• Breaking News

    Thursday, October 17, 2019

    Home Unlabelled Apple Daily Tech Support Thread - [October 17]

    Apple Daily Tech Support Thread - [October 17]

    October 17, 2019

    Apple Daily Tech Support Thread - [October 17]

    Daily Tech Support Thread - [October 17]

    Posted: 17 Oct 2019 08:08 AM PDT

    Welcome to the daily Tech Support thread for /r/Apple.

    Have a question you need answered? Ask away! Please remember to adhere to our rules, which can be found in the sidebar. On mobile? Here is a screenshot with our rules.

    Join our Discord and IRC chat rooms for support:

    Discord

    IRC

    Note: Comments are sorted by /new for your convenience

    Here is an archive of all previous "Tech Support" threads. This is best viewed on a browser. If on mobile, type on the searchbar [title:"Daily Tech Support Thread" author:"AutoModerator"] (without the brackets, and including the quotation marks around the title and author.)

    submitted by /u/AutoModerator
    [link] [comments]

    Wallpaper Wednesday - [October 16]

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 06:11 AM PDT

    Hello, /r/Apple, and welcome to Wallpaper Wednesday!

    Liven up your desktop space or iOS device with some new UI scenery! Please respect the rules below and upload the highest quality image you can find.

    Share your wallpaper on the r/Apple Discord.

    Rules

    1. Please use a reputable image host like imgur.com.
    2. No NSFW posts.
    3. Directly linked images only (albums are acceptable).

    This thread will remain stickied for 24 hours. At that time, the thread will remain active, and an archives link will be posted in the sidebar for easy access. You may also find archives here.

    submitted by /u/AutoModerator
    [link] [comments]

    Photoshop for iPad should be released soon with missing features

    Posted: 17 Oct 2019 06:50 AM PDT

    Apple looking at Face ID laser tech to improve iPad & iPhone typing

    Posted: 17 Oct 2019 07:29 AM PDT

    Apple says 50% of iPhones and iPod touches use iOS 13. 33% of iPad use iPadOS

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 02:46 PM PDT

    Steve Jobs ridicules MobileMe during the introduction of iCloud at WWDC '11, his last keynote.

    Posted: 17 Oct 2019 07:22 AM PDT

    Just noticed this "Search the Audio" beta feature in the iOS Podcasts app

    Posted: 17 Oct 2019 05:28 AM PDT

    Sorry if this has been posted before, but just saw it this morning and didn't find another mention of it when searching for it here: https://i.imgur.com/6d2azuh.png

    Is it related to how search results now have this "Transcript" bit at the end? It seems to show up for podcasts with very few ratings (i.e. unlikely to have manual transcripts); here's a search for "She sells seashells"

    https://i.imgur.com/ACz2Kac.png

    edit: just found someone tweeting about this last week, but it seems to be the only tweet with "Search the Audio" – seems like the beta has been relatively small then, I guess?: https://twitter.com/robmknowles/status/1181340093216415745

    submitted by /u/danwin
    [link] [comments]

    Luna Display Introduces Mac-to-Mac Mode Allowing Nearly Any Mac to Be Used as Secondary Display

    Posted: 17 Oct 2019 10:03 AM PDT

    A change in iOS 13 can put an end to Calm’s 1B valuation (and make AppStore better)

    Posted: 17 Oct 2019 07:19 AM PDT

    The last few years were big for non-gaming subscription-based apps in the Apple App Store. During this period, several simple apps started making millions of dollars per month.

    For example, Celebrity Voice Changer makes over $3M per month and raked in almost $30M in the past few years. QR Code Reader by Tinylab made over $800K last month and over $13M over the last few years. An app called Life Advisor generated over $1M in revenue in the last month alone.

    Some of the companies developing pretty basic apps have even become unicorns. In February, Calm raised $88M in funding at a $1B valuation. The maker of Facetune app raised $135M at a unicorn valuation In July.

    But how do they do this?

    These apps aren't powered by any innovative technology; they don't have network effects; and they are pretty easy to copy. So what is their secret sauce? Subscriptions. To be more specific, the obscure way that subscriptions used to work in iOS.

    I said "used to work" because Apple made a small change to subscriptions in iOS 13, the latest version of its mobile operating system. This change went unnoticed by media outlets covering iOS 13's release, but I believe it will have a profound impact on the mobile apps ecosystem in the Apple App Store.

    In this article I will use revenue and downloads estimates provided by GoPractice using Datamagic to explain why I believe the following will happen after Apple's new adjustment to iOS app subscriptions:

    • The revenue of Calm and Facetune on iOS will drop by a factor of 2-4, and they won't be able to justify 1B valuation.
    • Lots of sneaky subscription apps will first stop growing, and then disappear altogether from the App Store over time.

    Only 59% of the top 100 Grossing apps on the Apple App Store are games compared to 90% on Google Play

    As of the end of September 2019, 90% of the top 100 grossing apps in Google Play in US are games. In contrast, only 59% of the top 100 grossing apps in the App Store are games. This contrast becomes even more evident if we compare the share of gaming apps in the top 200 or 500 grossing apps on each platform.

    But why is there such a big difference between the two major app stores in the US?

    Оne could say that iPhone users are different from Android users: iPhone users play less games, and meditate and work out much more than Android users.

    Believe me, this is not the case.

    Interestingly, of the 41 non-gaming apps in the top 100 grossing on iOS, only 15 are also included in the top 100 grossing on Google Play. 97% of these apps are monetized through subscriptions.

    The truth is, the difference between how subscriptions work in the two platforms gives iOS apps an unfair advantage. Here's why.

    ARPU of apps monetized through subscriptions is 2.5-25x higher on iOS than on Android

    Let's see how big is the advantage that mobile apps monetized through subscriptions in App Store have over Google Play apps.

    We will calculate the ratio of Lifetime ARPU (lifetime revenue divided by lifetime downloads) of different apps in App Store and Google Play in the United States. For this, we will use a mobile market intelligence tool called Datamagic, which provides download and revenue estimates for mobile apps.

    But before we get to non-gaming subscription-based apps, we need to get a benchmark to know what is the normal difference in monetization between Google Play and App Store.

    On the chart below, you can see the ratio of ARPU(LT) on App Store and Google Play in the US for several popular gaming apps from the top 100 grossing chart. As you can see, the monetization of gaming apps is similar on both platforms. The ratio of of most of the apps is clustered around 1.1. A few outliers have a 2x difference.

    Let's do the same exercise for non-gaming apps from the top 100 grossing chart in the App Store for US. I have excluded apps that do not monetize through in-app purchases in Google Play.

    Most of these apps are generating 2.5-8 times more revenue per download on App Store compared to Google Play in the US.

    As we have seen before this cannot be attributed to the difference between the platforms in the US, because gaming apps have similar monetization on the App Store and Google Play. Neither this can be explained by the difference between the iOS and Android versions of the apps—they are usually identical on both platforms.

    The only difference is in the subscription models—or namely, how subscriptions work on iOS.

    What's wrong with iOS subscription-based apps?

    First, it's important to know that there are many useful and high-quality apps that monetize through subscriptions on iOS.

    In fact, many of the apps in the top 100 grossing chart are very useful. They generate more revenue than they should on iOS (we will get to this later), but their teams' goal is to build high-quality services and provide value to end users.

    A suitable real-life analogy for some of these apps would be fitness gyms. Fitness gyms don't do anything bad. Neither do they deceive their customers. But many of their customers purchase a three- or six-month membership, and then stop going to the gym after a couple of sessions.

    However, if you go beyond the top 100 grossing, there will be lots of sneaky scammy apps that provide almost no value and only exploit the subscription system to intentionally deceive users.

    Such apps are pretty easy to spot. They usually have lots of negative reviews with angry people demanding refunds and complaining that they keep getting charged after deleting the app. You usually won't see these reviews on App Store page, because the developers are smart enough to buy good reviews to bury the bad ones. But when you look up these apps on Sensor Tower, everything becomes clear pretty quickly.

    You can find more examples of scam apps here.

    What's wrong with iOS' subscription system?

    When you register for a subscription or a free trial in an iOS app and then delete the app, your subscription remains active. This means you will keep getting charged until you figure out that you have to go to the App Store settings and turn off the subscription.

    The probability that a regular user will know this is close to 0. Even people working on iOS apps often don't know about this.

    Why did Apple design subscriptions to work in this way? There are a few possible explanations.

    First, users might have several devices and use an app on all of them. In this case, it would make sense to not cancel a subscription if the users delete an app on one of their devices but keep it on others.

    Second, revenue from subscription-based apps was one of the main drives of the revenue growth of the Apple App Store in the past several years.

    Per Sensor Tower data, the average spending per active device in the App Store's gaming category increased by 20% in 2018. Meanwhile, in categories dominated by subscription-based apps, the growth has been considerably higher. Two examples are the Entertainment and Lifestyle categories, which respectively grew 82% and 86% in 2018.

    The impact of subscription-based apps on the App Store's revenue also becomes evident when comparing the percentage of non-gaming apps in the top 100 grossing charts of the App Store and Google Play.

    This data indicates that subscription-based apps play a significant role in helping increase iPhone consumer spending. Considering the slowdown in iPhone sales and Apple's focus on growing revenue from services, Apple's team might have turned a blind eye on the fact that iPhone users don't understand how subscriptions work and some developers are exploiting it for their own benefit. Turn a blind eye or kill one of the main growth drivers? What would you choose?

    What has changed in iOS 13?

    The way subscriptions work in iOS 13 is different: When you delete an app with an active subscription, you will now see a system popup asking if you want to cancel the app's subscription.

    It's still not super-easy to cancel subscriptions even with the help of this popup, but at least people will now become aware that they are still subscribed to the app even after deleting it.

    Subscription-based apps will see a 2-8x drop to their iOS revenue in the next few years

    It is still too early to evaluate the impact of the change to the way subscriptions work in iOS 13. However, I expect that it will solve the problem of people not understanding that they will keep on paying for an app even after deleting it. In the best case, the monetization of iOS' subscription-based apps will become similar to their Android versions.

    The first signs are promising. RevenueCat looked at the difference in trial conversion rate between iOS 12 and iOS 13. 80% of the apps they looked at showed a statistically significant decrease in trial conversion rate for users on iOS 13 vs iOS 12. RevenueCat measured an average drop of 9% in absolute conversion rate, which translates into a median relative drop in conversion rate of 29%, but with a pretty wide range depending on the app, anywhere from 0% to 60%.

    But we should keep in mind that the overall impact on the revenue of the subscription-based apps will be delayed for a few reasons.

    First, iOS 13 adoption rate was only 25% as of the end of September 2019. It will only reach 80% by the end of 2019 (based on how iOS 12 was adopted).

    Second, most subscription-based apps have already reached a significant number of active subscribers. They won't be affected by this change and will keep generating revenue.

    But even though the impact of the iOS 13 change will be delayed, it will still be massive if our assumption that the revenue of App Store's subscription-based apps will reduce to the level of Google Play is even half true.

    There are few areas which will be impacted:

    1. LTV of new users will drop significantly, which will impact the revenue from new users (by 2.5-8x depending on the app)
    2. Many subscription-based apps are aggressively engaged in paid user acquisition. If the LTV of these apps drops by as much as we predicted above, then the volume of paid traffic they will be able to bring in will decline as well.
    3. Paid traffic often helps drive organic downloads through ASO mechanisms, so organic traffic should be impacted as well.
    4. If LTV gets significantly smaller, then App Store will feature these apps less frequently, because there will be others with better performance metrics.

    Forecast of Calm's iOS revenue in the coming years

    Let's see how these changes will impact Calm.

    Below you can see Calm's revenue for the last couple of years based on Datamagic.
    Calm is making ~850k per week on Apple App Store and ~230k on Google Play.

    Now we will need to make a few assumptions:

    1. iOS 13 change will drop Apple App Store monetization level to Google Play level (for Calm the ratio based on US data is 2.4)
    2. 50% of downloads for Calm's iOS version come from paid ads.
    3. The amount of paid traffic is linearly dependent on LTV (if LTV drops by a factor of 3, then amount of paid traffic will drop by the same amount).
    4. iOS 13 will be adopted in the same way as iOS 12.

    In case the above assumptions are correct, Calm's iOS revenue in the following years will look like the following chart.

    * The big difference in Jan-Sep 2019 period is because Calm mostly sells yearly subscriptions, but in the model, I assumed that they mostly sell monthly subscriptions. That is why the revenue based on Datamagic data goes higher than the forecast in Jan-Apr 2019 period and then lower than the forecast in May-Sep 2019.
    * you can see the calculations here.

    In the worst case scenario, when LTV and paid traffic are affected, iOS revenue will drop by almost 2.5 times in the next few years. It's unlikely that with such revenue dynamics Calm will be able to maintain its $1B valuation.

    Another interesting fact is that, in case nothing changes, revenue growth will slow down significantly. Maybe that's what Apple App Store executives expected and that's why they decided to make the change now.

    Conclusion

    Since Apple has rolled out iOS 13 just recently, we don't have factual data on how the changes made to subscriptions will affect the monetization metrics of subscription-based apps. However, if my predictions are correct, the impact will be significant.

    And it will impact both:

    1. companies building useful apps that monetized through subscriptions
    2. sneaky scammy apps that used subscriptions to deceive users

    However, I believe that Apple should have made this change a long time ago. That way, the App Store would not have been flooded with lots of products from the second category (sneaky scammy apps), and the companies from the first category (useful apps) would not be overvalued (which might create problems for them in the future).

    submitted by /u/unab0mber
    [link] [comments]

    Jeffrey Paul: Stupid Unix Tricks

    Posted: 17 Oct 2019 04:58 AM PDT

    Video: Johnathan Morrison films thoughts on the Pixel 4 announcement using only the selfie camera on the iPhone 11 Pro

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 12:40 PM PDT

    Apple releasing iOS 13.2 developer beta 3 today with new emoji, Siri privacy settings, more

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 09:53 AM PDT

    Anandtech iPhone 11/Pro/Max and A13 Bionic Review

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 06:06 AM PDT

    TIL Because iPhones shoot photos in HEIC format and not JPG, you get free unlimited original quality backups to Google Photos due to HEIC being smaller and more efficient than JPG so Google doesn’t touch the files.

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 04:56 AM PDT

    With all modern iPhones shooting photos in HEIC format, which is smaller than even Googles compressed JPG files, iPhones therefore get free unlimited ORIGINAL quality backups simply because it would cost Google both storage space (because if Google tried to compress iPhones HEIC photos they would actually become larger) and computing power (because Google doesn't need to compress and process all of the billions of photos iPhones backup.)

    So Apple is literally saving Google millions of dollars by shooting their photos in HEIC and it benefits iPhone users as well because we get free original quality backups.

    submitted by /u/stephenvsawyer
    [link] [comments]

    Report: EU antitrust regulator enquiring about possible Apple Pay anticompetitive behavior - 9to5Mac

    Posted: 17 Oct 2019 01:10 AM PDT

    With each passing day now, I'm becoming less and less convinced Apple will be holding an October event this year:(

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 08:09 AM PDT

    Of course I could be wrong and I hope I am, but if you've been keeping an eye on the rumor mill lately, it's looking increasingly more likely they will just have a jam packed event in March with a new iPhone SE, iPads, MacBook, AirPods and the Tags thing.

    submitted by /u/wandering-ghost
    [link] [comments]

    LPT: The upgrade to Catalina may have broken your applications, but your hardware might still work!

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 11:09 AM PDT

    I figured I would share since I was just in this situation. I caught my dad buying a new scanner because Epson had decided not to release their software in a 64 bit version. It turns out the drivers for the scanner still work, he just needed different front end scanning software. I ended up installing Vuescan for my dad and it saved him a lot of money and prevented unnecessary waste!

    submitted by /u/DinoStapler
    [link] [comments]

    Apple Pay is now supported by Viseca card service in Switzerland. Tons of cards are now up and running for Apple Pay.

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 05:51 AM PDT

    Significant Apple Outage in Progress? (Apple Music, iCloud?)

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 10:27 AM PDT

    Looks like something really bad is happening - Apple Music stopped working, and I can't send or receive emails.

    Links to DownDetector:

    https://downdetector.com/status/icloud/

    https://downdetector.com/status/apple-music/

    I just wanted to send an email and listen to "Cat Food" by Aesop Rock. 😟

    EDIT: Might be back up around 1:51EST.

    submitted by /u/ItsBobsonDugnutt
    [link] [comments]

    Neat little trick: Ping any device through Siri

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 11:25 AM PDT

    Great to find your devices! Sorry if I'm late to the party but it's really neat.

    This is so far what I actually used it for in real day usage.

    • Powerbeats Pro to ping iPhone
    • iPhone to ping Macbook
    • iPhone to find iPad

    Screenshot

    submitted by /u/Jayson17_90
    [link] [comments]

    Xbox 360 Wired Controller not supported in Catalina

    Posted: 17 Oct 2019 08:49 AM PDT

    Thinking of leaving Android + Windows

    Posted: 16 Oct 2019 03:57 AM PDT

    Every day I'm thinking more and more about leaving Android + Windows and just getting a Macbook and iPhone. While I've been thinking about this, the Google event yesterday kind of gave me an additional push.

    Google and Apple seem to be going in two different directions, and I'm starting to agree more with what Apple is doing. Watching the event yesterday, I frequently asked myself, "who actually wants this?"

    For example, the hand gestures. Who ACTUALLY wants that? Why was so much time wasted on R&D for this feature when:

    1. It has already existed for a long time
    2. There is virtually no demand for it

    It reminded me of Android 10's new "desktop mode" as well. This is something that even non-Google companies have been trying to implement (e.g. Samsung Dex). The idea is that we would have either 1 device we use for everything, or seamless syncing of devices like the Apple ecosystem. So Google has the opportunity to steamroll the market and create this "desktop mode" that will essentially turn their phones into an all-in-one device, and instead, they release some garbage alpha version that needs developer options toggled just to use semi-properly.

    At first I thought that perhaps 1 device would be superior, but now I'm leaning more towards the ecosystem being better. Especially considering the new changes Apple has been making, where developers can actually make apps that work on iPhone, iPad, AND Mac from one code base.

    Another thing is privacy. Look at all of those new google devices that are going to be listening in on EVERYTHING you say. At first you might think, "wow, this is convenient!" and shortly after you think "wait, so I'm literally being listened to 24/7?"

    It just seems like Apple is starting to give people what they actually want and use while maintaining a strong sense of privacy. Google is just throwing shit at a wall and hoping some of it sticks. It makes me wonder - how many people at Google actually use iPhones instead of Pixels? Like, do people who create these products actually USE them?

    I might just go to Best Buy today or tomorrow and drop $5k to see if I'm right about my feelings. I'm posting this here to see if anyone has switched over to Apple and had a similar experience/thought process.

    submitted by /u/kjdion84
    [link] [comments]
    Read more
    at

    No comments:

    Post a Comment

    Fashion

    Beauty

    Travel