Pedro Salinas, poeta. Autenticidad, belleza e ingenio.
Google Will Allow More Real-money Games On The Play Store
Google announced today that the company plans to support more real-money games (RMG) on the Play Store this year by allowing more types of games in the category following local laws.
The search giant said that the program with extended support for real-money gaming will start in India, Brazil and Mexico in June, with rollout in more countries planned in the future.
Google is also considering a new service fee model for subscriptions and in-app purchases. However, the company didn't disclose many details about the cut it will take from developers.
"With this policy update, we will also be evolving our service fee model for RMG to reflect the value Google Play provides and to help sustain the Android and Play ecosystems. We are working closely with developers to ensure our new approach reflects the unique economics and various developer earning models of this industry," Karan Gambhir, director, Global Trust & Safety Partnerships at Google, said in a blog post.
Typically, Google has allowed real-money gaming apps that are governed by local regulatory frameworks for a particular type. With the change in policy, the company will allow more types of real-money gaming apps, which are legal but not regulated.
Google started working on including real-money gaming apps on the Play Store in 2021. In 2022, it started a pilot in India to allow fantasy sports and Rummy apps on the local Play Store. Last year, Google provided an extension to already approved apps until January 15. And with the latest announcement, the pilot apps will have a grace period until June 30.
In 2020, Google pulled Paytm's app from the Play Store because the app included newly introduced fantasy sports elements.
The pilot also had regulations around age verification and ID verification. Google started a similar pilot in Mexico last November, which will also extend to June 30. After that developers will be able to publish their real-money gaming apps on the Play Store beyond fantasy sports categories.
Google said it will publish detailed policies around the change in the next few months, but it will include guardrails such as age limits and geo-restrictions.
A new service fee on real-money games will be a key factor for Google Play Store's revenue as the company is facing scrutiny worldwide to allow developers to use alternative payment methods. It typically provides a 4% discount on service fees under its user-choice billing program, which was piloted in 2022 and still has select partners.
Apple Allows Devs To Promote Subscriptions On The Web With A 27% Cut
Apple updated its developer guidelines today to allow U.S.-based developers to link out to the web to inform users about other ways to subscribe to a service without using in-app purchases. This followed the U.S. Supreme Court's decision not to hear appeals from both Apple and Epic Games on Tuesday.
The company mentioned on a support page that, even if developers use a link to direct users to other options for digital purchases, they will have to pay a 27% cut to Apple. For developers who are part of Apple's Small Business Program or who are auto-renewing subscriptions for a second year, the fee is reduced to 12% instead of 15%.
Essentially, Apple is giving developers a discount of three percentage points to use alternative payment methods. This might not be enough in some cases, as developers will still have to pay fees to another payment processor. Notably, Apple allows a three-point discount for Dutch dating apps and a four-point discount on its commissions for apps in South Korea.
In 2021, a lower court ruled that Apple can't block developers from including links in the app leading to alternative payment methods. With the latest Supreme Court decision, the Cupertino-based tech giant will have to follow the order.
In an update outlining the App Store rule changes, the company insisted that Apple's payment system is the "the most convenient, safe, and secure" method for in-app purchases. It also noted that if developers used other payment methods, features like Family Sharing wouldn't be available to users, and Apple wouldn't be able to help customers with refunds and subscription management — putting the onus on developers.
Apple also mentioned that developers have to apply to get permission to include links in their apps. Plus, the developer will need to submit transaction reports within 15 days of a calendar month's ending.
Apple's example for showing a link leading to purchase from a website. Image Credits: Apple
The iPhone maker also detailed interface guidelines for developers to follow, including the text to indicate that users might not be able to use features like subscription management if they use a third-party payment option.
Apple's outline to show text to customers indicating that they are about to use an alternative payment method. Image Credits: Apple
Even after publishing these guidelines, Apple feels that collecting a commission will be "exceedingly difficult, and in many cases, impossible," because of the scale of the App Store, as noted by 9to5Mac.
According to a report by data.Ai, the app economy showed signs of recovery as consumers spent over $171 billion across App Store, Google Play Store and other Android app stores. However, regulatory moves such as the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) will force Apple to allow sideloading and third-party app stores — a move that might impact the App Store revenue.
Apple is not alone in facing regulatory scrutiny regarding app distribution on phones. In December, a jury found Google guilty in a case against Epic Games and deemed that the search giant engaged in anticompetitive behavior. Now, it's up to the judge to decide the next steps and remedies.
Separately, in December, Google paid $700 million in a settlement with the U.S. Attorney general over another case on Play Store's monopoly. As part of the case, the company made changes to the Play Store model to allow alternative billing for developers.
Earlier this month, Google announced that it would allow more types of real-money apps on the Play Store later this year and take fees from developers in a bid to bolster its bottom line.
Publishing Articles To WordPress With Workflow On IOS
For the past two years, I've been publishing articles and linked posts on MacStories via Python. This inelegant solution was my only option to automate the process of publishing directly from Editorial (most recently, 1Writer): when it comes to writing on iOS, I'm too fussy to accept primitive copy & paste into WordPress' official client. Despite its minimal GUI, crude Python code, and lack of advanced features, my 'Publish to WordPress' script served me well for two years.1 99% of my MacStories articles since late 2013 have been published with it.
Still, I knew that something better would come along eventually. When the Workflow team pinged me about a new action they were developing to enable WordPress publishing from the app, I couldn't believe they were considering it. Workflow, an app that I employ on a daily basis to speed up core parts of my job, combined with the single task that powers my entire business – posting new content. It was almost too good to be true.
Fortunately, great things do happen in the third-party iOS ecosystem. Today's update to Workflow (version 1.4.2) adds, among more actions, a brand new WordPress action to publish posts and pages to configured WordPress blogs (both wordpress.Com and self-hosted ones) and which can be combined with any other existing action or workflow for deeper automaton. After using a beta of this action for the past few weeks, I can say that it's, by far, the best automated publishing workflow I've ever had, and I don't want to go back to anything else.
Post to WordPressWith the new Post to WordPress action, the Workflow team has taken parameters for posts, pages, and media that you can post to a WordPress blog and they've enabled them as fields in a single action that's completely under your control.
The action is split in two categories – basic settings and Advanced options. For any new item, you can configure:
If you want more control, you can tap on 'Advanced' and set up the following:
The action accepts text, rich text, and images as input; you can configure multiple WordPress accounts in the action's settings by tapping the gear icon next to its name.
With the WordPress action, the Workflow team has opened up the app to the biggest publishing platform on the Internet, leveraging its integration with iOS and third-party apps to allow users to post content no matter the text editor they use. Unlike other WordPress clients that came before it2, the action offers a good selection of parameters that can be changed manually and programmatically: in my case, featured image, slug, and custom fields are values which I was never able to fully automate in Python and which I couldn't find in third-party apps that only offered basic WordPress integration.
The Workflow team has worked hard to build a WordPress action that can fit a lot of user needs at once: while I may require traditional post types with a single custom field, perhaps you need to publish asides to WordPress with three custom fields and a custom slug set each time. This action can do all that, with automation.
The important aspect to note here is that every field in the action can be integrated with variables or user input from a workflow. Want your post's title to be the contents of the iOS clipboard? Just use a clipboard variable in the Title field. Need to choose from a list of URLs for a custom field? Show a list in Workflow and tap your choice. Want to type an excerpt manually? Use an 'Ask When Run' token and you'll get a native input field upon running the action.
I've always dreamed of having a visual WordPress action that mixed the benefits of automation and GUIs while eschewing the complexity of Python code. Workflow's WordPress action is what I've been looking for, and, more importantly, it makes WordPress blogging integrated with iOS thanks to the app's extension, enabling all kinds of users and apps to take advantage of it.
My 'Publish to WordPress' WorkflowAs I've teased in some articles over the past weeks, I've been using the new WordPress action to publish content to MacStories in a semi-automated fashion that doesn't involve manual interaction with the WordPress admin interface or Python.
I've come up with a workflow to integrate 1Writer with WordPress via Workflow, but you can use any other text editor (as long as it implements the iOS share sheet). Thanks to Workflow's open approach, you can set the action to receive input from its extension or get text from the system clipboard. If you don't want to use anything else to write, you can even type your posts in a text field in Workflow.
In my case, the first order of business was coming up with a way to send the text and file name of a 1Writer document to Workflow via URL scheme. As we've seen before, 1Writer offers good flexibility with JavaScript actions, which allowed me to put together this bit of code to accomplish what I needed:
var title = editor.GetFileName(); title = title.Substring(0, title.Length - 4) var text = editor.GetText(); app.SetClipboard(title); app.OpenURL('workflow://run-workflow?Name=Publish&input=' + encodeURIComponent(text));You may be wondering why I chose a JavaScript action instead of calling the Workflow extension. The reason is twofold: 1Writer doesn't seem to offer a way to share plain text with the iOS share sheet (it shares a plain text file, which I don't want), and I need to share the contents of the file and the file name simultaneously. With JavaScript, I can set the iOS clipboard to the name of the file, remove '.Txt' from it, and send the document's text to Workflow.
You can download the action here, but keep in mind that you may need to tweak it if you use a different file extension or workflow name. If you don't use 1Writer, the basic steps (copying the future post's title to the clipboard first and sending text to the Workflow URL scheme) will work for other iOS apps like Editorial and Drafts, too.
The real fun happens in Workflow. First, the article's text is saved to a variable and previewed with Quick Look to make sure that everything looks good.3 Next, the workflow fetches the post's title from the clipboard, runs it through Brett Terpstra's Title Case API (a work in progress, but it already works very well), and displays an alert to confirm that the title looks okay (the title is editable so you can make changes if you want). The title is then saved to another variable.
At this point, the workflow takes a turn for my specific needs. I publish two types of articles to MacStories: regular posts (such as this one) and linked posts. Both are post types according to WordPress, but the linked ones use a custom field to set the external link parameter that makes their titles clickable when pointing to another website.
Because I want to choose whether a post is a regular post or a linked one, I put in a choice in the workflow that takes a different route depending on what's picked. If it's a linked post, the workflow asks me to select a URL for the custom field by listing all URLs found in the document (I always repeat the destination URL in the body text) and then uses that value for the custom field when posting to WordPress. Note how a routine that would take a few lines of regex and custom UIs in Python – scanning text for URLs and displaying them in a list – can be done with two drag & drop actions in Workflow.
If the post is not a linked one, I pick 'Normal' and the workflow posts my document's text to WordPress as a regular post.
The best part of this action – and the biggest difference with my old Python script – is performance: Workflow can fetch dozens of categories and hundreds of tags in a couple of seconds, and by using an 'Ask When Run' variable I can make sure I choose these taxonomy values from a searchable list every time.
Those who don't use WordPress on iOS won't see this new action as a big deal. But if you, like me, have been looking for a solution to integrate WordPress publishing at a system level because you've always been unhappy with WordPress clients on iOS, you can see why this is an important addition to the blogging workflows of iPhone and iPad users. With a single action and through the automation engine of Workflow, I can now publish content to my site from anywhere on iOS; if I decide to stop using 1Writer for Editorial or any other text editor, that won't affect my ability to automate WordPress publishing as I long as I have Markdown. That's the freedom of plain text and iOS extensions.
Workflow's WordPress action is now powering my iOS blogging setup, which is faster and more reliable than ever. You can download my workflow here.
Other New FeaturesIn addition to WordPress, Workflow's latest update brings some nice changes to actions for Messages, iCloud, Slack, Notes, and more.
For Slack users, the good news is that Workflow can keep multiple accounts signed in, so you'll be able to create blocks of actions to post in different teams within the same workflow. Messages and Mail actions can now open their respective apps when activated from the widget. This has been particularly useful for messages I always send at a certain location or time of the day (such as texting my girlfriend after I've gotten home), as I can open a pre-filled iMessage conversation from Notification Center.
The 'Create Notes' action is also capable of attaching files to Notes now – a welcome improvement considering the app's Attachments Browser on iOS 9.
Speaking of files, the most notable change is in the Get File and Save File actions, which can save files in Workflow's local iCloud container and retrieve them programmatically. While saving and retrieving files was possible before with Dropbox and other services, iCloud's native integration on iOS lets Workflow save files even when offline and upload them once an Internet connection is available.
While I won't be using these actions much (I don't trust iCloud Drive for critical work files), they open up some interesting use cases for a permanent local/remote storage location implemented in workflows (Workflow's Ari Weinstein mentioned creating a clipboard manager based on this; imagine storing text snippets, addresses, or other user data in text files stored in Workflow's iCloud folder and accessible from iCloud Drive).
My Most Used WorkflowsA few readers have asked me to share my most used workflows, so I thought I could have a brief recap for those who missed my previous coverage of Workflow (you can read all my posts here).
Furthermore, Club MacStories members will be able to access a new 'Workflow Corner' section in MacStories Weekly, starting this week.
In the new section, I'll be taking workflow requests from members looking for ideas or inspiration for their iOS workflows. It'll have a special focus on Workflow, but it'll also include general questions about iOS productivity apps. Workflows and content shared in this section will be exclusive to Club members.
If you're a member, you can send in your questions at the same email address used for Weekly Q&As. If you're not a Club MacStories member yet, you should consider becoming one.
A Workflow for BloggingIn just a year, Workflow has become the centerpiece of my iOS writing and blogging workflow. I use it to create linked posts thanks to its Safari integration, and I've run its extension thousands of times in Photos to assemble screenshots for MacStories reviews. Now, I can use Workflow to communicate with WordPress and publish posts in seconds, with automated rules and conditions that save me time every day. I've been trying to do this for a long time. Workflow can't access the full stack of WordPress functionalities yet (such as updating an existing post), but its integration is off to a great start.
In a way, Workflow has become the Minecraft for productivity on iOS: not an oxymoron, but a playground where building blocks can be mastered and remixed, personalized and shared with others. The Workflow team is continuing to iterate on their original vision. They're not stopping, there's more to do, and their app keeps getting better.
Workflow 1.4.2 is available on the App Store.
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