Apple initially added a new flashlight UI in iOS 18’s third developer beta, and with iOS 18 now available in public beta, you can try one of the most underrated additions to your iPhone right now.
The company had already introduced a new way to control True Tone Flashlights on iPhone 14 Pro and 15 Pro models. Unlike the previous controls of on/off and four levels of brightness, the new controls include variable brightness and a way to adjust the width of the beam. The controls in the first beta just had vertical and horizontal lines to represent them, and it took users a second to get accustomed to it.
However, with the iOS 18 developer beta 3, Apple has made the feature and design more amiable and simpler to use. The new design has a curved line to indicate both width of the beam and brightness. The UI also shows a dotted curved lineup top to indicate the peak intensity mark.
This is not a massive change, but it just makes for a fun design shift. As an added bonus, it also makes the flashlight more useful.
The third developer beta brings another design change, automatically converting third-party apps’ icons to a dark shade. Previously, only Apple’s native apps had new dark-tinted icons.
What’s more, the company has added a new dynamic wallpaper that changes colors based on the time of the day.
This story was originally published July 9 and was updated to include information about the iOS 18 public beta.
Apple initially added a new flashlight UI in iOS 18’s third developer beta, and with iOS 18 now available in public beta, you can try one of the most underrated additions to your iPhone right now.
The company had already introduced a new way to control True Tone Flashlights on iPhone 14 Pro and 15 Pro models. Unlike the previous controls of on/off and four levels of brightness, the new controls include variable brightness and a way to adjust the width of the beam. The controls in the first beta just had vertical and horizontal lines to represent them, and it took users a second to get accustomed to it.
Holy shit! You can change light focus on Flashlight in iOS 18! Dynamic Island looks amazing #iOS18 pic.twitter.com/T1M1Xejg6Q
— Willydoo (@wilson_boi_101) June 10, 2024
However, with the iOS 18 developer beta 3, Apple has made the feature and design more amiable and simpler to use. The new design has a curved line to indicate both width of the beam and brightness. The UI also shows a dotted curved lineup top to indicate the peak intensity mark.
OK this new flashlight UI in iOS 18 beta 3 has absolutely no right to go this hard. Too cool pic.twitter.com/vIyaiBYyHp
— Sebastiaan de With (@sdw) July 8, 2024
This is not a massive change, but it just makes for a fun design shift. As an added bonus, it also makes the flashlight more useful.
The third developer beta brings another design change, automatically converting third-party apps’ icons to a dark shade. Previously, only Apple’s native apps had new dark-tinted icons.
Image Credit: Screenshot by TechCrunchImage Credits: TechCrunch (screenshot)
What’s more, the company has added a new dynamic wallpaper that changes colors based on the time of the day.
This story was originally published July 9 and was updated to include information about the iOS 18 public beta.
Apple released the third developer beta version of iOS 18 on Monday. While there are no major new features like Apple Intelligence in this update, there are some neat design changes. But the new UI for the flashlight takes the cake.
The company had already introduced a new way to control True Tone Flashlights on Pro iPhone 14 and 15 models. Unlike the previous controls of on/off and four levels of brightness, the new controls included variable brightness and a way to adjust the width of the beam. The controls in the first beta just had vertical and horizontal lines to represent them, and it took users a second to get accustomed to it.
Holy shit! You can change light focus on Flashlight in iOS 18! Dynamic Island looks amazing #iOS18 pic.twitter.com/T1M1Xejg6Q
— Willydoo (@wilson_boi_101) June 10, 2024
However, with the iOS 18 developer beta 3, Apple has made the feature and design more amiable and simpler to use. The new design has a curved line to indicate both width of the beam and brightness. The UI also shows a dotted curved lineup top to indicate the peak intensity mark.
OK this new flashlight UI in iOS 18 beta 3 has absolutely no right to go this hard. Too cool pic.twitter.com/vIyaiBYyHp
— Sebastiaan de With (@sdw) July 8, 2024
This is not a massive change, but it just makes for a fun design shift. As an added bonus, it also makes the flashlight more useful.
The third developer beta brings another design change, automatically converting third-party apps’ icons to a dark shade. Previously, only Apple’s native apps had new dark-tinted icons.
Image Credit: Screenshot by TechCrunch
What’s more, the company has added a new dynamic wallpaper that changes colors based on the time of the day.
Most tech startups are born from a few early engineers building the company’s initial product. As those first builders work together, they begin to establish a developer culture — sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.
At Web Summit in Lisbon in November, two founders discussed the importance of building a developer culture that’s distinct from a company’s overall culture.
According to Shensi Ding, co-founder and CEO at Merge, a unified API startup, early developer ethos is particularly important inside tech startups, where engineers ultimately control how the product gets built and what gets prioritized. She says her co-founder, CTO Gil Feig, worked to set a positive tone from the start that empowered the team.
“He really instilled in us early on that engineers can, from the very beginning, decide that we can do anything. It just depends on how much time you want to allocate to [a particular task]. And we really wanted to instill that in the developer culture early on,” she said.
Ludmila Pontremolez, CTO and co-founder at Zippi, a Brazilian fintech startup, spent time as an engineer at Square prior to launching Zippi. She wanted to build a team-focused atmosphere: Regardless of who wrote the code, everyone is responsible for it. “Every mistake everyone makes is everyone’s responsibility,” she said. “When there’s something broken in production, Sunday at 1 a.m., it’s probably not the person who wrote the code that’s going to fix it, but whoever is in charge of looking after the servers at the time.”
“So we instill a lot of that communal thinking and how we’re writing code for everyone on the team. It’s not just about whether you should be building something faster. It is about what’s the legacy you’re leaving behind.”
Chronic technical debt could be holding your company back
Ding said that as she and Feig were engineers prior to building Merge, they wanted to create an atmosphere at their company where it was encouraged to take individual initiative and where all engineers owned the product collectively. “Early on, one thing that we really tried to do was lead by example. . . . We would set expectations, like you can just make these decisions for us. And we would also talk a lot about what the impact of what they were doing was because we really wanted to set that foundation early on that they weren’t going to be just task receivers and doers. They were going to be an integral part of the company,” she said.
A big piece of creating that culture is making sure that the group is diverse, and the earlier that can happen the better. Ding said, especially as a woman, that she wanted to deliberately create a tolerant and accepting environment.
“I’ve definitely been in companies where as a young woman, you’ll say something and you feel like people think you’re stupid or they don’t respect what you’re saying,” she said. “And I really want to make sure that everyone in the company is creating a great environment for young women [and others] to feel comfortable saying whatever they want.”
When hiring, it’s important to source and recruit diverse candidates, but that in itself isn’t enough, Ding said. “You can’t bring people in and expect them to change the environment. You have to have a great environment for them in the first place,” she said.
As a startup grows, and other areas of the business begin to take shape, the engineering team becomes a more distinct group, and as such has to define its own culture within the broader organization. Part of that is building their own ways to drive more efficient work.
Whatever workflows are put in place, adjustments will have to be made continually as the group grows. “I don’t know if I have a perfect answer for [finding a single way of working]. I’m sure [our processes] break all the time,” she said. So they keep trying new ways of working, knowing that at some point, it’s going to need to be adjusted again. “I think it’s really hard for companies to find a [single] process that will scale with them over time.”
Pontremolez says that her company recently wrote down its development values and what it believes in a software engineering manifesto to help new engineers understand how they fit in when they come on board. But she says that at their stage she doesn’t necessarily want to put hard and fast rules in place. “I think the toughest part about grading processes is separating individuals doing things that are not what you desire and not turning those episodes into rules that apply to everyone.”
For example, she said that if someone doesn’t properly deploy code, you don’t want to necessarily make a rule that developers can no longer deploy independently, something she would consider an overreaction to a single incident. It’s important to balance the needs of the overall company, especially at an early-stage startup, with whatever rules and processes you put in place.
But Pontremolez says that as you add more people, it’s important to help them “connect the dots” between engineering and what the startup is trying to accomplish, so they understand how their contributions fit into the overall goals of the organization.
What’s clear is that building a developer culture doesn’t ever really end. As the company grows and moves through different stages, the developer group will have to adjust to each new reality, and the founders or other management will have to help facilitate that.
Most tech startups are born from a few early engineers building the company’s initial product. As those first builders work together, they begin to establish a developer culture — sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.
At Web Summit in Lisbon in November, two founders discussed the importance of building a developer culture that’s distinct from a company’s overall culture.
According to Shensi Ding, co-founder and CEO at Merge, a unified API startup, early developer ethos is particularly important inside tech startups, where engineers ultimately control how the product gets built and what gets prioritized. She says her co-founder, CTO Gil Feig, worked to set a positive tone from the start that empowered the team.
“He really instilled in us early on that engineers can, from the very beginning, decide that we can do anything. It just depends on how much time you want to allocate to [a particular task]. And we really wanted to instill that in the developer culture early on,” she said.
Ludmila Pontremolez, CTO and co-founder at Zippi, a Brazilian fintech startup, spent time as an engineer at Square prior to launching Zippi. She wanted to build a team-focused atmosphere: Regardless of who wrote the code, everyone is responsible for it. “Every mistake everyone makes is everyone’s responsibility,” she said. “When there’s something broken in production, Sunday at 1 a.m., it’s probably not the person who wrote the code that’s going to fix it, but whoever is in charge of looking after the servers at the time.”
“So we instill a lot of that communal thinking and how we’re writing code for everyone on the team. It’s not just about whether you should be building something faster. It is about what’s the legacy you’re leaving behind.”
Chronic technical debt could be holding your company back
Ding said that as she and Feig were engineers prior to building Merge, they wanted to create an atmosphere at their company where it was encouraged to take individual initiative and where all engineers owned the product collectively. “Early on, one thing that we really tried to do was lead by example. . . . We would set expectations, like you can just make these decisions for us. And we would also talk a lot about what the impact of what they were doing was because we really wanted to set that foundation early on that they weren’t going to be just task receivers and doers. They were going to be an integral part of the company,” she said.
A big piece of creating that culture is making sure that the group is diverse, and the earlier that can happen the better. Ding said, especially as a woman, that she wanted to deliberately create a tolerant and accepting environment.
“I’ve definitely been in companies where as a young woman, you’ll say something and you feel like people think you’re stupid or they don’t respect what you’re saying,” she said. “And I really want to make sure that everyone in the company is creating a great environment for young women [and others] to feel comfortable saying whatever they want.”
When hiring, it’s important to source and recruit diverse candidates, but that in itself isn’t enough, Ding said. “You can’t bring people in and expect them to change the environment. You have to have a great environment for them in the first place,” she said.
As a startup grows, and other areas of the business begin to take shape, the engineering team becomes a more distinct group, and as such has to define its own culture within the broader organization. Part of that is building their own ways to drive more efficient work.
Whatever workflows are put in place, adjustments will have to be made continually as the group grows. “I don’t know if I have a perfect answer for [finding a single way of working]. I’m sure [our processes] break all the time,” she said. So they keep trying new ways of working, knowing that at some point, it’s going to need to be adjusted again. “I think it’s really hard for companies to find a [single] process that will scale with them over time.”
Pontremolez says that her company recently wrote down its development values and what it believes in a software engineering manifesto to help new engineers understand how they fit in when they come on board. But she says that at their stage she doesn’t necessarily want to put hard and fast rules in place. “I think the toughest part about grading processes is separating individuals doing things that are not what you desire and not turning those episodes into rules that apply to everyone.”
For example, she said that if someone doesn’t properly deploy code, you don’t want to necessarily make a rule that developers can no longer deploy independently, something she would consider an overreaction to a single incident. It’s important to balance the needs of the overall company, especially at an early-stage startup, with whatever rules and processes you put in place.
But Pontremolez says that as you add more people, it’s important to help them “connect the dots” between engineering and what the startup is trying to accomplish, so they understand how their contributions fit into the overall goals of the organization.
What’s clear is that building a developer culture doesn’t ever really end. As the company grows and moves through different stages, the developer group will have to adjust to each new reality, and the founders or other management will have to help facilitate that.
Andrew Boyagi is a DevOps Evangelist at Atlassian with extensive experience in software delivery and service management in enterprise organizations. He provides a practical perspective on how teams and organizations can maximize the benefits of DevOps based on real-life experience.
There’s an unhealthy obsession with companies looking for a way to measure developer productivity.
Over the last 20 years, I’ve led multidisciplinary technology teams across some of Australia’s largest enterprises. Most recently, I led the development of an internal development platform, supporting the experience of over 7,000 engineers as an executive manager at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Today, I lead the DevOps Evangelism team at Atlassian, where I regularly meet with Fortune 500 companies, traveling the world sharing insights and guidance on optimizing for high-performing and engaged software teams and leadership.
In my conversations with senior leaders, I’ve come to understand the desire to measure productivity. Senior leaders are under pressure to deliver results while capitalizing on their investments in teams and technology. There are no sinister intentions behind measuring developer productivity; leaders genuinely want their teams to be as productive as possible. The problem is that developer productivity is incredibly difficult to measure, resulting in organizations allocating disproportionate effort and resources while trying to find the magic measure. This investment in measurement takes precious time away from initiatives that could help developers be more productive.
Imagine the possibilities if the same amount of time and energy was invested in improving developer productivity rather than trying to measure it.
Fact: Happy developers are productive developers
Happy employees are productive employees may seem like an obvious statement, but this gets lost in the developer productivity discussion.
Think back to any high-performing developer you’ve worked with; chances are they’ve gone above and beyond what was formally expected of them. This developer was likely highly engaged, had everything they needed to perform at their best, and generally enjoyed their work.
The behaviors associated with employees who “exceed expectations” are known as have organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and are driven by job satisfaction. Thousands of academic research papers back the notion that satisfied employees are productive employees — software developers are no exception.
So, if satisfied developers are productive developers, developer productivity is a by-product of developer joy.
Inputs to developer joy
There are two main inputs to developer joy: developer experience and engineering culture.
Image Credits: Atlassian
You can think of developer experience (DX) as how developers feel about the tools and frameworks they use to build software. DX is heavily influenced by the quality of tooling and efficiency of processes used by developers to create software within an organization.
Developer experience refers to how engineers emotionally connect with their work, while engineering culture encompasses how work is done within an organization. It’s a fusion of an engineering organization’s values, practices, and norms. Leadership style, company mission and vision, team structures, decision-making processes, and the overall work environment heavily influence culture.
Leadership can influence culture but needs to be molded and evolve over time. On the other hand, organizations have direct control over the experience of developers within their company. Intentionally improving developer experience significantly impacts developer joy and, therefore, leads to improvements in productivity.
Steps to intentionally improve developer experience
Intentionally improving developer experience is the most potent way to improve developer productivity within an organization. Every organization has different challenges and needs to go on its own journey, but three common steps can turbocharge progress.
Step 1: Understand the current experience
Developer experience is how engineers feel about the tools they use to create software within their organization. The only people who know what the developer experience is like at a company are the developers, so the first step should be to get their perspective.
I once spent two full weeks asking developers one simple question: “How can we improve the way we deliver software?”
I walked away from two weeks of conversations with a two-year backlog of things we could do to improve the developer experience and, as a by-product, improve productivity. If you ask developers how to improve their experience, they will definitely tell you. This is free, requires no preparation other than memorizing a single question, and you can start today.
Speaking to developers is a significant first step, but it’s not scalable across a large organization.
Developer experience surveys are a great way to get a pulse check on developer experience at scale. You can use the information gathered in DX surveys to track improvements in specific focus areas and identify new focus areas.
Step 2: Empower a platform team
Platform teams are an internal group focusing on providing a great developer experience. Platform teams provide internal services to software delivery teams, enabling them to self-serve and work autonomously. These services might include infrastructure, CI/CD, monitoring and logging tools, or making it easy to understand and comply with company standards and practices.
Remember that DX is about how developers feel about the tools and frameworks they use to deliver software.
Centralizing these tools and frameworks under a platform team means one group is responsible for these within an organization. Logically, enabling a positive developer experience should be the primary goal for a platform team.
Step 3: Drive DX at scale with a developer experience platform
Platform teams use platforms as a vehicle to deliver an excellent experience for their customers — the developers. A good developer experience platform does this in three ways:
Reduces cognitive load for development teams. This means reducing the amount of information they need to remember while working in your organization.Promotes a healthy engineering culture. This is achieved through learning and continuous improvement.Allowing developers to easily extend the platform. This allows developers to solve your company’s unique challenges.
Thoughts on measuring developer productivity
A lot of people misquote Peter Drucker’s “You can’t improve what you don’t measure” when it comes to developer productivity and use this as a justification to measure the wrong things in the wrong ways.
Developer experience and engineering culture are the two inputs to developer joy, which results in developer productivity. These two inputs are unique to every organization and can’t be replicated; given their huge impact on developer productivity, what you choose to measure should also be unique to your organization. Copying metrics from another company is unlikely to work for your company and will probably make things worse.
This doesn’t mean you need to start from scratch; some companies are doing this well. Rather than copying their metrics, you should take inspiration from their journey to find suitable measures for their organization. Learn about the process they went through to find appropriate measures and follow similar steps. It will be a journey well worth the time and effort.
Developer experience for the win
Improving developer experience within an organization leads to satisfied, more productive developers.
Companies that work toward improving developer experience and engineering culture will have productive developers and will outperform their competitors.
Other companies will still be looking for ways to measure developer productivity.
I know which type of company I would prefer to work for.
The Apple-Epic saga has taken a new turn today as the Fortnite game developer, Epic Games, shared that Apple has terminated its developer account. This is a reversal from the earlier approval of Epic’s account last month, which Epic said would allow it to bring back Fortnite to iOS devices in the EU by way of the region’s new law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA). But Epic now says Apple’s lawyers have sent it a letter saying it’s terminating its Epic Games Sweden AB account — a move Epic calls a “serious violation of the DMA” and an indication that Apple has no intention of “allowing true competition on iOS devices.”
“In terminating Epic’s developer account, Apple is taking out one of the largest potential competitors to the Apple App Store. They are undermining our ability to be a viable competitor and they are showing other developers what happens when you try to compete with Apple or are critical of their unfair practices,” writes Epic on its company blog, where it has also published copies of its correspondence with Apple.
The game developer alleges that one of the reasons Apple provided to support its decision was Epic’s criticism of Apple’s proposed DMA rules, including this post on X (formerly Twitter) by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney. Of course, Epic has been a thorn in Apple’s side, having taken it to court over antitrust concerns and lobbying for regulations in multiple markets to crack down on Apple’s power and influence over the app economy. As a result, Apple would rather be done with Epic, it seems. According to Epic, Apple reportedly told the company that it’s “a threat to their ecosystem.”
However, Epic said that it has publicly shared its intentions and then again assured Apple in writing that it would agree with all the terms of its developer agreements after requesting one of the DMA consultations that Apple is offering its App Store developers. (The request was initially denied). It was after agreeing to abide by its rules that Apple’s lawyers sent a letter terminating its Epic Games Sweden AB account.
Epic claims the tech giant is retaliating against it for speaking out, as a letter penned by Apple exec Phil Schiller indicates.
“In the past, Epic has entered into agreements with Apple and then broken them,” Schiller reminds the game maker in the letter dated February 23, 2024. “You also testified that Epic deliberately violated Apple’s rules, to make a point and for financial gain. More recently, you have described our DMA compliance as ‘hot garbage,’ a ‘horror show,’ and a ‘devious new instance of Malicious Compliance.’ And you have complained about what you called ‘Junk Fees’ and ‘Apple taxes.”
Schiller suggests that Epic’s “colorful criticism” combined with its past actions “strongly suggests that Epic Sweden does not intend to follow the rules.” He adds that another intentional breach could “threaten the integrity of the iOS platform, as well as the security and privacy of users.”
“…in plain, unqualified terms, please tell us why we should trust Epic at this time,” he concludes.
It noted, too, that its company has contractual relationships with Apple going back to 2010 for Epic’s Games, Unreal Engine, and other creator tools and Apple itself has been a public supporter of Epic’s Unreal Engine.
In response to Epic’s news, Apple shared the following statement:
Epic’s egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right to terminate ‘any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.’ In light of Epic’s past and ongoing behavior, Apple chose to exercise that right.
The company also told us its right to terminate Epic’s account is based on the September 2021 judgment which resulted from Epic’s litigation against Apple. This judgment stated that “Apple has the contractual right to terminate its DPLA with any or all of Epic Games’ wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games’ control at any time and at Apple’s sole discretion.”
Apple noted, too, that Epic Games Sweden entered into the Apple Developer Progam License Agreement via a click-through agreement, which had not involved any executive review by Apple at that time.
Later in the day on Wednesday, Sweeney offered an update on the situation, thanking those for speaking up against Apple and noting the company had served over 270 million customers on the PC. The EU also announced it would look into Apple’s decision to kill Epic’s account.
Thanks to everyone who is speaking up against Apple blocking Epic from competing with their App Store.
On PC, we’ve served over 270,000,000 customers, so the victims of Apple’s competition bans include hundreds of millions of future customers on iOS who are deprived of better…
— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) March 6, 2024
EU looking into Apple’s decision to kill Epic Games’ developer account
Epic Games CEO calls out Apple’s DMA rules as ‘malicious compliance’ and full of ‘junk fees’
Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney calls out Apple’s ‘bitter griping’ after its EU fine over anticompetitive practices
The Epic-Apple antitrust saga isn’t over yet
Updated, 3/6/24, 12:44 p.m. ET with Apple’s statement; 3/7/24, 11:30 a.m. ET with Sweeney’s later comments and EU decision to investigate.
Would-be Twitter/X rival Bluesky is looking to more directly invest in its developer community in order to foster growth. The company last week announced “AT Protocol Grants,” a new program that will dole out small grants to developers building on its new social networking protocol. Initially, Bluesky said it would release $10,000 in grants of $500 to $2,000 per project apiece, based on factors like cost, usage and more.
Interested developers can fill out a form to apply for the grants. There’s no deadline to apply but Bluesky will announce when the $10,000 has been used up.
Already, the company has distributed $3,000 of the $10,000 in a pilot program to developers behind two popular SDKs, including the AT Protocol Python SDK (by Ilya Siamionau) and the AT Protocol Dart SDK (by Shinya Kato). A third recipient is SkyFeed, a custom tool that lets anyone — even non-developers — build their own feeds using a graphical user interface. Noted Bluesky, more than 40,000 custom feeds have now been built using SkyFeed.
At Bluesky, the idea is to offer users the ability to personalize the service to their liking, by controlling their own moderation preferences and building or subscribing to feeds that present its data in different ways beyond the default timeline Bluesky itself offers. Users will also be able to join federated servers (beyond the one operated by Bluesky), which may have different moderation rules.
The concept of decentralized social networking has been around longer than Bluesky, however, with many projects, including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed and others, backed by the ActivityPub protocol. Meta’s Instagram Threads plans to integrate with ActivityPub as well. But Bluesky is challenging these efforts with its own AT Protocol, which it believes is an improvement over the existing option for a variety of reasons, including its support for algorithmic choice. (A bridge between the two protocols may be built so, eventually, users won’t have to understand the differences but could talk to users on both networks.)
Bluesky says the projects receiving the grants can be useful to either developers or end users and will be paid out via public GitHub Sponsorships. The company also partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer developers $5,000 in AWS Activate credits to get their projects off the ground. These credits help to cover costs from cloud services, like machine learning, compute, databases, storage, containers, dev tools and more.
The investment in community projects lies in stark contrast with how Twitter, now called X, has treated developers under Elon Musk’s ownership. Twitter/X changed its API terms, putting many smaller developers, researchers and helpful bot builders out of business. Some have since turned their attention to Mastodon, as Tweetbot developer Tapbots did with the launch of Ivory. Bluesky has been far more collaborative with its developer community than X, seeing the value in a third-party ecosystem to grow its user base and engagement with its platform. That could be more helpful in the months to come as the bump that came from Bluesky’s public launch last month has since tapered off. The company now has nearly 5.18 million users, but growth has slowed in recent days.
The grants were announced last week alongside the launch of Bluesky’s app version 1.71 which added a polished hashtag view page, the ability for “mutewords” to catch quoted posts (but not your own posts), the ability to start hashtags with numbers and more.