Technology

The ambiguous finish to the Epic v. Apple trial opened a tiny crack in Apple’s control over in-app payments on the iPhone — and now, a small developer is trying to crawl through it. A company called Paddle has announced its own in-app payment system that will take a smaller cut than Apple’s system — 5 to 10 percent, instead of the 15 to 30 percent cut claimed by Apple. It’s a way around the commission fees that started the fight with Epic in the first place and likely to be the beginning of a new fight for developers. Paddle’s system is designed to take advantage of the Epic v. Apple verdict, which required Apple to allow external payment links. Prior to the verdict, an App Store rule had banned “external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms” — but...

A decade before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a tiny team of renegades imagined and tried to build the modern smartphone. Nearly forgotten by history, a little startup called Handspring tried to make the future before it was ready. In Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone, The Verge’s Dieter Bohn talks to the visionaries at Handspring and dives into their early successes and eventual failures. It’s a half-hour-long documentary featuring the key players at Palm and Handspring: Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins, Ed Colligan, and more. It’s one of our most ambitious video projects to date, and we can’t wait to show it to you. Handspring may no longer be a household name, but it was briefly one of the fastest growing businesses in American history, selling Visor personal ...

Ever since it was introduced in 2015, Apple CarPlay has represented a notable upgrade over the user interfaces most cars have by default, but many of our concerns about it, and Android Auto, come up due to their limitations. Newer features like dual-screen support and third-party apps like Google Maps could help, but there are still huge parts of the driving experience that exist outside of Apple’s control panel. Now, Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg that Apple’s “IronHeart” push envisions tying settings like climate controls, seat positioning, and even specific surround sound tweaks to your iPhone. This is a gap that Google has closed by cutting deals with automakers like Polestar, Ford, Honda, and GM to use Android Automotive as the basis for their UI. According to Bloomberg, while Appl...

The US Department of Justice has created a team to investigate cryptocurrency-related crime. The National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) will handle investigations of “crimes committed by virtual currency exchanges, mixing and tumbling services, and money laundering infrastructure actors,” the agency said in a news release. Mixing and tumbling services can obscure the source of a cryptocurrency transaction, by mixing it with other funds. Cryptocurrency is “used in a wide variety of criminal activity,” including ransomware demand payments, money laundering, and for the illegal sales of drugs, weapons, and malware, the agency noted. Several high-profile ransomware cases have involved demands in cryptocurrency, including the Colonial Pipeline attack in May, where the company reportedl...

Microsoft is celebrating the 20th birthday of Xbox with a couple of new, translucent accessories, including a wireless controller and a wired gaming headset. They’ll launch on November 15th, 2021 — marking 20 years to the day — and preorders are available now. Starting with the controller, Microsoft says its translucent look is a callback to the see-through controllers that shipped with the original Xbox debug kits. There are splashes of the brand’s signature green on the Xbox home button, as well as around the D-pad and rear grips. Microsoft colored the components silver so they’d be easier to see through its casing. Internally, though, it’s the same model as the one that ships with the Series S and Series X consoles, with Bluetooth support for connecting to mobile devices and PCs. This c...

Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service (xCloud) is now fully powered by custom Xbox Series X hardware. Microsoft tells The Verge it recently completed the upgrade, which improves both framerates and game load times for players streaming Xbox games over the web. While Microsoft has moved Xbox Cloud Gaming to 1080p and 60fps streams in recent months, the company has yet to unlock the full potential of custom Xbox Series X hardware to deliver 4K streams. It’s not clear when this will be available, but Microsoft has been moving towards delivering Xbox Cloud Gaming beyond just mobile devices and browsers. Microsoft is currently working on a dedicated Xbox app for TVs that will allow Xbox players to stream games without a console. Standalone streaming devices that you can plug into a TV or monito...

British Satellite broadcaster Sky is moving away from the satellite dishes that have defined its TV service for decades. Sky Glass is launching today, an ambitious effort to sell television sets that stream Sky TV content over Wi-Fi directly to consumers. There’s no external box, no satellite dish, and no need for a soundbar. Sky calls the all-in-one TV “no fuss.” Although announced for the UK today, Sky has global aspirations for Glass TV “built on technology borne of the collaboration as part of the Comcast Corporation.” As such, we might be looking at the platform underpinning Comcast’s rumored XClass TVs for the US. Sky Glass TVs will be available in three sizes: 43-inch, 55-inch, and 65-inch. Each 4K TV will stream Sky’s TV channels, and integrates in voice control (Hello Sky) and 21 ...

Snapchat has announced a series of measures it’s taking to counter drug dealing on its platform, and to educate users about the dangers of fentanyl and other drugs. When users search for drug-related keywords like “fentanyl,” Snap says it will direct them to a new educational portal called Heads Up. It’s also ramping up actions against drug dealers on its platform, including improved in-app reporting tools and proactive detection. The announcements follow a recent investigation by NBC News into a spate of deaths involving teens and young adults who were suspected of having bought fentanyl-laced drugs through the social network. The report alleged that drug dealers are able to use Snapchat to find buyers, and that the platform isn’t doing enough to remove their accounts and keep them off th...

Anker’s Soundcore brand is today refreshing its flagship true wireless earbuds with the new $169.99 Liberty 3 Pros. Both the earbuds and their slider-style charging case look very similar to the Liberty 2 Pros, though the buds are 30 percent smaller and have an “air pressure relief structure” in their wingtips for added comfort. Anker has made more significant improvements to the features they offer: the new earbuds have active noise cancellation — you’d hope for as much at this price — and the “HearID ANC” system is optimized for efficiency and comfort. Anker says it monitors outside ambient noise while also taking in-ear pressure into account, so the level of ANC automatically adapts to the environment. The dual-driver acoustic architecture of the Liberty 3 Pros has been refined, and the...

NFTs and cryptocurrencies have been prone to many scams. It is not uncommon for developers to quite literally create digital pieces and take the money and run. The most recent case of this involves an NFT project titled Evolved Apes. The project is described on the NFT platform OpenSea as “a collection of 10000 unique NFTs trapped inside a lawless land. Fighting for survival, only the strongest ape will prevail.” Just a week after the Evolved Ape is launched, the anonymous developer behind the project has seemingly disappeared and gone dark on social. The creator, who also promised a much-hyped fighting game that comes with the project, has vanished from the social verse, deleting the official Twitter page and taking down the website. According to Vice, the developers still left a blockcha...

Uber Reserve is now expanding its services to cover more than 20 airports in the U.S. The feature first launched back in November last year and allowed Uber users to book rides up to 30 days in advance from airports they would be arriving in. To make your life easier, the company is able to track your flight and adjust your ride’s reservation time according to any delays or early arrivals. Drivers will then wait for up to 60 minutes at no extra cost. With COVID-19 restrictions slowly easing, Uber is now hoping to bring this feature to more users, making it available for Uber Black and Uber Black SUV customers at more than 20 different airports stateside, including locations such as New York City, Washington DC, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta. You’ll also be able to ask for curbside pickups th...

Instant messaging app Telegram has gained 70 million users following the outages experienced by Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, making a record 10% gain in users in just one day. The outage across Facebook’s various platforms occurred earlier on Monday and lasted roughly six hours, making it the biggest global outage for the company since 2008. While both competitors Telegram and Signal gained a significant amount of users as a result of the breakdown, Facebook itself also lost out greatly, with many investors selling off the company’s shares which ultimately resulted in CEO Mark Zuckerberg losing $6 billion USD. Facebook has since explained that the outage was caused by configuration changes on its side and shut down any suggestion of data breaches and leaks. While Facebook’s services h...