Importantly, there is only an incentive for L2/L3 data on business/corporate cards, which have an inflated interchange rate above personal cards anyway.
This is not a scheme to get enhanced targeting data for personal transactions.
Ive heard of casinos trying to pay out winnings using some kind of prepaid card, where theyd also get info about how people spent their casino winnings. Lots of ways to leverage that data.
Prepaid cards are great for the vendor because they have breakage (the unspent amount before expiry). I doubt the data is worth much relative to that. If anything, they have much less of a tie to the individual.
The title is clickbait, they're not specifically adding Apple Pay (9to5Google did the same thing with the title 'Walmart finally supporting in-store tap to pay with Google Pay').
At the possible expense of just linking every page of their dark ages saga, The Chief Executive's handbook is somehow even more mask off 'but really, just absolutely fuck that guy'.
Yeah, except profits are down from the peak. I do not know enough about the market, but my suspicion is that they basically benefited by focusing on a specific market, "Focus," and will basically see this erode over time as more companies in the high end move into their market.
pivoting is useful if you are doing several things, one well and the others badly. You stop doing whatever it is you are bad at and focus on what you are good.
If your company is going strongly overall, you can just continue doing whatever you are doing (adapting to the market is still necessary, but not with huge changes)
What's worse is that the previous version of the same Weather app was fully native on Windows 10. Why would you take a perfectly working app and downgrade it like this?
They probably needed an electron web app that could run the (likely ~8MB+) javascript bundle loaded by their ad provider.
Sad reality aside; when the new app released I was using an old AppxBundle of the last good version downloaded from a microsoft store archive website. Later I fully uninstalled the app as it got annoying to cancel the autoupdate for that specific app.
I use a random website now.
In a parallel universe Microsoft would have never killed Windows phone and they would have been forced to keep these apps a little more memory/performance friendly.
I hesitate to make this sound positive, but to their credit, the leadership at Microsoft who likely steered the weather app towards using the web stack at least correctly identified a major problem: there is not a single good native UI framework for Windows today.
Was switching to webviews the right solution to that problem? Absolutely not. But at least we can admit they were in a difficult position.
At the time this bloated weather app was probably developed, the choice that most of the rest of the shell and in-box apps were making was C++/WinRT paired with System XAML (i.e. Windows::UI::Xaml aka WinUI 2 aka UWP XAML) via the still-marked-as-experimental-in-2026 islands API (DesktopWindowXamlSource) like the taskbar/control center/file explorer/etc. Or worse, actual UWP, such as the Start Menu, Settings app, or Notification Center. This can have a decent-ish memory footprint - Control Center, for example, uses about 150MB of commit and 30MB of working set. Still not good, but not atrocious either. But even for this mediocre level of performance and efficiency, you end up paying a very high cost in terms of development time and expertise required. This stack "just works" like 70% of the time, but the other 30%, you're scratching your head figuring out where you forgot to hold a strong reference across a co_await boundary. Or figuring out why a XAML ListView corrupted its recycling pool in korea because window messages reentered a nested message loop started by XAML's outbound RPC call that's only made in the TextBlock code for east asian languages. You get a razor thin veneer of user-friendliness, i.e. MVVM, x:bind, co_await ("hey, this is just like C# + WPF!") on top of a 60% finished UI framework and a terrible programming language feature which is quite possibly one of the leakiest abstractions in the history of the world (C++ coroutines). The fact that Raymond Chen managed to write a blog series on C++ coroutines in Windows that is 60 posts long is damning: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20210504-01/?p=10...
On top of all this, Microsoft's status in the industry has dropped. And they have absolutely no structured technical training program for new employees. I guess just pray you get paired with a decent mentor. So, young employees fresh out of undergrad who are asked to work in these codebases are super unproductive and make mistakes on a regular basis that cause inscrutable memory corruption bugs.
For a time, leadership was wildly flailing around trying to find some alternative to this madness. At the time when this bloated weather app was developed, the hot idea was that we should be switching to the web stack for native experiences. There was some low effort hand waving about how WebView2 would be continuously improved, we would mitigate the memory footprint by sharing webviews, etc.
My position is that there's no reasonable choice for building efficient native UX on windows today except by targeting a lower level graphics API like DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL, or even software rendering in GDI, rather than a GUI framework. Most serious software on windows ends up going down the route of literally building their own UI framework, i.e. web browsers, office, adobe suite. If you don't mind the dated look/functionality of win32's stock common controls, that's also a decent option. I've heard that Qt is okay, but haven't tried it.
One final note: if anyone is earnestly wondering whether WinUI 3 is perhaps, finally, an end to all the bloodshed, my take is: no It is (currently) UWP XAML wearing a trenchcoat, plus a needless namespace change that broke compat, plus the baffling choice to run a copy of the compositor in-process in order to - wait for it - be able to ship WinUI 3 apps downlevel to Windows 7 and have acrylic work correctly!!! (to their credit, they have signaled that they are reversing this decision and moving back to the system compositor). WinUI 3 has the potential to be good, but appears to be too underfunded to achieve its potential.
I'm not surprised. We're trying to migrate from Jira and Confluence (because we can't have our data outside our servers), and while Jira has many alternatives, it's difficult to find worthy competitors to Confluence. They either have an awful UI/UX, or don't have as many features. We're looking at Xwiki, but simply try to have multiple users simultaneously edit a table and you'll see why everyone prefers Confluence...
This used to be a thing on Windows Phone, you could download maps in the settings and they would be available in the default Maps app, but also in HERE Maps, Transit, etc.
I disable all animations everywhere (Android, Windows, Gnome) because I hate that they make me feel like I'm losing time waiting for something that could be instant, and they sometimes make me dizzy. I'm particularly exasperated that iOS doesn't offer that possibility.
But rotating an image is one of the rare use cases where I do want the animation. It makes me see what action happened, with which rotation angle, without having to think twice.
They're not the only ones, Anthropic and Google recently announced they'll be using xAI data centers, and I wouldn't be surprised if AWS also started to have capacity problems in the near future.
It's only available in the US, many countries have lower interchange fees and prohibit sending this data.
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