Bytes: What’s new in tech
App stores block new Fortnite
Epic Games sued Apple and Google last week after they pulled the wildly popular Fortnite from their app stores, said Jack Nicas in The New York Times. The clash over the world’s most popular video game started with “a clear provocation”: Epic began encouraging Fortnite’s mobile-app users to pay it directly, rather than through Apple or Google. This violated the companies’ policies requiring a 30 percent cut of revenue from in-app purchases. Fortnite remains available on Android devices because Google “allows people to download apps outside its app store.” But the confrontation with Apple has higher stakes, and Epic may be Apple’s “toughest adversary in years.” Epic even released a commercial echoing Apple’s own iconic “1984” ad from its fight against IBM—this time depicting Fortnite characters “defying Apple’s totalitarian regime.”
The fleeting joy of social media
You may spend less time on Facebook than you imagine, said Devin Coldewey in Tech Crunch.com. A study from Facebook comparing self-reported statistics about social media usage versus actual server logs revealed some surprising discrepancies. “Despite what they thought, very few people actually spent more than three hours on the site per day, with the vast majority spending about one.” Though the total amount of time spent on the app was surprisingly low—on average, three hours a day less than self-reported estimates—people dramatically underestimated how often they used the app. Few people in the study “thought they opened the app 10 times a day or more, yet that was extremely common.”
Wikipedia’s election war
Kamala Harris’ Wikipedia page became a “battleground” shortly after she was named as Joe Biden’s choice for vice president, said Joshua Benton in TheAtlantic.com. Wikipedia is the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” and the wording on its pages depends on “consensus” among editors. Harris’ page was altered 295 times in less than 24 hours, with many changes to the descriptions of her race that echoed attacks from conservatives who “question the validity of her blackness.” Administrators and seniors editors noted “the many years of news stories and official documents that have identified her” as AfricanAmerican, but others disagreed because of her biracial background. The site (for now) says she is African-American and Asian-American, as she is described in her Senate bio.