Makena Kelly, The Verge:

> The bipartisan “Open App Markets Act,” introduced by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) would ban app stores from forcing developers to use the store’s payment systems. It would also bar companies from punishing developers that offer lower prices on a separate app store or through their own payment systems, along the lines of Apple’s public dispute with Epic Games. Notably, the bill would also make it unlawful for companies like Apple to use non-public data from their stores to build competing products against companies using their service.

Lots to think about here. First thought is how much support this bill would get from streaming services like Netflix, if it meant they could sign up customers and let those customers pay and track their bills in-App, without having to run those funds through Apple.

Same with gaming services. And developers who want to offer related services/products for sale through their apps.

And that last bit, about building competing products, is this an anti-Sherlock bill?

From one of the bill’s authors:

> “For years, Apple and Google have squashed competitors and kept consumers in the dark—pocketing hefty windfalls while acting as supposedly benevolent gatekeepers of this multi-billion dollar market,” Blumenthal said in a statement Wednesday. “This bipartisan bill will help break these tech giants’ ironclad grip, open the app economy to new competitors, and give mobile users more control over their own devices.”

And from Apple:

> “Since our founding, we’ve always put our users at the center of everything we do, and the App Store is the cornerstone of our work to connect developers and customers in a way that is safe and trustworthy.” The spokesperson continued, “At Apple, our focus is on maintaining an App Store where people can have confidence that every app must meet our rigorous guidelines and their privacy and security is protected.”

The law of unintended consequence applies here. If this bill goes through, will this break the iPhone’s very foundation, change the nature of what distinguishes iPhone from Android, breaks Apple’s ecosystem?

Apple Machine Learning white paper (via MyHealthyApple):

> Respiratory rate (RR) is a clinical metric used to assess overall health and physical fitness. An individual’s RR can change due to normal activities like physical exertion during exercise or due to chronic and acute illnesses. Remote estimation of RR offers a cost-effective method to track disease progression and cardio-respiratory fitness over time.

In a nutshell, the research worked out a process for using AirPods to estimate respiratory rate (RR), with the goal of tracking RR over time, getting a sense of things like fitness, disease progression, chronic breathlessness.

This sort of work makes me hopeful for a future with more sophisticated health care available remotely.

Good read, but:

> In ‌iPadOS 15‌, today’s beta changes the shading of the tab interface in Safari in an effort to make it more clear which tab is the active tab.

In the image that Juli Clover posts, there clearly is a difference between the grey of the active tab and the grey shade used in the inactive tab. But I am running that same beta and I do not see those results.

Here’s a screenshot of my tab collection, this one in private mode. And here’s a generic set of tabs in public mode.

The lack of tab contrast is one major issue for me. The other is the wild range of colors that can make picking out a specific tab a nightmare for some people. Check the video below:

https://www.twitter.com/stevex/status/1423604246348500997

There’s a lot going on here. I do appreciate that Apple gave us a setting to keep a separate address bar above all the tabs. How about a setting to simplify the tab structure, with the main use of color a high shade contrast to clearly mark the current tab?