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ProtonMail CEO Compares Apple In-App Purchase Rules to 'Mafia Extortion'

Charlotte Henry ·

Protonmail CEO Andy Yen is not happy with Apple. At all. In an interview with The Verge, he described growing tensions between the two firms over the implementation of In-App Purchase rules.

For the first two years we were in the App Store, that was fine, no issues there,” he says. (They’d launched on iOS in 2016.) “But a common practice we see … as you start getting significant uptake in uploads and downloads, they start looking at your situation more carefully, and then as any good Mafia extortion goes, they come to shake you down for some money.” “We didn’t offer a paid version in the App Store, it was free to download … it wasn’t like Epic where you had an alternative payment option, you couldn’t pay at all,” he relates. Yen says Apple’s demand came suddenly in 2018. “Out of the blue, one day they said you have to add in-app purchase to stay in the App Store,” he says. “They stumbled upon something in the app that mentioned there were paid plans, they went to the website and saw there was a subscription you could purchase, and then turned around and demanded we add IAP.”

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Spotify Finally Gets Lyrics Search, Two Years After Apple Music

Charlotte Henry ·

This week, Spotify finally unveiled a lyrics search feature. It allows users to look for a song using the words in it, instead of by artist or title. As Engadget noted, Apple Music launched a similar tool nearly two years ago.

The two leading music services often add features seemingly inspired by their competition; the latest is lyric search. A Spotify engineer tweeted earlier today that users can now input lyrics into the app’s search field to get song results, something that Apple Music has offered since late 2018. As you can see from the screenshot above, songs that include the lyrics you input will have a “lyrics match” label; they show up along side other potential results, so keep an eye out for that label if you’re specifically searching with lyrics.

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Apple’s Internal Networks Were Hacked for Three Months

Andrew Orr ·

But don’t worry, they were hacked by good guys working under Apple’s bug bounty program. Sam Curry, Brett Buerhaus, Ben Sadeghipour, Samual Erb, and Tanner Barnes found a total of 55 vulnerabilities.

During our engagement, we found a variety of vulnerabilities in core portions of their infrastructure that would’ve allowed an attacker to fully compromise both customer and employee applications, launch a worm capable of automatically taking over a victim’s iCloud account, retrieve source code for internal Apple projects, fully compromise an industrial control warehouse software used by Apple, and take over the sessions of Apple employees with the capability of accessing management tools and sensitive resources.

When I first saw the news I was aghast to learn that Apple only paid them US$55,000, but the blog post was updated to add that the team so far has gotten 32 payments totaling US$288,500. Still doesn’t seem enough to me. Apple needs to work on its internal security.

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Apple Maps ‘Look Around’ Feature Now Available in Phoenix, Arizona

Charlotte Henry ·

Apple Maps feature ‘Look Around’  is now available in Phoenix, Arizona. Macrumors spotted the update, which recently arrived in cities in the UK and Ireland.

Apple recently expanded its “Look Around” feature in Apple Maps to Phoenix, Arizona, providing 3D street-level imagery that’s similar to Google’s Street View. Apple has been slowly adding the Look Around feature to new cities. It expanded to Chicago in April and several cities in Japan in August. Though not yet mentioned on Apple’s website, Look Around last week expanded to London, Dublin, and Edinburgh.