Apple Gave Zoom Access To Special API to Use iPad Camera During Split View Multitasking (macrumors.com) 85
AmiMoJo writes: Zoom, a hallmark platform used by millions during the global health crisis, has been given access to a special iPadOS API that allows the app to use the iPad camera while the app is in use in Split View multitasking mode. This case of special treatment was first brought to attention by app developer Jeremy Provost, who, in a blog post, explains that Zoom uses a special API that allows the app to continue using and accessing the iPad camera while the app is being used in Split View mode. Zoom can do this thanks to an "entitlement," which grants developers the ability to execute a particular capability with an API. As Provost notes, Apple publicly documents the ability for developers to apply for several different entitlements, such as ones related to CarPlay, HomeKit, and more. However, the special API that Zoom has been given is not offered to other developers by Apple, nor is its existence acknowledged by the company itself. On the Zoom Developer Forum, a staff member for the video conferencing platform had confirmed earlier in February that Zoom has access to the "com.apple.developer.avfoundation.multitasking-camera-access," or iPad Camera Multitasking entitlement. Further reading: Apple Offered Special App Store API Access To Hulu and Other Developers.
So the question is why is this not public... (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess access to the camera in split-screen multi-tasking may be limited for security reasons, but I do wonder why it's not a permission that is at least acknowledged so that other companies might apply to use it.
You have to think that Apple has given similar access to at least a few other companies though, at the very least Microsoft for Teams.
Re: So the question is why is this not public... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Teams does release DAU counts. As of April it was 145 million.
Back in April of last year Zoom said they had 300 million daily meeting participants.
For comparison also back in April of last year Teams had 75 million Daily Active Users but 200 million meeting participants.
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Teams does release DAU counts. As of April it was 145 million.
Back in April of last year Zoom said they had 300 million daily meeting participants.
I'm not sure if you can compare those numbers though, since Teams is much broader in scope many of those DAU users are probably chat / messaging only for most days, whereas Zoom DAU are all video users.
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If only you had read my next sentence.. :P
For comparison back in April of last year Teams had 75 million Daily Active Users but 200 million meeting participants.
So using a little bit of math. 75m DAU => 145m DAU = 1.9x DAU. 200 million daily meeting participants * 1.9x = 380 million meeting participants. vs Zoom - April 2020 of 300 million. Those ratios may have changed and zoom may have picked up additional daily users. But I suspect Zoom lost much of its concentration of users as it did at the beginning of the pandemic when companies just had people use free sessions of Zoom until they bought a real solutio
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Ummm no. MS reported 145M Daily Active Users for Teams. MS did not define DAU as using Teams for video meetings only as Teams is also messaging. If I log into Windows, by default I am shown as "Active" in Teams. A few coworkers use Teams so I leave it running. Am I counted as a DAU even though I only message every few months? Even rarer than that so I use Teams for meetings.
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It's available, just not well documented. Ask Microsoft as to how many API's are barely or not documented.
They're not "secret", just lazy dev work or sometimes just things they don't want publicly acknowledge due to support issues. You can go down the list of entitlements in Xcode and yes, if you talk to your Apple support person (which you have access to with your paid developers account), you too can ask about it being available.
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I guess access to the camera in split-screen multi-tasking may be limited for security reasons, but I do wonder why it's not a permission that is at least acknowledged so that other companies might apply to use it.
Maybe there's a perceived "user experience" reason. How well does the iPad perform in multi-tasking mode? Maybe Apple doesn't really want people using it for multi-tasking as they may realize they can be productive enough w/o having to buy something more expensive (from them). It's Apple, I can thing of several non-technical reasons for things like this. On the other hand, the API could just be relatively untested and or undocumented at this time...
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I'm curious about the rationale of having *any* special permissions needed for split-screen mode.
It totally makes sense for background apps that can be running without you noticing, but for split-screen it's presumably obvious the software is running, so why does it need different permissions than for full-screen mode?
Unless... I don't actually do iToys - does split-screen mode have the option for software to decide how much screen it takes up? Like, one pixel wide, or zero? If split-screen mode could be
Antitrust (Score:4, Insightful)
Owning the company store AND deciding who is allowed to compete.
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Well it's a step up from the old accusation that Microsoft was using special APIs to make their software work better. At least Apple is sharing.
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Strong backwards compatibility and decades of market dominance?
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At least Microsoft didn't prevent you from running whatever you wanted to, including software hooking into whatever non-public APIs you wanted to use.
You are just too young to remember "Dos isn't done until Lotus won't run".
MS applications routinely use undocumented API in Windows to gain an advantage vs its competitors, and when their competitors reverse engineered those API and used it themselves, the next version of Windows will change the API and break it (MS's own application, of course, would be properly changed to not break).
I can still remember the merry-go-around in Win32s, when MS made update after update to break Win32s running in OS/2 until I
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Re: Antitrust (Score:1)
No, they are not sharing. They are acquiring. Privileges for obedience.
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Hows the Pine phone working out for you?
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> Hows the Pine phone working out for you?
Mine came with Arch, so I thought the phone was broken, but then I installed Mobian and now it's quite usable. Hotspot and everything.
Not hating on Arch, just the phone version on this hardware, which didn't work (fully updated) to make phone calls.
Re: Antitrust (Score:1)
Granted, but really. Who uses their smartphone to make voice calls?
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I hardly think it's a case of "antitrust" for a manufacturer to have private/closed APIs that it decides to make an exception to let a third party use one of them after they presumably requested it and made a good case for why they needed it?
If you make a competing videoconferencing product and need the same thing, what's stopping you from contacting Apple privately about it and negotiating to get the same access? This article doesn't claim others already tried in the same situation and were turned down.
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I think you missed the bit about the APIs being secret.
Very similar to the secret Windows calls that MS Office could use to be fast, but WordPerfect couldn't.
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Wordperfect was primarily written by a non-diverse group of white developers and contributed to systemic racism. Microsoft Office code is maintained by Indian developers and therefore supports a woke agenda. By not supporting closed secret calls for Microsoft Office you are a bigot perpetuating white privilege.
--
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
Woke, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Very good (Score:1)
Thankss for my first smile of the day!
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Secret =~ unpublished. So far there is nothing indicating that there is something nefarious or monopolistic with the decision.
Re:Antitrust (Score:5, Interesting)
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Right, I noticed i couldn't do some things and reached out.
I'm still waiting for them to get back to me. I'm sure it will be any day now....
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Right, I noticed i couldn't do some things and reached out.
I'm still waiting for them to get back to me. I'm sure it will be any day now....
And Apple is also probably waiting for your blockbuster app to have as many downloads as Zoom got. I wouldn't hold my breath though.
Re: Antitrust (Score:1)
Re: Antitrust (Score:1)
No.
If you're not getting anything, shit up.
Re: Antitrust (Score:1)
Like owning the only store, in a town with a fence and gate so residents can't leave.
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Unfortunately the editors of /. doesn't care.
For a site that calls it "news for nerds" only to have it completely fuck up code (it eats consecutive whitespace because someone was too stupid to figure out the CSS style that emulates the "pre" tag via: white-space: pre;) it is an embarrassment. Even reddit doesn't fuck up code snippets.
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Unfortunately the editors of /. doesn't care.
For a site that calls it "news for nerds" only to have it completely fuck up code (it eats consecutive whitespace because someone was too stupid to figure out the CSS style that emulates the "pre" tag via: white-space: pre;) it is an embarrassment. Even reddit doesn't fuck up code snippets.
It's not that. Slashdot used to support the <pre> tag, but that ended because of ASCII goatse.
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You keep banging that drum, but you still ain't got no rhythm.
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"It don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that swing."
The ÃOEiPadÃOE camera (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if Slashdot has a special API to display unicode properly...
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I wonder if Slashdot has a special API to display unicode properly...
Is the backend Perl?
Re: The ÃOEiPadÃOE camera (Score:5, Funny)
> Is the backend Perl?
It is. Perl only got full Unicode support in 1997, so give them time.
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> Is the backend Perl?
It is. Perl only got full Unicode support in 1997, so give them time.
I'll try to be gracious given the extenuating circumstances.
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> Is the backend Perl?
It is. Perl only got full Unicode support in 1997, so give them time.
Would you like to maintain, update, and add features to old Perl [wikipedia.org] code?
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Slashdot does in fact support Unicode, it's just that most of it is disabled or badly decoded because people used to use it to troll.
Things like text direction marks or non breakable spaces that widen the page. I guess sorting it out wasn't a priority back then.
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binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(UTF-8)";
Re: The ÃOEiPadÃOE camera (Score:1)
Yes, a simple Greasmonkey script should do the back and forth conversion. Used to do this when I still had my old setup and cared for Shashdot. Even had my own comment editor with shortcuts ans automatic HTML entities and everything.
Unless you're using a retarded browser (in terms of progess and literally mentally regressing), where something so simpleand obviois as easy user scripting is not possible.
Somebody explain the implication to me (Score:5, Insightful)
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the problem is Apple (you can finish the sentence with whatever reasoning you made up this morning)
Re: Somebody explain the implication to me (Score:1)
The reasoning is harming us... that means you too, dummy ... by putting people into a situation where they have no choice, that they did not anticipate, and then leeching off resources against their will.
Aka your experience with mommy and daddy.
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The last option.
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The last option.
But isn't that how a walled garden operates? Apple trusts some developers more than others and the users trust Apple?
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But isn't that how a walled garden operates? Apple trusts some developers more than others and the users trust Apple?
Tim Cook: "We treat every developer the same."
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But isn't that how a walled garden operates? Apple trusts some developers more than others and the users trust Apple?
Tim Cook: "We treat every developer the same."
Has he said that? They obviously don't... in just a couple of weeks from now they will show off all the cool new things the next versions of their platforms can do. Some of those things are shown with apps made by third parties, who obviously have gotten information and support not available to every developer... just to name one obvious example. I don't think it will be Epic demonstrating Metal this time, though...
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Yes, it is, but at least, they should be more transparent about the criteria they use for rejection.
For instance, do you need a certain minimum of users? And how much do you have to pay per user for that kind of extra API access?
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Yes, it is, but at least, they should be more transparent about the criteria they use for rejection.
For instance, do you need a certain minimum of users? And how much do you have to pay per user for that kind of extra API access?
I think you'd have to know who requested this API access and was rejected for it to be an issue.
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Well, no one could request that API access. Apple claimed it didn't exist.
It's only through a Zoom spokesperson that we learned of its existence.
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Maybe, but this kind of thing got Microsoft in trouble back in the day. Other browsers couldn't use the secret Windows APIs that Microsoft could, preventing them from replacing IE fully.
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Maybe, but this kind of thing got Microsoft in trouble back in the day. Other browsers couldn't use the secret Windows APIs that Microsoft could, preventing them from replacing IE fully.
Does Apple have a stake in Zoom?
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I see I'm being modded Troll for an on topic reply to a comment in the story.
Seriously, what is wrong with you mods?
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I see I'm being modded Troll for an on topic reply to a comment in the story.
Seriously, what is wrong with you mods?
I don't know. Some people get it worse than others. The submitter, for instance.
Re:Somebody explain the implication to me (Score:5, Insightful)
In Apple's court filing they reportedly claim that every developer has full and equal access to everything in the ecosystem. This API isn't super-important - it's that Epik et. al. will use this to discredit their testimony.
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the âOEiPadâOE camera (Score:1)
a special API that allows the app to continue using and accessing the âOEiPadâOE camera
Sounds special to me.
Re: the âOEiPadâOE camera (Score:1)
It's not even the right characters. It should be âiPadâoe. Not âiPadâ, nor âoeiPadâoe.
This Is Only News Because Apple (Score:2)
Get Apple in the title of your article. Get clicks. Get paid.
As far as I am concerned Apple is running their own OS and app marketplace. They should be perfectly within their rights to pick and choose the 3rd party apps they sell, what they sell them for and what payment methods they accept for such sales. They should also be free to provide favored treatment to any vendors as they see fit.
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Rules whether they change or not.... (Score:2)
The real issue is basically when rules change and how.
If the rules change only when you win, but never when you lose.... you are a slave. You shouldn't actually follow the rules. They are an excuse to keep you losing.
The idea here is that rules are equal and we should follow them because everyone else has to.
If we find out rules are just there to "justify" letting someone else win constantly, it's not really fair and thus the rules are actually a thin-veiled proclamation that you lose. You'll find out once
Some apps are just special (Score:2, Interesting)
When certain apps accessing services are used by *all* teachers and students in America, and they can do something special like screen sharing while video broadcasting on PC and Android, then Apple makes that functionality available to them as soon as possible because it's a competition issue with Chromebooks and Windows laptops.
When does it make it available to Facebook or Amazon / Twitch or Google Chat whatever for their game / app streaming? I don't know. Maybe this is because Apple internally also uses
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Also quite possible that the API was established for Zoom based on a need, and that it was not a final product ready for broader release.