Delta's 10-year journey to the top of the App Store

26:44And it's just such a really good way, I think, for creators to build a relationship with their audience. And just people also don't mind spending a few bucks to a person, but they do mind spending a few bucks on an app. Yep. So it's just like very different relationship. And so we're basically just trying to really promote the Patreon idea. Our own income basically is just through the Patreon. We're still selling or having access to our betas for our patrons. And that's worked out pretty well as a way of monetizing Delta, honestly. Okay. Yeah. I mean, even just the idea of thinking of an app developer as a creator in the same way that you think about like a content creator as a creator is really interesting and is totally not how most people perceive it right and i think i think it's coming around a little bit like personally at least i've seen a lot more of the sort of bootstrapped one person app become a thing that people like in a way that i didn't and they like associate the app with the person who makes it yes yeah but i think for most people it's all so faceless right like you just it's just an app that exists.

27:46I don't know if it's made by one person or 10 ,000 and I don't care. I'm just mad that they're charging me money. And it's interesting to think that like maybe the business model is part of the problem there that because it all just sits in the app store and it is so divorced from personality and people that maybe that's the problem. So actually connecting Patreon to that is a really interesting way of just changing the way people think about what like an app is and how it gets made. Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, I'm really excited for that. And another nice benefit it is we can just have our apps be free and then people just get the betas and but so it means there's no features that are locked behind paywalls like forever it's just a you can wait forever and get it for free or if you just want early access you can donate and i think that's more appealing to people to like when they're trying to support an app versus oh you've locked away a feature and now i can never use it unless i pay it's like yeah that difference i think makes a huge deal.

28:39Yeah, no, I totally agree. So okay, so right before the DMA drops, and I guess, what was it like, March of this year when Apple put out its third party app store plans? It was in January. Okay, so this year, right before that, what was kind of the status of Delta and Allstore? It sounds like it's growing, people are using it. Like how were things? things were good we had like at that point like four million users on alt store like just existing i was like oh wow this is going great uh things are going right delta we had been prioritizing basically a new version of delta 1.5 to release alongside whatever apple announced and so we just like we're working on that but then basically by january we're just like okay everything's in a good spot we're ready to go we just need to know what the hell is happening and so we're just basically just waiting around to see like okay we can do this we had like the store had been finished by then like all the ui was done delta was ready clip was ready so so you you have this thing and you're like this exists we made it it's good we have absolutely no idea what we're about to do with it exactly that is exactly where we were what a strange place to be it was very strange it was yeah just because we're just every day we're like what do we do like we can't move forward in a lot of things but so it was just a lot of planning and strategizing yeah that makes sense so then end of january apple drops like a million press releases and technical documents about how all this is going to work what what happens to you on that day what do you do well what that was an overwhelming day like for sure and the first thing that we try to do is figure out okay can we exist at all in this new world because yeah there's all these like restrictions and we're trying to figure out what the hell like an alternative marketplace is and we're like and so yes we're we spend that whole day basically trying just to parse what apple's announced and then we basically are like okay we think we can do this we think we can meet the criteria if we get very creative because yeah the criteria was like a lot of things like you needed to have like the standby letter we need to have a subsidiary in the eu right and just like a bunch of things that we just sat down like okay we got to make all this happen in a month basically because we're like okay we have until march 7th was like the dma compliance day we're like okay let's set up a subsidiary let's get the standby figured out let's build everything because also they announced all the stuff we had to build and it's like okay let's build everything we need to do and then for the next month was like extreme crunch time just like getting everything done shane honestly was incredible he was calling so many countries to figure out where we could incorporate he we finally incorporated in ireland so we have a nice subsidiary in ireland which is great uh he was on talking to banks to get someone to believe in two people who are trying to do something crazy and they need this how hard was that process you're like so we build a game emulator and also other app stores i'm imagining a bunch of banks are just like this is a prank call and hang up a lot did yeah it was so many people just like wouldn't listen to us it was true pure luck that we found one person his name's logan he just like morgan stanley and he was just understood what we were doing and really wanted to go out of his way to help us and i honestly think if we had not met logan i don't know if we would have got this all figured out but he was like okay let's do this i believe in y 'all i can work with my bosses we can make it happen that that was a big win getting that one for sure yeah i mean i remember when the news came out thinking that there were like you described a bunch of technical challenges but there were always going to be a bunch of technical challenges right i feel like that you you sort of know going in there's going to be a bunch of weird work you have to do to get this thing to comply with what apple wants but the business challenges of just like the the hoops you had to jump through as an organization seemed like they were designed to keep almost everybody out uh except for the the truest of true believers and maybe just the most stubborn people building this thing yes exactly and and part of me wonders if if going back a few months apple just deeply underestimated your willing to your willingness to pick this fight after so many years of picking this fight you're like i've been through your nonsense before apple oh i i yeah i know they were caught off guard they they told us that they like when we when we end up going to the lab and everything they just said straight up oh we did not expect anyone to be this prepared especially as a two-person team they just did not expect us to be as prepared as we were which that had to feel good oh it did feel good i was like cool but at the same time i was like well then let us launch it was like cool okay that's amazing let this launch we're ready was there any question for a team of two whether to invest all this time on something that at least for now and potentially forever is only going to exist in the eu like there's a lot of people in the eu but there's a lot of people not in the eu also yeah i mean so two parts i'm like one i do think it's going to come outside the eu at some point i think it's a question of time so i yeah i expect to see within a few years it'll expand out to like i Japan, United States, eventually.

33:47So we viewed this as like the beginning of a much longer process of us to expand. But then the other thing was like, we had nothing to lose. This is literally all we're doing. All our income is working on Altstera Delta. We're like, well, we might as well just go all the way with it. Like what else? Like, why not? Yeah. I mean, I think the long bet I think is probably a safe one. Again, it's a question of how long it takes, but I do think you're probably right it also seems like you were in a position where even if it didn't sort of immediately reach a ton of people you were going to get so much notice just because this is such a big thing and such a big change that like i all of a sudden alt store just appeared in so many headlines in like february and march of this year which is like yes that was very very surreal seeing that all of a sudden yeah yeah i mean it's so funny because like explaining alt store to people It's like, okay, it is this bizarre sort of convoluted experience where you have to set up a server.

34:41And I'm seeing this in like mainstream news articles. I know. I'm like, oh, my God. It's like, oh, my God. If my mom asked me what alt story is, I'm not going to know how to answer that question for her. Same. Yeah, I explained to my friends. I'm like, eh, don't worry. It's just a tool to install apps. That's it. So, okay. So then we're almost to the present time, but I feel like we still have not gotten to the single wildest part of this whole timeline. Yeah, that's pretty accurate. so you're you're building the store things are going well you launch i think on launch day right march 7th was it ready to go no we we were ready we were all ready to go and that was the beginning of like this frustration so we were yeah we were invited to a lab in cork for the apple to like help us implement our back end and everything so like a week-long lab for us just to work with apple engineers to get everything working so then we flew out to cork it was like the week before March 5th.

35:34So the end of it, the end of February, we flew out day one, I showed up, I said, okay, here's everything. We're ready to go. Can we launch? And then they were like, Oh, hold on. They expected you to show up and be like, I'd like to build an app store. And instead you show up and you're like, I have built an app store. They literally, I really think they expected everyone to show up with like no code base, like to just start from scratch and how to do this. And yeah, so we show up and we're like, here's the entire product. It has store pages, it as everything you could possibly need downloading works and then they were just like oh wow yeah just very clear yeah they were not expecting that and so it basically was then okay so monday i was like trying to pressure them can we launch tomorrow can we launch tomorrow ios 1714 is coming out tomorrow can we be there and then it just became clear this whole process was going to be much longer than we expected for a lot of boring reasons like basically just legal like giving them documents having them review documents stuff like that so i was 70 before came out and me and shane were very bummed because we're like we were ready to launch on launch day we were all ready to go and then so that was frustrating so how long did it take before you actually got the thing up and running then i think it was two months later like it was yeah it was april 17th like yeah so So yeah, from March 5th to April 17th was just waiting.

36:54It's a month and a half. And so we did that. And then, yeah, the reception was immediately just phenomenal. People just so excited. But then we also immediately saw, which we expected, that Delta was the main story. Sure. That Delta in the App Store was the big deal. But we had to figure out what to do. And we knew that would be the outcome. If we released Delta in the App Store, that Delta would get its big moment to be everywhere. And we just were like, you know what? That's fine. It's free marketing for Alt Store. everyone just knows about Delta and then they talk about it and then they get it through Alt Store in the EU.

37:23So you just glossed past part of it though. The whole Apple suddenly allows emulators in the App Store. You say that as if you expected that to happen. I don't think anybody expected that to happen. Not at all. The most unexpected thing that could have happened. And me and Shane had different reactions at first. Shane was more like, this changes everything. Now we got to think through. And my just reaction was, wow, what validation that Apple had to change the rules to allow emulators because they were threatened by us about to launch with an emulator. Like that to me was like invigorating. I was like, this is, yes, it means we're doing something right.

38:01That Apple is literally like doing something I never thought they'd do because it was the only way they could try to make the story not. The EU now has the best apps outside the EU has, doesn't have the coolest apps. And I just knew Apple, yeah, they just couldn't have that story, which is also why emulators are allowed worldwide, is my guess, is the story just could not have been that the EU has better apps than the rest of the world. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And it is very hard to argue that this wasn't specifically about Delta. Like, I just can't. The timing, it's too. It is all about Delta.

38:33We haven't had a direct confirmation from Apple, but our app Delta was being notarized for like five weeks. They changed this rule. It's approved the next day. oh wow it's almost like they were holding it to figure out what they could do about it did you get any heads up that they were going to make this change nope nothing at all well and i would guess after that happened you would have expected it to be big it sounds like you did expect it to be big but i feel like it's been it's certainly been bigger than i expected like it is bigger than i expected it's been nuts man it's so validating like i really can't like because yeah we're doing this because we just really believe that people just want to play old nintendo games or old old games we just i think it's just a thing people want to do and for so long everyone just says no that's only for the nerds it's only for like people who know what they're doing and i've just been like you just have to make it accessible that's all it means like all you got to do if it's accessible people will know how to do it and they will love it we're seeing that that is exactly the case and yes so even more people than I thought are enjoying it.

39:35It is the most surreal thing seeing it not only in the app store, but being the top app in the app store for like a long time. Are you still the number one app in the app store? I mean, I think last time I checked, but yeah, since we've launched, we've been number one. And yeah, so surreal. Like the most, like anytime in my life, I've never felt more like I actually am dreaming right now. Like I need like pinching myself, like, because it was just too perfect. Like work on this app for 10 years. And then day one in the app store, it's the top. It was just incredible. Has it changed what you think about how to do all of this?

40:11I mean, if you had charged$2.99 for Delta, you would have made a crap ton of money by now. Like, have you, are you thinking about the business of all of this differently after it's blown up the way that it has? I think we want this to be bigger than just like Delta. And we want this to cause like actual change in like the emulation scene or in the gaming sphere just like we want to make this more accessible for everyone we want people to start talking about it and have real conversations about it without just being like piracy piracy and so a lot of what we're doing is we thought delta to make that change happen we had to like it had to be free had to be everyone had to have it and that's i think just what we're focused on really is like as long as we're making we're making enough to support ourselves and so we're not in need of more money but i just think for For Dell to have the biggest impact is just make it as fully free and accessible to as many people as possible and let them just start reliving games.

41:05Are you worried at all about legal ramifications? I mean, there was obviously the Yuzu thing that happened kind of right before this. It's been a weird moment in the emulation community. Have you heard from any Nintendo lawyers? Yeah, that came out as we're also like in Europe trying to launch this. I'm like, oh, interesting. Very, very relevant to us. But I'm not going to say I'm not nervous about things, but I am confident in what we're doing. I've learned a lot of what not to do over the past 10 years. And I think that we are really trying to show how you can do something like this legal. Like we're not Yuzu.

41:40We're not emulating a current generation console. We're not doing a lot of things that other emulators get in trouble. Like there's no DRM we have to deal with to like for the game. So just the game files ripped from cartridges. So we don't have to do anything like that. We're doing everything we can to do it right. And there was no world that I wouldn't have done this. I guess it's a better way. Like, I wouldn't have got this far and not released Delta. I just had to. No, I think that's part of why this moment of your story is so interesting, because we're at the beginning of this weird new era of apps in the App Store.

42:13And I think a lot of stuff is changing and a lot is going to continue to change. But we're also, in a funny way, kind of at the end of your 10-year journey. Like, you finally finished the thing. That is what it feels like. It's really weird, but I'm like, wow, it actually happened. Like it got in the app store. And yes, it does feel like the culmination of that whole journey, which is very weird. Does that make it feel like I finally got to do it and it worked and it was huge and it was awesome. And now I can go do something else. I honestly, the fact that Delta is doing so well, it's just motivated me to just want to work on it so much for right now because I've just been working on it in isolation, assuming one day it could like be a big deal that i don't know actually seeing everyone playing it right now has made me really motivated to like really focus on it again and also because so much of the past two years has been like a lot priority working on alt store and now that we launched alt store we can just like have some time with delta again like there's just so many fun features i want to add but i haven't had time to because we had to get alt store up and running for this deadline but so i'm looking forward to that but i don't know if this is a 10-year thing I don't know if this is the beginning of another 10-year adventure.

43:22To me, I think it's, I'll work on Delta for a bit, and I think I've got to finish up what Alt Store is. We still have something to do to prove it out. We've got to get the third-party apps on there. We've got to build up the platform. And I think that's, to me, the next step. It's just making sure that Alt Store is a real app store that people are using and happy with, and then maybe I'll be done. And then you will have resoundingly defeated Apple, which very few people can say. That's what I want, yeah. All right, we got to take a break. And then I have to tell you about this weird obsession I've developed in recent months.

43:55We'll be right back.

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47:34Welcome back. I've spent most of the last month and really most of the last year talking about and testing AI gadgets. It's been a long time, maybe since the early VR days, but maybe even as far back as the early smartphone era, since we've seen this many new things with this many new ideas. Most of those ideas right now are very bad. Well, not bad necessarily. It's just that they don't work. So they're bad. You know what I mean? The humane AI pin has some interesting theories about how you might use a device without a screen and without getting sucked in and distracted. It's just that none of those things work very well.

48:08The Rabbit R1 just kind of puts an AI chatbot on a device that looks like a rearranged phone. And again, none of it works very well. So far, for me at least, there is only one thing about AI that really feels like it works and actually makes my life better. And that is voice notes. A good microphone, plus good transcription software, plus some useful models for summarizing and grabbing the most important bits of what I say, it works. And it's awesome. I kind of feel like a doctor now, running around talking nonsense into my tape recorder, like JD from season four of Scrubs. Mrs. McCalla, 40s, moderately attractive, conditioned and proven.

48:45Did you just say I was moderately attractive? Excuse me, Mrs. McCalla? Patient's complaint of hearing loss was clearly just to get attention. Though I also, to be fair, have this experience a lot doing that. Thought. I like toast. They aren't all winners. In actual reality, by the way, doctors have used voice recorders forever. Talking is a lot faster than typing, and a transcript of a conversation can often give you a lot more information quickly and with context than you'd get from just a written thing. And a lot of doctors are now using AI to help summarize those transcripts and help them find key information later.

49:20because the problem with recording everything on a voice recorder is that it's a lot of information and it takes a lot of time to parse through it all. Listening to your own voice for hours at a time just to find that one thing you said, not fun. The big thing that happened to make all of this stuff work recently is that OpenAI built a speech-to-text tool called Whisper. When OpenAI launched it in 2022, it said that the model, quote, approaches human-level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition. In its blog post announcing it, it used this audio as an example. This is the Micro Machine Man presenting the most midget miniature motorcade of Micro Machine.

49:55Each one has dramatic details, terrific trim precision. That's a guy named John Moschita Jr. doing a commercial, by the way. He's actually in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's fastest talker. I've now listened to that ad approximately a million times, and I do think Whisper gets one word wrong. It says R near the end, and I think Moschita says and. But I can't even tell for sure. And that's all Whisper missed. That's how good this is. OpenAI reportedly developed Whisper as a way to transcribe millions of hours of YouTube videos in order to get training data for its GPT models, which is a strange and somewhat nefarious way to have gotten to this point.

50:30But let's just leave that aside. Now we have this open source Whisper model that works incredibly well and is being used all over the voice notes world. The first gadget I got to try all this out is called the Plaud Note, P-L-A-U-D. It's a$160 recorder about the size of a credit card, just a little thicker and a little heavier. It's just a microphone, basically, that connects to an app on your phone to store and process all of your recordings. You just press the one button on the plod to start recording, and a little red light turns on to let you know it's working. It has one mode for just recording your voice, and another that's supposedly optimized for recording phone calls.

51:05It actually comes with a case you can attach to the back of your phone for recording those calls. And it's surprisingly good at it. Note that this call may be recorded for quality assurance. If you have an emergency, please press 1 now. If you would like to fill a prescription, press 2. As a reporter who has spent most of my career constantly trying to find ways to record phone calls, this is awesome. For years, I've used this weird rig where I have a headphone splitter that goes into a pair of ear pods and also into a voice recorder. This is just way better. But you can also use it to record sales calls and meetings and that sort of thing.

51:40Plaud definitely imagines the Note as a business tool, first and foremost. I have been using it mostly for things like to-do lists or when I wake up in the middle of the night with a fun idea and want to get it down before I forget. And I love, love using it while I wander around my kitchen to see what needs to go on the grocery list. Okay, this is my grocery list for the week of May 1st. I need bagels, potatoes, almost out of bread flour, so I should get bread flour. I need more paprika, but the smoked paprika, not the other stuff. So I record that, and then a few seconds later, I open up the Plod app, which is very bare bones but works basically fine, and that recording shows up.

52:21I open it up, and I get three options. Transcription, summary, and mind map. Mind map is useless, let's not worry about mind map. I tap on transcription, and it asks what language the recording is in and what kind of note it is. Call, meeting, interview, task assignment, that kind of thing. I pick task assignment in English, and a few minutes later, I get a full and very accurate transcription of my grocery list. That's kind of useful, but really what I want is for this to just make me a grocery list. So I tap on summary. It tells me at the top, the meeting outlined the necessary grocery items to be purchased for the upcoming week, ensuring a sufficient supply of food and essentials, which is true, I suppose, but totally unnecessary.

52:59And then it gives me the list. All is a single action item. This is not what I was hoping for, but all the stuff is here. And the coolest part is when I said I was good on peanut butter and good on coffee, it actually kept those things off of the list, which means it actually in some way understood the difference between me saying something and me deliberately adding it to the list. That's the stuff, right? The Plot Note is very cool, but it's expensive for just a voice recorder, and you do also have to pay 80 bucks a year for the AI features. That is a lot for a grocery list tool. So instead, I turned to the Rabbit R1, a more full-featured AI device that in general is pretty bad.

53:40It can't do a lot of what it promises, but it can record, transcribe, and summarize audio. So I started carrying this thing around just to see how it would do with to-do lists and journal entries and all that stuff as well. This is me testing out the voice recorder. Let's see what I have to do today. I need to finish my Apple story. I sent edits back to Jake. He's going to get edits back to me. I'd like to get that at least into top edit today. We have the Vergecast it too. Once you record something, Rabbit stores it all in an app called the Rabbit Hole, which is not a good app in general, but for these purposes, it's fine.

54:16It pulled out a very basic plain text list of stuff from my note in addition to just giving me access to the recording itself. And it got most of the stuff on that to-do list that I said, but it did just completely ignore a couple of things. And since Rabbit doesn't just make a transcript and let you see it, I don't actually like this one quite as much. At least it is easy to download the audio and upload it somewhere else, which is something. And the mic is pretty good. I need to write the container post for tomorrow, but I can do that tonight while Anna's at class. That's my day. But in general, buying a whole device just to record audio is probably only for the most dedicated users of this stuff.

54:53The main advantage of a dedicated voice recorder is that the battery tends to last a lot longer. They tend to have better mics. And also, because they're not an app, you don't run the risk of weirdness with background apps shutting down or getting a phone call in the middle that screws everything up, or just loud pinging notifications constantly popping up in your recording. Not everyone needs a voice recorder all the time, but if you do, you'll probably appreciate it being a dedicated device. But if you want to get most of the functionality of those devices, but you'd rather just use your phone, oh boy, do I have good news for you.

55:25There are suddenly a million apps out there that are making use of Whisper and other models, especially from OpenAI, to transcribe, summarize, and make use of all of your audio. You can basically Google and find a thousand options, but let me just tell you about two. The first is called Cleft Notes, and it works on Mac and iOS. This one, I think, is the best voice notes app I've tried, period. You open it up and hit record, and it shows this amorphous, meshy blob that moves as you record, which is kind of delightful to look at. Like most other apps, it gives you both a full transcription of your audio and tries to make some sense of it after you've finished.

55:59But Cleft goes further, actually. It tries to format and structure everything you said so that if you come out of a call and you want to write down some takeaways. Okay, I just got off the call where we were planning Steve's bachelor party. It sounds like the plan is to go to Myrtle Beach for three days. It then turns that into a document with bullet points and numbers and headings. It's not always right, but it's usually actually a pretty good start. Like that voice note I just played turned into a cleft note with an itinerary, golf plans, a transportation section, a food and drink section, and a note about renting golf clubs.

56:32It's written strangely formally, but it is really helpful. There are, like I said, tons of apps that do this. And since they basically all use OpenAI's models, they're all roughly equivalent in terms of the actual quality of the transcript and information. But I just want to quickly mention one other app I really like. It's called Audio Pen. And it's a web app, which means it works everywhere. And it's super easy and fast. You just record some audio. My grocery list for today. I need eggs. I need nut butter. I'm good on coffee and good on tea. I need red wine for this weekend. I need coffee filters.

57:07I need three balls of mozzarella for pizza. Once you do, it gives you the same summaries and information as the rest. But what I really like about Audio Pen in particular is that if you pay the$99 a year for Audio Pen Prime, which gets you more transcriptions and storage and whatnot. You can also tell it how to format what it creates. So if you want everything in bullets or paragraphs or like iambic pentameter, you can do that. Here, for instance, is my grocery list in iambic pentameter, which I had a different AI from Eleven Labs read out loud. Eggs and nut butter I require. On coffee, tea, I'm satisfied.

57:42Red wine for weekend. filters too three mozzarella balls will do pepperoni for pizza's taste more bread flour not to waste broccoli mandarins combine and peaches sweet these fruits divine you probably don't want your groceries in iambic pentameter more likely you'll want to tell it to be formal for business stuff or write like an author you like or something but it works pretty well whatever you pick and it even goes another step toward turning my rambling thoughts into something that feels finished and useful and not just like rambling thoughts. Another thing you can do in AudioPen is upload existing audio.

58:20So like if you have a meeting you already recorded and now need to get something from, or you want notes on a YouTube video you liked, you can just dump the audio in and get info out. I've heard a lot of people say recently that summarizing YouTube videos is one of their core uses for ChatGPT and other AI models. And this is another way to get the same kind of thing. You could put this podcast in and it would probably give you some information. Basically, all of these tools do cost money if you want to do stuff like that, at least if you want to use them heavily. Whisperer is an open source model that anyone can use.

58:53You can actually download it to your computer and run it locally if you want to. But it is really computationally intensive. And for all the summarization stuff, these apps still are mostly using OpenAI APIs anyway. Oh, one exception I should mention, actually. If you have a Google Pixel phone, the built-in Pixel Recorder is a terrific voice recorder, and there's a new Summarize button in there that also works really well. Apple's Voice Memos app doesn't do any of the transcription or summarization stuff, but I wouldn't be shocked if that's coming soon. In the last few months, I've been using AI audio for lots of things.

59:25Meeting notes, to-do lists, searchable transcripts of YouTube videos that I want to refer back to, but I actually like it best as a journal. I've never been good at keeping a journal over the years, because it always involves taking the time and sitting down to do it. And it's an activity and it's a whole thing. But now I can just sit down in the morning and quickly brain dump everything I'm thinking about while I brush my teeth. Today is Wednesday, May 1st. The first thing I have to do is finish up the Apple story and my rabbit review. I also have to book train tickets to get to New York for tomorrow.

1:00:00Should be a relatively chill. And then at the end of the day, while I'm doing dishes or getting ready for bed or just walking around, I can just ramble about what happened that day for a few minutes. I was in Chicago today for the Chicago Humanities Festival. It was a really fun day. We did a good job of, I think, not having the whole thing be a bummer, but also having it not be too sort of Pollyanna-ish optimistic. When I do that, I now get, instead of just an audio file, a really good transcript that I can find again later and a nice summary of the key points of everything I talk about. It's both incredibly low effort and surprisingly useful.

1:00:38Honestly, I hope Day One, which is the journaling app I've been trying to force myself to use for like a decade now, adopts some of this stuff. This feels like a good way to get things into a journal. Honestly, I think these apps and devices are kind of perfectly indicative of how AI works right now in general. For all the hype over image generation and AI's abilities to write emails for you or, you know, replace your job entirely, the thing these models do best is take a bunch of information and try to simplify and summarize it. That's handy if you're trying to get the gist of a long legal document or you want to know what a podcast was about before you devote 90 minutes of your life to it.

1:01:14That's why I'm so intrigued by Notion AI and all the other tools that aren't trying to understand all of the universe's information. They're just focused on the stuff that you care about and making sense of that. That is a really good use case of AI, if you ask me. And it's working pretty well for me. Because, as you guessed, I do love rambling into microphones. Actually, you know what? I should stop doing that for a minute. We're going to take a quick break, and then we're going to come back and take a question from the First Cast Hotline. We'll be right back.

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1:04:38All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11, and the email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love your questions. Please keep sending them, keep calling, and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. This week, we have a very timely question from Dax. Hey guys, it's Dax from Virginia, and I can't go to sleep because I've just been thinking, why is the Rabbit not just an app? At$200, it's like a very buggy, bad-looking plastic thing, and it doesn't do anything that I feel like my phone can't do. So why isn't it just a paid subscription service app that I can install on my phone?

1:05:18We'd love to know your thoughts. Bye. it. I've been thinking about this a lot. I have the RabbitR1 in front of me. I have used it a ton. I just reviewed it. It's on the site. We have a video. You can watch me wandering Washington, D.C., yelling questions at the RabbitR1. And I've been thinking about this question a lot, ever since really using the Humane AI pin. What are these devices actually for? Why are they devices? And I think I have a cynical answer and I have a non-cynical answer. The non-cynical answer is that I think there is room for something that isn't a smartphone. In a funny way, we're actually going through the beginnings of an unbundling process in a lot of ways.

1:05:56I think there is a set of people who are realizing that they want multiple devices for multiple things. The idea that I should just have a smartphone that does everything was never really true. I mean, think about that brief moment where we tried to use our smartphones as TV remotes. It turns out that having buttons you can press without having to look down at is a good idea. Something like the Ray-Ban MetaSmart glasses, I think is really interesting, or the Snap Spectacles that they've been working on for years. The idea that actually a camera that's not in my pocket, but is on my face, is actually a good idea.

1:06:31So I think there are some things that should have been shoved into the phone, right? Like my phone as a music player and not necessarily needing a dedicated music player makes a lot of sense. But I think there is room for some kind of AI device that isn't your phone. The idea that it could be a little more accessible, it could be closer to your face and mouth and eyes and the sort of biometric stuff that actually can make AI really useful. My guess is that's probably something that looks more like a smartwatch or a pair of glasses than it is a sort of dedicated handheld device. But the reason I was so intrigued by Humane is I think the idea of a wearable that's like on your lapel, kind of always within arm's reach is really interesting.

1:07:12That's also how I felt years ago about things like Alexa and Google Assistant and the idea that, you know, I can talk to technology without having to pull my phone out, look at a screen, unlock a thing. This idea of ambient computing that's been floating around actually requires lots of different kinds of devices. I think the smartphone is going to keep being the main one for a long time. And I think any product that tries to subvert that and say, ditch your phone and use this other device is just going to fail because a people don't want to ditch their phone and be you shouldn't phones are great and they're useful and they do lots of things.

1:07:44But we can attach stuff to phones that does more things in more ways. And I think that's gonna be very cool. The AI gadget remains to be seen, but there are ways it could work and there are ways it could happen. And there are ways that it might be exciting. That's the non cynical answer is I think there is something here. The cynical answer is that they're just desperately trying to find a way to sell you something. We have gotten into a place in the smartphone market where there are two companies, Apple and Google, that are total gatekeepers for the entire industry, right? If you want to do something on the iPhone, you have to play nice in the App Store, you have to play by Apple's rules, you have to give Apple a cut.

1:08:22That is just how it works. Same in the Play Store, there's like a little more openness in Android. But for all intents and purposes, if you want to be on Android, you have to play by Google's rules. That means there are certain kinds of things you just can't do. That means there are certain kinds of apps that you can't make a real business out of because of the way that Apple's rules work. And so what you're left with is saying, okay, there are two companies that are just going to tax us every time we want to do anything. And I think we've kind of spent a decade watching companies that didn't win in mobile, try to win in the next thing.

1:08:57And I think in a huge way, that was why then Facebook now meta bought Oculus all those years ago, because it was saying, okay, we think that there is going to be a huge new VR platform, and we cannot lose it again, to Apple or Google, because there's so much money in being Apple and Google, you get to do all kinds of things, you get to insert yourself in the middle, you get to take the tax, you get to become a huge ad business, you set the defaults, it's just a massively powerful thing to be. And so when there was the idea that, okay, VR is the next thing, you saw a bunch of companies chase VR.

1:09:30When everybody thought AR was going to become the thing, that was where Snap showed up and was like, we're a camera company and we're going to build spectacles and we're going to take over. And, you know, the HoloLens did it and magically did it. And there was this crazy rush to not just be the first great device, but be the first great platform. The same thing is happening right now in AI. As I talk to both Humane and Rabbit, and frankly, a lot of other companies in this space, the idea is to start with hardware, right? You build a product, you make people buy the product, you make people like the product, and then you build a platform out of it.

1:10:00Humane's big idea is this thing called Cosmos. That's their operating system. They're hoping basically to have an app store for Cosmos. You'll be able to use the APIs to plug in. It'll work on lots of different devices. Like they are very much trying to build a software platform with the size and power of iOS or Android. Rabbit has been a little less ambitious about how it talks about that. But when it talks about the large action model, this thing that can actually go and use the apps you use for you, that's the same thing, right? Like there's a version of this that is kind of hacky that is you teach the system how to do it, but there's a much easier version that is just partnering with companies that exist and have existing products.

1:10:39And for Rabbit, if it can be that center point, the sort of place that you go to use the apps, that's very powerful. OpenAI is trying to do the same thing with the GPT store and custom GPTs. Google, I suspect, is going to start to push into that pretty hard. I think you're going to start to see Apple have AI APIs that you can plug into. The idea is just if you can be the sort of hub for all the different features of AI, that is going to be hugely powerful. We've seen in this first phase, a bunch of companies kind of try to do everything, right? You build the one huge, perfect model that solves all your problems.

1:11:15Everybody uses it for everything. The end. I don't think that's the future. I think the future is actually sort of an interconnected galaxy of models and systems and tools that you use. And so the question then is who sits in the middle? What is the platform that you use that translates all of that stuff for you and picks the right agent depending on what you need? And I suspect all of these companies think that if they can be that platform, they can make an awful lot of money off of being that platform. Hardware is part of the business. I think actually a lot of these companies genuinely would like to make money from their hardware.

1:11:49Rabbit is hard to tell, and frankly so is humane if there's actually any money in it right now. But they do seem to both want to be hardware companies. But more than that, they want to be platforms. And you cannot build a platform on top of iOS or Android. They just won. And as they push into AI, they're going to entrench that even further, right? I think we're going to see a lot of AI stuff at WWDC. We're going to see a lot of AI stuff at Google I.O. Gemini is already all over Android. Those companies are not interested in letting other AI platforms in. And I think there's really interesting regulatory questions about whether they're going to be forced to.

1:12:24Like, what if you picked your AI model the same way you picked your default browser? Really interesting idea. These companies will not do that unless they are forced to do that. So we'll see. But the way that these companies are thinking is that the only way in is to build a new thing that doesn't require a smartphone and start to slowly siphon you away from these two companies, Google and Apple, that have essentially owned our internet experience and have been between any company that wants to build something and you for 15 years. That's a hard, hard, hard thing to upset. It's why a lot of the antitrust stuff going on right now, especially in the US, is happening.

1:13:05And if I'm a new company, that's the only reason I would build hardware. Because building an app is too hard, there's too much stuff in the way, and you're probably just going to get eaten alive by Apple or Google. So that's the cynical answer. I hope for the non-cynical answer. And in reality, I think it's a little bit of both. Like we are in a phase where there are interesting new ideas about hardware because there are interesting new ideas about how we interact with technology. We're going to spend, I think, less time tapping on our phones over time and less time looking at screens just to do basic things.

1:13:38So if that's the case, we are going to need new devices. But also anyone trying to compete in those spaces knows that the only real way to build a company the size of Google or Apple is to do it outside of Google or Apple. And that's what everybody is desperately trying to figure out. That said, all the AI stuff we've seen so far should pretty much just be an app. I have yet to see the one that I am like, this is a new category of device. But I'm holding out hope. I haven't tried all the glasses yet. I'm excited to see. All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show.

1:14:11And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about. My Rabbit review, lots of our Delta coverage, all kinds of stuff on AI voice notes. Lots more on theverge.com. I'll put some links in the show notes, but as always, read the website. It's a good website. We try hard to make it great. If you've thoughts, questions, feelings, or other AI gadgets you want me to try out, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com or just call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. Send us all your thoughts and questions and ideas for what we should do on the show.

1:14:40Feelings about everything. It's my favorite thing. We have a Slack room, by the way, where every single one of the hotline questions comes in as they are received, and I get to listen to them, and it's just so fun. I listen to every single one, I promise. Whether or not it makes it on the show, please know our whole team hears all of your calls. We read all of your emails. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about earnings, iPads, and a whole bunch more.

1:15:09We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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