Magic Leap’s executive team is pretty heavy on the dudes these days.
The augmented reality startup’s two female C-suite executives, Chief Marketing Officer Brenda Freeman and Chief Business Officer Rachna Bhasin, have recently both stepped back into advisory roles at the company, TechCrunch has learned.
Freeman joined the startup two years ago from National Geographic. Bhasin joined the company as chief business officer in October of 2015. With the two executives, both women of color, taking a step back from the startup’s C-suite, there seems to be a strong lack of diversity among the startup’s top executives, a group that includes a chief games wizard and chief futurist but does not appear to have a single female chief officer.
“Freeman will be taking on a new role for Magic Leap as Special Projects Advisor reporting to the CEO,” a Magic Leap spokesperson told TechCrunch. “[Bhasin] is now transitioning to a senior advisory role at Magic Leap reporting to the CEO.”
We have reached out to Freeman and Bhasin for comment on the scope of their continued involvement with Magic Leap.
Problems surrounding leadership diversity at Magic Leap have been highlighted in the past. Early last year, the company’s former VP of Marketing Tannen Campbell sued the company for gender discrimination after she was fired when she “challenged Magic Leap’s CEO, Rony Abovitz, to acknowledge the depths of misogyny in Magic Leap’s culture and take steps to correct a gender imbalance that negatively affects the company’s core culture,” the lawsuit alleged.
The suit, which was later settled, cast a negative light on the startup, which has raised more than $2.3 billion to build an augmented reality headset akin to Microsoft’s HoloLens. The company released its Magic Leap One Creator’s Edition earlier this fall.
The startup placed a major emphasis on diversity during the opening keynote for its first developer conference this October. Freeman helped kick off the event with a proclamation of support for underrepresented creators, an apt topic for many in the game development industry where female and minority representation has typically been quite low.
“We are committed to making significant investments to support the efforts of female and minority creators, it’s not just the vision, it’s brave leadership and we are going to make this real,” Freeman told the crowd. “We can’t underestimate the power of that trickle down effect, because when every voice is heard and people see themselves represented, it inspires and really energizes the next generation of creators.”
Despite the rise in electric scooters in the U.S, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Asia — the region where bike-sharing foreshadowed the rise of e-scooters — has been left off the party. But e-scooters have quietly been in the region for some time and now they are beginning to ramp up their plans.
Singapore-based Neuron Mobility is one such riser, and the company announced today that it has raised a SG$5 million ($3.7 million) seed round to explore overseas growth opportunities. The money comes from a collection of investors that include SeedPlus, 500 Startups, SEEDS Capital, ACE Capital, undisclosed angels and family offices.
Founded in 2016, Neuron has offered electric scooters in Singapore since last year. That fleet is currently downsized, CEO Zachary Wang told TechCrunch in an interview, because the startup is awaiting new regulation from the Singapore government. He expects that to take another one or two months. At its peak, Wang said, Neuron was Singapore’s latest provider with around 1,000 e-scooters on the island nation, although the number is down to “a few hundred” right now.
Scooters from Neuron and other rivals have been impounded in Singapore in recent times because they have been parked in illegal areas. Singapore currently prohibits scooters from being left in public places, such as subway stations, but pre-defined adjacent spaces are ok. As such, Neuron charges users a $5 fee when they leave their ride in the wrong place. That’s detected by geo-fencing tech and the charge covers the cost of sending a staffer to move it, Wang explained.
Despite it forcing the startup to slim down its operations, Wang is supportive of the Singapore government’s moves. Admitting that on-demand bikes and scooters can pile up “like rubbish on the streets in many cities,” the Neuron CEO said that “multi-use of sidewalk pavements [from scooters and other services] is here to stay and regulation brings rights to operate, which is a good thing.”
[Left to right] Neuron Mobility founders Harry Yu and Zachary Wang started the Singapore-based company in 2016
While it is liaising with the Singapore government, Neuron is also taking its first steps overseas. That’s seen it deploy scooters in Thailand — capital Bangkok and northern city Chiang Mai — with an expansion to Malaysia set to happen before the end of this year.
It has trodden carefully, however. In Bangkok, Neuron is working with real estate giant Sansiri to offer last mile options around one of the developer’s main sites that includes retail, residential and education facilities in close proximity. In Chiang Mai, it is offering transportation in the old part of the city, which is popular with Chinese tourists and where bike-sharing services like Mobike are popular.
When pressed on safety, Wang said that keeping the focus on specific parts of the city is important. Indeed, Asia’s mega cities are frankly dangerous for even seasoned motorcycle or bike drivers, let alone part-time electric scooter riders, while a number of people in the U.S. have died following collisions with e-scooters. With that in mind, Neuron said it is also planning a ‘ride responsibility’ campaign.
Looking beyond Malaysia, Wang said that Neuron aspires to be in other parts of Southeast Asia — which houses over 650 million people — as well as cities that are comparable to Singapore, such as those in Australia. Those expansions, however, won’t happen until the startup raises another round of funding, that’s something that he anticipates could come in the first half of 2019, although Wang is coy on details at this point.
Speaking more broadly about the expansion of e-scooter startups like Bird and Lime, which have moved into Europe and most recently Asia, Wang — the Neuron CEO — stressed the importance of local players.
“The Southeast Asia game must be played by Southeast Asia players because the region is so fragmented,” he said. “Traditionally, it is very difficult to penetrate markets so the hyper-local approach becomes all important.”
Beyond working with regulators, Wang said another example of its local approach is that it is developing its own bespoke scooters, rather than going with off-the-shelf products from the likes of Xiaomi -owned NineBot, which is outfitting most U.S. startups. Neuron’s ‘next-gen’ scooter will “come to market pretty soon,” he said.
Neuron has occupied a unique position since it has been around since before bike-sharing startups flooded Southeast Asia last year following the trend in China. Unlike Ofo, oBike and countless others who expanded and then fled Southeast Asian markets, Wang believes that e-scooters are more sustainable as a business because the unit economics are healthier.
“Our rides can be benchmarked against taxi rides,” he explained. While, more generally, e-scooters are “priced between public transportation and taxis” rather than being cheaper than both, as is the case for dockless cycles.
Per The Globe and Mail, Meng, the company’s deputy chairwoman, was arrested on December 1; a bail hearing has already been set for Friday. Meng is the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei . She joined Huawei in 1993.
Tensions between U.S. authorities and Huawei have been high since 2016 and have taken a turn for the worse as the U.S.-China trade war has heated up. Citing national security concerns, President Donald Trump in August signed a bill that would ban government agencies from using products and services from Huawei and its Chinese competitor ZTE. Meanwhile, in a recent letter addressed to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, U.S. lawmakers have encouraged Canada to keep Huawei out of its 5G plans.
Duet Display is an app that lets you turn your iPad into a second Mac monitor. And the team behind it just released a major update that makes it much more efficient — it consumes less CPU resources and is now recognized as a true external display.
If you’ve used Duet Display over the past few years, you may have seen a change that made it worse, not better. At some point, Apple updated macOS and broke Duet Display’s method.
Duet Display had to use AirPlay as a fallback method. It made the app much less versatile as you were restricted to a handful of 16:9 resolutions with black bars.
But this is a thing of the past as Duet Display found a way to leverage GPU acceleration. It means that your iPad now appears as a display in macOS settings. It also should be more energy-efficient. In my experience, it’s now much closer to a normal external display. If you’re traveling and need a lot of screen real estate, it’s a good solution.
Luna Display has been able to do the same thing using a hardware dongle. Duet Display is now catching up with its competitor by releasing this update.
Version 2.0 is a free update. Make sure to download the latest version on your iPad and your Mac. For new users, Duet Display costs $10. You can optionally pay $20 or $25 per year for additional features, such as wireless connectivity and Apple Pencil support.
Duet Display is an app that lets you turn your iPad into a second Mac monitor. And the team behind it just released a major update that makes it much more efficient — it consumes less CPU resources and is now recognized as a true external display.
If you’ve used Duet Display over the past few years, you may have seen a change that made it worse, not better. At some point, Apple updated macOS and broke Duet Display’s method.
Duet Display had to use AirPlay as a fallback method. It made the app much less versatile as you were restricted to a handful of 16:9 resolutions with black bars.
But this is a thing of the past as Duet Display found a way to leverage GPU acceleration. It means that your iPad now appears as a display in macOS settings. It also should be more energy-efficient. In my experience, it’s now much closer to a normal external display. If you’re traveling and need a lot of screen real estate, it’s a good solution.
Luna Display has been able to do the same thing using a hardware dongle. Duet Display is now catching up with its competitor by releasing this update.
Version 2.0 is a free update. Make sure to download the latest version on your iPad and your Mac. For new users, Duet Display costs $10. You can optionally pay $20 or $25 per year for additional features, such as wireless connectivity and Apple Pencil support.
Video won’t start rolling on Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new bite-sized streaming service with the billion dollar backing until the end of 2019, but talent keeps signing up to come along for their ride into the future of serialization.
The latest marquee director to sign on the dotted line with Quibi is Catherine Hardwicke, who will be helming a story around the creation of an artificial intelligence with the working title “How They Made Her” according to an announcement from Katzenberg onstage at theVariety Innovate summit.
Hardwicke, who directed Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown, and, most famously, Twilight, is joining Antoine Fuqua, Guillermo del Toro, Sam Raimi and Lena Waithe, in an attempt to answer the question of whether Whitman and Katzenberg’s gamble on premium (up to $6 million per episode) short-form storytelling is a quixotic quest or a quintessential viewing experience for a new generation of media consumers.
In some ways, the big adventure backed by Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and founder of WndrCo, and every major Hollywood studio including Disney, 21st Century Fox, Entertainment One, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Alibaba Goldman Sachs, is the latest in an everything old is new again refrain.
If blogs reinvented printed media, and podcasts and music streaming reinvented radio, why can’t Quibi reinvent serialized storytelling.
Again and again, Whitman and Katzenberg returned to an analogy from the early days of the cable revolution. “We’re not short form, we’re Quibi,” said Whitman, echoing the tagline that HBO made famous in its early advertising blitzes. That Whitman and Katzenberg’s project to take what HBO did for premium television and apply that to mobile media is ambitious. Now industry-watchers will have to wait until 2019 at the earliest to see if it’s also successful.
In the interview onstage at a Variety event on artificial intelligence in media, Katzenberg cited Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code as something of an inspiration — noting that the book had over one hundred chapters for its five hundred pages of text. But Katzenberg could have gone back even further to the days of Dickens and his serialized entertainments.
And right now for the entertainment business it really is the best of times and the worst of times. Traditional Hollywood studios are seeing new players like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and others all trying to drink their milkshake. And, for the most part, these studios and their new telecom owners are woefully ill-equipped to fight these big technology platforms at their own game.
Taking the long view of entertainment history, Katzenberg is hoping to win networks with not just a new skin for the old ceremony of watching entertainment but with a throwback to old style deal-making. The term serialization here takes on greater meaning.
Quibi is offering its production partners a sweetheart deal. After seven years the production company behind the Quibi shows will own their intellectual property, and after two years those producers will be able to repackage the Quibi content back into long form series and pitch them for distribution to other platforms. Not only that but Quibi is fronting the money for over 100% of the production.
Katzenberg said that it “will create the most powerful syndicated marketplace” Hollywood has seen in decades. It’s a sort of anti-Netflix model where Katzenberg and Whitman view Quibi as a platform where creators and talent will want to come. “We are betting on the success of the platform — and by the way it worked brilliantly in the 60s, and 70s and 80s.” Katzenberg said. “Hundreds of TV shows were tremendous successes and [like the networks then] we don’t want to compete with our suppliers.”
In addition to the business model innovations (or throwbacks, depending on how one looks at it), Quibi is being built from the ground up with a technology stack that will leverage new technologies like 5G broadband, and big data and analytics, according to Whitman.
Indeed, launching the first platform built without an existing stable of content means that Quibi is preparing 5,000 unique pieces of content to go up when it pulls the curtains back on its service in late 2019 or early 2020, Whitman said.
And the company is looking to big telecommunications companies like Verizon (my corporate overlord’s corporate overlord) and AT&T as partners to help it get to market. Since those networks need something to do with all the 5G capacity they’re building out, high quality streaming content that’s replete with meta-tags to monitor and manage how an audience is spending their time is a compelling proposition.
“We want to work to have video that good on mobile [and] ramp up content in terms of quantity and quality,” Whitman said. That quality extends to things like the user interface, search features and analytics.
“We have to have a different search and find metaphor,” Whitman said. “It takes 8 minutes to find what you’re looking for on Netflix… We will be able to instrument this with data on what people are watching and using that in our recommendation engine.”
Questions remain about the service’s viability. Like what role will the telcos actually play in distribution and development? Can Quibi avoid the Hulu problem where the various investors are able to overcome their own entrenched interests to work for the viability of the platform? And do consumers even want a premium experience on mobile given the new kinds of stars that are made through the immediacy and accessibility that technology platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Snap offer?
“Where the fish are today is a phenomenal environment,” Katzenberg said of the current short-form content market. “But it is an ocean. We need to find a place where there are these premium services.”
Five years is an awful lot of time in the tech industry. Darling startups find ways to crash and burn. Trends that seem unstoppable putter-out. In the field of artificial intelligence, the past five years have been nothing short of transformative.
Facebook’s AI Research lab (FAIR) turns five years old this month, and just as the social media giant has left an indelible mark on the broader culture — for better or worse — the work coming out of FAIR has seen some major impact in the AI research community and entrenched itself in the way Facebook operates.
“You wouldn’t be able to run Facebook without deep learning,” Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun tells TechCrunch. “It’s very, very deep in every aspect of the operation.”
Reflecting on the formation of his team, LeCun recalls his central task in initially creating the research group was “inventing what it meant to do research at Facebook.”
“Facebook didn’t have any research lab before FAIR, it was the first one, until then the company was very much focused on short-term engineering projects with 6 month deadlines if not less,” he says.
LeCun
Five years after its formation, FAIR’s influence permeates the company. The group has labs in in Menlo Park, New York, Paris, Montreal, Tel Aviv, Seattle, Pittsburgh and London. They’ve partnered with academic institutions and published countless papers and studies, many of which the group has enumerated in this handy 5-year anniversary timeline here.
“I said ‘No’ to creating a research lab for my first five years at Facebook,” CTO Mike Schroepfer wrote in a Facebook post. “In 2013, it became clear AI would be critical to the long-term future of Facebook. So we had to figure this out.”
The research group’s genesis came shortly after LeCun stopped by Mark Zuckerberg’s house for dinner. “I told [Zuckerberg] how research labs should be organized, particularly the idea of practicing open research.” LeCun said. “What I heard from him, I liked a lot, because he said openness is really in the DNA of the company.”
FAIR has the benefit of longer timelines that allow it to be more focused in maintaining its ethos. There is no “War Room” in the AI labs, and much of the group’s most substantial research ends up as published work that benefits the broader AI community. Nevertheless, in many ways, AI is very much an arms race for Silicon Valley tech companies. The separation between FAIR and Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning (AML) team, which focuses more on imminent product needs, gives the group “huge, huge amount of leeway to really think about the long-term,” LeCun says.
I chatted with LeCun about some of these long-term visions for the company, which evolved into him spitballing about what he’s working on now and where he’d like to see improvements. “First, there’s going to be considerable progress in things that we already have quite a good handle on…”
A big trend for LeCun seems to be FAIR doubling down on work that impacts how people can more seamlessly interact with data systems and get meaningful feedback.
“We’ve had this project that is a question-and-answer system that basically can answer any question if the information is somewhere in Wikipedia. It’s not yet able to answer really complicated questions that require extracting information from multiple Wikipedia articles and cross-referencing them,” LeCun says. “There’s probably some progress there that will make the next generation of virtual assistants and data systems considerably less frustrating to talk to.”
Some of the biggest strides in machine learning over the past five years have taken place in the vision space, where machines are able to parse out what’s happening in an image frame. LeCun predicts greater contextual understanding is on its way.
“You’re going to see systems that can not just recognize the main object in an image but basically will outline every object and give you a textual description of what’s happening in the image, kind of a different, more abstract understanding of what’s happening.”
FAIR has found itself tackling disparate and fundamental problems that have wide impact on how the rest of the company functions, but a lot of these points of progress sit deeper in the five year timeline.
As FAIR looks to its next five years, LeCun contends that there are some much bigger challenges looming on the horizon that the AI community is just beginning to grapple with.
“Those are all relatively predictable improvements,” he says. “The big prize we are really after is this idea of self-supervised learning — getting machines to learn more like humans and animals and requiring that they have some sort of common sense.”
Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2018 Holiday Gift Guide! Need more gift ideas? Check out our Gift Guide Hub.
Since digital product designer Ryder Carroll’s list-based method for organizing his life first went viral five years ago, bullet journaling has become a movement of its own, helping people take charge of their time with a notebook and pen.
The system’s flexibility means it can be used for many things: time management, academic note taking, mental health tracking, meal planning, project management, scrapbooking, and more. While Carroll’s own approach is minimalistic — a simple system of lists and symbols — others have turned their bullet journals (or “bujos”) into elaborate works of art, with hand-lettering, embellishments, and illustrated “trackers” for to-do lists and goals.
In his new book, The Bullet Journal Method, Carroll explains that he began developing his “cross between a planner, diary, notebook, to-do list, and sketchbook” that eventually evolved into the bullet journal to cope with attention deficit disorder. Much of bullet journaling’s effectiveness comes from writing tasks out by hand: researchers have found that handwriting activates parts of the brain that typing doesn’t, helps people retain information, and, as Carroll puts it, “allows us to form new connections that can yield unconventional solutions and insights.”
If you know someone who’d be into bullet journaling, the end of the year is a great time to help them get the ball rolling. Veteran bullet journalers, meanwhile, probably won’t mind some new pens or stationery. This list also has suggestions for people who prefer digital journaling, too.
The definitive guide to bullet journaling
Sure, there are already a lot of bullet journaling guides online, including the original tutorial on Carroll’s site, but even seasoned bullet journaling fans can still get a lot out of his new book “The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future.”
It includes the basics, but also motivation for people who are turning to bullet journals to help overcome hardships or achieve major life goals. Carroll is a thoughtful writer and his chapters on how bullet journaling can guide people to live more intentional, meaningful lives is a big step above the standard productivity book. The print edition ($17 on Amazon) is a beautifully produced hardback that makes a great gift.
The best notebooks
Many bullet journalers prefer to use notebooks with dotted grid paper that helps them keep things neat but also gives them more flexibility than lined or graph paper. Notebooks by Scribbles That Matter (shown above, about $23), a new U.K. brand, are gaining popularity among bullet journalers because their 100gsm paper allows them to be used with a wide variety of pens, markers, and even watercolors. Hardcover Moleskine ($12 on Amazon) and Leuchtturm1917 notebooks ($20 on Amazon) are often used for bullet journals because of their durability and paper quality. In fact, Leuchtturm1917 offers a bullet journal edition ($25) with a guide, three page markers, and stickers for labeling entries.
Bullet journals include “collections,” or individual sections dedicated to specific projects or goals. Since collections can become lengthy, some bullet journalers prefer to use traveler’s notebooks, which are several slim notebook inserts gathered in a flexible cover. The inserts can be swapped in and out, making the journal even more customizable. Japanese stationery company Midori makes the original and best-known version with leather covers (starter kits begin at $58 from Baum-kuchen). For non-leather ones, check out Cadeneta (starting from about $31) on Etsy.
Writing tools
A lot of bullet journalers prefer fountain pens because they perform especially well on the high-quality paper used in notebooks like Moleskines and Leuchtturm1917s. The Lamy Safari (starting from $30 at Goulet Pens, one of the most comprehensive fountain pen stores online) is a popular “starter pen” because of its ergonomic grip and wide variety of colors and finishes, while the Pilot Vanishing Point (starting from $148) has a retractable nib, making it ideal for people who like the feel of a fountain pen, but prefer the convenience of a click pen.
Pre-filled ink cartridges are available for Pilot and Lamy pens (and many other fountain pen brands), but if you really want to get fancy, give your recipient a set of three mini Pilot Iroshizuku ink bottles ($32 for a box of three), known for their unique colors, smooth ink flow, and quick drying times.
If your recipient does a lot of sketching, they will appreciate a set of eight Sakura Pigma Micron pens in different sizes ($14.50). For marathon journalers, gel pens are a good option because the ink, pigment suspended in a water-based gel, glides onto the page and can help alleviate writer’s cramp. The Uni-ball Signo UM-151 is one of the most popular versions and comes in many colors. JetPens currently has a set of 12 new colors for $34.
Highlighters help keep bullet journals organized, but if your recipient isn’t into blinding neon colors, try a set of Zebra Mildliners ($18 for a set of 15). As their name suggests, Mildliners are highlighters that come in subtle colors.
Many people turn their bullet journals into a personal scrapbook or use it for project planning. Fuji Instax is a simple way to add photos and its Mini 70 model (starting from $60 on Amazon) weighs just 10 ounces. For diehard smartphone photographers who still want the look of instant film, the Instax SP-3 photo printer ($150) lets them print photos on Fuji Instax mini film ($44 for a pack of three).
Other options include the HP Sprocket ($100 on HP.com), which prints photos onto HP ZINK sticker paper ($10 for a pack of 20 sheets), and the Canon Selphy CP1300, one of the most popular compact photo printers ($168 on Amazon).
Digital Journalers
Pen and paper not your recipient’s thing? Consider gifting GoodNotes ($8 on the App Store), a popular app for digital bullet journalers because it does a great job of replicating the experience of writing on paper (its handwriting search function is also very useful). The app has a marketplace of downloadable bullet journaling spreads and templates created by other users. Digital bullet journals are also a good excuse to gift a stylus: an Apple Pencil for iOS users ($99 on Apple’s site) or Adonit Droid ($25 on Adonit’s site) for Android fans.
Organizers
Your bullet recipient will probably need a way to keep their notebook, pens, and other supplies together. Vitra’s Toolbox ($70 on Vitra) is a desk caddy that comes in 11 colors and is an attractive and portable alternative to clunky desk organizers. The Lihit Lab Teffa Bag in Bag ($11.25 on JetPens) fits an A5 size notebook and keeps stationery, coins, and other small things from getting lost in the bottom of their bag. Japanese stationery company Raymay’s Topliner ($16) is like a lightweight, grownup version of the pencil cases kids use in elementary school.
A number of app developers building third-party screen time trackers and parental control applications are worried that Apple’s increased scrutiny of their apps in recent weeks is not a coincidence. With Apple’s launch of iOS 12, the company has implemented its own built-in screen time tracking tools and controls. Not long after, developers’ third-party screen time apps came under increased review from Apple, and, in some cases, rejections and removals from the App Store.
The impacted developers have been using a variety of methods to track screen time, as there has not been any official means of tracking this data. This included the use of background location, VPNs and MDM-based solutions, and sometimes a combination of methods.
A small crowd of a half-dozen or so developers began to discuss their troubles amongst themselves over the past couple of months. But not all wanted to go on record. After all, publicly criticizing Apple is not something many developers feel comfortable doing, especially when their business is at risk.
However, a few did take to their company blogs to report their troubles when they thought they had reached the end of the road.
They were not alone. Several others, which did not want to be quoted, were also facing rejections.
Some of the developers, we understand, were told they were in violation of App Store developer guideline 2.5.4, which specifies when multitasking apps are allowed to use background location. Specifically, developers were told they were “misusing background location mode for purposes other than location-related features.”
Others were told their app violated developer guideline 2.5.1, which references using public APIs in an unapproved manner.
And others, still, were told the way they’ve implemented screen time and parental controls was no longer permitted.
In an odd turn of events, after Space and Mute published on their public company blogs to complain, they received a call from Apple and had their apps reinstated on the App Store.
“We are of course hugely grateful that Apple has chosen to continue to allow our business to operate,” said Space CEO Georgina Powell.
But these were not isolated incidents. Across the third-party screen time app industry, apps were coming under review — in some cases, after operating for years without incident.
Above: Moment app on iOS
But at the same time, some apps were getting a pass — as if Apple is making its decisions on a one-off basis.
For example, an app called Moment — which TechCrunch has covered a fewtimes over the past four years and has been featured by Apple — also received a call from Apple, we learned.
Apple had some questions for Moment, which they answered to Apple’s satisfaction. The app was not removed or threatened.
Asked if they were concerned at all about the increased scrutiny, Moment’s creator Kevin Holesh responded, “I do feel confident about Moment’s future after talking to Apple.” But he added he’s now “mostly watching to see how things play out with this issue going forward.”
The makers of the screen time app solution and hardware device Circle with Disney is also unaffected, we were told. (But then, imagine the consumer backlash if your $99 home network device just stopped working.)
Though not all apps were getting the boot, it seemed, Apple did seem to have a problem with screen time apps that took advantage of mobile device management (MDM) and/or VPNs to operate.
For example, the developer behind Kidslox had implemented a combination of MDM and a VPN for screen time and parental controls. The app tracks the time the device is connected to the VPN for screen time, which Apple said it could no longer do.
Kidslox CEO Viktor Yevpak tried to explain a VPN was necessary for more than just screen time. The app also includes a feature that checks websites against a blacklist to allow for kids to safely browse when they were connected through the VPN.
“I said, there has to be a middle ground, because you’re pretty much killing the entire company,” Yevpak told TechCrunch, recalling his conversations with Apple’s app review. “We have over 30 people working on it, and you’re us telling us to shut down,” he had told them.
After several rejections of updates to Kidslox’ year-old app, the developer finally took to the company blog to also call out Apple for what it believed was the “systematic destruction” of the third-party screen time management industry.
Like many we spoke to, he’s highly suspicious about the timing of Apple’s review, given that iOS 12’s screen time feature has just launched.
Kidslox remains available on the App Store today but its updates are not being approved. Yevpak says the company has been discussing ways to pivot the business, as it seems its time is up.
Apple, of course, never intended for VPNs to be used for screen time tracking or parental controls, nor did it want the enterprise-focused MDM technology to be implemented in consumer-based apps. And by permitting its use to date in apps like these, Apple had given up control over how its devices can be used by consumers.
But its policies have not matched up with its App Store approvals. Apple has greenlit — and it has been directly aware of — screen time apps using MDM in ways that violated its guidelines for years.
Above: OurPact’s app rules allow parents to block apps
One case in point is OurPact (specifically, its OurPact Jr. product), an app that leverages MDM technology to allow parents to control if and when kids can use certain apps on their phone, block texting, filter the web and much more. Its apps — one designed for the parent and the other for the child — have been live for four years. OurPact now says that Apple will no longer allow the company to use MDM for its purposes.
“Our team has received confirmation from Apple that managing application access and content outside of iOS Screen Time will not be permitted in the Apple device ecosystem,” says Amir Moussavian of OurPact parent company Eturi Corp., in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “It’s incredibly disappointing that Apple is choosing to dissolve the iOS parental control market at a time when childhood and adolescent screen time management is finally being understood as a necessity.”
The company says its OurPact Jr. app, the app designed for the child’s device, is impacted by the change. But its parent app will continue to operate.
Apple’s permissiveness to allow these “rule-breaking” apps signaled to developers entering the screen time space anew that MDM was being tacitly approved in these scenarios, even if Apple’s own terms and agreements said otherwise.
Developer Andrew Armour of ACTIVATE Fitness said he decided to implement MDM for a screen time management solution for iOS after seeing many other developers already had been doing the same thing for years, he told TechCrunch.
“I have sunk my entire life savings into the development of this mobile application to provide families with a solution to better regulate and manage screen time and at the same time promote physical activity,” Armour said, speaking about his app’s App Store rejection. “After two years of hard work and determination, my entrepreneurial journey to introduce ACTIVATE Fitness to the world has come to an end due to an Apple rejection in a flawed and unfair review process,” he lamented.
Apple could choose to release an official Screen Time API or carve out exceptions for screen time apps that use MDM or other technologies. Its decision to instead put the entire third-party industry on notice after rolling out its own screen time solution, however, seems to indicate it now wants to control the experience of monitoring screen time usage on iOS, and not leave it up to these third parties.
At the end of the day, the decision is bad for consumers because Apple’s solution doesn’t offer many of the features of the MDM-based solutions focused on parental controls. For example, parents using third-party screen time solutions can hide certain apps from kids’ homescreens and control when those apps function.
Apple declined to comment on the matter.
But sources familiar with Apple’s thinking dismissed this as being some sort of targeted crackdown against third-party screen time apps. Rather, the pushback developers received was part of Apple’s ongoing app review process, they said, and noted that the rules these apps violate have been in place for years.
That’s a fair point. Apple can opt to enforce its rules at any time, and building apps in violation of those rules is never a great idea — especially when developers are knowingly taking advantage of technologies in ways they had to know Apple never intended.
That being said, a decision to purge the App Store of third-party screen time and parental control apps is one that may come across to the impacted end users of these apps as being in poor taste.
In recent months, big tech companies — including the likes of Facebook and Google — have been made aware of the addictive nature of our devices and the apps we use and the negative effects on our mental health. They have all been rolling out solutions to counter this problem. For Apple to be seen as tamping down on the very apps that have been trying to battle these problems for years — before Silicon Valley took notice — is not a great look.
Laco is a small German watch company famous for its Flieger watches – pieces designed for pilots featuring big crowns and legible faces. Now brand has teamed up with ABlogToWatch on a Fallout-themed watch that looks like something pulled out of a deserted vault.
The $2,950 watch contains an ETA 2824.2 movement and features a massively distressed case and band along with a clever case that hearkens back to 1950s A-Bomb/military design. It’s limited to 143 pieces and you can pre-order it for shipment in March. The entire package looks like something out of the Fallout game. Bethesda is not involved in the product, incidentally, but the entire thing is an homage to the Fallout universe.
From the site:
On the outside of the heavily-worn tin box, we see a stamp showing that it was issued to the Overseer of Vault #43. Inside the box, you’ll find the Laco RAD-AUX, a user manual, and an accumulation of a few odds and ends. Presumably, the additional artifacts were collected by the owner of the Laco RAD-AUX before it was discovered. There are realistic Polaroid-style photos depicting abandoned landscapes, mutated plant-life, and a curious panther named Gloria. A bottle cap bearing the mark of a sunset, which has been turned into a pin. There is also a New California Republic ’protection postcard’ which instructs you to place it near the entrance of your domicile, and each item included looks realistically tattered and aged.
The most interesting thing about this watch is the partnership with ABlogToWatch, a popular watch blog run by Ariel Adams, and Laco. These sorts of partnerships usually result in a boring, branded watch with an ugly blog logo hidden somewhere on the case. This partnership is more about Laco and Adams’ imagination taking flight over a mushroom cloud. Regardless, this is a great piece for folks who haven’t yet picked up a 3D-printed Pip Boy. Good luck, Vault Dweller!
That’s a fair point. Apple can opt to enforce its rules at any time, and building apps in violation of those rules is never a great idea — especially when developers are knowingly taking advantage of technologies in ways they had to know Apple never intended.
