happybuy

> Instead, what I think has drastically changed over the past 40 years or so is the ability of a solopreneur to make real money.

Hard disagree.

As the article notes, I think if you concentrate on a real business, not a scam-y 'get rich quick scheme' business then, especially with the internet, its never been easier to run a solo business at scale.

For myself, I wrote an app as a side hobby, which then took off, so I started working on it part-time, then moved to full-time when the revenue justified.

It's now growing to where it exceeds what I would have made working for someone else.

Note this took 7+ years of constant work, improvements and care.

It's the type of dedication that makes you competitive with even larger organisations.

And the time required to be a 'success' ensures that you won't have any competitors who just want to make a quick buck or get to "passive income" within a year or two.

Most existing iOS apps are likely to use a suite of Apple platform frameworks beyond simply pure Swift and SwiftUI.

For those cases, Skip's approach seems to be a range of Skip* frameworks that are minimal implementations of the Apple or Android versions. This will likely grow over time, but for most apps it would likely be very limiting at this stage.

For instance in my iOS app I use StoreKit, WebKit, SafariServices, UserNotifications and CryptoKit amongst others that have no current implementation when using Skip.

As with all drugs, efficacy is only one part of the equation.

What's the potential side effects, both short term and long term, of this treatment?

For this treatment, it may be negligible, but without saying so we are only hearing one side of the story.

Am in a similar situation running a 1 person SaaS B2C product.

Recently wrote up a similar review post about the fears, failures and successes I experienced over the past year:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review...

As per the article, the issue isn't the ad it's peoples reaction to the ad.

Over the last year (or couple of years?), the general perception of Apple has changed which may have larger future ramifications for the company.

Agree that Search is a hard problem.

So was Maps, but Apple committed the time, resources and focus to make it happen. In 2024, I would say the Maps initiative has been an overwhelming success.

As per the article, Apple already has a search solution in Spotlight, which though it hasn't been battle tested as a general web search solution, seems to be a great basis to improve and make better.

My concern is that due to their addiction to the Google partnership money, Apple don't even seem to be contemplating their own Search approach.

This is how we end up with monopolies in product areas as the big tech players, in effect, collude to not compete in core areas of business due to partnership agreements.

Last week, as part of the US Department of Justice investigation, documents were released that showed Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to retain the search partnership.

This is almost 20% of Apple’s total operating profit for the year.

It’s never a good idea for a company to be so reliant on a single partnership or client.

It distorts incentives, is high risk and sometimes, as in Apple’s case leaves a company blind to other opportunities it could be pursuing.

On top of it all, Apple’s search partnership with Google trades their customer’s privacy for search $ kickbacks.

Based upon all this, it should be time for Apple to end this partnership and pursue their own search solution.

Why stop there?

Ideally you could use a device like the Apple Vision Pro with a machine learning model to blank out all advertising you see both in the real and virtual world. Would be interesting for it to recognise billboards, for example, and simply show a blank space instead. It could also work with AirPods to simultaneously silence any audio advertising.

Unfortunately this is not possible at the moment due to the restrictions that are placed on the pass-through video feed by Apple in visionOS. If these OS restrictions were removed it could be technically feasible.

As per your link, many of those other categories listed such as Video and Social media also contain as much as, if not more, advertisement load than perhaps even pure 'web traffic'.

The article was using the % of advertising resources in web pages – which came to 24% – as a proxy for the overall advertising resources across all internet traffic (which is difficult to accurately ascertain).

So, yes, this is a rough approximation... and the actual % of advertising resources on all internet traffic may be more or less.

However it is stating all digital advertising may be the cause 2% of global carbon emissions, not just due to the advertising on web pages.

Couple of months back I wrote how a Bing partnership would be a good initial step for Apple on the way to completely ending their Google search partnership:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/apple-google-search-partn...

Hush is a great tool to manage annoyance blocking and is also free and open source which is nice.

I've developed a full Safari ad blocking app which includes similar features (amongst others), though if you only want simple annoyance blocking to supplement Safari's in-built tracking protection instead of a full ad blocker, Hush is a good option.

It was rumoured a few weeks back that Apple TV+'s "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters" upcoming tv show has been filmed using this camera for Apple Vision Pro.

This is the series based upon the Godzilla / Monsterverse movies.

So, no-one should be saying that all Apple TV+ content has been filmed in this format. But, yes there will likely be at least one show that has been.

Why would Apple need to worry about non-Apple users?

Ultimately they could offer the service to them but they may find having Apple Search exclusive to their devices as a positive. It would allow them to offer many unique features such as integrating local and web results seamlessly (amongst many other ideas).

Also, and Apple knows this more than anyone, Apple users are the most capable in their ability to spend money. So although Safari users would be only 20% of the global search market, it's likely the most lucrative 20%.

Am excited about the support for the :has() selector for Safari Content Blockers. It will enable a lot of sophisticated blocking of page elements based upon characteristics of the child elements.

For example, in a feed of post where one post has a 'sponsored' text element, the :has() selector could be used to easily target the full sponsored post while leaving organic posts untouched.

Yet another huge update of features to Safari, building upon the great progress they made last year in:

- leading on the Interop 2022 dashboard results [1]

- posting the best Speedometer score on the Mac [1]

- changing their pace of innovation and releases to deliver newer API features in a quicker manner

[1] https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/triumph-of-safari/

The conversation back and forth with a bit of AI whimsy reminds me a lot of Apple's Knowledge Navigator video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0

Siri could've been this but overtime it has become more and more neutered to the point that it feels like talking to a drunken command line interface.

Lifetime pricing / one-time purchases seem to be a double-edged sword for app sellers.

You satisfy users who are happy to pay a large amount upfront by they are also likely your most enthusiastic customers. So in essence they would be the customers who would probably pay more than 3 years of subscriptions over the period the lifetime payment covers.

Users who aren't that enthusiastic are more likely to not use the app for long periods and also unlikely to pay a large upfront cost.

I know from personal experience of making and selling an App Store app [1] that it can be difficult to show accurate pricing on your products website.

There can be 175+ different territories that you may sell an app in, each with a different local price point. You also can't expect to simply show a converted $US dollar amount either as you may want to do price discrimination (so that the app is cheaper for regions that cannot afford the exact $US equivalent).

Overall options seem to be:

1. Don't show pricing and leave it for the App Store to display - the most common approach

2. Only show $US pricing on the website and let non-US customers manually translate to their local pricing - not a great experience for non-US users

3. Manually or automatically sync pricing on the website display with the actual current App Store pricing. This is quite a labour or integration intensive task and I've only seen this been done by large vendors

[1] https://www.magiclasso.co/

Wrote a similar article for Safari's Dangerous Defaults:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/safaris-dangerous-default...

These articles came out in the same week, so it looks like one inspired the other or was just serendipitous timing.