let me, and I know that it's challenging. Maybe it could be an action button thing, but let me invoke Spotlight from anywhere I am on the iPhone. Again, not just from the home screen. I just want to be able to invoke Spotlight while I'm using an app. Interesting. Interesting. You know what? I'm going to go with a refinement of Type 2 Siri and...
suggests that what Apple should do is make Siri a chat bot. I think that people are at a point now with ChatGPT and other large language models that they've become comfortable
With those kinds of UIs, I mean, it's essentially the UI for something like WhatsApp or iMessage anyway. So why not lean into that and take advantage of what people are familiar with instead of having to invoke some kind of gesture? I think that would allow Apple more flexibility.
room to do things like keep a log of your queries, allow you to get back to them, maybe include some UI to take those older responses using the share sheet. You know, let's take this response and shoot it over to notes, or maybe I'll use it as the basis for
document and pages, whatever you want to do. I think that with more of a full screen availability for a chatbot built around Siri and around Apple's app intents and large language model, that they can do a lot more than they can with a simple text field that is what they've got right now. Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to move to the iPad. Okay. Now, the obvious pick would just be show some love for iPadOS. Yes. So let's assume that they're going to show some love for iPadOS. The obvious one would be better multitasking. I feel like we tried Stage Manager. It's been three years. It's very clear to me that power users don't love it.
So I would like for Apple to come up with a multitasking system for the iPad that people are going to love, that power users are going to love. Whether that means getting rid of the four window limitation per workspace or freely resizable windows that resize in real time or no limitations in terms of where you're supposed to place a window. I don't know what it is. Just make a multitasking system that power users are going to love because...
I think we can all agree that people don't love the stage manager. People use stage manager. I don't think anybody truly loves stage manager. No. And give us clamshell mode. And that was also going to be a next pick for me, like clamshell mode. Like if I'm using the iPad Pro,
Look, the thing is, I haven't used my iPad Pro as my main computer for the past couple of months. This will also, this is a bit of a episode for reveals, I guess. Although the Pixel 9 Pro Fold I mentioned on Connected before, I've been working on a MacBook Pro.
for the past couple of months, and that'll be a story, hopefully before WWDC on the site at some point. These are the two big stories I'm working on, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold and my return to the Mac. But I would love to use the iPad Pro again. I do miss the iPad Pro. And, you know, a lot of the other picks that I will share in this episode are sort of related to the differences of the things that I can get done on the iPad Pro versus the many other things that I can get done on macOS.
But one of them is just I have better multitasking. And right now I'm looking at my MacBook Pro closed with the lid closed in clamshell mode. And I'm getting a giant macOS UI on my external monitor. And I should be able to have just that with my iPad Pro and an external keyboard and a trackpad. And I think it's a bit of a travesty that we still don't. So yeah, that was also a pick for me. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, the other thing I think
we should see is something that relates to shortcuts tangentially, which is
how Apple approaches the control center. And when I thought about this, I thought very specifically about reminders and how I think I'd like to have more customizable. I'd like to have customizable controls for reminders in control center. You know, the kind of thing that would let me access a particular list or add an item to a list. And I think it's a, it reminds me a little bit of how, um,
the addition of actions and shortcuts for particular apps has been uneven over the years. You know, some years a system app would get shortcuts actions on the iPhone or the iPad, but not the other, or it might come to the iPhone first. And a couple of years later, come to the Mac. I feel like if, if,
There are new features coming to a system app. One of the checkbox items that should be considered when it's being released is what controls make sense to add to the control center. Because I've really liked the new control center. I don't use it. I'd say I use it every day. I don't use it extensively. But I think with a little more customization, I would probably use it more. And I think Reminders is just a good example of that. I'm sure there are other examples of apps where Apple could...
burrow down into the data that's stored in a system app and surface it in a way that lets you go to the thing you use most without first going to the app and drilling down through multiple levels. Yeah. I need to take a bit of a pause in this episode because I need to...
Maybe gloat is not necessarily the right term, but kind of. If you recall, a few episodes ago, John, we were talking about the modern uses of AI and vibe coding. And I told you it's only a matter of time before one of the big platforms realizes that one of the greatest threats to the app stores is this upcoming trend of people coding apps without being developers.
And I'm going to read you a post by Mark Gurman that came out minutes ago as you were talking. Oh, wow. Apple is teaming up with Anthropic on a new AI-powered vibe coding platform and is rolling it out internally to employees. It could come to third-party developers in the future. Details on what this means for its own AI efforts and Swift Assist.
They saw the threat, I guess. There it is. There it is. Yeah. And, and then, you know, Xcode, I mean, we're not really, Xcode's not really part of this episode, but.
I think that the AI tools are a little lacking for developers within Xcode at the moment. Give me... Okay, can I do a new wishlist item? Go for it. Shortcuts vibe coding in iOS and iPadOS powered by Cloud. Thank you. This is actually a thing that I...
theorized years ago. Let me create shortcuts with natural language. I guess now I can be a little more hip, a little more, you know, Gen Z about it and say, let me vibe code my shortcuts with LLMs. And don't look like
Some of my more advanced shortcuts, you know, the really advanced stuff, you cannot vibe code that. But as a starting point, as a rough draft. And for chunks of it. And for chunks of it. Right. Functions, routines, like that sort of stuff will be an excellent time saver. You've made shortcuts, team up with Anthropic. Cloud 3.7 is excellent at coding that.
Yes, thank you. So that's a new wish list item has been added on the fly during the episode. Let me vibe code shortcuts in iOS 19. I'm going to pile on with this one, Federico, and say what you can do is once you've vibe coded your app using Anthropic, you can sell it on the App Store and link out. Yeah.
We're going to talk about that in the pro show. We're going to talk about that in the pro show. All right. Well, I kind of cheated with the new pick. You did cheat, but that's okay. Sorry. Let me say on iPadOS...
a better files app just a better files app make it more like finder make it faster make it more reliable give it more filters more filters more view options more sorting options saved searches small folders i mean you name it you literally name it like pick of the 20 more features that finder has compared to the files app pick five and i'll be happy that's the pick
Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to go with a simple one, Federico. I want, uh, I want the journal app on iPad. I don't use the journal app, but I think there might be a chance that I would use it more if it was on the iPad. It's, you know, it's iPhone only. And I find it a little odd that
It's only on the iPhone, given that the iPad is easier to use with a keyboard. So is the Mac for that matter. But this isn't a Mac OS episode. I'd love to see it on the iPad. I think it's time for that. I mean, I know that there are...
Probably privacy issues there because the journal app can import health data and that sort of thing. But that's been solved elsewhere. I mean, the health app itself is available on both iPadOS and iOS. I think that whatever the solution was there, it should be replicated for journal if that's what the impediment is. I'm going to continue with AI and I will mention any sign of life from Apple Intelligence.
Any sign of intelligence. Well, any sign of intelligence. No, any sign of life. Intelligent life. Yeah, anything, really. Maybe they got a demo. You should have heard Tim Cook list the long list of Apple intelligence features during the earnings call yesterday. Or maybe I shouldn't have. But no, maybe they should actually properly demonstrate App Intents and
context awareness again, or maybe it could be, this was also going to be one of my picks, natural language editing for photos. Apple actually published a white paper on this last year on editing pictures in the photos app using natural language, like make the sky red or make it blue or make the pizza bigger, like non-destructive AI powered natural language based photography.
photo edits. That could be a feature. I mentioned the vibe coded shortcuts. I would love to see a better framework for augmenting Apple intelligence with more extensions.
have more integrations beyond ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Cloud, maybe come up with a framework that lets me choose manually instead of waiting for Apple executives to strike a deal with Google or Anthropic
come up with a framework that lets me choose which local models I want to install on my iPhone. Instead of having to download 20 different apps from the App Store and those 20 apps, each of them wants me to re-download the same model locally inside the app, wasting storage on my iPhone. Maybe come up with an API for developers of AI apps to say, well,
We're accessing the same model that has been installed safely, sandboxed, but it's one model downloaded on the user's device. Whether that means I can install an iPhone optimized version of Lama or an iPhone optimized version of Quen, whatever it is, but have a unified... I actually wrote about this on Mac Stories a few months ago. Come up with a system that doesn't make me waste storage time.
I can just install local models. Instead of waiting for you to make a deal with Google or make a deal with Anthropic, just let me choose whatever I want to use. And I could go beyond that and say, and maybe the chat GPT integration in Siri, maybe I should be able to choose which chat GPT model I want to use in that case. I believe that for obvious reasons, performance-wise and cost-wise, Apple is using GPT for all.
But maybe, you know, let me put in, since you're making me log in with my OpenAI account, maybe let me choose if in Siri I want to access O3 or 4.1, you know, all that sort of, I understand if Apple doesn't want to roll out a larger language model of their own yet, but let me have more flexibility with the third party models that I can use on my phone.
Yeah, we'll be doing more on Apple intelligence and shortcuts in a future episode. But one of the things that I'm really going to have my eye on at WWDC is whether we can actually get some hands on time with app intents. I think
Given what has happened, I think the demos need to be real demos this year. Or people are just not going to believe what they see any longer, which is unfortunate. All right. So following on the iPad and talking about apps, I think that Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro X were great additions to the iPad. I think that those are classes of apps.
that we don't see that often. There are third parties that are making these apps, but Apple made these two, and I think they ought to push them forward faster and with more integrations that allow them to be closer to what's available on the Mac. And for me, one of the biggest things there is plugins with Final Cut Pro on the iPad, because Apple said they were going to do that when they introduced this app a couple of years ago, and they haven't done it. And
There is a vibrant community of developers creating Final Cut Pro plugins that YouTubers use and rely on and end up using Macs instead of using iPads because they can start on an iPad, but they invariably need to take the project into a Mac to do the plugins, the effects and all that kind of thing that they need. And that's just too bad.
There's no reason why an M4 iPad Pro can't run those plugins if it can run Final Cut Pro itself to begin with. So I would really love to see that. There are fewer limitations when it comes to logic, but I think both apps, if the iPad Pro is really going to become a pro device beyond the scope of its hardware specs,
They need to be pushed forward and kind of set the example for other companies that are thinking about making apps like this. And, you know, ones that come to mind from third parties are things like DaVinci Resolve, which is a very, you know, advanced app on the iPad too. But,
I'd love to see this spurred a little more. And maybe what needs to be done, maybe Apple needs to actually go out there and commission some of these things or provide some sort of incentive for third parties. Because I think Apple for too long has...
come to the conclusion that they don't need to incentivize anybody to do anything because they're Apple and it's their iPhone and their iPad and developers will just do, you know, make apps for their platforms because they'll make a lot of money. That's not as true on the iPad. It's not as true on the Vision Pro. It's not as true on a lot of things these days. And I think that those kind of things need to be rethought and reconsidered so that all of these platforms besides the iPhone remain vibrant as well. Hmm.
I'm gonna have two iPad picks rolled into one.
I would love to see Apple bridging the gap between shortcuts actions on the Mac and shortcuts actions on the iPad. Oh, for sure. If they redo multitasking on the iPad, I think it's time it's on par with the Mac version when it comes to the shortcuts actions. So things like finding windows, moving windows, recreating workspaces, that sort of stuff. So two-way street that one though, because there are things like in Safari and so forth that you can't do on...
Mac I think that you can do on iPhone or iPad but I will also mention I want to have a terminal on the iPad
I think it's time for pro users and tinkerers and people who want to use them as their main machine to have a sandboxed version of the terminal, like a shell. Let me, you know, come up with a way to have a terminal app on the iPad for people who want to use it. It's sandboxed. It's installing everything locally and, you know, cannot harm your device, but you, you know, have access to a shell. So, you know, at that point, yeah,
The world is your oyster, as they say. - Sandbox, but not too separated from the system level features of iOS and iPhone OS. - But even things like if I want to install FFmpeg or YouTube DLP or Simon Willison's LLM, there are so many shell utilities
that could help power users, developers when it comes to text files, for example, all that sort of stuff. You know, we have some third-party terminal apps on the App Store and it's fine. You know, A-Shell, great terminal app for the iPad that is on the App Store. It's, you know, it's sandbox, it's fine. You can download stuff that works on the iPad. I just would love to see an Apple-sanctioned official terminal app.
Yeah. And that will also mean that all of those run shell script actions in shortcuts that are exclusive to the Mac will also work on the iPad. Yeah, that would be nice. That would be nice. I'm going to go with on the iPhone revamping the tab bars, which is something that Ben McCarthy wrote about recently and we linked on Mac Stories. I'll put it in the show notes. But, you know, allow for actions to be tied to the tab bars
the tabs allow for context menus to pop up from a tab when you long press on them and let people do more tabs because right now I think once you get to five, the five one turns into a more button and then you have to, you have to pick from there. And these are all ideas that Ben talked about in, in that article that I'll,
that I'll link. But I think that there, the tab bar really is one of those things like a table view that's been around since the very beginning when it was still called iPhone OS and third parties weren't allowed to use it. And it's changed, but it's not changed a lot. And I think,
That they're, especially since the tab bar resides at the bottom of the iPhone. And if Apple is really rethinking how search bars might move to the bottom of the iPhone and how the bottom of the iPhone just works in general from a software perspective, tab bars ought to be part of that. So I'm kind of hoping that we'll see that this year. Yeah.
My final one is also about design. I would love to see a more themable, customizable UI, not just the wallpaper, not just the lock screen or the home screen, but like an iOS interface that maybe is translucent and lets me, you know, picks up the color of my wallpaper, for example, and so it's personal.
personalized for me. Or maybe a UI that supports, like on macOS, accent colors. Maybe I want to have, instead of the regular blue, I want to have a purple or a pink or a yellow accent color on iOS. I could see Apple going both ways about this. Just saying, oh, it's, you know, we have this new design language that is always
personalized to the user, picks up the color of Windows behind them or picks up the color from the wallpaper on the iPhone or to just say, well, in addition to that, you also can choose an accent color. I would like to see, I would love to see both and I have no idea what to expect.
from the new iOS UI language. But I think it's going to be fun. So I hope that personalization is a core idea at the center of it. I think that that one's likely. I mean, you know, we've seen more and more personalization over the last few years. There are other things that can be done, and that's one that I like a lot. I think that's a great idea. Well, Federico...
I think that's it for this episode. That's it. Yeah. That's it for iOS and iPadOS. Remember the time when it used to be easier. We could just say, oh, a calculator app on the iPad or I would like to see a weather app on the Mac. Those were the times.
Now we're talking about AI. Now we're talking about design. We're all grown up with this wish list. We are. We are. But, you know, there's ones that you can always kind of go back to and feel nostalgic about. Things like that clipboard manager. I think we've been saying that for, you know, 10 years now. Yeah. Yeah.
They'll always be the clipboard manager. Well, folks, that's it for this episode of App Stories. Thanks for joining us. If you want to get an extended version of this show that's out early and ad-free, just go to appstories.plus. You'll learn all about what that's about, how you become a member, and how you can get even more of this show.
You can find me and Federico over at MacStories.net. You can leave us feedback for this show by going to MacStories.net slash podcasts, where you'll find a link to leave feedback for this show and all of our other shows. And of course, you can find both of us on social media where Federico is at Vitici. That's V-I-T-I-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees.
J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-W-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John. All right, so are we here to talk about some court decisions or what? We are. They're dragging me back in, man. Here I am talking about the legal stuff again. So...
We got a very big decision this week from Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers, who is a district court judge in California. So that's federal district court.
And this is a case that's been going on since 2020. It all started with a kind of contrived dispute by Epic Games who allowed in-app currencies to be added to Fortnite, where you could buy them directly from Epic Games inside the Fortnite app, which was a violation of the App Store rules.
And that led to Epic having their
their developer account revoked and it led to litigation where epic games sued apple for on the day when fortnite was removed from the app store it was very well orchestrated yes it was very well orchestrated and i'm like on the record saying that i've i found the whole way this was contrived very distasteful i'm not a big fan of tim sweeney but i but very clever but very clever very clever um
I don't really agree with how it came about, but I think we got some good results from it, which we'll talk about in a moment. But the original lawsuit was an antitrust suit. And at the end of the day, Apple won the antitrust suit, but they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, as they say. Because the judge, who's a federal judge,
relied on a California state anti-competition law, which is very broad. And basically, I mean, I'm not going to go into the details of the law because we have a lot to talk about, but
That's what the judge hung her hat on and it was appealed. So this was 2021 when that decision came down. It got appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which affirmed the judge on pretty much everything except some attorney's fees things. There was a dispute over who was going to pay whose law, you know, legal fees in connection with the lawsuit.
And then it went to the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court said, we'll take a pass. We're not going to listen to this case, which means that the court of appeals decision stood. And it went all the way back to Judge Gonzalez, who at that time then, I think this was November 2024. At that point, the injunction became final and Apple was obligated to do what she said. And Judge Gonzalez's injunction was,
It was pretty admittedly a little blurry as to exactly what had to be done, but it was clear from the 80-plus page decision that...
She felt that the 30% that was being charged and the fact that developers couldn't link out to the web for purchases was wrong and that that had to change. And what Apple ultimately did, and I'm not going to go through every single detail of what they did and what the judge ordered because it would take two or three hours, but
Essentially, the highlights are Apple debated for basically from the day the decision came out in 2021 until 2024 about what the fee was going to be. Because Judge Gonzalez...
that there was something that Apple was entitled to for use of its platform. And what Apple did was it debated internally what to do with that. And there was, this has all come out now in this contempt order, what those debates were over. And
And so they spent those years debating what the fee would be. They ultimately chose 27%. So they, they lopped off 3% kind of explaining that that's the cost of payment processing, you know, using something like Stripe or Visa or whatever, whatever it is. And they,
made linking out very restrictive. There was the big scare sheet that comes up when you're about to leave an app and go onto the scary World Wide Web that blocked everything on the app and had a lot of scary language. There were a lot of restrictions around where the links could be. They couldn't be buttons. They had to be links. You could only use one. There are a lot of details about all of this. Well,
Epic said to the judge, Apple's not doing what you said. They're violating your injunction. We want you to hold them in contempt. And contempt is a legal procedure by which you punish somebody for not doing what they're told. Okay. And there's a couple of different kinds of contempt. There's civil contempt and there's criminal contempt. Okay. Contempt. And civil contempt is...
What epic asked for because this was a civil court and a civil order it wasn't a criminal proceeding It wasn't criminal antitrust. It was civil antitrust. So the judge held hearings in 2024 Asking basically telling Apple justify what you've done and Apple came in with and you and I are very aware of this company the analysis group the analysis group is
is something that Apple PR trots out on a regular basis. Oh, and of course, it'd be interesting to see if they do it again this month.
But every May, Apple has a PR press release that says all the great things that they've done for developers and how many bajillions of dollars they have given developers. And usually that is combined with some sort of report by the analysis group. We've done multiple of these reports over the years. And I link them all in my story that I had on Mac Stories about this because...
The analysis group is who Apple trotted out in 2024 as justification for how everything they were doing was totally fine. And the judge was like, no, this is not it. I mean, the judge was immediately suspicious. The judge wanted to understand not how it became. It's pretty clear from reading the decision that the judge did not buy the idea that the analysis group had actually done an analysis before.
at the beginning of this process and concluded that 27% was the right number. And what, so what she, she suspected, which I think she decided in the end was true, is that that was more of a, of a report that was done to justify the number after the fact. And so what she ordered was additional hearings. And right now at this point in the story, um,
All sorts of incredibly loud alarm bells should have been going off at Apple and their legal team, both the lawyers they're using from the outside, their internal lawyers, their finance team, their management team. Everybody should have freaked out because at this point, the judge has telegraphed to them.
I think you're lying to me. I don't trust you. I want to see all your documents. I want to see all your email. I want to see everything that you did between 2021 when I issued this decision and today in 2024. And they had to do that. And what they did, they did what big companies do with discovery. They dragged their feet. They...
They said a bunch of stuff was attorney-client privilege, which in the end they had to hire like a special person, like a third party to look at the stuff and decide whether it was really privileged or not because attorney-client privilege, that's where basically if you have a lawyer and you're talking to them about strategy, about your legal rights and obligations, you don't have to disclose that in litigation because that's how you're defending yourself. But it only goes so far.
It only goes so far. But what always happens with big companies, and I have been there, I have been the person who has looked at email. Oh, I'm enjoying this so much. Keep going. I have been the person who has sat for hours at a time looking at thousands of pieces of paper with names on them of people I don't know, comparing it to a list of lawyers and trying to decide whether it was privileged or not. And what you do in that situation is
Is you take the most conservative route possible because God forbid you'd be the person who lets like the smoking gun through, right? The really important document that shouldn't be given to the other side that happens to be privileged. So you're very conservative. Apple was very conservative. Apple was too conservative. They were so conservative that they really pissed off the judge because there were thousands of documents that were
marked as privileged that ultimately they had to give up. And in the judge's eyes, it was a delay tactic because she had ordered them to do something in 2021. And here we are in 2025, and it's still not really being done in her eyes. So she was upset. There were new hearings. There were new people who came and testified, including some, uh,
some vice senior vice president vice president in the finance group who she said outright lied and when you read this opinion i mean where where this all goes is the judge didn't buy apple's story not only about 27 being the right thing the right number but didn't buy that they were telling the truth then and found and as a result found them in contempt of court uh
And when you read this opinion, I've read lots and lots of judges' opinions over the years. This is a judge who is really, really angry. Judges tend to be very conservative and very level-headed and very...
Try to try to appear as calm and objective as humanly possible. I think most of them do, especially in the federal courts, which the best judges in the country in the United States are the federal judges. Really, there are good judges at state court level, but it's a really big deal to become a federal federal district judge.
And she just let she just ripped into Apple. Not only did she say that they were lying, but she said this this individual and named them was lying. She referred the case to the US, the US attorney, right? The US attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether Apple or this individual in the finance group had committed crimes.
Also, a criminal investigation. Yeah, this is now like a big, this is like a whole nother level, right? So Apple has been held in contempt and she had an order saying what they had to do, which we'll get to. But on top of that, Apple could be held in criminal contempt and then fined. I mean, you can't put a corporation in jail. But you can put an individual in jail. You can put an individual in jail and that person who's in the finance group
is under threat now of going to federal prison for having lied to a judge i mean you know it is and this is this kind of goes this is like a little bit of a tangent but i do think that it is important to remember what we're talking about that this was an actual federal court proceeding which i think still means something in america uh i say i think only because there's you know truth
Is a slippery truth is flexible these days. It is flexible these days. But here's the thing is that like one of the reactions to this I've seen is that this isn't anything new. We already knew all this.
But we didn't. We didn't really. We had assumptions. And I think people who watch Apple closely had assumptions about what was going on behind the scenes. I think we had a lot of hot takes on the Internet about it. But we didn't have testimony under oath of people working at Apple and copies of their emails, copies of their presentations, copies of all this stuff.
showing exactly what happened behind the curtain, which is not something you get to look at very often at Apple. And it's pretty damning stuff. So this is like, to me, this is, that's what's different here. This is in fact,
what happened. We know it. We don't have to suppose it. You can read this transcript. You can read this order and see exactly what happened day to day, meeting to meeting inside Apple, deciding what to do with these fees and other things. So to me, that's really the import here. And obviously, I don't know what was going on with this finance guy. That was
Bad choice. Don't lie to a judge like a judge. And so who knows where that goes? But the upshot of these sanctions that the judge has imposed is that the judge has basically said, you've lost your chance at coming up with
I love the line, this is an injunction, this is not a negotiation. Yes, and that is how Apple treated it. That's how they got, and it was even better about it. It was a negotiation with themselves. You can see it in these meetings where it's like, here are three alternatives. We don't charge anybody anything. We charge everybody a little bit of something. Oh, we charge them nearly 30%. You know where you end up when you negotiate with yourself over what
amount of money you should get. For more money. You come up with the more money option. I mean, that's obviously what happened. I mean, to his credit, like Phil Schiller actually said they shouldn't do the commission. And you know what? They should have listened to him because he sat through the entire initial trial. Phil Schiller was there. That's why you have like, when you have like big litigation like this, that is very important to a company. The reason that you have somebody with decision-making authority sitting there
bored out of their mind, listening to these lawyers drone on day after day after day. The reason you do that is so they understand what's going on and they get a feel for the judge and where the judge is going with things. Phil Schiller knew where this was going. And if Phil Schiller didn't, by 2024, when the judge said, I don't believe you come back with your documents, that's why I say that the alarm bell should have gone off because the
They should have known then that they were in deep trouble and that they needed to do something drastic to make this judge happy between the time that those initial hearings happened in 2024 and when they went back to court in 2025. Because instead what they did is they screwed around with documents and made the judge even angrier and then put up people on the stand who then lied. I mean, you couldn't do this worse, honestly. And that's why one of the things I put in my story was,
where was Apple's general counsel in all this? And I had remembered that the general counsel had changed at some point. I thought, oh, maybe this was all part of it. And I started having my conspiracy theories. Turns out that's not true. Same GC the whole time. It's paid a lot of money. You know, the GC of Apple makes like $25 million.
Oh. A year. Okay. All right. And there's a reason for that. It's a big company. And a lot of what the internal lawyers do is they deal with bureaucracy. They deal with getting, you know, talking to the accounts, making sure the taxes get paid, making sure regulations in all the countries are obeyed and all this stuff. But everything...
But every now and then some really big litigation hits like this, and that's where they earn their keep. They have to be the ones. They have to be the ones who become the stop sign. They have to push back at the worst impulses of people. When Tim Cook says, make it scarier...
Make the, you make the notice scarier. You have to say, you know what, Tim? No, you can't do that. In fact, you really shouldn't have this whole big thing at all. You should have just, you know, just a little thing saying, oh, you're going to the web now. You know, something like the judge ordered, which is a neutral alert. And so I don't, I think, I think there's, there's going to be hell to pay internally in the legal group. Uh,
I don't know. I don't have a sense for how well their outside lawyers perform, but that's more like inside baseball stuff. The reality is, is that because this went so poorly for Apple, not only did they not get some of what they wanted, they get nothing of what they wanted. Instead, now developers need to be able to link out to the web for purchases and they can't put up the scare screen.
They have to use real buttons that look like buttons, which the whole thing between links and buttons is ridiculous. And there's even pictures in the judge's decision about the links and buttons and what was proposed and what was landed on. And so those are kind of the big things, the big picture things that are the result of this. And where do I think it's going? I think that this is, to me, bigger than the DMA. Because the DMA...
As much as people wrung their hands about it, there's still a lot of friction in installing an alternative app store and going down that path for consumers. Here, and one of the things I think is really key here is there was this whole, this is a very technical thing, but it was this distinction between using static URLs and dynamic URLs.
What developers can do now is they can use dynamic URLs attached to these buttons. What that means is, say you are logged into the Kindle app. Now when you click on a link, if they put links to books in there, you will stay logged in when the Safari view controller opens in the browser. When it was static, you'd have to go through the whole thing. Oh, where's my password? Log in, do all that stuff. Now...
You're going to be able to go in some of these apps, and Spotify is one that's already done it. It's already on the App Store. You'll be able to tap the button, opens up the browser, tap buy, confirm, you're done. It's probably like three taps to buy something outside the App Store now. That is not what Apple wanted. No. And it's going to be...
Everybody's basically going to stop using in-app purchases, I think. The moment that Stripe or Revenue Cat, I think both companies actually already rolled out tools. The moment that all these big companies roll out this outside-of-the-app-store purchasing systems for developers to use and they get charged like, I don't know, 1%? Or in the case of Epic Games, 0% until a million dollars of revenue? Everybody will be like, why would I give 30% to Apple now? Yeah.
you know? Right, right. And, you know, where this is going to really hurt Apple, I think, is with Candy Crushes of the world. I think that one of the biggest, people don't realize this, but one of the biggest drivers of revenue on the App Store is in-app consumables in games like Candy Crush, which is kind of the canonical example. But I also think it's going to
It's going to enable things that we've never seen on the App Store before. I think, I don't see why Amazon wouldn't put links to buy books in the Kindle for once. How novel would that be? Actually be able to buy a book inside a book reader. You'll see all the streaming services do it. I think streaming games are going to be a thing. I really do think Xbox will open up a store on the web. You'll be able to go open up the Xbox app.
browse the catalog, click a button, buy it on the web, come back and stream it to your iPhone, your iPad. I think there's a lot of things here that people aren't realizing that are actually going to become available for the first time. And I do think it's going to have a significant impact on Apple's revenue. Now,
It's only, it's US only right now. Yeah. I, how long will that last? I don't know. I mean, I think. Not very long. I don't think very long. I think that they'll, once people see what this is like, there'll be a lot of demand for it in other countries as well. And I think the EU will probably, you know, go down a similar road at some point as well with the DMA instead of screwing around with the alternative app stores any longer. Well, John, thank you for this incredible overview. Yeah.
It's... What a story. And as we learned, don't lie to a judge. Yes. Shout out to Phil Schiller. Yes. Right? And... Yeah, the fellow. Fellow Phil. Fellow Phil. Go buy stuff on the web because now you can. It's a beautiful new world. Hey, maybe I'll go sign up for Spotify this afternoon just to see how it works. And can I just say at the end, it is so ordered. Oh, I just...
I always want to say that. No second bite at the apple, Tichi. No second bite at the apple. There's no second bite at the apple. Well, thank you, John. Sure, sure. All right. I'll talk to you next week, Federico. Buona sera, John.