Unpacked for Friday, August 5th, 2016

The Human Family – Apple’s New “Shot on an iPhone” Ad – by Carolina Milanesi
Apple just released a new “shot on iPhone” ad and, as usual, it is simple, elegant and will probably strike a chord with many who will watch it.

What I love about these ads is they advertise the product, the iPhone, and position it as the camera millions of people use every day. It shows beautiful pictures people are empowered to take, thanks to the iPhone. Yes, these “oh ah” videos are ads — Apple is not a moviemaking business after all — they sell hardware as their core business.

This is the second time this year Apple delivers more than pictures though. In its earlier Mother’s Day ad, Apple included a picture of a mom with a headscarf and an oxygen tube and one of a same-sex couple. No message was really needed and including those pictures was deliberate. So was excluding the same-sex couple picture from the ad in specific countries where the unspoken statement could have easily been seen as offensive by many.

This latest ad is loaded with a message beautifully delivered by Maya Angelou’s poem “Human Family”, “e are more alike than we are unalike.” The ad will be aired during the Olympic Opening Ceremony on Friday, August 5. If you think getting a Super Bowl slot is great, multiply that by the 207 nations that will be taking part in the Olympics in Rio. The ad is ideal for the Olympics — all people from the different corners of the world coming together. It is also a perfect reminder of human value for the US that has seen a lot of ugliness recently, both inside and outside of the Presidential race. Tech companies have been called to be more vocal about social issues as their leaders are seen as having a lot of influence, both in politics and as role models.

Tech companies have also been called to do more within their own businesses. This week, women and minorities inside Apple can also say “we are more alike than unalike” as Apple published its “Inclusion & Diversity Report” showing women and minorities now have equal pay. Back in February, Tim Cook had said an internal study had found women made 99.6 cents on the dollar compared to men, while underrepresented minorities made 99.7 cents to the dollar compared with white employees. Hiring practices are moving more slowly, however. Apple increased the percentage of female new hires from 31% in 2014 to 37% so far this year, while the figure for underrepresented minorities has increased from 21% of new hires to 27%.

Apple Announces Security Bounty Program – by Ben Bajarin
Late yesterday, Apple announced a new program where they are inviting the research community to spend more time digging into and looking for security vulnerabilities in their software and services. In 2014, Techcrunch encouraged Apple, at the request of security researchers reporter Matt Panzarino spoke with, to be more transparent about security. A bug bounty program was one suggestion in moving forward with that transparency. By bringing the research community more broadly into the security effort with this bounty program, Apple is doing just that.

The big question is, why now? As I’ve always said, Apple is the master of timing. Looking back on how the foundation for Apple’s security has been laid, a key piece came with the jump to 64-bit processor architectures and the creation of the secure enclave processor design. Both of these manifested themselves in the iPhone 5s and subsequent products. Meaning, in reality, we are only a few years into the hardware designs from a security standpoint. Built from those hardware bits are all the new layers of iOS security and iCloud server side security as well. So the foundation has been being laid the past few years and is now ready.

I had the opportunity to speak with Apple about this program and one point that stood out to me was their mention that security bugs are becoming harder to find. This tells me they had been aggressively poking holes at their security solution (as they should be, given their priority here) and, for the past few years, they were finding enough on their own. Now that security vulnerabilities are becoming harder to find, they are inviting more experts beyond Apple’s walls to start digging deeper into their security solutions and to help them make more secure products.

What we have to keep reminding ourselves is the security discussion is not a static one. Hackers get better and so companies like Apple with a security/privacy priority must keep advancing. Apple’s products will never be “secure enough” as there is no such thing. This security bounty program will motivate experts in the community to help Apple continue to be aggressive in making the security of their products best in class.

Instagram Clones Snapchat’s Stories Feature – by Jan Dawson
This week, Instagram launched what is effectively a clone of Snapchat’s Stories feature, in which users collect a series of photos and videos into a daily Story which is viewable for 24 hours and then disappears. I’ve already discussed the merits of the act of copying on my Beyond Devices blog, so I won’t rehash that argument here. Suffice it to say, I’m not impressed with how precisely Instagram has copied Snapchat’s feature, right down to the name and unintuitive user interface.

However, the logic behind this move is sound and that’s what I’ll focus on instead. The reality is virtually all services competing in the same space almost inevitably end up with very similar feature sets. We’ve seen fairly predictable transitions from photos to videos to live video and beyond in dozens of apps already and many of the details also end up being the same. But one of the things that has always set Snapchat apart is the ephemeral nature of the content posted there and the rawness that goes hand in hand with the fleeting nature of Snapchat sharing. Instagram, by contrast, is a far more curated and cultured experience, with individual posts being carefully crafted in order to get the most likes (and with some teenagers deleting posts that don’t measure up in order to curate their feed even more carefully).

Enter Instagram Stories, which is clearly designed to foster that same kind of fleeting sharing within Instagram. Facebook famously tried and failed to acquire Snapchat itself and has also failed with several organic attempts to build competitors, so it’s interesting to see Instagram as the home of the latest move in this direction. Two factors make this a sensible move, though. First, Instagram is enormously popular already among the same demographics that use Snapchat, especially teenagers. Second, Instagram is already focused on the kind of visual content Stories is built around. As such, Instagram’s Stories gets to tap into both existing habits and a very large base of users in the target age group.

I don’t think the intention here is to kill Snapchat – the app and service has evolved significantly from its early days as a somewhat shady messenger and there’s a lot more to it now than the original version of Stories. But I do think Instagram’s version is intended to steal away usage and to keep its users in the Instagram app longer. If a key reason for using Snapchat is to post Story-type content, then allowing users to do the same on Instagram should keep more of them there and give them one less reason to go to Snapchat. Precisely because Instagram has a similar penetration among teenagers to Snapchat, it has most of the necessary social graph in place to make the transition fairly seamless. That’s smart and arguably the closeness of the Instagram version to the Snapchat original will only help with that, even if I find the morality of such cloning questionable.

The only possible downside is more clutter in the Instagram user interface for those who have no interest in Stories. The concept is deliberately different from (and arguably even utterly foreign to) the core Instagram experience and I worry some users might be put off by the inclusion of Stories in such a nice clean setting. But I suspect Instagram will benefit far more from its addition to the app than it will be hurt by it.