The best apps download superpowers to your smartphone. The Verge covers the new and noteworthy Android apps, iPhone apps, and games, highlighting great design, impressive utility, and novel features. If it belongs on your phone, you’ll find it on The Verge.
Instead of just notifying your friends or family members when you safely return home, Snapchat now allows you to send recurring alerts when you reach other locations you frequent, like a class or workplace.
Sure, you could just load a script up in a window on your laptop, but then you wouldn’t be looking into the camera, which makes things feel awkward and amateurish when you’re recording a video. Moody solves that by putting the prompter in the notch right next to the lens.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is “scaling back” plans for the coach and will instead roll out some of what it had been working on into the Heath app over time. Maybe not the worst idea.
After rolling out account verification for brands and individual users, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman writes in a letter to shareholders that the platform is trying to make it easier to identify bots, too.
In the age of AI, if you can’t easily distinguish a real person’s thoughts or recommendations from a bot, that trust erodes. That’s why we’re actively working on ways to preserve our authenticity and conversation quality.
After adding tennis last June, the free Apple Sports app is introducing golf so fans can keep tabs on “official PGA Tour and LPGA Tour events.” You’ll have access to individual players’ scorecards, hole-by-hole results, and live leaderboards starting with the PGA’s WM Phoenix Open tournament this weekend.
Key privacy settings and best practices.
You can tell your Instacart shopper whether you prefer not ripe, almost ripe, or ripe bananas, as well as receive a photo of the bundle your shopper picked out.
Instacart says it will explore expanding this feature to avocado ripeness and deli meat thickness in the future, and it’s showing off a “Bananas” Super Bowl ad with Ben Stiller and Benson Boone to highlight the feature.
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An update coming today also introduces an “auto” mode that switches between ChatGPT’s responses and Google Search results based on your query. OpenAI is also working on Windows support and a mobile version of the browser.
It’s the first time that’s happened, and while generative AI “led revenue growth,” it “was not the only driver,” according to the report.
Consumers spent $85 billion in apps last year, a 21 percent increase year over year, compared to $81.8 billion in games, which was up just 1 percent.
With the launch, any user can start a community on “on nearly any topic,” according to TechCrunch. That would solve one of my biggest issues with the platform when I tested it last year. The public beta rollout is live now, Digg says.
Update: Digg posted about the beta.
[TechCrunch]
Ahmad Al-Dahle, who previously led the team behind Meta’s Llama AI models, is now joining Airbnb as part of plans to revamp search and other features in its app, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky tells Bloomberg:
What that means is moving away from an anonymous customer just searching, and making sure everyone’s search, everyone’s conversation is unique to them and that we take into account all prior conversations we ever had with you, all information we have.
An update rolling out today will allow Slackbot to do things like summarize information across multiple channels, help you sort through messages, and find time to schedule meetings with colleagues. The updated Slackbot is coming to Business Plus and Enterprise Plus customers following last year’s test.
While trying to find vacation info, the chatbot told a WSJ reporter that “Tripadvisor is being a little useless.” They tested several chatbot AI apps, and apparently, Instacart is one of the better ones -- having your former CEO become OpenAI’s “CEO of Applications” must have helped.
Other apps were slow, buggy, and complicated, and, at this stage, still slower than traditional iPhone apps.
Just like last year, Apple has announced new fitness content that will start rolling out next week (if you want to try another app, we’ve got suggestions).
There are new multi-week Strength, HIIT, or Yoga Fitness Comeback workouts, new music playlists, a Strava challenge for Apple Watch owners, and new Time to Walk audio episodes with Penn Badgley, Mel B, and Michelle Monaghan.
After going a year between his first and second videos investigating the PayPal-owned shopping extension, MegaLag didn’t make us wait long for part three.
Here, he says he has evidence of how Honey evaded detection by affiliate networks with “stand-down” rules against referral-fee-stealing behavior, and responses to Honey co-founder Ryan Hudson’s Reddit AMA. PayPal has not responded to requests for comment.
Beyond part one’s exposure of affiliate revenue hijacking, MegaLag digs into Honey’s “extortion” by adding limited-use “friends and family” type discounts and lying to the store owners about never removing codes for unaffiliated businesses while trying to sign them up as partners.
Other misdeeds described include marketing Honey’s for-adult-use-only browser extension to kids in partnership with channels like Mr Beast, who encouraged kids to install it everywhere they could, while collecting data on everyone who installed its extension, even if they never signed up. And despite a cease-and-desist from PayPal’s lawyers, this series isn’t over yet.
