fuzzywhite

If true, it’s really interesting. When I started hearing that Apple was working with Nuance last year on the Siri stuff, digging in, I learned that one of the reasons why Google was one of the few companies with their own voice technology was thanks to Cohen. Nuance is known to be very aggressive with pursuing lawsuits over their IP, which leads to a lot of partnerships — like Apple. Google was able to maneuver these waters without a Nuance partnership because Cohen was a co-founder of — wait for it — Nuance. And, more importantly, holds several of his own patents in the space.

Google is clearly working on their own direct Siri competitor for Android. And it was presumed that Cohen — and his patents — would be the key to this. But if he’s now gone from Google, it raises a lot of questions. 

(via Dan Primack)

Kim-Mai Cutler caught up with Hong Kong mobile app developer Animoca and notes that they test against 400 different Android devices. And they’d do even more — but many are no longer for sale.

Just look at the picture.

Cutler:

But imagine the long-tail of developers! Imagine the people who make the roughly 500,000 apps in the Google Play store. Total nightmare.

Right, for a big app house, this is very annoying, but doable. For a small team of app developers, this is impossible. Many pick the top 3 to 5 Android phones and stick to those when it comes to testing. Unfortunately, there are so many quirks across devices that it leads to a shit ton of bugs or full-on incompatibility. 

“Total nightmare” is too kind. It’s total hell. 

Bryan Bishop:

The issue is the way Dropbox’s new SDK handles the authorization of third-party apps: it sends users to a page in Safari where they can grant access. However, that same page also allows new users to create accounts, after which they could drill down through Dropbox’s site and upgrade to a paid account.

…and thus, Apple is rejecting them because you’re not allowed to have a link in an iOS app that allows for external purchases to be made unless it’s also available as an in-app purchase.

Federico Viticci writes, “Before we dabble in speculation about Apple wanting to ‘kill Dropbox,’ I suggest we wait.” True enough, and to a degree I understand Apple’s general position here—it’s kind of like letting companies put up ads on WalMart shelves for the sales they’re running at Target. But the rejection of Dropbox-enabled apps shows the flip side of this: prohibiting this kind of linking makes the user experience of certain iOS apps objectively worse. Apple is effectively saying they consider this an acceptable tradeoff.