With the WWDC keynote taking place yesterday, I covered a number of announcements in extra posts. You can find a roundup of my WWDC coverage here.
Here are some of the non WWDC stories I’ve found interesting over the past several days.
Google Following Apple’s Lead On App Tracking
This came to light after iOS 14.5 introduced app tracking restrictions last month, but before WWDC began this week. Google is introducing some of the same restrictions on app tracking on Android, hiding Advertiser ID’s for users who opt out of ad tracking. It remains to be seen exactly how this will work, but in an email to developers Google says this will be part of Android 12, and coming to the best Android Phones via Google Play in 2022. That likely means it will be baked into Android 12, and some of the functionality brought to phones on Android 11 and earlier using Google Play Services.
Interesting to see Google try to find a way to increase user privacy while still maintaining the advertising business which fuels the vast majority of the company’s revenue. We’ll see how this goes.
The Migration from Wear OS to Wear Looks Rocky as Fossil Confirms Existing Watches Will be Left Behind
This isn’t terribly surprising, but Fossil has confirmed that all of its existing watches will be upgraded from Wear OS to the new Wear platform from Google and Samsung coming later this year. It is likely too much of a technical hurdle, especially considering most Wear OS devices run relatively ancient Qualcomm hardware. Samsung had previously announced that none of its Tizen based Galaxy Watches would receive an update to Wear either. That means users looking to keep up to date with Google’s wearable platform will need to upgrade to a new watch when Wear devices become available this year.
Existing watches will of course keep working, but it is unclear how long or how much support these watches will get.
Google, Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft Want to Make Cross Platform Browser Extensions
The companies responsible for the web browsers that make up almost 100% of the market have come together to form a new standards body that aims to standardize web browser extensions. This may not seem like a big deal, but common extensions could improve web security and safety, as developers only need to maintain one extension, and it is in theory easier to spot malicious extensions if they are the same across all browsers. This isn’t the sexiest news of the week, and won’t change anyone’s lives, but could make quality of life just a bit better on the web.
https://www.engadget.com/w3c-browser-webextensions-community-group-035312365.html
Google Photos Advanced Editors Coming to iOS
Google Photos got updates on Android and Web earlier this year that brought significantly better editing features to the app. Even with Google now charging for all photo uploads to Google Photos, it remains more affordable than iCloud storage, even if it isn’t quite as well integrated as the Apple software is on Apple platforms.
Sony WF-1000XM4 Headphones Announced
Sony makes some of the best noise cancelling headphones around, with the WF-1000XM3 headphones from 2019 being the first truly good wireless earbuds with active noise cancelling. But the XM3 (I’m calling them the XM3 and XM4 from here on) were big and unwieldy, with large charging case to match. Sony has finally updated the headphones, with the XM4’s being announced today with reviews in tow. The design looks much better, though I’m personally still not a big fan of the look. But they’ve reviewed well, and should be among the best options for those who want active noise cancelling wireless earbuds. But you need to really want them. The XM4’s are $400 in Canada, which is very expensive for wireless earbuds.
https://www.theverge.com/22523584/sony-wf-1000xm4-wireless-earbuds-headphones-review
Sonos HD Radio Comes to Canada
One of the things I was actually surprised when I purchased my first Sonos product, the Sonos Roam, was that the company had their own music service. Sonos Radio is a free service that functions like regular radio, with unskippable music supported by some ads in between. I’ve listened to it a few times as I explored the Sonos ecosystem and found it fine, especially for free. Now Sonos is bringing Sonos Radio HD to Canada. Sonos Radio HD brings higher quality audio, no ads, and the ability to skip songs you don’t like. At $8/month is is less expensive than services like Spotify, YouTube Music, or Apple Music, but is also less flexible. I’m not sure how big the market is for Sonos Radio HD, but the service exists in the United States and has now come to Canada so there must be some demand for it.
https://www.sonos.com/en-ca/sonos-radio
Huge Outage Affects Some of the Biggest Websites on the Internet
I won’t often report on a 60 minute outage, because it doesn’t affect anyone reading this after the fact, but the sheer scale of this one is notable. Early on the morning of June 8th Fastly, a Content Delivery Network that provides service for some of the biggest websites on the internet had an outage. This took down a large number of big, popular websites. The outage took place just before 5am ET today, so the disruption to North America was less sever, but users Europe and Asia were greeted with 503 errors across the web.
This serves as a reminder as to just how few companies control or facilitate so much of the internet now. Fastly offers a service used by some of the biggest websites because they offer a good service, but the flipside of that is if Fastly has an issue, it affects millions of people.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22523953/twitch-reddit-down-fastly-outage-issues