New updates for Apple’s operating systems contain security fixes and new features. But a few promised new features didn’t make it this trip. And we have a discussion about messaging on Android. Should Apple provide an iMessage app for Android?
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Voice Over 0:00
This is the Intego Mac Podcast–the voice of Mac security–for Thursday, December 14, 2023.
This week’s Intego Mac Podcast security headlines include new updates for Apple’s operating systems contain security fixes and new features. But a few promise new features didn’t make it this trip. And we have a discussion about messaging on Android. Should Apple provide an iMessage on Android app? Now, here are the hosts of the Intego Mac Podcast: veteran Mac journalist Kirk McElhearn and Intego’s Chief Security Analyst, Josh Long.
Kirk McElhearn 0:42
Good morning, Josh. How are you today?
Josh Long 0:45
I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk?
Kirk McElhearn 0:46
I’m doing just fine. Once again, we get Apple operating system updates before we have finished recording a podcast episode. Fact this week. They came out on Monday, not Apple’s normal day for releasing updates, is it?
Josh Long 1:00
No. But you know, Apple’s kind of inconsistent, right? I mean, sometimes they release the middle week, sometimes the beginning, hopefully not usually on Friday for the sake of all those system administrators who are trying to go on their weekend break. But you never know when you’re going to get Apple updates.
Kirk McElhearn 1:16
Okay, so these were not just security updates. But these were feature updates. These were the dot two versions of the operating systems. So 14.2 for Mac 17.2 for iOS and iPad, OS 10.2 for Watch, and I forget what the Apple TV was probably 17.2. Let’s start by talking about the security features.
Josh Long 1:36
First thing that we should talk about is macOS Sonoma, which got a whole bunch of updates. macOS Sonoma 14.2 got about 40 updates that are named with CVE numbers. And there’s a couple of additional recognitions. One of those is kind of funny, because apparently there was a security issue with me emoji, like what how was that a thing but, and then iOS 17.2 got not quite as many updates this time, there were 12 CVS that are listed in Apple’s patch notes for this update.
Kirk McElhearn 2:12
But it wasn’t just macOS Sonoma, they updated n-minus-one and n-minus-two this time. In other words, the previous and the previous versions of MacOS.
Josh Long 2:22
Right. macOS Ventura and macOS Monterey both got patches. Not everything was patched that was patched in Sonoma, as always. And iOS 16 also got some updates as well. And once again, not as many as iOS 17.
Kirk McElhearn 2:37
OK. So new features. I haven’t actually seen all of these, but Messages has a catch-up arrow that lets you easily jump to your first unread message. Haven’t noticed it. Enhance Autofill identifies fields in PDF. This is something that Apple previewed which is really useful. It’s actually more useful, I think, on the iPad, than on the Mac, because on the Mac, it’s been a lot more efficient. An update to the Weather app that I really like and I’ve seen on my iPhone, I haven’t checked on my Mac yet. It’s now a wind map. So you can see the little arrows animating showing the directions of the wind, it’s really mesmerizing. Just stare at it, especially because it’s been really windy where I live, they talk about multiple timers that let you run several timers simultaneously and create a name for each timer. Now, I’m very happy to have the multiple timers which came in with the current operating system. And I’ll be in the kitchen and I want to set a timer for one thing, cooking pasta. And for another thing cooking tomato sauce. And before you only have one timer. So I use an app called MultiTimer on my iPhone and my Watch. Now I can just tell my Watch, set a timer for 10 minutes, set a timer for 30 minutes. And they just run and I kind of know which one ends first, but I don’t think I can name them on the Watch. So the biggest feature on iOS is the Journal app. Now the Journal app is an app for journaling where you want to record things you’ve done, people you’ve seen, movies you’ve seen, books you’ve read, etc. There have been lots of apps like this. And the best known is called Day One which was bought out a year or two ago by Automatic the company who owns WordPress. And Day One was basically it would give you a blank slate on every day and you would fill it in. The difference with Apple’s Journal app is it will give you a prompt based on a movie that you’ve Watched, the TV episode that you’ve Watched on Apple TV, music you’ve listened to an Apple Music, people you’ve chatted with in Messages or on phone calls. So it gives you some context to write about. It also gives you, I want to say, journaling prompt because apparently journaling can be very good for your mental health if you do it regularly. This was one of the main reasons that Apple brought this in. And so here are the three prompts that I see today. I think everyone sees different prompts at different times. I don’t know whether it’s random. “Write about something great in your life that you don’t always think about.” “Write about a song you love. Record yourself Singing the first few lines if you like.” So you can record a Voice Memo. “Have you changed any of your beliefs recently? What happened?” So these are actually kind of interesting questions to prompt you to—introspect isn’t a verb but to think about yourself. I think the only people who are going to use this or people who are already used to journaling, and have that habit, you can send a notification. So the Journal app reminds you at the same time every day to add something to your journal, and you might want to do that. What about you, Josh? Do you think you’re gonna start journaling on your iPhone? It’s okay to say no,
Josh Long 5:36
I’ll give it I’ll give it a try. I mean, I’m not one to do this on a regular basis. But I kind of feel like I should be writing these things down a little bit more often. The only problem that I have with this is I don’t really necessarily have anything super notable or exciting that’s going on on an everyday basis, like, oh, my gosh, like, I got a phone call from my mother. Wow, like, for my like, it’s not that exciting to write about.
Kirk McElhearn 6:04
I don’t know, you’ve got a family with three kids at home, I don’t have any kids at home. So there’s always things happening. And maybe you’re going to sporting events that your kids are involved in, or you’re playing Fortnight with your son or something like that, maybe just want to write down something to remind you. One of the problems I see in the Journal app is you can’t search for anything. Now in Day One, you could you can export anything. So it’s kind of you can only go back through the timeline and look at what’s there. I kind of expect Apple to, you know, add some features like that going forward, if they see how people use the app.
Josh Long 6:38
Yeah, in fact, that inability to export anything, at least for the time being that is a bit concerning for me, because my view of journaling is if you’re going to take the time to do this and invest all this time and journaling about your life. You want to make sure that you’re getting that in a format that’s portable. So if at some point in the future, Apple decides that it’s not going to update the Journal app anymore, will you want to take that somewhere else? And still have that preserved for posterity? Right. That’s one of the main reasons for journaling. And you know, I think Apple’s use cases, they assume you’re going to be more using this for your own self reflection. But then you also need that search feature that’s not there yet, if you want to go back in time and find something easily.
Kirk McElhearn 7:24
Well, what if you’re in psychotherapy, and you want to write down your dreams, and then to be able to export them to send to your psychotherapist, what you can do screenshot it. So there are a lot of considerations. I mean, it is one way and I think you can copy text and maybe send it another way. But it is one thing to think about. So on the one hand, it’s extremely private, it’s only on your iPhone, and there’s no iPad app, and there’s no Mac app, which may or may not be a problem. But on the other hand, that privacy limits what you can do with it. For example, a few years ago, I started keeping a list of all the books I read, because I was curious how many books I read in the year, spoiler overbought, and I did this in obsidian, which is an app I use to store notes. And it’s very easy to you know, add something to it. If I were to do it in the Journal app. Today, I finished this book, I wouldn’t be able to export, say all the journal entries with the tag books or something like that, which I might want to do to collate them, or movies I’ve seen or games, I’ve played things like that. So it seems a bit limiting to me that you’re able to enter all this personal information, but you’re not able to do anything with it afterwards.
Josh Long 8:31
And that’s something that I think Apple has to address because people who use Journal apps want that feature. And so I think they’re gonna put a lot of pressure on Apple to add things like that.
Kirk McElhearn 8:42
You know what you can do? You can buy a notebook and a pencil, you could do that. Yeah, you won’t be able to record the lines of your favorite song or, you know, add photos that you’ve taken on the day. But it’s true that that’s a more or you could use Apple’s Notes app or any kind of app like that. You can password protect Notes. So they’re encrypted. There’s plenty of notes apps, you can do it with any one. People who are regular “journalers” probably already have a process that they follow. The question is whether this will actually incite a lot of people to take up the habit of journaling. So along with these new features we just talked about, there were some delayed features. There were two features that were supposed to be released. By the end of the year. One of them was AirPlay in hotels, I don’t remember how Apple presented it but you will be able to easily connect to a TV that supports AirPlay to and streaming movie from your iPhone, something like that. Right? So let’s say you’ve got an Apple TV subscription, and you don’t want to pay the exorbitant price for Watching a movie in a hotel. You can just stream the latest episode of Sawhorses or For All Mankind or whatever in the hotel. So that’s been delayed, I think till next year. The other one is collaborative playlists in Music. So the idea here is that you would create a playlist and send a link to friends and family to have them add to the playlist. I suspect the reason it was delayed is because that they were worried about people being able to find the links and then spam people by putting, you know, songs that they want to get money for, because they’re played, or maybe raunchy songs that didn’t fit or, you know, Alvin and the Chipmunks Greatest Hits that type of thing into the playlist. I think it’s more of a security feature than an actual usability reason for this to be delayed.
Josh Long 10:26
And that’s an interesting thought, because, of course, you can choose who you want to collaborate on these playlists, hopefully, you trust the people you’re sharing these playlists with, if you want them to be able to contribute to them.
Kirk McElhearn 10:38
Yeah, but if there was a possibility that someone could figure out a link, or I’m not really sure how it works, because I think you actually publish them on Apple Music. So it seems like a complicated thing. On the one hand, you’re publishing it. On the other hand, you have to choose who gets access, we’ll find out. I know, it’s in the current betas that have just been released for the dot three versions. And maybe I’ll install one of those betas and look at it before next week. One really good feature on the Apple Watch, and I really missed when WatchOS 10 came out, the ability to swipe to change Watch faces. Now, I’ve never been a fan of a Watch face with a whole bunch of Complications. So I basically had two Watch faces, an analog face with no Complications. And then I would swipe to a digital face with a whole bunch of Complications. So when I needed to see the temperature, or start a workout, or that sort of thing, I would just switch faces, and they change the process in WatchOS 10. And a lot of people complain, it’s a little bit complicated to turn this on, you go to Settings / Clock on the Watch, and you have a little toggle that you put on. We have an article on the Intego Mac Security blog with a screenshot, if you want to figure out how to do this. Josh, do you change your Watch faces? Or do you use the same digital Watch face that I’ve seen on camera several times?
Josh Long 11:52
No, I pretty much stick to one Watch face and I have set up other Watch faces. But I always forget to switch to him. And I don’t know I’m happy with the my standard Watch face.
Kirk McElhearn 12:04
See, for me, I just looked at my Watch. And I see the time. That’s all I see. I’m not distracted by numbers and arrows and wines and stuff like that. But I know previously. And of course now with the 10.2 update, I could always swipe to see all the complications of the information like the temperature and weather conditions. And now playing that you know, all those sorts of things. When they added the widgets that you get when you turn the digital crown, I find those a bit clunky, I’d rather just swipe Watch faces, it’s a lot simpler. Speaking of delayed features, Apple’s CarPlay site still says vehicle announcements coming in late 2023 for this new expanded CarPlay that’s specific to bigger displays in cars. And it was going to be like a custom CarPlay for each car manufacturer, except for GM is getting rid of CarPlay and Android Auto.
Josh Long 12:53
This was actually first teased in June 2022 at WWDC, so that this was kind of like the “One More Thing” they were showing off the next generation of CarPlay. And they show this amazing looking dashboard where the you’ve got all these instruments, which are now widgets, that indicate things like your speed, and RPMs. And of course, you’ve got all the other cool CarPlay features. And it’s this dash that goes all the way across the front of your car and a that hasn’t materialized yet. And they’ve still got a picture of it. If you go to apple.com/car play to this day, they still have that beautiful shot. And there’s no cars that have this yet. And they still say vehicle announcements coming in late 2023.
Kirk McElhearn 13:39
Well, I think one of the reasons why is there needs to be a display where the current instrument panel is a proper display, like you know, a computer display, because one of the images that they show and I would really like this is that the maps when you’re getting directions are in front of you instead err on the side of you. And that’s really practical. RPM, I guess I could take that off. I have an electric car, so you don’t care what the RPM is. But you do want to see the battery level, right? You want to see things like that. What’s interesting is this will be highly customizable per car. And depending on what you want to see, do you want to see the weather? Do you want to see you know, directions, that sort of thing. In any case, it’s probably the longest time between Apple announcing a feature and its actual implementation that I can remember, this is a year and a half already.
Josh Long 14:29
Well, unless this becomes vaporware. And, you know, that’s a possibility to is that maybe this never materializes. But because Apple still has it on their site, I kind of suspect that they’re going to update that date and say coming in early 2024. Something pretty soon
Kirk McElhearn 14:45
Coming in 2024 coming in 2024, not “early”, because if they’re waiting for car manufacturers to build cars with the display, where the instrument panel is on the dashboard, that’s that’s probably what’s slowing it up.
Josh Long 14:57
And that’s a good point because usually The car manufacturers will release their new models toward the end of the year. So yeah, maybe we’re looking at in 2024.
Kirk McElhearn 15:07
Okay, we’re gonna take a break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about iMessage on Android and how it’s turned into a fiasco.
Voice Over 15:16
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Kirk McElhearn 16:32
I got an interesting email today I managed a website for someone. And I got an email saying that I was using photos that belonged to the person sending me the email was fraudulent. And they were going to issue a DMCA takedown and I was stealing their work. But if I want to settle for $500 in Bitcoin, then they leave me alone. Now this is not a very big website, I know the provenance of all the images. And I know that this was not the case. But I had to stop and think about it and look into it. This reminds me of those emails had been going around for a few years, I hacked into your camera, and I’ve got films of you watching porn, and I’ll send them to all your contacts and all that. This is actually clever because it went through the contact form on the website, it wasn’t a random email, it mentioned the name of the website and a URL. And if you run a website, and you’re not sure about the images, this is going to make you think. One of the things that was surprising is that the language was so well written. Most scam emails, they’re sort of not too grammatically correct. But of course, now you can use AI tools to either write the emails or check the grammar. I find it really creative. And I find it really disturbing because there are people who have websites who maybe do steal images and figure oh, now I’m in trouble. So I got to pay this person $500 in Bitcoin. Of course, they have to figure out how to pay someone in Bitcoin. It’s not like you just go to “Bitcoin Pal” and put in an address and send them the money.
Josh Long 17:56
Yeah, that’s a good point. And you’re right about using AI tools. If you were to prompt ChatGPT, for example, and say, “somebody has stolen content from me and is has published it on their website, can you write me an email that I could use”, it’ll do that for you. Because it doesn’t sound like you’re trying to be a scammer, it sounds like you’re actually genuinely looking to contact somebody for legitimate reason. It’ll give you perfect output. And then you can of course, just tell it, translate that into Spanish or Portuguese or French or whatever language you want, depending on the website that is your target. So you can certainly use AI tools and get perfect grammar in multiple languages and potentially get a payout if you find somebody who’s gullible enough to fall for this. And somebody who runs a website, you know, might be willing to do that, if they’re concerned if they don’t know the origin of all their images. And maybe they’ve got a ton of images, and it’s too complicated to go through them all. For a fairly good sized organization, or maybe even an individual, they might feel like 500 bucks, it’s not that much money, I guess I’ll do it.
Kirk McElhearn 19:01
The real tell was at the end where the person said, “Please note that I’ve also sent out a hard copy of this correspondence to your office.” There is no physical address on the website, so they didn’t send a hardcopy of anything. But kudos to them for, you know, trying something original. Of course, I think we’re going to see this scam a lot, but only to people who are on websites. It won’t be coming out to people at random. This is a WordPress website. Maybe they have a way of finding WordPress websites that have contact forms and automating the process because I know this contact form spam on WordPress and it has been for a long time. Quickly, before we get into Android and iMessage, we want to talk about how Facebook’s messenger is finally getting end to end encryption by default soon, maybe sort of, right?
Josh Long 19:46
Yeah, there is an article on The Verge that we’ll link to in the show notes that talks about how this is starting to roll out. It’s not by default yet, but their goal is that once this capability rolls out to everybody, that it will become a by-default feature to have end to end encryption for all your Facebook Messenger messages. I guess this is an interesting thing because Meta is not well known for privacy, obviously Meta being the Facebook company owner, which also owns WhatsApp, by the way. And so you know, WhatsApp does have end to end encryption messaging, the same protocol that’s found in the Signal messenger app. So it’s not such a big leap for Meta to also add this into Facebook Messenger. Now, some governments are already up in arms over this whole thing, because they’re there. They say, No, we need to be able to see all communications. And this is yet another platform that’s going to evil end to end encryption messaging, because now, of course, that’s going to enable child pornographers. And it’s like, well, you guys do realize that, like every other platform has been to an encrypted messaging now, right. But that’s the whole thing. Of course, they want to ban into an encryption so that all messages can be seen by any government at anytime with just a simple request.
Kirk McElhearn 21:07
Yep, as usual. So we want to talk about iMessages on Android. Last week, we talked about this app called Beeper Mini, which allowed you to register your phone number for the iMessage service and send and receive messages. I tried it on my Google phone and it didn’t work. I don’t know why. I emailed the company. And they never replied to me. Now, I hadn’t started paying for the app, I was still on the seven day free trial. But they didn’t provide very good customer support. I think I’ll give ’em a one star on the Google Play Store. Anyway, Apple shut down Beeper Mini’s iMessage for Android, and they said that they will continue to do so in order to protect users.
Josh Long 21:43
Now that’s interesting. I guess the thing is that one could look at it as Beeper has done something to sort of compromise the security of the iMessage system, because they found a workaround, right, they say pretty openly that they reverse engineered iMessage. And that’s how they were able to get be permitted to work on-device without having to go through a proxy service that’s, you know, basically a Mac logging into the iMessage service and then forwarding messages to your Android phone. So Beeper Mini was doing this in a totally on-device way. And of course, Apple said, “Well, wait a minute, hold on, that’s not approved. And because you reverse engineered how our process works, we need to shut that down, because that’s a security vulnerability.” But is it? Is that exactly a security vulnerability? I mean, we don’t know a whole bunch of details about how the permitting was working. But it sounds like that’s the approach that Apple is taking. And of course, of course, they want to take that approach, because otherwise they’re going to, you know, successfully get sued for antitrust violations and things like that.
Kirk McElhearn 22:52
So we had a discussion before we started recording about what if Apple did release an iMessage app for Android. Now, iMessage is free for Apple users. And it has a cost there are servers and there were, I don’t know, hundreds of millions or maybe a billion Apple users who use iMessage and add another billion if you add I missed for Android. So let’s say they made an app and it was 299 a month, I think a lot of Android users might want to have the features of iMessage for that price. And there are a lot of advantages to Apple doing this. That would be goodwill, they’re saying, Okay, we are interoperable goodwill, in the sense of staving off these antitrust suit from the EU, we want to be interoperable. So we’re giving you this option. They could talk about how, you know Apple is all about privacy and your messages are end to end encrypted. Of course, you said earlier WhatsApp is owned by Mehta and Facebook Messenger is getting end to end encryption soon. It’s interesting when you think about rolling out end to end encryption. If only half the people have it on and have people have it often it’s not really end to end, if someone from one half messages someone for the other half. So everyone has to have this feature enabled. But it could be an interesting way for Apple to maybe get people to buy more apple services. So you can use Apple Music on Android is no reason why they can’t make an Apple TV app. Apple’s future is in services, not in hardware.
Josh Long 24:18
Well, right. You’ve been saying that for a long time. And Apple does make a lot of money off of services. However, I do feel like that hardware really locks people into the ecosystem, a lot more than you know, just having services, right? Because if you just have the service, then you can decide to switch services at any time. But if you’re locked in to the hardware that kind of keeps you in that Apple ecosystem, because all those services are so well integrated with the Apple hardware. So here’s the thing. I think the reason why first of all the reason why we don’t have iMessage for Android right now is because Apple really wants people to be buying Apple hardware. It guarantees lock into all these other Apple services. It gives them you know, the recurring revenue of every time they buy a new iPhone or other new Apple product. It gives them recurring revenue from Apple services that people are paying for like the upgraded versions of iCloud services and things like that, as well as any purchases in the App Store in app purchases, subscriptions. I mean, these are all things that make money and a significant amount of money for Apple. So if Apple were to create an iMessage, for Android app and charge some amount of money for it, they would have to charge kind of a lot of money to actually be making roughly as much as they would be if those people were just buying an iPhone instead. And so I think Apple still really wants people to make the decision to buy an iPhone. And that’s why we don’t have iMessage for Android yet. Now, someday Apple might do that. I don’t think that Apple is going to make that leap until some government says you’re going to be banned from our country, or in the EU case, many countries, unless you have an iMessage app for Android.
Kirk McElhearn 26:21
I think the universe is trending toward interoperability. And it’s just a question of how long it takes to reach that station, that we’ve achieved interoperability in some areas, but not in others. And it seems like messaging is the one that’s making the most noise now, which if it’s just about green and blue bubbles, I mean, seriously, get a life. But there’s more than that, because messaging is a very important feature, probably more than phone calls are now in particular, because of the fact that it’s encrypted with good services or end to end encrypted. So you can send confidential information. The question is, if we get to that point, that Apple can, I mean, they could put the Apple TV app on Android phones and make money renting films and selling movies, they wouldn’t have their own app store. But they could get money from Apple Music. I mean, if they didn’t have Apple Music already on Android, you would say, well, there’s no services on Android. But they do and they’ve got iCloud for Windows. And they are kind of slowly opening up. And I agree that Apple doesn’t want to do that. They want the platform lock in for as long as possible. I think it’s inevitable. And it’s more a question of how does Apple manage this rather than how does Apple prevent it? Because governments and you know, things like the groups like the EU will start imposing this soon.
Josh Long 27:41
By the way, Apple actually does have an Apple TV app for Android.
Kirk McElhearn 27:46
Really? (Yeah.) I looked for it earlier I didn’t see it.
Josh Long 27:49
Well, it maybe it’s not rolled out worldwide. And maybe that’s why I’m seeing it in the US store. So they’ve got Apple Music, they’ve got a move to iOS app, like the idea behind that. They’ve got tracker detect, which helps Android users find air tags, they’ve got a beats app, they’ve got the Apple music, classical app. This is actually interesting. I’m gonna have to look into this later.
Kirk McElhearn 28:12
But I think that these apps are to be installed on TVs running the TV version of Android. If you recall, they first rolled these out to LG TVs a few years ago. And if you say this is Sony version, then that means it’s specific to Sony TVs. I don’t think that this is available for Android tablets and phones.
Josh Long 28:32
It looks like it because it because they’ve got two buttons, like you can see reviews for phone and for TV.
Kirk McElhearn 28:38
Okay, well, I didn’t know that. And that would be a way that Apple does get some services income out of there. They also have a beats app for Beats headphones, that there are some features that you can tweak with the beats app. Anyway, Beeper Mini is temporarily dead and you can log in with your Apple ID and I’m not sure how it works. If that’s still the old method of going through a proxy. Don’t ever do that because your Apple ID is too valuable. If anyone gets a hold of that you can lose everything. Okay, that’s enough for this week. Until next week, Josh, stay secure.
Josh Long 29:09
All right, stay secure.
Voice Over 29:12
Thanks for listening to the Intego Mac Podcast—the voice of Mac security—with your hosts, Kirk McElhearn, and Josh Long. To get every weekly episode, be sure to follow us on Apple podcasts, or subscribe in your favorite podcast app. And, if you can, leave a rating, a like or review. Links to topics and information mentioned in the podcast can be found in the show notes for the episode at podcast.intego.com. The Intego website is also where to find details on the full line of Intego security and utility software: intego.com.
