Last month, Marcin Wichary began publishing updates to Unsung, a new blog about “software craft and quality”. Contra “backseat software”; among the posts published so far is a list of well-made apps and websites.
I disagree with some of the choices, but one thing you will notice is that there are very few examples from the world’s biggest vendors. Most are indie projects. That says a lot to me about the kinds of software with which people develop a connection.
And yet, this is how a lot of modern software behaves. Not because it’s broken, but because we’ve normalized an interruption model that would be unacceptable almost anywhere else.
I’ve started to think of this as backseat software: the slow shift from software as a tool you operate to software as a channel that operates on you. Once a product learns it can talk back, it’s remarkably hard to keep it quiet.
You have heard about this stuff before, but Swanson’s piece is not mere repetition. There is history, and reasonable suggestions on how to correct the current oft-miserable state of software.
The TikTok deal announced in December is done. There is now a U.S.-specific version of the app running the same recommendations algorithm as the rest-of-the-world version but trained only on a bald eagle-approved data set. The U.S. app is owned by a bunch of friends of the family who bought it at a suspiciously low price. Oh, and users now have a more invasive privacy policy to contend with.
Reece Rogers, Wired:
Now that it’s under US-based ownership, TikTok potentially collects more detailed information about its users, including precise location data. A spokesperson for TikTok USDS declined to comment.
Whether this represents an actual change in the data collected or merely a difference in description is something it seems Rogers cannot answer. However, it is a good reminder that lawmakers’ opposition to TikTok’s data collection was never based on a principled stance on user privacy.
This may be U.S.-only for now, but I am deeply concerned about the precedent it sets for the rest of the world. There is nothing I can see that limits the scope of the new U.S. app to only U.S.-based users. In the near term, I bet a few other countries could be pressured into switching to TikTok U.S.; farther into the future, what this looks like is an acknowledgement that the U.S. will take what it needs with whatever justification it wishes.
Update: Lily Jamali, BBC News:
Precise location sharing hasn’t yet been enabled in the US, where it is expected to be optional and turned off by default so users will be asked to opt in with a pop-up message. TikTok has not said when the update is due to reach American users.
TikTok already collects similar data from users in the UK and Europe as part of a new “Nearby Feed” feature that lets users find events and businesses near them.
Via Jason Anthony Guy.
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Mike Masnick, Techdirt:
For years now, we’ve been repeatedly pointing out that the “social media is destroying kids” narrative, popularized by Jonathan Haidt and others, has been built on a foundation of shaky, often contradictory research. We’ve noted that the actual data is far more nuanced than the moral panic suggests, and that policy responses built on that panic might end up causing more harm than they prevent.
Well, here come two massive new studies — one from Australia, one from the UK—that land like a sledgehammer on Haidt’s narrative — and, perhaps more importantly, on Australia’s much-celebrated social media ban for kids under 16.
The Australian study is sprawling, with over 100,000 youth participating over several years, though it should be noted it uses self-reported data only from weekdays and only for three hours after school. The study’s authors say that this “may not fully reflect total daily or habitual use”. (Also, they seem to have excluded nonbinary youth.) Still, the findings support a reasonable conclusion that children who spend a “moderate” amount of time using social media — about two hours daily or less — tend to have better outcomes, and it depends what they are doing.
The British study, on the other hand, found “distinguishing between active and passive use of social media played a limited role in our overall findings” suggesting “the distinction may be overly broad and does not sufficiently predict mental health”. So even the supposed quality of screen time might not have as much of an effect as we imagine.
The Australian government may have banned providing access to social media for people under sixteen, affecting millions, but these studies indicate it is an over-broad response to a complex topic. In explaining the limitations and caveats, the Australian researchers pointed out “[h]igher after-school social media use may also indicate fewer extracurricular or social opportunities” including those that may result from too much time spent on homework. That is not to say it would instead make more sense to me to ban homework, but it seems banning social media is both a red herring response to our built environment and has the potential to limit the actual socialization that takes place in these apps.
Canada is one of several countries working on a similar ban. Marie Woolf, Globe and Mail:
Prof. [Taylor Owen, of McGill University] warned that without a regulator, when a child hits the age when social media is allowed, they could “jump right into a social-media ecosystem that has no protections in it whatsoever.”
He said there is a need to address problems on platforms, which include certain kinds of content, “the incentives within them, the way the algorithms boost that content, the lack of guardrails, the lack of accountability, lack of safety teams and measures.” He added that a teen social-media ban would not resolve these problems on its own.
I am not knee-jerk opposed to considering the many harms created or exacerbated by online platforms; I think Owen is right in arguing for a more comprehensive vision. But if we are looking at correcting for failures in platform accountability, social media use by youth seems somewhat less important. The problem is that trying to make platforms in any way responsible for user-generated material will break the internet. It is much more straightforward — in theory — to add an age gate.
There is plenty of blame to go around, however, for our agency over our attachment to our devices, and I have no problem doling some out to platforms. “Time spent” is a bullshit metric that has nothing to do with user satisfaction, and encourages aggressive strategies like autoplaying the next video after one finishes and suggesting an endless scroll of entertainment. These features might not have an outsized effect on young people. But we should consider that the operators of these platforms are not building their apps with the happiness of people in mind. They are adding and continuously refining this functionality because it increases the time people spend using their thing instead of the competitor’s thing, thus making it more valuable.
Then again, perhaps we ought to limit social media use by age. Not for children, though: anyone over 55 gets read-only access to a maximum of six verified accounts, akin to broadcast television.
David Ljunggren, Reuters:
Canada’s federal court on Wednesday overturned a government order to close TikTok’s Canadian operations, allowing the short-video app to keep operating for now, and told Ottawa to review the case.
When the ban was enacted in November 2024, I noted the inconsistencies in the government’s position. The judge in this case, Russel Zinn, did not comment on why the ban was overturned, according to this Reuters story, and it looks like this decision will result in a new security review.
Hartley Charlton, MacRumors (I am linking to them instead of the actual source link because Bloomberg is expensive):
In yesterday’s report detailing Apple’s plans to turn Siri into a chatbot in iOS 27, [Mark] Gurman said that the company is in discussions with Google about hosting the forthcoming Siri chatbot on Google-owned servers powered by Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), a class of custom chips designed specifically for large-scale artificial intelligence workloads. The arrangement would mark a major departure from Apple’s emphasis on processing user requests either directly on-device or through its own tightly controlled Private Cloud Compute infrastructure.
Note that the press release last week regarding certain Apple Intelligence features set to be powered by Google’s Gemini specifically says “Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute”. Siri will have Apple Intelligence features but, in the company’s unique structure, it itself is not part of Apple Intelligence. Also note that Google in November announced Private A.I. Compute, which should be useful.
Jason Snell, Six Colors, in December:
Apple generally tries not to leave behind users who haven’t updated or can’t update to the latest OS version. Apple also usually offers security updates for past OS versions, and indeed, the company also released iOS 18.7.3 to address the same issues.
Unfortunately, there’s an ugly catch: Numerous iPhone users have reported that if your iPhone is capable of running iOS 26 but you’re still back on iOS 18, you won’t be offered iOS 18.7.3. Instead, the only update option you’ll be given is iOS 26.2.
As Snell writes, Apple created versions of iOS 18.7.3 for newer iPhones, but withheld those builds from public release, following a pattern of pushing users to the newest version of iOS after about the x.2 release.
It is a good reminder that the iOS adoption rate is not solely motivated by individuals, or even primarily so. Apple requires people to install the newest major version, even if they have automatic updates turned off, if they wish to install patches for security vulnerabilities. With automatic updates switched on, even stragglers will eventually find themselves using the new version anyway as long as their device is compatible. My wife’s iPhone was updated overnight to iOS 26 this week. She is not a Liquid Glass fan.
On Friday, I received an email from Aodhan Cullen, CEO of StatCounter, confirming iOS 26 users had been incorrectly counted as iOS 18.x in its analytics software and, accordingly, in its public trends. Cullen said the company was working on a patch. According to a note pinned today to the top of its iOS version chart, corrected reporting only began rolling out yesterday. However, because this chart represents a version share breakdown for a month that is mostly behind us, more accurate figures will start becoming noticeable in February. (Figures are available from one full day showing a 49% combined share for iOS 26.1 and 26.2.)
That is the first update. The second is by way of Timo Tijhof, principal engineer at Wikimedia, who points me to Wikimedia’s network-wide stats showing, as of 11 January, around 50% of “Mobile Safari” visitors were using iOS 26, compared to 41% using iOS 18. (Also, 2.8% using “Mobile Safari 19”, and I suppose that can be added to the ’26 total.) Not bad — until you start poking around the figures from the same time in prior years. In the week of 12 January 2025, for example, nearly 72% of visitors were using some version of iOS 18, then the most recent. The week of 14 January 2024, over 65% were using iOS 17. iOS 26 adoption is fifteen to twenty points behind the uptake rate seen before. Not good.
I am irritated at myself for not thinking of using Wikimedia’s figures, which represent users across all versions of Wikipedia, Wikiquote, the Commons media library, and plenty of other widely used websites. I have relied on them plenty of times before for similar projects since they represent such a gigantic and general-purpose sample. Thank you to Tijhof.
Fine, have a third bonus update: I have been trying to get Chris Taylor at Mashable to correct his assertion — attributed to me — that the frozen version number in the user agent string of Safari in iOS 26 is a “bug”. It is a claim that appears in the dek (“a bug Apple won’t squash”), and a few times in the text (“there’s actually a bug in the reporting system, and it’s Apple’s fault”; “a tiny bug in Safari”). I told Taylor about the error, and he updated the article way down in the fifth paragraph, of seven total, to claim “it isn’t a bug, exactly”, which is a long and misleading way of saying it is not a bug at all. Taylor writes “for obscure techie reasons, as far as Apple is concerned, it’s a feature”, but does not elaborate or explain, which is kind of Taylor’s job as a “veteran tech … journalist”. I guess I am a little peeved to be cited for Taylor’s own error.
If you’re not familiar with Aperture, it’s an app for organising, managing, editing, and exporting images. If you’re familiar with Apple’s Photos app, it’s that. But for professionals! Aperture is a complex app — its PDF user manual is over 900 pages long — so to keep this manageable I’ll focus on one particular aspect of it via two short excerpts from said manual.
Two excerpts that hide an astonishing amount of engineering effort.
If you had asked me from 2007 why I saved a huge amount of money to buy a MacBook Pro, one explanation I would have given you would have been about Aperture. When I bought another Mac in 2012, I would have again cited Aperture as a motivating factor. It was a far better reason to keep buying stuff from Apple than the kind of mandated stickiness of a paid iCloud account.
The 2015 discontinuation of Aperture continues to break my heart for two reasons: the loss of support for a tremendous piece of software, of course, and also for what it represents. It was, for reasons Kennett writes about and plenty more, a pinnacle of software design and engineering. It felt like it was built by people who took two crafts — software and photography — very seriously. Times change, though, and it seems like Apple has lost the soul of what made Aperture excellent. It should really figure out what that is. Questionable user interfaces, mediocre icon design, tolerance for lagginess and bugs — these are all bad things, but they are symptoms of a greater loss.
You see, what I hadn’t considered that night when I was messing around with this website’s chat bot was that the existence of a public user facing chat bot had the requisite of having public LLM API endpoints. Normally, you probably wouldn’t care about having a
/searchendpoint exposed on your website, because very few (if any) people would care to abuse it. Worst case scenario is someone has an easier way of finding content on your site…which is what you wanted when you built that search button anyways. But, when your/searchendpoint is actually just talking to an LLM and that LLM can be prompt injected to do what I want it to do, suddenly I want access to/searchbecause I get free access to something I’d normally pay for.
If you have administrative access over a website and you have had reason to dig into the access logs, you have no doubt seen an avalanche of automated requests looking for common security vulnerabilities. Now imagine that but with a bunch of plain language attacks on the very expensive new website feature you added. It is going to be a wild several years as more people begin to integrate these sophisticated yet — to anthropomorphize — gullible text boxes without understanding how much it is going to cost them directly and indirectly.
Most governments in Canada and around the world rely on Microsoft’s software. Most businesses route their applications through AWS. Most people tap away their lives on devices built and sold by American businesses, running American operating systems.
It’s like waking up and finding yourself ensnared. And it makes me mad as hell!
I get it.
This is, of course, a massively difficult problem. I love the MacBook Pro I am using right now, and it would be unbelievably difficult to get me to switch to some crappy product just to fight with driver incompatibilities again. A big problem is that trying to build a competitor to these established, widely supported, and well-integrated companies is a daunting task no matter where it takes place. The most valuable companies in the world rely on each other. The fact that we are in a situation where we must consider the consequences of our dependence on a handful of corporations showing a dictator-like level of obsequiousness to the U.S. president is also a big problem.
This can be a long-term goal. In the nearer term, we — the rest of the world — should take reasonable regulatory steps to curtail the influence and control of U.S. companies where we are. Any understanding that there was a great responsibility aligned with the great power of the U.S. has vanished, at least for now.
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Paris Marx, writing for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives:
It can be easy to believe that all this pressure [on governments by the United States] is a product of the way Trump’s return to office emboldened U.S. tech companies, but it’s simply brought a longstanding process out into the open. The U.S. government has long recognized how much it benefits from ensuring other countries are dependent on products and services made by companies in its jurisdiction. For years, it used trade negotiations to insert clauses in agreements that limit foreign governments’ ability to regulate its tech companies and has used its diplomats to apply pressure in other ways.
A common complaint, mostly from U.S. politicians and think tanks, about competition policies designed to address the influence and control of massive technology companies is that they are anti-American. This is a tacit acknowledgement that the current state of affairs advantages U.S. companies, and an expectation that the rest of the world should be completely fine with that.
Samantha Subin, CNBC:
Apple is joining forces with Google to power its artificial intelligence features, including a major Siri upgrade expected later this year.
The multiyear partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a joint statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
Apple and Google, in the statement that still has not been corrected to change Al to AI, but I presume it is about artificial intelligence rather than Google’s Albert technology:
After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.
Michael Acton, Stephen Morris, and George Hammond, Financial Times:
The deal would be structured in the form of a cloud computing contract, which could lead to Apple paying several billion dollars to Google over time, a person familiar with the agreement told the FT.
[…]
“I think that the ChatGPT integration is going to die on the vine … having two large models, given the economies of scale, wouldn’t make a ton of sense for Apple,” said Gene Munster at Deepwater Asset Management, who estimated the Gemini contract could be worth $5bn for Google.
Or, to put it another way, Gemini is worth to Apple roughly what a few months of default search placement in Safari are to Google, assuming these figures are in the right ballpark.
This announcement is vague. It seems to imply the Siri features that were supposed to roll out last year have been rebuilt on a new architecture that, turns out, has Gemini at its foundation. Apparently some other features are coming in mere months, like an ability to “tell more stories”, which will be a welcome distraction while Siri fails to text the right person in my contacts. Max Weinbach, of the well-connected Creative Strategies analysis team, is optimistic for what this means. I think it is super weird that Apple has teased Gemini integration alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT since WWDC 2024, but it is unclear whether this deal will include that capability.
Jeremy Freed, of GQ, in an article with the provocative headline “You Won’t Be Able to Escape Smart Glasses in 2026”:
“If AI glasses are going to go mainstream, 2026 will be the year that we start to see that,” says Sinead Bovell, a futurist and the founder of tech education company, WAYE. Meta introduced its first line of Ray-Ban AI Glasses in 2021, and has sold more than 2 million pairs since launching the second generation in 2023. By the end of 2026, the company plans to sell 3 million more while ramping up production to 10 million pairs annually. As hard as it is to imagine 10 million people — the combined populations of NYC and Philly — buying Meta AI Glasses every year, it may well come to pass. “The iPhone came out in 2007 and by 2011 BlackBerry was still the number-one smartphone,” says Bovell. “The iPhone wasn’t seen as a phone, it was seen as a toy. The exact same things that were said about it in 2008 are being said now about [smart] glasses.” Likewise, no one knew they needed an Apple Watch when the product launched in 2015, but the company has reportedly sold hundreds of millions of them since then.
This article was published a day after people from, presumably, Meta or EssilorLuxottica told Bloomberg they were going to double production to 20 million units by the end of this year in response to overwhelming demand. So from two million since 2023, three million this year alone, to twenty million next year — that is quite the forecasted sales curve. It is almost enough to make you think Meta has a hardware hit on its hands.
Bovell is from Canada, where the BlackBerry was indeed still the top smartphone brand through 2010, but that was not a worldwide trend. By 2011, Android phones were outselling BlackBerries in the United States; worldwide, RIM was never the best-selling smartphone vendor.
As for Bovell’s claim that the “exact same things that were said about it [the iPhone] in 2008 are being said now about [smart] glasses”, the problem is that there is a far better comparison given we have already had an example of smart glasses in Google Glass, and the same things were being said about those a decade ago. In 2012, CBC News quoted a researcher saying Glass is “the mainstreaming of this kind of device”. In 2013, Jessica Guynn, of the Los Angeles Times, wrote that they “may still be on the fringes of mainstream consciousness. But they are not going to stay there very long”. The following year, Paul Saffo lamented for CNN that while “[i]nfo-glasses today are like PCs in 1984 – they look cool but perform a few functions that aren’t all that useful, such as taking pictures or surfing the Web while sitting in a bar with friends” — yes, “they look cool” is presented as a factual statement — in the very near future from 2014 “we are certain to be astonished by the capabilities of the device sitting on the bridge of our nose”.
Well, it has been nearly twelve years since Saffo wrote that, and the killer capabilities of smart glasses remain based entirely around the camera. And you know what? It is a pretty good feature — but it alone is not as compelling today as was a smartphone in 2008. I do not think the question is are smart glasses today akin to smartphones in 2008?; the question is more like what is different about today’s smart glasses compared to Google Glass?. To his credit, Freed attempts to answer this in noting that Meta’s Wayfarer shape instead of a sci-fi is an obvious upgrade, but I think he underplays the advancements in image, language, and speech detection since Google Glass by calling it “a Siri-like voice assistant”. GQ is not a technology publication, true, but that is among the biggest changes for a device so dependent on real-time interaction with the surrounding environment, like for translation features.
But there are problems with today’s smart glasses that remain unchanged from those that affected Google Glass. Most obviously, they are still a privacy nightmare for yourself and for others. Meta says the externally-visible recording LED must not be obstructed to record video, but people are modifying the glasses to remove that restriction. They must effectively be treated like spy glasses because they could be recording anywhere — in a public area running facial recognition software, to the apparent privacy of a massage room.
Meta is far from the only company producing glasses like these. Snap has its Spectacles and Xiaomi’s A.I. Glasses are available in China. All of these companies are responsible for developing a selfish future that prioritizes selling buyers on the advantages of an unobtrusive camera while barely acknowledging the societal impact of the same. Google is taking another kick at the can, and rumours consistently indicate Apple and Samsung are each working on their own, too. They may all say the right things about privacy, but the fundamental fact is that a barely-visible camera is a tool for abuse as much as it is entertainment.
Freed:
Whether the possibilities presented by smart glasses sound fun and appealing or like the tipping point into a dystopian nightmare is a matter of perspective. There are the obvious doubts about what happens if someone hacks your glasses and what companies like Meta are planning to do with your data (spoiler alert: it’s being used to train AI), but these aren’t so different from existing concerns around other internet-enabled devices. “Every piece of technology ever created has been used for good and bad things,” says Edward R. McNicholas, a Partner at Ropes & Gray in Washington DC who leads the firm’s global data, privacy and cybersecurity practice. “Just think of the Internet itself — it helps bad actors, but it brings the globe together, creates enormous economic opportunity, and inspires millions.” What will ultimately decide the fate of smart glasses, he says, is regulatory friction — and cultural embrace. “That is, what’s the rizz? Do the 20-somethings deem it based or cringe?”
McNicholas was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1996. His career as a lawyer is at least Millennial-aged and, as a Millennial myself, I feel pretty confident in saying he cannot use “rizz”, “based”, or “cringe” like this. It is not, in fact, lit.
I find it difficult to believe it is a coincidence there are two stories promoting Meta’s A.I. glasses appearing in the news the same week Meta laid off ten percent of its Reality Labs employees, and reallocating funds to the team developing those glasses. I am sure these things have their defenders, and may be more popular than Meta expected given the company’s long run of hardware flops. The relative success of the glasses means Meta can jettison its original messy concept of the metaverse and redefine it to suit its needs today.
But this does not feel like the nascent days of the iPhone, nor like we will not “be able to escape smart glasses” this year. I knew lots of people with smartphones in the mid-to-late-2000s, including some with original iPhones despite them not being available in Canada. Anecdotally, I do not personally know anyone who owns or is even thinking about buying smart glasses. Mind you, I know plenty of people with an Apple Watch today who did not consider it compelling even years after it launched. Maybe it is like the early days of smartwatch ownership, after all, and I simply do not notice because Meta’s glasses just look like Ray-Bans. That is, I guess, the whole point.
Despite the concept of smart glasses being the product of so much hype and excitement, it never seems to have materialized in something you can buy. Maybe that will change; maybe that has changed without me noticing it. But one of the other biggest shifts of the past ten years is how much people say they want more distance from technology. One of the predictions for 2026 in a list from the New York Times is the rise of the “dumb phone” as a status symbol. Some people who have tried smartwatches have found them more demanding over time than helpful; I stopped wearing one after four years because I need less technology in my life, not more. There is a vast gulf between what people say they want and their actual behaviour, of course, but I cannot shake the feeling this technology is still too much of an imposition. We will not need to “escape smart glasses” if people still choose not to buy them.
Riana Pfefferkorn, in an op-ed for the New York Times:
A.I. companies like xAI can and should do more not just to respond quickly and decisively when their models behave badly, but also to prevent them from generating such material in the first place. This means rigorously testing the models to learn how and why they can be manipulated into generating illegal sexual content — then closing those loopholes. But current laws don’t adequately protect good-intentioned testers from prosecution or correctly distinguish them from malicious users, which frightens companies from taking this kind of action.
To the extent A.I. companies are truly “red teaming” their models — this term has been misused by the industry, which often outsources the work to contractors in developing nations — current laws restrict the limits to which they can be taken. On this I agree with Pfefferkorn, and I think she is right to call for a change in policy.
But I am not convinced xAI is much interested in ensuring its model is that much safer. CSAM is obviously over the line and I would be surprised if anyone there were to defend Grok on that. Most anything else, however, is something I think xAI would find permissible albeit perhaps unseemly for Grok to generate. Remember: Grok is supposed to be “unfiltered”. Does it offend you? Because it should, buddy. That is the freedom you get when you look at the world through the lens of a mall-grade edgelord who will be turning 55 years old in June.
I made a mistake on Friday: instead of waiting to polish a more comprehensive article, I effectively live-blogged my shifting understanding of how StatCounter was collecting its iOS version number data by way of updates and edits to existing posts. In my own defence, I did not know the rate of users updating to iOS 26 would become as much of a story unto itself as it has. So allow me to straighten this out.
Here is the background: StatCounter publishes market share data by country and user technology based on statistics it collects from its web analytics package which, it says, is used by over a million websites totalling around five billion page views monthly. I have not heard of many of the sites using its analytics, but it seems to be a large enough and generic enough sample that it should be indicative — more so than, say, visitors to my audience-specific website. Ed Hardy, over at Cult of Mac, used StatCounter’s figures to report, on January 8, that “only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed”. Hardy compared this to historical StatCounter figures showing a 63% adoption rate of iOS 18 by the same time last year, 54% on iOS 17 the year prior, and 62% on iOS 16 the year before that. If true, this would represent a catastrophic reluctance for iPhone users to update.
If true.
I do not think the iOS 26 uptake rate is about 15%. I think it is lower than the 54–63% range in previous years, but not by nearly that much. I think StatCounter has been misinterpreting iOS 26’s user base since last year because of a change Apple made to Safari.
If the phrase “user agent” does not make you respond by tipping your head to the side like my dog did when I asked him if he knew what I meant by that, you can skip this paragraph. A user agent string is a way for software to identify itself when it makes an HTTP request on behalf of a user. A user agent might describe the type and version of a web browser, the operating system, and have other information so that, in the old days, websites could check for compatibility. This leads to user agent strings that look a little silly:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.
This does not represent a Firefox user, despite starting with “Mozilla”, nor does it represent a Safari or Chrome user, despite the mentions of “Safari”, “Chrome”, and “AppleWebKit”. It is a user agent string for Microsoft Edge, which is begging to be treated like its competitors.
This is a simplified explanation, but it is important for how StatCounter works. When someone browses a website containing its analytics code, it reads the user agent string, and that is how StatCounter determines market share. The above user would be counted for Edge market share (“Edg/134.0.0”) and Windows. Which version of Windows? Well, while “NT 10.0” suggests it is Windows 10, it is also used by Edge running on Windows 11 — that part of the user string has been frozen. The Chromium team did the same thing and reduced the amount of specific information in the user agent string. This removes a method of fingerprinting and is generally fine.
This movement was spearheaded by Apple in 2017, when Ricky Mondello announced Safari Technology Preview 46 “freezes Safari’s user agent string. It will not change in the future”. But this remained a desktop-only change until September 2025, when Jen Simmons and others who work on WebKit, announced that the version of Safari shipping in iOS 26 would have its user agent stuck on the previous version of iOS:
Also, now in Safari on iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS 26 the user agent string no longer lists the current version of the operating system. Safari 18.6 on iOS has a UA string of:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.6 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1And Safari 26.0 on iOS has a UA string of:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
Apple justified this change only by implication, writing “we highly recommend using feature detection instead of UA string detection when writing conditional code”. But, as Jeff Johnson points out, this change does not eliminate version detection entirely:
[…] because Safari is always inseparable from the OS, so it’s possible to derive the iOS version from the Safari version, which continues to be incremented in the User-Agent. On macOS, in contrast, the latest version of Safari typically supports the three latest major OS versions, so Safari 26 can be installed on macOS 15 Sequoia and macOS 14 Sonoma in addition to macOS 26 Tahoe, and therefore the User-Agent — which actually says “OS X 10_15_7”! — is a little more effective at obscuring the OS version.
I noticed this, too, and it led to a mistake I made in my first guess at understanding why StatCounter was reporting some iOS 26 traffic, but not a lot. I thought StatCounter could have made a change to its analytics package to interpret this part of the user agent string instead, but that it may not have rolled out to all of its users. I was wrong.
What actually appears to account for iOS 26’s seemingly pitiful adoption rate is that third-party browsers like Chrome and Brave produce a user agent string that looks like this, on my iPhone running iOS 26.3:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 26_3_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/144.0.7559.53 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
Safari, meanwhile, produces this user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_7 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
“iPhone OS 26_3_0” on Chrome, but “iPhone OS 18_7” in Safari. And iOS 18.7 also exists, with a similar user agent string as Safari, albeit with “Version/18.7” in place of “Version/26.3”. The operating system version is the same in both, however: “18_7”. StatCounter’s iOS 26 data is not reflective of all iOS users — just those using third-party browsers that still have the current iOS version in their user agent string.
Even though third-party browsers are available on iOS, most users browse the web through Safari. And that means StatCounter is almost certainly counting the vast majority of people on iOS 26 as iOS 18.7 users. I retrieved those user agent strings using StatCounter’s detection utility, which is how it says you can validate the accuracy of its statistics. And it seems they are not. (I asked StatCounter to confirm this but have not heard back. Update: StatCounter’s CEO told me iOS 26 users had been miscounted.)
The actual rate of iOS 26 adoption is difficult to know right now. Web traffic to generalist websites, like the type collected by StatCounter, seems to me like it would be a good proxy had its measurement capabilities kept up with changes to iOS. Other sources, like TelemetryDeck, indicate a far higher market share — 55% as I am writing this — but its own stats reported nearly 78% adoption of iOS 18 at this time last year, also greater than StatCounter’s 63%, but not by as much. TelemetryDeck’s numbers are based on aggregate data from its in-app analytics product, so they should be more accurate, but that also depends on which apps integrate TelemetryDeck and who uses them. What we can see, though, is the difference between last year and this year at the same time, around 23 percentage points. For comparison, in January 2024, TelemetryDeck reported around 74% had updated to iOS 17 — iOS 26 is 19 points less.
If its reporting for this year is similarly representative, it likely indicates a 20-point slide in iOS 26 adoption. Not nearly as terrible as the misleading StatCounter dashboard suggests, but still a huge and embarrassing difference compared to prior years. Apple will likely update its own figures in the coming weeks for a further point of comparison. However, even though there are early indications iOS 26 is not as well-received as its predecessors, what we do not know is why that is. Fear not, however, for there are obvious conclusions to be drawn.
Hardy, later in the same Cult of Mac article:
It’s not that millions of iPhone users around the world have somehow overlooked the launch of iOS 26 followed by iOS 26.1 and iOS 26.2. They are holding off installing the upgrades because this is Apple’s most controversial new version in many years. The reason: Liquid Glass — a translucent and fluid new interface. Many elements of the UI go semi-transparent, while clever effects make it seem like users are looking through glass at objects shown on the screen behind the Control Center and pop-up windows.
David Price, of Macworld, made the same assumption based on Hardy’s story — twice:
It’s debatable whether the egregious design of last year’s OS updates falls under the category of arrogance or incompetence; perhaps it’s both. But the takeaway for Apple should be that customer loyalty is finite, and there are consequences when you consistently lower your quality-control standards. When your entire business is built on people liking you, it’s best not to take them for granted.
I have no particular affinity for Liquid Glass. I am not sure its goals are well-conceived, and I do not think it achieves those objectives.
Even so, I think the aversion to Liquid Glass is so strong among some commentators that erroneous stats are fine so long as they are confirmation of their biases. Put it this way: if just 15% of users had, indeed, upgraded to iOS 26 and the reason for so many people remaining on previous versions is Liquid Glass, surely that should mean a corrected percentage — perhaps 55%, perhaps lower — is indicative that most people are not actually bothered by Liquid Glass, right?
Yes, there is a likely 20-point gap and, if that is due to Liquid Glass, it should be cause for worry at the highest levels of Apple. iOS is a mass-market operating system. The audience is not necessarily obsessed with information density or an adequate contrast ratio. If a redesign of iOS were exciting, people would have raced to update, just as they did when iOS 7 was launched. They instead appear hesitant. Maybe the reason is Liquid Glass, or maybe something else. Or maybe there are further measurement errors.
Whatever the case, I would avoid believing articles making sweeping conclusions based on a single data point. After all, if that number is shown to be incorrect, it destabilizes the whole argument.
Jason Snell, Six Colors:
I’ve been thinking about Apple’s relationship with computer displays lately. Maybe it was the report that the iMac Pro might somehow return, combined with John Voorhees of MacStories detailing how he gave up the Studio Display for an ASUS monitor? And, of course, there’s the prospect that we may be seeing new Apple-made standalone displays in 2026.
I don’t want to go back to a world where Apple no longer makes standalone displays. But that said, I think the company’s approach to display technology needs a serious upgrade.
Co-signed. When I bought my iMac 5K in early 2019,1 it was the only big desktop display Apple sold. Now, as I think about an update, I am dismayed I will not officially be able to use it as an external display, though it seems like Luna Display might be worth a shot over Thunderbolt 3. If that does not work, it is gutting to me that I will have to effectively re-purchase this same 5K panel for my desk. And then there is the question of what I should do with my otherwise-good-just-outdated iMac.
I have been keeping an eye on Michael Tsai’s posts about displays, particularly those regarding non-Apple 27-inch 5K models. I know I have to adjust my expectations. Even so, these all look pretty tacky. Imagine being from Asus or ViewSonic and thinking I want to look at an ugly logo all day long. Still, a near-thousand-dollar difference is hard to dismiss, especially since Apple’s expensive display continues to have software problems.
And, of course, the only other display Apple sells is a 32-inch model that is over-engineered for most people, costs nearly eight thousand dollars in Canada with a stand, and has not been updated in over six years. Asus’ comparable 6K display is under $2,000, though it is not as bright and it looks pretty tragic.
Arguably the worst time in modern Apple history to be shopping for a new Mac. Butterfly keyboards in all the laptops, stale desktops, and on the verge of the last batch of Intel-based Macs. ↥︎
Elizabeth Lopatto, the Verge:
Less than five years ago, I sat through the interminable Epic v. Apple antitrust trial. Real heads will remember that Apple’s lawyers heavily implied that a naked bananaman called Mr. Peely was somehow inappropriate for court. This came after a week where Apple argued that an indie storefront that users could install via Epic was a problem because it hosted porny games, calling games on Itch.io “offensive and sexualized.”
You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs, and of children with so-called “donut glaze” on their faces — which, by the way, were being generated at a rate of one per minute. I’d also call that “offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste” and *especially *“just plain creepy”! Do you need a back brace to stand up straight, buddy? Because at this point, I am certain you haven’t got a single vertebra.
Correctly righteous anger. That there has barely been any reckoning with this from Apple, Google, or even xAI despite at least a week of mainstream media coverage shows a callous indifference to the ongoing effects of the victims of this abuse. The best argument I can imagine — and it is a terrible argument — is that Apple’s lawyers advised the company against doing anything that looks anticompetitive since it is currently being sued by xAI. This is why it is a bad idea to rely on private corporations to do the job of regulators and law enforcement — but, still, Apple and Google should not be carrying apps from this company for as long as it continues to be a mass-scale abuse generator.