The Pulse #133: App rushing to add web payments on iOS
Apple fighting Spotify, Kindle, Patreon, and other apps add web payment buttons to iOS apps. Also: the downside of feature flags, Big Tech generates 20-30% of code with AI tools, and more.
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Today, we cover:
Industry pulse. Google searches fall on iPhones, Redis becomes open source (again!), Uber pushes RTO up to 3 days per week, transformers & LLMs useful in Fintech, larger tech companies buy smaller ones, Duolingo declares itself “AI-first”, and a potential memory breakthrough from China.
Apps rush to add support for iOS web payments in US. A court has forced Apple’s hand in allowing web payments on iOS, in the US. Immediately, iOS apps like Spotify and Kindle have become more usable. Apple will fight the ruling that benefits app developers and its own customers.
Downside of feature flags. Figma revealed a new product (Figma Slides) this week, three weeks after software engineer Jane Manchun Wong shared screenshots and details about the feature. Jane could do this because Figma shipped everything in their iOS/Android apps, only guarded by a feature flag!
Big Tech uses AI for coding – does it matter? Microsoft and Meta say between 20-30% of their code is generated by AI. This sounds impressive, but the productivity benefit is still unclear.
Engineering leadership career advice for 2025. If you’re an engineering leader who feels the job market is uniquely tough, CTO and author, Will Larson, shares that it’s likely the market, and not you.
Industry Pulse
Google searches drop on iPhones?
This week at Google’s antitrust trial in the US, Apple executive, Eddy Cue, revealed that Google searches made in Safari have dropped for the first time ever. The cause of the change is likely because more users are turning to AI chatbots and AI search engines, instead of using Safari’s default search function that redirects to Google.
The US state’s lawsuit wants Google banned from paying Apple $20B per year to be the default search engine on mobile devices like iPhones. Losing this revenue source would hurt as it accounts for 5% of Apple’s entire revenue, and just over 20% of annual profit. And this $20B revenue is pure profit: it doesn’t have to do much except keep the default search engine setting as Google, across all users’ devices.
Both Google and Apple want this deal to remain in place, but the US regulator claims that Google’s treatment – unavailable to any other company – is an anticompetitive practice that ultimately hurts competition and pushes up prices for advertisers.