It’s been a few weeks now since the release of iOS 17.4, which

[…] provides new options for app marketplaces, web browsers and payments for residents of the European Union. […]

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer in the underlying regulation to it, and have been ever since the possibility of this becoming a reality was in the Brussels air. But so far, I haven’t really been able to come up with a truly practical use case.

Furthermore, I haven’t seen any marketing for an Epic Store, Meta Store, or similar “app marketplaces”, but this may be attributed to the still rather… wobbly legal situation surrounding, notably, still having to direct payments to Apple while not using their store for app distribution. I don’t think there has been any follow-up from Apple (or the EU) that retracts these conditions.

So: Have any fellow EU resident ~tech’ies done anything fun or interesting with this new freedom yet?

To those not affected by this regulation, what would you like to “sideload”, or are perhaps already sideloading on Android?

Do any of you think big companies will move their entire palette onto an alternative store anytime soon, e.g. Facebook and sister products? To be honest, I doubt this will happen, otherwise it would’ve long occurred on the Google Play Store as well.

My ideas were:

• I’ve thought about trying to install Minecraft (the full version, probably using Pojav), or a game of similar caliber, on my phone just for fun and to see how well the iPhone GPU really fares against a “real” game, but didn’t find the time yet for looking into it.
• Also personally, I’d love to see a real “root-capable” shell on iOS, but I don’t think that will ever be a thing irrespective of how much sideloading Apple is forced to allow into their OS.

Basically the title. I've been an Android user since 2012, but have have an iPad and a Macbook that I really like, especially how well they work together. My pixel 5 was on its way out, so I finally took the plunge and bought an iPhone 15 Pro earlier this week. I'm still getting everything set up, and I'm particularly excited to play with the different focus modes and shortcuts. I'm curious what apps and features should I be using to make the most of this switch?

I've noticed that my phone's home screens have become a bit cluttered and figured it's about time to clean it up. So I tried searching online and found tons of recommendations and suggestions, but figured I would ask users here if anyone has any tips for productivity or efficiency, or just something that works for you. Might give me some good ideas to try out, and hopefully can benefit anyone else reading this thread.

Do you have tons of home screens or just one with a ton of folders? Do you use many widgets or not at all? Do you organize apps by how frequently you use them? Or how similar the apps are to each other? By color of the app icon? Or something else entirely?

Seriously, any help/suggestions/ideas would be appreciated.

I just got a new phone, and I opted to download all the apps I usually use manually, rather than having them transfer over automatically. It's like a nice cleanup thing that I get to do every couple of years. I feel like I partially should just have a list somewhere of the apps I usually use and was wondering what people would download first (plus if I forgot anything)

For me, this was my process yesterday:
Password manager - Bitwarden - mostly so I can copy/paste my logins for everything
Authentication - Not listing these but ya know
VPN - MozillaVPN - just something for hostels and travelling
Browser - Firefox Beta or Nightly - for downloading my new wallpaper and general use (including Tildes!)
Sleep + Alarm - Sleep as Android
Car things - My car app, EVGo/Electrify America - getting around and things
Rideshare - Uber and Lyft - When I'm in a new city!
Food - Doordash, Grubhub, asian specific food apps - to eat when I'm lazy!
News - Boston Globe, AP News, BBC - Kinda obvious what they're here for
Todo - TickTick - Checklists and all that
Fitness - Fitbit, my smart scale app, and my gym app - general fitness stuff
Language Learning - Duolingo and Lingodeer!
Banking + Investment + Payments + Insurance - not listing these but yeah!
Music + Podcasts - Spotify
Streaming - D+, Netflix, Vudu, Peacock, Max, Movies Anywhere, Dropout, Hulu, Prime Video, Twitch - General Streaming
Books - Kindle and Audible
Messaging and Social Media - Signal, Beeper, Messenger, Discord, Slack, Instagram, etc. - just daily entertainment and connections
Games - Slay the Spire, Dead Cells, Nonograms, Don't Starve, Cards of Terra, Bloons, etc.

Bonus Q: I've been thinking of trying to add Obsidian to my general day to day, how? Might ask a question about this later though!

Really hoping there’s an easy fix for this, because it’s making using my phone a pain. Relevant info:

• I never actually set up a fingerprint, and have only used passwords.
• phone memory is almost full (I have too many photos I still haven’t offloaded, I don’t use iCloud)
• I did drop the phone earlier today, but there was no visible external damage
• case does not cover the home button
• I’ve tried force restart, it didn’t work

I'm open to hearing from folks who have used iOS longer than me. How is the iOS dialer so terrible when it's supposed to be the primary usage of a phone, calling people?

1. Why can't I type the letters of a name in my contacts list, eg "5-2-6" for "JAM" and have all the "James" show up? Android has had that since forever because it's not rocket science.
2. Why can't I type to correct a digit in the middle of the number dialed? Or correct a number I've pasted in?
3. Seriously, is there no way to replace the dialer with something better? And if there is and I just missed it, what are your recommendations?
4. Same question for the god-awful contacts list. I use Google Contacts, have 3 google accounts in which the contacts are… and the syncing seems piss-poor.

Ok, this turned out to be more of a rant than I anticipated. I've gotten to like iOS quite a bit, especially because the android ecosystem has become a very "worst of both worlds" option. But man the dialer's shit. Someone please tell me I'm missing something obvious.

Hey Tildes,

I am wondering if anyone has any recommendations for a way to transcribe voice memos on iOS/macOS.

I want to take up a weekly/daily/whatever journal, however, I felt it may be good for me to use the voice memos feature on my iPhone as I go on longer daily walks and I always have my phone on me. However, going back to look at old voice memos can be rather time consuming rather than just reading/skimming through a text version.

The app can be paid or free. I am hoping to be able to export into multiple file types as well that I could open on any device I really want.

I’ve been running into a minor annoyance of late, I tend to get logged out of ~ on a page refresh (I.e., pull the screen down) on iOS after about a day or less. I have also noticed that my outlook web also does a thing where it seems to forget that I’m signed in under an account, and asks me to input an email, but if I refresh, there’s a 50/50 shot it will see I’m logged in and drop me into the outlook web client.

I recall some of these threads from a few years ago here (but having issues finding them in search) and seem to remember the consensus being “check your add-ons”…. But this is happening on the super nerfed Firefox for iOS (I.e., there are no add-in’s to my knowledge).

I’m running Ffirefox 115 if that helps at all

I'm looking for suggestions. The Internet has become very small over the last 11 years. My go-to for the moments of downtime was RIF. I was able to consume all the little spaces with it since it was an infinite feed - that's a bit harder now. All sorts of apps are welcome, but I'm not looking for things that require high effort or attention span (unless they are worth it). Games are fine, but other apps that fill your time are very good - preferably SFW and audio-off! I use Android, so I prefer those, but our Apple brethren are also welcome to share.

My phone used to autofill the 2-factor SMS verification codes used when logging into a site. I can't remember when or why, but suddenly it doesn't appear, and I have to... (gasp) type in the SMS code manually.

SOLVED:

Autofill SMS codes only work with Safari.

I know the scene is in a rut right now with iOS 16 having pretty much no hope (and with iOS 17 right around the corner), but I wanted to see if anyone else is using a jailbroken iPhone (or any other device) on a day to day.
If you are, drop your device, version and tweak list, I wanna add some new tweaks to my collection! My favs at the moment are Jellyfish (LS clock replacer), Saw (removes space at the bottom of the screen) and Ampere (iOS 16 style battery)

Official Announcement

NYTimes Article

Apollo Apollo (well known iOS client) developer talking about the specifics. Sounds like the API will now be paid based on usage.

It's a bit easier to have an opinion after the Apollo developer revealed the specifics Reddit gave him. Other than the NSFW part, which seems odd considering the API will be one of the revenue streams that isn't advertiser supported, it seems reasonable, of course waiting on the final price per usage.

It was never going to be sustainable for Reddit's API to be fully free. It was just silly - you could use the whole site, which certainly costs money in both AWS fees and developers doing KTLO, and not see any advertisements via the API.

App developers will pass the costs along to the user, many will likely fold because it won't be commercially viable with the additional cost, but, well, that's the way of things.

Starting on Thursday night, Twitter cut off API access for some of the biggest third party clients.

From The Verge:

It’s hard to tell whether the third-party client outage is due to the API. Attempting certain calls from my individual Twitter developer account seemed to work, while Twitter’s own API explorer tool is currently broken.

It definitely seems like it is on purpose. For it to last this long without any update definitely makes it feel like it was done on purpose. Many developers' apps have started showing up as "suspended". In looking at my own account, I can see that both Tweetbot and Fenix are gone from my list of connected apps.

The Icon Factory (makers of Twitteriffic) have a blog post about it as well.

The complete silence from Twitter is completely baffling. Burning more than a decade of working with developers overnight seems incredibly stupid. As Paul Hadad, one of the makers of Tweetbot said:

Even during the darkest Twitter 1.0 days they were pretty open about what they were doing. I remember getting a call prior to the 4 quadrants token limit where they explained what was going to happen and answered questions. I wasn't happy but at least felt there was respect.

After reserving a Steam Deck twice, and letting it drop, trying to get FTL running acceptably with touch controls on my old generic Windows Tablet, and doing the bulk of gaming and leisure time with my phone, I wonder if the best solution to my varied tech needs might be just to bite the bullet, turn in my Android cred and take a walk on the iPad side. I haven't used an Apple device regularly since my iPod touch from ten years ago and ever since that was stolen, I was all Android, all the time. But if I want a device to read comics (PDFs, Kindle/Comixology, Hoopla), watch streaming (Netflix, Prime Video, Youtube), try out games (Apple Arcade, Xcloud Web) but have the option to go back to my old reliables (FTL, Binding of Isaac), should I consider dropping $200 on an older iPad and see if it fits my needs? Should I do it now, or wait on rumors of new ones in October? I know they're supported for longer then the average Android, but at the same time, I don't want to pick one up just in time for it to be a security risk either.

Hello everyone,

I recently moved to a new town and I'm looking forward to walking on all its streets and discover its secrets. However, it's relatively a big town and it will take me a while to do that.
I also don't like walking all that much and I'm not an outgoing person at all, so I want to gamify this a little bit to trick my monkey brain.

So, as an idea, I wondered if there was an iOS app that used the GPS on my phone (or some other trick that I can't think of) to map my route, save it, and place it on the map of the town so I can coordinate my future routes according to the places I've already visited. It's sort of like those running apps that shows you your route after you finished running, except I want it to be not about running and I want them to save the route data, preferably locally.

Thank you everyone in advance for their time.

So far I have been having a surprisingly easy time learning iOS. It is incredibly intuitive! Though to be fair, my friend who has always been on iOS said the same thing about Android when she switched.

There are so many things that are basically identical on the two operating systems. But I am sure I am missing out on a lot of things that my iPhone 13 can do that my Samsung A50 could not do.

So far I'm really loving the switch, everything feels smooth. But I am very accepting of any tips and tricks that anyone might have up their sleeves! 😊