iPhone Home Screen gets a makeover in iOS 14

that you send me What's going on? I already said that if you don't know who I am, I'm Rich Demiro, tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. Usually producer Megan accompanies me on this show. She is on vacation. I hope she's enjoying a much needed break. I know I got one a couple of weeks ago, exactly two weeks ago, and it felt pretty good to be on the open road and just do a little road trip.

It was a little, you know, a little scary with the whole coronavirus stuff going around, and you know, it was it was different, but we did survive, and we took all the precautions necessary and wearing masks and sanitizing and Clorox wipes everywhere, but we did it and it was fun and I think that is going to be the only way that people really travel this summer is by road trip. So just talk to a cool guy named Josh who actually does a website and a YouTube

channel called California through my Lens. So he just did a road trip and he makes a living by going to different places, and for like a couple of months he just stopped and he finally did a road trip recently and we were talking about it. And by the way, he was one of these people that when you talk to you just kind of connect with like everything he said, like I liked as well, so I feel like him and I should be friends. So I'm gonna once the

pandemic is over, hopefully it's over soon. Once that's over and you can actually do normal things again, definitely gonna hang out with Josh and and just kind of see if we can be buddies because it's pretty cool. He cool story too. He actually quit his job to do a blog and then YouTube and it's been five years. So anyway, I tell you this because he's gonna be on KTLA in one of my segments about road tripping,

and he had some great information. By the way, if you follow me on Twitter, you might have seen that. I tweeted a picture from our story that we were shooting the other day, and I'm at richon tech on Twitter, and I did it in front of it. We shot in front of Pasadena City Hall because I thought that was like a kind of a cool looking location. And all these people start tweeting me back saying, oh my gosh, you're in Pawnee, and I'm like, what Pawnee like parks

and rec And sure enough, parks and Rec. I guess that's where they do the exterior for the city hall. But which is kind of funny because this isn't Wasn't that city like a tiny little city and that's such a grand city hall. Maybe that's part of the joke. But anyway, I had no idea, even though I watched that show. I love that show. In fact, I was out to dinner once and the oh my gosh, you now I'm blanking on her name, the lead woman. She was out to dinner with us in the restaurant. This

was a long time ago. Anyway, I digress. We're talking about technology. There's a lot of stuff happening this week, and WWDC twenty was the big event. Now it's thirty one years, which is pretty wild. Apple says this is the biggest WWDC today. I don't know where they got that, but I guess technically it is because there's more developers

than ever, twenty three million Apple developers. And this year it was kind of cool because they all got to attend if they wanted to, because it was all virtual, so everyone got to see this stuff if they wanted to, and the entire keynote was virtual as well, and we learned a lot about what the future of the iPhone is going to hold, not just the iPhone, but all kinds of gadgets from Apple and just some number on the app Store launched in two thousand and eight. Can

you believe that? So the first iPhone didn't have the App Store, which now seems crazy. Two million apps on there, five hundred and nineteen billion dollars in billiing and sales in twenty nineteen. Wow, And that's all just virtual. It's all just digital. It doesn't even exist in real life except in bits wild. All right, let's talk about the biggest thing that is going to affect the most people, which is iOS fourteen. And I installed iOS fourteen, a

developer edition on a spare iPhone. You're not supposed to put this on your main one, although I really really want to because it just looks so cool and it brings so many of the features that I want on the iPhone, and the two biggest features are widgets on the home screen. And also you can finally stop organizing

your apps. So I only organized my first two pages of apps, and then I just, you know, declare bankruptcy on the rest, and they I'll just float on the extra pages as they go along, and I just don't care because I'll just search for an app. Most of the time after my first page. I'm not even using those apps except maybe once in a while, and so I don't need them all in little folders and perfectly

figured out and set up. So Apple is now letting us do something called the app library, which if you've ever had an Android phone, that's called the app drawer. You swipe up and you can see all your apps in alphabetical order, or you can sort them the way you want on certain launchers, but anyway, on iPhone, it's

all going to be organized. So when you get to your last page, all of the apps will be in an app library that lets you see the apps organized by Apple into categories, so all your communication apps, all your entertainment apps, whatever, and then you have if you swipe, I think it's down from that screen or up. It's very complicated to get used to it. But then you have a list of all your apps in alphabetical order. So the good news is you can also delete home screens.

You only have to have one home screen now, so for me, I'm just gonna have two home screens. My main apps, my secondary apps, and the rest are all going to live in that app library. Other notable improvements to iOS fourteen phone calls and FaceTime calls when they come in do not take up your entire screen, which is kind of nice and picture and picture so you can watch a video like a YouTube video, or you can do FaceTime. And this happened to me the other day.

I'm sitting there and I'm facetiming. I think it was my sister and I want to look something up, and I swipe down to you to or bring up an app, and she goes away, and I'm like, wait, what that seems kind of crazy And it just didn't even occur to me because I don't use FaceTime that often that they didn't have picture and picture, and sure enough that's there. When it comes to messages, you can now pin a

conversation to the top, which I love. I use Telegram for a lot of my conversations and I pin the most important ones to the top. I can finally do that in messages, although for the majority of people that I talk to the most, I don't use I message anymore. See you can mention and you can also do inline replies, so if you're having a long conversation with someone and you want to reply to something they said, you know,

three lines up, you can finally do that. What else maps There are cycling directions that doesn't really appeal to me, but ev directions is kind of cool. So you can route based on your you know, availability of charging stations. If you have an electric car, digital car key, so you can use your iPhone as a key for your car,

which I think is really cool. And I know I did a story about this on KTLA, and of course all the comments come in about how it's not going to be safe and what if you lose your phone and what if your phone dies? And yes, of course Apple has thought of all of these things. And if you lose your phone, yeah, that's tricky because you don't have your phone, but I believe you'll be able to do it with your watch as well, so you still

have your watch hopefully if you have a watch. I mean, I'm not assuming everyone out there has an Apple Watch as an iPhone, but if you do, that's one way. You can also share keys with friends. So maybe with your spouse or significant other, you share a key and you know, hopefully they didn't lose their phone as well. But that's the beauty of this. If you ever lose a real key fob, you're gonna you're paying a couple

hundred bucks. Now, if you lose your iPhone, yes, that's definitely a problem, but you have ways of finding it, like find my iPhone. So there are pros and cons to everything, But personally, I love the idea of one less thing to carry around. So I've got electronic door locks on my house and now I've got my phone working as a key. I'm just saying theoretically, so I don't even have to carry keys around anymore. How cool

is that? I love it. That's gonna happen actually in July, starting with the BMW five series, and it's gonna expand to other BMW's. And this isn't just Apple, by the way, and it's not just iPhone. This is going to be something that happens in the future. There's a big consortium of all how do you say that word consortium? Consortium? I don't know. Let's see. Let's see what Google says consortium.

Let's see how to pronounce that consortium. There's a big consortium of companies and this includes you know, GM, Honda, Hyundai, Volkswagen, so Samsung. So believe me, Google wasn't on there though. So but these companies want to make the phone everything and they will continue on their way of doing that. All right, let's get to let's get to the first question here. Usually producer Megan would chime in here with the first question, but it's going to be me. You

get all me for this podcast. Let's start with don Don says, I have a question I guess I should know the answer to, but I do not, And some others I've asked don't either. It seems pretty simple. This morning, Sam Rubin had a segment that's our entertainment guy at KTLA on a new movie called irresistible and stated it as being released on video on demand. Okay, how does

one find VOD? Is it a streaming service? I have a Samsung Q ninety, top of the line on this stuff, and the caves and canyons of online streaming is endless. One friend says, may it's something you get on your smartphone or iPad and watch it there, not on your big screen. What's the use of that? This seems like a catch twenty two. You have to know. But how by some strange brew of mental osmosis, is this a paid streamer like Disney or Amazon or something you find

magically somewhere hidden in the canyons of mystery? He liked that word canyons seems like something I should understand, but short of geekiness. Thanks Don, It's a good question, and I don I get it. I think that this is it's something that like I would take for granted, but I would not. I would not automatically assume everyone knows how to get a movie that's VOD. And this is new for these video on demand movies that are being

released straight to demand. Video on demand has been around forever, mostly on cable boxes, but there is a weird delineation nowadays that you have sort of picked up upon. And we've got two things going on right now. You've got streaming services, which ninety nine point nine percent of the conversation is about all the time, Netflix, Disney Plus, Quibi even what are some of the other ones, Hulu, Hbo and those are services that you pay a monthly fee for and then you get to watch as much as

you want. It's the all you can eat kind of method, and that's what most people do. Then you have something else, which is you can buy a digital copy of a movie. You can rent a digital copy of a movie, and examples of this include the iTunes Store, include Google Play Store, Google Play Movies, I should say, and there's a whole bunch of other ones. There's Voodoo, there's Microsoft, There's a whole bunch of ways to buy movies. Now here's where

it gets really confusing. Amazon Prime Video is a way to get subscription stuff because it's including an Amazon Prime but it's also has paid movies as well, and so

I think that's where it gets a little complicated. And the bottom line for your TV, a Samsung TV, I believe you'll just have to look for the app on that TV that actually sells or rents movies, and that won't be Netflix, that won't be Disney Plus, that will be something like I'm guessing because it's running Android or a version of that, maybe something like Google Play Movie Store, so look for that. Maybe Samsung has their own movie store.

I don't think so. But it gets really complicated because you have like the Apple TV app on your TV, perhaps you have a new Samsung, and you can't rent or buy anything through it. You can only view stuff through it, So I get it. Don It has become a little bit confusing, and to be honest, a lot of people aren't buying movies. They're just watching what's on streaming, So when these new movies come out, it takes a

little bit of figuring out. We watched the new Trolls movie on Fandango now, which who knew that that was sort of a streaming service that you can buy and rent movies on. But yes you can. So I think that's a good question. And for me personally, I do everything in my power to not purchase or rent movies anymore because there are just so many services that I pay for that I would rather watch a movie that I pay for. That a movie that's streaming on a

service I already pay for. And I know I've mentioned this before, but two ways to find movies on services that you're already paying for. The first is an app called Real Good are e E, L g oo D, and you pop in all the services that you subscribe to, and they slice and dice this in a million different ways, so you can keep a list of the things you want to see and it will tell you when they're

streaming for free. Or you can browse the newest movies, the most popular movies, movies in various categories, movies just added to your services, so if you're all caught up on everything, you can see sort of what's new. The other thing I like is a website and it's called only on Streaming dot Com. Only on Streaming dot Com. And what's magical about this website is that they give

you all the newest stuff. So I just sit here and watch the newest or I can see what the newest items are original streaming content coming to Netflix, Amazon, Disney Plus, Hulu, CBS DC YouTube, Crackle, Apple TV plus, Facebook, and more. So, for instance, I can see on July third, Hamilton is coming to Disney. Plus, I can see that Little Voice season one is coming to Apple TV. Plus I can see that Muppets Now Season one is coming

to Disney. Plus I can see that Let's see what else is on here, Animaniacs season one is coming to Hulu on oh in twenty twenty. Okay, some of these are way far out, but I can see Pete the Cat, which my kids like, just launched on Amazon Prime Video. Okay, I told you there'd be a couple of ways. So one more way is on on Google. You type in

oh gosh, hold on, hold on. I think it's called what to Watch, And let me just confirm that, yes, if you search on Google what to watch, they have their own secret little place where you can find all the movies on your provider. And I keep a list in here. It's a little confusing because I keep a list in Real Good and I also keep a list on what to watch on Google. I haven't decided which one I think is better. Real Good is definitely the more elaborate app. It has many more features. But I

got to say. Google has the power of Google Search, so they know exactly what people are searching for at that very moment and what people are watching, so you can see all the popular stuff. And again you can see stuff that's just on your streaming providers or stuff that's free. You can see TV shows and you can keep a watch list. So again all you have to do is search what to watch on Google and do it from your mobile phone because that's like the easier

way of doing it. So anyway, Wow, good information, good question, and again find those free movies. That's my recommendation. Moving on, now, let's talk more about WWDC because there are more features I want to talk about. Let's move into iPad iPad

os four ten. The main feature they're bringing there is Scribble, and I will be honest, I've been testing out a iPad pro with the Apple keyboard case and I haven't opened the Apple pencil yet, but it's got one and also the track pad, and I'll say I love the big screen and I've been basically just reading the newspaper on it every day, and you know, that's kind of it. And I actually used it as a workout thing the other day to watch my peloton and use that on

my bike, which was great the big screen. But I did also do a blog post on the iPad as well, and I'll tell you it, it's really tricky because I think it's one of those things where you just have to get into it and use it. But I am so used to my computer. That is sort of my world. That is how I know how to do everything. I drag, I drop, I move, I've got my apps that I like, and so I think you can do a lot of the same stuff on the iPad and especially the iPad Pro,

but it just takes a lot of getting used to. Now. With that said, and I always say this on this podcast, if I was not editing video and I was a business person that was doing blog posts and social media, I would be on the iPad Pro in one second as my daily driver computer with the keyboard and the pencil, because you can do so much, and I love the

fact that it's got a touch screen. I find myself trying to touch my screen on the MacBook Pro and it's not there, and sometimes I'm like, oh, this would be so much easier, And then sometimes on the iPad, I'm using it and I forget that it's a touch screen. Anyway, the feature they're bringing is called Scribble to the iPad, which means you can use the Apple pencil to type or to write in any text field and it will convert it to handwriting. And there's been this long dream

of converting handwriting to text. It's not very good in my opinion, but who knows, maybe this will work. When it comes to the Apple Watch, and you know, I love the Apple Watch. It is such a great device. A couple things are doing there. You can share watch faces, which is kind of cool. So I see a lot of celebrities and influencers and writers sharing kind of the best setup for a watch face. Let's say you love hiking and you've got a favorite hiker that you follow

on a blog. He's like, here's he or she is like, here's my watch face. Go ahead. You can just download it and there's a click to download, and now you've got their watch face with all their setup and everything. And if you don't have the apps that they have, it'll direct you to do that. Now. From Apple standpoint of course, this up sells apps. So if they've got a complication on there, that's a buck ninety nine. Now they've just sold that to you. Brilliant sleep tracking. Now

I think Apple is tiptoeing into sleep tracking. I'm not sure this is going to beat something like a fitbit to track your sleep, but it's a step. It's a first step. It's gonna get you to see just how much you're sleeping. I'm not sure how rich the data is, but we'll have to see just how good that is.

But it's kind of nice to have that. It's gonna make a lot of people try to figure out when they can charge their Apple Watch because it does not last for more than pretty much a day, especially if you're working out hand washing feature, so this will detect

when you're washing your hands. This is their coronavirus toss in here, so if you're washing your hands, it will start a twenty second countdown timer to make sure you wash for twenty seconds, which I'm guilty of not washing for that full time every time, but maybe I would if my watch prompted me to do that. And it's kind of interesting how they did this. They're using the motion sensors in the watch to kind of figure out, Okay,

did he start washing his hands. Yes, Then they tap on the microphone to listen for the sound of water running and also the sound of soap being squished between your fingertips, so a very interesting way to detect hand washing. And finally, the activity app in iOS fourteen is going to be called Fitness. Now they've added four new fitness types, core training, Dance, functional strength training, and cool down. So

that's pretty nice. And now there's some privacy things as well, and I love that Apple just continues to hammer down on privacy. Users can share their approximate location with developers, which is so nice because on Twitter, I used to think it was really a good idea to share your exact location, but guess what, they're collecting way too much data on exactly where I am. So I would very much be happy if Twitter just knows that when I'm tweeting, I'm in Los Angeles, not exactly where I am in

the city or anywhere. Then there's indicator lights now, so whenever an app has access to your device's camera or microphone, there will be a little tiny indicator light on your screen. On the iOS iOS I should just say iPhone, iPad and watch. That is a brilliant move because everyone is so concerned about these apps having secret access, especially Facebook. Everyone thinks that they're listening to them. Now you'll know

if you see your camera or mic light up. Okay, yeah, that app is listening, and this will keep bad developers out of the store as well, or malicious developers or malicious apps, whatever you want to call it, but bad stuff. Now, with that said, there's another feature which shows when an app spies on your clipboard. And it's already getting a lot of publicity because a bunch of apps look at what you copy and paste on your iPhone. Surprise, surprise.

If you've ever wondered why when you send a text to someone you get an ad for that exact thing ten minutes later in your Instagram or Facebook feed, Well, guess what, now we have a little idea why. So a lot of users have been posting videos of screencaps because they've installed the developer version of iOS fourteen, And when you open up an app, it says at the top of the screen app whatever the app name, just

access to your clipboard. WHOA wait? What? So this is again built into iOS fourteen so that you have the power as an individual to say, hmm, I just open up a weather app. Why does it need access? Why is it taking a look at my clipboard? Now there are some benefits to this, so Let's let me give

you one example. Let's say you have Apple or Google Maps, and Google google Maps looks at the clipboard to see if you copied and paste copied an address, and if you did, if you ever noticed, when you go to search on Google Maps on iOS, it'll say, do you want to search for the clipboard the address you just copied? So I get it. There are valid reasons for this behavior, but it's nice now that it's out in the open that it will definitely catch some bad actors for sure.

Let's get to the next question here in the show, and Steve says, good morning, rich. My wife is a makeup artist, but she has about twenty five thousand pictures on her iPhone and it's already reaching Your iPhone could not back up due to limited storage. Our next option is getting the one terabyte for nine to ninety nine a month. Isn't there a better option? And my answer to this is, before you pay that ten bucks a month,

you might want to check a few things. So number one, iPhone and Apple are notorious for gobbling up your iCloud storage and with stuff that is unnecessary. So the first thing before you pay for this extra storage, what I want you to do is check the iCloud backups for older backups that you might not need anymore. What happens when you update or upgrade your iPhone or an iPad or an Apple Watch or anything, iCloud keeps that old backup of that device, even after you've started using your

new device and backing that one up. So let's say your old phone was twenty five gigs backed up, and then your new phone has twenty five gigs on it because you moved everything over. Well, now you're taking up double the storage in iCloud because you never deleted that old phone out of iCloud and you don't need it in there because guess what the data is on your new phone and it's backed up into iCloud, so you

can delete that old backup. So the number one thing to do is look for old backups you don't need anymore. So that means you got to go into settings Apple ID, which is right at the top. It has your little picture iCloud, then manage storage and backups. Yeah, they don't make this easy to find, and then look for old devices that you're not using. If it says this phone,

that means it's your phone. That you're using. If there's any other old phones in there from years past, you can go ahead and safely delete those as long as you know that that data has been moved to a new device. Make sure you do that. Don't just delete

stuff without thinking, because you could get rid of something important. Now, if you're using iCloud for photos, you need to do another thing because if you're running out of storage on your phone, which this sounded like it was an iCloud thing, not an iPhone thing, you still want to check this option to make sure that you're optimizing the storage on your iPhone as well, because a lot of people buy extra storage on iCloud not realizing that it doesn't really

have to do with their iPhone. So you want to go into settings Apple id iCloud then Photos and there's a toggle says that says optimized optimize Phone Storage. And what this does is it will look at how much space is on your phone and it will make sure you don't run out with all your pictures taking up

space on your phone. So what it does is, if you're using iCloud, let's say you've got, you know, a sixty four gigabyte iPhone and you've got fifty gigs of pictures and you're getting close to that sixty four gigabyte limit on your iPhone. Well, Apple is smart enough to say, well, they've got one hundred gigs out here in iCloud. Let's offload some of these pictures from the iPhone. Let's offload

fifteen gigs. But we'll keep little thumbnails on the iPhone, so if you ever need to scroll through your photo library, you'll still see those, and when you tap one, we'll just download that photo on demand from the cloud instantly. So it seems like everything's on your phone, but in reality, it's been offloaded to the cloud. Google Photos works in

very much the same way. It's a little bit different on the iPhone, but yes, that's kind of how Google Photos works is you can have Google Photos on your phone. It will delete the originals from your phone and it will keep them in your library. So when you're searching on Google Photos, seems like everything's there. It's just really

in the cloud. So those are my two recommendations. I would recommend the Google Photo but if you're already using iCloud and backing up your photos there, Steve, I think that just stick with what she got but that's my recommendation, and hopefully you're not paying for storage that you don't really need. Wise Cam has done it again. Wise Cam

is the company that you probably know. They make a twenty dollars security camera that many many people did not believe me when I first presented this on TV back in twenty seventeen. They said, what, there's no way that a security camera can be twenty dollars. And here's the thing, I actually take the time to test this stuff before I just talk about it. Now. I get it. If something is announced like this camera that I have not tested,

I will talk about it without having tested it. But most of the time, if I'm doing a story on TV about a product, I have done my research. I have figured out who are the people behind this company? How is this so cheap? What are they doing? Is it, you know, sending data to China like everyone accused it of doing. No, it was just a bunch of smart Amazon people who saw what Amazon was doing. I mean, look at them. They came out with a thirty five

dollars streaming stick. Google came out with a Chrome cast device that was dirt cheap and let you stream stuff to your TV for the first time, cheaper than any other method in the history of mankind. So yes, these companies figure stuff out and they cut things out of the system that you may not need in a more expensive system. Apple TV is two hundred dollars. Do you need all the features in there? Probably not, but you're getting something that's in the Apple ecosystem. Chrome cast dirt cheap.

A lot of people love it. Didn't believe when I talked about that either. So again, these companies do this, and the Wyscam outdoor is now just forty dollars. Now before you, let me give you some details on this. So this is a wireless outdoor security camera. It records in full HD ten ADP. It is IP sixty five weather resistant, which is not the highest, but it will be just fine. I got a question of about the temperature rating, and it operates from negative four degrees to

one hundred and twenty degrees, so pretty much. Maybe some places in America might be outside of that range, but that's gonna cover a lot of people. And for this price forty bucks, you probably set it up and see if it works, I mean, if it's not gonna work, if it if it bottoms out, well, you're only out

a couple bucks. The device is fifty dollars for a starter kit because this does require a base station, and the base station to me, it looks like it has to plug in via Ethernet, so there are some caveats to this little setup. But with that said, you can hook up to four cameras to a base station. So if you want to put a wireless camera on all four corners of your home, you can now do this for under four times three is one twenty plus fifty one hundred and seventy dollars. And by the way, the

monthly service is free. So the way they do that, which nobody believed me by the way, when this first came out, is they give you fourteen days of rolling cloud storage. So what does that mean. That means that this thing is not live streaming to the cloud twenty four to seven. It just isn't going to be able to do that on a battery. But when it senses motion or people, this has a people detection. When it senses a person walking by or motion, you can set

how you want it to react. It will record a clip and then it will send that clip to the cloud. That clip is saved for fourteen days and it's rolling, so that clip is deleted after fourteen days. Now, can you buy extra storage in the cloud, I'm sure you can. Can you have local storage on this Yes, you can, up to thirty two gigabytes. You can put in a micro SD card. But again, and the battery is gonna last three to six months? Now, I always think it's

probably gonna last closer that three months. Six is probably if nobody's walking in front of this thing. But I would say three months. So you are gonna have to get up on a ladder, depending on how you mount this thing, pop it off there it's magnetic, and charge it up every couple of months. I do that with my ring doorbell. It's fine, I do it. I actually have two batteries for it, so I just keep one charging and then when I have to pop it out, which I can never remember how to take the front

off of the ring doorbell for some reason. But anyway, I pop it out and I put the new one in, and it's just fine. And of course the battery doesn't last as long as it used to. When ring first came out, it was almost as if you could have that battery in there forever and it would just work. But now they've added a lot of new features to the ring video doorbell, and the battery gets used up much quicker than it ever has in the past. So the wise outdoor cam. What else do you want to

know about it? Let's see, it's small, it looks like the old camera, the standard one. It's got one hundred and twenty eight megabytes on board memory. The battery is there's two batteries inside, twenty six millionmp hours, two of those, so there's you know, so that's for fifty two hundred

million hours. It's kind of like a cell phone, a little bit bigger than cell phones are limited to five thousand million hours, so it's a little bit bigger resolution, night vision up to twenty five feet, let's see eight times digital zoom. It's got Ethernet. Oh, the base station, yes, has Ethernet on board and wireless, so maybe I don't know. I think from what I could tell, it looked like you had to put the Ethernet into the base station, so that could be a catch for a lot of people,

but you'll figure it out. There's also this weird offline travel mode, so you can take this with you and put it, they say, in your hotel room, which I guess if you want to keep an eye on, like who's cleaning your room while you're not there? That's kind of weird. And then you can also do time lapses of says bring it on vacation, or take time lapses of your campsite while sleeping under the stars. That's also

kind of strange. But I guess, you know, if you're expecting a bear to interrupt you at your camp sence. I don't know, but that's the wisecam and I would definitely I can't wait to test this thing out because for forty dollars or fifty dollars, that is a fantastic value when it comes to home security. There are other cameras that are pretty cheap. The Blink cameras from Amazon are pretty cheap, so are the Ring cameras. But you're

still talking with the Ring at least you know. I saw I think it was a three pack for two point fifty for their stick up cam that's wireless outside, so this is still significantly cheaper. Babs writes in Hey, Rich, can you please explain why iPhone users were not given the option to accept or reject or made aware of the COVID tracker now under health that came with the latest iOS update. You need an app for it to actually work, but shouldn't have Apple asked permission. Plus they

don't let you know what the corresponding app is. Hmmm. I have gotten so many questions about this, And whenever I get a lot of questions about something, I know that it is making the rounds on social media, and usually what happens on social media, only one portion of the story is being given out. So people put a and some people send me the screenshot so I see them and it'll be like this has been installed on your phone secretly by the government. What to? How dare they?

And there's a story behind everything. And again this is me coming out as a journalist saying I've done my research on this. I've talked to Apple about this, We've heard from Google about this. This is a joint effort and here's the real deal. Yes, with the latest operating systems on Android and iOS, they introduced what's called contact tracing, and this is Apple and Google's hope or I guess, attempt at helping stem the pandemic. And what they did was they came up with a system that does not

use location. That's number one. It does not use personally identifiable information about you. In fact, all it does is send out a Bluetooth beacon from your phone and from everyone else's phones. And when you walk past a phone, or you spend a certain amount of time with someone in a room at a certain distance from them, and again it's not using location. It's using Bluetooth low energy, which measures the distance between you and the other person.

It will record that person's number, and then if that person says, oh, shoot, I got coronavirus, they will flag their number in the database, and your phone says, oh, I have that number of my database, and it will tell you that, hey, someone who came in contact with has coronavirus. It doesn't give you their name, doesn't tell you when. Maybe it tells you the time and the date, but it does not tell you. It does not tell you the location. Now, with all that said, it's not

secretly tracking you. In fact, in the US, at least, there really are no apps that take advantage of this. There's three states that have signed on and that's about it. And I believe it's like North Dakota, South Dakota and maybe Alabama or something, but again not California, where a majority of my listenership is from. California did not sign on to this. They don't have a COVID tracing app as far as I know right now, the WHO does not have one, the CDC does not have one. There's

no nationwide app. So the reason why BABS is saying you need an app but they're not telling you what the corresponding app is is because there really aren't any now now. I do think in the future, if companies decide to build an app or organizations decide to build an app that takes advantage of this system, which I'm not sure if this is effective or not. I think it would be if people used it, but it's opt

in and so nobody has to use it. So again, I would think that Apple would put the list of apps inside that little area so that you can see which apps would activate this feature. I don't think they're doing that just yet. But if you want to see this feature on your phone, yes it's there and no, it's not active for ninety nine point nine percent of you. You can go into your settings on the iPhone. Let's

see under oh, gosh, is it privacy? And then let's see health and then COVID nineteen exposure logging and it should say off and it says no installed app. And there's not even a place to find apps right now. I assume they should have some links to apps in the future. But that's the explanation. On Android, it's in different places, but I have gotten some screenshots from folks on Android. I will do a story on this on

TV so I can explain this to people. And here's the world we live in now, with all the fake news and this stuff. I am a journalist that does do research and I do try to present stuff on TV that is factual. I mean, for twenty years now, that has been my goal is to not to lie to people on TV. I'm trying to do my best at that and I have. But it is so crazy, which this is a change that is not you know, it's pretty new that people don't believe the stuff that

I even post to my social media. And it used to be if you saw a journalists post something, you would believe it. But I get it. There are so many opinions out there that are masquerading as fact. There are so many people out there that just talk and put stuff out there without any sort of basis to

whether it's true or false. That I get why you might not believe me And you don't know who I am if you're just scrolling through and someone shared one of my posts on your page, And are you going to go through the effort of looking up who I am and verifying that I'm actually on TV because I say I am, and verifying that I know what I'm talking about. No, And so I get it. But it's we live in a very tricky time right now for information. And with that said, let me tell you one thing

that Facebook is doing. You hear them all my papers here, I've got so much stuff. Let's see, do I have it here? No? I don't, Okay, Well, I know that Facebook is doing something where oh here it is. Facebook is rolling out a new Facebook. You know, they got drugged through the mud when it came to the twenty sixteen election, and you know, Facebook is making sure they're doing everything in their power to not be blamed for anything when it comes to fake news and all this

stuff in the future. And so they just keep making these changes and one of them is now they are rolling out a notification screen. So if you try to share an article that's more than ninety days old, they'll say, WHOA, hold on, hold on, are you sure you want to share that? That article is more than ninety days old? And so you can decide if you want to share that or not to make sure that people are sharing relevant new information. And it's just again, it's just a

sign of our times where it's tough. All right, I do have a lot more to go through here and shows almost over. I can't believe it. Google, this is a new one. Google is privacy. Privacy is big. Google is introducing new controls that they are well, they're introducing a new protocol for saving your data. So they are now going to save data but for eighteen months by default. And data. This is not your Gmail, This is not

your photos, not your calendar. This is your location data, your search history, your voice data, and your YouTube activity data. So by default, when you open up a Google account, they will just keep that information for eighteen months. And again, you know that Google relies on this data to help personalize the service, to help sell you stuff, to help you create ads, whatever, to help just market to you. They want to know as much about you as possible,

and of course as a consumer, you want them. You want to ride this line of I want when I start searching for something in Google Maps for them to know the restaurant that I just searched for yesterday, because then it'll come up quicker, or the place I search for that I want to go on vacation because then they can target you know, vacation ads to me, or you know, more information about the place I'm going to. But at the same time, I don't want them to

retain this stuff forever. So now it will be deleted after eighteen months. But here is the catch. This is only for new Google accounts. And guess what, over a billion people have Google accounts, So if you're one of those billion people, you have to go in and change this manually. Now I did a step by step on my Instagram at richontech on how to do that. It's quite easy. In fact, all you have to do is

go to myactivity dot Google dot com. You tap the menu, you go to activity controls and there's an option for auto delete right now on my it says off. You tap it and it says auto delete activity older than three months, Auto delete activity older than eighteen months, or you can just leave it on off. I would recommend three months if you're really worried about your privacy, eighteen months if you're like me and you actually value some

of the personalizations that Google has. I've actually kept this on indefinitely for right now because it's like, it's sad for me to like give up all my Google Search history because even when you look through it, you can see, like, you know, like I can go back and see the voice commands I said to Google when I first had my kid, and you know, back in the day a couple of years ago. I mean, how crazy is that?

So it's weird, I know. But again, it's good to have this choice, and it's good that they're actually going to turn this on by default for new accounts, so again I'll put the link to how to do that. For YouTube, it's still going to remain thirty six months by default, and that makes sense because on YouTube, they're trying to give you recommended videos, and the more information they have about what you're watching, the better recommendations you get.

And they're also making it easier to access incognito mode. So from now on, when you see your little Google logo or your profile picture on a Google app on iOS and Android, you can just long press that picture and it will bring you into incognito mode. This will work on Google App, maps, and YouTube now. Right now it's only active on iOS for the Google app, but it will be across all the the maps, the YouTube, and the Google App on iOS and Android in the

near future. All right, let's see one more question. Uh Jackie, Gosh, she'se are all iPhone? So many people have iPhone questions? There always iPhone? All right, let's do this one from Jennifer. She says, I lost my iPhone over the weekend. It turns out someone found it and returned it. Anyway, I bought another phone, changed my plan, even got a five dollars iPad out of the deal. Okay, that's cool, but of course you're going to be paying the data on that. I bet sort of too late to go back. But

what should I do with my old phone? Other than a tiny chip in the top right corner it works perfectly. Should I fix the screen and sell it? Or forget fixing the screen and just try to sell it? Where would you sell it? Well, you've got a couple options. Yeah, you're definitely not going to go back. You probably don't want to return the new phone by now. I assume you also upgraded your phone. But I would do two things. Number One, if you don't care about the money, you

can keep this as a backup phone. So if something ever happens to your new iPhone, you've got a backup device, and that is not a bad thing to have just sitting around the house. You can always use a different an old iPhone for something, even if it's like a music player or a remote control whatever. Now, if you'd like to just rid this thing of your life, you do have to erase all your data from it. Make

sure you do that now. The way that I have sold old iPhones in the past, if I'm not keeping them, is to friends and family because it's so easy. You don't have to deal with eBay, you don't have to deal with a third party website. Someone out there on your social networks needs a new phone. Now, I don't know how old this phone is, so but you never know. There's a lot of people out there, and in my history I have posted I can remember at least twice

where boom. People buy these things in seconds and the good news is you're selling it to a friend, so it's easier. You can just give it to them, or I should say get it to them because you can you can make money off the deal, or I should say you should there should be a transaction unless you're giving it to them. I've given phones to friends and family as well. But just make a post on Facebook or Instagram and say, hey, I've got my old phone.

Hey it's the screen is chipped, if you want to do it that way, or you can get the screen fixed if you want to be really nice and get a little bit more money for it. But you have to kind of take everything into consideration, see how much it is to get this thing repaired, and factor all that in. Also to get kind of an idea of the price you should charge for this phone. I would just go on a site like Swapa or eBay and see what people are charging for that phone, whether it's

cracked or not cracked. And then if it's friends and family, you're not gonna charge the same amount because the reason you're selling to friends and family, Let's say you probably want to take ten percent off the price because by the time you give eBay their cut and ship it out, you know, you're talking ten to twenty percent of the price of the purchase price, and you know, collect the payment, so you can offer this to your friends at a discount at a lower price than they would purchase it

from eBay four. So that would be my advice, you know, And if you need to get it fixed, actually, Swapa has a new repair section of their website where you can find a repair place that has a thirty day guarantee. So you can go to swapa dot com slash repair, or you can check out a U break I Fix, I like that place there in a lot of areas, and that's another way you can do it. All right, show is almost is pretty much over, so I'm just gonna get through two more stories real quick, just so

you guys are up to date. Microsoft Store is closing sadly, all physical locations or a majority of physical locations of the Microsoft Store are closing, and they paint a Rosie picture for the retail team members that work there. So I don't know if they're losing their jobs or they're going to move on to different positions in the company, but they say they're kind of going to go to corporate facilities or continue to serve customers remotely, providing sales,

training and support. So I guess Microsoft decided they don't really need these stores. And if you ever went to a mall where there's a Microsoft store and an Apple store, it's kind of sad because the Apple store would be packed and the Microsoft store would be empty, and it's just I don't know, you know, And it's probably because ninety nine percent of the people in the Apple store there for an iPhone, and then they see an iPad, and then they see maccomputer and then they see all

these other things and they just get it. Whereas with Microsoft, most people have a Microsoft computer and that's about it. They don't need to go in for repairs and questions and things all the time, so they just Microsoft just has a different business. So they are going to keep Microsoft Experience centers in London, New York, Sydney, and on

their campus in Redmond, Washington, but that's it. And the stores have been closed since late March, which means it's kind of sad that they're just not going to reopen, which is really really crazy. So that's sad. And on a final note, Google nest Hub Max, I don't know how many of you have one of these, but if you do, they've added some pretty cool features. You can

now do group calling, which is really cool. So you can say, h, Google, make a group call, and you have to set up your groups in duo on the app first before you do this on the screen, But once you do, you can meet with those people on duo and Duo is up to thirty two people. But if you really want to take it to the next level, you can connect with up to one hundred people on

Google Meet right from this little nest Hub Max. And if you're not familiar with the Nest Hub Max, this is their smart display that's also smart speaker, but it also has a camera inside and the screen is a little bit bigger, and this is really really cool. You can also have a speed dial for your contact so

you can call them from this thing. But here's my favorite part is that you can use Google Meet to start your meeting and you can just say h Google, start a meeting to connect with up to one hundred people on Google Meet. Or you can say join a meeting, or you can say join my next meeting if your meeting is in your calendar, and it will just automatically

do that. Now, why do I think that's so cool is because let's say you had one of these things on your desk, it now frees up your computer because you can type on your computer and do all that stuff. But you're joining your meeting, your group meeting from the nest hub Max. I'm saying all this with the reality that nobody's using Google Meet except people that are forced to, perhaps from their organization, and ninety nine point nine percent

of people are actually just using Zoom. So I wish that Google would have enabled Zoom functionality on there because it would have been a game changer and people probably would have bought these things for that. But again, there are two competing companies, and everything we have nowadays with technology has to live in a silo by some unspoken rules. So sadly we're all being pushed to silos, and I don't see a day where nest hub Max is going to work with Zoom. So sadly, all right, that's gonna

do it for this episode of the show. Can you believe it's over? I've got some housekeeping. I was on Brian Tong's Apple Bits XL podcast, So if you know Brian Tong, him and I used to work at c neet together and he went off on his own became very successful as a YouTuber. I couldn't believe. I just checked his Twitter and wow, he's got a lot of Twitter followers. He's got hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers, so he is killing it on his own. Good job,

Brian Tong. Check out his podcast called Apple Bits XL. I'm on the latest show talking about WWDC and all the announcements. If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, just go to richon tech dot tv hit the email button at the bottom of the page that will submit your question. Also, we would love it if you would rate and review this podcast to help

other people discover it. All you have to do is go to rate this podcast dot com slash rich on tech Miles and Lily recently gave us five stars, saying, Rich and Megan, I just wanted to let you know how much I love your podcasts. I have learned so much about your iPhone. I have both of your books, and I look forward to your new podcast every week. I tell everyone that they should be listening to it

because it's so informative. I like the fact that you don't have to pretend or you don't pretend to know everything, and you seem to research every answer that you give someone, and you're very thorough. Keep up the good work. Thank you, Miles and Lily. If you'd like your review read on this show, just go ahead and leave one. You can find me on all social media networks at rich on Tech. My name is rich dmiro On, behalf of everyone that gets this show to your ears. Thank you so much

for listening. We'll talk to you real soon. Hm,