How to Sideload Apps onto an iPhone or iPad Without Jailbreaking - Ho
Welcome To Camp Apple Intelligence
Howdy👋🏾, On Sunday, a close friend and I pitched tents at Shenandoah National Park. As we drove up the mountain, my service dropped from full coverage to zero bars, and all of my notifications, emails, and text messages went silent.
(Jason Michael Perry)
As someone who is often directly jacked into the Internet, the silence initially caused a feeling of anxiety that gradually turned into a quiet calm. I was reminded of how often so many of our devices buzz, begging for our attention when the reality is it's not that important.
You could call my trip into the wilderness a bit of digital detox, but I made some exceptions, including watching Apple's World Wide Developer Conference. It took some planning, and while my Verizon service was non-existent, a T-Mobile-equipped iPad was just what we needed.
(Jason Michael Perry)
Many have done an amazing job covering WWDC24, and I highly recommend giving it a watch, but I wanted to share my thoughts:
⚡️Apple Vision Pro was front and center, and with so many rumors of device returns, lack of sales, and little love from the developer community, this sent a strong message. The platform is actively under development and not one that would sit on the shelf and go stale. The updates also directly address many of the issues I shared in my review, and I'm excited to try out the beta and see if the device is better after these changes.
(Jason Michael Perry)
(Jason Michael Perry)
⚡️Apple architected things exactly how I predicted. On-device models that run Small Language Models that handle most responses and reach out to the cloud when they can't. This leans into Apple's biggest strength, it makes its own silicon and is not dependent on the expensive and huge Nvidia backlogs. The benchmarks for these models are crazy! Based on their own benchmarks, these models beat most other models on the device and server. They also state that they're less likely to hallucinate. For the moment, they're singularly positioned to use their vertical stack of hardware and software to build something few (if any) other companies can.
⚡️Apple Intelligence is unavailable today, and the rollout will be phased and possibly take more than a year. I'll install the betas when I get home to faster Internet, but my understanding is that none of the Apple Intelligence features shipped in the beta and that when it comes, it will require a waiting list.
⚡️Privacy and confidentiality played a huge role in how Apple constructed and planned its models, which is incredibly important. When I use ChatGPT or Claude, my biggest consistent complaint is that it lacks so much context that I have to repeat myself over and over again, or share details about people and things it just can't know. Apple Intelligence is meant to create an AI model that's less about the outside world and more about each of us trained on tons of your personal data. It will train locally on your texts, emails, photos, contacts, calendar, maps, app settings, and who knows what else. Anyone who sends text messages knows how deeply personal these exchanges can be. The only other companies in similar positions to build a model so deeply personal are Google, Microsoft, Meta, and maybe Samsung – and frankly, I'm not sure I trust them not to harvest my personal data for advertising or something else. Apple's privacy stance and unwillingness to build backdoors or provide access to the police might become one of its biggest advantages in creating a truly personal AI that people trust to learn about so much intimate and personal data.
(Jason Michael Perry)
⚡️The possibility of a personal AI with so much of our own data opens up the possibility of a true digital assistant like never before. During the keynote, Apple pitched this as a system that can fill in the dots we forget, similar to proactively adding a calendar event. Think about how powerful ChatGPT is, then imagine an AI model that's trained on you and has access to tools to do things for you.
(Jason Michael Perry)
⚡️App integration on devices is also built with privacy in mind. I need to read more and watch the developer-focused Platform State of the Union when I get home. My understanding is that the App Intents allow an app to register the types of questions they can answer or aid and actions they can perform. This approach creates a protective molt around this trove of your personal data but still allows you to query The NY Times Cooking app for recipes or check the status of an EV car charge. This seems like a decent compromise, but I'm curious how intuitive this will be, especially if multiple apps can answer a similar question.
⚡️The partnership with ChatGPT is interesting and very different than what I expected. Apple is essentially treating them like your choice of default search engines in their Safari browser. Apple Intelligence is the default, but you have the option to use another AI. It sounds like you ask Siri to respond to a prompt with ChatGPT or select it in your interface. As a warning, Apple will confirm that you want to do this before sending any data to their service. This sounds good on paper, but it also has a cumbersome implementation. What I like and see as smart is that Apple does not need to build the best LLM. Apple Intelligence becomes the AI that knows you, your home, your contacts, and your App while being good for general-purpose things. Other AI models can fill in the gap by being more "worldly," ultimately, you may have access to multiple models that you can use alongside Apple's AI as you see fit. In a world where Google and Android are potentially locked to its Gemini model, and Microsoft is mainly based on CoPilot 
(Jason Michael Perry)
⚡️Grammarly's business model is DEAD. Writings have been on the wall for some time, but today, they sherlocked the product and deeply integrated into the operating system in a way Grammarly could never do. Maybe it won't be as good, but if it's good enough it's going to be tough to shell out money monthly for those features.
Apple's WWDC also solidified something that I've assumed for a while, AI is never going to be the star product people imagine it will be. The nature of how it works requires it to become so ubiquitous and so tightly integrated into the devices we use that a great implementation of AI will be invisible and fully transparent.
Betting on an AI startup for users is like investing in Grammarly or the best spell-checker tool that exists. It's easy for me to think of OpenAI or Anthropic in 20 years as something licensed and more akin to a computer using Intel or AMD processors, or better yet, a person knowing the brand of RAM in a computer. The stuff embedded in our devices will get good enough, and that means people simply won't care.
This is the battle car manufacturers are finding with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto – I have a device that knows my contacts, does mapping, already knows the location I'm headed to, and is my go-to device for listening to music, books, podcasts, and so much more. Using a competing product requires such great context and integration with things around and about me that no matter how well-designed the product is, it's still a frustrating experience. Today's AI is exactly that. It knows so much about the world and so little about me. It doesn't know my style, what music I like, my favorite movies, my kids' names, my parents' birthdays, how I text, my writing style, or how I start and end my emails. I can teach it these things, but some of this I don't know or think to tell it.
AI is not the platform; it's a killer feature in the platform, and the more platforms integrate it and couple it with the platforms we use, the more invisible it will be, and the less you, as a customer of it, will care who powers the thing as long as it's good enough.
The calculus is a bit different for developers and enterprises building platforms or using them. An end user does not care what type of database or programming language I'm using to build out my product, but as an engineer, I know how these choices can impact performance, scalability, security, and user experience.
At WWDC24, Apple reminded everyone that it's the platform and ecosystem that matter, and those ivory walls are indeed tall, and they control who gets in and who gets out.
I'm back from my excursion next week and enjoyed the much-needed R&R. If you're interested in having me speak, deliver one of my great AI-focused workshops, or need a hand from a fractional CTO/CAIO, reach out. Also, don't forget to share the newsletter if you know anyone who might find it useful. Now I'm turning off my notifications and hopping in the hammock for a nice long nap and digital detox… OK, maybe not a full detox. See you next week.
p.S. So apparently, Elon Musk is pissed that OpenAI is getting integrated into Apple's products and deeply misunderstood how. He went on a tirade saying Apple didn't or couldn't make its own LLMs (incorrect) and implied that the on-device training uses OpenAI (also fully false).
Others have repeatedly tried to correct his very wrong statements – but crazier, he's now suggesting a total ban on any Apple products at all the businesses he owns/operates and suggested employees and visitors need to check their Apple products at the door. I can't make this stuff up…
How Apple's Software Engineering Teams Manage And Test New Operating System Features Ahead Of Launch
Livability is an internal app used by Apple engineers to manage new features
Internally, Apple engineers rely on a dedicated app to view, manage, and toggle in-development features and user interface elements within pre-release versions of new operating systems. Here's what the app is called and what it can do.
An essential internal-use application known as Livability lets the company's software engineers keep track of individual operating system features and test devices as a whole. It can be found in InternalUI builds of iOS, a specialized variant of the iPhone's operating system that's used internally for software development.
The application itself is a core component of Apple's pre-release operating systems. With Livability, Apple's software development and engineering teams can enable, disable, and debug upcoming features to make sure they are fully functional before their inevitable release to the general public.
Speaking to people familiar with the matter, AppleInsider has received information about the core functionality of the Livability application, as well as the specific options and settings the app contains.
Settings and features available within the Livability app
Livability provides Apple employees with the following information and settings related to development devices:
Device information and settings within Livability
The Livability app contains an overview of essential information and options for development devices. Through the app, its users can see the serial numbers, codenames, hardware models, and marketing names of development devices, among other things.
The application also contains information about device fusing — a key hardware characteristic of all Apple devices. The devices Apple sells to its customers are "production-fused," meaning that they have significant hardware-level security measures in place, preventing the device from running certain types of code.
"Development-fused" devices are the exact opposite of this. Pre-PVT type prototype units, such as EVT or DVT devices are in most cases development-fused, meaning it is possible to use the JTAG testing standard through specialized cables.
Apple uses both development-fused and production-fused devices to test different things, which is why Livability has an indicator for this key hardware characteristic.
The application also allows employees to specify whether or not their device is a so-called "carry" device, a daily driver, in other words. According to people familiar with the application, this information is primarily of use to Apple's engineering teams.
In addition to this, Livability features options to set custom boot arguments for the operating system kernel. With this feature, the user can force the device to boot into verbose mode or a special diagnostics menu, among other things.
Livability's feature management system
Livability provides Apple's software development teams with a comprehensive overview of all features available on the operating system currently installed. The application displays and organizes feature flags — which are toggles that can be used to disable or enable software features.
Feature flags are organized primarily by date. In speaking to people familiar with the development of Apple's latest operating systems, we have learned that feature flags are sorted into the following categories for each year:
These categories indicate the intended release date for new operating system features. Apple generally releases updates for its latest operating systems throughout the year, and such updates often introduce new features that were announced or previewed at an earlier point in time.
Apple's internal-use operating systems can have features, or early code for features, that are scheduled for release years into the future. The same operating system could have feature flags meant for release during WWDC 2024 and WWDC 2026, for instance.
Within these time-based categories, feature flags are further divided according to the app or aspect of the operating system they affect. This means that within WWDC 2024, for instance, employees would see categories such as Notes, Music, Spotlight Search, and so on.
Individual operating system features, or features part of a larger initiative, are often developed under codenames known only to select Apple employees. While some codenames can present a vague indication of the feature's overall goal, the exact purpose of codenamed features cannot be discerned without people who have direct knowledge of the matter.
Greymatter, a reference to a type of tissue within the human brain, was the codename for Apple Intelligence. Apple's new universal calculator app was codenamed GreyParrot — a nod to the African Gray species of parrot, known for its high intelligence compared to other bird species.
Features are also classified according to their current development status, which changes as time moves on. There are four categories that indicate the degree of completion:
Within Livability, it's possible to activate all features with a specific development status through a dedicated subscription setting. We were told that Apple employees could use this to, for example, activate all features marked "Under Development."
The application will display different warnings depending on the category selected. These warnings serve to inform the users of the potential effects a new feature may have on their machine.
Generally, features other than those marked "Feature Complete" have not been fully tested and may be incomplete in some way. Features labeled "Under Development" could cause devices or specific applications to behave in unexpected ways.
Practically, this means that in-development features may prevent system applications or UI elements from working properly, causing them to crash upon launch. Alternatively, visual glitches such as misplaced text, images, or toggles can also sometimes occur.
What is Livability used for?
Livabillty's feature flag viewer is of use in situations where debugging is necessary. If a new feature causes major issues, Apple's engineers can disable it until it has been fixed, then activate it later on to confirm its functionality.
With the app, Apple's employees can disable so-called sensitive UI elements so that they are not accidentally exposed to unauthorized individuals. An example of this use case was seen in a pop-up message uncovered by users of social media platform X in June of 2024.
At WWDC 2024, Apple previewed a new user interface for Apple Intelligence and Siri but kept the UI disabled in the initial developer beta of iOS 18 released on June 10. Users quickly found a way to activate it, however, which is how the pop-up message was accidentally discovered.
The message warned employees that sensitive UI and sounds were enabled and that they were not to be used within 50 feet of undisclosed individuals. Instructions on how to disable the sensitive UI elements were also included in the message.
As mentioned earlier, the application also lets users install software updates and create backups, manage VPN settings, and much more. This makes Livability an all-around device management application for Apple's software teams.
The information we acquired about the Livability app provides useful insights into Apple's development process, how software teams manage and organize new features, and how they keep track of development units.
Apple, Softrax, And More Offer Essential Tools And Software To Scale Small Businesses
By Aaron Lee
In 2023, the US witnessed a surge in entrepreneurial activity, with a record 5.5 million new business applications filed.
This trend highlights the growing momentum of small business creation, notably driven by women and minority entrepreneurs. According to a survey by payroll firm Gusto, women represented 49% of new business owners, and African-American and Hispanic entrepreneurs accounted for 6% and 13% of new business applications, respectively. As more Americans pursue their entrepreneurial dreams, the need for efficient tools and software to manage and scale these new enterprises has never been more critical.
In response, technology companies like Apple and SOFTRAX are offering innovative solutions tailored to help small businesses scale efficiently. Below, we'll explore these tools and examine how they can benefit small businesses' bottom lines, ultimately helping them flourish.
Apple's device management serviceAn article from Forbes notes that over the past 12 months, 71% of small business owners have digitally optimized their business to streamline operations. To meet growing demand in this area, Apple introduced a comprehensive service called Apple Business Essentials that caters to the needs of small businesses. This all-in-one subscription combines device management, 24/7 support, and cloud storage into a single package.
Apple Business Essentials simplifies the setup and management of Apple devices used in a small business. It includes an intuitive app that allows business owners to manage employee devices, deploy settings and apps, and ensure security policies are enforced. This is particularly beneficial for small businesses that lack dedicated IT staff, as it reduces the complexity of managing multiple devices. Moreover, the inclusion of 24/7 tech support ensures that any device issue can be resolved swiftly, minimizing the costs associated with repairs and resulting downtime.
SOFTRAX's revenue management softwareBank of America's 2024 Business Owner Report reveals that while 65% of small business owners expect their revenues to grow this year, 84% still say that inflation is impacting their businesses. Due to inflation, 40% of small businesses have reevaluated cash flow and spending. To help with this, business owners can turn to SOFTRAX's consumption billing software, which addresses several common challenges, including complex billing structures, revenue recognition, and compliance with financial regulations.
SOFTRAX's software supports various billing methods, such as subscription-based, usage-based, and hybrid models. This flexibility is crucial for businesses with diverse products and services, enabling them to adapt to customer preferences and market demands without overhauling their billing systems. Additionally, as businesses grow, so does the complexity of their billing and revenue management needs. SOFTRAX's solutions are designed to scale with the business, providing support as transaction volumes increase.
Apps provide a direct channel for customer engagement, offering features like personalized promotions, loyalty programs, and easy access to services. Done well, a dedicated app can boost profits, attract new customers, and strengthen a brand. However, they are quite costly to develop and maintain, with some reports estimating that Android app development can set businesses back by as much as $20,000 on the lower end.
For small businesses, the ability to quickly develop a functional, attractive app without extensive resources is a game-changer. Enter Wix's AI-powered design tool, which is capable of building an app through simple design prompts. The chatbot-style interface allows users to generate a tailored app, complete with relevant features and design elements. Ultimately, the tool seeks to democratize app creation, enabling businesses to tap into the growing mobile market and provide a seamless digital experience for their customers.
With the optimistic outlook for small businesses, leveraging the right tools is essential for sustaining growth and competitiveness. These solutions promise to streamline complex processes, improve efficiency, and enhance customer engagement, empowering small businesses to scale and thrive.
Article provided with permission from AppleWorld.Today
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