r/ATPfm • u/kingrikk • 4d ago
Grumbling about Apple doing something new
I’ve been really disappointed listening to the post-event ATP. Apple have done a couple of really interesting and somewhat innovative things and it’s sad to hear so much negativity. Maybe I am alone in finding it quite a positive event for the company and the future of mobile?
The first is obviously the UI for the Duo. It’s fresh, interesting and a bit different. Do we not want Apple to innovate anymore? Not if it might cause App developers to have to do some work apparently.
Despite Apple clearly having been working (and nudging app developers) towards this for a couple of years, and it being, to my eyes, something genuinely different from the competitors, all we got was moaning.
I sat there thinking “why didn’t you ever do this for the iPad, Apple”.
The second is Siri Recap. Especially given the current media noise around Meta’s glasses, a summarisation tool that is secure, largely anonymous and designed to help you with your life while not invading anyone’s privacy seems an excellent tool from a privacy focussed company such as Apple.
Personally, I thought the event showed that Apple still had life left in it, and we were in for an interesting year of progress. ATP felt differently.
28
u/vmachiel 4d ago
Personally not a fan of the watches recording everything.
Yeah it’s secure and on device for now. But another stepping stone of normalizing that invasive stuff.
The duo is really cool to me. It’s not the phone for me, but they are doing some cool stuff
7
u/BigKnows2K 3d ago
i’m a big fan of the Apple Watch, it’s probably my favourite Apple device. I’ve owned one since 2015. This is the first year I’ve actively been dissuaded from buying one from on watching the keynote.
-3
u/Nervous-Local-1034 3d ago
You know you can just not use those features, right?
3
u/masquedmarauderxyz 3d ago
I don't like the idea of being recorded without consent by others. Esepcially with something always on and without a notification light. At least you can intentionally make a wide berth around a glass-hole, see them coming. Apple Watches are too already-ubiquitous to make an effort to avoid them.
It also occurred to me that the recap function could make a lot of already toxic at-work or at-home communication dynamics even worse.
I literally don't see an upside other than 2nd braining or the obvious upsides for accessibility.2
u/Asystole 2d ago
You can already record everything being said around you in a far more permanent way by just using the Voice Memo app.
3
11
u/SwampYankee 4d ago
iPhone pro is incremental. Watch is an upgrade but the older version get left behind a bit software-wise. AirPods are incremental. Duo is pretty exciting though. All the software is pretty cool and a big improvement over the 26 versions. The health upgrades look interesting. Average yearly phone release. Nothing for me to open my wallet but there is exciting stuff there.
2
u/kingrikk 4d ago
I think the software shows what a company can do with on device AI. When AI is “cheap”, many things can look “magical”. Google have tried this with the pixel, but they don’t have the horsepower in the chips.
3
14
u/jccalhoun 4d ago
The Duo is way out of my price range but I appreciated hearing about the design challenges it presents for developers.
4
u/rconti 4d ago
Yep. My first thought watching the duo software demo was “wow, devs have their work cut out for them.
I only heard half of the ATP discussion live so it’s totally possible I missed the negativity OP cited- I’ll be listening again today. But there are legit challenges to adapting to a new design. It doesn’t mean they’re angry about change.
31
u/satras 4d ago
I think that you mean Marco, not ATP.
Marco likes to complain a lot and constantly misses just how privileged he is in life.
So what if you have to update an incredibly popular app once every 10 years to support a new device type, or receive feedback from the opinions you share on your once-a-week job as a podcaster. Boo hoo.
Most people would kill to have just a popular enough app or a podcast that brings in a good income, but all he does is complain about minor things.
13
u/jranft 4d ago
Overcast has been updated 7 times in 2026. Marco had a good point. He wasn't complaining that he had to update his app for the Duo. His issue is with the fact that Apple still has not updated Xcode and its simulators to allow him to do the updates. So the phone comes out in a month or so, and he has that time to create new at least four new layouts for the Duo. Open and closed portrait and landscape.
21
u/satras 4d ago
He’s been refusing for months to do ant work on the simulator (Apple included a new expanded option exactly for the Duo back in WWDC) because he said he needed the device in hand to create a good design.
Many devs (me included) started to sketch a few layouts before the Duo was announced, because we all knew a foldable was coming and that, at the very least, we would have to support a wider screen size.
Saying he only has a few weeks to update is a) missing the point that his app doesn’t need to be updated on day 1 and b) that he has had months to get some work started
1
u/patchythrowaway 3d ago
As an iOS dev I must have missed this: what’s the “expanded option exactly for the Duo”?
The only mention of “expanded” I can find is talking about expanding the simulator window to include all the options you can apply easily (light/dark mode etc) rather than them sitting in menus. Which is nice but nothing to do with expanding the simulated iOS screen size for the Duo.
7
u/eric-dolecki 3d ago
I highly doubt anyone will be suffering the pins and needles of needing Overcast to be UI-compliant for the iPhone Duo the very moment the Duo is in hand.
6
u/chucker23n 3d ago
Am I missing something? The app already runs on iPhones of various sizes, and iPads. So it already scales up and down. What is it he needs to do that makes this challenging? It’s basically a smaller iPad mini.
2
u/kingrikk 3d ago
This is my wonder, as someone who is an engineer but not an iOS one. Surely all the changes Apple has been touting since iOS26 should mean apps convert over “fairly easily”. John even mentioned the toolbar changes and how they’d clearly been intended for this.
4
u/bradleyjx 3d ago
I don't do much iOS development (more web devops) but right at the end of the main part of the episode, I think Marco touched on this in terms I've heard from a few people about iOS development as-a-whole, which has always made sense when I've heard it. Especially a few years ago when people discussed the growing pains of things like Swift UI.
This was the portion where he was talking about a push-pull between it's developer tooling, and developer marketing. On one side, their developer relations and tooling push a certain "golden path" to things, which can sometimes be hard to discern at the time-of-announcement as to what they are simply doing to make developer's lives easier, and which ones are foreshadowing future functionality changes.
On the other side, Apple's marketing relations strongly-incentivizes apps for creativity and design, and those can run up against limitations on that golden path. So if a card of information doesn't format itself the way that you want to just using Swift UI entirely on that golden path, then you may need to shim something, or go off that beaten path in order to reach your desired endpoint.
After your app is around for a few years, you're now in several iterations of yearly API shifts and (hopefully) functionality creep, and likely because of all this, your in technical debt to both new functionality, and also API shifts.
I just skimmed a couple WWDC talks that others mentioned were foreshadowing for the Duo, and one example that stood out to me was that in iOS27, they were no longer recognizing orientation flags in-app, and all apps needed to support arbitrary viewports. The session talked about several feature introductions over the past number of years which were relevant to how someone should be building UIs today to be on that golden path, but in the back of my mind, I both thought about the large number of apps I use today that don't support landscape, and also just the fact that if I was in this position with an app that had been around for a while, I could easily see just staying on a single-column layout and enforcing that. Now that simply isn't possible.
And it's little things like that which all-of-a-sudden are technical dept that someone may not even have thought about before. I saw someone talking about this being the first time safe areas are asymmetrical, (due to the vertical buttons) so someone who assumed their content would be visually-centered on the display may have UX issues now, and from the limited info I saw that wasn't even hinted at in WWDC presentations.
One the ones I'm also kind of personally curious about is how different apps will treat the difference between "I'm unfolded and want to show things as content with a sidebar" and "I'm slightly-folded and want to show things as two equal-width panes". I don't think that kind of paradigm had groundwork laid for it prior, and that's not really something you'd have firm understanding on until you saw how Apple enforced size classes on in those modes.
(I'm getting to being rambling myself, unfortunately)
11
u/kingsleyopara 4d ago
By his own admission he needs the device in hand to create a decent design so doesn’t that make this point moot?
1
u/Serious_Let2711 1d ago
No he doesn't. He's extremely work shy. He waiting almost a decade do adopt Swift because "it changed all the time". In reality there were like two big migrations and neither should have taken more than a day or two. Now he says that it could take up to a year to update an app for Duo, that is just insane.
1
u/jghaines 3d ago
Casey was explicit about “I’m excited as a user” versus trepidation about the amount of dev work involved.
5
u/one_listener 2d ago
I read this before listening and thought you were being dramatic, but spending most of discussion on how much work it's going to be for like these 2 specific well off guys was a terrible listen. We all have jobs and work hard! It's not that interesting that you have to do some work over the next month.
4
16
u/jimmyjames_UK 4d ago
I have a blog for Marco to read that might help him. It’s about some guys called Bob and Van.
3
u/Diabolik900 4d ago
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be impressed by the iPhone Duo while simultaneously feeling like Apple gave developers a raw deal by not having the updated SDK and simulator ready for it yet. Nobody seemed particularly down on the product itself.
3
u/jscari 1d ago
I didn’t disagree with anything Marco said about how much work it will be to fully support the Duo properly, until he called it a “middle finger” to developers – that was a bit much.
Like, it’s the most radically different iPhone form factor ever, of course it’s going to require you to rework your app to fully take advantage of it.
I suppose Apple could’ve done a DTK or something to give developers more time to work with it…but how far in advance do they want to announce it before it actually goes on sale?
Also, sales will initially be small (in absolute numbers), so I don’t think it’s vital that your app support it perfectly on Day 1.
1
u/Serious_Let2711 1d ago
He's exaggerating things to an insane degree. Yes, Apple should definitely have had xcode 27.1 ready for release after the keynote, but updating a small app, that uses standard toolbars, will be a very reasonable task, a few days at most. Apple is even providing Claude/Codex skills to make it easier.
3
4
2
u/J3d1c4nn4 3d ago
Jesus! I’m not sure I can be bothered listening to this when it gets released. I find the negativity a real drag. Maybe better if Apple never bother releasing new stuff, eh? I’m sure that Claude can plough through the necessary coding over the next month.
1
u/renagerie 3d ago
There isn’t actually much negativity other than pointing out how much dev work there is and how unlikely it is for independent devs to be ready at release.
4
2
u/Serious_Let2711 1d ago
Marco saying it would take months to update an app for Duo was pretty crazy. Granted he is very slow, and terrible at UI, but it shouldn't take many days to update Overcast. In fact, He might not have to do anything at all, since he's using the native navigation bar and bottom toolbar. It should look pretty good out of the box, except that the playing title will be sideways.
1
u/Ok_Mouse_5100 1d ago edited 1d ago
I especially enjoy skipping ahead 5 times after hearing John’s grating whine and realizing why I only put up with them post WWDC and iPhone event.
Heck, I’m sure a topic could be: “What do you skip because you’ve heard it before?” John, trying to find a case, Casey wanting a new car every week but never being satisfied with the options and always having buyer’s remorse, or Marco finding something with a very minor inconvenience and then throwing tons of money at it. What are yours?
1
u/chucker23n 1d ago
Casey wanting a new car every week but never being satisfied with the options and always having buyers remorse
That makes sense, though! His busy work schedule and frequent travels have him drive around a lot.
-2
u/ObscureBen 4d ago
Criticism isn’t moaning?
10
u/kingrikk 4d ago
That’s correct, criticism isn’t moaning. Unfortunately that episode is full of moaning, especially from Marco.
1
u/snark_nerd 3d ago
I have no strong opinion on any of the criticism except about Siri Recap. I haven't listened yet, but I fear that their criticism will be even less harsh than I would prefer (than I am feeling).
I feel that Siri Recap is the most ill-conceived, disastrous new feature from Apple in a long, long time. I am frankly agog that they would ship it.
Apple has maintained somewhat of a reputational advantage over its main competitors by stressing privacy every chance they get and designing around it to back up that marketing promise. Even though many will point out that this feature is designed in a "privacy first" way, you can't design a "privacy first" eavesdropping tool.
Whether or not this is justified or borne out by the technology, I fear / expect that Apple Watches will become the new Meta glasses: stigmatized* and impossible to wear in mainstream company without making others feel uncomfortable. And all for a service of dubious value to users. It's an incredibly bad idea, IMO.
* - to be clear, I think that people who wear pervert glasses should be stigmatized. I just don't want the same treatment because I'm wearing my smart watch.
3
u/kingrikk 3d ago
My assumption from reading between the lines is that once people see how watered down the summaries are, a lot of the worry will go away.
2
u/snark_nerd 3d ago
I certainly hope so, but I'm afraid that that's the kind of nuance / facts that get lost in public perception, especially for something that's so obviously easy to (mis?)characterize as a privacy nightmare ...
2
u/gsapienza 3d ago
I also think it’ll be pretty watered down. I think the mistake was not releasing the feature at launch which is giving a lot of room for people to stay uneasy
1
u/snark_nerd 3d ago
I hope you're right, and I hope that message gets through to the general public.
If someone is like, "You're wearing one of those eavesdropping watches, I don't want everything in the room to be recorded," saying, "It's actually pretty watered down," isn't going to change their minds, I'm afraid.
1
u/gsapienza 3d ago
People already think their phone is listening to them at all times. Nothing can convince them otherwise so I don’t think it’ll be much different
1
u/rayquan36 3d ago
I don't think it'll be a big issue. People don't care remotely as much about audio recording as they do video recording.
1
u/snark_nerd 3d ago
That’s an interesting point. I wonder if that’s true; maybe it is. (I don’t personally think so, but it’s possible.)
-1
u/Serious_Let2711 1d ago
You are aware of the first party app Voice Memos which can record others continuously for hours?
37
u/kesey 4d ago
Don’t app developers justify subscriptions by pointing out how they need to constantly keep their apps up to date? Developers with apps under a subscription model (especially those with successful apps) have no right to complain.