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AppStories, Episode 379 – A Classic Mac Pick 2

This week on AppStories, we return with a classic Pick 2 episode focused on the Mac.


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A Classic Mac Pick 2


On AppStories+, we talk about Apple’s decision to allow game emulators and game streaming services on the iPhone worldwide.

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MacStories Unwind: It’s All Been Leading up to This

This week on MacStories Unwind, Federico has reached the pinnacle of handheld gaming with a setup that he’s been working toward for years.



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Unplugged

A Federico Videogame Surprise


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Magic Rays of Light: Girls State, Franklin, Spatial Personas, and tvOS Game Emulation

This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon highlight American Revolution-era drama Franklin ahead of its premiere on Apple TV+. They also dive into new Apple Original documentary Girls State, spatial personas on visionOS, and the possibility of game emulation on Apple TV.



Show Notes


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Sigmund Judge | Follow Sigmund on X, Mastodon, or Threads

Devon Dundee | Follow Devon on Mastodon or Threads

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Automattic Acquires Messaging Integrator Beeper

Mark Gurman, writing for Bloomberg, reports that Beeper, the messaging app that ultimately lost its fight to bring blue bubbles to Android, has been acquired by Automattic, for $125 million according to his sources.

You may recall that Automattic, the company behind WordPress, Tumblr, Day One, Pocket Casts, and other endeavors, acquired a company called Texts last fall. Roughly two months later, Beeper took advantage of a loophole in iMessage’s architecture to offer iMessage natively on Android. After some back and forth, Apple ultimately blocked the technique Beeper was using.

According to Gurman, Automattic is acquiring Beeper’s team of 27 employees, its app, which integrates services like Signal, Facebook Messenger, and Slack, and about 100,000 customers. Of those things, I suspect the people and the customers were most important to Automattic because, as I explained in my story about the company’s purchase of Texts, the two services run on different technology stacks. Regardless of Automattic’s underlying motivations, it’s more apparent than ever that the company is betting that consumer demand, government regulation, and antitrust lawsuits will open up messaging platforms for companies ready to integrate them.

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Monument Valley at 10: The Story of the Most Meticulous Puzzle Game Ever Created

Earlier this week, I linked to The Ringer’s profile of Monument Valley on its 10th anniversary, which focused on what’s become of mobile gaming since the game’s release. Today, I have another story about Monument Valley that focuses on the game’s origins and beautiful design.

Jonathan Bell’s article for Wallpaper explores the Monument Valley team’s approach and influences:

The end result had a pixel-perfect axonometric aesthetic that not only went hard on its references to Dutch master artist and printmaker Maurits Cornelis Escher, but also dug deep into classic video game design, going right back to early arcade machines and 8-bit titles. Each of the ten levels is like a piece of fine furniture, built with invisible dovetail joints and inlaid with marquetry, stuffed with secret compartments and little design flourishes. Gray cites the world of theatre and stage design, as well as graphics, as important keystones in the way the levels were constructed. ‘Ken would always talk about flower arranging, and how you frame a silhouette of a level on the screen,’ he says

I love this anecdote about the game’s last minute naming:

The small team was so laser-focused on delivering the best game they could that the name wasn’t even considered until the very end. ‘Right before launch we were going to be interviewed by Edge magazine – the morning of that day we hadn’t picked the name.’ Monument Valley was chosen as being familiar, yet unusual, implying a sense of mystery, grandeur and travel.

Monument Valley is one of the most important indie games ever published on the App Store, so it’s great to see its backstory told in detail by Bell. Be sure to check out the full story, which includes photos of early design sketches of the game’s interface and characters.

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MacStories Unwind: I Don’t Believe This Website

This week on MacStories Unwind, cicadas invade Italian TV, John tries an espresso soda, Dragon’s Dogma II, The Creator, and what’s next in our media queues.



  • Show Notes

Unplugged

Picks

On Deck


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Ten Years Later, ‘Monument Valley’ Is a Monument to Mobile Gaming’s Bygone Era

Lewis Gordan, writing for The Ringer, looks back at the 10 years since Monument Valley was released and wonders what has become of premium mobile games:

With such gigantic success, Monument Valley should have become a blueprint for indies on mobile (and it did, for the small cohort of artful titles such as Alto’s Adventure and Old Man’s Journey that followed soon after it). But as the years wore on, it became clear that the game was really more of an aberration. Premium mobile games, that is, those that you pay for, eventually turned into an endangered species, crowded out by free-to-play “forever game” behemoths such as Clash Royale and, most recently, Monopoly Go! (the latter of which is partly bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and spent an eye-watering sum of nearly $500 million on marketing and user acquisition alone). A binary, then (and thus a battle), presents itself, pitting the art game that values people’s time against the commercial product that seeks to exploit it with ever-increasing, capitalistic intensity. “In 2014, it was just the beginning of that battle,” says Orland. “We didn’t have a clear winner.”

Gordon argues that Monument Valley’s release marked a high water mark and the beginning of the end of artful mobile games. As he recounts, the game was profitable within a week, but just six months later, users were leaving one-star reviews for a $1.99 expansion pack to a game that was only $3.99 to begin with. Gamers had been trained by the Candy Crush Sagas of the world to expect endless free updates.

Adriaan de Jongh, who Federico and I interviewed on AppStories years ago, points to the 2017 redesign of the App Store as another factor in the decline of premium titles:

Before, says de Jongh, Apple “featured” a couple of titles per week, promoting them to anyone across the entire globe who opened the App Store. It was the “single biggest marketing beat” for Hidden Folks, helping the game earn just more than $50,000 on its very first day. Then, with the redesign, the opportunity practically vanished. iPhone users had to navigate to a different tab to see new games. In de Jongh’s view, this was a fundamental and ultimately fatal layer of friction.

Gordon’s story is worth reading in its entirety because it’s one of the best tours of the business of selling iPhone games that I’ve read. At the same time, though, I think Gordon paints a bleaker picture than is justified. There’s no denying that the iPhone gaming universe has changed a lot from the days when games like Monument Valley, Alto’s Adventure, and Hidden Folks were first released. However, it’s also too soon to declare the end of premium iPhone gaming. Few of those titles may break into the top paid games category these days, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t innovative, artistic games being released on the App Store. You need to work a little harder, cutting through the jungle of free-to-play games to find them, but they’re there.

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A First Look at AltStore in the EU

Callum Booth, writing for The Verge, was able to try a pre-release version of the app marketplace flavor of AltStore, which – pending Apple’s approval – should be one of the first third-party marketplaces under the new DMA regulation. The installation process, as expected, is not exactly straightforward:

It goes like this: you begin by clicking a browser-based link to load the alternative store. From there, you receive a pop-up informing you that your installation settings don’t allow marketplaces from that developer. Then, you head into Settings, enable the marketplace, return to your browser, click the download link again, and receive another prompt asking you to confirm the install. Finally, you can open the store and browse the available apps.

Make sure to check out the screenshots in the story to see what the installation flow looks like in practice. Besides Delta, the Nintendo emulator created by the AltStore developers that has long been available as part of AltStore’s other (non-jailbreak) installation method, Booth tested Clip. This one is interesting since it’s a clipboard manager that can monitor changes to the clipboard in the background – something that is not allowed under traditional App Store rules:

Regarding the app itself, the version of Clip I tried differs from similar software offered on Apple’s App Store in that it constantly runs in the background. Normally, clipboard managers on iOS have to use a variety of workarounds to achieve comparable functionality. For example, Paste requires you to open the app each time you want to add something you’ve copied to the clipboard.

This is where Clip thrives, by comparison. When you copy something, you immediately receive a notification and can swipe down to save it to your clipboard. This means you have the option to add it if it’s something useful — like an address — or dismiss the notification if it’s something you don’t want logged, like a password. I found saving your copied items like this into a centralized location to be incredibly useful, as it makes sharing and reusing these snippets painless.

I’m very curious to see how Apple will go about notarizing apps that rely on native APIs to perform “unexpected” tasks; in this case, it sounds like Clip will integrate with MapKit to let the app stay active in the background and monitor changes to the system clipboard. (Remember when Pastebot for iOS implemented a silent audio track to run in the background? Some things never change.) Regardless, I’m keen to play around with these marketplaces as soon as I can, and I will report back.1


  1. Here’s a fun problem for me at the moment: I live in Italy, haven’t left the country in months, and I use a dual Apple ID setup with an Italian iCloud account and a U.S. App Store account. Despite my geographic location, iOS 17.4 (and the 17.5 beta) won’t let me access any of the new EU-only features yet. For example, the browser selection screen never came up for me after updating to iOS 17.4, and when I tried to install a beta version of AltStore that Riley Testut sent to me, iOS told me that my device isn’t “eligible” to install the app. I have to wonder: will iOS eventually understand that I’m an Italian citizen with a U.S. Apple ID? Or am I living in some kind of weird edge case that will never be fixed? We know that there’s a grace period for users who leave the EU, but what about the other way around? ↩︎
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Ruminate, Episode 181 – A Dusting of Dill

This week on Ruminate, we start with some very old follow up, I have a story about Dominos, we both have a near-miss on being April-fooled, then into a discussion about webmentions, plus a little bit about Arc.


Webmentions | crashthearcade

Mastodon Webmentions and Privacy • Robb Knight

Neatnik Notes · A Fediverse, if you can keep it

A simple explainer on federation, and what it means for Threads users

We Might Not Make It - by The Browser Company

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