The day after the keynote, Daring Fireball's John Gruber took the stage at Mezzanine in San Francisco with not one, but two special guests from Apple: SVP Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller, and SVP Software Engineering Craig Federighi. Below is a full transcript of their remarks, and check out the full Talk Show audio and video on Daring Fireball!
KAFASIS
Ladies and gentlemen: Welcome to Mezzanine! Won't you please take your seats and silence your cell phones.
John Gruber
[chuckles]
KAFASIS
Daring Fireball Productions, in association with The Daring Fireball Company LLC, is delighted to welcome you to a Daring Fireball presentation of The Talk Show — Live from WWDC 2016! And now: Won't you please welcome your host, Johnnn Gruuuuber!
[applause] John Gruber
Thank you Paul! I actually needed that reminder; my cell phone was not on silent. Thank you, Mike.
I will start by thanking our sponsors. This is the fifth year I've been doing the show, fourth time here at Mezzanine, and I think that Mailchimp has been sponsoring our bar all along, and if not that, then at least as far back as I remember. So, just in case it isn't clear, the bar is on the house, it's on Mailchimp. Mailchimp, if you guys don't know, they are — do email newsletters, like my friend Ben Thompson over at Stratechery, those go out through Mailchimp. They also have a bunch of new features, stuff that integrates with with online stores, and integration with just about any online store platform that you might be familiar with. And then you can get your customers to get email when products that they're interested in are available, or... whatever.
[audience laughs]
Great company! If you need to send email, go to Mailchimp.com. And, please, let's hear it for them for the open bar!
[applause]
Also back with us for the fourth consecutive year as a sponsor of the show is Microsoft. And at four years, it's not even like a "Whoa, that's weird, Microsoft sponsoring..." Nah! It's like awesome. And it makes total sense.
They have this website. It's going to give you so much more information than I have time to give you now. Anydevanyapp.com.
That's the message that they're trying to give: That any developer, whether you're working on mobile or the web, for any type of app — if you need cloud services, it's now called the Azure app service. If you need that kind of stuff, go check it out — their website has so much information.
Here's a funny thing: They had the same website last year, but instead of anydevanyapp.com, I said anyappanydev.com.
[laughter]
And we are, in fact, streaming this live. And, y'know, the show went on, and in the meantime, I gave out the wrong URL for a pretty pricey sponsorship! [laughs] And what happened was there was some kid in Australia who was watching the live stream who quick, like, jumped on and registered the domain.
[laughs]
True story! This is an absolute true story. If you guys see Matt Hansing, he's here representing Microsoft; he's about this [gestures] tall, him and [Craig] Hockenberry are gonna have a fight after the show's over. You can ask him, he'll vouch for this.
So they got in contact with him, were like — oh, man, that's Microsoft now — "We better get this domain," and it was already gone. And they contacted the kid, and they were like "Oh, man, this kid is gonna, y'know, he's really gonna let us have it." And he was like, "Well, one of those Xboxes would be nice!"
[huge laughter from the audience]
So they sent the kid like, a box with an Xbox and all the cool stuff that you could possibly imagine that goes with an Xbox, and they got the domain. So I think it's safe that you can just go check out the information from Microsoft. Go to Anyapp... or anydev... dot com. [laughs] No, anydevanyapp.com! Microsoft, great sponsor.
And then last but not least, we have one more sponsor, this one's new. And surprisingly, this is the thing, because we think Microsoft, how are you going to go bigger than that. But this is actually one of the few — I mean, I'm guessing maybe three or four corporations in the world with a larger market cap than Microsoft.
It's Meh.com.
[surprised laughter.]
Meh.com is the store that I would run if I were going to run, like, an online store. And let me be clear, I have absolutely zero interest in running an store. It seems like a [laughs] seems like a terrible job. And a lot of hard work, and I don't like either of those things.
So, yeah, I'm not going to run a store. But if I did, it would be like Meh. And here's the way Meh works. They have one product a day. That's it. You don't even know what it is. You have to, like, go there at midnight and find out what they're selling today. One thing, daily deal, usually at like, an unbelievable price. I've said this before: I'm half-worried that they're, like, stealing these things — and I don't know if me endorsing it like this makes me complicit in a crime, because when you're selling, like, a $120 stereo for $14... usually it's like that scene in Goodfellas, where they're selling cigarettes out of the back of the truck.
[laughter]
But what they really do, the other thing they do, is they concentrate on making everything real funny, the descriptions of the products are real funny, they have funny videos every day, and I really do get the feeling that they'd be happy if you just go there and check them out every day and you never buy anything.
That's like the gimmick, or the thing, it's like: Here's the product. Buy? Or meh? And you can just, like, type MEH, and then they're like, well, that guy didn't like that. So my thanks to them.
On the guests for Talk Show 2016
John Gruber
So, last year was a little different than in previous years, because we had an actual special guest. What happened was, the back story on it, is it was a week before WWDC, and I still hadn't asked anybody to be on the show. And I was putting it off, because I kind of had it in my head that I kind of wanted to see if I could get Phil [Schiller, worldwide marketing at Apple]. And I put it off, because I didn't want to hear no. And it was like, a week before, and I was all "Well, this is ridiculous. I'll just ask."
And so, I sent an email to Steve Dowling. And I said: "Look, this is probably ridiculous, and so just feel free to say no. But: I do this show every year, and I think it would be really cool, I think it would work really well if Phil Schiller came on, and the day after the keynote, and we could talk about it, and nerd out, and go into detail that you can't get into in a keynote."
And he wrote back, and all he said was "Not ridiculous. Let's talk tomorrow." And next thing you know, a week later, Phil Schiller was screwing around, not coming out behind the [laughs] curtain, and making me wonder whether, like, maybe he went to the bathroom? Maybe we miscommunicated on what the cues were going to be. And it was GREAT! I mean, I don't know how many people were here last year?
[big cheers]
It really was great. It was the best time I've had on stage in my life, and then I watched the video, and I didn't even really die watching myself. I was like, "Oh, this is actually pretty good!"
And it ended, and it was a big surprise, we kept it under wraps, everybody seemed pleasantly surprised and it just made it all the more fun. And then, the show's over, and I go backstage, and people are like, "Wow, that was great, I can't believe it, that was amazing, that was amazing." And I start meeting people, and it was about three minutes — three or four minutes after the end of the show — when the first person came up and said: "Well, you're really going to have a hard time topping that next year!"
[laughter]
Annnd, I thought "Wow! That did... not occur to me, because this... this week has been a blur, like, I really just asked a week ago, and then we set this up, and I've been thinking up questions, uh... and you're right!"
And there's only so far up I can go, you know, there's only so many different ways that we could go up. And so, one of these years, it is absolutely going to be the case that it is not as good a guest as the year before. I mean, one of these times, it really is going to be John Moltz coming out.
[laughter and some awwws]
And that'll be great! And we'll have a good show. I mean, there might be more people leaving to go to the open bar mid-show — which you can do by the way, please! Really, run up a good tab, we're good here.
But! This is not that year. This year, I think it's a little better.
So, this year, how do you top Phil Schiller? Here's how. Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to... Phil Schiller...
[bemused groans from the audience]
And! Craig Federighi.
[Huge applause and cheers as Federighi and Schiller enter, shake hands, sit on the couch.]
Craig Federighi
Wow!
[Audience hoots and hollers. Federighi laughs.]
John Gruber
True story. Got a text message about 45 minutes ago, an hour ago: "Do you guys have any food here?"
[Federighi chuckles.]
No. We don't. We have lots of booze, but... So when they get here, here's what Craig... Craig has a boxed lunch from WWDC.
[laughter and whistles]
And that's what he's eating! And friend of the show and announcer Paul Kafasis asked him, "Is that a WWDC boxed lunch?"
And the answer is:
Craig Federighi
It aged well.
[chuckles]
John Gruber
It was an old WWDC boxed lunch.
Craig Federighi
[laughing] Yeah.
John Gruber
So, let it be said — Apple does eat their own dogfood.
[Laughter, groans from the audience.]
Craig Federighi
True that.
Phil Schiller
I can absolutely validate that for over 20 years of doing surveys from WWDC, every single year, the number one complaint is the food. And so, we resigned ourselves to the fact that if that's the worst thing that comes out of WWDC, all is good.
[Craig laughs.]
It's tradition, so...
On the keynote
John Gruber
So I always start the show, I started it the same way last year: I always ask the guest "How do you think the keynote went yesterday?"
Craig Federighi
Good audience. [laughter] Great crowd.
Phil Schiller
Great presenters.
[wry laughs]
Craig Federighi
[gesturing to Schiller] We were missing one!
John Gruber
Once again, Phil Schiller was not on stage at the keynote. This is becoming a new tradition.
Phil Schiller
I was teasing with Tim that between Craig and Jeff Williams, and now Boz[oma Saint John, head of Global Consumer Marketing for Apple Music and iTunes], I don't meet the minimum height requirement to present.
[laughter]
John Gruber
But, Craig, I honestly thought — I spoke to you yesterday, briefly, and I told you I thought you did an amazing job. I mean, how many people thought Craig did —
[big cheers]
Because you — it's not just that you're up there and you're covering stuff, but you covered, like, three hours of stuff in 90 minutes, or however long you were on stage.
Craig Federighi
[pauses] Yeah.
[laughter]
It was a lot, yeah. I mean, the team did a tremendous amount of work, and we try to pack it all in.
John Gruber
Well, the article I saw on the Ringer did a — I don't know if you saw this — I'm not going to go into detail on the article, but the headline was "Apple's Craig Federighi is perfect."
[laughter]
Phil Schiller
I read that article, and I can only confirm that it's half-true.
[laughter]
On overriding themes
John Gruber
So, I didn't think about it yesterday, but today it occurred to me that there sort of was a recurring, overriding theme in the announcements yesterday. Which, in broad strokes, was that you guys have opened up a lot of stuff to third-party developers that was previously reserved for Apple's first-party code.
Craig Federighi
Yeah.
John Gruber
Quick list, and I might even miss some. CallKit, so that VOIP apps can get the same Lock screen privileges for incoming calls as the Phone app and FaceTime, which took years.
Craig Federighi
Yes.
John Gruber
Messages, so that WhatsApp can, you can specify a contact. When I text Craig, default by going to WhatsApp —
Craig Federighi
That's right.
John Gruber
— instead of iMessage?
Craig Federighi
That's right.
John Gruber
Siri API, iMessage apps...
Craig Federighi
Yeah.
John Gruber
Maps extensions.
Craig Federighi
Yep.
John Gruber
And even non-Mac App Store apps can now use CloudKit, and a bunch of other iCloud stuff.
Craig Federighi
Yep! That is true.
[big whoops for that]
John Gruber
Is that a coincidence? Or is that a strategic part of the plan for this year?
Craig Federighi
Well, with iOS 8, we started that with extensions, you know, opening up the Share Sheet, for instance. For awhile there, it was, if we didn't build it, it couldn't be in the Share Sheet. And so we had to build a Twitter interface ourselves, and a Facebook interface, and as of iOS 8, we started having extensions for extending the system with sharing, widgets... And so we built a lot of the technology with XPC services, if you folks know what those are, and autoprocess UI, and all the building blocks to make this possible.
And this year, we really felt like, uh, giving the developers more and more opportunities to let users do what they want to do across all these experiences. It was, y'know, a way that we could make the platform better for all of our users, so... yeah, it all came together nicely. With Siri, as well.
John Gruber
And a big part of it, it seems to me, as the platforms (plural) evolve — because it's definitely — especially iOS and Mac — what it means to have an app is more than [what it is] on a Mac: Okay, you launch an app, and a window opens up, and you are in this window, and it's yours as the developer. Where, on iOS, it's a little simpler. It's like, you get the screen.
But now, to be an app that's really taking advantage of the best and newest that the platform has to offer, you need to be inside other apps. Widgets inside iMessage.
Craig Federighi
Yup. I think that just makes sense for mobile. I mean, if you have an app, and the right place to interact is on the notification on the Lock screen, and you don't want the user to have to unlock the phone and launch your app in order to get something done — or invoking your app with Siri is going to be the quickest path to getting something done — we want to make that possible.
And so, I think that's what you're seeing here, as well as, what you say, inside of Maps. If you want to book a ride, or you want to get a restaurant, or any of those things, it's going to just be a quicker and smoother flow if you're integrated into the place where the user started instead of requiring switching around.
And so this is opening all that up, and I think developers are going to do a tremendous number of things with it that we didn't even envision. It should be an exciting year.
Phil Schiller
It's also just an evolution of the success of the app model, right? I mean, apps took off, been wildly successful, with this amazing software process, and then you want to have apps in your Maps, you want to have apps in your Siri situations, and you want to have apps in your messaging... and so we like apps, we like them everywhere, we want to use them in many places, so to me it's an evolution of what's going on with apps in general.
On XPC, bundles, and new technology
John Gruber
And you [Craig] mentioned XPC. And I know this is a fairly, fairly nerdy crowd. But I do think it's a years-long shift, where... in my layman's terminology, XPC is Inter-process communication, and it's a way for different processes that can be sandboxed and all of the privacy and "hey you, this process can't diddle with the data of this process without having it in a shared location" — that they can still communicate with each other in a rich way.
Compared to the old days, the Mac OS has always been extensible, and whether you want to go back to the Classic Mac OS with nits, or the Nextstep days with...
Craig Federighi
Bundles, yeah.
John Gruber
Bundles, and input managers, and...
Craig Federighi
Mmmhmm!
John Gruber
Remember in the early days of Mac OS X, when we had the hacksees, and the input managers....
Craig Federighi
Oh yeah.
[laughter]
John Gruber
And that was — in laymen's terms, the fundamental difference is those were ways to extend apps officially or unofficially, where the extension code was running within the process.
Craig Federighi
Yeah, and from a stability point of view, and a privacy point of view, really bad news. So, we started years and years ago, with Mach messaging, and on that, we built XPC as a form of remote procedure call, or an asynchronous messaging, structured messaging thing. But we then created what we internally called XPC Containers — which are really what you now think of as XPC services, which are the ability to package a whole bunch of code, and let the system manage launching that code, tearing that code down when it needed to, but exposing services in that way.
And that turned out to be really important — even internally within the OS! We were using it for quite awhile within the OS, before it was exposed as a mechanism for third-parties because it allowed us to set different security boundaries around different — this is really getting nerdy, but —
[cheers]
John Gruber
Nah, this is good!
Craig Federighi
— But around, uh, [laughs], because if you're going to go load some image format, even, or run a doc, run a Spotlight converter or something, that's going to run over all your documents, you want to make sure that if that thing crashes, it doesn't crash the overall process or Spotlight index or app, you don't want it to have any more access than anything but the one thing it's supposed to have to do the job.
So this was all part of our security and sandboxing architecture, but then, with iOS 8, we saw the opportunity to combine that with, essentially, remote views, the ability to say that the UI that you see on screen that looks like it's all from one app is actually composed from the main app, but also one or more XPC services serving UI into that, and we manage all that. And that gives you this single experience, but where all the stability boundaries, and the security boundaries are in place. And that's enabled us to take this extensibilty model from something that was really hacksy-prone in the Nextstep, and well, nit —
John Gruber
Yeah, nit was...
Craig Federighi
The old days. And make it much more stable. And so that's been, now, a building block for all these things that we're doing. And iOS 10 was just really stepping on the gas on the places where we could do that that made the biggest difference in user experience.
On the removal of stock (and Stocks) apps
John Gruber
One of the most surprising changes, and again, I think that this is in the spirit of openness, or flexibility on Apple's part, and relinquishing control that previously wasn't relinquished. And it surprised me, that you can now remove a whole bunch of the default apps on iOS from your home screen.
Craig Federighi
Though you would not want to.
[big laughs]
You have the freedom — just knowing you have the power that you'll never use, it's...
John Gruber
It's one of my favorite features on the What's New site. I love the page, because it even goes out of its way to say "Y'know, because of all the compression that we use, and the techniques that we use, and the shared frameworks, they only take up 150MB.
[laughter]
Craig Federighi
Yeah! Well, okay, so, this is true. This is true. We should be really, really clear on exactly what this feature is and what it's not. Because it's not everything you might think it is.
So what it is is, you are removing... when you remove an app, you're removing it from the home screen, you're removing all the user's data associated from it, you're moving all of the hooks it has into other system services. Like, Siri will no longer try to use that when you talk and so forth.
We're not actually deleting the application binary, and the reason is really pretty two-fold. One, they're small, but more significantly, the whole iOS security architecture around the system update is this one signed binary, where we can verify the integrity of that with every update.
John Gruber
Okay.
Craig Federighi
That there's no mixing and matching going on between all of these different pieces. And so, if you go and say, well, I don't like... what's an app that someone would really... I'm going to get myself in trouble here. Okay.
Phil Schiller
Hmm...
Craig Federighi
[fake smile] I can't think of one! I...
Phil Schiller
Stocks.
Craig Federighi
Stocks?
Phil Schiller
Stocks. Some people don't follow the stock market.
Craig Federighi
Fair enough. Some people do not follow the stock market, or there's not one in their country...
Phil Schiller
Which is good for them, yes.
Craig Federighi
And so they might remove that app. And when you do, it's hidden, and any user data and preferences and so forth associated with it is gone. If you want to get it back, we were thinking, well, how do we let you restore this. And we thought, "Well, people are naturally, when they want to go get it back, they're going to go to the App Store and search for it. And so, you go to the App Store and search for it, and it'll show up, and you'll say Get, and it will reappear [on your home screen].
John Gruber
'Cos that's how they know to install apps.
[laughter]
Craig Federighi
The download will be remarkably fast.
Phil Schiller
Exactly.
Craig Federighi
The compression technology... good stuff.
Phil Schiller
It's been... and it has lead some to mistakenly report that we're moving these apps out of the system bundle and into the store for downloading, and that's not really the case; we're just making that the easy mechanism for restoring, seeing it from the store side. But it's really still part of the system.
Craig Federighi
Good to set the record straight here.
John Gruber
That's interesting. Because that means there won't be, like, an update to Mail that comes through the App Store, it's just like it used to be: It'll be part of the system update.
Craig Federighi
That is correct.
On pre-announcing App Store changes
John Gruber
Well, speaking of the App Store, this last week...
[Craig leans precariously backward to reveal Phil, to laughter from the crowd]
A week ago...
Phil Schiller
There was a reason I sat on [the far] side! I just thought these two were going to totally nerd out, and I'm just gonna let them have fun. And I... have no problem with that.
John Gruber
A week ago, there were a bunch of changes, improvements to the App Store. And in a certain sense, one of them did not get mentioned in the keynote. But review times for apps submitted to the App Store are waaaaay faster than they used to be!
[huge applause and cheers]
Craig Federighi
We thought, this is one of those cases where we can address a problem before it starts to boil over.
[laughter]
Just in anticipation of potential future.
John Gruber
For the audience at the keynote, though, to not even mention and just take that applause is amazing, because you know that it's coming. And developers are pretty happy about that.
Phil Schiller
It would have been an easy way to get applause, but we didn't stoop to that trick.
[laughter]
So, yeah! It was exactly — people have all these awesome conspiracy theories, and they're fun to read, but it was exactly what we said, which was that we were working on the keynote, we actually thought about having a whole developer section to talk about the App Store and the Keynote, and looking at keeping it, we really wanted to get [the keynote] done in just under two hours if we could. And you couldn't really talk about that, and the subscription stuff, and the ad search stuff, and all that, in three minutes.
You really needed, probably, about fifteen minutes to explain, and it just wasn't worth losing fifteen minutes of product time to talk about that when if we could, instead, just talk it to people ahead of time.
And so we decided to do something we've never done before, which is before the keynote, explain some of this. However, it was kind of tough to do, because here we're talking to you and a few others, and saying "Here are things we're doing for the App Store," knowing that still had to come, a few days later, apps working with Siri, and apps working with Messages, and these are huge impacts on developers. And a new store for Message apps, we're going to come out with. So we couldn't really tell the whole picture of all the things we were doing.
So we told sort of half of it, and waited for the rest.
On App Store search ads
John Gruber
Well, part of it that goes together. So, one of the improvements last week was search ads. And...
Phil Schiller
I noticed — I don't know if any of you [gestures to audience] noticed before we came out, there was an ad that showed up first, as John, you did your ads before we started this session.
[laughter]
It was really nice, thank you!
[clapping]
And I found two of the three were relevant to what we were discussing!
[Craig cracking up]
I won't further — for the benefit of your advertisers, I won't mention which one I didn't find relevant to my interests, but...
[Gruber laughs]
John Gruber
I was going to be nice! I was going to say how there's a tie-in that you couldn't mention a week ago, where the idea of the search ads is that it improves discoverability. And there's a discoverability aspect with the iMessage apps, where if I send you a widget through an iMessage app —
Phil Schiller
That's right.
John Gruber
And you don't have it yet, there's a very subtle, y'know, I forget what exactly it says.
Phil Schiller
Yep.
Craig Federighi
Get.
Phil Schiller
Yeah. Two — couple of the very interesting things that the team did in working on these message apps is: #1, that if I send you something, if I send you a sticker, if I send you a JibJab, you get to receive it and experience it without having to download the app. And so, you can do that on a lot of these things. Where some other service, you're always being hit with a "Download this in order to see what someone is sending you!"
So the team really wanted to have a great experience for the receiver — you don't have to do that. However, there is attribution there, and you can choose to get it. If you're like, "Wow, those JibJabs are really cool, I want to download them too, and share them with friends." Hopefully that'll become a nice viral marketing, in addition to other ways for users to discover apps in messages.
John Gruber
On search ads: Make the case — when we talked last week, you did. On the phone call, I thought "Yeah, that makes sense." And then I went away, and looked at my notes, and I was like, I'm not sure I get it.
[laughter]
Make the case on this part, on this particular part, that the system that you guys have designed can, and should be, to the benefit of smaller indie developers and it's not going to be dominated by the biggest companies —
Phil Schiller
Mmhmm.
John Gruber
That, with the, y'know, budgets that are more than everybody here combined.
Phil Schiller
So, the two sort of priorties we set on the team as they were working on it was, if we're going to do this, we have to do it in a way that, number one, protects user privacy. There are many ways that companies do it where they're not protecting privacy and we need to understand that. And secondly, how do you do it in a way that gives advantages to small and indie developers, because it's easy to imagine a system that didn't do that.
And so, we set out to think of all the things we could do to make that possible. And there's a long list of things. And I won't go through all of them to bore you all, but there are many things.
Things like:
First of all, there's no minimum bid. So we don't set a bar, if you have a very small amount of money, you can just do what you can with a small amount of money.
The fact that we're going to work really hard to try to make relevance the top priority, over bid, for why something gets shown. That the users are the ultimate deciders of what gets shown, based on their clicks, they're a big input to what is relevant to the search result.
The fact that we're going to work hard to try to police and improve the whole metadata system if we find, as it easily could be abused to hurt [small] developers.
The fact that — and this has been a hotly-debated thing — the fact that you can do conquesting. You can use someone else's brand in your ad words that you want to use. As we thought about it, that is more likely to benefit the small developer than the big developer. Because the big developer isn't going to pick on a lot of small developer terms, but a small developer can try to latch on to a big developer's name. If I want to search for Angry Birds and your game, you can. Right? And so we think that that can help them.
The fact that there's no exclusivity. So a large developer cannot say, "And I want to be the top bid, and I'm going to spend everything I can to buy out this term." There will be no exclusivity, there's going to be a rotation there, and as that rotation appears, the relevance will help drive it further.
We're trying everything we can, and I think one of the best things is, right now, once we're in beta throughout the summer, the downloads the users get from the ads are real downloads to benefit the developer, but we're not charging [for ads] during the beta time. So there's a chance for everybody to get in and try it out, help us learn from it, and drive real downloads and real business without any marketing spend.
So we're trying to think of things we can do, and we'll think of more. We'll take feedback and see what's happening, and where it works and doesn't work, and where it feels like they're getting stomped on, and we'll try to do all that we can to make it better.
[cheers and claps]
On App Store subscriptions
John Gruber
And the last bit of news with the App Store changes, y'know, big third of it, was an expansion of the categories that are allowed for subscriptions. I don't know if you noticed, but there was a little bit of confusion last week about the difference between apps from all categories versus "all apps."
Phil Schiller
Let me just, let me explain that. So, our intention is exactly as we talked about. Which is, we're opening up the subscription model to all categories, so what kind of an app you make doesn't directly have an impact on whether you can have a subscription model or not.
There are, we wanted to open up subscriptions to all developers of all apps. That is the hope. However, there are a couple of little "gotcha"s where we have to be careful. And so, that's why there's some caution here.
Number one: If you want to create a professional app, and you're going to to maintain it, and do updates, and you want to have an ongoing revenue stream, that's of course an intention of this.
[clapping]
Yeah, let's clap on that! But do users really want, and I'm sorry to pick on this category if somebody makes this app, because I'm sure there's examples where you would want it, but do you want a flashlight app to now be an app you have to pay for forever with a subscription model? Users probably don't want that.
And so, we have to be sensitive, first of all, to: Is there some minimum functionality where users now get pissed off, and say "Everything's turned to subscription, I don't want to buy stuff anymore, this is not okay," and now that's a drag on business on the App Store and therefore, we all lose. So we feel a responsibility. And I read your thing that says, "Hey, why don't you just let the market choose—"
John Gruber
Right.
Phil Schiller
Well, what if the market screws itself up and it does badly? And then we all lose. So we have to be able a little bit sensitive to not do something we think could backfire and hurt all of us. So we want to be careful about minimum functionality, so there will be some guideline around that.
Which we already have a guideline on minimum functionality for anything, you can't just wrap a website and call it an app. But there will be a little bit more minimum functionality for subscription.
John Gruber
I think the guidelines include, a longstanding guideline is that the App Store has plenty of fart apps already.
Phil Schiller
That is absolutely one of the rules.
[chuckles]
And then, there is a secondary issue. And we're working through this. There are certain states and governments where there are laws about creating a subscription revenue stream without a clear promise to the user of what they're paying for down the road.
And so, our legal team's been working with us on this, on trying to make sure we put in place in the store the right way for developers to make clear their intention to deliver value for that customer, or else they'll be breaking the law by asking for a subscription with no intention of delivering value down the road.
So we want to be careful of those things. So those are the kinds of reasons we have caveats on it, but the intention, I think, is what we all want.
John Gruber
Alright.
[cheering]
On the Mac App Store
John Gruber
The Mac App Store...
[chuckles from audience]
I'm not going to say it's been treated as the ugly stepchild, but maybe the slightly less attractive stepchild? And a couple of examples: TestFlight beta testing was in the iOS App Store. Craig [Hockenberry], is it in the Mac App Store yet?
Hockenberry
[from the audience] No, I don't think so.
John Gruber
I don't think so. Alright. So no TestFlight...
Phil Schiller
[dryly] Hi, Craig, how are you doing?
[laughter]
John Gruber
Video reviews. I know it seems like that really works, like there's just, instead of static screenshots to show your app on iOS, you can have a video that shows it in animation, and then lots of times, for developers who are doing the cinematic experience of really making the app feel great, the video can do so much more than a static screenshot.
Craig Federighi
Mmmm.
John Gruber
And all of the news last week applies to all of the App Stores.
Craig Federighi
Yes.
John Gruber
So that in of itself is a change, a change in the way that the App Store is distributing new features.
Craig Federighi
Yep.
Phil Schiller
So, we love all of our kids — I'm sure all of you do as well — equally.
[laughter]
And so, we love the Mac App Store, we want it to do well, we want to support the developers in it, we care a lot about it. We use it ourselves, it's a very important store for ourselves. We've moved all our software distribution into it, and are very happy with that. So, we're one happy software developer that's using it.
[scattered laughter]
And we still think, in the long view of all of this, it matters a great deal. We think it matters for privacy, we think it matters for security, we think it matters for quality on the store. We've all seen examples of apps that have been hijacked on servers, where people download stuff that have viruses injected in them, and we don't want any part of any of that, all of us.
So we think it's still an important solution, and we're dedicated to it.
There are things through the years in the Mac App Store that haven't been fully implemented because they didn't make as much sense on the Mac as they did on iOS, or the engineering effort was really high for a benefit that wasn't seen as as big, or whatever. Example: So, TestFlight. For the engineering involved there, people have felt that there are a lot of opportunities on the Mac from a website to download apps for test, and to distribute beta software, so the need wasn't as great. Right? It was a clear need on iOS, not clear on Mac.
So that's why some decisions were made and trade-offs, there. But, as you say, as I've been working more with the App Store team since December, I've really pushed the team to please make sure everything makes sense across all the stores as much as possible, and maybe there'll be some exception to that that we have to make, but we don't want to. We want to try to do everything the same on all the stores as much as possible, including the Mac App Store.
[applause]
On iPad app pricing and lack of pro apps for iOS
John Gruber
So, one thing the Mac App Store has been good for, and the Mac software ecosystem in general is good for, is that it seems to support higher prices of apps, for truly professional apps, deeper apps. And there's a consensus — or maybe not, consensus is the wrong word, maybe you'll disagree.
But there's a lot of people who think that one of the things that's holding back the iPad — especially now that it's the iPad Pro — from replacing a MacBook for someone who might want to, is that it lacks the same depth of deep apps for work that the Mac has. And the reason is that the pricing pressure is more like iPhone-style, couple of bucks, as opposed to Mac-style, where $50, $80, $100 software has long been the norm.
Phil Schiller
I think you see two things happening at the same time. Number one, the iPad's capabilities are growing as a PC replacement product for some people. I know some people have made some statements about that, I don't know who.
[laughter]
And so, we're trying to make it more and more powerful, making larger screens, keyboards, the more powerful processors, and all that's happening to drive it into a more capable product.
At the same time, you've started to see more professional applications begin to make their way onto it. And so, I think we're seeing changes there. We're seeing... certainly, apps that have a similar version on your iPhone that you want on your iPad will have similar pricing. But other apps that may be coming over from the Mac, or PC, are bringing on pricing models that are more like that.
And so you're going to see this duality with iPad, that there's a little of both happening. And we see an increase of the more professional apps happening. And we see stuff in flight with developers we're working on that's really impressive desktop-quality software, more and more coming to iPad.
John Gruber
Yeah, it's definitely not the hardware. 'Cos the iPad Pro stands toe to toe with the MacBooks on any technical measure you can give it. I mean, beautiful displays, powerful CPUs, and stuff like that. So it's not holding it back.
Craig Federighi
And I do think if you really look at some of the professional apps that are on the iPad, it's... I mean, some of them are really first-class. I think the iPad Pro's going to accelerate that, and we absolutely want to find any way possible to make deep investment by developers on the platform possible. Because, I think, we'll all win when that happens.
On passwords and macOS's auto-unlock
John Gruber
Alright. New topic. Privacy and security. I remember a couple of years ago, maybe more — I don't know how many years. But I was at WWDC, and I somehow wound up in a session on security. I don't even know why I was there. But it was interesting. I think I was talking to somebody, and he was like "I gotta go into this thing on security," and I was like, "Well, I'll go with you," and I went in and listened.
And at the end, it was when they were still doing Q&As, and I remember this very vividly. Somebody asked the question of somebody who was on the engineering team in charge of security, gave a rant about how passwords are terrible, and people pick bad passwords because they're easy to remember, and passwords that are hard to remember, or hard to crack, or hard to guess, are unusable, or less usable. "Have you guys given any thought to what's next beyond passwords?"
And there was this pause, and the speaker...
[Gruber intimates looking down toward the mic.]
"Yes."
[laughter]
And it was like, well that's an interesting — that's a very interesting and truthful answer. And we've seen, I think, in the intervenining years, some of the things that might have been circulating. Touch ID...
Craig Federighi
Yeah.
John Gruber
And now, one of my favorite features you guys announced yesterday, can't wait to use it, is...
Craig Federighi
Auto-unlock?
John Gruber
Auto-unlock.
Craig Federighi
Yeah! Yeah.
[big cheers]
John Gruber
So can you talk about how that came to be?
Craig Federighi
Which part of it? I mean, caring about security? Or, uh...
John Gruber
Well, no. With Auto-unlock in particular, the details of how — what are you guys doing to make Auto-unlock truly secure? That it's not, y'know, that I'm not over here opening Phil's MacBook because he's in the room.
Craig Federighi
Yeah. Yeah. Well, of course, this — it's a continuation of the work we did with Continuity to develop really low-power BTLE-based discovery protocol, so your devices could discover each other continuously with acceptable overhead from a battery point of