The part that sucks for consumers is that they often kill things that people like. I wish they had a better way of doing this.
Bravo to brutecat for this excellent discovery, productionization, and writeup.
But I am getting more hesitant as often when I (and others) do it seems companies think they can increase their prices wildly or do other stuff.
I have this exact feeling now with Logseq: I started paying for sync a while ago and it seems so did others and now they are rewriting the whole thing from plain text[1] to some kind of database based storage :-/
[1]: which could be synced over git, transferred effortlessly into another application and was one of the reasons I went with Logseq
From Kagi’s website
https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#:~:te...
We are currently serving around 2.1M queries a month, costing us around $26,250 USD/month.
Between Kagi and Orion, we are currently generating around $26,500 USD in monthly recurring revenue, which incidentally about exactly covers our current API and infrastructure costs.
That means that salaries and all other operating costs (order of magnitude of $100K USD/month) remain a challenge and are still paid out of the founders’ pocket (Kagi remains completely bootstrapped).
I’m honestly glad to hear that. Until I heard your interview with Gruber, I thought Kagi was the same company that use to provide a payment platform for Mac indie developers.
It’s always good to see a bootstrapped company become successful without enshittification. I put you up there with BackBlaze.
I see you have investors now (not saying that is a negative). Are the laws still the same about having to be a “qualified investor”? Can anyone invest - asking out of curiosity.
As sister comments have said there is no money in it. They are stickiness plays or just bets for Google.
That’s part of the stupidity of the DOJ trying to force Google to sell Chrome. Who would want it? And how would they profit from it?
All valid questions, but it might be that splitting the tool used to bludgeon everyone around is still worth it, even if pace of development slows down considerably.
Unless you are using Chromebooks, every desktop user who uses Chrome made an affirmative choice to download it.
My point is that maybe it is okay? Runaway churn is at least partially responsible for current situation, where most companies simply unable to compete.
Apple has no reason to compete, it can just make more and more functionality for native apps as can Google if it doesn’t have to worry about Chrome anymore.
Microsoft doesn’t care about the browser anymore and just uses Chromium. Firefox’s revenue comes completely from Google. If Google doesn’t have to prop up Firefox for antitrust reasons anymore, why would they?
Photos redesign makes it really hard to use.
Siri works half of the times, maybe even less than that.
Books lacks of basic functionalities such as downloading and keeping books on device.
Photos redesign maybe something you don’t like, but you can hardly call it half baked. All of the functionality is there and there’s a new consistency in how it works that wasn’t there previously.
Books automatically downloads to device. There isn’t a way to read a book without it local.
A simple google search will answer this question
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/9/24340238/apple-iphone-alar...
Even an hn search is fine, if you do not trust the Verge (notice these are comments from the last 3 months so not an old issue):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42705217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41962418
> Books automatically downloads to device. There isn’t a way to read a book without it local.
Have you used Books extensively or just skimmed it? There's no way to keep books on device, make another Google search if you do not believe me.
> Photos redesign maybe something you don’t like, but you can hardly call it half baked.
Perfect, then keep Photos and kill only alarms, books and Siri.
I haven’t used Books extensively outside of audiobooks. So it sounds like there’s offloading of caching going on that’s iCloud wide; disabling iCloud sync would fix this. I can imagine that being frustrating if the book you want isn’t there when you’re on a flight (which should only happen if you haven’t recently accessed it). I agree there should be a way to prevent this. I wouldn’t call that half baked, but it’s a big enough problem I’d agree that’s not fully thought through (or more likely, they did think through it but came to a different conclusion).
Once you download a book to a device, it stays downloaded. There is a setting to automatically remove downloads once you're finished with the book, but that defaults to off (and I didn't even realize it was there until I went looking just now).
This is objectively false. I suggest you do a simple google search or read my other comment.
I just checked my phone, I have 169 books downloaded. This includes many books I haven't looked at for years and years. This includes many books that I bought 3, 4, 5 iPhones ago and are still present, copied from device to device, because Books does not remove store downloads unless asked to.
It's happened for years: it was pretty bad about 5/6 years ago, but Apple claimed they fixed it, but it's still happening a bit.
In fact, when I really need to wake up at a particular time (say for a flight), I set two alarms 1 minutes apart.
Go to library > collections > downloaded.
I can see books I purchased and other PDFs that I uploaded.
I do agree on the Photos redesign. I feel like I constantly get stuck on certain pages.
Your tone is aggressive and uncalled for. In fact, the fact that you have never found a very common bug says a lot about your inattention to detail.
There's no "keep forever on device" button, which to me seems like a basic functionality. If the app decides to delete them, it will.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/1b04rzy/apple_what_wer...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23736536
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/344271/books-autom...
iCloud offload is a pretty common feature on Apple devices and one that I find pretty handy. I understand why it doesn’t work for others though.
You can turn off iCloud sync in general for the device.
I'm still upset about Google Reader.
I'd be so glad now to give up on Google and all its enshittified shit. I could give up things that are still super useful and I get value from every day: YouTube, Gmail, Play Services, Drive, Maps. But I don't think I could give them all up at once. I've been trying to migrate to Proton and OpenStreetMap and some kind of real Linux phone etc, I don't even mind if I have to fiddle around before everything works. The trouble is that the claws are in, but they're not in me.
Remember when Google proudly didn't advertise themselves? They got to critical mass through word of mouth, from having a compellingly better product. Now what they have is network effects and locking. They used to appeal to developers and techies because and that ended up making the services better for everyone. Now like all the other tech giants they have PHB's optimizing for the next millisecond of attention and Microdollar of ad revenue from a lowest-common-denominator victim.
Google is so big that it's a significant part of life for a significant proportion of the world. When Google is shit it moves the needle on net human suffering. I think the UN should be focussing on prevent war and trying to salvage our environment, but if they aren't going to do that then it might be rational to just form a worldwide consumer group to take on megacorps.
What upsets me re RSS these days is how many people were apparently so reliant on one reader that they still publicly mourn every time it comes up, 12 years later. Who are these fair-weather feed followers who threw their hands in the air with the loss of exactly one product?
All so they could clear the way for Google Plus. And look how that turned out.
So yeah, watershed moment, the point where the scales fell from my eyes, still justifiably pissed, fool me twice, etc etc etc
(Still using RSS daily, though I lapsed for a while).
The other problem was that Google killing Reader was a signal to the broader web to move away from RSS. RSS has kind of limped along since then.
Are social features the main selling point of RSS readers? I mean I just use mine to know when there's a new blog post/webcomic posted on a few sites I follow, without having to give my email or use another platform like social media to know about it. And I'd use the social features which are present on the blogs, under the control of the blog owner(s), if there's any. Or maybe my use case is not the most common one?
Though I agress about the signal Google sent by killing GR.
That marks my coming of age on the enshittified web. The killing of Google Reader was a watershed moment. It marks the moment in time when the tide turned from the open Web to closed social media gardens.
Years later, I came across Artifact, created by the founders of Instagram, and thought it was an interesting idea. The problem was I was reading its shutdown announcement.
Sometimes I think products are killed way too early. Look at twitch, it boomed after years of stagnation.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/517907/twitch-app-revenu...
Most software products rely on very complex software stacks, and if you trust 100% all the libraries and the OS you use I would say it's a wrong mindset. There were bugs even in the processor (meltdown). Security is a continuous battle and you never know if you won, only (sometimes) if you loose.
When I breeze through your login process with the wrong credentials that's because your security was fake, if it was real that would break because it didn't know who I was, so if some bug lets me past login I don't somehow successfully log in as me, I'm logging in as nobody at all which is clearly nonsense.
This is "Make Invalid States Unrepresentable" at scale, and it's difficult to do, but not impossible.
There's definitely some measure of complexity. I still like simple cyclomatic but I know there are better ones out there that try to capture the cognitive load of understanding the code.
The attack surface of the system is definitely important. The more ways that more people have to interface with the code, the more likely it is that there will be a mistake.
Security practices need to be captured in some way (maybe a factor that gets applied). If you have vulnerability scanning enabled that's going to catch some percentage of bugs. So will static analysis, code reviews, etc.
It's not a black and white of "an app is truly secure" or "an app is truly insecure", but rather a continuum from "secure enough in practice for this threat model and purpose" to "an insecure mess".
Like, plenty of websites and apps have launched, existed for years, and then shutdown without a single security incident. In those cases, surely the app was secure, right? At least secure enough? Signal so far has been "secure enough in practice" for most people, while iMessage has in practice been "secure enough if you're a normal person, but with serious security issues for anyone who might be subject to serious targeted attacks"
Say more about what you mean by "no app is truly secure"? Especially in the context of signal?
> Im just saying that all it takes is one employee to click onto the wrong URL to breach your apps security
Pretend I'm a signal employee. What link can I click that breaches the app's security?
They don't store unencrypted data, pushing source code changes requires review, releases are signed and a single employee can't compromise the release process, so I'm missing how one employee being compromised could lead to the signal app breaching signal's security.
Also, in practice, how often are apps compromised from a phishing attack? I don't even really see news reports on that, so I'm curious if you're operating off like a specific case or something.