WhatsApp’s new Channels feature brings social media to your messaging app
Illustration: The Verge
The newest feature in WhatsApp brings a very different kind of messaging to the world’s most popular chat app. It’s called Channels, and it’s designed specifically for one-to-many broadcasts rather than conversation. The Meta-owned company calls it “a private way to follow what matters,” and names local and sports updates among the ways you might use it.
But what is a channel, really? It’s a Twitter feed, minus all the metrics and reply guys. WhatsApp has clearly noticed all the governments, transit agencies, brands, and others looking for a new (and non-Twitter) place to share their most important updates, and sees Channels as a drop-in replacement.
Channels is also a creator tool to some extent, a place for those with an audience to “send text, photos, videos, stickers, and polls,” according to WhatsApp’s launch blog post. The company has plans to build payment and other monetization services into channels, too. You’ll be able to find channels by searching for them in WhatsApp or by browsing in a newly created directory, and see their most recent updates in the Status section of the app.
WhatsApp says privacy is a key part of the experience, which is why channel admins’ information isn’t shared and the app only stores 30 days of a channel’s history. Admins can even block screenshots and forwards, making sure that what’s in the channel stays in the channel. Channels aren’t end-to-end encrypted, though; they’re treated more like your messages with businesses, which are also not totally private. But WhatsApp does say it’s thinking about ways to encrypt some channels over time.
This is mostly a really obvious feature for WhatsApp to add. Telegram has had a similar feature, also called Channels and also meant for one-to-many broadcasts, for years. Instagram has a similar feature, too, called Broadcast Channels. And it actually makes sense to bring this kind of information into WhatsApp; getting air-quality updates and train statuses feels more natural in a messaging app than intermingled with everything else on Twitter
But if you zoom out a bit, WhatsApp is quickly turning into something other than just a messaging app. Just in the last few months, the company has made it possible to use one account on multiple phones; has been working on a private newsletter tool and a new usernames system; added polls and shopping and a bunch of other Facebook-y things to the platform; revamped its Status system; improved its group chats; and much more. Channels is just the latest way WhatsApp is trying to bring social media to messaging.
Like most WhatsApp features, Channels is starting small. The company is planning to launch channels with “leading global organizations and select organizations in Colombia and Singapore,” and the feature will only be available in those two countries at first. It’ll come to more countries, and channel creation will be available to more users, “in the coming months.”
WhatsApp is obviously still a messaging app first — billions of people use it to chat with their friends and loved ones. But as it looks to grow, make more money, and become the all-encompassing super app it wants to be, it’s trying to find ways to be much more than that.
Apple wants to turn your iPhone into a pet-tracking camera
Image: Apple
Apple has a new development framework that can be used to turn your iPhone into an autonomous pet-tracking camera. According to documentation on Apple’s website, developers can use pet-tracking features with motorized phone stands to capture and follow your pet around your house while you’re not home.
As noted by Apple, developers can achieve this using a new framework called DockKit, which can create “photo and video experiences” while an iPhone is mounted on a motorized stand. From there, devs can then use something called the Animal Body Pose API (application programming interface), which is capable of identifying and tracking animals with your phone’s camera. It’s able to identify a pet’s pose, too, including if your pet is sitting down, standing up, or begging for food.
Image: Apple
By combining DockKit with Animal Body Pose API, Apple says devs can create apps that “automatically track subjects in live video across a 360-degree field of view, take direct control of the stand to customize framing, directly control the motors, and provide your own inference model for tracking other objects.” To be clear, pet-tracking isn’t an official iOS 17 feature that’s getting shipped by Apple, but the company is giving developers the tools they need to create and launch their own iPhone-powered pet cams. Apple plans on getting into more detail about all this in an upcoming session at its Worldwide Developers Conference.
Although swiveling iPhone holders have been around for quite some time now, building the feature directly into Apple’s ecosystem means that you might not be forced to use a proprietary app in order for the mount you’re using to function properly. And it seems Apple has broader ambitions for how to use your iPhone while docked: it’s also rolling out a new docking feature called StandBy, which turns your iPhone into a smart home-like display when it’s charging and tilted sideways.
Crypto Firms Start Looking Abroad as U.S. Cracks Down As the country becomes one of the world’s strictest crypto regulators, companies are exploring plans to expand internationally and possibly leave entirely.
Twitter’s window to edit tweets is now one hour, but you still have to pay for it
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
When Twitter finally added its long-awaited edit button last fall, it limited the feature to Twitter Blue subscribers and only allowed changes on original tweets (not replies) within 30 minutes of the post, but now that’s changing.
The official Twitter Blue account now says that the tweet editing window has been doubled to one hour. The post announcing the feature was edited moments after it went live to note the change but, confusingly, didn’t add any other edits past the thirty-minute mark to demonstrate.
Blue subscribers now have up to 1 hour to edit their Tweets.
Twitter’s editing perk for Blue subscribers package arrived after Elon Musk said he would buy Twitter, but well before he actually did. Even after Elon’s revamp of Blue and the installation of new CEO Linda Yaccarino on Monday, it’s still one of the features highlighted in the subscription that also gets paying users access to a blue verified checkmark label, among other things like writing posts with up to 4,000 characters.
Twitter’s support page for Blue was updated shortly after the post went up to reflect the new one-hour time limit. After the feature went live in the US last fall, my colleague David Pierce wrote that “Twitter is being as careful as can be on this one, and seems to have landed in the right place.” So far, the availability of editing hasn’t been a source for major issues that I’ve seen, and direct access to the history of edited tweets generally makes changes easy to spot.
However, as Alex Heath wrote in his Command Line newsletter, Blue signups have been slow, and in replies to the @TwitterBlue tweet, many blue-checked tweeters complain that various parts of the package aren’t working for them. At the same time, reduced ads is a feature that has been advertised as a feature of Blue since its November relaunch and still hasn’t rolled out — according to the support page, “we are working on a feature that will reduce the number of ads you see.”
Of course, some people are still waiting for the ad revenue split Elon Musk promised in February that never seemed to arrive. Concerning that split, in a recent interview, Musk said that not only is it still in the works, but it will also be backdated to his original announcement with “some reasonable revenue share.”
That’s a complicated promise from a company named in manyrecentreports about not paying its rent and other promised fees. Twitter (or X, depending on who you ask) is also now worth only one-third of the price Musk paid for it last year, and reportedly ad sales for five weeks this spring were reportedly down 59 percent from the same period last year.
Microsoft has no shame: Bing spit on my ‘Chrome’ search with a fake AI answer
Illustration: The Verge
It was time to download Google Chrome on a new Windows 11 computer.
I typed “Chrome” into the Microsoft Edge search bar.
I was greeted with a full-screen Microsoft Bing AI chatbot window, which promptly told me it was searching for... Bing features.
Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Search query: “Chrome.” Search result: “news articles about Bing features.”
I picked my jaw up off the floor and tried again. Same result every time.
Same exact text, too. This is clearly not Microsoft’s GPT-4 powered chatbot at work — it’s a completely canned interaction. Here’s how much of my screen it took up, and what it looks like zoomed in:
Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Every search result link is pushed entirely off my screen by this canned ad copy. Screenshot by Sean Hollister / The Verge
This supposed AI response even has a headline: “Bing: The Search Engine That Does More Than Just Search.”
I get it to work on a different computer. Across the country, a colleague tells me he saw the exact same thing setting up his wife’s gaming laptop. Across the ocean, another colleague pulls it up on his mobile phone. It’s not universal, but it’s absolutely not a tiny experiment in a single region, either.
Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal to you. I’m using Microsoft’s search engine in Microsoft’s browser on Microsoft’s operating system, after all — why should Microsoft willingly link me to a competitor?
Let me put things a different way: Microsoft just gave itself a full-screen ad in search results by faking an AI interaction. This “search result” is juicing Microsoft’s own product instead of respecting its users’ intent.
Yes, Microsoft has previously plugged Edge when you search for Chrome — but not like this. Let’s compare:
Even if you don’t agree with me that Microsoft is yet again shoving its Edge where it doesn’t belong, this kind of move makes a mockery of the company’s AI ambitions.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella claims he wants Edge to genuinely compete. “Let’s build first a product that is competitive in the marketplace that’s actually serving user needs,” he told us in a February interview, when my editor-in-chief Nilay Patel asked whether the Bing AI browser integration was partially an attempt to “capture marketshare from Chrome”.
“It’s not just a search engine; it’s an answer engine,” claimed Nadella earlier in the show, “because we’ve always had answers, but with these large models, the fidelity of the answers just gets so much better.”
Would you call replacing a “Chrome” search with a juiced “news articles about Bing features” search as “better”? I know where I land on that.
But it’s important to both Microsoft and Google that their answers are seen as “better,” because they’re pushing aside the ten blue links that have dominated search for so long. We recently worried out loud whether Google’s new Search Generative Experience would prioritize ads over actual answers, but it looks like we won’t have to wait to see how brazen these companies can get. Unless there’s strong pushback, I would expect the ads to win whenever it’s profitable or convenient.
When asked for comment, a spokeperson forwarded this generic statement from Microsoft product marketing director Jason Fischel:
We often experiment with new features, UX, and behaviors to test, learn, and improve experiences for our customers. These tests are often brief and do not necessarily represent what is ultimately or broadly provided to customers.
Shortly after we published this story with that comment, third-party spokesperson Chris Donohue reached out to confirm Microsoft has pulled the plug on this particular idea. “The experience is no longer flighting,” he wrote. Sure enough, I no longer see it.
Some open questions: Did this represent what Microsoft wants to provide to customers? Would it have been an experiment if I hadn’t put Microsoft on blast? And given we personally saw this on the other side of the country and the other side of an ocean, what is the company’s definition of “broadly?” I asked Microsoft a few such questions, and I’ll update you if we receive answers.
As we keep saying every time Microsoft pulls this kind of shit, it’s a shame because Edge is actually good. I was just beginning to try Microsoft’s browser again because I found Bing fascinating. Now, Bing is the reason I’m boycotting Edge once more.
Update, 9:59 PM ET:Added that Microsoft turned off this “experience” shortly after we published this story.
Samsung’s next foldable-focused Galaxy Unpacked will take place in late July
Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Samsung’s next Galaxy Unpacked event, where it typically reveals new smartphones and other gadgets, is scheduled for sometime in late July, the company announced on Tuesday. For the first time, it will take place in Seoul, South Korea. Like other recent summer Unpacked events, expect the 2023 iteration to focus on foldables.
“The foldable category embodies Samsung’s philosophy of delivering innovation that pushes boundaries to reshape the future of mobile experiences,” TM Roh, Samsung’s president and head of its mobile experience business, said in a statement. “Hosting Unpacked in Seoul holds great significance both as it is a city that has become an emerging epicenter of innovation and culture as well as the foldable category.”
A rumor from May said this year’s Unpacked could take place on July 26th. Moving forward, the Unpacked shows focused on foldables will be held in different cities that “closely align with the designated theme of each event,” Samsung says.
Regardless of exactly when this year’s event happens, the July timeframe means Unpacked will be a bit earlier than usual — last year, it took place in August. At that show, Samsung revealed the Galaxy Z Flip 4 and Z Fold 4, so I’m guessing we’ll get updates to both of those smartphones this year: the Z Flip 5 is rumored to get a larger outer display, while the Z Fold 5 is reportedly much thinner while folded. Hot foldable summer indeed!
With iOS 17, Apple lets you share AirTags with friends and family
Image: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
Apple’s AirTag item trackers are about to get more useful — with iOS 17, you’ll be able to share them and other Find My objects with up to five other people, the company has quietly revealed.
That means you can begin tracking communal property, not just wholly personal items. Where are the household car keys? What about the Apple TV remote we duct-taped an AirTag to because it unfortunately still does not come with a UWB locator of its own? It’s my turn to play Zelda — where’d the Switch go?
Frankly, it’s the excuse I needed to buy more than one single AirTag because the only personal property I lose is my wallet and Apple’s tracker makes a bit too much of a bulge. Other communal property, like a Find My-equipped coffee mug, might make a little more sense, too.
Image: Apple
FromApple’s press release: “Everyone in a group will be able to see an item’s location, play a sound, and use Precision Finding”
Please do note that this change might not be welcome to those worried about stalkers and domestic abusers — trackers are fundamentally dangerous tech in the wrong hands. If someone adds you to an AirTag, don’t blindly accept: they could then place that AirTag on your person or in your vehicle and theoretically stalk you that way.
iPhones are designed to alert you if an unknown AirTag is found traveling with you; previously, you could “borrow” an AirTag-equipped item by turning off its alerts or find and deactivate it via the alert. (Things have been harder on Android, but Google and Apple have begun working together.) But if you’ve agreed to accept someone’s shared AirTag, that AirTag won’t alert you.
Siri gets a bit smarter, but Apple Home is still lagging behind
Apple’s Siri voice assistant will soon be capable of responding to multiple requests at once. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge
Despite some hints toward a possible Apple smart display with its new StandBy feature for iPhones, Apple’s WWDC was underwhelming for the smart home. But Apple did announce one noteworthy addition, Siri will soon handle “multiple commands” in succession without you having to say its name again.
This might seem like a small update, but for anyone who uses voice control in the smart home, saying, “Siri, turn off the dining room lights and lock the front door” will be a huge improvement. However, it’s also another example of how Apple is still playing catch-up in the smart home.
Both Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant have been smart enough to understand back-to-back requests for years now, but Siri still needed to be asked nicely each time. With its newest updates, Apple has also dropped the “Hey” from “Hey Siri,” bringing it in line with the one-wake word nature of its biggest competitor, Alexa. (While “Hey Google” is still a mouthful, Google doesn’t even need its wake word in some situations).
But seriously, it’s very likely that saying city, cereal, series, and hundreds of other common Siri-adjacent words will now activate the voice assistant, which was already the worst for false wake-ups. Hopefully, Apple has worked some magic in its device’s detection capabilities to avoid this.
Image: Apple
Apple TV gets a redesigned Control Center in tvOS 17, making smart home controls easier to access.
One area where Apple is ahead of the game is with smart home control on its TV platform, and tvOS 17 has a redesigned control center that looks like it will make it slightly easier to navigate to your cameras and activate scenes using the Siri remote. There were also a couple of minor updates announced for the Apple Home app, including up to 30 days of “activity history” from devices such as door locks, garage doors, alarm systems, and contact sensors. This will be viewable in the app under Safety & Security (according to screenshots posted on Reddit) and can show when a garage door was opened or closed, a security system is activated, and when a door has been locked or unlocked. It’s a welcome feature, but again, something already found in most smart home apps.
It's also likely we’ll see a few Apple Home UI tweaks when iOS 17 actually arrives later this year. Some have already been spotted in the developer beta, such as an improved color picker for lights and a customizable Home widget. Apple also announced that PIN codes and tap-to-unlock are now available for Matter-compatible smart locks (of which there is currently one). Presumably, this opens up the ability for HomeKey locks to be added via Matter and not lose that core function. However, there aren’t currently any HomeKey-compatible locks that work with Matter.
This overall lack of activity this year highlights what I believe is Apple’s plan to rely completely on Matter for its home automation efforts going forward. The new smart home standard championed by Apple and its competitors, including Amazon, Google, and Samsung, is still barely crawling, and I don’t think we’ll see any new features from Apple Home that aren’t linked to Matter.
What’s more likely, and what I had hoped for from this year’s WWDC, is that we’ll see more of Apple’s unique features — such as adaptive lighting and HomeKit Secure Video — ported to the Matter standard for everyone to enjoy.
After all, last year’s WWDC was a banner one for Apple Home because of Matter. The company announced an all-new Apple Home app, along with an entirely new architecture for its HomeKit smart home platform, and told everyone that Matter was essentially built on HomeKit. Then a new Apple HomePod followed in January of this year with a Thread radio onboard — Thread is one of the two wireless protocols Matter runs on.
For Apple Home users, Matter has the potential to bring Apple’s smart home platform up to par with the competition when it comes to compatible devices — another place Apple has lagged behind. There will be more gadgets from more manufacturers compatible with their setup.
We’re already seeing this happen. Smart lights from Govee and smart curtains from SwitchBot now work with Apple Home, and Matter should also bring new device categories into Apple Home, including much-requested ones like robot vacuums and pet feeders. But Matter’s progress has been much slower than anyone had anticipated, and it seems like that also includes Apple.
Microsoft to pay $20 million FTC settlement over improperly storing Xbox account data for kids
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge
Microsoft is set to pay the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) a $20 million settlement over charges that the company violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The company retained certain personal information of kids far longer than it should have when they made accounts, according to a press release.
Microsoft will also have to make some changes as part of a proposed order filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on behalf of the FTC. Those changes include telling parents that a separate child account comes with additional privacy protections, requiring parents to give consent for child accounts made before 2021, making systems to delete data about necessary to get parental consent for a kids’ account, and telling other publishers when it “discloses personal information from children that the user is a child,” the press release says.
This is just the latest FTC settlement with a video game company over alleged violations of COPPA. In December 2022, Fortnite developer Epic Games reached a $520 million settlement with the FTC, with $275 million of that over the COPPA violations. Earlier that month, Epic introduced for-kids accounts for Fortnite, Rocket League, and Fall Guys.
On Monday, the FTC said that until late 2021, when a user created a Microsoft account, the company asked for certain personal information before asking a parent of an under-13 player to get involved in making the account. But the FTC alleges that Microsoft retained that personal data “sometimes for years” even if the parent didn’t finish the signup process, which is something that’s prohibited by COPPA.
“Regrettably, we did not meet customer expectations and are committed to complying with the order to continue improving upon our safety measures,” Microsoft’s Dave McCarthy, CVP of Xbox Player Services, wrote in an Xbox blog post. “We believe that we can and should do more, and we’ll remain steadfast in our commitment to safety, privacy, and security for our community.”
In the post, McCarthy says that Microsoft wasn’t deleting account creation data for child accounts due to a “technical glitch,” and that the company has since fixed the glitch and deleted the data. “The data was never used, shared, or monetized,” according to McCarthy.
Apple’s Vision Pro headset uses iris scanning for logins with Optic ID
Apple’s Optic ID as depicted in the WWDC Keynote. | Image: Apple
Apple is introducing Optic ID, its latest biometric security authentication technology and the first from the company to be based on the details of your iris. Optic ID will be used to unlock Apple’s new Vision Pro mixed reality headset that was introduced today at the WWDC 2023 event.
According to Apple, Optic ID works by analyzing a user’s iris through LED light exposure and then comparing it with an enrolled Optic ID stored on the device’s Secure Enclave. During the WWDC keynote, Apple’s VP of technology development group, Mike Rockwell, said the system could detect iris differences even with identical twins.
Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge
Face ID was introduced in 2017 on the iPhone X.
Apple’s existing biometric authentication systems include Touch ID, a fingerprint sensor, and Face ID, which authenticates your face using projected infrared dots and a depth sensor. Both of these systems were introduced on the iPhone, but Optic ID, Apple’s third overall biometric system, is being introduced on the Vision Pro. Optic ID will be used for everything from unlocking Vision Pro to using Apple Pay in your own headspace.
As with every Apple security feature, the company is stating Optic ID “never leaves your device,” and the information is completely encrypted. We won’t get a sense of how accurate and fast Optic ID will be compared to Face ID until we get a full hands-on on the Vision Pro. One of the last widely released consumer tech devices with an eye scanner was the Samsung Galaxy S8 in 2017 — but hopefully, Apple has made some advancements since then that aren’t as easily defeated by hackers.
With Zoom IQ — the app’s AI-powered assistant — hosts can now generate summaries of meetings and send them to users through Zoom Team Chat or email, all without actually recording the meetings. It’s hard to tell how accurate (or detailed) the meeting summaries are without trying them out for ourselves, but it still seems like a much quicker way to get a recap on anything you’ve missed, as opposed to watching an entire prerecorded meeting.
In addition to AI-generated meeting summaries, Zoom is launching the ability to compose messages in Team Chat using AI. The feature leverages OpenAI’s technology to create messages “based on the context of a Team Chat thread” and also lets you customize the tone or length of a message before you send it.
Image: Zoom
All of these features build upon what Zoom’s IQ assistant already offers, such as the ability to create meeting highlights and chapters. In the near future, Zoom plans on rolling out several other AI-powered features through its partnership with OpenAI and Anthropic.
That includes the ability to write emails with AI using context from previous meetings, phone calls, and emails as well as a way to summarize threads in Zoom Team Chat “with the click of a button.” Zoom is also working on a way for you to use AI to “discreetly” obtain an in-chat summary of a meeting when you arrive late, create whiteboard drafts with text prompts, and automatically organize ideas into categories during brainstorming sessions.
According to Zoom, the company “collects data from users’ interactions with the Zoom IQ features, including inputs, messages, and AI-generated content” and could use this information to train Zoom IQ AI models (but not third-party ones) unless you choose not to share data with Zoom. Alongside Zoom, other productivity platforms, including Salesforce’s Slack and Microsoft 365, have begun incorporating AI features as well. Slack, for example, lets you reply to colleagues with ChatGPT and could soon have AI attend Huddles on your behalf, while Microsoft has rolled out an AI Copilot for its 365 apps.
For now, though, only Zoom IQ’s meeting summaries and chat compose features are available as a free trial “for a limited time” to subscribers of Zoom One (Enterprise Plus, Enterprise, Business Plus, Business, Pro) and some Zoom legacy bundles (Enterprise Named Host, Enterprise Active Host, Zoom Meetings Enterprise, Zoom Meetings Business, Zoom Meetings Pro). It’s unclear how much these features will cost after the free trial, however, but Zoom spokesperson Lacretia Taylor tells The Verge that the company will reveal pricing information “in the coming months.”
Spotify cuts 200 roles from its podcast division
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge
Spotify is axing approximately 200 roles from its podcasting division as part of a “strategic realignment” of the vertical. The cuts were announced today, June 5th, in a company memo published by Sahar Elhabashi, Spotify’s VP, head of podcast business, with the figure representing around 2 percent of Spotify’s total workforce.
The company will also be combining Parcast and Gimlet — two high-profile podcasting studios acquired by Spotify in 2019 — into a single Spotify Studios operation. While 11 podcasts from these networks were already axed last year, popular productions like Stolen, The Journal, Science Vs, Heavyweight, Serial Killers, and Conspiracy Theories will continue to be produced under the newly formed Spotify Studios name, alongside additional original programming from The Ringer. “Both studios will greenlight new shows with an increased focus on always-on programming that drives strong, loyal audiences and attracts advertisers,” Elhabashi wrote.
While Spotify will continue to produce original content, Elhabashi’s memo makes it sound like Spotify is thinking far more seriously about how it can capitalize on the broader podcasting ecosystem. Elhabashi says the company plans to expand the analytics capabilities within Spotify for Podcasters to help boost audience numbers and says the company is beefing up its advertising offerings to “help more creators make meaningful money.” And even though today’s memo is announcing layoffs in the podcasting division, Elhabashi still notes that Spotify will expand its podcasting roles dedicated to creator partnerships.
“We are expanding our partnership efforts with leading podcasters from across the globe with a tailored approach optimized for each show and creator,” Elhabashi wrote. “This fundamental pivot from a more uniform proposition will allow us to support the creator community better. However, doing so requires adapting; over the past few months, our senior leadership team has worked closely with HR to determine the optimal organization for this next chapter.”
Today’s announcement follows a larger round of layoffs for Spotify back in January, in which the company let go of 6 percent of its then 9,800-strong workforce. Some of the employees affected by those layoffs had come to the company as part of Podsights and Chartable — two podcast measurement and analytics platforms acquired by Spotify for undisclosed sums in February 2022. Almost one-third of union members from both Parcast and Gimlet were also cut in October last year. That makes this the third time that Spotify has cut its podcasting division in the last 12 months as the vertical struggles to turn a profit, despite reporting back in April that ad revenue for podcasts had grown by 20 percent year over year.
That said, Spotify isn’t blaming the cuts on a lack of interest in its podcast products. In the memo, the streaming giant claims to be the biggest podcast publisher in the US, on top of being the most-used audio podcast platform in “most corners of the world.” Spotify has certainly paid for the privilege, however, having spent over $1 billion since 2019 on tech, studios, and landing exclusive deals with the likes of Joe Rogan, Kim Kardashian, and Michelle Obama — the latter of which has already departed from the platform.
After the company reported a net loss of around $248 million for its first quarter this year, Spotify vowed that its era of big spending on podcasts is over and promised to operate more efficiently this year. It’s worth noting that while profitability remains a concern for Spotify, growth certainly isn’t — the company also reported that its platform attracts over half a billion monthly active users, a whopping 22 percent increase compared to last year. Paid subscribers also increased by 15 percent year over year, now sitting at around 210 million. The streaming giant still has a goal to hit 1 billion listeners by 2030, and its drive to procure original podcasting content, while expensive, may still prove to be a worthwhile investment.
WWDC 2023: all the news from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
Virtual reality, a bigger MacBook Air, updated OSes, and more are on the docket.
WWDC 2023 is going to be a big one for Apple. The company is rumored to be introducing its long-in-the-works VR headset, a super high-end model that’s meant to prove what its tech is capable of and why virtual reality might be a compelling future.
The conference is typically where Apple unveils the next versions of its many operating systems, and we’re expecting the same marathon of updates this year, too. Expect new features in macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS — plus the likely announcement of a new operating system designed for VR devices.
Alongside all of that, there’s also a chance we’ll see some new Macs, including a larger MacBook Air. There have also been rumors that Apple will make changes to open up its operating systems to comply with regulations in Europe, which could present major opportunities for developers.
This year’s conference is once again being held primarily online, but Apple is also hosting an in-person component at its Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, on opening day. The event kicks off on June 5th with a keynote presentation that’ll likely start at 1PM ET / 10AM PT. The presentation is once again being streamed online.
Google trials passwordless login across Workspace and Cloud accounts
Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge
Google has taken a significant step toward a passwordless future with the start of an open beta for passkeys on Workspace accounts. Starting today, June 5th, over 9 million organizations can allow their users to sign in to a Google Workspace or Google Cloud account using a passkey instead of their usual passwords.
Passkeys are a new form of passwordless sign-in tech developed by the FIDO Alliance, whose members include industry giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Passkeys allow users to log in to websites and apps using their device’s own authentication, such as a laptop with Windows Hello, an Android phone with a fingerprint sensor, or an iPhone with Face ID, instead of traditional passwords and other sign-in systems like 2FA or SMS verification. Because passkeys are based on public key cryptographic protocols, there’s no fixed “sequence” that can be stolen or leaked in phishing attacks.
Image: Google
Google isn’t ditching passwords just yet, but Workspace and Cloud users can now use passkeys as an alternative sign-on method.
Passkey support for Workspace administrators, who have the authority to enable passkey sign-on within their organizations, will be gradually rolled out over the next few weeks. The ability to skip passwords is disabled by default and must first be enabled by administrators. Even when disabled, however, users will still be able to create and use passkeys for 2FA authentication.
It’s hoped that passkeys will eventually replace passwords entirely, but that’s going to take time. Adoption has been steady, though, with passkey support embraced by platforms like Apple and Microsoft and password managers like Dashlane and 1Password.
Today’s announcement follows passkey support being introduced to standard Google user accounts back in May. The Chrome web browser was also updated with passkey support in December, though passkeys can only be used on third-party sites and services that have rolled out their own support for the passwordless tech. That’s a relatively short list right now — 1Password is keeping track of which sites and services support passkeys if you want to stay up to date.
Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Some of Reddit’s biggest communities including r/videos, r/reactiongifs, r/earthporn, and r/lifeprotips are planning to set themselves to private on June 12th over new pricing for third-party app developers to access the site’s APIs. Setting a subreddit to private, aka “going dark,” will mean that the communities taking part will be inaccessible by the wider public while the planned 48-hour protest is taking place.
As a Reddit post about the protest, that’s since been cross-posted to several participating subreddits, explains:
On June 12th, many subreddits will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed, since many moderators aren’t able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn’t something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love.
The protest comes after the developers of several third-party Reddit apps have said the future of their services have been threatened by the company’s new pricing. The developer behind Apollo, for example, said that at its current rate of making 7 billion requests per month, it would need to pay $1.7 million for access to Reddit’s API, or $20 million a year. “I don’t see how this pricing is anything based in reality or remotely reasonable,” developer Christian Selig wrote. “I hope it goes without saying that I don’t have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card.”
However, one of Reddit’s employees has argued that the new API charges should be affordable if third-party apps are efficient with the API calls they make. “Our pricing is $0.24 per 1000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app,” they wrote. “Apollo as an app is less efficient than its peers and at times has been excessive — probably because it has been free to be so.”
But the developers behind other third-party Reddit apps have expressed similar concerns. Reddit is Fun said it would have to pay a figure “in the same ballpark” as Apollo to continue to operate and that it “does not earn anywhere remotely near this number.” The developer behind Narwhal said it will be “dead in 30 days” as a result of the charges.
The potential for third-party apps to cease operations is particularly problematic for subreddit moderators, who say they often rely on these tools to manage their communities. “In many cases these apps offer superior mod tools, customization, streamlined interfaces, and other quality of life improvements that the official app does not offer,” moderator BuckRowdy wrote in an open letter that’s since been co-signed by the moderators of numerous other subreddits. “The potential loss of these services due to the pricing change would significantly impact our ability to moderate efficiently.”
As well as the new API pricing, the open letter also raises concerns about the ability of third-party apps to show ads (a key source of revenue), and new restrictions that would prevent NSFW (not safe for work) content from being made available via the API.
Reddit has seen several protests like these throughout its history. In 2021, for example, hundreds of Reddit communities locked down to protest the site’s handling of a controversy around a former UK politician it had hired (Reddit later confirmed it had cut ties with the individual). Moderators took similar collective action the previous year in protest over Reddit’s hate speech policies.
Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue In internal forecasts, the company projected that ad sales would keep declining, handing a tough challenge to its new chief executive.
Everything we know about Apple’s mixed reality headset
Illustration: Kristen Radtke / The Verge
Apple is rumored to be announcing its long-rumored virtual and augmented reality headset at WWDC 2023. Here’s a timeline of all the details that have emerged about the device over the years.
People have been speculating about Apple’s entry into the world of virtual and augmented reality headsets for the better part of a decade, but it’s increasingly looking as though 2023 might be the year the company might finally announce and release a device into the world. Specifically, the prediction is that the company will debut the headset at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
Although Apple has never officially confirmed that it’s working on the headset, there have been plenty of reports over the years about what form it could take. The most recent rumors suggest it’ll be called the “Reality Pro,” a so-called “Mixed Reality” device capable of both virtual and augmented reality experiences. Users will be able to switch between AR and VR using a digital crown-style dial.
A short history of every time Apple CEO Tim Cook praised augmented reality
Laura Normand / The Verge
The rumored debut of a “Reality Pro” headset is right around the corner, but Tim Cook has been singing the praises of AR for years.
With Tim Cook as CEO, Apple has become the most valuable company in the world, having passed a $3 trillion market cap in the past and sitting at around $2.6 trillion as of this writing. For all of his nearly 12 years as the head of the company, though, there hasn’t been one single product tied to him the way the iPhone, iPad, and revitalized Mac computers are so inextricably linked to Steve Jobs.
But while Cook’s impact on the company has largely been in his operational mastery and the massive pay-off of his strategy in pivoting to services, he’s consistently found time to talk about one platform as potentially game-changing without fully committing to the tech through actual new product releases: augmented reality.
That was despite Cook’s denigrations of early AR headgear like Google Glass. This would become a running theme: AR good, VR not so good. In September 2021, he went as far as to call himself “AR fan number one.” Although he once called virtual reality “really cool,” he’s also said it’s “for set periods, but not a way to communicate well” while taking swipes at the metaverse in an interview last year.
Now, on the eve of a presumed announcement of Apple’s new “Reality Pro” mixed reality headset, it's much easier to see where it was all going. The company has been slowly integrating the technology that will presumably breathe life into the new device for years, adding AR features to its iPhone and iPads that, while none of it has ever made more than a momentary splash, may have been crucial development experience for Apple.
One example is the 2019 Minecraft Earth demo at WWDC that showed a hint of Apple’s capabilities without tipping its hand about any new hardware. As you’ll see in his various comments from 2016 onward, while Cook mentions gaming, it sounds like his vision for the Reality Pro is much broader, viewing it as a collaborative technology consistent with Apple’s overall philosophy about creating tech that integrates with your life.
Here’s a brief history of all the times Tim Cook said he was convinced AR was the future.
We have been and continue to invest a lot in this. We are high on AR for the long run, we think there’s great things for customers and a great commercial opportunity. The number one thing is to make sure our products work well with other developers’ kind of products like Pokémon, that’s why you see so many iPhones in the wild chasing pokemons.
There’s virtual reality and there’s augmented reality — both of these are incredibly interesting. But my own view is that augmented reality is the larger of the two, probably by far.
[AR] gives the capability for both of us to sit and be very present, talking to each other, but also have other things — visually — for both of us to see. Maybe it’s something we’re talking about, maybe it’s someone else here who’s not here present but who can be made to appear to be present.
I think AR [augmented reality] is extremely interesting and sort of a core technology. So, yes, it’s something we’re doing a lot of things on behind that curtain that we talked about.
October 2016: In an appearance at Utah Tech Tour, Cook goes into detail about how crucial AR may become and why he views it as superior to VR — while stressing that AR presents significant technology challenges before it can be adopted for mass consumerism.
In terms of it becoming a mass adoption [phenomenon], so that, say, everyone in here would have an AR experience, the reality to do that, it has to be something that everyone in here views to be an “acceptable thing.”
And nobody in here, few people in here, think it’s acceptable to be tethered to a computer walking in here and sitting down, few people are going to view that it’s acceptable to be enclosed in something, because we’re all social people at heart. Even introverts are social people, we like people and we want to interact. It has to be that it’s likely that AR, of the two, is the one the largest number of people will engage with.
I do think that a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day, it will become that much a part of you, a lot of us live on our smartphones, the iPhone, I hope, is very important for everyone, so AR will become really big. VR I think is not going to be that big, compared to AR. I’m not saying it’s not important, it is important.
I’m excited about VR from an education point of view, I think it can be really big for education, I think it can be very big for games. But I can’t imagine everyone in here getting in an enclosed VR experience while you’re sitting in here with me. But I could imagine everyone in here in an AR experience right now, if the technology was there, which it’s not today. How long will it take?
AR is going to take a while, because there are some really hard technology challenges there. But it will happen, it will happen in a big way, and we will wonder when it does, how we ever lived without it. Like we wonder how we lived without our phone today.
October 2016: Cook tells BuzzFeed News that while “VR has some interesting applications,” AR is superior to VR because “there’s no substitute for human contact. And so you want the technology to encourage that.”
Augmented reality will take some time to get right, but I do think that it’s profound. We might ... have a more productive conversation, if both of us have an AR experience standing here, right? And so I think that things like these are better when they’re incorporated without becoming a barrier to our talking. ... You want the technology to amplify it, not to be a barrier.
I’m excited about augmented reality because unlike virtual reality which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world but hopefully allows an improvement on what’s happening presently. Most people don’t want to lock themselves out from the world for a long period of time and today you can’t do that because you get sick from it. With AR you can, not be engrossed in something, but have it be a part of your world, of your conversation. That has resonance.
I regard it as a big idea like the smartphone. The smartphone is for everyone, we don’t have to think the iPhone is about a certain demographic, or country or vertical market: it’s for everyone. I think AR is that big, it’s huge. I get excited because of the things that could be done that could improve a lot of lives. And be entertaining. I view AR like I view the silicon here in my iPhone, it’s not a product per se, it’s a core technology. But there are things to discover before that technology is good enough for the mainstream. I do think there can be a lot of things that really help people out in daily life, real-life things, that’s why I get so excited about it.
I think it is profound. I am so excited about it, I just want to yell out and scream. The first step in making it a mainstream kind of experience is to put it in the operating system. We’re building it into iOS 11, opening it to developers—and unleashing the creativity of millions of people. Even we can’t predict what’s going to come out.
There’s some things that you can already get a vision of. We’ve talked to IKEA, and they have 3D images of their furniture line. You’re talking about changing the whole experience of how you shop for, in this case, furniture and other objects that you can place around the home. You can take that idea and begin to think this is something that stretches from enterprise to consumer. There’s not a lot of things that do that.
You’ll see things happening in enterprises where AR is fundamental to what they’re doing. You’re going to see some consumer things that are unbelievably cool. Can we do everything we want to do now? No. The technology’s not complete yet. But that’s the beauty to a certain degree. This has a runway. And it’s an incredible runway. It’s time to put the seat belt on and go. When people begin to see what’s possible, it’s going to get them very excited—like we are, like we’ve been.
October 2017: At an event at Oxford, Cook responds to a student who asks what technology he would consider “transformative.” Cook says there are widespread uses for AR:
I’m incredibly excited by AR because I can see uses for it everywhere. I can see uses for it in education, in consumers, in entertainment, in sports. I can see it in every business that I know anything about.
I also like the fact that it doesn’t isolate. I don’t like our products being used a lot. I like our products amplifying thoughts and I think AR can help amplify the human connection. I’ve never been a fan of VR like that because I think it does the opposite. There are clearly some cool niche things for VR but it’s not profound in my view. AR is profound.
October 2017: In an interview with Vogue UK, Cook says while Apple wasn’t looking to build a “giant database of clothes,” it would support companies in the AR space who were doing this work.
If you think about a runway show in the fashion world, that’s a great application of AR because some of these, you want to see the dress all the way around, you do not want to just see the front.
There already are over a thousand apps with powerful AR features in our App Store today with developers creating amazing new experiences in virtually every category of app aimed at consumers, students and business users alike.
Put simply, we believe AR is going to change the way we use technology forever. We’re already seeing things that will transform the way you work, play, connect and learn. For example, there are AR apps that you interact with virtual models of everything you can imagine from the human body to the solar system. And of course you experience them like you’re really there.
Instantly education becomes much more powerful when every subject comes to life in 3D. And imagine shopping when you can place an object in your living room before you make a purchase – or attending live sporting events when you can see the stats on the field. AR is going to change everything.
This is not quite what came to pass (more on that later).
October 2017: Post-ARKit launch, Cook admits he thinks AR technology for headsets or glasses isn’t yet up to par as far as Apple is concerned.
I can tell you the technology itself doesn’t exist to do that in a quality way. The display technology required, as well as putting enough stuff around your face — there’s huge challenges with that. The field of view, the quality of the display itself, it’s not there yet.
We don’t give a rat’s about being first, we want to be the best, and give people a great experience. But now anything you would see on the market any time soon would not be something any of us would be satisfied with. Nor do I think the vast majority of people would be satisfied.
Most technology challenges can be solved, but it’s a matter of how long.
February 2018: During Apple’s Q1 earnings call, Cook described “great excitement” around augmented reality among customers.
Augmented reality is going to revolutionize many of the experiences we have with mobile devices, and with ARKit, we’re giving developers the most advanced tools on the market to create apps for the most advanced operating system running on the most advanced hardware. This is something only Apple can do.
October 2018: Cook tells NowThisNews during an interview about Apple’s Watch that AR is poised to become indispensable.
I think that one day we will wonder how we ever lived without it. We can have a much more enhanced conversation with the power of AR. The future is now.
January 2020:Cook tells an audience in Dublin, Ireland, that augmented reality “is the next big thing” and that it will “pervade our entire lives.” He gives an example of a company using AR and describes its potential uses.
Yesterday, I visited a development company called War Ducks … in Dublin – 15 people and they’re staffing up and using AR for games. You can imagine, for games it’s incredible but even for our discussion here. You and I might be talking about an article and using AR we can pull it up, and can both be looking at the same thing at the same time.
I think it’s something that doesn’t isolate people. We can use it to enhance our discussion, not substitute it for human connection, which I’ve always deeply worried about in some of the other technologies.
April 2021: During an interview with journalist Kara Swisher Cook agreed with her that augmented reality is “a critically important part of Apple’s future.” He imagines AR being used in health, education, retail, and gaming.
I’m already seeing AR take off in some of these areas with use of the phone. And I think the promise is even greater in the future.
I am so excited about AR. I think AR is one of these very few profound technologies that we will look back on one day and went, how did we live our lives without it? And so right now you can experience it in thousands of ways using your iPad or your iPhone, but of course, those will get better and better over time.
Already it’s a great way to shop, it’s a great way to learn. It enhances the learning process. I can’t wait for it to be even more important in collaboration and so forth.
So I’m AR fan number one. I think it’s that big.
After a comment from Justine about the future impact of AR, he continued:
I mean, simple things today that you can use it for, like if you’re shopping for a sofa, or a chair, or a lamp, in terms of really experiencing it in your place, we’ve never been able to do that before until the last couple years or so. And that’s at the early innings of AR. It will only get better.
“I am incredibly excited about AR as you may know, and the critical thing in any technology, including AR, is putting humanity at the center of it. That is what we focus on every day,”
I think that we’ve had a great conversation here today, but if we could augment that with something from the virtual world, it would have arguably been even better. So I think that if you, and this will happen clearly not too long from now, if you... zoom out to the future and look back, you’ll wonder how you led your life without augmented reality. Just like today, we wonder, how did people like me grow up without the internet.
If you think about the technology itself with augmented reality, just to take one side of the AR/VR piece, the idea that you could overlay the physical world with things from the digital world could greatly enhance people’s communication, people’s connection.
We might be able to collaborate on something much easier if we were sitting here brainstorming about it and all of a sudden we could pull up something digitally and both see it and begin to collaborate on it and create with it.
Baron then paraphrased Cook’s proposal that users could measure a glass pane or put some art up on the wall. Cook also said Apple isn’t trying to follow up anyone else’s efforts:
Can we make a significant contribution, in some kind of way, something that other people are not doing? Can we own the primary technology? I’m not interested in putting together pieces of somebody else’s stuff. Because we want to control the primary technology. Because we know that’s how you innovate.
What’s Apple’s plan for AR?
Clearly, Tim Cook has been bullish on AR for a long time. Until we see the new headset, the extent of Apple’s foray into AR will have been the 2017 launch of ARKit — which use iPhones’ and iPads’ cameras and sensors to overlay images in 3D space when the device is pointed at a given area — for iOS 11. ARKit is available across Apple’s devices, which has spurred a lot of cool little projects by amateur AR enthusiasts. When it launched, The Verge wrote that the tech had the potential to allow Apple to catch rival Google in the AR space.
Ultimately, AR on phones, for most people, probably means the occasional quick measurement or level check when you can’t find your bubble leveler. And let’s not forget plopping a virtual chair in your room, which is an admittedly cool use of AR. But one of the most striking examples of what a combination of AI and augmented reality can produce was the recent introduction of TikTok’s “Bold Glamour” face filter, which had been used in over 58 million videos by mid-May.
In short, the company’s AR work on phones hasn’t been the sort of bombshell that Cook’s words hint at. It’s not clear yet that the Apple mixed reality headset’s debut will be any different, at least in the short term.
But it's a first-run product that will probably come with first-run problems that will need dedicated work from Apple and good third-party support to ensure long-term success. There are supporters and detractors both inside the company and out, but given Cook’s enthusiasm and the Reality Pro’s long development period, it’s probable Apple is in it for the long haul.
It shouldn’t be all that surprising that Apple has taken its time making the Reality Pro, or whatever it’s actually called. This is, after all, the company that introduced the AirPower wireless charging pad, showed it off to the world, then canceled the product because it wasn’t up to company standards — and that was just a charging accessory, not a potential new computing paradigm.
Update September 16th, 12:40PM ET:Added quote from his post-Apple event interview with iJustine.
Update June 5th, 2023, 12:40PM ET:Added quotes from this April GQ profile and additional information about the headset ahead of its rumored introduction at WWDC 2023.
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