Apple

Daniel Howley, Yahoo Finance:

Testifying in game developer Epic’s antitrust suit against Apple, Cook called the notion of putting third-party app stores on the iPhone “an experiment I wouldn’t want to run.” He’s not alone, either. According to New York University Tandon School of Engineering professor Justin Cappos, opening up the iPhone would imperil every iPhone owner.

“I think there’s a very clear line to draw to say that if you let basically people go and run their own effective app stores,” Cappos told Yahoo Finance, “even if they’re installing things like kind of within an app, the potential for malicious code and malicious behavior on the iPhone increases dramatically.”

This seems an obvious point. I’ve never seen it argued that Android is more, or even as secure as iOS. The well known issue is update fragmentation. The percentage of users on the latest version of iOS is always much, much higher than the percentage of users on the latest version of Android.

While Android has gotten better over the years at getting security updates onto user machines, there’s still no comparison. Apple is aggressive about getting their latest iOS onto more and more phones, and has clearly made strides in expanding the number of older phones that can run the latest iOS.

Though the issue of scammy apps on the App Store continues to exist, it’s important to distinguish those subscription hacking apps from apps that take over your phone in some, more malicious way.

Apple has done a great job in locking down the iPhone, from making you more aware of an app’s clipboard copy and paste, to locking down your microphone, camera, and location data. Opening up the App Store to side loading would make users much more open to malware.

That said, the weak point in this argument is the Mac. From this CNBC piece, talking about Craig Federighi and Mac malware:

On Wednesday, Federighi said that the user base of the Mac is about one-tenth the user base of the iPhone. Apple said in January that it had 1 billion active iPhone users.

And:

“For iOS, we aspired to create something far more secure. All indications are that we have succeeded in doing so,” Federighi said. He said that Apple found and removed about 130 different kinds of malware on Macs last year that had infected hundreds of thousands of user systems, compared with three kinds of malware that had infected iPhones.

Apple has a model to look at. More malware on the platform that allows side loading. As you’d expect.

Watch the video embedded in this tweet:

https://twitter.com/keleftheriou/status/1397288720357679104

I’ve heard the argument that there are just too many apps in the App Store to police properly. But surely there’s some sort of threshold test, perhaps assisted by machine learning or some form of bounty or crowdsourcing, that would flag these sorts of scams.

And the bit about preventing someone from tapping a low star rating. A bad look. I struggle to understand how this is possible.

Apple:

Apple today previewed Apple Via del Corso, the newest retail location nestled in one of Rome’s most vibrant areas. As the 17th store to open in Italy, Apple Via del Corso will serve as an all-new, centrally located space for Apple team members to provide best-in-class service and support to the local community. The store preserves the grand Palazzo Marignoli, paying homage to Rome’s rich history of art and culture, and making it one of Apple’s most significant restoration projects.

Just look at the images embedded in the linked post. This is a spectacular Apple Store, blending beautifully into ancient surroundings.

My favorite part of all is the video, about halfway down that gives you a bit of a guided tour through the store. This is definitely on my bucket list.

Zak Doffman, Forbes:

Despite me telling my iPhone “never” to allow Facebook access to my location, despite me checking Facebook online to confirm it knows “location history for mobile devices” is set to “off.” Facebook continues to exploit a loophole, harvesting photo location tags and IP addresses, all of which it will, in its own words, “collect and process.”

Loophole?

I took a photo with my iPhone and then uploaded that to my Facebook account. I used Facebook’s app on my iPhone, the same app that has been told “never” to access my location, the same account that knows I have this switched off. But Facebook still collects the location tag from that photo, along with my IP address.

And:

Facebook and Instagram do in fact strip the metadata, the so-called EXIF information, from photos that are saved to their platforms. You can see this, because if you save a photo from Instagram or your Facebook albums onto your phone, there will be no location information. That has been replaced with Facebook’s own codes.

And so, you might assume that Facebook has deleted this data. Wrong. If you go to your Facebook privacy settings and select “your Facebook information,” you can download a copy of the data it holds. If you select “photos and videos,” you will see the data that Facebook saved from the images you uploaded.

This is heinous. Read the whole piece. There’s a lot more detail here, but in a nutshell, the loophole is Facebook’s access to your photo EXIF data.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple today released iOS 14.6 and iPadOS 14.6 to the public. The iOS 14.6 update isn’t quite as significant as the iOS 14.5 update that preceded it, but it still introduces a number of notable new features. We’ve highlighted everything that’s new in iOS and iPadOS 14.6 below.

There’s Lossless and Spatial Audio. Support for. But the switch to turn it on won’t be flipped ’til June.

Apple Card Family. See this post for details on that.

Podcast subscriptions, AirTag Find My support. Good info there.

But down at the very bottom, there’s this:

iPhone users with the Voice Control accessibility option enabled can unlock their iPhones for the first time after a restart using only their voice after installing iOS 14.6.

I’ve never used Voice Control before. Definitely going to experiment with this. Unlock your iPhone after a restart with your voice. That sounds like a huge assistive win.

From this Apple support document:

Apple Card Family lets you co-own your Apple Card account with one member of your Family Sharing group. You can share your credit line with a co-owner and build credit together as equals. You can also share your Apple Card with members of your Family Sharing group, including teens and adults. Everyone on the shared account can use Apple Card and view their spending. Account owners and co-owners can see a participant’s activity, set transaction limits, and more. And there’s a single monthly bill.

Co-ownership involves risk! From the footnote:

Each co-owner is individually liable for all balances on the co-owned Apple Card including amounts due on the existing co-owner’s account before the accounts are merged. Each co-owner will be reported to credit bureaus as an owner on the account. In addition, co-owners will have full visibility into all account activity and each co-owner is responsible for the other co-owner’s instructions or requests.

As to participants, they are not liable for their charges.

Coming July 2021: You will be able to invite another Apple Card owner to combine credit limits and form one co-owned account.

You can have up to 6 people (yourself and 5 others) on an account.

Apple makes it easy to add co-owners and participants. Watch the videos below (very short) for details.

Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

When you go to the HomePod settings in the Home app with the latest version of iOS, there’s now the option to set timers right from there without having to ask Siri. This new option is located right below the HomePod alarms.

Obviously, you could long (since iOS 12) set timers using Siri. But now you can see the timers count down, at a glance. I use Siri timers when I’m cooking and I always have to ask Siri “How much time?” to get a sense of things.

After adding the timer, you can see the countdown for all of them in the Home app and cancel them from there as well. In addition to iOS 14.7, this also requires HomePod Software 14.7 installed on your HomePods.

Really glad to see this interface. Once you go beyond a single timer, asking Siri about timers is just awkward. This is a great add.