People are spreading unfounded rumors of Apple cancelling their investment in Indonesia

Apparently people are spreading misinformation that Apple has backed out of its Rp1.6 trillion ($100 million) investment in Indonesia and canceled plans to build a resource plant after Tim Cook’s visit to Indonesia last month, based on a clickbait headline.

First of all, that plant cancellation story was lifted from news coverage from early 2023 when an official from the Maritime Affairs and Investment Ministry claimed that Apple approached the government in 2016 about building a lead processing plant but the company reportedly said that the government must get rid of illegal mining operations and meet the company’s environmental, social, and governance guidelines. The government’s failure to comply with that request meant that plans to build the plant were shelved, the official said. That is old story, nothing about that is new. There was also no investment amount mentioned because it never came to that point.

Secondly, the $100 million investment has been spent gradually since 2018 on establishing and running three Apple Developer Academy sites with another one expected to open in Bali next year. It’s an ongoing investment as part of regulatory compliance to meet the local component requirement necessary continue selling 4G and 5G smartphones in the country. Back in 2016 Apple reportedly committed $44 million on establishing an Apple Developer Academy in the country within three years, the first of which opened in 2018.

This investment is indeed small compared to the amount of money spent by Indonesian consumers on purchasing iPhones in 2023. Figures from the Ministry of Industries revealed that out of the nearly 2.8 million smartphones imported by Indonesia last year, 85% of them had been iPhones because despite domestic manufacturing of 50 million smartphones a year, Apple’s smartphones are fully imported.

Apple supplier Pegatron was once reported to invest $1 billion to open an Apple manufacturing plant in Batam in 2019 but that report was either inaccurate or that the company drastically changed its plans in short order. While Pegatron’s consumer electronics plant did open in Batam, it has yet to manufacture Apple products to date.

Certain government officials and critics have pointed out that the amount invested by Apple in the country is minuscule in comparison, especially when other Apple products are included. Additionally, with Apple’s newly announced $250 million investment in Singapore to expand its original campus in the country and the company’s increased investment in Vietnam, where the company has spent nearly $16 billion since 2019, Apple’s Indonesian investment numbers and plans are incomparable.

It’s for this very reason that President Joko Widodo has assigned his most senior aide, Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investments Luhut B. Panjaitan, to ensure that not only will Apple’s investment plans come to fruition but that the country can play a bigger role in Apple’s manufacturing and development operations.

In short, it’s simply not true that Apple already canceled its recently announced $100 million investment. All the commotion came about due to the conflation of a government official’s statement in early 2023 and the recently cited investment figure for Apple’s Developer Academy.

Aphantasia

It never made sense to me when people ask to picture or imagine something in your mind and then describe it or talk about it like it’s something you see on a screen. I think it wasn’t until about a decade or so ago I learned about aphantasia and I literally can’t imagine how that’s like to have a visual representation of anything visible in your mind.

For me recollecting something is conceptual, it’s an idea, an abstract based on a memory or knowledge. It’s not at all visual. Visual is just what you see and nothing else. If you’re familiar with that image of five heads each with gradually deteriorating visuals of an apple from a very clear picture of an apple in the first head to nothing at all in the last one, I’m that last one.

This BBC article explains what aphantasia is and how it affects certain people.

Those who cannot visualise anything in their mind’s eye are probably among 1% of people with extreme aphantasia, according to a review of studies on the phenomenon.

They are also less likely to recognise faces, remember the sound of a piece of music or the feel of sandpaper, and more likely to work in science, maths or computing.

And up to 6% of people may experience some degree of aphantasia. 

That description doesn’t really fly with me, though. I do recognize faces but forget their names often, much like Inspector Gadget who says he “never forgets a face”. I remember parts of songs like no one else around me can. I can often recognize that part of a song comes from another song and if I can’t recall what the song was that had the same rhythm or melody, it would drive me crazy and determined to find it. But I do work a lot with numbers and my career had been almost entirely in the tech scene.

Has it affected me personally or professionally? I honestly can’t say because I can’t compare my experience with what it’s like to have a visual mind but I’m pretty sure I would have experienced things very differently.

Super Apps in America might be different from the Asian ones

In this Vergecast episode they keep saying Apple doesn’t allow super apps on iOS so they won’t have to concede the market to something like WeChat which made the hardware mostly irrelevant. They also said the banks are prevented from using the payment feature directly so they have to sign a deal with Apple to use Apple Pay.

I get that it’s an American perspective but don’t publish misinformation. China’s WeChat and Southeast Asian “super” apps like Grab, Gojek, and Air Asia all work on iPhones with no problems whatsoever. We use these apps daily to book a car, a bike, order food, arrange for courier deliveries, pay for stuff, etc.

Highlighting that last part, we use these apps to pay for things. The retail finance world in Southeast Asia is probably a world away from the American one. We don’t just use our bank accounts to make payments, we often send our money to multiple digital wallets and other finance-enabled apps allowing us to pay for utility bills, insurance, car registration, installments, paylaters, and many other payments, and earn ourselves points or cash back just like credit cards.

Our shopping apps are also payment apps. Imagine using your Amazon, Uber, or Temu app to pay for your city ordinance, cable, neighborhood services, and many other bills.

Most banks and digital wallets in Southeast Asia skip Apple, Android, or Samsung Pay altogether because Android is dominant so they all adopt QR payments in their respective markets.

Right now a common QR payment is being rolled out across almost all of Southeast Asia so whichever Southeast Asian bank or wallet you use you’ll be able to use your account to pay for almost anything anywhere in the region that accepts QR payments.

I regularly use my Singaporean UOB account to pay for things like groceries and gasoline in Jakarta by scanning the QR code on the merchant terminal and it’s as seamless as using your card. Sure it’s not as fancy as tapping your phone or watch to pay for stuff but in terms of financial inclusion, it’s so much wider since cheap Android phones are on board.

There’s also no good reason why Uber and Uber Eats have to be different apps! If anything Uber is one of the few American companies that know everything about super apps because they competed with Grab and Gojek in Southeast Asia before retreating and merging their local ops with Grab. They were also in China, the original super app market.

Apple is not preventing super apps from existing or working on your phones. Is anyone even trying it in the US? It’s not Apple who’s actively preventing it, it’s the “western” digital culture, the market, it’s Americans who don’t want them. What you might prefer to have instead in the US are integrated services or features around a specific theme or category.

Like Google Maps gives you direction but also information about venues and locations including place reviews, prices, photos, opening times, transit and traffic information, and so on.

Right now Spotify is trying to be some sort of a super app by offering not just songs and lyrics and information about musicians and bands but also music videos and podcasts, and now they’re trialing online education courses in the UK.

Who knows maybe Netflix will also add education courses or classes or live sports and events aside from streaming movies, series, documentaries, and games because those are things you do on your TV.

Think of what you can do in Fortnite or Roblox already and expand that outside the narrow boundaries. I mean Fortnite and Roblox already hosted concerts, Duolingo added maths and music courses.

See what I’m getting at? The category expansions app developers are trying in the “western” markets are not all encompassing like in Asia but they grow out of a central theme.

FWIW, you can lump Instagram into this category because it’s a photo and video sharing app that has direct and group messaging, audio and video calls, online shops, and gives you information about venues and locations. Who knows what else will Meta be adding to Instagram in the near future?

X suffers from declining usage but you won’t hear that from Indonesians

NBC News has the stats from a few traffic monitoring companies showing the drop in usage and downloads of the former Twitter app.

In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S., down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco. The U.S. user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022, the first full month of Musk’s owning the app, and in total it’s down 23% since then, Sensor Tower said. 

The numbers were nearly as bad worldwide, as daily active users on the mobile app fell to 174 million in February, down 15% from a year earlier, the firm said. The worldwide user base has been flat or down every month during Musk’s tenure began except one, when it grew slightly in October and then resumed falling, according to Sensor Tower. 

Other social media apps experienced modest increases in their worldwide user bases during the same period, according to the research, with Snapchat growing 8.8%, Instagram 5.3%, Facebook 1.5% and TikTok 0.5%. Those apps all experienced declines over that period in the U.S., but none was as steep as the decline on X. 

X had “the most material decline in active users compared to its peers,” Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, wrote in a research report. 

The company also struggles to retain advertisers with 75% of the top 100 ceasing their spend on X. The kinds of ads you see on the site are now primarily cryptocurrency, AI apps, individuals promoting their own accounts, and other oddities.

While there’s no numbers shared for individual countries or markets, traffic and attention for the Indonesian market seems to remain high or at least visibly active, despite the exodus reported worldwide.

What’s happening in the US and most of the English speaking community doesn’t seem to affect the Indonesian speaking users who continue to post and have conversations on the platform.

Politics, entertainment, and daily life activities dominate the discourse in the market especially with the general election happening in February and the results only just announced on Wednesday. The local scene on X seems to remain healthy more than a year after the acquisition and just under a year after the platform was legally reestablished under X Corporation.

As the English speaking crowd slowly make their way to alternative platforms such as BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, and other platforms on the social web, the bulk of the Indonesian crowd are mostly sticking to Instagram and TikTok in addition to X itself and major brands such as Bank Mandiri, BCA, Mitsubishi, Grab, Warner Music, and Indosat, are still buying spots on X.

There’s little to no push factor that will drive them away from the platform and no amount of pull will convince them to make a move. Unless there’s an existential threat to their presence on X or to X itself, it’s extremely unlikely for Indonesians on the platform to switch to another. The majority, especially the younger demographics, are already on TikTok and Instagram anyway because they prefer video platforms, which leaves text based alternatives a niche.

Everything is a billboard these days

Car sharing and rental company Free2Move rolled out a new advertising unit in Germany recently where they placed ad screens on the rear side windows of their cars.

On-car advertising is by no means new. For decades cabs around the world have had advertising boards or brackets installed on their trunk or the roof as a way to increase revenue. Brands have also deployed cars or other vehicles to promote their products during campaign periods, and racing cars have always sold advertising or brand placements as part of sponsorship packages.

These days even private car owners can also partner with certain advertising companies to place stickers or wraps on most parts of their cars to earn money as they drive around the city, so there’s nothing surprising or novel about placing ads on cars.

However, Free2Move, which is a Stellantis subsidiary, decided that it’s a good idea to place advertising screens on the rear windows instead of stickers or wraps. According to Reddit users, these displays don’t activate unless the car is parked or stationary, most likely to avoid breaking local laws on car safety.

It’s not difficult to imagine the thought process that went into creating this ad unit. A screen takes away the need to take the car to the shop to place or replace stickers or wraps as necessary. Depending on how the technology works, they may be able to program the ads and deploy them at will or as part of a schedule, or they can update them over the air. Any typos or errors on the ad which may escape QA stage may be fixed much more easily that printed ads.

However, screen-based ads are much more distracting, and therefore less safe. When they’re only deployed when the car is stationary, it’s much less effective than having a wrapped car drive around town because far fewer people would see the ad on the the car when they’re parked versus when they’re on the move. The ad product may be novel or innovative but the effectiveness is certainly up in the air.

Speaking of up in the air, just the other day I posted about Indonesian airlines putting up ads on the overhead compartment panels on their planes. This is not new, they’ve been doing this for so long, maybe a decade or more, and they’re not the only airlines that do this.

These ads are certainly eyesores but they do take advantage of a captive market. What are you gonna do on an airplane, not look around? I’d argue that these ads are much more effective than the window screens on Free2Move, at least when it comes to creating awareness and imprinting the brand and product on people’s minds.

Some people don’t like ads because they can be intrusive and pervasive, not to mention distracting, which they certainly are when they’re on LED panels. However, it’s nigh impossible to avoid or ignore them and in many cases ads can be informative. People love ads that entertain, that are inspirational, and they equally hate intrusive and incessant ones.

These car window ads, in my opinion, because they supposedly don’t run when the car is moving, more likely serves little purpose, even as a tech demo, because ads are all about return on investment and for advertisers, I can’t imagine the return being worth the cost or effort compared to more conventional placements.

Challenging Jakob Nielsen’s claim on accessibility

Renowned user experience guru Jakob Nielsen published a post offering generative AI as an alternative to accessibility measures which he claimed to have failed to make computers usable for disabled users. He’s been criticized for the way he offered his thoughts which can easily be taken as dismissing accessibility altogether.

Nielsen claims that he sees all computer users equally, not making distinctions based on their ability to use them so user and interface experience designers:

Where I have always differed from the accessibility movement is that I consider users with disabilities to be simply users. This means that usability and task performance are the goals. It’s not a goal to adhere to particular design standards promulgated by a special interest group that has failed to achieve its mission.

He then offers two reasons why he thinks accessibility has failed. The first is that “accessibility is too expensive for most companies” so instead of making an effort to meet the needs of disabled users, companies either forego accessibility altogether or follow a checklist of items without verifying the results with actual disabled people. That last point actually contravenes the evaluation steps on accessibility work in the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Involving actual disabled users is one of the final steps towards compliance with WAI.

The second reason is, “accessibility is doomed to create a substandard user experience” and then continues to dismiss the present approach to auditory interface because it poorly translates a two dimensional visual user interface designed for sighted people.

At the end of his argument he offers generative AI as the core of interface generator which will present a visual interface for sighted users and auditory interface not based on the visual version, for blind users.

He may well be correct in how AI in the future may play a substantial role in presenting computing interfaces based on the user’s conditions but that day has yet to arrive and it may take some time.

The current accessibility solutions for disabled users based on W3C standards are indeed interpretive of the visual interface instead of being fully designed for non sighted users, which makes them less ideal, but for such a renowned leader in experience design to dismiss the efforts entirely may lead to companies taking his advice on face value and use that as an excuse to not make the effort and investment towards accessibility and assistive technologies at all. That’s harmful.

Per Axbom, the Swedish designer and thought leader on human centered design, has a much more comprehensive breakdown of his objections over Nielsen’s proposal. Worth reading in its entirety. The crux of his argument is Nielsen is advocating for radically customized individual interfaces, not just general interface approaches for certain groups of people with different abilities. He said distinct experiences for individuals “is an extreme take with very little foundation in feasibility or desirability”.

Update 7 March:

I just came across several more reactions and responses to Nielsen’s ignorant claims about digital accessibility and they are livid.

Designer and accessibility advocate Eric W. Bailey called Nielsen “an asshole” in a very short post, but he also included links to a handful of other people’s thoughts about the matter that you might be interested to read.

A much more diplomatic response came from Léonie Watson, a board member at the W3C, telling Nielsen to rethink his views on accessibility, based on her own disability and how she’s managed to experience and contribute to the development of the web as a blind person.

In fact, just a couple of weeks prior to Nielsen’s post, she wrote a post about how the leading AI tools would present misinformation or incomplete info, skip rules and guidelines, and even fail when tasked with delivering “all the code that I need to create a set of accessible tabs for a website”.

So just like with any information delivered by AI, we still need to verify their validity, whether they’re factual, whether they work, whether they’re applicable, etc. Maybe one day that won’t be as urgent, but for now, especially in delivering universal digital experience, AI still needs human supervision and oversight to minimize mistakes. Which is ironic because we rely on digital tools to minimize our own.

Wise forced to restrict use in Indonesia to fund transfers only

The money transfer service Wise sent out an email to customers with registered Indonesian addresses on their accounts telling them that they must empty their accounts before 23 May 2024.

From then on, Wise customers in Indonesia will not be able to store, receive, or send money from their Wise accounts. They will be limited to using Wise only as a wire transfer service and nothing else due to local regulations governing financial transactions.

The company is advising customers with Indonesian addresses to inform their benefactors or clients that they can use Wise to arrange transfers to their bank accounts instead.

While fund transfer is the core of the service and Wise is a licensed remittance facilitator, it offers a wider range of services including an account that people can use to store balance and internationally send and receive money, international remittance, and issuing debit cards for international transactions.

In a lot of ways Wise is similar to PayPal as they allow customers to receive, send, and store funds on their accounts but in Indonesia Wise doesn’t appear to have a license to operate as a bank or digital wallet provider which means they’re not permitted to allow customers to store funds in a Wise account.

It would be … wise for the company to acquire the wallet license if they wish to offer their full services in Indonesia. Until they manage to secure that license, their services will remain limited to remittances, just like Western Union.

Live Action Avatar: The Last Airbender

Watched three episodes of Netflix’s live action Avatar series. As someone who only knows the original series from internet memes and still has yet to watch even a single episode of the animated series, I don’t see what’s wrong with it. It’s a perfectly fine fantasy series which seems to draw story inspiration from Star Wars.

I get that there may be differences but what do you expect when it’s an 8 episode series as opposed to 20 in the first season? On top of that, no adaptation is going to be a perfect 1:1.

I don’t know if character and story arc changes were necessarily abandoned to keep the story moving or if the team couldn’t get it to work but the original series is still there to watch and I plan to catch it finally once I’m done with the live action.

Google Testing Removal of News Tab

With Australia, Canada, and Indonesia passing laws or regulations requiring platforms to pay for news links and the US having introduced the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act last year, removing the News tab looks like Google’s response to avoid having to pay link tax to media companies.

The News tab is only missing for a limited group of users for the moment. It is a test after all and I still see it when I use Google search.

Indonesia’s Deadly Elections

71 Indonesian election officials died on duty from exhaustion following last Wednesday’s elections while more than 4,500 fell ill. Health Minister Budi Sadikin said other than exhaustion the second highest cause of death was heart failure.

Apparently nearly 400,000 people out of 6.8 million officials across the country were approved to work on the election despite having health concerns. Officials have been working 10-15 hour days to verify ballot papers, tabulate the results, submit and verify the submitted results to the central database, which has problems of its own.

So far, with 71% of the ballots officially counted, data from more than 1,200 polling stations were found to be erroneous out of more than 820,000 stations, which triggers a revote in a number of locations.

In 2019 nearly 900 election officials died on the job from exhaustion while more than 5,000 fell ill.