Simon Willison’s Weblog

Technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it, and we’re here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.

— Tim Cook # 31st January 2021, 6 pm

The open secret Jennings filled me in on is that OpenStreetMap (OSM) is now at the center of an unholy alliance of the world’s largest and wealthiest technology companies. The most valuable companies in the world are treating OSM as critical infrastructure for some of the most-used software ever written. The four companies in the inner circle— Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft— have a combined market capitalization of over six trillion dollars.

— Joe Morrison # 20th November 2020, 9:11 pm

Apple now receives an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in annual payments — up from $1 billion a year in 2014 — in exchange for building Google’s search engine into its products. It is probably the single biggest payment that Google makes to anyone and accounts for 14 to 21 percent of Apple’s annual profits.

— Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet # 26th October 2020, 3:10 am

Without touching upon the question of who’s right and who’s wrong in the specific case of Basecamp’s Hey app, or the broader questions of what, if anything, ought to change in Apple’s App Store policies, an undeniable and important undercurrent to this story is that the business model policies of the App Store have resulted in a tremendous amount of resentment. This spans the entire gamut from one-person indies all the way up to the handful of large corporations that can be considered Apple’s peers or near-peers.

— John Gruber # 20th June 2020, 5:48 am

Somebody should write up how the early-2000s push for open standards and the Web Standards Project’s advocacy are a major factor in why Apple was able to create its enormously valuable comeback. Put another way, one of the killer moments of the first iPhone demo was Jobs saying it had the “real” web, not the “baby” web, by demonstrating the NYT homepage. That would’ve been IE-only & Windows-only if not for effective advocacy from the web standards community.

— Anil Dash # 7th May 2018, 1:28 pm

Apple reserves new emojis for point releases, instead of major upgrades, to incentivize people to keep updating. Very smart strategy.

— SwiftOnSecurity # 4th November 2017, 4:15 pm

The crisis Flash now faces is that Apple has made it clear that Flash will no longer be ubiquitous, as it won’t exist on the iPhone platform, thus turning “runs everywhere” into “runs almost everywhere.” As Web developers know, “runs almost everywhere” is a recipe for doing everything at least twice.

— Rafe Colburn # 5th May 2010, 12:10 pm

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

— Steve Jobs # 29th April 2010, 3:22 pm

Imagine if 10% of the apps on iPhone came from Flash. If that was the case, then ensuring Flash didn’t break release to release would be a big deal, much bigger than any other compatibility issues. [...] Letting any of these secondary runtimes develop a significant base of applications in the store risks putting Apple in a position where the company that controls that runtime can cause delays in Apple’s release schedule, or worse, demand specific engineering decisions from Apple, under the threat of withholding the information necessary to keep their runtime working.

— Louis Gerbarg # 12th April 2010, 5:24 pm

We all think of Java as a boring server-side language now, but the initial idea behind Java was that software developers could write applications in Java rather than writing them for Windows, and that those applications would work everywhere, thus defanging Microsoft’s desktop OS monopoly. Microsoft took various steps to prevent that from happening, but they lacked a tool like App Store that would enable them to just ban Java. Apple has that card to play, so they’re playing it.

— Rafe Colburn # 10th April 2010, 6:42 pm

32.38 percent of visitors to DF last week did not have Flash.

— John Gruber # 31st January 2010, 12:05 pm

If Apple is really successful, it’s likely that other companies will be more emboldened to forsake openness as well. The catch is that customers won’t accept the sudden closing of a previously open platform, that’s one of the reasons Palladium failed. But Apple has shown that users will accept most anything in an entirely new platform as long as it offers users the experience they want.

— Rafe Colburn # 28th January 2010, 9:54 am

Programmers don’t use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.

— Paul Graham # 19th November 2009, 10:13 pm

This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.

— John Gruber # 6th October 2009, 7:33 am

Look at Sony, or Microsoft, or Google, or anyone. They still don’t get it. They’re still out there talking about chips, or features, or whatever. Or now they’re all hot for design. But they think design means making pretty objects. It doesn’t. It means making a system of pieces that all work together seamlessly. It’s not about calling attention to the technology. It’s about making the technology invisible.

— Fake Steve Jobs # 28th September 2009, 10:40 pm

Developing for the iPhone at the moment is like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.

— Tim Bray # 21st September 2009, 5:30 pm

When we get the tools to do distributed Twitter, etc., we get the tools to communicate in stanzas richer than those allowed by our decades-old email clients. Never mind Apple being anti-competitive, social networks are the peak of monopolistic behaviour today.

— Blaine Cook # 13th August 2009, 1:06 pm

Unlike progressive downloads, HTTP Live Streaming actually does stream content in real time, although there can be a latency of as much as 30 seconds. [...] the content to be broadcast is encoded into an MPEG transport stream and chopped into segments that are around ten seconds long. Rather than getting a continuous stream of new data over RTSP, the new protocol simply asks for the first couple clips, then asks for additional clips as needed. This works great through firewalls, and doesn’t require any special servers because any standard web server can deliver the chopped up video segments.

— Prince McLean # 9th July 2009, 12:52 pm

Perhaps it’s just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app.

— Garrett Murray # 22nd April 2009, 12:17 pm

The App Store has an inscrutable, time-consuming, whim-dependent approval process. The App Store newsgroup postings are full of angry claims that this is a bug, but I bet it’s a feature. If you can’t get an app approved until it’s working perfectly, and you have to wait a week or two -- or more -- between approval rounds, you’re much more likely to put a lot more effort in up front to get it right.

— Marc Hedlund # 12th April 2009, 1:49 pm

I can’t question that [the App Store] is probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies.

— Steven Frank # 17th August 2008, 11:15 pm

Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe (ADBE) that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos.

— Ben Charny # 6th June 2008, 9:08 pm

The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.

— Tim Bray # 3rd January 2008, 1:08 pm

The companies that couldn’t beat Microsoft have all died, and evolution has resulted in three very different types of companies that are each immune to Microsoft’s strategies in their own way. Yet all are still vulnerable to the same thing: a better product. For the end users, this is a good position for the industry to be in.

— Ian Hickson # 6th December 2007, 3:43 pm

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February.

— Steve Jobs # 17th October 2007, 6:04 pm

I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that “It Just Works.” By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the “Just Works” factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?

— Mark Pilgrim # 5th October 2007, 4:32 pm

For any song you already own on CD, Apple is asking you to pay three times for it in order to use it as a ringtone on your iPhone: once for the CD you’ve already purchased, again to buy a needless duplicate of the track from the iTunes Store, and a third time to generate the ringtone.

— John Gruber # 14th September 2007, 8:15 am

The other interesting thing about the 1.0.2 update is that Apple didn’t try to prevent the hacks that are out there [...] one would have assumed that Apple would have done *something* in this release as a sort of “shot across the bow” but they didn’t, which bodes well for a future, more open platform.

— Russell Beattie # 22nd August 2007, 10:08 pm

I heard that Foxconn—the place that makes the iPods and iPhones—consumes 3,000 pigs a day.

— Bunnie Huang # 14th July 2007, 12:59 pm

The music companies are in a dying business, and they know it. Sure, they act all cool because they hang around with rock stars. But beneath all the glamour these guys are actually operating two very low-tech businesses. One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution.

— Fake Steve Jobs # 5th July 2007, 12:03 pm