The release of iOS 10 is just around the corner. I’ve been running the public beta on my phone for a few weeks, and I think it’s going to be an incredible update. It’ll be even better once I can run it with watchOS 3, but that’s neither here nor there. All the UI tweaks, features, and simple improvements have made using my iPhone so much easier and more pleasant, with one exception.
That is: the Music app.
I won’t deny that the iOS 10 Music app is a huge step up from the convoluted mess that was iOS 9.3’s Music app. I can actually figure out how to navigate, control the playback queue, and find my music. The new interface is also a lot more visually appealing. I’m a big fan of the new, bold San Francisco font used for section headers. It looks and it works great, though it’s not likely to sway me back from Cesium any time soon.
The problem I have with the Music app can be summarized in one screenshot. I have highlighted the offending feature, in case you missed it.
If I want to view only my locally stored, downloaded music, there is now a separate menu option. For everything iOS 9.3’s Music app got wrong, and boy did it get a lot wrong, there was at least a simple toggle that would hide all my cloud and iTunes purchases not stored on my phone. It didn’t work all that often, but at least it was there. Apple showed they cared, just a little, about us legacy luddites who still synchronized music to our phones over USB like an animal. And to be honest, after the last time I tried Apple’s cloud music solutions, I’m going to stick with syncing until Apple takes it away.
Replacing the “Downloaded Music†toggle with a menu option means there is now an additional step between me and getting a view into the music I keep on my phone. It’s additional friction, and it renders the music synced and stored on our devices to second-class citizen status. Showing me all the artists and albums I bought on iTunes, even if I don’t have them on my device, is not a benefit. There is a reason I didn’t sync those songs to my phone. Limited space forces me to keep only a subset of my library, the music I know I’ll want to listen to most often. This is fine. If I want to listen to something I don’t normally keep on my phone, I’ll sync it.
And before you ask, yes, I already filed a Feedback report.
I think it’s fine for Apple to create a Music app that puts streaming and the cloud first. This is the future, and how most of Apple’s users listen to their music. Fine. It’s a future I want no part of, until they drag me there, kicking and screaming, but I admit it’s the future. That doesn’t mean the streaming and cloud first Music app needs to leave local music users as second class citizens. A toggle is a simple way to streamline and keep the iOS Music experience pleasant for users who don’t stream or have poor connectivity. You can’t stream music in a subway tunnel with no cellular or wi-fi connection. And let’s not forget those poor iPod Touch users.
You might think I’m just complaining about a zeroth-world problem, and I might be. Despite it, music is something I’m passionate about. It’s a huge part of my life. My music listening habits are strange and idiosyncratic in an age where everything is streaming, but they’re mine. And I know I’m not alone. Just make local music a toggle again, Apple. It’s not hard—you already did it once.
I have six messaging apps on my phone right now: the stock Apple Messages app, Telegram, Skype, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, and Slack. (Seven if you count Tweetbot.) Each gives me access to a subset of my friends, family, and coworkers. Each app’s subset overlaps some, and, well, it’s really annoying in a first-world problem kind of way. The proliferation of messaging apps over the past several years has me desperate for the days when I could reach the majority of people in my life with one simple application on my phone or computer, regardless of platform.
That’s right. Once upon a time, messaging services had open APIs, and there were clever applications that could tap into several of them at once. In one window, I could see all my friends on AOL Instant Messenger, my friends on ICQ, my friends on Google Talk, and eventually my friends on Facebook. When I was a Windows user, there was Trillian—an app whose name I appreciated, even if the app itself was ugly and clunky. Once I switched to the Mac, I had Adium, which I customized to hell and back, and kept its buddy list pinned to the corner of my desktop for the better part of eight years.
These apps still exist for the desktop, along with a handful of multi-platform iOS messaging apps, but they’re moribund, and typically ad-supported. Trillian was last updated a little over a year ago, while Adium’s last major update was in 2014. Many are tied to legacy APIs that don’t provide newer features. I ended up abandoning Adium after I found out I couldn’t join a Google Hangouts group chat with it. And there’s no incentive for the platform creators to allow that API access, since they can’t monetize a third-party app. The result is a bunch of competing services with no sane way to unify all your contacts in one place.
SMS is the closest thing left to a “universal” messaging platform, but its limitations are myriad. It’s limited to text and images, many phone plans still have limits on the number of SMS and MMS messages that can be sent, and it’s insecure. iMessage looks like it aspires to be the replacement for SMS, and another potential “universal” platform, but as long as it’s limited to iOS, that won’t do. My partner is on Android, and despite the pre-WWDC rumors, it’s not looking like Apple will release an Android iMessage app any time soon.
Our messaging needs have changed since the days when America On-Line opened up their instant messenger platform to the masses. We’re no longer sharing text, we’re sharing our lives—links, photos, video, and audio. More of us are concerned about our privacy, and we want encryption to make sure nobody is peeking in on our conversations. It’s possible that these are obstacles to a more interoperable messaging space. I suspect they’re secondary to a lack of interest on the part of the platform owners.
I’m asking to send a message to someone on Facebook from my Telegram account or with the Messages app. I’d just like to keep one app where I can reach everyone, regardless of what service they choose to use, like I could only five years ago. Moving forward with richer, more secure, and more robust messaging platforms shouldn’t mean convenience and freedom get left behind. Yet, that’s exactly the situation I find myself in. I can’t be alone.
The new hotness is no longer going iPad only. Now, all the cool kids are writing missives about how the iPad can’t be their only computer. Okay, that’s a more dismissive than I mean to be about Watts Martin’s excellent Medium piece on trying to do his work on the iPad, especially since I’m typing this on a Mac. He makes some great points about file handling and interoperability with the legacy PC world. Going iOS only is feasible, but only if you have the infrastructure to support it in your line of work. If you desperately need to use the Track Changes feature in Word, well, don’t plan on going iOS only just yet.
What I’d like to do, instead, is discuss the difference between the iOS and iPad ecosystem and the world of desktop Linux. First a caveat: while I have used Linux as my primary operating system, I am a decade removed from that whole scene. I ditched Linux for the Mac in 2006, and have never looked back. Well, okay, I’ve looked back once or twice, enough to know that my experience with Linux in the early 2000s is not accurate to the experience someone would have in 2016. That said, some aspects of Linux have not changed in the intervening ten years, and its those aspects that make all the difference here.
The history of iOS has been the slow re-development of the GUI-based computer from first principles. From the original iPad and iOS in 2010, the past six years have seen an incremental inclusion of the features we take for granted with modern desktop operating systems. You can argue about whether this was the plan all along, but you can’t deny it’s happening. iOS on the iPad now has multitasking, rudimentary multi-user support for education, the start of a user-accessible file system via iCloud, improved inter-app communication, and even the first steps towards a native development environment. However slow it’s been, the forward momentum of development makes me think that in a few more years, we’ll have an iPad and an iOS that addresses most of Martin’s complaints.
Linux, on the other hand, is design-by-committee. There’s a million ways to do everything, and no unified vision for the operating system above the kernel level. There’s distributions focused on usability for the desktop, and development on open source Linux consumer applications that have almost perfect feature parity with their Windows and Mac counterparts. Despite all of this, and people proclaiming every year since 1998 as “The Year of Linux on the Desktop†it’s yet to happen. And I have my doubts it will beyond the niche of computer geeks who are into that sort of thing and/or are frugal on hardware and software. That’s not to say Linux doesn’t have a place. It’s part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and it’s not going anywhere. Linux, in a pure form, as a desktop OS, however, is not likely to happen in the next few years. And it won’t happen as the underpinning of ChromeOS either.
Maybe the future isn’t everyone with 10†and 13†slabs of glass as their primary computing device, but I maintain that it’s still far too early to tell. Right now, the consensus seems to be that big changes to iOS for the iPad will come in the Spring. Whatever changes Apple brings will make doing “real work†easier and faster. In a few more years, I fully expect a native development environment in time, perhaps once Swift is streamlined a bit more. The iPad and iOS keep making slow, steady strides towards being a new way of computing. Linux, on the other hand, continues to be itself, a powerful tool that can be used as a desktop operating system if you want, but unlikely to make any additional inroads into people’s homes except as the foundation of an Internet of Things device. And I also don’t think the Mac or traditional PC will ever go away either.
Abuse filters are a lot like anti-spam. They look for patterns in data. When I’m creating rules for filtering abuse in my own software, I look at a combination things like account date creation, if the profile pic is still the default, who the person interacts with, if that person interacts with people I’ve got blocked, who they follow, how many tweets they’ve sent, how many of their tweets are retweets versus original content, etc. It’s a huge list, and it creates a risk score. Any one or two or three of these things isn’t enough to get you caught by my anti-abuse filters, but a combination of many means I won’t have to see your tweets. As I was building out this system, many things became clear. While some mob harassment shares very distinct characteristics, this is generally limited to abuse that exists within communities on Twitter.
Verification is only one, small, tool out of many that needs to be in place for Twitter to protect its users from abuse. This is the sort of thing Twitter’s team would know and understand if solving abuse was a priority. Anyone who thinks being verified would be a panacea for the abuse problem on Twitter, (like a certain Mr. Calacanis) would do well to give Randi’s well-considered post a read.
It’s time we admit that the era of open-by-default social media is an experiment on the verge of failure. It’s not that people don’t want to have a public persona, but they want it to be a broadcast medium open to responses from selected friends. Nobody wants to be accessible to every jerk with an account and a grudge. Without a strong, active—and expensive—human moderation team, any digital space where people can directly contact anyone else is at risk of becoming an open sewer of abuse. And when the tools provided to end-users manage those communications are toothless, the situation can only get worse.
There are three major public and open-by-default social networks currently: Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. Of these three, Tumblr and Instagram two have some protections against abuse. Instagram is actively moderated, and has the advantage of being a visual medium, which makes abuse a bit harder to commit. Tumblr has had a handful of high-profile harassment and abuse cases, but is typically a safer, and more limited, space than Twitter. Twitter’s problems are numerous, and beyond the scope of this piece. For a sampling, just look at my last few essays and links. Or just read Randi Harper.
Considering that conflict, harassment, and abuse are par for the course on open-by-default networks, it’s not a surprise more people are moving towards closed networks. The geeks have their private Slack channels, the kids have Snapchat, and Facebook… is Facebook. Facebook is semi-public by default, but easy enough to lock your profile down so that your content can only be seen by friends. You won’t see anyone in your Facebook News Feed unless you friend them, or they’re a friend of a friend. This means you have significantly less risk of being attacked, spammed, or deal with any of the garbage that infests Twitter.
Open-by-default social networks operate under the assumption that all speech should be treated equally, and that equal access means a level playing field. All one needs to do is take a look at the people most likely to be the victims of abuse and harassment online to see that this is far from the case. Women, minorities, and LGBTQ people all face significantly more online harassment than the white men who make up the leadership and technical staff of most social networks. It’s been documented time and again that abuse leads to a chilling effect where victims of abuse lose their freedom of speech, because speech means they risk violence. When that’s the choice, who can blame someone for choosing a smaller, closed network of safe people.
The downside of closed-by-default networks is that they make positive network effects harder, if not impossible. In my personal experience, I have made some wonderful friends through Twitter that I doubt I would ever have made in a more private space. It’s a criticism that echoes the sentiment of a number of geeky types who live in private Slack channels. Still, unless the toxic elements of the open-by-default social network are brought under some semblance of control, many people are willing to give up the openness and connections for personal security. But doing so is expensive—financially, technologically, and emotionally.
Whatever way you want to look at it, it’s clear that the lack of controls and moderation of Twitter is proving to be a mistake. It seems obvious in retrospect, like so many other ideas. Perhaps in the brief days when Monthly Active Users were in the five-to-six digit range, it wasn’t a mistake, though Charlie Warzel’s reporting says otherwise. Perhaps we’re just not meant to have open, unfettered, unmoderated access to each other all the time. Twitter has been an interesting experiment in human nature, but like all experiments, its time has passed. The hypothesis has been proven false. Let’s take the lessons we’ve learned and build something better. Hopefully that better thing will come soon, before we all decamp back to App.Net.
