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Developers, Developers, Developers

Tim Cook kicked off Apple’s developer conference on his home turf in Cupertino, addressing an arena of Memoji. 'Twas a friendlier crowd than he enjoyed at his recent away game—Epic v. Apple—in which he defended Apple’s approach to developers from a courtroom in Oakland.

First, a WWDC 2021 recap

Apple services were the star. 

• Video: FaceTime will get voice isolation, a scheduling feature, cross-platform support, and spatial audio that makes it sound like call participants are in the same room. 
• Audio: Siri is headed to third-party devices. AirPods’ Conversation Boost could assist people who have mild hearing loss.
• On-device processing: Your iPhone will handle more machine learning tasks, such as Siri banter or batched push alerts. No relays to the cloud needed.
• Search: Apple’s Live Text AI will recognize and index text in your photos, which you can search for on your iPhone.
• Privacy: Apple introduced Private Relay, a VPN-like service, as a part of its iCloud+ subscription bundle.
• Identity: Use Apple Wallet to unlock supported cars, houses, and hotel rooms...or flash a digitized driver's license in the TSA line. 

Dept. of Developer Diplomacy 

Since WWDC is a developer conference, let’s consider the state of affairs. Terms like “in-app payments” are currently top of mind for not just engineers but also for lawyers and lobbyists. Tech companies aplenty have publicly criticized Apple’s App Store bylaws and practices.

But the hard feelings aren’t shared by everyone. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said his company gladly pays Apple’s 30% take rate. RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, whose company makes subscription tools for mobile developers, tells us many developers are fine with current arrangements. 

“In some ways, I think Apple is super developer-friendly,” Eiting said. “In other areas, their market dominance is starting to bump into things.” To elaborate: 

1. iOS is the #1 place to build, he said, leading Android by 13 percentage points in North American market share. iPhone owners also spend more money. 
2. Rather than worry about the 30% figure, Eiting argued that “there’s more leverage in finding 30% more users.” 

Zoom out

An Epic v. Apple decision isn’t expected until later this year. But the EU has already ruled that Apple Music/App Store practices violate competition law. So...Apple’s mobile marketplace of the future could look different by decree. 

If the App Store is pried open or iOS is forced to accommodate third-party marketplaces, it could lead to development challenges. 

“Amazon, Huawei, and Samsung all have their own app stores,” Eiting says. “They’re all, like, parallel hells.” Since you can’t write once and deploy everywhere, navigating all those infernos requires more developer bandwidth, without necessarily improving the end user experience.—RD

CLOUD

Fastly and the furious

On Tuesday morning Fastly one-upped Kim Kardashian and, for around an hour, actually broke the internet. 

Fastly, one of the world’s largest cloud computing companies, had an outage that shut down its CDN service, affecting major websites including the New York Times, HBO Max, and the British government’s homepage. 

CDNs and what they mean to you

Do you like the internet? Do you like fast internet? Of course you do. Without a strong infrastructure of content delivery networks (CDNs), website loading times would be too slow to stream Netflix or argue with Reddit strangers.

CDNs are geographically distributed networks of servers that handle processing and speed up internet delivery. In practice, CDNs make website content like HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos load faster. They also reduce bandwidth costs, handle more traffic, and provide a little security protection. 

• CDNs don’t actually host web content, but instead keep cached versions of it at the ready in edge servers.

Big picture: Fastly is one of a number of significant CDN providers that help form the infrastructure of the internet. And while the outage shows the breadth of its reach, it’s far from the biggest player—Akami, Cloudflare, and Amazon CloudFront take up 75% of revenue in CDN space, per Intricately.—JM 

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HARDWARE

Meanwhile, in Silicon Saxony...

Bosch has lifted the wraps on a ~$1.2 billion chip fab in Dresden, capital of the eastern German region of Saxony. The world’s largest auto supplier, Bosch builds brakes, powertrains, and many more parts for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs...or carmakers). 

• Bosch touted the plant as the “single biggest investment” in its 135-years-young company life. 
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU tech czar Margrethe Vestager attended the ceremony virtually. 

Slated to begin production six months ahead of schedule in July, the factory will churn out chips for vehicles and power tools. The Dresden plant itself runs on what Bosch calls “AIoT.” We ran that through the techno-gobbledygook translator and came out with: The 77,500-square-foot factory is highly automated and connected.

Bottom line: Ranking #95 on this year’s Fortune 500, Bosch derives 59% of total sales from its “mobility solutions” division. 

Vehicles demand more computers and code by the day. As tech companies circle the auto supply chain, the German giant is investing to keep pace.—RD

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Ford revealed the Maverick hybrid-electric pickup truck, which will start at $19,995 and supposedly get 40 mpg in the city. 

Quote: “There’s no competition at this price point.”—Hau Thai-Tang, Ford’s chief product platform and operations officer, describing the Maverick in a conversation with Ryan 

Read: An explainer on how the current ransomware crisis came about. 

Analysis: Barron’s has been doing their thing reporting on the financial world for 100 years, which makes them extremely well equipped to provide cutting analysis of finance’s future. Tesla’s PR problem is the latest—read more here.*

WEIB

• Tesla trucking vet and top Musk lieutenant Jerome Guillen has left the company. 
• SoftBank wants to take out a $7.5 billion loan against its proposed ARM sale, which faces heavy regulatory scrutiny (h/t Bloomberg). 
• Bank of England warns that digital currencies threaten financial stability.
• The FBI and Australian Federal Police ran AN0M, an encrypted messaging service, for over three years, The Record reports. 

FROM THE CREW

There’s a lot of talk about what automation will be able to achieve in the future, but what are the robots up to right now?

On June 24, Hayden will sit down with two roboticists to find out. She’ll chat with...

• Ayanna Howard, the current Dean of Ohio State University’s College of Engineering, founder of assistive robotics company Zyrobotics, and former NASA roboticist
• Clara Vu, cofounder and CTO of VEO Robotics, which builds products that enable humans and robots to work alongside one another in a safe way.

Click here to RSVP.

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ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• A world tour of new crypto rules and regs
• Federal facial recognition ban will be reintroduced ‘soon,’ Sen. Jeff Merkley says
• Ex-OpenAI employees create AI safety and research startup Anthropic