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The TUAW Daily Update Podcast for April 10, 2014
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
A friendly reminder of the benefits of Apple's walled garden
The debate over which app marketplace model is best -- Apple's "walled garden" or Google's much more open approach -- will likely never be settled. For developers who favor the Play Store, the ability to immediately iterate on their apps and fix bugs without delay is fantastic, while App Store devotees quickly point out the value of having a more rigid screening process in place. If you're in the App Store camp, you can add an arrow to your quiver thanks to an Android app called Virus Shield. The app, which sold for a pricey US$3.99, rocketed to the top of the Play Store's paid apps chart thanks to its claimed ability to keep Android devices free of malware. The app's "features" included the ability to scan files and media on an Android device in real time, alerting the owner of any suspicious activity while at the same time preventing future attacks. All told, over 10,000 people paid the premium for the app's services, giving it a shining 4.7/5 rating. Unfortunately, it was all a scam: Virus Shield did nothing to protect any device and its entire feature list was false. The app quite literally ran a fake "scan" and then produced a check mark after it was done, assuring the user that no malware was present. The good people of Android Police were the first to actually dig into the guts of the popular app and discover that it had absolutely no utility function whatsoever. The app has since been pulled from the marketplace, but attempts to track down its creator -- the one who raked in tens of thousands of dollar off of an app that did absolutely nothing -- have been fruitless. Google's just-announced on-device monitoring of apps is a nice step towards weeding out existing scams, but if it can't prevent shoppers from downloading (and paying for) the apps ahead of time, its ability to limit situations such as this is questionable. So while Apple's App Store review process isn't perfect, and can put a damper on the quick turnaround offered by more open alternatives, you can be confident that this type of thing wouldn't happen inside the walled garden. Sure, developers might sneak a Super Nintendo emulator onto Apple's shelves every once in a while, but I'm OK with that. Note: To be fair, there are plenty of shady apps on the App Store as well, and I've written about many of them. This one, however, is a particularly shameless cash grab that does literally nothing it claims to do, which is something the App Store review process would almost certainly weed out. [via Android Police]
HackStore is like Cydia for Mac OS X, replaces walled garden with open dacha
Despite its loud anti-piracy notice, Andrey Fedotov's HackStore sees no issue in ripping off the official App Store's interface. Nevertheless, its aim is to gather up legit and readily available apps that didn't make it past Apple's trellis for whatever reason, and hopefully with Fedotov keeping an eye out for malware. You'll find FileZilla, Gimp and many rarer specimens -- and they're all just regular .dmg files so there's actually no hacking involved. That said, we downloaded the RTF to ePUB Converter and then struggled to make it run, so we're not ready to vouch for HackStore's ease-of-use any more than its security or legality. All we're saying, officer, is that it exists.
Talkcast reminder: 10pm ET, new gear and new month
It's the first of August -- already? -- and we're back live tonight on Talkshoe, so call in and chat with us about the biggest Apple stories of the past week. On the docket this evening, we'll be talking about what iPad owners (and the iPad's detractors) are like, the revised iMacs and Mac Pro, Apple's new battery charger and the Magic Trackpad, running iOS 4 on an older iPhone, and what exactly happened to the Michael Jackson zombie. To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, the embedded Facebook app, or the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the "TalkShoe Web" button on our profile page at 10 pm Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (take advantage of your free cellphone weekend minutes if you like): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8. If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac or your PC, you can connect via the free Gizmo or X-Lite SIP clients or using the Talkshoe client's ShoePhone tool; basic instructions are here. We'll kick things off at 10pm ET/ 7pm PT. See you there!
The iPad as a new "walled garden" of content
John Battelle's Searchblog has an interesting post up about whether or not the iPad can be categorized as a disappointment. He begins with a mea culpa; while he predicted earlier this year that the iPad would more or less fail, the sales figures from earlier this week have proven him wrong. However, he says that the question then turns to whether the iPad will be a disappoint in its larger goal: to revolutionize computing and use the App Store model as a replacement for the usual download-and-install app method that we currently use on desktops. Battelle says that the iPad is doing what AOL (disclaimer: TUAW is part of Weblogs, Inc., a division of AOL) did back in the early days of the Web: distilling it into an easily consumable form. Just like AOL created a portal for Web browsing, the iPad creates a portal for content consumption, all through Apple's App Store (and through Apple's "approved" Web, depending on whether you think Flash's approval is a bug or a feature). Battelle also says that Apple's portal comes with the same issues that AOL's portal did; AOL, he says (and I presume he means the old AOL, not the one paying me to write this), was killed by the link, and the iPad, as he sees it, will eventually be killed by whatever links apps together. AOL was a "walled garden" of their content, and as long as Apple maintains its grip on the App Store, it's that same garden; each app works within its own flower pot, almost completely independent of the others.
