It looks like there’s growing consensus that Dynamic Island’s primary interaction model is wrong. Michael Tsai compiles commentary across two posts, which include people grumping about how a tap on Dynamic Island opens an app, whereas a long-press is required to expand what’s in the island to use its controls. Everyone from Nilay Patel at The Verge to John ‘Daring Fireball’ Gruber seems to want the opposite.

I’ve taken a contrary viewpoint. The iOS Home Screen has long had a similar interaction model. Whether you’re interacting with an icon or a widget, a tap opens an app, whereas a long press (and, previously, Force Touch) exists for actions. To my mind, Dynamic Island follows this existing convention, rather than making up new ones. So if a timer’s in the island, you tap-hold to perform a contextual action, or tap to open the item’s app. Even if you take a more desktop analogy of minimising to a ‘dock’ (which is in some ways how Dynamic Island presents), Apple is being consistent in this regard.

Rob Jonson on Twitter disagrees, arguing we’re effectively talking about a long press for a quick interaction and a tap for a deeper one (that is, opening the app), which “doesn’t seem right to me”. He asks: “Put it another way – is the dynamic island primarily the holder of the full app, or the holder of the expanded dynamic island?”

I’m clearly in the minority here (albeit, at present, a minority that includes Apple), but it’d feel odd to me if a long-press in Dynamic Island was the route to launching an app, just the same as it’d be weird elsewhere in the operating system.

Kevin Archer is an indie developer who makes Authenticator App by 2Stable, a feature-rich, premium and suitably named take on, well, an authenticator app. There are of course other, similar, apps on the App Store. But he today revealed just how similar.

On Twitter, he claimed another developer lifted text from his app (including a section on Apple Watch support, despite the other app not supporting Apple’s wearable). When testing the app, Archer found a review request during onboarding, which doesn’t appear to align with Apple guidelines. And, naturally, there’s a weekly IAP subscription, because of course there is.

That’s all bad enough, but the dodgy app popped up a second time, with a different icon. The linked thread outlines how the app is not only a straight clone of the other scammy app (right down to what appears to be integrated stock art), but also directly lifts copy and functionality from Archer’s app.

On Twitter, Archer rightly said he didn’t understand how these apps pass review with features that don’t work, a copied design and a weekly subscription. He added that every day, indie devs like him get “apps rejected for silly things”, while these scammy apps sneak through.

It’s reasonable to argue Apple cannot deal with a flood of daily apps to review that might circumvent copyright – and that certain things aren’t liable to such protections anyway. If someone steals the ideas within an app, tough (broadly). Actual content is another matter, mind. But you might counter by using an argument from Apple itself that the App Store is meant to be better. It’s supposed to be curated. It should be a place where developers thrive, not where they play whac-a-mole with pretenders ripping them off.

Mind you, Archer told me even getting to whac-a-mole stage isn’t easy. Although you might reasonably argue Apple cannot pre-emptively police its store, surely it makes it easy for developers to flag when their apps are ripped off? Archer suggested otherwise: “One of the main issues with the App Store team is that you can’t contact them directly. You can contact developer support, but they are in charge of technical issues and told us on the phone they can’t put us in contact with the App Store team.”

Archer says he’s submitted a report via the App Store’s ‘report a problem’ feature and is hoping for the best. Meanwhile, Apple regularly argues that when devs hit a problem that running to the press won’t solve them. History suggests otherwise; but if Apple really doesn’t want issues to be fixed by bad press, perhaps it should give developers the tools to flag problems more rapidly with those who can actually do something about them – who then should, very swiftly, take action.

Update: MacRumors wrote about the situation yesterday. Apple has since removed both apps from the App Store.

A week or so ago, Cloud Battery stopped working for me. The app syncs device battery status across iCloud, providing alerts across all your devices — handy when one needs charging. Having just updated a bunch of them, I figured this was a bug in a nice but not critical piece of indie software and thought nothing more of it.

Then I needed to use Transloader for something. It worked – at first. But then it started throwing up sync errors. On iPhone, the app noted these were 503s. If you’re not familiar with arcane error codes, this one states a server is not able to handle a request. Since the ‘server’ in this case is iCloud, that was a concern. I switched two devices to a spare account and Transloader worked fine. I finished my work, albeit a day behind.

Then Soulver failed — suddenly and very badly. I needed to restart my iMac so was shutting down all my apps. Soulver threw up a permissions error. A week of input was wiped out in an instant. This was a shock on multiple fronts: in part because of the data loss, but also because Soulver is one of the most robust apps I use. It had never failed before.

I swapped messages with the app’s creator, who was mortified. I sent grabs of my iCloud Drive folder where Soulver’s ‘sheetbook’ was stored, which now had an exciting and mysterious new file. I moved the sheetbook to local storage and had had no further problems. I tested the old one several times on iCloud, and it went wrong half a dozen times. The culprit was clearly iCloud.

I griped about this on Twitter. It turned out, I wasn’t alone. Developer Becky Hansmeyer kicked off a thread about the issue, which ended up starring, among others, Paul Haddad (Tapbots), Adam Overholtzer (Cheatsheet), and Quentin Zervaas (Streaks). A quick look on Reddit had already suggested to me that the problem had in fact been around for months, rather than days; terrifyingly, Zervaas said he’d seen this issue “on and off since May 2021”, and his own app only currently fully works on some of his Apple IDs.

On and off since May 2021. For iCloud sync. For an issue that at best causes somewhat random sync failure for the apps that differentiate Apple’s devices and that at worst can cause catastrophic and unrecoverable data loss. That is not good enough.

Several devs noted Apple is at least “aware” of the problem, but it’s apparently been rumbling on for eight months now, and is, as Zevaas suggests “seemingly quite random”. That’s just what everyone — users and developers alike — want to hear about the reliability (or lack thereof) of such a critical service. My question now — having apparently decided at the worst possible time to bin Dropbox and go all-in on Apple’s equivalent — is whether I can trust iCloud sync and iCloud Drive at all.

An hour or so after I posted this piece, some of the Mac website giants stomped on in with their takes. You can read two below:

• Developers Unhappy With Bug Causing iCloud Unreliability (MacRumors)
• iCloud syncing issues are plaguing third-party apps as Apple stays silent (9to5Mac)

Update: Zervaas said on 25 Jan he saw a big drop-off in 503 errors. For now (26 Jan), Cloud Battery and Transloader are working for me again. (I haven’t moved my Soulver sheetbook back to iCloud though. It’s going to take a lot for me to trust iCloud Drive with that again.)

9to5Mac reports iDOS 2 is to be pulled from the App Store. This isn’t the first time the app’s been removed, and probably not coincidentally comes hot on the heels of news posts showing people using it to get Windows 3.1 running on an iPad. (With a bit of effort, you can get classic Mac OS running too.)

Apple, naturally, cites that its rules have been broken:

Executing code can introduce or changes features or functionality of the app and allows for downloading of content without licensing.

Presumably, Apple reckons the ‘executing code’ bit is the main issue; after all, kicking an app for running illegal content would be a touch hypocritical, given how many book readers and audio and video players are on the store. Ahem.

This also points to shoddy App Store review. It’s not like iDOS 2 snuck through. It’s been back on the store with this exact same functionality for a while now, and received several updates. I’d hoped this was a sign Apple was changing its tone on retro gaming and emulation, but feared it was not. And Apple’s seeming distaste for emulated classic games feels further cemented by it not approving entirely legal retro-gaming streaming service Antstream Arcade for the App Store.

So what now? If you like emulators and want them on your phone: Android. Sure, there are workarounds on iOS, but they’re more hassle than they’re worth. But if Apple was canny, there would be another way — a very Apple way: add a retro arcade to Apple Arcade.

Apple Arcade is oddly lacking in arcade games. Apple likes doing things by the book. Plenty of companies are happy to license out old IP. So alongside Arcade Originals, App Store Greats and Timeless Classics, let’s have Arcade Classics. Get fully licensed Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Robotron, Bubble Bobble, Dig Dug and loads more — an actual old-school arcade — on to Apple Arcade. It would be a great way to show off iOS 15’s new virtual controls overlay system, along with simultaneously dealing with the bizarre lack of arcade games in Apple Arcade and the paucity of classic games on the App Store as a whole.

Now iPadOS 15 has appeared, it’s a crushing disappointment to those people who enjoy being crushingly disappointed when Apple doesn’t do precisely what they want. And it’s not like I don’t have frustrations with the iPad myself. For years, I’ve banged on about wanting full external display support, the dream being a fully modular computing experience that could ‘be’ tablet, laptop or desktop within relevant contexts. But as I wrote for Wired, this is not Apple’s strategy. The company isn’t seeking to replace laptops with iPads, but to “finesse the transition between its platforms, with all your hardware and software working together”.

In a sense, iPad still exists where it was originally positioned, between a smartphone and a laptop. It’s just this definition has expanded from the device’s originally fairly limited scope. But even from day one, it was a superior device for some tasks—without that, it wouldn’t have had any reason to exist. Today, the ambition of app creators has helped the platform evolve into a primary device for a wider range of users, including some illustrators and video editors on the move.

It’s with this in mind that I find increasing frustration in commentators who should know better slamming the iPad for not having “real apps” to do “real work”. It’s like the conversation hasn’t moved on in a decade, despite the platform and its capabilities being far beyond what was possible with the original iPad. And while I do understand some people are irked they can’t get Final Cut on their iPad, I’ve also watched video folks scythe through 4K edits on LumaFusion. Elsewhere, I’ve talked with visual designers using Affinity apps and illustrators working with Procreate. Writers? Plenty tap away on an iPad with the likes of Ulysses and Scrivener. Musicians? There are tons of superb synths, virtual instruments and DAWs for the system, many of which work brilliantly, and most of which cost a fraction of their desktop counterparts or equivalents.

Could Apple do more? Sure. But is iPad somehow deficient? I don’t think so, unless your requirements are very specific—or your real aim is screaming that iPad is doomed at the top of your lungs, despite all evidence to the contrary.