Today Apple announced the dates for their Annual World Wide Developer Conference. The dates will be from June 3rd to June 7th, 2019. The conference will be held again in San Jose, California.

As with the past few years you enter into a random drawing to try and get a ticket to the conference. The cost for the conference is the same, at $1599. Entries for a chance to win need to be by 5 PM Pacific Time on March 20th, 2019. You can enter register for your chance on the Apple Developer website.

The cost of the conference can be outside the reach of some. If you are a student, or a member of a STEM organization, you can apply for one of the 350 scholarships that are available. Information for these are available on the WWDC Scholarship page. There are some requirements. Applications for these need to be submitted by March 24th, 2019 at 5PM Pacific Time.

Also as in past years, if you are not able to attend the conference sessions will be streamed throughout each day of the conference.

The tagline for this year's conference is "Write code. Blow minds." The text below tagline on the page is:

"This is not an invitation. It‘s a challenge. This is your chance to join thousands of coders, creators, and crazy ones this summer to do the insanely great."

When you visit the page you may get one of four different images at the top. They are an alien, a monkey, a robot, or a skull. Each of them have a different colors, and yet they have some common elements. The brains of each of the items are being blown. Here are each of the images.

If you do decide to enter into the random selection for at ticket good luck. Also make sure all of your payment information is ready to go when you register.

It is not often that I log into the iTunes Connect App, but I decided to do so this morning and noticed a message on the app. "Starting March 20, 2019 iTunes Connect for iOS will no longer be available. To continue managing your content, use the iTunes Connect website." Before I delve into my thoughts, a brief history of the iTunes Connect app.

Brief History

There are a variety of different services that Apple provides to publishers, depending on the types of media that are published. Prior to 2008, a majority of iTunes users, including myself, were not aware of how items were added to the iTunes Store. In 2008 Apple unveiled the iTunes App Store, which allowed developers to submit their applications to the iTunes App Store.

On June 11th, 2010 Apple released a new iOS application that would allow authors, music publishers, movie publishers, and developers to manage their content, look at purchases of their apps, and get reports all from their iPhone or iPad. This had been the status quo until 2010. On June 4th, 2018 at their World Wide Developer Conference, Apple announced a brand new site for developers to manage all of their apps, titled App Store Connect. At the same time they also released a new iOS app, similarly named App Store Connect. When the app was released developers could no longer log in to iTunes Connect App.

My Thoughts

I cannot say that I am surprised that the App is going away. It has been neglected and not maintained. For instance, if you look at the screenshot above you will see that it does not take advantage of all of the screen sizes. The last update of the app was on June 21st, 2018. According to the release notes it "includes minor improvements". The update prior to that was October 31st, 2016.

It would have liked to have seen Apple improve the app, but my guess is that its usage significantly dropped after the introduction of App Store Connect, since developers has a newer and better maintained app that provided functionality that better suited the needs of developers, which are inherently more complex.

Along with dropping usage, the iTunes Connect website is responsive, so it will work on any iOS device via a web browser. The removal of the app also means that there is less to maintain and if more users are using the iTunes Connect website it is better to maintain that, because it will impact more users. Along with this, the iTunes Connect website has more functionality than the app.

If you have been following world news at all over the last two and half years, you have likely heard about the referendum that the United Kingdom voted for in 2016 to leave the European Union. Even though it has been a big news story it may not be easy to understand. Thankfully, there is a video by CGP Grey to explain the issue with why an agreement cannot be made easily.

There is also a footnote video that adds a bit more information. Both of the videos are worth watching to learn a bit about the struggles that the United Kingdom is having.

Today Apple sent out event invites for an event that they will be holding at the Steve Jobs Theater at 10:00 am on Monday, March 25th, 2019. The invite is titled "It's Showtime". As John Paczkowski of Buzzfeed stated, that it is the same tagline as the September 2006 event that showed off the original Apple TV.

According to Matthew Panzarino of Tech Crunch, the invite has an animation, which is shown below.

https://twitter.com/panzer/status/1105187595246395397

There have been some rumors of what might be shown at the event. I will make my predictions before the event. What predictions do you have for the March 25th event?

March 8th is set as International Women's Day, but Apple is celebrating the entire month of March. The first way that Apple will be doing this on the App Store by having the "App of the Day" highlighting an app founded, developed or led by a woman.

Along with highlighting stories of female developers, musicians, and artists, Apple is hoping to bring even more women into technology. One way that Apple is doing that is by partnering with Girls Who Code who will be using Apple's "Everyone Can Code" curriculum. With the curriculum 90,000 girls and the Girls Who Code facilitators can use Swift to help the students learn. Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives stated:

"Women have earned the opportunity to have our ideas shape the future. We’re excited to support Girls Who Code as they empower girls to be the developers and tech innovators of tomorrow."

In addition to working with Girls Who Code, Apple will also be holding over 60 sessions within their own stores. These session are all in a "Made By Women" series. Some of these sessions will be led by artists, musicians, photographers, app developers, scientists and entrepreneurs.

The sessions will be held in various stores including:

• Chicago
• Dubai
• Hong Kong
• Kyoto
• London
• Los Angeles
• Milan
• New York
• Paris
• San Francisco
• Singapore

Specifically for International's Women's Day, Apple will have an exclusive Activity badge, with accompanying stickers, by performing a walk, run, or wheelchair exercise of a mile or more on March 8th.

If you have been paying attention at all, it should be no surprise that there is a disproportionate number of males in technology. Hopefully with Apple highlighting women throughout the entire month of March, it may inspire some other women to get into technology.

Source: Apple

When Apple unveiled a new product in September of 2016 alongside the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, it was something that users were not necessarily expecting. The product was the AirPods. During the announcement Apple let us know that there was some very custom silicon in the earbuds. This chip was a wireless chip that they dubbed the "W1".

The W1 chip is an Apple designed chip that is specifically for being able to quickly pair with any iOS or macOS Sierra device. The W1 chip also enables is the syncing of the pairing information between all of the devices using the same iCloud account.

The synchronization with iCloud is designed to allow your devices to automatically switch, without having to go through the tedious, “un-pair”, “re-pair” dance that is typical of Bluetooth enabled devices.

Apple has made this entirely seamless when switching between iOS devices. And it is somewhat seamless on the Mac as well. However, unlike iOS there is no nice interface on the Mac for connecting to the AirPods. In order to connect to your AirPods, or Beats Solo 3 Wireless headphones, you have to select the headphones either within an app or from the Bluetooth menu. This is where AirBuddy can come in handy and makes things a bit easier.

AirBuddy

AirBuddy is an app that Apple should have created for macOS. Since they have not, macOS and iOS spelunker Guilherme Rambo, has written it. AirBuddy takes the look and feel of the iOS card that appears when you open your AirPods and it brings that to the Mac. The app uses the same services and graphics as on iOS and mimics the look and feel. The screenshots below show the comparison

Prerequisites

There are some requirements to be able to use AirBuddy. These include a Mac running macOS Mojave, and signed into the same iCloud account that your AirPods or Beats Solo 3s are on. The second requirement is that you will need a Mac that supports Bluetooth Low Energy, also known as BTLE. If your Mac supports Handoff and continuity it is quite likely that it will support AirBuddy.

Preferences

As with any good Mac app there are a few things that you can tweak. There are only two options. These are "Enable for AirPods" and "Enable for other W1 headsets". By default "Enable for AirPods" is checked and "Enable for other W1 headsets" is unchecked. This is because most users of the app have AirPods, but may not have a pair of Beats Solo 3, or newer headphones.

Today Widget

There are different interaction methods on the Mac, including via the Today section of the Notification Center. With the Today Widget enabled you can not only view the battery levels for all of the bluetooth connected devices, but you can also click on a device that you want to connect and it should connect to your Mac.

Pricing

AirBuddy has a slightly differentiated pricing model than most other apps. For many apps an author will provide a price and you can either agree to pay or not pay it. AirBuddy has this same idea, with a price of $5.00. However, if you so choose, you can actually pay more than the minimum. To quote Office Space:

"Now if you feel that the bare minimum is enough, then okay. But some people choose to [pay] more and we encourage that, okay?"

When I bought the app, I paid more than the minimum. This was for two reasons. The first is to support an indie developer and the second is because any native Mac app that is produced brings even more to the ecosystem. You can purchase AirBuddy at Gumroad.com starting at $5.00.

Closing Thoughts

AirBuddy is an app that cannot live on the Mac App Store. This is because it uses some system frameworks that will not allow it to be in the store. Even though it is a side project for Mr. Rambo, he does intend to provide meaningful updates and bug fixes, as time permits. If you use any W1 enabled headphones on your Mac AirBuddy can help make things easier. While it is a minimalist application, it does what you expect an all in a nice clean interface. AirBuddy is worth the entry fee, whatever you decide that fee is.

Today Apple sent out an email to developers about the security of their accounts. The emails states:

In an effort to keep your account more secure, two-factor authentication will be required to sign in to your Apple Developer account and Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles starting February 27, 2019. This extra layer of security for your Apple ID helps ensure that you're the only person who can access your account. If you haven't already enabled two-factor authentication for your Apple ID, please learn more and update your security settings. If you have any questions, contact us. Best regards, Apple Developer Relations

There are a few possible reasons for this. The first is, as the email states, to help secure developer accounts. By enabling the two-factor authentication, particularly for Certificates, Identifiers, and Profiles cannot be added by unauthorized users.

This will have some downsides though. By requiring two-factor authentication, only ten devices will be able to receive the two factor authentication codes. For most individual users, this will not be a problem. Five of these trusted devices can be Macs and five of these can be iOS devices.

I contacted Apple Support to verify the number, and it is indeed ten trusted devices that can be associated with an Apple ID.

For larger development groups who may need to allow more than one user to login to the Certificates, you will likely need add a user who has access to the Developer Resources.

If you have not already enabled two-factor authentication on your Apple Developer account, you will want to review the two-factor authentication support page to be sure that you have a way to recover your account, if needed.

When you think of February it is possible that you might think of hearts. To coincide with this February is also known as Heart Month. One of the areas where Apple has set a focus on for the Apple Watch is health and fitness and in particular heart health. There are two ways that Apple is celebrating Heart Month in two different ways. The first is with the Apple Watch and the other is with Today at Apple classes.

When you think of February it is possible that you might think of hearts. To coincide with this February is also known as Heart Month. One of the areas where Apple has set a focus on for the Apple Watch is health and fitness and in particular heart health. There are two ways that Apple is celebrating Heart Month in two different ways. The first is with the Apple Watch and the other is with Today at Apple classes.

Apple Watch

Last February Apple offered a challenge for Apple Watch Activity Challenge. You were able to earn this badge by closing your exercise ring, which is 30 minutes, each day for seven days in a row. This ran from February 8th to February 14th.

This year Apple will be offering another Apple Watch Activity Challenge. It is the same challenge and runs for the same time frame, February 8th to the 14th. If you complete the challenge you will get a special badge in the Activity app. Along with the badge you will also get some stickers for Messages.

In order to receive the Activity Challenge and possibly get the stickers, you will need to be running at least iOS 12.1.3 on your iPhone and watchOS 5.1.3 on your Apple Watch.

Today at Apple

Besides the Apple Watch activity challenge with its badge and stickers. Apple will be hosting three different "Heart Health with Apple sessions at three different stores across the United States.

In recognition of Heart Month, Apple will host special Today at Apple sessions, “Heart Health with Apple,” in stores in New York, Chicago and San Francisco with celebrity fitness trainer Jeanette Jenkins, Sumbul Desai, MD, Apple’s vice president of Health, Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, Jay Blahnik, senior director of fitness for health technologies, and Julz Arney and Craig Bolton from the Apple Fitness Technologies team. Attendees will hear a discussion about heart health and participate in a new Health & Fitness Walk, which was co-created with Jeanette for participants to take a brisk walk with Apple Watch around their community.

• San Francisco: Apple Union Square, February 11, 2019, 6 p.m.: Dr. Sumbul Desai, Jeanette Jenkins, Julz Arney
• New York: Apple Williamsburg, February 21, 2019, 4:30 p.m.: Dr. Sumbul Desai, Jeanette Jenkins, Jay Blahnik
• Chicago: Apple Michigan Avenue, February 27, 2019, 6 p.m.: Dr. Sumbul Desai, Nancy Brown, Jeanette Jenkins, Craig Bolton

It is not surprise that Apple is promoting health, given that one of the Apple Watch is fitness. Regardless, it is good to see Apple hosting sessions at their stores to promote heart health.

Source: Apple

Today Apple has announced that Deidre O'Brien has been named Senior Vice President of Retail + People. O'Brien has taken over for Angela Ahrendts joined Apple in early 2014. In that time she has been in charge of Apple's Retail Stores. Angela Ahrendts plans to depart Apple in April for new personal and professional pursuits.

Deidre O'Brien's role has been expanded. Her previous role was Vice President of People, and she will be continuing her existing role as well as taking over Retail.

Deirdre will bring her three decades of Apple experience to lead the company’s global retail reach, focused on the connection between the customer and the people and processes that serve them. She will continue to lead the People team, overseeing all People-related functions, including talent development and Apple University, recruiting, employee relations and experience, business partnership, benefits, compensation, and inclusion and diversity.

There are two things that I want to highlight. First, it is good to see Apple promoting from within. Additionally, it is definitely a plus to see that the person promoted is a woman. The latter is good to see because the ratio of men to women in senior positions within the technology sector is too often too high.

Source: Apple

On Tuesday Techcrunch reported that Facebook had been paying people, in particular teens, $20 a month to install their "Facebook Research" app. The "Research" app includes a Virtual Private Network (VPN) client. The "Research" app is a rebranded app that was removed from the public iOS App Store in August of 2018 because it violated App Store terms of service. The old name of the app was Onavo.

The method used by Facebook for this installation is by using an Enterprise Developer Certificate, which is designed for distribution of applications to a company's employees. In addition to distributing apps to their own employees Facebook used this method for external testers. This is in direct violation of the terms of service for the Enterprise Developer account which were agreed to upon signing up for the account.

Once Apple found out about this, they revoked the Enterprise Developer Certificate. Revoking this certificate had a major impact on Facebook. Besides having their "Facebook Research" app no longer function, all of Facebook's internal applications used by employees were broken, meaning that they can no longer function.

From an Apple spokesperson:

“We designed our Enterprise Developer Program solely for the internal distribution of apps within an organization. Facebook has been using their membership to distribute a data-collecting app to consumers, which is a clear breach of their agreement with Apple. Any developer using their enterprise certificates to distribute apps to consumers will have their certificates revoked, which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data.”

It turns out that Facebook is not the only big tech company that has been misusing their Enterprise Developer account.

Yesterday, January 30th, Google stated that they were doing something similar with their Enterprise Certificate with an application named "Screenwise Meter". When users used the app, they were able to earn gift cards by installing the application. Just as with Facebook Apple has revoked Google's Enterprise Certificate. This revocation has same effect as Facebook, where Google's internal iOS applications ceased functioning. This includes employee-only beta versions of apps, as well as other applications used by employees. Here is a quote from the TechCrunch article:

“We’re working with Apple to fix a temporary disruption to some of our corporate iOS apps, which we expect will be resolved soon,” said a Google spokesperson. A spokesperson for Apple said: “We are working together with Google to help them reinstate their enterprise certificates very quickly.”

As of today, Thursday January 31st, Facebook has had their Enterprise certificate re-instated, but Google has not had their Enterprise Certificate re-instated, yet.

Some Thoughts

I am somewhat surprised that Apple revoked the Enterprise Developer certificates, given that the companies involved.. However, Apple is fully within their right. Both companies violated not only the terms of service, but also used the applications to acquire consumer information. This is a clear violation Apple's principles and definitely should not be tolerated.

Besides the violation of the policies, there are consumer implications. Both companies are relying on ignorance of users to collect information. In both cases the apps collected browsing history of all activity on the users iPhone, through the VPN that was installed when the app was installed. Additionally, Facebook gathered Amazon purchase history by having users send screenshots of their Amazon orders.

I suspect that Google will get their Enterprise Certificate re-instated in the next couple of days. In the wake of these incidents, I would not be surprised if Apple starts cracking down on this type of behavior for all Enterprise Certificate holders.

If it any smaller company had done something similar, it would be my guess that Apple would revoke the certificate and that would be the end of the discussion. A smaller company would likely not be able to get their Enterprise Certificates re-instated at all.

These two instances should be a wake up call for all Apple Enterprise Certificate developers. If you are providing applications to end-users through your Enterprise Certificate, Apple may end up revoking your certificate and there may be no recourse.

It will be interesting to see what other ramifications this will have on other developers. I also wonder if Facebook and Google will try doing something similar again in the future. Only time will tell whether or not this will happen.

Source: TechCrunch (Facebook) and TechCrunch (Google)