Photo illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos by Philip Pacheco, Bloomberg, Getty Images In a redux of a case against Apple and iOS, Epic aims to dismantle barriers that could spell higher fees for app makers — and, Google argues, keep Android safe and competitive. Continue reading…

Sam Altman. “Clearly our governance structure had a problem,” according to Altman. Continue reading…

From left to right: Conrad Kramer, Kim Beverett, and Ari Weinstein of Software Applications Incorporated. AI chatbots like ChatGPT have, to date, been fairly impersonal, existing outside of the apps and data that we use every day. A new startup by three ex-Apple employees called Software Applications Incorporated hopes to change that.The company’s CEO, Ari Weinstein, is a repeat founder, having sold his last startup, the iOS automation app Workflow, to Apple in 2017 alongside co-founder and CTO Conrad Kramer. This time, the two have been joined by Kim Beverett, a 10-year Apple vet who was onstage at this year’s WWDC and previously oversaw product management for various teams, including Safari, Messages, FaceTime, and user privacy. In their first interview since leaving Apple to start something new, the trio tells me that their focus is on... Continue reading…

Call of Duty: Warzone is a free-to-play battle royale shooter, and to get the best out of it, you need the best ping possible. Ping refers to the amount of time it takes your PC or console to communicate with the server. In an ideal world, you’ll connect to a nearby server with a low ping and plenty of players, but in reality, connections can be way less consistent. Using a VPN with Warzone can help you get on a server with plenty of other players and a consistent connection, even if it’s not the closest one to you.

A Google Nest Cam set up in a garage will soon be able to send an alert if the door is left open. | Screenshot by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge Google’s adding a new garage door detection feature to its Nest security cameras that will alert you if your garage door has been left open. The company is also bringing the first-gen Google Nest Outdoor Cam to the Google Home app and finally allowing Nest Cam users to create custom clips in the Google Home app.These new features are part of the Google Home app’s public preview and are rolling out this week. Adina Roth, product manager of Google Home & Nest, announced the updates in a blog post on Wednesday. Image: Google The new garage door detection feature leverages AI image detection, according to Google. According to Roth, the garage door detection feature can detect and alert you when the door is closed,... Continue reading…

From Samsung bringing their web browser to Windows PCs to the Microsoft Paint app getting a generative AI upgrade, this week may have put some happy faces on many Windows users. But users seem to be equally dissatisfied, if not more, after finding out that Microsoft is automatically installing the HP Smart app through the Microsoft Store app on PCs running Windows 10 and Windows 11 without their consent.

Laura Normand / The Verge Some of the biggest names in tech will testify before the US Senate on January 31st, 2024 during a hearing about online child exploitation. In a Wednesday announcement, the Senate Judiciary Committee said it will hear from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Linda Yaccarino, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, and Discord CEO Jason Citron.Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) issued subpoenas for Yaccarino, Spiegel, and Citron earlier this month after receiving “repeated refusals to appear during several weeks of negotiations.” Zuckerberg and Chew voluntarily agreed to testify. The senators say the hearing will give the CEOs the chance to “testify about their failure to protect children... Continue reading…

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Evernote is going to limit new and existing free users to a maximum of just 50 notes and one notebook starting December 4th, the company announced in a blog post on Wednesday. The change, which Evernote had been testing, means that free users who have a high volume of notes may have to consider paying for one of Evernote’s other plans or switching over to another note-taking platform.If you currently have more than the allotted 50 notes or one notebook, Evernote says that you’ll still be able to “view, edit, export, share, and delete existing notes and notebooks.” But it seems like if you want to create any new notes or notebooks, you’re going to have to delete notes or notebooks to fall under the limit. We’ve asked Evernote if that’s... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel / The Verge Until today, we’d never heard of “Project Boston”. It was Activision Blizzard King’s big plan to earn more money from its mobile games by changing its relationship with Google. And if things had gone differently, it would have given Activision Blizzard its own app store on Android.In late 2019, according to internal emails and documents I saw today in the courtroom during the Epic v. Google trial, the company decided it was going to dual-track two intriguing parallel plans. The first plan was to build its own mobile game store — either in partnership with Epic Games and Clash of Clans publisher Supercell or all by itself — to bypass the Google Play Store. You’d download it from a website, sideload it onto your Android phone, and then... Continue reading…

Noah Berger Amazon wants users to evaluate AI models better and encourage more humans to be involved in the process. During the AWS re: Invent conference, AWS vice president of database, analytics, and machine learning Swami Sivasubramanian announced Model Evaluation on Bedrock, now available on preview, for models found in its repository Amazon Bedrock. Without a way to transparently test models, developers may end up using ones that are not accurate enough for a question-and-answer project or one that is too large for their use case. “Model selection and evaluation is not just done at the beginning, but is something that’s repeated periodically,” Sivasubramanian said. “We think having a human in the loop is important, so we are offering a way to... Continue reading…

Whether it's the sales figures collected by research firms, Samsung's own marketing claims, or my own personal anecdotal experience from seeing what phones people use in multiple countries, it's clear the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 was a big hit, and perhaps the first foldable phone to achieve mainstream status instead of being a niche, enthusiast-only device.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Microsoft is adding an energy saver mode for Windows 11 Insiders (Build 26002) that “extends and enhances” the existing battery saver option. The new mode doesn’t apply to just laptops like battery saver does — you can also use energy saver on a desktop computer if you want to conserve electricity, too.Aside from availability on both desktop devices and laptops (even when they’re plugged in), energy saver works pretty much the same as battery saver mode. The new feature also helps save energy by “trading off some system performance,” so you might not want to use it if you’re gaming. Image: Microsoft You can enable energy saver from the Quick Settings menu, or you can configure it from the Settings menu by heading to... Continue reading…