The Roundup

Last week Apple hosted its annual WWDC event – dub dub as the cool kids call it – to unveil all the new things they've been secretly working on.

But before that, we asked the Product Hunt community to share their predictions. Unfortunately we didn't see a Daft Punk AR helmet. Or a privacy-focused search engine to compete with Google. Also no wild 4 camera iPhone.

But, Tim Cook and team revealed a few exciting things:

iOS 13 now with dark mode (queue the applause).

macOS Catalina now with less iTunes (now you can stop using this).

iPadOS now with its own OS (best feature: multitasking).

watchOS 6 now with a dedicated App Store (and ways to stay fit)

New Mac Pro now starting at $5,999 (but it's powerful).

They also unveiled more Memoji customization, AirPods audio sharing, and better photo-sharing. But the most important and surprising announcement:

Apple is creating a privacy-focused identity layer for the future. Sign In with Apple comes a decade after Zuckerberg introduced Facebook Connect which has become the preferred login for millions of people and arguably their greatest innovation to date. 😯

It's given Facebook tremendous amounts of data, made it easy for users to bring their information (friends, likes, identity) with them across the web, and created lock-in among consumers and makers.

Of course this move from Apple has been in the works a long time as they've been laying the foundation for your digital identity. Memojis = Your digital avatar. Apple Pay = Your digital wallet. Contacts = Your digital (and “IRL”) friends.

We're excited to explore it at Product Hunt although us and many others have major concerns. According to Apple's updated App Store guidelines:

“Sign In with Apple will be available for beta testing this summer. It will be required as an option for users in apps that support third-party sign-in when it is commercially available later this year.”

Translation: Apps in the App Store that support Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other 3rd party logins will apparently be forced to integrate Sign In with Apple. That's very concerning and frankly a surprising bet from Apple as it and other big tech co's risk anti-trust regulation.

We'll see how it plays out. In the meantime, share your thoughts in the thread.

ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, is reportedly working on its own smartphone. 

What we know: The phone would come with preloaded ByteDance apps, which includes TikTok, chat app Flipchat, video-messaging app Duoshan, Slack-like work messaging app Lark and news aggregator Jinri Toutiao. Over the weekend, rumors broke that ByteDance is planning to launch a music streaming service. The company also confirmed it made a deal with phone maker Smartisan earlier this year — now we know why. 

ByteDance isn't the first company to make smartphones as a growth hack. Selfie app maker Meitu also builds smartphones pre-loaded with photo editing apps, and recently sold this arm of its business to Xiaomi. Amazon tried this with its Fire Phone (launched in 2014) and Facebook with 'Home' (launched in 2013). Both companies have since discontinued these products. 

Ultimately, it's pretty easy (and cheap) to download any app you want on say, an iPhone, without buying a smartphone preloaded with a suite of apps. 

On a related note, we have seen a ton of cool new smartphones launch in the past year if you are thinking of shaking things up. Some to check out: 

📱 Palm is a tiny smartphone that fits in your palm

📱 Blackview is a super rugged smartphone

📱 Redmi Go is a $65 smartphone from Xiaomi

📱 Huawei P30 is a photography-centric smartphone

📱Samsung Galaxy Fold is a foldable smart phone

We’ll keep you posted when the “TikTok smartphone” launches. Until then, send us your best Lil Nas X lip sync videos. 😉

According to reported code hidden in Uber's Android app, Uber is planning to launch a subscription service for unlimited food delivery. The 'Uber Eats Pass' will cost $9.99/month and omit Uber's service fee that's usually ~$5 or more. In other words, if you order in a lot, this could save you a lot of money. 

There's already lot of competition in the food delivery space, but Uber's going after customer loyalty. In October, the company introduced Ride Pass, a $14.99/month subscription that gives riders flat, discounted fares to save them 15% on travel. This suite of subscriptions is very Amazon Prime-esque, and it's not hard to imagine Uber offering a subscription for all deliveries in the future. 

But Uber isn’t the first to offer a delivery subscription. There's Postmates Unlimited and DoorDash DashPass (both $10/month for no delivery fee on orders over $15). With these services available, you're a lot less likely to order from apps like Caviar or Seamless if you're already paying a recurring monthly fee for a different food delivery service.

But part of the fun of ordering in these days is the democracy of places to choose from. Some other options: 

🥕 Our Harvest for fresh produce 
😋 Soylent Squared for mobile snacking 
🍎 Farmdrop for groceries from farmers markets 
🇮🇳 The Buttermilk Company for fresh Indian food 
🔥 Yummit for home-cooked meals 
🍴 AmoChef for booking a private chef

Since our API's birth in 2014, we've seen our community build a variety of creative, sometimes silly, ideas with it including a:

🙌 Chrome Extension to surface the day's most popular products

👀 “Tinder for products” mobile app

👏 Mac menubar app to quickly browse the day's top products

🤫 Command line interface to browse Product Hunt secretly at work

💬 Direct messaging app for the community

Over the past five years, we've also made several updates to Product Hunt, including a space for makers to share what they're working and help one another with their side (or full-time) projects. But we haven't updated the API to include this new functionality... until 4 days ago.

Today we're pulling the covers off Product Hunt API 2.0 and kicking off our next Makers Festival to support everyone in building something cool.

Throughout the next four weeks, we're challenging you to surprise and inspire the community with your 'API Edition' Festival creations.

For more inspiration, here are some product requests we and the community would love to see built:

• Makers mobile app. A simple app to view, add, and start goals.
• Makers Mac menubar app. A tiny app to view, add, and start goals. Bonus points if it includes the goals friends are currently working on.
• Goal integration with other apps. Make it super easy for people to share their tasks and to do's from 3rd party apps like Todoist, Wunderlist, Trello, and others to Makers.
• Guess the product. A silly game that presents four product taglines. Three are real, one is fake. Guess the fake product.
• Upvoting browser extension. A Chrome/Firefox/Safari extension that embeds an upvote button on the page when viewing a product that's been hunted.
• Mentorship matching. A site, weekly email, or app that matches makers in the community that have complimentary skill sets to accomplish specific goals or tasks.
• Tipping for makers. A browser extension that embeds a “tip” button on producthunt.com comments, using Lightning or something similar.
• Product Hunt TV. A site to channel flip through product videos.

Of course you can build whatever you’d like using the API. Get creative.

Sign up for Makers Festival here. Registrations close May 26!

Winners will be announced on June 25th (and receive a Silver Kitty trophy). If you have any questions, join the discussion here.

We can't wait to see what you build. 😻

In a truly bizarre move, Apple has quietly released its first iPhone game in over a decade. Even weirder? The game appears to by a tribute to Warren Buffett, one of Apple's largest shareholders (he currently holds between $40-$50B in stock). 💸

The game is called Warren Buffett's Paper Wizard, where players deliver newspapers (playing homage to Buffet's job as a 13-year-old boy). How to play: you get points for each newspaper that lands at its target, and lose points for hitting things like birds or cards. The game also gets gradually harder as you, the paper boy, travel from Omaha, Nebraska to Cupertino, CA (there are only two levels). 

The game is more or less a clone of Atari's 1985 arcade game Paperboy, but is copyrighted and operated entirely by Apple. For context: the last iPhone game Apple developed was Texas Hold'em back when the App Store launched....in 2008. 😳

The game is free to download so give it a whirl and please tell us what you think. 

Some more weird games: 

💀 Ok, Dracula for kicking skulls 
😛 CatchFlake for playing with your tongue 
🔷 Tilespace for a puzzle 
🐯 Animar for AR wild animals

“There's a ton of job opportunities constantly being tweeted out there and as much as I tried to retweet them all, they still got lost in the feeds.” 

This is the problem that led Maker Dann Petty to create a *different* type of job board. The result is Epic Jobs. 👀

How it's unique: Epic Jobs sets itself apart from other job boards in that its listings feel human. Dann observed how personal tweets about open jobs garnered attention, and replicated that feeling on the platform. Job seekers can browse 90-140 second video clips called “Intros,” where they can learn about the opportunity directly from the hiring manager. The site also features “Office Tours,” which are fun videos that give you a virtual tour of a company's workspace. 

Some initial reactions: 

“I find the interviews super interesting, many questions I'd ask during the interview process already answered” - Julie 

“Adds the human element that is often missing in the hiring process” - Pradip 

“I don't think I'd be in my current role if it wasn't for the connections that I made via Twitter. Can't wait to see where all this goes.” - Josh 

It's worth noting that Epic didn't come to be overnight. In fact, Dann has been connecting people to jobs via Twitter since 2010, and has been conducting experiments, polls and interviews about hiring along the way.

It's a novel idea in a crowded — albeit difficult to crack — job hunting market. Beyond big tech incumbents like LinkedIn, we've seen more and more niche job boards crop up. And if you're looking for a job at a startup specifically, definitely check out AngelList (but we're biased 😉). If you’re hiring, you can also promote your job to millions of talented makers in the Product Hunt community.

We want to send you to Brazil, for free! Let's call it endorsing the digital nomad life. Enter to win here.

Courtesy of our friends at Dollar Flight Club and World Nomads, this free trip to Brazil includes roundtrip flights (and travel insurance) to Rio de Janeiro. Think beaches, warm weather and crossing one of the 7 wonders of the world (IRL) off your bucket list.

After you win, download all of these travel apps to make the most of your trip. You can use things like:

👋 Friend Theory for connecting with people while you travel
🎒 Bounce for storing your luggage
😋 What to Eat In for discovering local food

Last week, news broke that Facebook is reportedly prototyping horizontally swipeable cards to combine News Feed and Stories into a single feed. Why? It's doubling down on Stories. 

Instagram (owned by Facebook) rolled out Stories over two years ago, directly copying the feature (down to the name) from Snapchat Stories. Since then, Stories has supercharged Instagram and Facebook, slowed down Snapchat and grown to 500 million daily active users. A few months ago, Instagram also briefly switched to a horizontal, tap-to-advance feed “by accident.” 

Mishap or not, Stories are starting to dominate social media platforms across the board. A few weeks ago, Snapchat announced a new developer kit to integrate Snapchat Stories into other apps like Tinder and Houseparty. This week, Google announced its rolling out AMP Stories — its own answer to Stories — to Google Search, meaning they'll have a dedicated section in search results. 

A new startup called Jumprope ($4.5M raised) just launched on Product Hunt to make Stories-like how-to videos. The app lets anyone easily create videos that are shot as casually as Instagram Stories, and it helps people discover how to do everything from yoga poses to oil changes. 

The key to Stories is that they're visual — they focus on photos and videos in short snippets of content. As a creator, they're easy to shoot and edit. And as a viewer, you can control the speed at which you consume them. 

We've seen a few other startups make inroads in this space as well. There's Supergreat for honest makeup reviews. There's Buffer Stories Creator and Insense Stories Video Editor for editing Stories outside of Instagram's limits. There's Medium Series for Medium and Twitter Moments for Twitter. And of course, there's another product called Stories for watching trending YouTube videos.

Who remembers Sunrise? ☀️📅

If you don't, it was a beloved calendar app bought by Microsoft for $100M in 2015. In 2016, Microsoft shut down Sunrise, and absorbed some of its features into Outlook. 

If you were a bereaved Sunrise user — good news. The former Sunrise CEO Pierre Valade just launched his next product. 

The app is called Jumbo, and it touts itself as “your privacy assistant.” How it works: The app lets you simply and easily clean up your social profiles. You can automatically adjust 30 Facebook privacy settings, delete old Tweets and make new ones ephemeral, clean old Google searches and erase your Amazon Alexa requests. 👀

Some initial reactions on Product Hunt: 

“This service is so needed. I hope it helps bring attention to something we should all be concerned about.” - Yann 

“PLEASE do jumbo for e-mail. PLEASE” - Daniel 

With privacy being the topic of the year, it seems Jumbo is coming at the right time. But the app definitely poses a threat to big tech companies, which make money by gathering and leveraging user data to deliver targeted ads. Though Jumbo is still living and breathing today, time will tell if big tech finds a way to shut it down. 

Next up for Jumbo? The company is working on a privacy feature for Twitter that lets you manage your settings. It's also planning to help you manage your privacy on Instagram and Tinder. 

“Long-term, we simply want to build the best privacy assistant, which works for you (and not anyone else). I think of this as your digital agent, similar to a lawyer in the real world, who represents you and make decisions in your favor, because it's incentivized to do so (ie: you will pay for it at some point).” - Pierre

For now, it's free to use.

Jumbo joins a growing list of apps designed to help users take control of their privacy on the internet. Vanish provides step-by-step instructions for controlling your social media presence. DeleteHuband Cardigan are tools for deleting old Tweets. And Facebook even has its own ”Clear History” feature, which lets you erase data Facebook has collected on you.

RIP Google Inbox. 

If you didn't hear the news, Google Inbox — Google's beloved email client that launched back in 2014, shut down last week. This means that if you're a Google Inbox user, you're now being forced to switch to Gmail. 

Google announced it would be sunsetting Google Inbox last September, and needless, to say people have been upset.

“My heart goes out to the millions of bereaved Google customers. Remember that we're all in this together.” - Ron Amadeo 

Every single person I know who uses Google Inbox is using it until the bitter end, ignoring the nags, hoping it won't die” - Owen Williams 

For some context, this is how people felt about Google Inbox when it launched: 

“Can't remember ever being more excited to share a Google product with the world. Has completely changed how I use email.” - Ken 

“Can't upvote any harder. Combines a lot of my favorite Google Now / Gmail Labs features into a much better package.“ - Ece 

Google Inbox rethought how an inbox should work (like a to-do list), and a lot of its pioneering features are now deployed across Gmail. But if you're a bereaved Inbox fan and not ready to hop on the Gmail train, here are some alternatives you can check out: 

Spike presents email as chats 🗣

Spark has smart filters and customizable designs ⚡️

Consider keeps you calm 😌

Zero sorts by relevance and importance 💌

June.ai wants to replace the inbox with AI 👀

Superhuman is super fast email 🚀

You can pay your respects to Inbox at the Google Cemetery, along with all other dead Google products.