Axios

Asked about the recent removal of VPN apps from the Chinese App Store, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company had no choice under local laws, but expressed hope the crackdown won't be permanent.

"We're hopeful that over time the restrictions we are seeing (will be) loosened," Cook said on a conference call with analysts. "Innovation really requires freedom to communicate and collaborate."

While Apple's business was down yet again in Greater China, CEO Tim Cook says he is encouraged that business there is improving, especially in mainland China.

"We were very encouraged by the results this quarter," Cook said on a conference call with analysts. "We improved as we thought we would from previous quarters." (Sales were still down year-over-year for Greater China, but less so than in recent quarters.)

Cook noted that sales in mainland China were actually flat year over year and, were it not for currency fluctuations, would have been up 6%.

Other notes on China:

• Cook said the iPad and Mac grew much more than the overall Chinese market for tablets and computers
• iPhone sales were relatively flat year on year, Similar to the broader market.
• Services grew extremely strongly during the quarter

"We see all of those as very encouraging signs," Cook said.

Apple reported quarterly earnings and revenue slightly ahead of what Wall Street was expecting, but more importantly issued a strong forecast for the current quarter.

Bottom line: All eyes will be on what Apple has to say (or not) about the next iPhone. But investors were encouraged by the company's financial outlook, which calls for revenue for the current quarter and runs through the end of September, to be between $49 billion and $52 billion.

In its first foray into hardware, Facebook is developing a video chat device for the home, according to Bloomberg. Facebook is also working on a smart speaker to go up against the likes of Amazon Echo and Google Home, Bloomberg says, citing unnamed sources. Both devices would run a voice assistant service also being built by Facebook.

Why it matters: These projects are coming from Facebook's experimental Building 8 lab, run by former Googler Rugina Dugan, that was created to build hardware to encourage consumers to spend more time an all-Facebook ecosystem of products, centered on the company's social core. It underscores the race between the top tech companies, including Apple and Microsoft, to control consumers' interactions not only with each other, but also with devices and voice-activated services in their daily lives.

Internet payment company Stripe has quietly begun handling a large portion of Amazon's transactions, a deal that can help Stripe significantly increase its transaction volume, Bloomberg reports. The number of transactions Stripe is handling is unknown, as the companies aren't commenting.

Why it matters: Stripe, the company founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, handles tens of billions of dollars in internet transactions every year. It makes money by charging a small fee on each transaction. The low margins in the online payment business means Stripe has to process high volumes of transactions to effectively compete in the market. The deal with Amazon could help Stripe live up to its $9.2 billion valuation.

British Home Secretary Amber Rudd is in Silicon Valley as part of her campaign to push platform companies to do more to combat extremist content. She's attending a forum involving tech companies devoted to the issue.

• Rudd has been prodding companies to let law enforcement access encrypted data. "Companies are constantly making trade-offs between security and 'usability', and it is here where our experts believe opportunities may lie," she said in a Telegraph op-ed published late Monday. But encryption supporters say it'd be impossible to make any real tradeoffs without rendering it useless.
• Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, who met with Rudd this year, told the BBC recently if "people move off those encrypted services to go to encrypted services in countries that won't share the metadata, the government actually has less information, not more."
• Sky News says that she'll huddle with Apple, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft. "We look forward to further conversations about how Facebook and WhatsApp can work with policymakers to address this challenge," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

N.Y. Times Quote of the Day, from Marina Umaschi Bers, a professor of computer science and child development at Tufts University who directs a research group that is working in part on how to prepare children for an increasingly automated economy:

Technology can be a vehicle to help people create and collaborate better, but at the end of the day, people need to learn to work with people.

Lawyers for ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick have told Alphabet's self-driving car unit that they have recovered more than 400 missing text messages and will turn them over by Tuesday, August 1, according to new court documents.

• Last month, Waymo complained that Uber was withholding evidence, including Kalanick's text messages with Anthony Levandowski, the former employee at the center of Waymo's trade secret theft lawsuit against Uber. Because the text messages were not initally found, Waymo accused him of deleting them.
• Because Uber didn't provide the messages before Kalanick's deposition on July 27, the company has agreed to make him available for a second one.
• Waymo is also seeking an unredacted copy of a presentation by Kalanick and other execs to Uber's board of directors in April 2016 about its plan to acquire Levandowski's startup, Otto. Waymo argues that the presentation was for business purposes, not legal, and thus can't be confidential.

Why this matters: one of the biggest questions is whether Uber/Travis knew what Levandowski was doing and helped him do it. So far Uber has argued that they had no idea and Levandowski was just a rogue actor so Waymo wants to see what the two of them discussed.

U.S. companies are largely unprepared for what's about to hit them when sweeping new EU data laws take effect next year. The regulation — the General Data Protection Regulation (or GDPR) — is intended to give users more control of how their personal data is used and streamline data processes across the EU. Companies that fail to comply with the complex law will face steep fines of up to 4% of their global annual revenue.

Why it matters: Europe has by far taken the most aggressive regulatory stance on protecting consumer privacy and will in many ways be a litmus test for regulating the currency of the data economy. It impacts a huge number of businesses from advertisers to e-commerce platforms whose data flows through EU countries. That means everyone from Google to your neighbor who sells shoes on eBay could be affected.