As more and more devices around us sprout microphones and "smart" assistant software that listens for commands, various problems are emerging. Much attention is lavished on the Big Brother aspects of what amounts to always-on ambient surveillance, and that is indeed a development that is worth examining. However, today I would like to focus on another aspect of voice-controlled user interfaces: when a system has no easy way of telling you what its capabilities are – how do you know what to ask it?

The answer to this question entails discoverability, and I would like to illustrate this somewhat abstract concept with a picture of a tap. This particular tap lives in my employers’ newly refurbished London office, and I challenge you to work out how to get sparkling water from it.

The answer is that you press both taps – and now that I’ve told you, you may perhaps notice the pattern of bubbles along the bottom of the two taps. However, without the hint, I doubt you would ever have worked it out.

Siri, Alexa, Cortana¹, and their ilk suffer from the same problem – which is why most people tend to use them for the same scant handful of tasks: setting timers, creating reminders, and playing music. Some users are willing to experiment with asking them to do various things, but most of us have enough going on in our lives that we can’t take the time to talk to very stupid robots unless we have a reasonable certainty of our requests being understood and acted upon.

Worse, even as existing capabilities improve and new ones are added, users generally stick to their first impressions. If they tried something a couple of years ago and it didn’t work then, as far as they’re concerned it doesn’t work, even if that particular capability has been added in the meantime.

It’s only a power user if it’s from the Puissance region of France. Otherwise, it’s just a sparkling prosumer.

— Dominic 🇪🇺🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 (@dwellington) July 16, 2019

I generally find out about new Siri features from Apple-centric blogs or podcasts, but that’s only because I’m the sort of person who goes looking for that kind of thing. I use Siri a fair amount, especially while driving, although AirPods have made me somewhat more willing to speak commands into thin air, so I do actually take advantage of new features and improved recognition. For most people, though, Siri remains the butt of jokes, no matter how much effort Apple puts into it.

This is not a competitive issue, either; almost everyone I know with an Alexa just treats it as a radio, never using any other skills beyond the first week or so of ownership.

The problem is discoverability: short of Siri or Alexa interrupting you ("excuse me, have you heard the good news?"), there isn’t any way for users to know what they can do.

This is why I am extremely sceptical of the claims that voice assistants are the next frontier. Even beyond the particular issues of people in an open-plan office all shouting at their phones, and assuming perfect recognition by the AIs² themselves, voice is an extremely low-bandwidth channel. If my hands and eyes are available, those are far better input and output channels than voice can ever be. Plus, graphical user interfaces are far better able to guide users to discover their capabilities, without degenerating into phone menu trees.

Otherwise, you have to rely on the sorts of power users who really want sparkling water and are willing to spend some time and effort on figuring out how to get it. Meanwhile, everyone else is going to moan and gripe, or bypass the tap entirely and head for the bottled water.

Apple’s terrible, bad, no good updated guidance (not actual results yet, note) was pretty much unavoidable – as were the reams of commentary on the subject. Nevertheless, I had some thoughts of my own to add to the torrent.

China Syndrome

Tim Cook cited slowing sales in China as the primary factor in his guidance:

While we anticipated some challenges in key emerging markets, we did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China. In fact, most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 percent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPad.

China’s economy began to slow in the second half of 2018. The government-reported GDP growth during the September quarter was the second lowest in the last 25 years.

We believe the economic environment in China has been further impacted by rising trade tensions with the United States.

In other words, a combination of a slowdown in the Chinese domestic economy, and the US sanctions starting to bite. I am sure these are both factors; China is the only market with the size and depth to be able to offer the sorts of growth that Apple investors have become used to. Apple’s stock price has long been a lagging indicator, underpriced (in price/earnings ratio terms) by investors stuck in the late Nineties who still thought of Apple as a company that was perpetually circling the drain.

In contrast the stock is now arguably overpriced, as it is hard to imagine another product ever again offering growth rates comparable to the iPhone in its first decade. The Apple Watch, a perfectly respectable business in its own right and a product that completely dominates its sector, is widely decried as a failure because it cannot match the iPhone’s runaway success. The iPad, a smaller business than the Watch, is nevertheless the tablet, with everyone else an also-ran. However, both of these are rounding errors compared to the iPhone business.

Meanwhile, for a company whose products are famously "Designed by Apple in California", but "Assembled in China", any trade sanctions are sure to cause a number of headaches. The sanctions apply most obviously to finished products, but any extended trade war could also affect the supply of raw materials, IP transfer, or relationships with component vendors.

However, I do not think that the Chinese economy and sanctions represent the whole story here.

A Perfect Storm

As everyone concentrates on the impact of US sanctions and wider macro-economic trends, there is another factor whose unfortunate timing is compounding the bad news for Apple.

As a general rule, people don’t upgrade their phone every year. Even among my tech enthusiasts friends, most are on what is known as a "tick-tock" upgrade path, meaning that they change their phone every other year. One reason for this pattern (apart from the obvious one of budget) is that Apple’s hardware generations are not all equal. Historically, a new form factor is launched one year, and then in the following year it is refined and improved.

These "improvement" years used to be known as the "S" models, as in 3GS, 4S, 5S, and 6S. People who wanted new form factors would buy on the non-S year, while those who craved reliability and performance improvements would buy on the S year. So far so good – until the iPhone 6.

As an example, the iPhone 6 was the first to offer the option of a larger screen, in the form of the iPhone 6 Plus, long after most Android manufacturers had launched their own larger-screen models.¹ The pent-up demand for a larger iPhone caused many users to upgrade out of cycle, pulling demand forward that would otherwise have hit during the 6S cycle.

The same thing happened with the iPhone X. As the first iPhone to do away with the home-button, relying instead on Face ID, and offering that gorgeous all-screen view, it again caused many users to upgrade early. I was one of them, trading in my perfectly functional year-old iPhone 7 Plus for an iPhone X instead of waiting another year. If it had not been for the iPhone X, I doubt I would have bothered to upgrade to an iPhone 8, which is not different enough from a 7 to justify the outlay.

Breaking The Pattern

In contrast to the visible differences between the iPhone 7 and iPhone X, the iPhone XS and XR offer little to tempt owners of the iPhone X to upgrade early. To compound that effect, the steep price increases of the new models may be actively dissuading users from upgrading, putting them onto a three-year cycle. In other words, we are seeing a trough in demand that is caused at least in part by a previous bulge around the launch of the iPhone X.² The sheer desirability and newness of that phone may also have obscured the impacts of the price increase – but having made such large investments, users are that much more reluctant to spend even more on newer models.

This effect may be even greater in China, as Ben Thompson has written before:

That, though, is a long-term problem for Apple: what makes the iPhone franchise so valuable — and, I’d add, the fundamental factor that was missed by so many for so long — is that monopoly on iOS. For most of the world it is unimaginable for an iPhone user to upgrade to anything but another iPhone: there is too much of the user experience, too many of the apps, and, in some countries like the U.S., too many contacts on iMessage to even countenance another phone.

None of that lock-in exists in China: Apple may be a de facto monopolist for most of the world, but in China the company is simply another smartphone vendor, and being simply another smartphone vendor is a hazardous place to be. To be clear, it’s not all bad: in China Apple still trades on status and luxury; unlike the rest of the world, though, the company has to earn it with every release, and that’s a bar both difficult to clear in the abstract and, given the last two iPhones, difficult to clear in reality.

John Gruber made the same connection, and commented succinctly:

By Thompson’s logic the iPhone X should have done well in China, because it looked new, and the XS/XR would disappoint in China because they didn’t. And, well, here we are.

What Now?

I am hardly going to offer advice,³ either to Tim Cook or to Apple investors. Tim Cook sees numbers that nobody outside the company does, and has certainly already put plans in motion whose effects we will only see several quarters from now. An aircraft carrier⁴ the size of Apple does not turn on the spot. Meanwhile Apple investors, taken as a group, have never displayed any particularly deep understanding of the company’s business, and will no doubt continue to do their own thing.

As an Apple user, however, I am not particularly worried – yet. The moment of truth will come later this year, with the launch of the successor phones to the XS and XR. If these phones are sufficiently compelling – and come at a suitably accessible price point, at least for entry-level options – demand would presumably plateau back out, all macro-economic trends being equal.

If on the other hand Apple launches a successor to the XS that is not immediately and obviously different – as the iPhone 7 was not visibly different from the 6 and 6S – and continues its price increase trend, then there may be an issue with longer-term viability.

Apple will probably never again have another iPhone-type product, with such universal appeal and monstrous growth. Everything from now on is about getting iPhone users to upgrade their device regularly, purchase ancillary products (AirPods, Watch, HomePod, Apple TV), and consume Apple services (Music, plus the long-rumoured video subscription service).⁵ That is a different kind of business, and expectations should be set accordingly.

One of the most powerful memes in tech is the Innovator’s Dilemma. Professor Clayton Christensen’s theory posits moves from integrated products to modularised ones, driven by waves of innovation at different levels. The world of tech swings regularly between these poles of integration and modularisation. Sometimes the whole industry moves at once, as in the ongoing move away from modular desktop computers and towards all-in-one laptops, tablets, and hybrids of the two, with modularisation moving to other levels of the stack. At other times competing models are in play at the same time, with little agreement as to which is better.

Apple is often cited as a counter-example, the archetypal integrated company that defies the conventional wisdom of modularisation exemplified by the infinite variety of the Android platform. One counter-counter-example that often comes up is Maps, and I would like to take a moment to explore (sorry – not sorry) this point.

From launch, Apple Maps was derided as not just a failure, but an actively wrong and misguided choice by Apple. It even gets brought up as the ultimate negative example, as in this M G Siegler piece about Instagram data: "The data makes Apple Maps look like a pristine globe of information". Google had mapping and navigational data that were objectively better, the thinking went, so Apple should simply continue to adopt this external module within their own platform, regardless of consequences.

There is a philosophical aspect to this debate, of course, which may have more currency today than it did at the time. As the famous adage goes, if you’re not paying, you’re the product. Certainly with Google Maps, gathering and analysing users’ personal data was very much a key goal of Google’s, both for the altruistic reason of improving mapping and routing data, and for the more irritating one of contributing to the ever more detailed profiles it keeps of all of us in order to pitch us en masse to advertisers.¹

Apple had never been entirely comfortable with this situation, and exacted large payments from Google in return for its privileged position within iOS.² With the launch of iOS 6, Apple deprecated the use of Google’s data as a source for the built-in Maps application.

Note that Google’s own Maps app was never banned from Apple’s iOS or from its accompanying App Store.³ The difference between the systemwide Apple Maps and Google Maps (or any other third-party mapping app, for that matter) was the integration with all other apps that needed mapping data. In much the same way that tapping on a link would open the built-in Safari web browser, tapping on an address would open the built-in Apple Maps app. Using a third-party web browser, mapping app, or chat/IM or email client, required explicit action by the user each and every time.

Apple’s Walled Garden… Orchard?

Some users objected on grounds of principle to the deep integration of first-party apps and the consequent exclusion of third-party ones. Windows desktop operating systems had trained users to install any number of third-party utilities and widgets, either as replacements for system components or to extend native functionality. iOS did not work this way.

Apple had always preferred an integrated approach, producing both its own hardware and its own operating system ever since the original Apple ][, and complementing that with suites of its own applications. In the 90s I had an Apple StyleWriter printer attached to my Macintosh LC, which I interacted with through an Apple monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Displayed on that monitor was a ClarisWorks document, which was of course owned by Apple as well. Sure, it was possible to run Microsoft Office, and even (for a while) Internet Explorer. In fact, in the doldrums of the early 2000s, after the demise of Cyberdog, Apple’s first attempt at a web browser, and before the rise of Safari with OS X, Microsoft’s was the best browser option on the Mac.

This moment of dependence on third parties had its benefits – keeping the company alive at a very difficult time, for instance – but robbed Apple of ultimate control. As owners increasingly expected to be able to personalise the behaviour of their Macs with custom extensions, those systems became increasingly unstable. The introduction of OS X addressed many of those issues by replacing the creaking foundations of classic Mac OS with the Darwin kernel, but still gave users quite a lot of control. When it came time to launch iOS, however, Apple’s pre-existing philosophical bent towards opinionated design combined with the very real limitations of the hardware of the day to produce a "walled garden" where only Apple’s apps would run. The original iPhone did not even have an App Store; instead, Apple envisioned that third-party functionality would be provided through web apps (never mind that EDGE connectivity was not really up to the job, even in 2006).

Play Nice In The Sandbox

Apple did eventually relent and allow third-party apps to run on iPhones, but always in a very controlled manner, with strict sandboxing preventing apps from interfering with each other. This separation also prevented apps from interacting with each other at all, to the point that copy&paste functionality only arrived on iOS with 3.0, released in 2009, and was heralded as a major innovation when it did.

Even then, Apple maintained strict control over core functionality, giving users no ability to replace the standard web browser, email client, to-do list, and more. The Maps app was also part of this list, but used third-party data from Google for its functionality. Tensions had been brewing over this arrangement for a couple of years already, with Google introducing turn-by-turn navigation on Android only, but they came to a head in 2012. What Apple did with iOS 6 was to replace the Google back-end to Apple Maps with its own home-grown data.

For Apple, the creation of its own mapping and routing data from scratch was a monumental undertaking, which unsurprisingly ran into some issues, especially in the early days. However, very soon I found the data to be perfectly usable in the real world, even where I live, very far from Silicon Valley, with all that entails.

That positive overall opinion does not mean that there were no annoyances. Apple Maps’ search function is very finicky, expecting names of streets and businesses to be entered exactly as written, and with an irritating tendency to provide a result, any result – even if it happens to be somewhere completely different, thousands of miles, several national borders, and sometimes even an ocean or two away. Surely some basic heuristic should be able to figure out that if I don’t specify that I want a far away result, I’m probably expecting one within a few tens of kilometres at most? This behaviour has improved over time, but is still present to a certain extent.

All apps have their foibles, and these days, the Big Three mapping services – Apple Maps, Google Maps, and Waze – are pretty close in their usability. Head-to-head comparisons reveal that Apple Maps gives the most accurate estimates of arrival times, while Waze over-promises the time savings from its shortcuts. As more and more people use Waze, those "shortcuts" are causing congestion on the suburban streets that drivers are being guided to use in place of the gridlocked highways.

So Do I Want Modular Or Integrated Maps?

Very few people make detailed comparisons of map data and navigation instructions. The main benefit people are looking for is usability. Can I tap on an address and get directions? If I connect my phone to my car, does it offer to give me directions to the next appointment in my calendar? Can I text my spouse with a detailed ETA based on actual traffic conditions?

In the modular world, such integration is harder to achieve, simply because each one of the different modules offers slightly different features, or different implementations of common features. Also, modules are constantly changing and evolving at different paces, or even disappearing entirely.

Google is the main advocate for the modular approach, and indeed often produces several competing apps and services for the very same functionality. Google Maps and Waze are increasingly overlapping with each other, for instance. Google Play Music and YouTube Music are equally hard to disentangle. And it seems that every other month brings either the launch of a new Google chat service, or the demise of one of the existing ones. In this situation, users are expected to swap modules around on a regular basis – and if the new module doesn’t offer the same functionality as the old one, or does so in a way that is different and breaks your workflow – well, tough!

For myself, I find the Apple approach preferable. When I invoke a voice assistant on my phone, I am happy to know that it’s Siri, not Alexa or Cortana or whatever Google’s assistant is called, and that my personal data are not being added to some advertising profile that is of no use to me – but that’s another rant for another day. Meanwhile, everything just works; iOS knows who my next calendar appointment is with, and that person's contact card has their office address – and so Maps can suggest a route to that address, as well as letting me easily tell my counterparts when I will arrive. Doing this with modular services is not impossible, but it takes more effort than the average person wants to deal with, while exposing them to a series of trade-offs, precisely because of the lack of separation between apps.

When it comes to maps, though, I have to add one last caveat: your mileage may vary (still not sorry).

🖼️ Photos by Capturing the human heart., Mike Enerio, and Alexander Popov on Unsplash

I’m always going on about my troubles with the Italian iTunes Store, but I realise people might not know what that means in practice, so I wrote up a real-world scenario.

I wonder what movie we could watch on Sunday night – maybe that 1969 classic, The Italian Job?¹

First hurdle, finding the thing. Searching for "the italian job", as any reasonable (meaning "naive and inexperienced") person might, brings no results.

As this is not my first rodeo with the Italian iTunes Store, I fall back to searching for everything Michael Caine has been in – and sure enough, after the various Batman and Kingsman films, there is… Un colpo all’italiana. Sure, why not.

But once again, this is not my first rodeo – and therefore, instead of just hitting that "Buy" button, I know to scroll down and check one more thing:

Do you see it?

Look under Language: there is only one entry, "Italian (Stereo)". No English audio.

I refuse to pay ten Euros to hear Michael Caine dubbed into Italian, thank you very much. If you won’t sell things to people, they won’t buy them.

Guess we’re watching something else, kids.

One of the biggest problems in data analysis is making sure that your inputs are clean and sane. This holds true whatever you are using to do the analysis, whether it’s the latest fancypants machine-learning, or a roomful of expert humans doing the calculations by hand.

I think it’s useful to keep this perspective in mind when considering Apple’s recent tie-up with Salesforce.

The first example given by Salesforce is this scenario:

Imagine a sales rep saying "Hey Siri, Daily Briefing" then hearing an overview of their day.

This scenario encapsulates the dream end-state of all of these integrated CRM systems. Normally, of course, the user requesting an overview is not the sales rep but a manager, whether the person responsible for a region who needs to know whether their team of sales reps is going to hit the regional number, or a higher manager preparing a presentation for the board and hoping very much that the key dashboards are all in the green.

The problem with such dashboards is the age-old one of Garbage In, Garbage Out. The predictions are only as good as the data they are based on. Unfortunately, the data are not always good, because by and large, sales reps – and I’ve known a few, good, bad, and indifferent – do not particularly enjoy documenting everything they do for someone else. That last clause is important; the good sales reps take a lot of notes and know all sorts of details about their accounts and territories, but the notes are for their own consumption, and the way they are taken and stored make them hard to access. Sometimes this is even by design, especially among "relationship" sales people who see their value mainly in terms of the thickness of their Rolodex¹: "if you fire me, I’ll walk and take all my customers with me!".

We all know how well that play worked out for Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire. Regardless, getting the input data is a very real problem. This is why I am much more interested in the second half of that example scenario from Salesforce:

They can also easily update Salesforce records after a meeting.

Updating opportunities is already pretty easy from the Salesforce mobile app, but sales managers and Sales Ops types have a tendency to over-complicate the process by adding supplementary required fields which must be filled in to save the simple text-based notes and contact info which are the most valuable parts of the process. Added friction in the data-entry stage leads to opportunity details being added in a rush at the end of the quarter, ret-conning against the ultimate outcome of the opportunity rather than documenting facts in near real time.

Adding support for other technologies on the input side has the potential to remove much of that friction. Siri would let reps have a good rant in the car on the way back from the meeting and transcribe all of that into the activity record. Location data would enter the correct office where a meeting was held. Integration with office suites and cloud storage could add the collateral used in a meeting to the opportunity. Each addition of intelligence on the input side would remove a small amount of friction from the opportunity management process, which in turn would help to ensure that the data which all the fancy analyses are based on are at least somewhat factual.

I have no doubt that most of the videos and presentations around the Apple-Salesforce joint technology developments will focus on showing magical Minority Report² dashboards, updating in real time, and smiling managers happy with the results being displayed. However, if any of those whiz-bang dashboards are to have utility in the real world, it will be down to the input capabilities in the individual sales reps’ iPhone and Apple Watch, and the technology’s removal of as many excuses as possible not to update Salesforce records.

I noticed this aside in a CBInsights piece on the state of AI assistants in China:

Among US big tech, only Apple’s Siri supports Mandarin on the iPhone. The company’s Homepod smart speaker only supports English, and is not available in China.

This sounds very much like my ongoing issue with the lack of Siri support on AppleTV. Siri is available on iOS in many different languages, but for whatever reason, Apple does not capitalise on that capability to deliver Siri functionality on its other devices.

The assumption is that this behaviour is driven by App Store issues:

I have never watched the Godfather films (I know, I know), and with some intercontinental travel coming up, I thought this would be a good time to load them up on my iPad and finally catch up - forty years late, but who’s counting?

Since I no longer have any truck with physical media, my first stop was iTunes. At first I thought they did not have the films, but this turned out to be because I live in Italy, and so they are listed as Il Padrino. Fair enough, except that it’s not just the title card that’s Italian; the only soundtrack available is an Italian dub. It’s not even the original, it’s a re-dub, and the reviews are all one-stars complaining about the new dub.

Of course iTunes has all three Godfather films in the US store, but Apple in their wisdom tie your iTunes account to the country your credit card is registered in. This means I can’t simply download the English-language version from the US store.

However, when it is keeping Apple out of a market the size of China, which its competitors are unable to enter because of their lack of language support, I would suggest that it is high time to figure out a way around this problem.

Here’s hoping…

I am broadly bullish about Apple’s purchase of digital magazine subscription service Texture. I do however have concerns about Apple’s ability and willingness to deliver this service internationally. This concern is based on many past examples of Apple rolling out services to the US (and maybe UK) first, and the rest of the world only slowly, piecemeal, and according to no obvious or consistent logic.

Subscription hell is a real problem, and it creates a substantial barrier for users considering new subscriptions. Even if the financial element were removed, I have had to adopt a strict one-in, one-out policy for podcasts, because I simply don’t have enough hours in the day to listen to them all. (It doesn’t help when The Talk Show does one of its three-hour-long monster episodes, either.) Add a price component to that decision, and I’m even more reluctant to spend money on something I may not use enough to justify the cost. I would love to subscribe to the Financial Times and the Economist, but there is no way I could get through that much (excellent) writing, and they are pretty expensive subscriptions.

On the other hand, the idea of paying for one Netflix-style sub that includes a whole bunch of magazines, so that I can read what I want, seems pretty attractive on the surface. Even better if I can change the mix of consumption from one month (beach holiday) to the next (international business travel) without having to set up a whole bunch of new subs, with all the attendant friction.

Here’s the problem, though. Apple has form in releasing services in the US, and then only rolling them out internationally at a glacially slow pace. I realise that many commentators may not be aware of this issue, so let’s have a quick rundown, just off the top of my head.

News

Apple’s News app is still only officially available in the US, UK, and Australia. Luckily this restriction is pretty easy to fool by setting your iOS device to a region where it is supported, and there you go – the News app is now available on your home screen. Still, it seems an odd miss for what they regularly claim as a strategic service.

Siri on AppleTV

I have ranted before about the shameful lack of Siri on AppleTV, but this issue still hasn’t been resolved. Worse, the list of countries where Siri is available on AppleTV makes no sense. What concerns me, obviously, is the absence of Italy, especially when much smaller countries (the Netherlands? Norway?) are included, but there are other oddities. For instance, French is fine in France and Canada, but not in Belgium. Why? Quebec French is far more different than Belgian French. Also, Siri works just fine in way more countries and languages than are on that list, so it’s far from obvious why it’s not available on tvOS.

The worst is that it is not possible to get around this one, as the restriction is tied to the country where the user’s Apple ID is registered, and that in turn is tied inextricably to the credit card’s billing address. Short of registering a whole new credit card, if you live outside one of the blessed countries, you’re not going to be able to use the Siri remote for its intended function. Given that nobody likes that remote, and fully 20% of its button complement is dedicated to Siri, this limitation substantially detracts from the usage experience of what is already a pretty expensive device.

Apple Pay in Messages

As with Siri on tvOS, this is a weird restriction, given that Apple Pay works fine in many countries – but is not available in Messages. I could understand if this were a banking restriction, but why not enable payment in Apple Store vouchers? Given my monthly spend, I’d be happy to take the occasional bar tab in store credit, and put it towards my iCloud, Apple Music, other subscriptions, and occasional apps. But no, I’m not allowed to do that.

TV app

Returning to the TV theme, if you’re outside a fairly short list of countries, you are still using the old Video app on iOS and tvOS, not the new TV app. Given that the TV app was announced in October of 2016 and launched at the end of that year, this is a pretty long wait. It’s especially annoying if you regularly use both the iTunes Store and a local iTunes library, as those live in separate places, especially in light of the next item.

iTunes Store

Even when a service is available, that doesn’t mean it’s the same everywhere. One of the most glaring examples is that I still can’t buy TV shows through the Italian iTunes Store. I’m not quite sure why this is, unless it’s weird geographical licensing hangovers. Cable TV providers, Amazon, and Netflix all seem to have worked out licensing for simulcast with the US, though, so it is possible to solve this.

Movies are another problem, because even when they are available, sometimes (but not always!) the only audio track is the Italian dubbed version, which I do not want. Seriously, Apple – literally every DVD has multiple audio tracks; could you at least do the same with Movies in the iTunes Store?

And sometimes films or books simply aren’t available in the Italian store, but they are in the US store. It’s not a licensing issue, because Amazon carries them quite happily in both countries. A couple of times I have asked authors on Twitter whether they know what is going on, but they are just as mystified as I am.

It Works In My Country

There is a more complete list of iOS feature availability out there, and I would love if someone were able to explain the logic behind the different availability of seemingly similar functionality in certain countries – and the different lists of countries for seemingly identical features! Right now, Apple’s attitude seems to be a variation of the classic support response, "it works on my machine": "but it works in my country…".

And that’s why I worry about Apple’s supposed Texture-based revamp of Apple News: maybe it gets locked down so I can’t have it at all, or maybe it’s neutered so I can’t access the full selection of magazines, or some other annoyance. I just wish Apple would introduce an "International" region, where as long as you accept to do everything in English, they just give you full access and call it good, without making us jump through all these ridiculous hoops.

There is a widespread assumption in tech circles that privacy and (useful) AI are mutually exclusive. Apple is assumed to be behind Amazon and Google in this race because of its choice to do most data processing locally on the phone, instead of uploading users’ private data in bulk to the cloud.

A recent example of this attitude comes courtesy of The Register:

Predicting an eventual upturn in the sagging smartphone market, [Gartner] research director Ranjit Atwal told The Reg that while artificial intelligence has proven key to making phones more useful by removing friction from transactions, AI required more permissive use of data to deliver. An example he cited was Uber "knowing" from your calendar that you needed a lift from the airport.

I really, really resent this assumption that connecting these services requires each and every one of them to have access to everything about me. I might not want information about my upcoming flight shared with Uber – where it can be accessed improperly, leading to someone knowing I am away from home and planning a burglary at my house. Instead, I want my phone to know that I have an upcoming flight, and offer to call me an Uber to the airport. At that point, of course I am sharing information with Uber, but I am also getting value out of it. Otherwise, the only one getting value is Uber. They get to see how many people in a particular geographical area received a suggestion to take an Uber and declined it, so they can then target those people with special offers or other marketing to persuade them to use Uber next time they have to get to the airport.

I might be happy sharing a monthly aggregate of my trips with the government – so many by car, so many on foot, or by bicycle, public transport, or ride sharing service – which they could use for better planning. I would absolutely not be okay with sharing details of every trip in real time, or giving every busybody the right to query my location in real time.

The fact that so much of the debate is taken up with unproductive discussions is what is preventing progress here. I have written about this concept of granular privacy controls before:

The government sets up an IDDB which has all of everyone's information in it; so far, so icky. But here's the thing: set it up so that individuals can grant access to specific data in that DB - such as the address. Instead of telling various credit card companies, utilities, magazine companies, Amazon, and everyone else my new address, I just update it in the IDDB, and bam, those companies' tokens automatically update too - assuming I don't revoke access in the mean time.

This could also be useful for all sorts of other things, like marital status, insurance, healthcare, and so on. Segregated, granular access to the information is the name of the game. Instead of letting government agencies and private companies read all the data, users each get access only to those data they need to do their jobs.

Unfortunately, we are stuck in an stale all-or-nothing discussion: either you surround yourself with always-on internet-connected microphones and cameras, or you might as well retreat to a shack in the woods. There is a middle ground, and I wish more people (besides Apple) recognised that.

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

So there’s an Apple ad for the iPad Pro out there, which is titled "What’s a computer?". It’s embedded here, in case you’re like me and don’t see ads on TV.

Uh oh, it looks like your embed code is broken.

tl;dr is that the video follows a young girl around as she does various things using her iPad Pro, signing a friend’s cast over FaceTime and sending a picture of it via Messages and so on.

It’s all very cute and it highlights the capabilities of the iPad Pro (and of iOS 11) very well.

However, there is a hidden subtext here, that only young people who grow up knowing only phones and tablets will come to think of them as their only devices in this way. Certainly it’s true of my kids; I no longer have any desktop computers in the house, so they have never seen one. There is a mac Mini media server, but it runs headless in a cupboard, so it hardly looks like a "computer". My wife and I have MacBooks, but they’re our work machines. My personal device is my iPad Pro.

My son actually just started computing classes in school this year, and was somewhat bemused to be faced with an external keyboard and mouse. At least they’ve moved on from CRTs since my day…

A Second Childhood

There is another group of users who have adopted the iPad enthusiastically, and that is older people. My mother used to invite me for lunch, and then casually mention that she "had some emails" for me to do. She would sit across the room from the computer and dictate to me, because she never felt comfortable doing anything on the infernal machine herself.

Since she got her first iPad a few years ago, she has not looked back. She is now a regular emailer – using the on-screen keyboard, no less, as I have not been able to persuade her to spring for a Pro yet. She surfs the web, comments on pictures of her grandchildren, keeps up with distant friends via Skype and Facebook, and even plays Sudoku.

That last point is particularly significant, as for people who grew up long before computers in homes, it is a major shift to embrace the frivolous nature of some (most?) of what we do on these devices.

None of this is to say that I disagree with Apple’s thesis in the ad. When it comes to computers, my own children only really know iPads first-hand. They see adults using laptops occasionally, and of course spending too much time on their phones, but they don’t get to use either of those devices themselves. As far as they are concerned, "computer" might as well mean "iPad".

I just think that they should do a Volume Two of that ad, featuring older people, and perhaps emphasising slightly different features - zoomed text, for instance, VoiceOver, or the many other assistive technologies built into iOS. Many older people are enthusiastic iPad users, but are not naturally inclined to upgrade, and so may still be using an iPad 2 or an original iPad mini. A campaign to showcase the benefits of the Pro could well get more of these users to upgrade - and that’s a win for everyone.

The Internet is outraged by… well, a whole lot of things, as usual, but in particular by Apple. For once, however, the issue is not phones that are both unexciting and unavailable, lacking innovation and wilfully discarding convention, and also both over- and under-priced. No, this time the issue is apps, and in particular VPN apps.

Authoritarian regimes around the world (Russia, "Saudi" Arabia, China, North Korea, etc) have long sought to control their populations' access to information in general, and to the Internet in particular. Of course anyone with a modicum of technical savvy - or a friend, relative, or passing acquaintance willing to do the simple setup - can keep unfettered access to the Internet by going through a Virtual Private Network, or VPN.

A VPN does what it says on the tin: it creates a virtual network that connects directly with an endpoint somewhere else; importantly, somewhere outside the authoritarian regime's control. As such, VPNs have always existed in something of a grey area, but now China (the People's Republic, not that other China) has gone ahead and formally banned their use.

In turn, Apple have responded by removing unregistered VPN apps (which in practical terms means all of them) from their App Store in China. In the face of the Internet's predictable outrage, Apple provided this bald statement (via TechChrunch):

Earlier this year China’s MIIT announced that all developers offering VPNs must obtain a license from the government. We have been required to remove some VPN apps in China that do not meet the new regulations. These apps remain available in all other markets where they do business.

Now Apple do have a point; the law is indeed the law, and because they operate in China, they need to enforce it, just as they would with laws in any other country.

Here's the rub, though. By the regionalised way they have set up their App Store service, they have made themselves unnecessarily vulnerable to this sort of arm-twisting by unfriendly governments. Last time I wrote about geo-fencing and its consequences, the cause of the day was Russia demanding removal of the LinkedIn app, and China (them again!) demanding removal of the New York Times app. As I wrote at the time, companies like Apple originally set up the infrastructure for these geographic restrictions to enable IP protection, but the same tools are being repurposed for censorship:

This sort of restriction used to be "just" hostile to consumers. Now, it is turning into a weapon that authoritarian regimes can wield against Apple, Google, and whoever else. Nobody would allow Russia to ban LinkedIn around the world, or China to remove the New York Times app everywhere - but because dedicated App Stores exist for .ru and .cn, they are able to demand these bans as local exceptions, and even defend them as respecting local laws and sensibilities. If there were one worldwide App Store, this gambit would not work.

The argument against the infrastructure of laws and regulations that was put in place to enable (ineffective) IP restrictions was always that it could be, and would be, repurposed to enable repression by authoritarian regimes. People scoffed at these privacy concerns, saying "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". But what if your government is the next to decide that reading the NYT or having a LinkedIn profile is against the law? How scared should you be then?

If you are designing a social network or other system with the expectation of widespread adoption, these days this has to be part of your threat model. Otherwise, one day the government may come knocking, demanding your user database for any reason or no reason at all - and what seemed like a good idea at the time will end up messing up a lot of people's lives.

Product designers by and large do not think of such things, as we saw when Amazon decided that it would be perfectly reasonable to give everyone in your address book access to your Alexa device - and make it so users could not turn off this feature without a telephone call to Amazon support.

How well do you think that would go down if you were a dissident, or just in the social circle of one?

Our instinctive attitude to data is to hoard them, but this instinct is obsolete, forged in a time when data were hard to gather, store, and access. It took something on the scale of the Stasi to build and maintain profiles on even six million citizens (out of a population of sixteen million), and the effort and expense was part of what broke the East German regime in the end. These days, it's trivial to build and access such a profile for pretty much anyone, so we need to change our thinking about data - how we gather them, and how we treat them once we have them.

Personal data are more akin to toxic waste, generated as a byproduct of valuable activity and needing to be stored with extreme care because of the dire consequences of any leaks. Luckily, data are different from toxic waste in one key respect: they can be deleted, or better, never gathered in the first place. The same goes for many other choices, such as restricting users to one particular geographical App Store, or making it easy to share your entire contact list (including by mistake), but very difficult to take that decision back.

What other design decisions are being made today based on obsolete assumptions that will come back to bite users in the future?

UPDATE: And there we go, now Russia is following China’s example and banning VPNs as well. The idea of a technical fix to social and legal problems is always a short-term illusion.

Image by Sean DuBois via Unsplash