Android Marshmallow is out. What’s inside? Photo by Waleed Alzuhair on Flickr.
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A selection of 11 links for you. Hydrated for greater comfort. I’m charlesarthur on Twitter. Observations and links welcome.
Russian antitrust officials give Google deadline on Android bundling » Re/code
Here’s the edict from the Russian antitrust agency (pulled from Google Translate, since it has yet to update its English site): “In order to restore competition in the market … Google [must] adjust the agreements with the manufacturers of mobile devices to exclude from the agreements anticompetitive requirements limiting the installation of applications and services to other developers.”
Google declined to comment. It could face a fine, according to the Russian agency, of up to 15% of the revenue from the preinstalled apps. Morgan Stanley has estimated that Russia accounts for about $560m of Google’s annual revenue, or roughly 1%.
Yandex, which brought the case, said in a statement it was “satisfied” with the decision. “Our goal is to return fair play to the market – when apps are preinstalled on mobile devices based on how good or how popular they are rather than due to restrictions imposed by the owner of the operating system,” the company added.
As I read it, that would only apply to devices sold inside Russia after the November 18 deadline. Wonder what it means for grey imports. Obviously it can’t be retrospective.
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Learning more about Google’s self-driving cars made me terrified to ever drive again » Business Insider
less than 24 hours after Google’s presentation… I had to drive to and from Los Altos, California. What would otherwise have seemed like a completely typical trip suddenly made me realize just how pathetic a driver I am compared to one of Google’s cars.
Although I didn’t commit the cardinal sin of texting while driving, I was for the first time hyper-conscious of how often I let me eyes drift from the road, whether to check Google Maps on my phone or change the radio station. At one point, I needed to slam the brakes: I had been watching traffic, but deep in thought, making my reaction time slower than it should have been.
Suddenly, I couldn’t wait to get out of that car. The person driving next to me, yapping on her phone, immediately seemed like a threat. As did the fact that I was taking my eyes away from the road ahead to look at her. I have never loved driving, but recognizing all the normal minutiae as potentially dangerous distractions makes me hate it.
I think there are going to be two reactions to SDCs: those like D’Onfro, and those who enjoy the chance to beat the slowpoke super-cautious SDCs by driving aggressively.
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Building a city without open data » Medium
Citymapper explains how it began with open data for its travel planning service, but is now working on cities which don’t:
We’ve learned that the goal is not just to launch cities and win fancy prizes, although that’s fun. It’s about maintaining and improving data so that citizens and travellers can trust us to give them the best information when and where they need it.
And this is hard. The largest cities of our planet are complicated and evolve over time. They require dedicated focus. And we’ve found that open data is not enough to satisfy the information demands of the ever wanting smartphone user.
So we’ve been fixing data. And we’ve been improving data. And we’ve been adding data. And in the process of doing so we’ve developed a number of tools to help us scale and solve problems faster. And to empower our heroes to fix things and solve problems without the need for engineering.
We’ve done a lot with these tools. Well for one, we’ve used them to create some fake data…
They can show you what travel in London is going to be like with Crossrail. Terrific.
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Android 6.0 Marshmallow, thoroughly reviewed » Ars Technica
Google says that the new release has a “back to basics” motif with a focus on “polish and quality.” Marshmallow makes many long-requested features a reality with selectable app permissions, a data backup system that actually works, and the ability to format SD cards as Ext4, allowing the system to treat cards just like internal storage. Marshmallow is also prepared for the future with support for USB Type-C’s power delivery spec, a Fingerprint authentication API, and 4K display support. And, as with any Android release, there’s also lots of new Googley stuff—a slick new search interface and a contextual search mode called “Google Now on Tap,” for example.
While this is a review of the final build of “Android 6.0,” we’re going to cover many of Google’s apps along with some other bits that aren’t technically exclusive to Marshmallow. Indeed, big chunks of “Android” don’t actually live in the operating system anymore. Google offloads as much of Android as possible to Google Play Services and to the Play Store for easier updating and backporting to older versions, and this structure allows the company to retain control over its open source platform. As such, consider this a look at the shipping Google Android software package rather than just the base operating system. “Review: New Android stuff Google has released recently” would be a more accurate title, though not as catchy.
The 23rd version of Android, though I’m guessing that includes hundredth-decimal point updates. Amadeo’s predictions about how developers will abuse the battery-saving Doze mode are worth reading (as the whole thing is – allow plenty of time). Finally fixed permissions, eh? Only been waiting since 2012. And definitely read the last page if nothing else.
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Carriers are making more from mobile ads than publishers are » Medium
Rob Leathern crunched the numbers, based on the NY Times article about sites’ ad heft:
For each site, take Mb/minute x Avg per/Mb mobile data cost, and weight the average by each site’s monthly unique mobile visitors (so heavier data-using sites get more weight in our calculation) and normalize to one minute of time on each site, for a value ranging from $0.01 to $0.24 per minute. Compare that figure to our average revenue of $0.15/hour = $0.0025/minute and weight the average to get the result:
16.6x more in data costs to the user than mobile ad revenue to these top 50 news sites on average
Even if it isn’t exactly accurate, it’s showing an order of magnitude difference. Publishers get an absolute pittance from ads. Then again, people spend very little time on them – Leathern’s data (from public sources) says it’s about 3.5 minutes per month.
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We’re replacing comments with something better » Motherboard
Derek Mead, editor-in-chief of Motherboard:
Comment sections inspire quick, potent remarks, which too easily veer into being useless or worse. Sending an email knowing that a human will actually see it tends to foster thought, which is what we want. So in addition to encouraging that you reach out to our reporters via email or social media, you can now also share your thoughts with editors via letters@motherboard.tv. Once a week or thereabouts we’ll publish a digest of the most insightful letters we get.
The argument for comments has long been that a well-moderated section lowers the barrier to entry for readers to share their thoughts, positive or otherwise. In a vacuum, that sounds like a dream, but the key there is “well-moderated.” Good comment sections exist, and social media can be just as abrasive an alternative. But for a growing site like ours, I think that our readers are best served by dedicating our resources to doing more reporting than attempting to police a comments section in the hopes of marginally increasing the number of useful comments.
Ah, another one. Gresham’s Law continues to apply.
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Microsoft lowers its expectations for phones » WSJ
Shira Ovide on the forthcoming launch of new (high end?) Lumia phones:
Microsoft is betting that shoppers and mobile-application developers will find it alluring to buy Windows smartphones, or write applications for them, in tandem with Windows PCs. To lure app makers who have treated Windows smartphones as an afterthought, Microsoft has made it easier to repurpose their iPhone or Android apps for Microsoft phones.
People close to Microsoft say success at proliferating Windows 10—the company aims to have it installed on 1 billion devices by mid-2018—would give a huge lift to Windows smartphones. That would likely invert the pattern set by Apple, which found that people who bought iPhones were more willing to buy a Mac computer.
“The best thing for Windows phone devices is Windows 10 use,” said a person familiar with Microsoft’s strategy.
Microsoft executives hoping for a smartphone turnaround can point to a precedent: the company’s Surface line of tablet-plus-PC devices, a once-struggling hardware business that found its groove even without blockbuster sales.
“Let’s write an Uber app for the desktop!”
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I once was in Maps, but now I’m found » Unauthoritative Pronouncements
Joe Steel has some worthwhile objections to Apple Maps:
One of the things I’ve found puzzling about the design of the Apple Maps interface is that you can see traffic, and travel estimates supposedly influenced by traffic, in the route overview, but no traffic information is provided when turn-by-turn is on. All the roads are tranquil, neutral tones, and a serene blue path flows before you. It’s as if you’re in a kayak, on a river, being gently pulled along by the flow of water.
That’s not true, of course, because why would there be that much water in Los Angeles?
At heavy intersections, like Highland Ave. and Franklin Ave., you see no information about the flow of traffic in any direction. Instead of blue, you should see the streets run red with the blood of the Traffic God. Woe betide thee that commute on his most sacred of poorly designed intersections!
Tonight, Apple Maps routed me down Cahuenga to Highland. That sent me past the large, somewhat famous, amphitheater known as The Hollywood Bowl. Not a big deal, unless there’s an event at The Bowl. Guess what? There was an event! Van Halen! There were orange, safety cones and traffic cops directing at intersections. Apple Maps just herp-derped me through that. The only difference in the display was the estimated arrival time slowly ticking upward as I crawled.
On exactly one occasion I had Apple Maps present me with a yellow bar across the top, and Siri’s voice notified me that there was a delay due to an accident. (No alternate routing was provided on this occasion.) Waze has a leg up on Apple and Google when it comes to accident notifications. You even get notified about which lane the accident is in. Google sources some Waze data, but isn’t as specific. On the 101 N last night there was a very sudden slowdown, without warning, at a time of night when there shouldn’t be traffic at all. I waited patiently for Apple Maps to let me know what it was, and Apple Maps was oblivious to it. There was apparently a car accident that closed two lanes, and the car was being loaded on to a flatbed truck, so it wasn’t recent. Why Apple Maps kept silent about it, I don’t know.
The “not showing traffic when you’re en route” question puzzles me too. And TomTom, which is Apple’s data provider, does offer a (paid) service with alerts about traffic. I don’t think Apple’s privacy approach (it splits the route halfway and runs it under another random ID) is the cause, but it seems odd not to feed in traffic data in from other devices on the same route ahead of you.
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The death of advertising and the future of advertising » Tech.pinions
our research indicates the extremely valuable 18-35 yr old demographic ranks highest in our surveys of those who use an ad blocker. In the US particularly, 4 in 10 millennials admit to blocking internet advertising. Anyone in marketing will tell you this age bracket is highly sought after by marketers. In follow-up interviews I’ve had with this demographic, one of the driving motivations for use of an ad blocker is so they can block ads on YouTube. Watching videos on YouTube is a hefty part of millennials’ weekly activity and many indicated to me their desire to skip ads and get right to the video was centered on their feeling ads were a waste of time. They were going to YouTube to see a short video and did not feel a 5 or 15-second ad before a video was an efficient use of their time. I also asked millennials how they found out they could block ads on the web and the most common answer was from a friend. It seems ad blockers are going viral with many US millennials and it is unlikely this trend loses steam any time soon.
Remember too that those young millennials are highly likely to be using an iPhone – where they can now get an adblocker too.
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Reverse engineering proves journalist security app is anything but secure » Motherboard
On Friday, Motherboard reported that the new Reporta app, billed as “the only comprehensive security app available worldwide created specifically for journalists,” may not be secure at all.
After we published our story, Frederic Jacobs, Open Whisper Systems’s lead developer for their secure messaging app, Signal, spent his Friday night at home reverse engineering the Reporta binary for iOS. He published the results here. His conclusion was, in a tweet, “Sloppy engineering. Reporta is forensics & analytics rich.”
“Every action is logged,” he wrote in his report. Google Analytics is built into the app, which stores the logs in a local cache before uploading them to Google’s servers. Reporta also uses Twitter’s Crashlytics crash-reporting framework, he explained.
“If you’re building an app for journalists in ‘potentially dangerous conditions,’” Jacobs wrote in a Twitter direct message, “you shouldn’t be tracking your users that much. And certainly not giving out that information to third parties without asking for consent of their users.”
Also has variable use of https and on-device encryption.
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Windows 10 does not change the PC’s fate » Gartner
The market is still rebalancing. PC sales continue to decline, and tablets are the preferred consumption device. But new lightweight PCs have emerged that can compete with tablets as an all-day carry device. Made possible by Ivy Bridge architecture in 2013, which has improved steadily since, the new ultramobile premium devices, such as Microsoft’s Surface, now compete with tablets on four fronts; mobility, light weight, all-day batteries and lower price. Windows 10 is targeted at the last of the tablet’s differentiators – ease of use and empowering users.The global installed base for desktops and laptops will decline for at least five more years, nothing changes that. However, the PC ecosystem now has a Windows 10 device that can re-engage users in the thin, light, all-day ultramobile devices that pack the power of a PC. Ultramobile premium devices halt the decline in PC shipments in 2017 and halt the decline of the PC installed base in 2019.
If you’re into webinars, Gartner is doing a free one at 11am EDT today (Tues October 6) on the PC market’s impact on overall IT spending. “Webinar”. Hmm.
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 