I saw this chart in a The Wall Street Journal piece today called If This Is a Recession, We Might Not Know for Months:

Official acknowledgement of recessions in the United States is the responsibility of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). However, their timing is often too late as we can see from WSJ’s graph. During the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, the official call was only made in Dec 2008 even though the recession had actually begun a full year prior. NBER’s criteria to reach a consensus also seems rather fuzzy.

This week, I watched POTUS and Fed Chair Jerome Powell voice their opinions strongly that we are not in a recession. I found Treasury Sec Janet Yellen’s analysis thereafter a bit more thoughtful, in comparison. Then, I saw money managers on CNBC, including Cathie Wood of ARKK fame, declare the end of the bear market and proclaim that the “bottoms are priced in”.

I can safely conclude that everyone knows a lot but also no one knows anything at all. We’re all basically on our own.

As far as the tech industry is concerned, the downturn has already begun with double digit % cuts all across the board. Down rounds, difficulty of raising capital, hiring freezes, you name it. The “growth story” as a selling point for companies public and private seems to be over for the time being. The gloom-and-doom is in full motion.

What’s an entrepreneur gotta do? It’s the worst and best time to be in the process of launching a company. The worst because early-stage capital seems a lot harder to come by. The best because it really tests your mettle as an entrepreneur and your ability to build a profitable business from nothing. Some of the most iconic companies of the last decade were built during the last Great Recession — WhatsApp, Instagram, Uber, Slack, Square and Venmo to name a few. These are the datapoints I look towards for motivation as I build my business.

That said, recessions and downturns change you as a person in a sort of permanent way. They make you more disciplined with finances but they also make you more risk-averse and possibly pessimistic.

What will 2023 and 2024 look like, I wonder? No one knows. Only hindsight is 20/20. What we do know that everyone seems to unanimously agree on is that “inflation is out of f@#%!#% control and someone needs to cool it down.”

But, will it?

There’s a social app that’s having a big moment. You’ll find it trending at the top of the App Store. It’s called BeReal.

But how long will the hype last, for real? At what point do you get exhausted from seeing mundane photos of your friends’ computer screens and views from the couch/bed?

The app is reminiscent of a phase I had on Snapchat several years ago where I was receiving meaningless photos of literally nothing from connections on the app to maintain “streaks”.

Consumer moods are ever-changing but often cyclic. A look at fashion is the most tangible way to see this. Trends do return. The consumer social app industry also reflects this (the incredibly insightful Ben Evans has put this phenomenon into words succinctly). And perhaps that’s all there is to the current hype around BeReal.

But I wonder if there’s more than meets the eye. Have users hit peak self-curation in social? People who aren’t influencers certainly create a lot fewer posts on Instagram than they did in 2019. Or is it our social graph on Instagram et al. that has gotten too big and too meaningless? If that is the current mood, then BeReal fixes both for the time being.

Note that BeReal is not a brand new app. It’s been around for a while, but the hype is new. It isn’t uncommon for products (or even people, for that matter) that have been around for a while to suddenly start breaking out. Only time will tell whether this ballyhoo will last a cool 15 minutes or crown a new king of social network land.

Emerging in the tech world this week is a story about Google firing Timnit Gebru and providing a pretty bad excuse for doing so. This is the kind of stuff that makes me very angry.

During my teen years, I’d look up to a company like Google or Facebook as the kind of company I wanted to be part of or create someday. I often thought they were innovative and made great products, but my respect for these companies, especially for Google and Facebook, has exponentially diminished over the years. It’s becoming increasingly crystal clear to me that Big Tech will pretty much compromise on everything to increase their bottom line and remove anything that could potentially get in their way of achieving the highest amount of profit quarter-after-quarter.

Companies are built by people coming together to achieve a shared goal. A company is a set of filters to look at the future in a particular way. And if your only filter is basically profit, then be honest about that, instead of deceiving people that you’re in it for the greater good.

I believe that entrepreneurs, founders and investors or pretty much everyone in the tech industry should take note that how Big Tech has been operating this last decade is the incorrect way to build sustainable, lasting companies. This is also absolutely not how you make the world a better place. These companies need to stop misleading people that they’re doing good for everyone when all their actions suggest that they’re only concerned with making themselves richer (but not the people who use their products). It’s totally ok to do things to make more money for yourself, but be honest about it.

Here’s my message to Big Tech: Write it in your company values that you value profit over everything else. If you’re failing at making your company diverse, publicly admit as a company, as CEO or Chairman, that you’re failing and you’re trying to fix it and give people who are trying to fix it power and influence in your company instead of firing them. Honesty is the only real way to get people to trust you. But this kind of silencing which we are seeing again and again of the good people speaking up is what will be the reason of your undoing. It will be a slow undoing, but over time, people will realize that the products you make are shit, that your values are a bunch of lies and that there is a much better world that we all could live in. Much better companies we could build and be part of.

Some of the most intelligent engineers (and also kind, good-hearted people) I’ve met in my life work at Google and other Big Tech, but unfortunately they are being misled into believing that every single day the work they’re doing is making the world a better place ‌— it’s not. The work they’re doing is basically only increasing the company’s profits, which does not equate to making the world a better place.

If you want to make the world a better place through a for-profit company, you have to build a company that values purpose over the profits and a lot of thought has to go into every initiative, every product to ensure that that core value is being upheld. You can’t be afraid of initiatives that cannibalize your existing products or a segment of your profits for the greater good.

Note: I haven’t written anything for almost 5 months on this blog. I wish I could make more mental space and time to write and publish. I would be delighted if I could write even 2x a month on meaningful topics and publish it here, even if no one really reads it.

After several years of intermittent social media usage, a few months ago, I decided to enforce strict limits on some apps. When the pandemic of 2020 started, I found myself browsing social media excessively. What seemed like an innocent desire to connect to people in a period of isolation quickly turned into act of feeding the frenzy. I’m introspective enough to tell the difference between natural human tendencies and obsessive anxiety-fuelled behaviour.

As of the last 2 weeks of July, here’s a screenshot of my App Limits:

So far, this has worked pretty well and I’ve had an easy time keeping my usage within these limits. However, the Screen Time feature on my iPhone has some serious limitations.

First of all, App Limits only applies to usage on mobile devices. What about desktop usage? I know there’s Screen Time on my Mac, but honestly it seems fairly complicated to set up. In fact, Screen Time on iOS itself took me a while to figure out and I’m tech-literate enough to code iOS apps. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for non-techy people to enable these limits. It feels like a feature designed by code-loving engineers, not designers.

(Edit: My friend @aareet{:target=’_blank’} pointed out that you can turn on syncing across desktop and mobile devices in Mac’s Screen Time. After spending a few minutes looking for it, I found it and it does block twitter.com from Safari if I’ve exhausted my 15 mins, so it’s functional. Though, I stand by my analysis that it’s still complicated to set up. The fact that I wasn’t aware of this and that nothing comes up when I search from Screen Time from my desktop is a testament to its obscurity on desktop.)

Secondly, App Limits treats all usage as the same. But usage is of different types. Mindlessly browsing an Instagram feed is a very different type of behaviour than having a deeply personal conversation in the app’s DM thread — the latter should not exhaust your limit. Watching an insightful interview embedded in a tweet is significantly different than being stuck in an infinite scroll of dumb replies to a viral tweet. The idea of limits is to prevent unhealthy app usage, but Apple’s Screen Time fails to address that in a robust manner.

I have no doubt in my mind that the future of app limits and screen time monitoring is in limiting different types of usage within an app intelligently. The technology to determine different types of usage has existed for well over a decade — it’s a central functionality of app analytics software. I suspect why this deep differentiating doesn’t already come bundled in with app limits is because only recently have people become mindful of healthy vs unhealthy app usage. But it’s functionality people are willing to pay for, for themselves and their children.

I feel that to some extent this is the responsibility of app developers. When developers publish apps, perhaps there should be some kind of basic standard that developers should be forced to comply to in terms of distinguishing healthy from unhealthy usage. Based on accepted patterns of functionality and their well-established relation to usage (feeds: unhealthy after a threshold, direct messaging: mostly healthy), developers ought to have a basic idea of what’s potentially good and bad behaviour.

Digital health organizations such as Center for Humane Technology{:target=’_blank’} and Civic Signals{:target=’_blank’} can definitely take a more active role in ushering in a world where developers are much more mindful of what they create.

What’s clear is that Apple, Google and the social media giants are doing very little in this area, considering how much power they possess around this issue. Perhaps, in cooperation with non-partisan bodies like the aforementioned digital health groups, it’s time for governments to implement regulations to force the tech giants to do more for mental health.

Today, I’m publishing a new page on my website: Request for Startups{:target=’_blank’}. It’s my personal list of opportunities that I’d like ambitious and talented individuals to pursue by building products. I’ve kept this list internally for a while now, but there’s no reason it should just collect dust in my file hierarchy. I have a gut feeling that some of the opportunities in this collection are of significant value to the world.

Some of the ideas in here are ones I’ve considered working on in the past, but can’t due to the level of commitment required. These are ideas that can only be pursued by entrepreneurs who are willing to bet the next 5 years of their careers on them. 5 years is a worthwhile amount of time to put in to something you truly believe in.

If I were an angel investor, I’d consider seed funding startups solving these problems because I find them very interesting.

The ideas span industries and levels of abstraction.

Over the last few years, I’ve accumulated hundreds of ideas for products, of which many I’ve spotted organically and many I’ve generated through controlled observations. However, this list that I’ve published today exclusively contains a select few organically spotted opportunities, arising from a mix of realization, observation and intuition.

If you’re an entrepreneur or venture capitalist working on any of the problems in my RFS, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Or if you’re just a reader and would like to shed light on any of the opportunities or are aware of startups working on any of the ideas, don’t hesitate to reach out.

The phrasing Request for Startups is obviously inspired from the startup incubator Y Combinator’s Request for Startups{:target=’_blank’}. While YC’s RFS is an assortment of open-ended calls to innovate industries, my RFS is a collection of mostly specific ideas or specific niches I see as open within industries.

There’s much ado about fairness creams all of a sudden. As of the writing of this post, consumer goods behemoth Unilever is rebranding its well-known fairness cream brand, Fair & Lovely{:target=’_blank’}.

The Oxford dictionary defines ‘virtue signaling’ as “the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue.” The #BlackLivesMatter movement has truly unleashed virtue signaling left, right and centre, across social media and op-eds, in people’s personal and work email inboxes, podcasts and talk shows. Unilever simply rebranding their decades-old racist fairness cream as a response to criticism of late is a solid example of this phenomenon.

I tweeted the following{:target=’_blank’} around one year ago in June 2019:

It was in response to 30 Miss India finalists in the same year having the exact same “fair” skin tone. One news outlet reported that other photos of the same contestants showed them in their true skin colour which was much darker, but Femina and the pageant’s sponsors always chose the “fairer”-looking photos in their campaigns. In fact, all finalists had the exact same long & dark straight hair too.

Asia and India’s obsession with fairness is an issue engrained in the culture. Products like Fair & Lovely and the countless other fairness creams marketed in India capitalize unsympathetically on this inherent weakness in modern Indian culture and make the problem infinitely worse. They sell dark-skinned people a potentially fairer version of themselves and promise significantly more success in life. With A-list celebrities in Hindi cinema endorsing fairness creams throughout the last few decades, the cultural conditioning has never faltered. And the storylines are not subtle. A several-episode long ad series featuring Priyanka Chopra, Saif Ali Khan and Neha Dhupia{:target=’_blank’} shows Saif Ali Khan going out with a fair-skinned Neha Dhupia until a dusky Priyanka Chopra starts using a product called “Pond’s White Beauty”, at which point he finally notices the suddenly fairer-looking Chopra. Here’s an ad for Fair & Lovely{:target=’_blank’} depicting a dark-skinned woman and a fair-skinned woman auditioning for a dance role. Fast-forward a decade and Pond’s runs a similar campaign featuring an A-list actress of today’s era Kiara Advani{:target=’_blank’} for the same Pond’s White Beauty product — only this time, an updated tagline appears printed right on the sachet: Spot-less Fairness. These ads continue to run despite strong guidelines from the Advertising Standards Council of India, as per this article in The Wall Street Journal{:target=’_blank’} from 2014.

As an Indian of significantly dark skin, I was viciously discriminated against throughout my childhood by people at my elementary school in Delhi, India — kids would often refer to me and several other dark-skinned classmates as “darkie”. To some extent, even teachers seemed to be more lenient towards fair-skinned students. This discrimination was not confined to school either. Family members would often make remarks on my skin colour in the form of casual, passive comments. This is what living North India felt like in the 90s and 2000s. And it hasn’t changed much.

The obsession with fair skin is prevalent in the Indian diaspora as well. At college in Canada, North Indian girlfriends of a couple of friends casually mocked their darker-skinned boyfriends as being somehow inferior than their fair-skinned selves. I was surprised to find that people who’ve grown up in countries like Canada and US projected this colourism so openly. One can attribute it to their North Indian upbringing and the decades-long conditioning that the degree of their beauty is heavily dependent on the fairness of their skin. Essentially a subset of white privilege, in the Indian community, the fair-skin privilege has been a taboo topic to talk about until recent years. I was moved by one very fair-skinned North Indian friend who over dinner a few years ago narrated to me the special treatment her fair skin gets her when she visits Delhi. That was a rare instance — you’ll be hard pressed to find fair-skinned Indians acknowledge this privilege. It’s something that simply exists in the fabric of everyday life and everyone knows and feels it, but no one admits it.

And Indian women experience it the most. In most North Indian families, the misogynistic bride-searching process of arranged marriages often puts the “fair-skinned” requirement near the top of the list. A potential dark-skinned bride is expected to have other redeeming qualities such as a top-quality education or numerous talents. A potential fair-skinned bride doesn’t need anything else to “market” herself other than her fair skin. In the jarring world of Indian arranged marriages, a fair-skinned groom with strong education credentials and a good career ahead always has a leg up on a darker-skinned groom with similar credentials. In newspaper ads or on websites like Shaadi.com, you won’t have to search far to find ads that mention “wheatish complexion” or “very fair complexion” either as an attribute or preference of the advertising bride or groom, or in lots of cases, a hard requirement.

If you think this sounds ridiculous, the Hindi film industry will clear your doubts. The majority of actresses in lead roles are fair-skinned, or at least are made to look fair-skinned through a combination of makeup, lighting and digital effects. It is widely accepted that to break into Hindi cinema as a lead actor or actress, being dark-skinned works against you. Well-known songs{:target=’_blank’} with almost a billion views on YouTube openly tout lyrics like “Tenu kala chashma jachda ae jachda ae gore mukhde te” which essentially means “your black sunglasses suit your fair-skinned face”. Or the much less subtle, Chittiyian Kalaiyan song{:target=’_blank’} with almost half a billion views on YouTube whose chorus, “Chittiyaan kalaiyaan ve, Oh baby meri white kalaiyaan ve”, literally means “white wrists, oh baby, my fair-complexioned wrists” — a quality the character of Sri Lankan actress Jacqueline Fernandez uses to entice her lover in the disastrously bad Hindi film Roy. Cinema is so tightly integrated with Indian culture itself that these highly discriminatory songs are top choices for dance performances at South Asian weddings. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone at the wedding who thinks there is anything wrong with that.

While A-list celebrities in India endorse fairness creams with one hand, they simultaneously post pleas on social media with the other hand to support the #BLM movement by posting messages like “all colours are beautiful” or quotes about racial injustice from Desmond Tutu or MLK. A Twitter thread highlights this hypocrisy{:target=’_blank’} very clearly. It’s not just people who are now finally starting to speak out, but celebrities as well. Actor Abhay Deol took to social media{:target=’_blank’} to call out ‘woke Indian celebrities’ for this duplicitous behaviour. Celebrity Chef Padma Lakshmi took to Instagram{:target=’_blank’} to lobby for an end to Fair & Lovely. “Anyone else out there sick and tired of being told that fair=lovely?”, she wrote, adding that it “did a number on [her] self-esteem” growing up.

Like Padma Lakshmi, I can vouch, from first-hand experience, the feeling of shame internally that colourism causes growing up. And it stays with you for a long time. I’ve spent years unconditioning myself from this insecurity through introspection. Sadly, for many others, the process hasn’t even started. To this day, Gen-Z is growing up in households which condition them to think that fair skin is more beautiful than dark skin.

Nonetheless, due to all this backlash getting media coverage, perhaps the revolution has finally begun. However, a simple rebranding of products, like Unilever did this week, is nowhere near what needs to be done. According to The Wall Street Journal{:target=’_blank’}, Fair & Lovely brings in $560 million in annual revenue for Unilever. In a capitalistic world, to expect an NYSE-listed company with $145 billion in market cap to stop selling one of their most successful products is naivety.

But the truth is that so much can be done by policy makers and influencers. Regulation is one way — a tobacco-like high tax on fairness products could make it unaffordable for people to buy fairness creams and expensive to sell for consumer goods companies. But this can only happen with massive public support and influencers lobbying for such regulation. Also, if more celebrities speak out and bluntly refuse to endorse fairness creams, consumer behaviour may change altogether. If ‘woke’ people bring these issues up at the dinner table discussions with their families, perhaps a cultural change could occur. Beauty companies, the ad industry, policy makers, celebrities, journalists, song writers, movie makers, and the public — the onus is on everyone to root out this harmful bias from our culture.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference happened earlier this week. The conference was held virtually for the first time, due to obvious reasons. Most of it felt pre-recorded, but it was nonetheless packed with some major updates.

I’d like to briefly talk about some of them.

App Clips

This aims to radically change how you discover apps. App Clips are small versions of existing apps that allow you to accomplish small transactions like pay for parking, view a product or borrow a scooter. For these micro-transactions, it replaces the 3-step task of finding, installing and opening an app with a 1-step task of opening an App Clip. How you discover an App Clip is supposed to be automatic through several ways at the moment — 1) iMessage: a friend sends you a text with an Etsy product and you can open the corresponding App Clip right away w/o going on the App Store and installing Etsy and signing up / onboarding; 2) Apple-only QR-code / NFC tag: your phone scans an Apple QR Code / NFC tag somewhere outside like on a parking meter, and it opens the clip that lets you pay for parking with Apple Pay; 3) Web: you’re browsing a web page, and it’s somehow associated to an App Clip, which can let you open the corresponding clip; 4) Apple Maps: a place on Apple Maps like Starbucks can have a corresponding clip which can let you order coffee.

The concept behind App Clips is not a new one. Interestingly, I had this product idea a few years ago:

But, without users having a directing app on their phone already, this idea wouldn’t have been possible on iOS or Android. Because of the nature of the operating systems of Apple and Google, only Apple or Google themselves could make this kind of discovery work seamlessly. However, it looks like Android has had a feature called “Instant Apps”{:target=’_blank’} for a while and it hasn’t really been a hit. Judging from the lack of proliferation of “Instant Apps”, App Clips may turn out to be not as radical as Apple envisions.

Through App Clips, one of the things that Apple has essentially done here is create an Apple-only QR code standard that doesn’t work with other devices, making this closed ecosystem even more isolated. One can argue that Apple makes these kind of moves because their platform only works well when they have control over every component. But the other perspective is also a valid concern — that Apple makes its ecosystem more closed so that the people who don’t have iPhones feel more left out and they give in to buying an iPhone. That, in turn increases Apple’s quarterly financials. That being said, QR codes have only been successful in particular regions. In the West, QR codes are everywhere but most people don’t use them. I’ve never used a QR code in North America to load an app or website in the last 10 years. I’ve only ever used it for enabling two-factor auth through authenticator apps. However, lots of people in Asia use them. In India, I’ve used Paytm QR codes to pay for stuff.

It’s hard to tell whether App Clips will work or not, especially in the West, where there are more iPhones. What’s clear to me though, as an app consumer and developer, is that the way apps are discovered right now needs radical improvement, and due to the tight control Apple and Google wield over their ecosystems, as long as we consume software in these walled gardens, only they are in a position to make app discovery truly better.

Places

Apple is improving Maps to improve trip planning and local discovery. This is exactly what I set out to do in October 2019 with the maps product I was working on. However, as per my post earlier this month{:target=’_blank’}, it just didn’t make sense to launch a city exploration app during a pandemic. However, I’m glad Apple is working on this problem. At the moment, it seems the improvement is basically aggregation of city guides created by bloggers or popular brands, presentation of these guides alongside places you’re looking for and the ability to save and organize them to plan trips.

Whether Apple does it or Google does it, our mobile maps of today need major improvements. There are so many opportunities to make the experience of discovering places better — but Apple and Google only seem to be working on 10% of them.

Widgets

Widgets looked cool. Essentially, imagine widgets as a way to make icons on your homescreen bigger and their ability to show live content within those widgets. It could be weather, music, stocks, your calendar — the possibilities are endless. It’s really up to the app developers to think of ways to make people’s lives more convenient through meaningful widgets. It’s unclear whether people will actually use the feature or not. Very few people use widgets in the state they’re in today on their iPhones or Macs. Are widgets in their present form just not useful enough? Or because widgets are always seperated from the main points of contact (homescreen, desktop) people can’t really access them easily? Or do people not really care about widgets? I’m fascinated by these questions and I’ll be waiting for iOS 14 so I can determine the value homescreen widgets can bring to my life.

That said, this essentially seems like a “catch-up” move by Apple to Google. Android has had SmartStack for ages and users have been customizing their homescreens or “App Drawers” on Android in a million ways over the last few years.

Conclusion

Overall, WWDC is always intriguing to watch. WWDC day is well-established in the tech world as an afternoon on which people don’t really get any work done. After all, the future of mobile platforms is important for anyone in technology and without a doubt, Apple shapes much of the direction.

The pre-recorded feel of the 2020 one wasn’t as fun. It’s always entertaining to hear the woos and boos of the live crowd and the celebrity sightings. However, amidst a worldwide pandemic, that was clearly not an option this year.

I’ve already expressed how wary I feel about the closed ecosystem of Apple that exists in the guise of openness. It’s not good for the world, and its eventual demise is inevitable. However, for the near term Apple’s future still seems good. Apple devices are shiny, new objects everyone wants to own. In comparison to other hardware and operating systems, the Apple experience feels slicker. And as expected, Apple has been shipping more affordable phones, tablets and desktop machines. With their decision to abandon Intel chips moving forward, their machines are only going to get faster.

That said, I’m honestly starting to get tired of Apple executives describing everything they make as “gorgeous” and their inauthentic claims of “inventing” things that already exist. More often than not in the last few years, their products have not really “reinvented” anything. There was a time when Apple reinvented stuff and it felt justified (and an admirable, clever marketing ploy) that they refer to themselves as inventors. But every year in my recent memory, their annual event becomes slightly more boring and they become less of inventors and more guarders of their closed ecosystem and gargantuan bottom line.

This week, the EU formally opened antitrust investigations{:target=’_blank’} into Apple’s questionable business practices around the App Store and Apple Pay’s unfair advantage in the world of mobile payments. The former deals with software distribution and the latter deals with preferential hardware+software coupling. I want to share some thoughts on software distribution.

I reminisce about the days of the open web. With some beginner knowledge, anyone could build a website and make it available to the whole world. As a teenager, I felt its magic, and I attribute my interest in software to the ease with which I could create websites. Best of all, it was an affordable hobby with potentially high return for kids like me who grew up in India.

I never envisioned that 15 years down the line, delivering your software to the world would get a lot more complicated. Today, if you want to build something for the whole world, you need to build an app. To build an app, you need to learn the programming languages of Apple and Google. To build an app for iPhones, you need a Mac and the several gigabytes heavy Xcode development environment. To publish an iOS app on the App Store, you need to pay $99/year. And that only publishes to Apple’s App Store. To publish to Google’s Play Store, you have to follow its own process in parallel.

This begs the question, why are we here in the first place? Smartphones let you download third-party apps in the early 2000s but as far as I can remember, it was a nightmare. And then, came the App Store in 2008. Apple single-handedly sealed the fate of the open web for the next decade by making developers learn their platform instead of letting web apps run on the iPhone as easily as their native apps. Walter Isaacson writes in Steve Jobs that Jobs initially “didn’t want outsiders to create applications for the iPhone that could mess it up, infect it with viruses or pollute its integrity”. It’s not surprising when you consider Jobs’ puritanical bent throughout his life. According to Isaacson, Apple board member Art Levinson lobbied Jobs about “the potential of the apps” and over time Jobs became receptive to the idea. As per Levinson, a controlled environment of apps gave Apple “the benefits of openness while retaining end-to-end control”. And to this day, that’s the stance that Apple continues to take.

This “end-to-end control” has provided Apple unchecked power in what kind of apps are allowed in the App Store and the commission that Apple takes from developers who generate revenue through apps. And that has sparked furious debate in the industry over what’s an acceptable amount of power for Apple and Google in the duopoly that is the app economy. Among the band of internet companies opposing Apple in this debate are wildly popular brands like Spotify, Fortnite, Netflix and Tinder. Recently, the creators of HEY{:target=’_blank’}, an email service with the ambitions of reinventing email that’s currently invite-only (sadly, an invite that I still have not received 😞), have come into the limelight after Apple rejected an update to their newly-launched iOS app. In general, Apple’s stance for such rejections is that the rules are stated clearly and the companies trying to bypass Apple’s massive 30% commission just want “a free ride”.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball exposes the shortcomings of this stance{:target=’_blank’}. Gruber makes an excellent point that Apple’s classifications of consumer vs business, reader apps vs non-reader apps are highly questionable:

At some level there’s a clear distinction here — Netflix and Kindle are clearly consumption services. But Dropbox? Dropbox is a lot closer to an email or messaging service like Hey than it is to Netflix or Kindle. The stuff in my Dropbox account is every bit as personal as the stuff in my email account. When you put Dropbox in the same bucket with Netflix and Amazon Kindle, it seems to me like the distinction is not so much between what is and isn’t a “reader” app or what is or isn’t a “business” app, but between companies which are too big for Apple to push around and those they can.

While the founders of HEY and John Gruber are well-known people in the industry with enough clout that their views make headlines, there is little a small developer can do to challenge Apple’s rejections apart from outrage tweeting or blogging. And even that comes with risks such as a permanent ban from publishing on the App Store because Apple doesn’t like it when people to go to the press against them.

Yet, people on Apple’s side of the debate argue that all this is justified. That the commission Apple takes is a “cost of entry” for the reach Apple provides, or essentially, the cost of a subscription to the App Store itself. It’s the price you pay for the level of quality you find on the App Store. They argue that the cost is the necessary barrier to entry that enables the high quality and in turn, the trust of a consumer in Apple. Also, how else will Apple make money to keep these services running? And with all that said, nobody is forced to be on the platform, so what’s wrong with pay to play?

It’s interesting to put this in perspective with a real-estate analogy. Imagine that you’re a landlord and the next time someone rents your place, the broker is entitled to take 15-30% of the rent every month for the rest of your life in return for providing potential tenants a website that lets them find places for rent and making sure your place passes their standard checklist before you rent it out. Wait a minute.. sounds like Airbnb, doesn’t it? Except, imagine that we lived in a world where there were only two websites to find or rent out a place to stay: Airbnb and GoBnb, and in order to list your place on either of these websites, you had to learn a new language in addition to the one you already speak. And on top of this, there was a $99/year cost to list your place, irrespective of whether anyone even visits your listing or not.

The major criticism of this analogy will undoubtedly be that Apple creates the means to publish these apps in the first place, shipping the best-in-class hardware and software that only Apple can enable. But what’s almost never talked about is that Apple created this “walled garden” in the first place. Today, you can write HTML, CSS and Javascript to build the exact same experience that you get with writing native Swift or Kotlin code, so why must these two walled gardens of Apple and Google exist at all?

What I keep thinking about is that if Jobs really believed in the power of the web and touted the iPhone’s web browser as the first powerful web browser that rendered websites the way they were designed to and marketed it as the biggest appeal of the iPhone at its launch — why did he not envision a future in which the open web as the great equalizer of humankind wins? It reflects a deep dichotomy that I suspect Jobs resolved by giving into the temptation of choosing massive, recurring profits over what’s better for the world.

Frankly, Apple’s policies seem discriminatory in nature — companies too big for Apple to fight get special treatment, building apps that compete with Apple’s own suite of apps is risky territory, their own products like Music and Apple Pay get an unfair advantage and products can work around the system by simply forcing users to sign up on the web instead of within the app. While it’s uncertain how these antitrust investigations are going to play out, it’s clear to me that this ecosystem that Apple has established is broken in both the context of design and fairness. And developers have had enough. In a midst of the chaos of 2020, the time has come for Apple to evolve its stance from a purely capitalistic company to one that cares about fairness. In fact, one may argue that the time has come for America as well as the rest of the world to follow suit. Apple can go to war, as it usually does, and dismiss arguments against it as “baseless”, but they’re not going to be able to silence critics and proponents of a fair and just ecosystem.

It’s time to rethink the whole world of apps and how much power the self-appointed ‘gatekeepers’ of the ecosystem should possess. The truth is that technology is cyclic. Access to internet in the 1980s was controlled by walled gardens of companies like AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy with curation and safety as the selling point. Following that, the 90s era dismantled this reign of a handful of companies with the World Wide Web. That’s the era I grew up in. And then, just over a decade ago, with the advent of new mobile platforms to consume software, the power shifted back to a couple of companies that reaped billions of dollars as profits in the process. Inarguably, a plethora of companies arose from scratch during this last decade that capitalized on the concept of the app. And those companies created considerable prosperity, employment and opportunity. But I personally believe that the entrepreneurs behind these companies would’ve found a way to bring their ideas to life without the tight restrictions and centralized control of software distribution in the hands of a couple of companies. Developers and entrepreneurs made the best of what they were given.

To me, it seems that now we are ushering into an era where this power will shift back to the people. Do you need a tightly controlled system like an App Store with extraordinarily high taxes to offer curation? I envision a future where the things like Product Hunt become the new app stores. I envision a world where all you need to put software out to everyone on the planet is simply HTML, CSS, Javascript and a mechanism to serve your content. Our technical capabilities are taking us there, but the policies need massive overhaul. With the combination of good technology and policy, my hope is that we will get there — but the current realities are grim.

Anyone familiar with the larger-than-life persona of Steve Jobs will admit that his outlook on everything was somewhat influenced by Eastern philosophies. In Eastern philosophy, the concept of ‘karma’ is well-established: the sum of your actions in your current and previous states of existence decides the fate of your future existences. If in 2008, Apple had figured out a way to let web apps run like native apps while not compromising security and provided a curated directory of applications without making the App Store the only way to conveniently use third-party software, then Apple would’ve created good karma for itself. Instead, it made the internet more closed, gave its own products unfair advantage and charged developers outrageous fees. Tim Cook could still make major amends, but in the capitalistic world we live in, Apple is not inclined to and probably won’t and it may be too late anyway.

India’s Northeast is a land of immense history, beauty and courage. Northeast India consists of 8 states: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura. Together, these states are home to over 50 million people of India.

Despite being such a big and important part of India, it is oft-forgotten by India.

India attained freedom from the British over 70 years ago, but millions in the Northeast over multiple generations have never experienced freedom. Since 1958, most of Northeast India has lived under the draconian AFSPA{:target=’_blank’}. AFSPA is an act imposed by the Government of India that gives Indian Armed Forces unchecked power to arrest, shoot and kill anyone on mere suspicion that they have committed an offence. It also gives the Army unchecked power to enter and search any house. Withdrawn from a few states of the Northeast only recently, this draconian law continues to be in effect for the majority of states in the region.

The people of the Northeast have faced rampant systemic discrimination in their own country. In one instance, in 2014, this racism led to the murder in broad daylight of a 20-year-old student{:target=’_blank’} from Arunachal Pradesh, Nido Taniam, in one of the busiest areas of New Delhi. While this one incident was publicized by the Indian and Western media at the time, there are thousands of cases of killings and extrajudicial executions that have not received media attention or even any hopes of justice. In fact, media coverage of the Northeast is hard to find whether from Indian or Western media.

Many of these points were brought to my attention by Binalakshmi Nepram{:target=’_blank’}, a guest on a recent episode of the podcast Grand Tamasha{:target=’_blank’}. Bina is a humanitarian bringing issues facing the Northeast India to light. She advocates for peace and disarmament of the region. India needs more courageous people like her.

The people of India, old and young, need to uncondition themselves from the discriminatory attitude towards the Northeast drilled into their minds by the system and society. There is a dire need for India’s domestic and foreign policies approach to incorporate inclusion and diversity — two fundamental ideas that modern democratic India was founded upon. In the words of Ms Binalakshmi Nepram that will echo for not just the Northeast but also Jammu & Kashmir, “you cannot claim to love someone at gunpoint”.

Just over 6 months ago, in November of 2019, I embarked on a mission to build a new kind of map experience that’s social by design. I began the dance of the oft-repeated philosophy “real artists ship” by picking a starting point — build a socially curated map of places you and your friends want to explore. There was a lot of uncertainty in where I was headed but I had a lot of conviction that this was what people needed in 2020. At the very least, I needed it myself. I reckoned that I can’t go wrong if I’m in tune with the “scratching your own itch” thing. By March, after some redesigns and code overhauls, I was getting ready to ship the first public version of the iOS app.

A couple of weeks prior to that, I had occasionally been hearing chatter about a virus that was plaguing China. As an Indian who grew up in a Northern India battered with seasonal diseases like dengue, chikungunya and a host of other deadly ones, my brain was conditioned to view the news of such outbreaks from India and China as pains of densely-populated developing countries — concerning but not out of the ordinary. However, things changed quickly in March. Before people could catch a breath and wrap their heads around what was happening, cities outside of China were getting shut down, horrific stories of hospitals in Italy and Iran started circulating, people were ordered to #StayHome, and Covid-19 was declared a pandemic. Death became the daily update everywhere.

In a matter of weeks, the app I was working on — the premise of which was getting out more to explore the world outside your home with your friends — went from a potential need to literally the last thing people needed. I was depressed that 5-7 months of work+thought basically evaporated into thin air but I was infinitely more depressed and shocked by state of the world. Hearing stories of the pain people were experiencing and the rapidly increasing death that gripped the world numbed any other thought. The looming uncertainty about what was going to happen with life provoked a great deal of anxiety every single day but the worry for the health of family and friends around the world held precedence over any other concern.

Fast-forward two months from March, we live in a new world, that we are only vaguely starting to understand through caricatures drawn by influential columnists, economists, epidemiologists, doctors, politicians and Twitterverse. No one knows what it will really look like at the end of 2020 or in 2021 or 2022. In addition to the war with the virus, countries around the world face other crises. America is in the midst of widespread protest against the systemic racism that has existed in the region for centuries. Hong Kong resumes its political struggle against the Communist rule in China. In India, after the lockdown ended a few days ago, the virus is now starting to surge and chaos is ensuing all over the nation. The outlook of the world looks grim for the rest of 2020.

I am left thinking as to how I can contribute meaningfully to what’s going on right now. Amidst all this, I am a speck of dust and the question of “what should I do with my life now?” are really of no significance to the rest of the world. However, from my individual perspective, it is of great significance to me. And as any human, I’ve had dreams and aspirations, but now I am not so sure. I am needing to really rethink my life and where I fit in from a first principles standpoint. What’s next for me?

To be very honest, I don’t know. The confidence and conviction I had in my goals several months ago have been replaced by a great deal of anxiety and dread. However, I’m not the type of person to lose all hope. I’m searching for opportunities to make the world better, ways to feel content about what I’m doing for work, and figuring out how to pay the bills.

My intuition and dreams of being a self-sufficient entrepreneur are taking me towards using my product building skills to create apps for this new world. Apps that are mindful. Apps that make life slightly more convenient. Apps that bring a bit of joy to our very chaotic world. While I’m not really sure what this inclination will transpire into, I am experimenting with ideas. For the last 3 weeks, I have been getting my friends to test an iOS app I built called Dino Journal. It was a desperate pivot during the month of April in an effort to be distracted and wanting to ship something. It’s a simple and basic “social journal” that lets you broadcast bits from your daily life and let friends subscribe to them. While it is a social network, in the very basic form, I built it as an antidote to the circus-like, anxiety-marred spectacle of social media. It’s far from accomplishing that goal and I’m trying to really figure out what it is and whether it adds any good value to the lives of people who are using it.

For the next little while, to carry out my vaguely-defined “what’s next” plans, I’ve renamed the company I started in Oct 2019 to Dino Network Inc. I see it as a legal entity to facilitate publishing of mindful apps that add some positive value to people’s lives. I don’t like swimming in uncertainty, so this is my attempt at reducing that uncertainty and instil some direction. Ideally, it will lead to being content about my work life. But it could lead to nowhere and if so, I will have to change course.