Guilherme Rambo

On this season two premiere John and Gui analyze the latest spelunking findings, talk about going indie, the launch of AirBuddy, the case for smaller iPads, and hey — the show has also got a new logo and is now part of 9to5Mac! Welcome back to Stacktrace.

Stacktrace by 9to5Mac is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

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9to5Mac has new podcast news to share! John Sundell and myself, Gui Rambo, started Stacktrace last year with the goal of producing a podcast about Apple and general tech news, specifically from a developer’s perspective, since we both develop software for Apple’s platforms. More than 20 episodes later, Stacktrace now joins 9to5Mac’s growing catalog of podcasts, alongside 9to5Mac Happy Hour and 9to5Mac Daily.

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Update: iOS 12.1.4 is now available.

Last week was a tough one for Apple and privacy. First, a huge bug in Group FaceTime would allow someone to eavesdrop on another FaceTime user just by calling them and adding themselves to a group call before the contact answered. Then, a project from Facebook was revealed to be spying on users, violating Apple’s Enterprise Developer Program policies. The latter was dealt with by revoking Facebook’s enterprise certificate, rendering their internal apps unusable. The same action was taken against Google, which had a similar project.

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Update: The second iOS 12.2, watchOS 5.2, tvOS 12.2, and macOS 10.14.2 betas are now available. Apple also has new betas for its Classroom apps.

Apple will be releasing the second developer betas of iOS 12.2 and watchOS 5.2 later today. On the first iOS 12.2 developer beta, we found evidence of a new generation of AirPods with voice-activated Hey Siri, the Apple News Premium subscription service, new iPads and iPod touch that could be released with this update, and many other changes and improvements.

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Apple is releasing the first public beta of iOS 12.2 later today, three days after releasing its first iOS 12.2 developer beta on Thursday.

With its first developer beta, we found evidence of a new generation of AirPods, the Apple News subscription service, new iPads and iPod touch, and many other changes and improvements. It’s likely that tvOS 12.2 public beta 1 and macOS 10.14.4 public beta 1 will also become available; we will update the post if they are released.

For customers, iOS 12.2 introduces support for the recently announced AirPlay 2 and HomeKit smart TVs while introducing a handful of other changes and improvements.

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The most significant change to Apple’s developer ecosystem this decade has been the introduction of the Swift programming language – and we’ll probably see the next big change come during this year’s WWDC with the introduction of third party UIKit apps on the Mac.

As for Swift, the new language was announced at WWDC 2014. With contributions from both Apple engineers and the open-source community, it has seen constant updates and is now in version 4.2.1.

An important aspect of Swift that has been affecting users since its first version is that its application binary interface, or ABI, is not stable. What that means in practice is that Apple can’t include the Swift language support in its operating systems, because an app written with Swift 3 won’t work with the language support binaries for Swift 4. The solution to that is to include the Swift language libraries inside the app bundle that gets downloaded from the App Store, increasing the bandwidth and storage required by the app.

That’s finally changing for Apple and Swift soon…

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Earlier today, we reported that new iPad models had been registered with the Eurasian Economic Commission. The registration indicates that Apple plans on releasing several new iPads sometime this year. Recent reports have suggested that these may include an updated iPad mini and 10-inch iPad. We’ve also found a reference to what could be the 7th generation iPod touch. However, it doesn’t appear to include Face ID or Touch ID.

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There have been rumors about an Apple News subscription service since mid-2018, starting with a report by Bloomberg that said Apple was planing to utilize it’s acquisition of Texture to launch its own paid subscription service for news, including magazines from different publishers. Later, a report by The Information claimed that Apple was considering an all-in-one subscription model with magazines, tv shows and music.

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Earlier today, Apple released the first beta of iOS 12.2 for developers. This first release includes quite a few changes and new features, which you can learn more about in our post. One of those changes, which is currently hidden from public view, is the addition of a new setup screen that’s used when configuring AirPods. This new setup screen clearly states that the user will be able to talk to Siri with AirPods or iPhone by saying “Hey, Siri”.

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Two weeks after releasing the latest watchOS 5.1.3 developer beta, Apple is releasing its final version for consumers later today. The release notes only mention bug fixes, but we’ll update if anything notable is discovered on the new release. iOS 12.1.3 is also coming out to all customers.

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We’ve been seeing a lot of scam apps in the App Store lately, which try to trick users into purchasing expensive subscriptions or products, we’ve also seen apps that track and transmit the user’s location without their consent. Today, I want to talk about an app that’s using iOS devices to perform work for other users, without the device owner’s consent.

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Recently, Instagram released an update to their iOS app, version 75, which broke support for the screen size of the iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR. This caused the UI and pictures to look scaled on the new devices. In a previous post about the update, we mentioned that the company might have accidentally broke support for the new devices which originally arrived in October.

We’ve now been able to confirm that this change was intentional, but here’s why it’s not Instagram’s fault…

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[Update: Now available (and labeled beta 2 after the initial iOS 12.1.2 beta cycle). The second macOS 10.14.3 and tvOS 12.1.2 betas are also out today. watchOS 5.1.3 beta 2 and public betas for iOS and tvOS are also available.]

Apple is releasing the first iOS 12.1.3 developer beta later today, after releasing iOS 12.1.2 earlier this week following patent claims by Qualcomm which threatened iPhone sales in China. This new beta is actually considered beta 2 because it follows the same train of the previous iOS 12.1.2 beta, but since that version number was taken by the unexpected release, Apple had to increase the patch number. The release notes only mention bug fixes, but we’ll update if anything notable is discovered on the new beta.

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In this grand season finale of Stacktrace, John and Gui review the iPad Smart Keyboard Folio, Apple Watch Series 4, discuss entitlements, electrocardiograms and reveal the latest spelunking findings including (and we’re not kidding) – new details about AirPower.

Stacktrace by 9to5Mac is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

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Yesterday, we wrote about a new icon found on watchOS 5.1.2 showing a new model of Apple’s Smart Battery Case designed for new iPhone models such as the iPhone XS, XR and XS Max, which have no home button and the back camera in a vertical arrangement.

Today, we have obtained images that show a more clear picture of the new Smart Battery Case and also new information found in iOS that gives us an indication of Apple’s planned release schedule. There are images for three different models of the battery case: A2070, A2071 and A2171.

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Apple’s Smart Battery Case, with its controversial design, was released back in 2015 with support for the iPhone 6 and 6S and it now currently supports the iPhone 6, 6S and 7. With the release of iPhone X and iPhone 8, users wondered whether a new battery case would be released for this new iPhone design, but so far nothing has been announced nor released by Apple.

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Rambo runs his first ever App Store sale, John continues prototyping using his new iPad Pro, and the two discuss what it would take for the iPad to reach its full potential, what makes up a good backup strategy, and how Swift has fundamentally changed programming for Apple’s platforms.

Stacktrace by 9to5Mac is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

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Rene Ritchie joins John and Gui to discuss the new iPad Pro, the pros and cons of doing work on a tablet, and how we’d like iOS to change to take full advantage of the new hardware.

Stacktrace by 9to5Mac is available on iTunes and Apple’s Podcasts app or through our dedicated RSS feed for Overcast and other podcast players.

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