Castro is Having Another Very Bad Time

The Castro podcast app is currently experiencing another extended outage. It started over the weekend, when entire castro.fm domain seemed to disappear, bringing the app, company website and email all down.

After a couple of days of no communication from Tiny (who bought Castro in 2018), the app’s X account tweeted today:

Hello Castro Users!

We are having issues with our DNS on Digital Ocean. We have been working over the weekend to fix it. We will be back shortly.

Thank you for your patience 🙏

“Working over the weekend” should have included updating paying customers as to what was going on. Instead, the company was silent — yet again — as people wondered about the future of the app.

I hate it to say it, but I have very little confidence that Tiny knows what it’s doing with Castro, or even cares that much about it.

Facades 2 →

Michael Steeber:

Today I’m launching a major update to Facades, the field guide to Apple Retail Stores. I’ve added detailed timelines filled with store history, new ways to track and share your store visits, custom lists, and much more. This update is the product of feedback from readers like you, and I hope you’ll enjoy what I’ve made.

I’ve been using the updated version for a while via TestFlight, and it is delightful. The title design touches are fabulous.

Apple’s Journal App Ships →

Apple Newsroom:

Journal, a new iPhone app available today, helps users reflect and practice gratitude through journaling, which has been shown to improve wellbeing. With Journal, users can capture and write about everyday moments and special events in their lives, and include photos, videos, audio recordings, locations, and more to create rich memories. On-device machine learning provides private, personalized suggestions to inspire journal entries, and customizable notifications help users develop their writing habits. With the new Journaling Suggestions API, third-party journaling apps can also suggest moments for users to write about. Journal and the Journaling Suggestions API are available with the release of iOS 17.2.

There’s no iPad or Mac version yet, which some may find frustrating. However, given all the suggested content stuff that the app is doing, Apple may not be ready to ship it on more than one device.

The version that is out now for the iPhone is very basic, without any import or export functionality, so I’m not considering leaving Day One any time soon anyway. Speaking of Day One, here’s more from the press release:

“The Journal app is an exciting development for us because it introduces the benefits of digital journaling to a wider audience and ushers in a new chapter for the practice,” said Paul Mayne, founder of the journaling app Day One. “We have integrated the Journaling Suggestions API into the Day One app to give our users an even richer experience that puts privacy at the forefront, and we can’t wait for them to try it.”

That is pretty exciting news.

Apple Kills Beeper Mini →

It took less time than I expected, but Apple has responded to the recent news that part of iMessage had been reverse-engineered, opening the door to blue bubbles on Android. Here’s David Pierce:

A few days after the team at Beeper proudly announced a way for users to send blue-bubble iMessages directly from their Android devices without any weird relay servers, and about 24 hours after it became clear Apple had taken steps to shut that down, Apple has shared its take on the issue.

The company’s stance here is fairly predictable: it says it’s simply trying to do right by users, and protect the privacy and security of their iMessages. “We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage,” Apple senior PR manager Nadine Haija said in a statement.

Here’s the statement in full:

At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.

iMessage Reverse-Engineered for Android Users →

The folks behind Beeper — in partnership with a high-school student — have reverse-engineered Apple’s iMessage system and have shipped it in an Android app. Here’s a bit from the Beeper blog:

Now you can send and receive blue bubble texts from your phone number. As soon as you install Beeper Mini, your Android phone number will be blue instead of green when your iPhone friends text you. It’s easy to join iPhone-only group chats, since people can add your phone number instead of your email address. All chat features like typing status, read receipts, full resolution images/video, emoji reactions, voice messages, editing, un-sending, and more are supported.

Unlike every other attempt to build an Android app like this (including our first generation Beeper app), Beeper Mini does not use a Mac relay server in a data center. Instead, the app connects directly to Apple servers to send and receive end-to-end encrypted messages. Encryption keys never leave your device. No Apple ID is required. Beeper does not have access to your Apple account. Learn more about how Beeper Mini works.

Jacob Kastrenakes at The Verge has more:

Other services — including Beeper’s previous iMessage implementation — would relay messages through a Mac hosted in the cloud. That poses real security problems, as recently exemplified by Sunbird and its Nothing-branded spinoff, Nothing Chats. Nothing’s app was launched and pulled in just four days after serious security issues were discovered; Sunbird pulled its app shortly thereafter.

Beeper Mini avoids some of those problems because it’s operating in a fundamentally different way. Its developers figured out how to register a phone number with iMessage, send messages directly to Apple’s servers, and have messages sent back to your phone natively inside the app. It was a tricky process that involved deconstructing Apple’s messaging pipeline from start to finish. Beeper’s team had to figure out where to send the messages, what the messages needed to look like, and how to pull them back down from the cloud. The hardest part, Migicovsky said, was cracking what is essentially Apple’s padlock on the whole system: a check to see whether the connected device is a genuine Apple product.

Quinn Nelson has a video up about the app and the open-source project that is powering most of it. He shows it running on a laptop running Linux, which is wild:

Reverse engineering is protected in the United States, but Apple may still make moves to shut this down. One could argue that this project isn’t worth the company risking the bad PR that would come with squashing Beeper Mini, but time will tell. The fact that Beeper charges $1.99/mo for the app may end being a liability in the long run.

The Future of Castro →

After the very bad week the Castro app had, there’s a new blog post up sharing more details:

First and foremost, we sincerely apologize for the app downtime and any distress it has caused. Initially, we had believed it was a quick backend fix, but unfortunately, the issues turned out to be more complex than anticipated, requiring extensive work.

During this time, there were rumors circulating about Castro’s future. We want to make it clear that any communication or publication regarding the app’s future is not official and does not represent Castro’s views.

While it is true that we have experienced departures within our company, we want to assure you that we are actively working with a lean dedicated team to address these challenges. We apologize for any unnecessary panic that may have arisen from these conversations.

We believe in transparency with our community and want to share with you that we are actively seeking a new home for Castro with new owners. Our goal is to continue providing you with the app you love, but with even better features and improvements.

Castro on the Outstro?

Jason Snell:

Castro has been a popular iOS podcast app for many years, but right now things look grim.

The cloud database that backs the service is broken and needs to be replaced. As a result, the app has broken. (You can’t even export subscriptions out of it, because even that function apparently relies on the cloud database.) “The team is in the progress of setting up a database replacement, which might take some time. We aim to have this completed ASAP,” said an Xtweet from @CastroPodcasts.

What’s worse, according to former Castro team member Mohit Mamoria, “Castro is being shut down over the next two months.”

John Gruber:

I always appreciated Castro — it’s a well-designed, well-made app that embraced iOS design idioms. But as a user it just never quite fit my mental model for how a podcast client should work, in the way that Overcast does. I wanted to like Castro more than I actually liked it.

As a podcast listener, I’ve always been in the same boat, and like Gruber, I have nothing but respect for the people who have worked on Castro over the years. I respect opinionated indie apps, even if they aren’t for me.

As a podcast network owner, I’ve had a front-row seat to Castro’s entire history. It’s never accounted for a large number of downloads when it comes to shows on Relay, but I know users who love Castro really love it, despite the lack of an iPad app and other oddities.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen the number of support requests I’ve fielded for Castro users climb, and as some on Reddit have experienced, the wait time for hearing back from Castro staff has gotten longer and longer.

It looks like the app is slowly coming back to life now, but it took days for Castro to publicly acknowledge the issue, and of this writing, the team hasn’t updated their X thread in two days.

I honestly don’t know if the rumors of Castro’s demise are true, but an outage like this — coupled with poor communication — certainly doesn’t give me much hope for its longterm future. That really stinks.

Update: Castro now says everything is back online.

Word Turns 40 →

Microsoft:

From its humble beginnings, Word has gone on to become one of the most popular office tools in the world, and pretty much everyone is familiar with it in one way or another. So, to celebrate its 40th birthday, we decided to take a look at how we got here and also share where we’re going.

Adam Engst:

Tonya and I have a long history with Word. Although we primarily used WriteNow at Cornell University during our undergraduate years from 1985 through 1989, we often helped users with Word while working in Cornell University’s public computer rooms. Two years after we graduated, a college friend of Tonya’s encouraged her to apply for a job at Microsoft. She was hired and spent the next two years doing phone and online support for Word 4 and Word 5. (So many people considered Word 5 to be the pinnacle of the app’s history that Tonya later penned two April Fools’ spoof articles about it: “Microsoft Word 5.1 for Mac OS X,” 1 April 2003, and “Microsoft Word 5.1 Returns… to the iPad,” 1 April 2011.) She also helped edit the manual for Word 6, Microsoft’s first attempt at a cross-platform version. I applied for a position as a Word program manager and got an interview but was not offered the job due to my lack of design skills, a rejection I took as a compliment, given my low opinion of Word’s interface.

Word 5 was indeed perfect.