Apple will launch a journaling app
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends.
Basically a big FU to all the independent devs trying to compete on a fair playing field.
> Apple Business Connect lets businesses create and update their information in the cards that represent them in apps and services that only Apple controls, like Apple Maps, Wallet, Messages, and in search results via Siri or Spotlight. Updates business owners make to their cards will then propagate to all these places. That incredible access to the right place at the right time for 1.8 billion active Apple devices has never been available before.
It seems to me that the rest of the article is just a kind of prediction about what Apple could do. Underline _could_ and that is different than doing or wanting.
Only until Tim Cook reverses that trend. “Services” revenue has been growing like crazy and will continue to do so as Apple pursues ever more aggressive strategies to shove ads in our faces.
Steve Jobs’ last mistake was appointing as CEO someone who cares about money this much over good products.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/02/02/apple-services-re...
But the fact that today I still cannot use a different web-browser engine than the iOS one is appalling. I cannot change the Photos app for an app that offers native integration with my Synology. I am forced to go through iCloud.
That sounds incredibly glib, but a lot of Apple users feel this way. It's fine and I don't give a shit how the iPhone works by default because it works for me. It sounds like you're not the target market - go get an android and be happy.
The iPhone works the way it does, and if that's a pain for you, don't use a fucking iPhone. Imagine people who love driving stick pitching a fucking bitch fit because you can't install a clutch on the automatic car you bought. Not everything in life works or will ever work exactly the way you like.
Not everything in life requires you to kneel and vigorously lick the boots of a corporate overlord.
Actually that is exactly what happens.
Ok, maybe not one tyre, but a small number.
The car manufacturers all certify their vehicles against a small set of tyres. That's a fact.
Its a necessity because choice of tyres touches almost every part of the certification process ranging from fuel economy figures to NVH (Noise, Vibration and Harshness) specs and parameters and many many other things.
Look inside your fuel-cap flap, you'll typically find a label there showing you a list of tyre specifications, of which maybe only one or two are actually certified by the manufacturer for your exact car model. The should of course also normally be found in the owners manual too.
In addition, the higher up the car spectrum you go, the tighter the definitions become. For example, the likes of Porsche actually do name precise brand and model for tyres.
Sure you can go off-piste with your tyre selection. But the manufacturer will likely take great delight at voiding your warranty. And your insurance might have a thing or two to say too since you are going against manufacturers guidelines. Finally of course the on-board computer calibration will be all off too.
The only possibility would be a GrapheneOS-installed pixel, but the pixel is nowhere near an iphone in terms of hardware and besides all the unacceptable hardware bugs, google simply doesn’t seem to want to sell it to people. (Most of the EU is not a target for some insane reason).
The real solution is government intervention, which will allow sideloading.
Also, not fear mongering, just speculating -- I look forward to this happening actually! Will finally be able to get an iphone and use software that isn't kneecapped by Apple's gatekeeping.
When you are a government, Apple will sides against you anyways, as seen as in China.
So I made the next most obvious choice - a vm which is logged into iCloud and downloads them, then rsyncs out the vm and onto a Synology file share.
It’s terrible.
For others, it's important to have the ability to use their device in ways that aren't 100% controlled by a single company. It's about having a choice and having alternate options. Large platform providers going "we know what is good for you" has been a major setback for personal computing over the last decade or two, and it's sad that so many consumers are enthusiastically accepting it as the new norm.
And specifically in the smartphone market, Google is always close behind in following the precedent set by Apple in implementing software restrictions. How does one protest then?
Android is open source. You don't have to be a large player to make a phone with a custom OS. The hardest part will not having access to Google's Play ecosystem if you modify the OS too much.
So yes, I want ios to put in the effort and I want to force them by the government. I don’t see how is it bad, should I feel bad for a private entity for benefitting a huge number of its customers?
Most people do not understand the intricacies of the iOS and App Store app distribution model, and most people do not buy Apple hardware because of it.
All users, including those users, deserve the freedom to own the hardware they buy and run what they want on it.
It may come as surprise but to lot of people/institutions getting something done is far more valuable than totally owning something.
No, and I never suggested they did.
> It may come as surprise but to lot of people/institutions getting something done is far more valuable than totally owning something.
Doing what you want with the stuff you bought is not orthogonal to "getting something done".
They have paid placements in the App Store.
I suppose you could consider some of the music in the Music app to be promotional for that music.
It’s nothing like Google’s ad network.
2. Red Badge in settings when your device is eligible for Apple Care+
3. Bullet point for 1 year free AppleTV at the top of the settings app
4. Same as 3) but for Apple Arcade
I had a bug where the AppleTV ad was shown consistently for two years, although I already used the trial. It only got fixed with the latest iOS update.
I too have mostly escaped ads on iOS, but I think that’s a combination of not living in the US, never opening the App Store, and a few other factors. I’m under no illusion that will last forever. Tim Cook must be salivating with ideas.
¹ https://daringfireball.net/2023/04/ios_adware
² https://www.macrumors.com/2022/08/21/ads-coming-to-apple-map...
It’s explicitly linked in my post. In the article they talk about it and have a link to a screenshot. Search for:
> I’ve noticed an ad in Settings on my iPhone, in the iCloud section at the very top of the first screen
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/13/all-the-things-apple-sherl...
(Mind you I’m not a fan of general software patents, but that’s what’s needed if you don’t want this to happen to software.)
"Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss" — The Who
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_(software)#Sherlocked...
https://www.google.com/search?q=who+lyrics+meet+the+new+boss...
At first I read the headline and thought this was dumb, but maybe it will be more like a simple social media app that’s less about mass news stories and more about people you care about (kinda like Facebook back in the OG days)
Seeing Apple implement this has me torn between a feeling of unfairness and excitement. Like why wasn’t I allowed to do this myself? But now that it’s here, do I use it? It has everything I wanted and it’s highly unlikely for Apple to shut down the app and burn their users.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170215124251/https://j9sopinio...
Nice, so even if users wanted to benefit from competition between Apple's and others' services, they can't because Apple blesses their software on iOS in ways that others' aren't.
BUT, I still prefer Google Maps, non-Safari browsers, Spotify over Apple Music, Feedly/my browser over Apple News.
I agree that it’s problematic that apps made by the OS developer receive preferential treatment, but I haven’t personally found that to mean that the experience is better than third party apps.
In every situation, it makes more sense to segment and triage private APIs for a promotion to a public API with user-friendly permission prompts and controls to protect the user's data.
"It will even offer "All Day People Discovery," which will track the user's proximity to others, drawing distinctions between work colleagues and friends."
That could be really useful for tracking down illegal immigrants, gays, and politicians meeting with lobbyists.
Do we have any records of Apple doing this previously?
Thanks for providing your own refutations. Now stop lying.
The end result was the same, and it let to a wave of privacy resulting in Apple locking down their app permissions further, and FB throwing a fit about it.
I think people are only annoyed at Apple because they use that same locked down information for their own services, including their ad network. Though of course Facebook does that too.
It is somewhat strange to sell how HN has shifted again. Somewhere along 2022, most of the extreme left, also the Anti Facebook, Anti Ads, group are gone or disappeared.
You can now actually say They didn't sell any data to Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook's API allowed CA to harvest a lot of data, which allowed them to conduct psychological profiling and targeting research, and analysis on massive troves of FB's data. All of that allowed them to develop tailored ads for specific segments of the population they chose to turn elections. Based on the profiling they did, for example, they were able to determine that if they were able to show 1,000 narrowly chosen people in one neighborhood, say, racist ads, CA's statistics show that they will be able to turn a tight election. CA was able to do this because of the data Facebook provided them, as well as the advertising platform Facebook provides that allowed CA to pinpoint segments of the public that are susceptible to their particular brand of psychological and political exploitation.
However, the data that CA mined was provided by Facebook's API, and anyone with a free API key could have mined it. FB technically didn't sell them the data, but they certainly sold them the means to manipulate elections and violate the privacy of millions of people. And as I said, that's a technicality that doesn't mean much.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/02/facebook-ads-white-supre...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/23/leaked-cambr...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Google is eons worse, but for some reason more interesting categories were not listed at all.
Well I dont disagree with most of the points, considering I was the first few on HN to rally about their so called privacy stand / fundamental human right, but
>Then it will come out it's being sold for marketing purposes
I seriously seriously doubt. As much as I like to shit on Apple, I think the worst they do is to hold all the Data for themselves and build an Advertising platform. Unless that is what you mean by being sold for marketing purposes, which is what most of HN thinks during 2017 - 2022. And that is a generalisation of US / Free World only. They might very likely hand those Data to some government.
iCloud user data that’s not end-to-end encrypted unless you find and change multiple different settings that few people know about: files, photos, notes, texts, full copies of laptop’s and phone’s storage…
I’d take a bet that 99% of the time Apple or a local regime wants to read iCloud user data, they can.
I do think that a lot of these are hard problems to truly tackle, I was just commenting on this cognitive dissonance where people say things like “iCloud user data is private”, while in fact iCloud user data is this huge trove of very personal information that’s not private, and we don’t act like those ideas are in conflict.
Besides, Apple’s not doing the most they can within the confines of user wishes and local law. Neither one requires using dark patterns to ensure that 95% of users have privacy turned off. They’re also tracking every interaction for ad purposes on the App Store. I’m not trying to call them an evil boogeyman, but I think they’re trying to have their cake and eat it too: have users buy more because they think it’s private, while not disadvantaging themselves or pissing off local regimes by actually preventing data access in the majority of cases.
> What if I tell you that literally any physical supermarket will also have this data?
Great, now we're comparing iPhone privacy to a supermarket. Wasn't Apple supposed to care about this stuff?
You are either doing business with China at their own rules, or you don’t do anything. Apple has different iCloud settings for the rest of the world, and while it does suck for Chinese people, the alternative would be some domestic OS with much much more involved privacy violations.
Also, why should a company be above local law? Sure it sucks when the local law is bad and apple should not make the job easier, but if they do lawfully request some data then I don’t see why Apple should not fulfill it.
This was the ethical abstention that the rest of FAANG pursued. At least, the ones who didn't have vested manufacturing contracts in the China mainland. Let them replace it with their own thing, it's a better alternative than compromising every iPhone "just in case". It's not only about domestic security, it's about how it devalues the meaning of Apple's privacy worldwide.
> Also, why should a company be above local law?
Because their principles of privacy and security supersede their interest in moneymaking? If the local law is unjust, you don't do business there. That's what Microsoft, Google, Netflix and
> I don’t see why Apple should not fulfill it.
Your phone shouldn't have a backdoor in the first place. Letting Apple have this much vertical authority over their platform is why we're here now, trying to decide if America's largest corporation is right for sleeping with the enemy. It's obviously wrong (as you note), but we're also helpless to resist it (as you also note). The best path of recourse is legislation that dilutes Apple's absolute authority and forces them to play ball with the industry. It's attractive to legislators, regulators, and the common people.
But that’s absolutely not what happens - do you have any sort of citation for that?
You forgot the last part: then we'll learn Apple has been granting near-automatic access to any three-letter agency that wants to read your journal.
Even if the app doesn't do any correlation, it will be very helpful to have the data collected into HealthKit so your health care provider has good data to work with.
(No connection other than being a very happy customer.)
Unfortunately, it seems somehow broken. When I tried adding a meal, it just failed silently.
To me this looks like laying the groundwork for centralizing the most relevant and important information about yourself, which so crucially includes the contexts you are in! and are so often painstaking to actually record in detail when journalling manually. For what purpose? I genuinely think this leads to a Siri that's finally useful in a way that leapfrogs everything and everyone else out there. Think GPT-4(+) with an insane amount of detail and context tailored to you, and (hopefully!) executed in a way that re-affirms Apple's stated commitment to privacy and security.
I have only the most cursory understanding of ML technology but have obviously been trying to follow along with everything pretty much since DALLE-2 made such a splash. With some of the impressive performance shown in smaller models, sometimes with different quantization, I think that Apple Neural Engine silicon might be getting more attention soon... okay, "soon" is probably over-optimistic. But – in September '22 I asked online about running Stable Diffusion[0] on M1 chips on iPad, since I was able to run it on an M1 Mac Mini. The 8-ball said "outlook not so good," and yet by November 8th liuliu had it running on _iPhone_[1]. These are truly interesting times.
[0] I know this is not a 1:1 comparison. But Llama ran on my MacBook without any CoreML optimization. Maybe there will be a tier of requests that could be handled by a smaller model on-device, and more complex stuff heads to the datacenter. I am an amateur at best; don't listen to me.
[1] https://liuliu.me/eyes/stretch-iphone-to-its-limit-a-2gib-mo...
If Apple does go this route, I feel like they're setting themselves up for disruption. Someone else (hell, maybe even Meta) will do it better, and Apple's implementation will hold on by the thread of native integration it uses. It's not a bad or new situation, but I'm going to bet that Apple will hamstring themselves by locking competitors out. Especially if the current pace of model development keeps up.
I have to think they wouldn't mobilize some of their capital reserves if need be in order to avoid missing this wave. Part of me thinks that's the only reasonable cause for Siri being so terribly useless for so long— that it's because they have a "leapfrog" up their sleeves. I acknowledge this is a pretty heavy cope though.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230420002004/https://blogs.mic...
For those who don't know, journalling apps universally suck. Especially when it comes to security.
Day One, the canonically recommended app, doesn't even locally encrypt their entries, so basically anybody can access it despite the veneer of a password on the app.
I’d prefer a FOSS phone ecosystem, but sometimes pragmatism wins out.
If you don't want Apple's services then neither iOS nor MacOS can satisfactorily work for you. Their products are built on the assumption that you will immerse or have immersed yourself completely in their ecosystem, trying to use one on its own is a horrible experience.
It's not obnoxious like Windows 11's badgering for a Microsoft account, but it manifests in parts of MacOS (namely anything to do with the App Store) flat out refusing to work until an Apple account is provided.
I may have to make a throwaway Apple account just so I can do something as mundanely basic as updating the system applications.
Perhaps you have an odd definition of "system applications", but macOS updates do not require logging into iCloud, or the use of an Apple ID.
Updating MacOS doesn't require an Apple account, but not the pre-installed stuff.
This is misleading.
All apps included with macOS are updated via Software Update and don't require a login.
What I think you're referring to are apps you get free with the purchase of a new Mac. This includes the suites previously referred to as iLife and iWork.
These aren't part of macOS, and if you do a clean install they aren't there, but you do get a free copy, via the App Store, with the purchase of a new Mac. The App Store does indeed require a login.
I guess we need a Digital Markets Act 2 because I thought that's the type of stuff it was supposed to mitigate. This type of thing gets me endlessly pissed off at Apple. Guess how difficult and bug-ridden it is to synchronize files without iCloud (at least it's possible at all!).
Apple Notes introduces neural-engine powered "Clippy"?
If this replaces the standard Notes app I'll wager there'll be a lot of backlash. People like Notes because it's the equivalent of Notepad on Windows - fast and un-fussy, your classic 'dumb' app.
The first and most exciting part of this is the ability to have a 'day in the life' consolidated ledger of our activities on device, across all app experiences. The ability to log our lives and add our own thoughts on top of it is important for self-reflection and for the many moments we want to recall using temporal cues and in context (I remember I was talking to Joseph and then saw a really cool webpage).
A lot of the time the act of journaling is writing about the activity that has transpired on/through our devices (who we spoke with, what we did, etc), yet currently there is no affordance to link these together. We may add a note in a calendar event to remind ourselves of what happened, or rely on our memory, but just to look back at our day we have to cobble together a mix of calendar, notes, messages, etc; it's all a very disjointed experience.
A consolidated journal/ledger of the day with the ability to write atop it is essentially the user-facing version of what a future AI assistant would see and present to users. A good assistant would not just do tasks but solicit our feelings and attune to us, which is essentially 'journaling' when brought into UI form.
This whole product is frankly quite a bit overdue.
The second value-add of this idea is tying journaling closer to Health. Health journaling is essential to managing chronic conditions, as its value is primarily retrospective discovery of trends. There's a lot of sub-par health journaling solutions out there, and none do a good job weaving themselves into the context of Health data. I hope to see this use case in this initiative.
The history of our usage of devices has always remained a largely unexplored area of computing, and one of the major divergences between how people see the world and how computers present the world to us. Bringing history back to us in human-consumable form is important to get this sense back. The only other initiative that I see taking on this need is rewind.ai, which is quite exciting and I'm guessing is on Apple's short list of potential acquisitions.
Finally this seems like the next step in the feature trajectory of adding context to our device usage. The first feature in this trajectory was Apple's Shared with You framework [1], which is about adding contextual data tags to activity (E.g. seeing a webpage in Safari showing at the top that it's shared by your friend Joseph, which reminds you of why its relevant).
(FWIW I've spent the last year designing an OS for a new tablet platform with journaling as a central experience)
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sharedwithyou
1. when you turn on your car and it connects to iPhone via BT, it just starts playing what was last played in Apple Music, even if you were most recently listening to an Audible book and had paused it before.
2. Another is when you're playing music and then open a YouTube video. The pause button on the keyboard should pause the music (in the background) not the video (in the foreground), yet Apple insists on a simple foreground=control rule.
Apple OSes just have no mental model for what we want to be playing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This must be vehicle- or Audible-specific, because my complaint is exactly the opposite: My phone continues playing the last thing played, which is often not what I want.
For example: When connecting to my car in the morning, the iPhone continues playing my sleep noise instead of one of my preferred choices for that Bluetooth context — music or podcasts. It sort of astounds me that annoyances like this can persist for years.
EDIT: Whoa! I did some digging based on this conversation and, at some point, Apple added the ability to trigger an Automation in response to connecting to a specific Bluetooth device. Maybe this will help you too, @npunt?
If I were building a v1 of this iOS journal, I'd do the following:
1. Consolidated daily and weekly ledgers in a nice UI, basically a much fancier version of one of those generated Photos albums. Lets us scroll through to see our day with objects representing the activities across all the different apps we used.
2. Ability to attach a journal/note on anything in those ledgers, both individual objects (e.g. photos, a health reading, a convo in messages) and the overall day/week.
3. Reuse Notes' UX and formatting for these journals. No need to link between notes for v1, that's a power user feature.
4. Ability to attach journal entry from within individual app experiences like Health, Notes, Calendars, Photos, etc (possibly via Share Sheet, but perhaps more embedded), as well as link back to the main ledger when there are journals attached to those objects.
Honestly hearing that Apple is doing this makes me want to join them and work on this product. In my eyes, journaling needs to be an OS-level experience, because greater affordances for self-reflection are a core part of developing better executive function. Making reflection just another app competing against all the other apps and addictions and bullshit that our devices provide is a disservice to our sense of agency and self-determination; journaling and reflection need to sit atop these experiences.
I see a parallel between a journaling app and HealthKit[2], where the latter is like basically a health and exercise journal for things like step counts[3] and medications[4]. It could follow a similar trajectory and eventually be made available as an API to third-party apps.
[1](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeviceActivity)
[2](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit)
[3](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkquanti...)
[4](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/healthkit/hkclinic...)
Forget UI and all that. 4G modem and an OS that displays UI for calling and texting with formally verified E2E encryption for both with no plans to offer any features outside of this period! I would buy that in a heartbeat.
You and not many other people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess it's much harder to compete with companies you are dependent on for your platform (Adobe and Microsoft) than with small developers of small tools.
With office suite I guess you mean Pages, Numbers, etc? How have those been abandoned? What are you missing?