Tech Radar wrote about issues they want Apple Music to fix.

Surprisingly, Apple Music streams at a bitrate of 256 kbps, which is lower than most of its competitors. Spotify, Rdio, MOG and even Beats Music, which Apple Music’s streaming foundation is built on, all stream at 320 kbps (Beats Music still streams at this quality on Android and Windows Phone devices, rubbing even more salt on our wounds).

And then there’s Tidal, which manages to stream its music at the lossless FLAC bitrate of 1411 kbps. So what gives, Apple? Why is the biggest and baddest new streaming service on the block peddling inferior audio quality?

You would think that an article about music streaming would be written by someone with some knowledge about how digital music works, or at least research about it before publishing a post. Beats streamed 320 kbps MP3 files, while Spotify a variety of files. Apple Music streams 256 kbps ACC files.

256 kbps ACC files are comparable to 320 kbps MP3 files, and people find the lower bitrate AAC having higher fidelity, but apparently Tech Radar and several other writers only look at the bitrate and accuse Apple Music of serving inferior quality.

Spotify streams MP3 files at 96 kbps on mobile and 160 kbps on desktop and web player for the free service. It streams 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis files for Premium subscribers.

Serenity Caldwell wrote on iMore explained why Apple Music adds DRM tracks.

Just like every other streaming service, Apple adds a DRM (digital rights management) layer to its streaming music collection. This keeps you from getting a subscription, downloading a ton of music in month one, then canceling the subscription. Instead, if you cancel Apple Music, all that streaming music becomes inoperable. […]

Then, any songs it can’t match, it uploads directly to iCloud; when you download a copy of those songs on a different device, you’re getting the same file you had on your Mac.

So what gets DRM? Any matched track you download to another device. It gets DRM because the file itself is coming directly from the Apple Music catalog, which, as we established above, has DRM on it.

Uploaded tracks that you re-download will never get DRM, because they’re not coming from the Apple Music catalog.

Mass panic because “journalists” jumped to conclusions instead of investigating before they write.

The Next Web wrote about DuckDuckGo bangs.

While its main draw is privacy, DuckDuckGo has another killer feature you may not have heard of. In fact, it should cause you to consider ditching your existing search engine for DuckDuckGo — yes, even Google. I’m talking about bangs.

Bangs have transformed how I search ever since I switched to DuckDuckGo as my default search engine when iOS 8 was released.

Matthew Panzarino wrote on TechCrunch about [Tim Cook’s blistering speech on encryption and privacy]((http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/02/apples-tim-cook-delivers-blistering-speech-on-encryption-privacy/) at EPIC’s Champions of Freedom event.

Cook lost no time in directing comments at companies (obviously, though not explicitly) like Facebook and Google, which rely on advertising to users based on the data they collect from them for a portion, if not a majority, of their income.

“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,” said Cook. “They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.” […]

“We shouldn’t ask our customers to make a tradeoff between privacy and security. We need to offer them the best of both,” Cook wrapped up. “Ultimately, protecting someone else’s data protects all of us.”

Droid Life reported on why Android is still the second platform developers work on.

Despite his love for Android, he and Martin were hesitant to launch on Android first:

“Everything we’ve read, every number we’ve seen shows that it’s really difficult to get people to pay for apps on Android. We didn’t think we could release a paid app on Android and create something sustainable enough to fund further development.”

But the bigger issue is getting the app to work on Android.

Dave Feldman, co-founder of Emu, a third party messaging app, actually bucked the trend of iOS first and launched Emu on Android in late 2012. By April of 2014 Emu was pulled from the Play Store and launched on iOS. Developing Emu for Android hit a lot of issues working with SMS/MMS, dealing with Eclipse, and, of course, device fragmentation.

Feldman told TechCrunch, “We were finding Android in general to be a slower platform to move on. There’s more time spent dealing with fragmentation bugs. There’s more time spent dealing with testing and debugging, and we would rather spend that time building new functionality.”

According to Feldman issues they faced with fragmentation were particularly perplexing:

“On a Galaxy S4 with Samsung’s Multi-Window feature enabled, Emu’s popup windows are squished by the keyboard. This doesn’t happen on the Galaxy S4 sold by Google, without Samsung’s software modifications; or with the Multi-Window feature on the Galaxy S3. We’ve investigated, but because it relates to Samsung-specific functionality, we probably can’t fix it without direct cooperation from them.”

“On some Galaxy Nexus phones, when you’re listening to Pandora and get a notification sound from Emu, Pandora’s volume drops. This doesn’t happen with other apps’ notifications, nor does it happen with streaming apps other than Pandora, nor does it happen on any other device.”

In other words, Android users are less willing to pay for apps and device fragmentation remains a big issue.

Benedict Evans wrote about Android taxonomies.

First, there are actually (at least) six types of ‘Android’ in the market today:

‘Stock’ Android, as seen on Google’s Nexus devices, complete with Google services (but with tiny unit sales) ‘Modified’ Android, as seen on phones from Samsung, Sony, LG etc, complete with Google services – generally, these are modifications that no-one especially likes, but which Google explicitly allows ‘AOSP’ or open Android, as seen in China – essentially these phones are the same as number 2, but with no Google services and apps from the Chinese portals embedded instead. Hence Samsung, Sony etc sell their phones in China without Google services, but few other changes (or perhaps 3.1) ‘Modified’ Android as seen on Xiaomi phones and those of its followers, which people actually seek out, and which comes without Google services in China and with them elsewhere ROMs and third-party implementations of Android that are available for any handset, such as both Xiaomi’s MIUI and Cyanogen (an a16z portfolio company), which may or may not have Google services included or accessible. Again, these contain optimisations and improvements that make people seek them out Forked Android, such as the Kindle Fire phone: Android heavily modified to produce a different experience, and Google refuses to allow Google services to run on them (other than plain old web search, AKA POWS). Note that Xiaomi and Cyanogen are not forks.

The first two or perhaps three I would describe as ‘closed’ Android and the second three are ‘open’ Android, certainly from the perspective of device manufacturers.

Confusing. But at least know that they are not the same.