App Store Guidelines ban police-spotting apps, raise bar on dating apps and more

Apple this week alerted developers to a new set of App Store Review Guidelines which detail which apps will be accepted or rejected, and what apps are allowed to do. The changes to the guidelines impact reviews, push notifications, Sign in with Apple, data collection and storage, mobile device management, and more, the company says.  Some of the more high-profile changes include the ability for apps to now use notifications for ads, stricter rules for dating and fortune-telling apps, and a new rule that allows Apple to reject apps that help users evade law enforcement, among other things.

This latter change to police spotting apps, surprisingly, didn’t get as much attention as push ads or dating apps changes — though it’s among the most notable of the new rules.

A previous version of the App Store Review Guidelines (seen in a snapshot here from January 2020) stated that apps could only display DUI checkpoints that were published by law enforcement agencies, and noted that apps shouldn’t encourage activities like “drunk driving” or “excessive speed.” These were reasonable concerns.

The revised rule (section 1.4.4.) now says that Apple will reject apps “used to commit or attempt to commit crimes of any kind by helping users evade law enforcement,” in addition to the existing language.

As you may recall, Apple last year got into hot water over its decision to reject a crowdsourced mapping app, HKmap, that was being used by Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors to evade police. Initially, the app had been approved, but was pulled a day after Apple was criticized by Chinese state media who said the app allowed “rioters…to go on violent acts.”

The app had allowed users to crowdsource information like the location of police, the use of tear gas, and other details about the protests, which were added to a regularly updated map. In a statement, Apple said it removed the app when it learned it was used to “target and ambush police.”

Above: Section 1.4.4, before and after

The new App Store Review Guidelines now puts Apple’s final decision over this sort of app into writing. Effectively, it bans apps that help users evade law enforcement. Arguably, avoiding police isn’t always about wanting to “commit crimes,” as the guidelines state, however. Amnesty International, for example, documented cases of police brutality including beatings and torture in police detention during the Hong Kong protests. The HKmap may have also allowed users to bypass police for their own safety.

Apple’s rule, therefore, is vague enough that it still allows the company itself to make the ultimate call over how an app is being used before deciding to reject or ban it.

Other worthy-of-note changes to the guidelines include an update (section 4.5.4) that allows app developers to send marketing messages (aka ads) in their push notifications. Before, these were banned. This change was immediately hit with user outcry, but it may not be as bad as it first seems.

Clearly, many apps were already spamming their users with ads, despite the prior ban. Now, they’re being required to get customer consent within their app’s user interface and to provide an opt-out mechanism in their app that lets users turn the push notification ads off. This change will at least force reviewers to look for mechanisms and opt-outs in apps offering in-app purchases or that rely on sales to generate revenues.

“Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges,” Apple also warns.

Another change adds “fortune-telling” and “dating” apps to the list of apps that are considered spam if they’re not providing a “unique, high-quality” experience. The relevant section (4.3) warns developers about the app categories that Apple thinks are oversaturated, and where it will be more critical with its reviews.

The guidelines also now include a new section (5.6.1) that instruct developers on how to respond to App Store reviews, reminding them to “treat customers with respect when responding to their comments” and not include irrelevant information, personal information, spam, and marketing in their messages.

And developers must now use Apple’s own API to solicit reviews, instead of other mechanisms. This will allow users to toggle off App Store review prompts across all apps from the iOS settings.

Finally, Apple reminded developers that all apps going forward, including app updates, will need to use the iOS 13 SDK as of April 30, 2020. Apps will need to support the “Sign in with Apple” login/sign-up option as of that date, too.

 

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Investors move from coronavirus woes to Biden wins as markets rally on Super Tuesday results

While the aftermath of Super Tuesday has left the Democratic Party riven between its more liberal and moderate wings, investors viewed last night’s results as a win for business and markets.

Shaking off the steady beat of bad news about the advance of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 within the U.S., major markets rose on Wednesday following the news of Joe Biden’s surge to the front of the Democratic Primary pack on Super Tuesday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up a whopping 1,173.45 or 4.5% to close at 27,090.86, while the Nasdaq was up 334 or 3.85% to close at 9018.09 and the S&P 500 was up 126.75 or 4.22% to 3130.12.

Biden’s moderate position contrasts with the more liberal policies endorsed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ positions on how to combat climate change and reshape the healthcare industry diverged sharply from the incrementalism that Joe Biden promoted, both as vice president and on the campaign trail this year.

It’s been a rocky road for the major stock indices, but over the past few days investors’ fears about the economic impact of the coronavirus seem to have stabilized as the U.S. government begins to take more decisive action.

Since hitting their troughs of the year on Friday, the Dow has risen 1,681.50 points, the Nasdaq is up 748.35 points and the S&P 500 is up 265.20 points — buoyed in part by today’s news.

Tech’s biggest companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, all saw their stocks rise on a day that the market soared. Health insurance companies and pharmaceuticals were among the day’s big winners buoyed both by the Biden victory and new congressional cash coming from the U.S. government to finance the development of tests, treatments and potentially vaccines for the new coronavirus.

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Five, the self-driving startup, raises $41M and pivots into B2B, away from building its own fleet

We are still years away from a time when fully-autonomous cars will be able to drive us from A to B, and the complexity of getting to that point is likely going to need hundreds of billions of dollars of investment before it becomes a reality.

That hard truth is leading to some shifts in the self-driving startup landscape. In the latest move, England’s Five (formerly known as FiveAI), one of the more ambitious companies in the space in Europe, is moving away from its original plan, of designing its own fully self-driving cars, and then running fleets of them in its own transportation service. Instead, it now plans to license its technology — starting with software to help test and measure the accuracy of a vehicle’s driving systems — that it has created to others building autonomous cars as well as the wider service ecosystem that will exist around that. As part of that pivot, today it’s also announcing a fresh $41 million in funding.

“A year and a bit ago we thought we would probably build the entire thing and take it to market as a whole system,” said co-founder and CEO Stan Boland in an interview. “But we gradually realised just how deep and complex that would be. It was probably through 2019 that we realised that the right thing to do is to focus in on the key pieces.”

The funding, a Series B, includes backing from Trustbridge Partners, insurance giant Direct Line Group and Sistema VC, as well as previous investors Lakestar, Amadeus Capital Partners, Kindred Capital and Notion Capital. The company has now raised $77 million and while it’s not disclosing its valuation, Boland said that it was definitely up on its last round. (Its Series A, in 2017, was for $35 million, and it didn’t disclose its valuation then, either.)

Five’s change in course is a significant development. The high-profile startup, founded by a team that had previously built and sold several chip companies to the likes of Broadcom, Nvidia and Huawei, had been the leading partner for a big government-backed pilot project, StreetWise, to test and work on autonomous driving systems across boroughs in London. The most recent phase of that project, running driver-assisted rides along a 19-km route across south London, got off the ground only last October after initially getting announced in 2018.

Five might continue to work on research projects like these, Boland said, but the primary business aim for the company will no longer be ultimately to build cars for themselves, but to work on tech that will be sold either to other carmakers or those building services catering to the autonomous industry.

For example, Direct Line, one of Five’s new investors and also a participant in the StreetWise project, could use testing and measurement to determine risk and pricing for insurance packages of different vehicles.

“Autonomous and assisted driving technology is going to play a huge role in the future of cars,” said Gus Park, MD of Motor Insurance at Direct Line Group, in a statement. “We have worked closely with Five on the StreetWise project, and we share a common interest in solving the formidable challenges that will need to be addressed in bringing safe self-driving to market. Insurers will need to build the capability to measure and underwrite new types of risk. We will be collaborating with Five’s world-class team of scientists, mathematicians and engineers to gain the insight needed to build safe, insurable solutions and bring the motoring revolution ever closer.” Park is also joining Five’s board with this round.

There were already a number of big players in the self-driving space when FiveAI launched — they included the likes of Waymo, Cruise, Uber, Argo AI and many more — and you could have argued that the writing was already on the wall then for long-term consolidation in the industry. Indeed, there have been some significant casualties in the meantime, including Drive.AI (which Apple acquired after it ran out of money), Oryx Vision and Quanergy.

Five’s argument for why a U.K. startup was in a good place to build and operate self-driving cars, and the tech underpinning it, was because of the complexity behind building localised systems: a big U.S. or Asian company might be able to map the streets in Europe, but it wouldn’t have as good of a feel for how people behaved on those roads. Added to that, Five firmly believed the economics of building and operating these cars would prove to be too high for wide-scale private ownership. Hence, the strategy (one adopted by many in the autonomous space) of building the technology for fleets, where transportation businesses, not individuals, would own the cars and recoup their investments by charging private individuals for rides.

Yet while it may have been easy to see the potential, the process of getting to that point proved to be too challenging.

“What’s happened in the last couple of years is that there has been an appreciation across the industry of just how wide and deep the challenges are for bringing self driving to market,” Boland said. “Many pieces of the jigsaw have to be assembled…. The B2C model needs billions [of investment], but others are finding their niche as great providers of technology needed to deliver the systems properly.”

As a ballpark figure, Boland believes that to get to a self-driving, Level 5 reality, we’ll need to see “hundreds of billions” of dollars of investment. But so far, collectively, self-driving startups have raised a mere $15 billion, according to figures from Crunchbase — significant money, but nowhere near the amounts that will be needed, and one argument for why only a very few, backed by huge automotive giants, will ever make it.

As FiveAI (named after the “Level 5” that self-driving systems attain when they are truly autonomous), the company built (hacked) vehicles with dozens of sensors and through its tests managed to build a significant trove of vehicle technology.

“We could offer tech in a dozen different areas that are hard for autonomous driving companies,” Boland said. Its testing and measuring tools point to one of the toughest challenges among these: how to assure that the deep learning software a company is using is correctly identifying objects, people, weather, and other physical factors when it may have never seen them before.

“We have learned a lot about the types of errors that propagate from perception into planning… and now we can use that for providing absolute confidence” to those testing the systems, he said.

Self-driving cars are one of the biggest AI challenges of our time: not only is the requirement to essentially build from the ground up computer systems that behave as well as (or ideally better) than multitasking humans behind the wheel; but the consequence of doing that wrong is not just a strange string of words, or some other kind of non sequitur, but injury or death. No surprise that there appears still a very long way to go before we see anything like Level 5 systems in action, but in the meantime, investors are willing to continue placing their bets. Partly because of how advanced it got with its car project on relatively little funding, Five remains an interesting company to investors, and Boland hopes that this will help it with its next round down the road.

“We invest in category-leading companies that are delivering transformational change wherever they’re located,” said David Lin of Trustbridge Partners in a statement. “As Europe’s leading self-driving startup, Five is the furthest ahead in developing a clear understanding of the scientific challenges and novel solutions that move the needle for the whole industry. Five has successfully applied Europe’s outstanding science and engineering base to create a world-class team with the energy and ambition to deliver safe self-driving. We are delighted to join them for this next phase of growth.”

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Finally dark mode arrives to soothe your 3am WhatsApps

Facebook-owned WhatsApp is finally giving users’ eyes a break by rolling out a dark mode setting to the messaging app — years after some other tech giants figured out how to offer a ‘dimmer pixels’ switch.

The messaging giant says the feature is rolling out globally in the “coming days” to the latest version of WhatsApp on both Android and iOS.

The setting can be enabled via system settings for users running the most recent versions of the respective smartphone OSes — or via the WhatsApp settings option on Android:

Users on Android 10 and iOS 13 can use dark mode by enabling it in system settings. Users on Android 9 and below can go into WhatsApp Settings > Chats > Theme > select ‘Dark’.

We’re told iPhone users not running the latest OS are out of luck. “Dark Mode will only be available to users on iOS 13 and above,” said a spokesman.

WhatsApp says the eye-soothing option has been the most requested feature from users everywhere.

Nonetheless it’s taken its sweet time to jump aboard the dark mode bandwagon.

YouTube, for example, announced a dark mode for its iOS app a full two years ago. While Twitter added an even darker mode to its dark mode more than a year ago. Google was also showing off a system-wide dark mode for Android Q last May. In June Apple followed suit, previewing iOS 13’s eye-soothing setting.

Apparently Facebook has low interest in moving fast and soothing things. But, er, it got there in the end…

In a blog post about the launch, WhatsApp writes that it spent its time “researching and experimenting” how to design a dark mode that would ensure “readability” and maintain “information hierarchy”.

Which is a fancy way of saying it didn’t want to reduce eye-strain so much that users might actually remember they need to fall asleep, rather than carry on WhatsApping through the night.

“When choosing colours, we wanted to minimise eye fatigue and use colours that are closer to the system defaults on iPhone and Android respectively,” it writes, before reversing the intent by expressing the counter design: “We wanted to help users easily focus their attention on each screen. We did this by using colour and other design elements to make sure the most important information stands out.”

Perhaps it’s clear why it took the company so long to ‘fix’ eye strain after all.

The Android flavor of the dark mode (below) also appears a smidge less dark on the contacts screen view vs the iOS version (pictured at the top of this post) — though that may be to do with differences in how the two OSes handle dark mode at the system level since WhatsApp said it wanted to reflect those choices.

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Finally dark mode arrives to soothe your 3am WhatsApps

Facebook-owned WhatsApp is finally giving users’ eyes a break by rolling out a dark mode setting to the messaging app — years after some other tech giants figured out how to offer a ‘dimmer pixels’ switch.

The messaging giant says the feature is rolling out globally in the “coming days” to the latest version of WhatsApp on both Android and iOS.

The setting can be enabled via system settings for users running the most recent versions of the respective smartphone OSes — or via the WhatsApp settings option on Android:

Users on Android 10 and iOS 13 can use dark mode by enabling it in system settings. Users on Android 9 and below can go into WhatsApp Settings > Chats > Theme > select ‘Dark’.

We’re told iPhone users not running the latest OS are out of luck. “Dark Mode will only be available to users on iOS 13 and above,” said a spokesman.

WhatsApp says the eye-soothing option has been the most requested feature from users everywhere.

Nonetheless it’s taken its sweet time to jump aboard the dark mode bandwagon.

YouTube, for example, announced a dark mode for its iOS app a full two years ago. While Twitter added an even darker mode to its dark mode more than a year ago. Google was also showing off a system-wide dark mode for Android Q last May. In June Apple followed suit, previewing iOS 13’s eye-soothing setting.

Apparently Facebook has low interest in moving fast and soothing things. But, er, it got there in the end…

In a blog post about the launch, WhatsApp writes that it spent its time “researching and experimenting” how to design a dark mode that would ensure “readability” and maintain “information hierarchy”.

Which is a fancy way of saying it didn’t want to reduce eye-strain so much that users might actually remember they need to fall asleep, rather than carry on WhatsApping through the night.

“When choosing colours, we wanted to minimise eye fatigue and use colours that are closer to the system defaults on iPhone and Android respectively,” it writes, before reversing the intent by expressing the counter design: “We wanted to help users easily focus their attention on each screen. We did this by using colour and other design elements to make sure the most important information stands out.”

Perhaps it’s clear why it took the company so long to ‘fix’ eye strain after all.

The Android flavor of the dark mode (below) also appears a smidge less dark on the contacts screen view vs the iOS version (pictured at the top of this post) — though that may be to do with differences in how the two OSes handle dark mode at the system level since WhatsApp said it wanted to reflect those choices.

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Apple Stores to host over 5,000 female-focused sessions in March for International Women’s Day

Apple is celebrating International Women’s Day with a full month of events across its retail stores, App Store and other platforms, including Apple TV, plus its Apple Books and Apple Podcasts applications. In March, Apple’s retail stores will host over 5,000 “She Creates”-branded sessions as part of its “Today at Apple” event series focused on highlighting female leaders, artists, entrepreneurs and creators.

Over 100 sessions in select stores will be led by notable women, including co-chair of the Women’s March Linda Sarsour, as well as musicians Meghan Trainor and Victoria Monét and designer Carla Fernández. Two new sessions featuring the music of Alicia Keys are also now available, including a Music Lab where participants deconstruct her song “Underdog” and remix their own version with GarageBand.

In addition, a new Art Lab session called “Playful Portraits” will draw inspiration from three female artists from New York (artist Jade Purple Brown), Tokyo (illustrator Niky Roereke), and Warsaw (illustrator Jula Borzucka). In these, participants will transform everyday photos into art using patterns, stickers, and colors using the third-party Procreate app on iPad Pro.

Elsewhere across Apple’s platforms, the company will celebrate International Women’s Day with a variety of activities including curated content on the App Store, Apple TV, Apple Podcasts, Apple Books, and Apple Watch.

 

Notably, the U.S. App Store will feature an App of the Day and Game of the Day highlighting the work of female developers, designers and entrepreneurs every day during the month of March.

So far, Apple has featured titles like female-focused investing platform Ellevest, inspirational podcast network app Seneca Women, and female-founded political donations tracker Goods Unite Us, for example. These are labeled with a “Women’s History Month” badge on the App Store’s Today tab. The App Store will also feature editorial content that celebrates women helping build apps and games.

On the Apple TV app, the company is offering an International Women’s Day round-up featuring collections that highlight women’s contributions to movies and TV, including Bold New Voices, Women Directing Women, Rebellious Icons, and Recent Watershed Moments in TV. It’s also offering extended trials to Starz, BritBox, History Vault, and Lifetime Movie Club, where customers can find female-focused shows and movies.

On the actual date of International Women’s Day, March 8, Apple will launch a curated collection of podcasts called “Changing the Narrative,” to feature women podcasters and shows.

Apple Books will showcase famous women’s favorite book picks, and Apple Watch users will be able to earn a special award and sticker set for Messages when they walk, run or wheelchair workout for 20 minutes or more on March 8.

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Apple agrees to settlement of up to $500 million from lawsuit alleging it throttled older phones

Apple Inc. has agreed to pay a settlement of up to $500 million, following a lawsuit accusing the company of intentionally slowing down the performance of older phones to encourage customers to buy newer models or fresh batteries.

The preliminary proposed class action lawsuit was disclosed Friday night and would see Apple pay consumers $25 per phone, as reported by Reuters.

Any settlement needs to be approved by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, who oversaw the case brought in San Jose, Calif.

For consumers, the $25 payout may seem a little low, as a new iPhone can cost anywhere from $649 to $849 (for a lower-end model). The cost may be varied depending on how many people sue, and the company is set to pay at least $310 million under the terms of the settlement.

For its part, Apple is denying wrongdoing in the case and said it was only agreeing to avoid the cost and burden associated with the lawsuit.

Any U.S. owner of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7 Plus or SE that ran on iOS 10.2.1 or any of the later operating systems are covered by the settlement. Users of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus which ran iOS 11.2 or later before Dec. 21, 2017 are also covered by the settlement.

Apple customers said their phone performance slowed down after they installed Apple software updates. The customers contend that Apple’s software updates intentionally degraded the performance of older models to encourage customers to unnecessarily upgrade to newer models or install new batteries.

Lawyers for Apple said that the problems were mainly due to high usage, temperature changes and other issues and that its engineers tried to address the problems as quickly as possible.

In February, Apple was fined $27 million by the French government for the same issue.

As we reported at the time:

A couple of years ago, Apple  released an iOS update (10.2.1 and 11.2) that introduced a new feature for older devices. If your battery is getting old, iOS would cap peak performances as your battery might not be able to handle quick peaks of power draw. The result of those peaks is that your iPhone might shut down abruptly.

While that feature is technically fine, Apple failed to inform users that it was capping performances on some devices. The company apologized and introduced a new software feature called “Battery Health,” which lets you check the maximum capacity of your battery and if your iPhone can reach peak performance.

And that’s the issue here. Many users may have noticed that their phone would get slower when they play a game, for instance. But they didn’t know that replacing the battery would fix that. Some users may have bought new phones even though their existing phone was working fine.

Shares of Apple were up more than 9% today in a general market rally.

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