Apple Event on the 14th; TikTok Passes YouTube in Viewing Time; Facebook Denies Report That WhatsApp NOT End-to-End Encrypted; Government Pressure Could Make Companies Support Smartphones Longer

The invite dropped this morning, as expected. Apple has announced ‘California Streaming,’ their upcoming digital event. It will be September 14th at 10 AM Pacific, emanating from Apple Park in Cupertino. According to Macrumors.com, once again there will be no members of the media on hand in person in the Steve Jobs Theater. Apple is widely expected to show off the iPhone 13 series, the Apple Watch Series 7, and maybe AirPods 3. Expected new MacBook Pros with the M series chips and new iPads will probably be revealed in another event….likely in October. 

TikTok continues to show more strength. Theverge.com reports that a new study from analytics firm App Annie shows that TikTok users spend more time watching content every month that YouTube users. As of June, that’s 24 hours of content a month, compared to YouTube’s 22 hours and 40 minutes in the US. In the UK, TikTok’ers watch 26 hours a month, compared to 16 hours for YouTube users. Worth noting: these figures only include viewership on Android phones, so YouTube could be in better shape if you were to add in iOS users. YouTube continues to be ahead in overall time spent since they have more than 2 billion users, compared to 700 million for TikTok.

A report out from ProPublica claims that WhatsApp does not have end-to-end encryption. Apparently, this is based on the fact that there are over 1,000 contract workers in Austin, TX, Dublin, and Singapore that examine ‘millions of pieces of users’ content.’ Facebook claims that only messages which are reported by WhatsApp users are forwarded to Facebook’s contract moderation team. The report also alleges that WhatsApp regularly shares unencrypted records with the US Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies. The best advice is still to consider ANYTHING you post on the internet as being public, and that nothing is un-hackable. 

The German government has now started looking at making smartphone manufacturers offer security updates and spare parts for 7 years. Right now, the EU requires this for 5 years, according to zdnet.com. iPhone’s Apple and Android makers are, of course, howling about this. The Germans also want the parts to be offered at ‘a reasonable price,’ and would make the producers publish a price list and make the parts available quickly. It should be noted that this is actually a completely reasonable demand. The US has made auto makers keep parts available for 10 years for decades now. As for the reasonable price part, with most car parts, there are enough aftermarket parts makers to keep those prices down. For the phone makers’ part….they feel that keeping batteries and screens available is enough, as those are the most failure prone items in the smartphones.