When choosing what apps and services I use, the level of trust I have in the company is weighing heavier and heavier in the calculus. That level of trust is based on a number of factors ranging from trust in the quality of a product, its potential longevity, and—increasingly—whether I can trust it with my personal data.

The trust factor came into sharp focus for me when I tried out Readdle’s new email app, Spark. While it’s a gorgeous, powerful app that I want to like, there’s two things about it that gave me pause. The first is that Readdle stores my login credentials on their server, giving them full access to my email accounts, even beyond the standard Google APIs. The second is that, not long after setting up the app, Readdle had signed me up for an email newsletter.

Readdle claims their server back-end has stronger encryption than Google’s gMail server, and that the email newsletter sign up was a mistake. I’m sure both are true, but they were two very large strikes against the product. [1] It’s possible Readdle can make up for their mistake and prove that they’re worthy of my trust, but until then, I will not be using their app.

The situation around Spark storing login information is similar to the launch of Mailbox, which also had similar security concerns. I refused to use the app until it was acquired by Dropbox, which I did trust—at the time. Since then, Dropbox has made decisions that have me questioning the trust I placed in them, and now I’m using iCloud Drive more, and Dropbox less. I don’t use Mailbox at all anymore, and have settled on sticking with the gMail web interface on my Mac, and Dispatch on my iPhone.

Most services and apps I use rest somewhere along a spectrum of trust and utility, much like Dropbox. Any service below a certain threshold, I will not use. Facebook is just on the “will use” side of that threshold. I wouldn’t trust it any further than I could throw Mark Zuckerberg—he may be small, but I’m not very strong—but since almost everyone in my life is on Facebook, I’m sort of stuck. Apple services I trust almost whole-heartedly. While they’re not known for their reliability, that aspect is improving. Sure, Apple services are free, save for extra iCloud storage, I trust Apple not to go peeking to sell my data to advertisers. They made their money when I bought the hardware.

The exception is Google, and I’ve been looking at my Google usage with a more skeptical eye after reading Marco Arment and John Gruber’s recent posts on why they don’t trust Google. I’m not a fan of Google poking through my email, though I use gMail anyway. I put up with it because gMail is the best free solution for email out there, especially in terms of integrations and app support.

In the past year, however, I’ve been moving away from Google as my trust of them wanes. With the release of Yosemite and iOS 8, I switched to using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. I only use Google Maps on my desktop when I need transit directions. I use Google Chrome only for sites that require Flash, or as my browser for day job related tasks. [2] This leaves gMail and Hangouts. I’m tied in and comfortable, and don’t think I’ll switch yet, but I have updated various online accounts that use my gMail address to my sanspoint.com email, in case I decide to jump ship after all. $40 a year for Fastmail doesn’t seem terrible.

You can say “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” all you want. It doesn’t change that many of the best, or at least most useful services on the Internet are ones you pay for in data instead of money. If you’re getting enough back from the trust you put into those services to respect you as a user, to keep your data secure, and to keep you happy, then it’s time to find greener pastures—even if you have to pay for it.

And that’s the other part of the trust problem that often gets ignored in these discussions: not everyone can afford to use services they can trust. At least in the United States, you can pay quite a bit just for an Internet connection. I’ve paid, on average, $35/mo for home Internet, and another $90/mo for cell service (with voice and texting). That adds up to $1,500 a year for connectivity. I’m gainfully employed, and live in an area with decent enough options for Internet service. For many people, that’s more than they can reasonably afford—and asking them to drop more on top of that for the nebulous benefit of “trust” is pushing it. It’s a point I’ve made before, but bears repeating.

The danger of a filter bubble isn’t whether it’s harming political discourse, but what it means for how we communicate with the people we care about most. Many Facebook users are unaware that Facebook is even filtering their news feeds, even after the debacle of their infamous emotion study, where some users had either happy or sad updates hidden from their feeds to see how it changed their own updates.

— Facebook Is Hiding Your Friends' Updates From You | Unicorn Booty

I’m now contributing to the wonderful site Unicorn Booty, and this is my first piece. There’s something very dangerous about a social media company determining what you see, even if it’s with an algorithm. Especially if it’s with an algorithm.

“Everyone has to eat, obviously, and so “cooking” is much more of a central human life-activity than “compiling a Linux app from source.” However, the parallel here is that to someone who’s not at least a semi-skilled computer user and who’s never faced down a bash prompt, compiling that application seems not just intimidating but actually impossible. And that same feeling of hopelessness is present for people who have never learned how to properly cook. Both activities ultimately boil down to a discrete series of steps guided by a mix of instruction, experience, and intuition; both look equally impenetrable to an outsider”

— The psychology of Soylent and the prison of first-world food choices | Ars Technica

Some interesting thoughts about Soylent in this piece, but this paragraph stuck out to me. It reflects some thoughts I’ve expressed before about skill acquisition.

And now I’m back to giving serious thought about getting some Soylent to use as quick, easy breakfasts.

It hasn’t been a month since I wrote up my iPhone fitness tracking setup, and it’s already been thrown into disarray. I don’t even have my Apple Watch yet. Back in late April, when I wrote about the apps I use to track my food and exercise, I had a system that was working fine. Then, Jawbone made changes to their API, things started breaking, step data stopped ending up where it should, and I decided it was time to throw it all out and start over. It also didn’t help that the clip for my Jawbone UP Move had deformed after four months of use. Frustrating.

There’s two main problems with the state of fitness tracking on iOS, at least if you’re relying on third-party hardware and software. The first is that most applications do not use HealthKit effectively, if at all. I know HealthKit has had its fair share of flaws and problems since its release, but they’ve largely been ironed out. There’s no good reason for a fitness tracking app, like Jawbone or FitBit, to not read and write as much data as they have to HealthKit. In the case of Jawbone, their app can only read and write step and sleep tracking, but in their API, they expose a ton of useful data. This includes walking distance, active calories, and BMI. I used a third-party app to sync this data with HealthKit—the need for which indicates that someone on Jawbone’s software team is falling down on the job—but that also broke with the API change.

This means that the picture of my health that I was trying to formulate is now fractured. And it leads into the second problem with Fitness Tracking on iOS: the companies that make many fitness tracking products want to silo the data we feed them. FitBit is probably the worst offender, without making even a token gesture towards interoperability with the iOS fitness ecosystem, but other products have similar degrees of lockdown. It’s easier, I suppose, to build a business on data if you’re keeping the juiciest bits for yourself, but I thought these companies were in the business of selling gizmos, not my data. And that’s not even getting into the problem of apps that use the iPhone’s internal CoreMotion data for step counting instead of what’s in HealthKit, a problem I’ve chatted about with Jamie Phelps quite a bit on Twitter.

Elsewhere on iOS, several apps that track food, Lose It! and Lifesum come to mind, even have the audacity to lock fitness tracker integration to their premium, paid memberships. A decent, standalone tracker like the Jawbone UP, costs about $50, while a year of premium membership to these food tracking apps costs about the same. Suddenly, you’re paying $100 to see data that you’re generating and pipe it into another app full of data that you’re generating. This just seems unfair to me. I don’t begrudge food tracking apps and companies adding premium tiers—they gotta make money somehow. I just bristle at the idea of locking tracker integration behind that wall. Fortunately, my food tracking app of choice, MyFitnessPal, has kept tracker integration free. If only it still worked with my Jawbone UP…

The only way to stay sane is to stay first party, as much as possible. So, I’ve tossed my Jawbone aside, and am now using my iPhone as a fitness tracker, until my Apple Watch shows up sometime in the next five to eight weeks. Inconvenient, but it looks like enough bugs are ironed out of HealthKit that i don’t think it’ll start losing my steps again. I have a few apps I’m using to pick up the slack of what Jawbone did: Pillow for sleep tracking, Caffiend for caffeine tracking, FitPort for quick visualization and an app called QS Access to let me pull my data out of HealthKit for… some future endeavor.

Which is the one thing I miss about having a service like Jawbone. I recently started using an IFTTT recipe and a script to get my daily activity data and save it into Day One. Now, there’s no sane way to get that data out of HealthKit and into Day One, or any other app, at least not yet. That’s the most frustrating part: I’ve given up putting my health data into one silo, only to start putting it into a different silo. The new one is (hopefully) less leaky, but it also means there’s fewer ways to get that data back out. This is my data. I’m creating it, and I’m using it to improve my health. I should control of it, not Jawbone, not UnderArmour, not even Apple.

I’m in on the Apple Watch. All in.

Well, in for a $400 Nerd Edition Space Gray Sport with the black band. That’s pretty all-in though.

I wanted to hold off for a year, convinced my I needed to upgrade my iPad first, and that would cost the same. Then, on a whim, I decided to see if I could improve my iPad’s performance with a nuke and repave. It worked. My iPad 3 isn’t a speed demon, by any stretch, but it’s far more usable than it was before. Suddenly, I have a $500 surplus, and I know exactly what I want to waste it on.

So, why an Apple Watch? It comes down to three things:

Fitness Tracking

I wear a Jawbone UP Move and like it a lot. What I don’t like is the lack of integration with the iOS ecosystem in many ways. It’s HealthKit sync is limited to step counts and sleep tracking—the latter of which is flaky. It’s clear that if I want to use iOS and get the best fitness tracking experience, It’s going to have to be either an Apple Watch or nothing. (Or just keeping my phone on my person, which is a pain.)

I’m also planning to get back into running for fitness. The ability to use the Watch as a tracker for running alone appeals to me. It’ll be a while before I can use it on its own with, say, a Couch to 5K app, though, so it’s a good thing I still have my iPhone arm band, which will be a good stopgap until real native apps are available.

The only issue I can see with an Apple Watch over my Jawbone is that I can’t do sleep tracking with it. I can use my iPhone to track sleep, but I’ve found having an alarm right next to my head in the mornings is ineffective. I don’t hit snooze—I turn it off and go right back to sleep. With Apple Watch, I can just plop it on its charger and have that wake me up instead, and be free to do sleep tracking on the phone.

Contextual Computing

Smartwatches are the best expression of context-aware computing we have at the moment. I’ve seen a few Apple Watch owners on Twitter showing off the customized faces they use at various times of their life, and I love the idea. At the office, I can have a face that shows my work calendar, my activity goals, and current weather. At home, I can switch to one that just shows the current time with nothing else to distract me. If I’m out for a walk, I can switch to something that’s optimized for info I’ll need while out of the house.

And then there’s glances: all the info I’d want to see, and quick little actions that I can get to and deal with in seconds, with (hopefully) less distraction and Social Media K-Holes than before. Running errands? Check the OmniFocus glance. Buying groceries? There’s my list, right when I glance at my wrist (I presume). [1] Need to see if the trains are screwed up? Glance.

If there’s one thing I loved about my Pebble, it’s just the power of looking down at my wrist and seeing little bits of contextually relevant information. To have that again, only in a fully-integrated manner, would be an incredible boon. Which leads to number three…

I Miss My Pebble

Not going to lie. I really miss having my Pebble on my wrist. Not enough to go back to it, mind, but I miss the ability to just shove my phone in a pocket and not have to dig it out for stuff like switching music or even just to see what notification I just got. I’ve got my notifications pared down pretty severely, but that only means that when my phone buzzes, it’s probably something important. If I can deal with some of them from my wrist, instead—I’m thinking Due timers especially—that’s one less excuse to pull out my phone and fiddle with it.

Apple Watch looks to excel at all the things where the Pebble failed for me. It’ll let me interact with notifications from my wrist, be a fully-integrated fitness tracker, and let me get relevant, glanceable information without having to pull my phone out of my pocket. I don’t want to have to switch modes just to switch my music, see how far I’ve walked, or just find out what someone messaged me.

I don’t need a smartwatch, let alone a $400 Apple Watch. I just want one. I have a use case for it, and it looks like it will fit my life and my needs well. I’m already comfortable wearing watches—even before I got a Pebble, I would switch between an analog Swiss Army watch and a Casio F–91W. A watch has a natural place in how I live my life, and I want to expand on that. It looks like Apple Watch is the best solution for that right now, so it seems right to dive in.