Owners of Apple’s HomePod and HomePod mini can now connect their smart speakers directly to Deezer and make the music streaming service their default player. That means they can take advantage of the HomePod’s Siri voice controls to navigate their tunes and playlists on Deezer.
To connect the services, you’ll first need to be a paying Deezer subscriber. If you are, head to the Deezer app on your iOS device (make sure you’re on iOS 14.3 or later), hit the settings cog in the top right, then scroll down and hit “Connect with HomePod.” You can then play music from Deezer on your Apple speakers by saying “Hey Siri, play [insert cool and relevant band of choice] on Deezer.”
Alternatively,you can make Deezer your default player from Apple’s Home app and avoid having to specify which streaming service to use. We weren’t able to test this ourselves, but it’s likely the same process as for other third-party streaming services. So go to Home Settings by hitting the house icon in the top left of Apple’s Home app, tap on your face under the “People” section,” then go to “Default Service” and choose Deezer.
Phew. Isn’t it fantastic when these services just work?
Of course, the struggle to offer these sorts of basic, third-party integrations is exactly what’s hurt Apple’s smart speakers, likely contributing to the company’s decision to discontinue the original HomePod in March this year. Despite this, the reasonably-priced and good-sounding HomePod mini still soldiers on. In addition to Deezer, these devices can now directly integrate with other streaming services including Apple Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and Pandora.
What’s missing from this list, of course, is Spotify. Although Apple says it’s enabled integration with the music streaming giant, as far as we know Spotify hasn’t switched things on at its end. If you’re searching for an explanation, look no further than the huge lawsuit Spotify is currently pursuing against Apple. As an alternative, you can use Spotify to play music on HomePod speakers, but you’ll need to connect via AirPlay, which is frustratingly slow and lacks voice controls — one of the big draws of using a smart speaker at all.
But hey, that’s what you, the unlucky consumer, get for being stuck between two warring corporations. Enjoy.
If you get annoyed with the number of apps that crowd your iPhone’s home screen, you probably welcomed a feature that came with iOS 14: the App Library, which gathers all of your apps into various categories and displays them on a separate page to the right of your home pages.
The App Library doesn’t only add some automatic organization to your iPhone’s home pages, but allows you to clean up your home screen by hiding as many apps as you want. You can keep your favorites front and center, and get the more utilitarian or less-used apps out of the way. (In fact, one way to keep a clean screen is to have all your newly-installed apps appear in your App Library only — we offer directions on how to do that here.)
If you want to organize your current apps by hiding some of them, there are several ways to do it. You can remove individual apps from the home screen, you can hide an entire screen of apps, or you can organize several apps by putting them into a folder.
Here’s how.
Hide a single app
To hide individual apps:
Press on your selected app until a menu appears. The menu will include a number of options, depending on the app’s features (for example, if I press on an app for Microsoft Teams, the menu will let me make a new call or start a chat). But you will always get an option (in red) to remove the app. Tap on that.
You will now have the choice of deleting the app from the phone or removing it from the home screen. Select the latter. You’ll still find the app in the App Library.
If the app is not already in the App Library, then after you tap “Remove App,” you will instead be given the choice of either deleting the app or moving it to the App Library.
Hide a page of apps
You can also hide an entire page of apps — and get rid of that page — at one blow if you want. And since it’s really easy to also restore that same page, it’s a great way to hide groups of apps that you only use occasionally.
Tap and hold on an empty part of your screen until the apps begin to jiggle
Tap on the dots at the bottom of the screen
You’ll now be able to see small versions of all your screens (except the App Library and Today View). Beneath each visible screen is a checkmark; uncheck any screen you want to hide and tap “Done” in the upper right corner.
To “unhide” any of the screens, follow these same directions and replace the checkmark of the screen that you want to see again.
Use folders to organize apps
You can use folders on the home screen to gather similar apps together and save space. You won’t be completely hiding the apps — they’ll be there. But they’ll be consolidated in a single space.
It’s very simple to create a folder:
Long-press on an app in the home screen until the icons jiggle
Move the app onto one of the other apps you want to group it with
You’ll now have a gray icon that contains the icons for the apps in the folder. Tap on the icon to open the folder and access the apps in it.
iOS will assign a name to the folder depending on what apps you’ve put in it. To change the name, long-press on the folder, and select “Rename” from the pop-up menu. Then type in the new name.
To remove an app from a folder, simply open the folder, long-press the app until it jiggles, and move it out of the folder and to another space on your home screen. If you remove all the apps from a folder, the folder will disappear.
If you want to get rid of a folder, you can also long-press on it and select “Remove Folder.” Any apps that were in the folder can then be found in the App Library.
Safari just doesn’t support key features — and Safari’s the only option
Something keeps coming up at the Epic v. Apple trial as a potential alternative for getting Fortnite on the iPhone: web apps. It’s an intriguing idea, as web apps are able to do surprisingly complex things: just look at a Chromebook or even game streaming services on the iPhone. But potential is far from reality, because the ability for web apps to look, feel, and perform as well as native apps on iOS is severely limited.
These web apps aren’t the preferred way for consumers or developers to use or create apps on the iPhone, either. But Apple has forced companies like Microsoft and Nvidia to use web apps, instead of native ones available in the App Store.
Though the term itself hasn’t really come up explicitly, what’s being discussed are Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs. If you’re unfamiliar, think of them as slightly more advanced web apps that you can “install” directly from your web browser on to your home screen. Google has been pushing the idea (though support for PWAs on its own platforms is a little mixed), and some companies like Microsoft and Twitter have wholeheartedly embraced PWAs.
Not Apple, though. There are a variety of reasons for that — ranging from genuine concern about giving web pages too much access to device hardware to the simple fact that even Apple can’t do everything. There’s also the suspicion that Apple is deliberately dragging its feet on support for features that make PWAs better as a way to drive developers to its App Store instead.
Fortnite running on an iPhone before its removal.Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
But the App Store has restrictions that aren’t tenable for some developers. That’s the whole crux of this trial for Epic, after all. On the stand, a Microsoft executive detailed the company’s struggles to get its xCloud game streaming service onto iOS. Lori Wright, VP of Xbox business development at Microsoft, revealed the company spent around four months talking to Apple to try and get xCloud launched as a native app. Apple seemed, initially open to the idea of letting Microsoft use the same model as Netflix or Audible. But Apple changed its mind and forced Microsoft, Nvidia, and others to list cloud games as separate apps.
Submitting Xbox games one-by-one was simply a nonstarter for Microsoft, so it resorted to making a web app. In addition to the technical hurdles a web app involves, it also introduces a discoverability issue. Users simply aren’t used to installing apps from the web on their iPhones. Apple has effectively trained everybody that if they want an app, they go to the App Store.
Wright essentially admitted that the only reason Microsoft is releasing Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) as a web app is because Apple’s terms on the App Store are too onerous. “People don’t play games through the browser on iPhone,” said Wright, but “it was our only outcome in order to reach mobile users on iOS.”
Even the judge in the case seemed confused by Apple’s rule, which says that services that stream movies can offer them all in a single app but services that stream games have to separate each game for individual listing and review. “I can use Netflix with a native app and I can see lots of different movies or TV shows or whatever. Is it that you didn’t want to use a subscription model?” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers asked at one point.
Apple has forced Microsoft and others to head to the web for gaming streaming.Photo by Nick Statt / The Verge
But back to those technical hurdles: they’re tall, numerous, and can be blamed both on the nature of web apps and Apple’s own decisions. Safari on the iPhone only recently became capable of supporting a service like Xbox Cloud Gaming via specific controller support. Until then, that sort of thing was on the list of features Apple was reticent to include in Safari. There are legitimate reasons to block things like Bluetooth access from web apps, including fingerprinting for tracking, but it was getting harder to justify and Apple needed some kind of escape valve as pressure mounted to support cloud gaming services.
Google software engineer Alex Russell recently published a very comprehensive list of all the features that Safari on iOS doesn’t support yet — and it’s a long list. For PWAs to truly be a viable alternative to App Store apps, there are at least a few of these features that need to be enabled. The inability to send push notifications via a web app, for example, is particularly galling as it’s already possible on Safari on macOS. An app that can’t send notifications is simply not competitive with an app that can.
Grant is touching on some more of the benefits to native versus web apps; push notifications and ARKit both come up. The former is another example of Apple letting native apps reduce friction points — Epic needs to convince the judge these smaller features are meaningful.
— Adi Robertson (@thedextriarchy) May 5, 2021
As Russell notes, his “interests and biases are plain” as a Google engineer. But it doesn’t change the fact that there are many things that a PWA cannot do on the iPhone that a developer like Epic would need to support Fortnite as a web app.
“Native [iPhone] apps would have access to a far wider range of APIs than web apps,” explained Andrew Grant, engineering fellow at Epic Games, during the trial. “Access to things like push notifications, to Siri, to health data, and augmented reality features” are also limited to native apps, said Grant. Web apps also have to be far smaller than native apps, and are capped at about 50MB in size.
Plus, from a simple performance perspective, web apps have more overhead than native apps — and lack access to Apple APIs that can speed up games like Fortnite.
In fact, this was a sticking point for a lot of the questioning of an Nvidia employee. Nvidia, like Microsoft, has been trying to get its GeForce Now cloud gaming service into the App Store, but has faced the same restrictions that Microsoft is struggling with. Nvidia director of product management Aashish Patel spent a lot of time answering questions around latency in a browser and the benefits of using native apps.
“There are less controls over the streaming, so you could argue in some ways it’s worse,” than a native app, said Patel. Developers are also locked into using the video codecs provided in Safari on iOS, whereas they could use alternatives that might be better at handling latency inside a native iOS app.
All iOS browsers run the same WebKit engine underneath.Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
All of this is compounded by yet another Apple policy: no third party browser engines. You can install apps like Chrome, Firefox, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and others on the iPhone — but fundamentally they’re all just skins on top of Apple’s Webkit engine. That means that Apple’s decisions on what web features to support on Safari are final. If Apple were to find a way to be comfortable letting competing web browsers run their own browser engines, a lot of this tension would dissipate.
As it relates to Epic v. Apple, a lot of this PWA discussion isn’t germane to the fundamental arguments in the case. Fortnite as a PWA would necessarily be a streaming app instead of a native game and that introduces an entirely different set of compromises. Which is why it’s so fascinating to see Apple’s lawyers float web apps as a potential solution — because web apps on the iPhone are famously more limited than they are on other platforms, including even Apple’s macOS.
The human-readable versus machine-readable code bit is back now — Grant is talking about how web apps don’t go through the same kind of compilation process that increases processing efficiency, yet another reason they’re not as good as native apps.
— Adi Robertson (@thedextriarchy) May 5, 2021
Even if every single browser feature was available on mobile Safari or even if Apple allowed alternative browser engines on the iPhone, a web app will never match the performance of a native app. At the end of the day, though, all the discussion of web apps in the Epic v. Apple case highlight the limitations of Apple’s App Store policies, not PWAs.
Microsoft is finally preparing to refresh its Windows 95-era icons. The software giant has been slowly improving the icons it uses in Windows 10, as part of a “sweeping visual rejuvenation” planned for later this year. We saw a number of new system icons back in March, with new File Explorer, folder, Recycle Bin, disk drive icons, and more. Microsoft is now planning to refresh the Windows 95-era icons you still sometimes come across in Windows 10.
Windows Latest has spotted new icons for the hibernation mode, networking, memory, floppy drives, and much more as part of the shell32.dll file in preview versions of Windows 10. This DLL is a key part of the Windows Shell, which surfaces icons in a variety of dialog boxes throughout the operating system. It’s also a big reason why Windows icons have been so inconsistent throughout the years. Microsoft has often modernized other parts of the OS only for an older app to throw you into a dialog box with Windows 95-era icons from shell32.dll.
New vs. old Windows 95-era icons.Image: Windows Latest
Hopefully this also means Windows will never ask you for a floppy disk drive when you dig into Device Manager to update a driver. That era of Windows, along with these old icons, has been well and truly over for more than a decade now.
All of this work to improve the consistency of Windows is part of Microsoft’s design overhaul to Windows 10, codenamed Sun Valley. The visual changes are expected to appear in the Windows 10 21H2 update that should arrive in October. Microsoft has not officially detailed its Sun Valley work, but a job listing earlier this year teased a “sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows.”
Microsoft has so far revealed new system icons for Windows 10, alongside File Explorer icon improvements, and more colorful Windows 10 icons that appeared last year. Rounded corners will also be a big part of Sun Valley, alongside changes to built-in apps and the Start menu.
We’re expecting to hear more about Sun Valley at Microsoft’s Build conference later this month, or as part a dedicated Windows news event.
(Pocket-lint) – While many of us are still very much locked indoors for the foreseeable, working from home, the spectre of a potential commute is beginning to rear its head for plenty of people. Now more than ever, an electric bike is an attractive prospect.
Avoiding public transport, getting fresh air, but without the risk of exhaustion, what’s not to love? The main downside is that many of the most well-known options are prohibitively expensive.
That provides an opportunity for the likes of FuroSystems, a smaller manufacturer who can attract people with cost-saving as well as features. Its Aventa is a prime example – a great e-bike that doesn’t reinvent the wheel by any stretch, but offers a great experience at a very sensible price.
Sleek and disguised
Weight: 16.5kg
Aluminium frame
Central LCD display
Tektro HD-E290 Hydraulic Disk Brakes
Turning first to the look and feel of the Aventa, the good news is that it falls safely into the “you wouldn’t know it” category of electric bikes. This is a bike that at first glance doesn’t look electrified, which we consider to be a good thing.
Only one chunky part of its frame and the motor on the rear wheel give the game away, but the matte paintwork and FuroSystems logo do a good job of disguising this.
Pocket-lint
An integrated front light keeps things sleek up front, athough there’s no back light for some reason – and you’ll need a reflector/light to ride on UK roads legally – while a fairly narrow set of handlebars and a sleek saddle makes for a racing-style fit. It’s not the most laid-back e-bike we’ve ridden – that honor belongs to VanMoof – but when you get the Aventa’s saddle adjusted right it’s entirely comfortable and feels nice and nimble.
The Aventa’s other big clue as to its electrification is a little dashboard that’s located between the handlebars – a small digital display that acts as a speedometer when its turned on, as well as indicating the battery level and what amount of pedal assist you’re currently getting.
We’re a bit torn on this. On the one hand, it gives you a bunch of useful information if you want it, with the pedal assist level particularly good to keep track of. Equally, however, it’s fairly ugly and has a tendency to make you look like you’ve got a GPS or phone strapped to your bike and are in the process of getting lost. If we could remove it easily, we probably would – indeed we think that’d be a good thing to stop it looking like a fancy e-bike.
Pocket-lint
On the left handlebar, nicely nestled where your thumb rests, is the main control point for this e-bike, comprising a power button (holding it down switches it on and off), and a button each to either raise or lower the level of pedal assist. These are smartly placed and easy to use while riding, letting you adjust on the fly. The right handlebar houses a traditional gear switcher to let you control the bike’s nine standard gears.
Overall we’re impressed by how premium the Aventa looks and feels. It’s not quite at the level of VanMoof and Cowboy’s bikes – particularly when it comes to cable tidying, with most of the cabling on the bike’s exterior – but it’s also a big chunk less expensive than those options. And sometimes that can be what matters most.
Pedal assistance
6 levels of pedal assist, 25kmph/15.5mph top speed
Integrated Lithium-Ion battery
60km/37m range per charge
An e-bike’s design is important, but how it feels to ride is the key variable, and FuroSystems does well on that front. The newest version of the Aventa is easy to switch on and has six different levels of pedal assist to pick from – which help you to get up to a speed of 25kmph/15.5mph before letting you put in the work to go faster. That speed cap is the UK legal limit for an e-bike, it varies in other territories.
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Between the first and second levels of assist you won’t even notice a huge difference, with acceleration just feeling a bit easier than it otherwise would. Putting things up to level three or four on the power scale gets you a more appreciable boost as you kick off from a standstill, and makes getting up to speed feel really easy. On strenghts five and six, meanwhile, things feel really zippy – just after you start turning your pedals you’ll get a nice push of extra power.
Getting the system right on pedal assist is a little harder than it seems, while making sure that you feel in full control of your acceleration is something other e-bikes we’ve tested haven’t quite managed, but the Aventa strikes a great balance. You’ll find it super easy to get going at traffic lights; hills also won’t pose much of a challenge as far as maintaining your speed. All this is achieved without a particularly loud motor noise – just a very low-level whirr that wind-noise cancels out.
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With a standard nine-gear shifter also available, if you run out of battery then you’re far from stranded, and using normal gears in conjunction with the pedal assist levels lets you get to a pretty precise level of work as you cycle, which makes the Aventa good if you’re keen on having plenty of control.
A sizeable 80km/50m range means you can get plenty of cycling done on a single charge too, which is for the best since the Aventa’s battery isn’t removable – a typical shortcoming of e-bikes’ designs at the moment.
A four-hour charge should juice it back up, but you’ll have to lug it near to a power point to do so, and at 16.5kg you’ll find that a slightly tiresome task. Still, heaviness is also far from unique to the Aventa, it’s part and parcel of an e-bike, so it’s not a great sin. For context: a carbon road bike, all in, is about 8kg; a London ‘Santander Cycle’ is around 24kg, so this sits somewhere in the middle – not bad considering it’s the only electrified option.
Best Garmin watch 2021: Fenix, Forerunner and Vivo compared
By Chris Hall
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Apart from that pedal assist things are extremely simple to operate – there’s no companion app or smart features to speak of here, which means an ease of use that’s almost refreshing at times.
On the flip side, it does make for a lack of security features that competitors can offer, like bike tracking or even integrated locking. Still, provided you gear yourself up with a proper bike lock you’ll be able to lend it to mates and ride it without your smartphone, both options that can be surprisingly tricky on some so-called ‘smarter’ bikes.
Verdict
FuroSystem’s pitch is pretty clear when it comes to the Aventa: you can get a lot of the same feeling while riding it that you’ll find from the Cowboy or VanMoof S3, but you’ll have spent hundreds less on the bike.
That’s a surprisingly accurate summary of how it feels to use too. No, the Aventa might not have a ‘killer feature’, but it doesn’t put many feet (or wheels) wrong at all. You get really solid pedal assist, impressive range, and a design that manages to look as sleek as you could reasonably hope – and discreet too.
While a removable battery, smarter features, and better cable integration would be nice, the savings you make on the up-front cost more than explains their absence. So, if your budget doesn’t stretch to one of the more chic names in the market, the Aventa is an option that’s well worth considering.
Also consider
VanMoof S3
VanMoof also doesn’t have a removable battery, but its smoothness of ride and comfort are unrivalled, making its S3 or X3 brilliant options to ride. Either model is pricier than the Aventa, but you get a lot of app-based smart features like auto-unlocking and bike tracking, plus a design that’s a little more unique and modern.
Read our full review
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Cowboy
If your budget can go even further, the Cowboy is a superb option that has perfect pedal assist and probably the best app integration of any e-bike we’ve tried, making for a superb package that is just a bit of an upgrade on the Aventa in most areas. The biggest fillip it lands over other bikes, though, is that removable battery – making it miles more convenient than many competitors. Still, you’ll be paying for those privileges.
Read our full review
Writing by Max Freeman-Mills. Editing by Mike Lowe.
As first reported by Android Police, some users have reported that the desktop and mobile versions of YouTube have begun showing options for automatic translation of titles. The videos spotted by users displays the titles, descriptions, and closed captions all translated automatically.
YouTube titles auto-translated into Spanish
Those users who submitted these screenshots to Android Police have so far only confirmed that auto translation on YouTube is being tested for users with their primary languages set to either Portuguese, Spanish, or Turkish. A video with translated titles shows a small translation icon that precedes the title.
YouTube Videos translated into Portuguese and Turkish
The change appears to be happening on the server end, so updating the app likely won’t have an effect on enabling the auto-translate feature. Automatic translation of videos in English gives videos the potential to reach more audiences and opens accessibility for English videos to non-English speakers.
Android tablets still exist, somehow. And people may still be buying them, for some reason. All of this in spite of Google’s best efforts to simply ignore the form factor completely for the past few years, and we don’t mean just by not releasing any more of its own tablets, but also in not adapting Android to the bigger screen sizes at all.
Today the search giant has suddenly remembered that Android tablets exist, and has thus announced a new feature, just for Android tablets. Can you believe it? Something in Android, tailor-made for tablets. Hell is freezing over, surely.
Anyway, that’s probably enough snark and you may be wondering what this is. It’s called Entertainment Space, and, well, the name is pretty descriptive. Google describes it as “a one-stop, personalized home for all your favorite movies, shows, videos, games, and books”.
It lets you not go through the trouble of hopping between apps to try and figure out what’s where, taking care of that for you by presenting an aggregate view of content from your apps, that’s grouped by type.
So you have the Watch tab with movies, TV shows, and YouTube videos. This includes a Continue Watching row, as well as personalized and trending recommendation rows from Google TV, Twitch, Hulu, “and many additional services”.
Then there’s the Games tab, which has a Continue Playing row (see the theme?), as well as recommendations. Select games are available to play instantly too, letting you try without having to download.
Finally, the Read tab is for your books, although it seems like this only plugs into Google Play Books. So if you’re a heavy Kindle user, you’ll still need to go to the app. Anyway, audiobooks are also to be found here, but there’s no sign of Audible. And of course, recommendations.
“Starting this month”, Entertainment Space will be available on Walmart onn. tablets and “later this year” it will roll out globally “on new and select existing Android tablets from Lenovo, Sharp, and more”. That’s about it for availability info, unfortunately.
But, on the plus side, Google says that it’s seen over 30% more people start using Android tablets in the last year, compared to the prior year. Maybe if more and more people start doing that, the company will give us more and more tablet-exclusive features? There’s a thought.
We recently saw a video revealing the design and major features of Huawei’s HarmonyOS. Now we are looking at another clip showing a quick speed test comparison between EMUI 11 and HarmonyOS 2.0. You can watch it below.
As you can see, apps on the phone running EMUI 11 load a tad faster than HarmonyOS 2.0, but that might be due to network lag. It’s also worth noting that the comparison is made between the Developer Beta3 of HarmonyOS 2.0 and the stable firmware of EMUI 11, which could also have some impact.
Besides, EMUI 11 and HarmonyOS 2.0 are running on different phone models, which is yet another thing to consider for the differences in app load times.
Either way, we’ll reserve our judgment until we get our hands on the stable build of HarmonyOS 2.0 and run some tests ourselves.
João Silva 15 hours ago Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
UL Benchmarks has recently announced the Wild Life Extreme benchmark, a more demanding version of the Wild Life benchmark. Unlike Wild Life, the Extreme version won’t be limited to smartphones and tablets, allowing users to run it on Apple computers with M1 CPUs and Windows 10 PCs, including those powered by Arm processors.
The new Wild Life Extreme benchmark is three times more demanding than the original Wild Life benchmark thanks to the addition of new effects, enhanced geometry, and more particles. Moreover, Wild Life Extreme can run at up to 4K resolution, making it even more demanding. On Windows and Android, the Wild Life Extreme benchmark uses the Vulkan API, but Windows 10 on Arm devices use DirectX 12. On Apple devices, the benchmark uses the Metal API.
With the Wild Life Extreme benchmark, users may compare the GPU performance across most of their devices. The higher the score, the better it performs. Users may choose the quick benchmark to measure peak performance or a longer one for testing sustained performance. Besides showing how your GPU performs against other machines and devices, the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme score can also predict the framerate your system will output in some games.
3DMark Advanced Edition includes the Wild Life Extreme as a free update. Customers with a valid annual license of 3DMark Professional Edition also have free access to the Wild Life Extreme benchmark.
Android users can now download Wild Life Extreme as a free update for the 3DMark Android benchmark app. To run it, your mobile device has to run Android 10 or later and support the Anisotropy feature level 16 and above.
As for Apple users, the Wild Life Extreme benchmark is available on the free 3DMark Wild Life iOS benchmark app. The iOS device compatibility list starts with the iPhone 7 Plus and beyond. Only Apple Mac computers powered by the M1 CPU are compatible with the benchmark.
KitGuru says: Have you already tried the Wild Life Extreme benchmark? What score did you get on your device?
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Gamescom 2021 will once again be an all-digital event
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Matthew Wilson 19 hours ago Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
World of Warcraft Classic is going through some changes this year, with Blizzard launching new servers for The Burning Crusade expansion. There is currently an on-going beta for this but a release date has not been announced – although a Battle.net update may have leaked it.
A number of players spotted a new notice on Battle.net this week, stating that World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Classic will be launching on the 1st of June. The image was later removed from the app, although screenshots were taken and shared by WoWhead.
Blizzard has previously announced plans to launch The Burning Crusade for WoW Classic ‘this summer’, but this is the first time we’ve seen a specific release date publicised.
Currently, the expansion is in beta, so plans could change based on feedback and testing. Blizzard has not commented on the leak yet.
KitGuru Says: Have any of you been playing The Burning Crusade beta? Do you think Blizzard will be able to meet such a close release date?
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Gamescom 2021 will once again be an all-digital event
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Matthew Wilson 2 days ago Featured Tech News, Software & Gaming
While it looked like Microsoft may acquire Discord in recent months, those negotiations unceremoniously ended and now, it looks like Discord has chosen to partner up elsewhere. In a surprising announcement last night, Sony announced that it has invested in Discord and plans to integrate the app with PlayStation consoles.
In an announcement straight from Sony Interactive Entertainment head, Jim Ryan, we learned that starting next year, Discord will integrate with PlayStation consoles, a move that will include Discord friends lists, group chats and server communities accessible on console:
“Together, our teams are already hard at work connecting Discord with your social and gaming experience on PlayStation Network. Our goal is to bring the Discord and PlayStation experiences closer together on console and mobile starting early next year, allowing friends, groups, and communities to hang out, have fun, and communicate more easily while playing games together.”
Sony also has a minority stake in Discord moving forward, although the exact investment amount has not been disclosed yet. We could be moving towards a future where Sony’s PlayStation social features are replaced by Discord.
There is no reason why these integrations couldn’t also come to Xbox. Discord already has basic integration with Xbox, allowing your account to be linked to Discord to display games being played on Xbox consoles.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: Discord integration on consoles is something I’ve been hoping to see for a while. Xbox and PlayStation party chat was good enough back in the day, but nowadays, it is lacking compared to PC offerings like Discord.
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Home/Lifestyle/Mobile/Apple/Apple execs discussed dropping App Store revenue split back in 2011
Matthew Wilson 2 days ago Apple, Featured Tech News
Ever since the launch of the iOS App Store, Apple has taken a 30 percent revenue cut from developers. Now known as the ‘Apple Tax’, Epic Games is attempting to challenge this revenue split in court. As it turns out, executives within Apple had their doubts that they would be able to maintain a 70/30 revenue split and some suggested dropping it as far back as 2011.
Internal emails amongst Apple executives were made public as part of the Epic Games v Apple trial. In one such email sent in July 2011, App Store head, Philip Schiller, asked Apple Services head, Eddy Cue, and former CEO, Steve Jobs, if the 70/30 revenue split was sustainable and even suggested dropping to 80/20.
The document, which was first publicised by Bloomberg, shows Shiller saying: “I don’t think that 70/30 will last that unchanged forever. I think someday we will see enough challenge from another platform or web based solutions to want to adjust our model”.
Later in the email, Schiller adds “once we are making over $1B a year in profit from the App Store, is that enough to then think about a model where we ratchet down from 70/30 to 75/25 or even 80/20 if we can maintain a $1B a year run rate?”
This just goes to show that Apple executives saw this challenge to its revenue model coming nearly a decade ago. At this point, Apple is making well over $1 billion per year from the App Store. In fact, in 2020, App Store revenue rose as high as $64 billion.
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KitGuru Says: Apple is facing more pressure now than ever before to adjust its App Store business model. Day 2 of the Epic v Apple trial is kicking off this afternoon, so it’ll be interesting to see what else comes out from the court proceedings.
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That question was asked — implicitly and explicitly — over and over on the third day of Epic v. Apple testimony. The antitrust trial started on Monday with some heady pronunciations about Fortnite, the game and/or metaverse at the heart of the case. Yesterday, both sides argued about whether iPhones and iPads were truly locked down. And today, Apple and Epic delved into one of the biggest questions of the trial: whether saying iOS violates antitrust law would make every major game console an unlawful monopoly too.
Apple’s attorneys issued a dire warning to Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft during its opening statement, saying that their business models were all fundamentally similar. “If Epic prevails, other ecosystems will fall too,” they warned. But today, Epic called up Microsoft’s Xbox business development head Lori Wright as a sympathetic witness. In response to a line of questioning, Wright divided computing devices into “special-purpose” and “general-purpose” devices — in a way that clearly defined iPhones as the latter.
The Xbox, as Wright describes it, is a special-purpose device. “You are basically building a piece of hardware to do a specific thing,” she told a judge. “The Xbox is designed to give you a gaming experience. People buy an Xbox because they want to play games.” As a result, Microsoft keeps tight control of what content users can access — it’s a “curated, custom-built hardware/software experience.” The market is also much smaller: tens or hundreds of millions sold, compared to “billions” of Windows devices. Later in the day, Epic engineering fellow Andrew Grant gave his own, similar definition of gaming consoles in general, calling a console “a single-purpose device for entertainment.”
Windows computers, according to Wright, are “general-purpose” devices. “You’re buying it to do a wide variety of things, and that changes every day as new ideas are getting created,” she said. “It can do a bunch of things already, and it has the aperture to do a bunch more things.” These platforms can support unexpected, emergent applications across more aspects of people’s lives, particularly when it’s easy to get an app onto them in the first place.
Wright made a point of discussing all the different ways that users could get apps on Windows. That includes Microsoft’s own app store, but also Steam, the Epic Games Store, and direct downloads from a website. Microsoft recently dropped its commission on Windows apps to 12 percent to compete with Epic, while the Xbox still takes a 30 percent commission. Wright says there’s no plan to change that discrepancy. That’s despite the fact that under the hood, there’s not a massive hardware difference between an Xbox and a desktop PC.
It’s hard to call the iPhone anything but a general-purpose device under Wright’s definition. (She described a “special-purpose” Apple product as something like an iPod.) Intentionally or not, Wright also linked the distinction to one of Epic’s major talking points: profit.
Epic describes profit as one of the biggest differences between iPhones and consoles. It argues console makers have to treat app makers better because they lose money on hardware, unlike Apple, so they need to plan around attracting developers to the platform. And from Microsoft’s point of view, Wright emphasized in testimony that no Xbox console has been sold at a profit, even late in a generation’s lifespan after manufacturing costs fall. So part of that curated hardware/software experience includes planning around a specific genre of app and attracting the developers who will build it, rather than simply turning it loose and seeing what happens.
Microsoft later hedged in a statement saying that “profits are generated in game sales and online service subscriptions,” but it didn’t really contradict the claim — it just made clear, as Wright did, that the overall operation is profitable.
Will these distinctions convince the court? It’s hard to say, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has asked questions that appear lightly skeptical of Epic’s hard lines between consoles and iPhones and Wright’s strict delineation of “general” and “specific” devices.
Apple’s attorney didn’t spend as much time arguing over precise definitions. Apple’s strategy relied more on questioning Wright’s credibility by noting that she’d failed to produce documents that Apple requested. Later, an attorney similarly lambasted Grant for working on the hotfix that secretly introduced a new payment system into Fortnite, insisting that “you knew you were being dishonest, didn’t you?”
But Apple did push Wright to lay out in detail just how much more locked-down Xbox is than Windows, asking whether it did things like support rival game stores or streaming services. (This questioning was muddled by the fact that Microsoft refers to both its consoles and general gaming division as “Xbox,” so you can have an “Xbox store” on PC — a fact that led to some confusion during cross-examination.)
Why is this useful to Apple? Well, Epic began the trial by saying that iOS should work more like macOS. Both operating systems have a reputation for relative security and seamlessness, but only the latter allows installing software from outside the App Store. Epic’s opening statement questioned why Apple needed to lock down the iPhone when it had already created a perfectly workable but more open system. But with Wright and Microsoft, Apple has a perfect comparison point: a major computing company that offers two very different versions of a big black box.
Nintendo’s next game for the Switch is one you build yourself. Today the company revealed Game Builder Garage, a new software title that’s designed to teach beginners the basics of programming and game design. It utilizes visual programming, has pre-built lessons and games, and will be launching on the Switch next month.
Game Builder Garage appears to build off of some of the ideas featured in past Nintendo projects, like the DIY series of Labo experiences and Super Mario Maker. The core of the experience is a playful, visual programming language that utilizes cute characters called Nodon that you can move around and assign properties to. For instance, once you insert a character node, you can attach a “stick” node and assign the Switch’s joystick to control left and right movement. (Nintendo says that there are dozens of these Nodon, each with different characteristics.)
And just like in Super Mario Maker, players can quickly move back and forth between building and playing in order to rapidly iterate on ideas. The app also features several different control options: Joycon controllers, touchscreen, or a USB mouse.
The other half of the equation is the “Lesson Mode.” Game Builder Garage comes with seven pre-made games — they range from a 3D platformer to a multiplayer game of tag to a side-scrolling shooter — and the tutorial takes you through how they were built, so you can see the process from scratch. Each of the games is broken down into several steps, starting with basic concepts like movement, before moving on to more complex design features like adding a counter or game-over screen. Outside of those seven games, there’s a “free programming” mode, where players can build whatever they want. This mode is also available from the beginning if you don’t want to go through the built-in lessons.
Naturally, players will also be able to share their creations via a code that can be sent to other players. (Nintendo says that there will be an option to report inappropriate games, particularly given Game Builder Garage’s younger target audience.) In order to share their creations, players will need a Nintendo Switch Online connection. Once you download someone else’s game, you’ll not only be able to play it but also look at the programming view to see how it was designed. You can even make a copy to build on top of another player’s creation.
Over the last few years, Nintendo has steadily been putting a bigger focus on building user-friendly creation tools and bringing them to a wider audience. In 2016, the company partnered with the San Francisco Public Library to host a series of game design lessons via Super Mario Maker, and in 2018 it launched a pilot program to bring Labo to schools.
Game Builder Garage will be available on June 11th for $29.99.
In 2020, Microsoft was battling to bring xCloud or Xbox Game Streaming to the iPhone and iPad, and the conversations had an unlikely victim: Shadow — a third-party cloud gaming app that lets you stream PC games to an iPhone or iPad.
Emails between Microsoft and Apple, revealed in the Epic v. Apple trial today, show how the Xbox maker was trying to get xCloud on iOS. Microsoft was trying to figure out how Shadow, Netflix, and other similar “interactive” apps were able to exist in the App Store while Apple was refusing to approve xCloud. Microsoft put forward Shadow as an example of such a service, only to see it suddenly removed from the store.
“We were showing two examples where a game or an application was able to exist, and we didn’t understand why we couldn’t,” explained Lori Wright, Microsoft’s head of business development for Xbox, during the Epic v. Apple trial today. “I believe they [Apple] ended up pulling Shadow out of the App Store based off this email we sent until they submitted changes. That was not our intention of course, it was a byproduct.”
Shadow on iPhone.Image: Shadow
While Shadow’s removal wasn’t permanent, Apple has temporarily removed the app from the App Store twice in the past year. Shadow was first removed in February last year, with Apple reportedly citing a “failure to act in accordance with a specific part of the Apple App Store Guidelines.” Apple once again removed Shadow from the App Store in February, and the app returned a week later.
Shadow revealed that the app was removed the second time “due to a misunderstanding” around the nature of the app. “Unlike game streaming services, Shadow provides a full Windows 10 PC, rather than a library of games,” explained Luc Hancock, a community manager for Shadow. “This unique approach allows Shadow to comply with the App Store guidelines, so that you can access your Shadow PC on any iOS device to run your favorite games and software.”
Valve struggled for more than a year to launch its Steam Link game streaming service on iOS. Apple rejected the app, likely because it allowed an iOS user to access another app store, Steam, within Apple’s tightly controlled ecosystem. Apple revised its rules after rejecting Steam Link, and the app was finally approved two years ago in May 2019.
xCloud on iOS via the web.Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge
Apple continued to make it difficult for services like xCloud and Stadia to run the way Microsoft and Google wanted to on iOS devices after those conversations, only slowly making App Store policy carve-outs that would let the services operate under severe restrictions. Apple now insists that developers individually submit games as separate apps using their streaming tech, only then bundling them together as a “catalog”-style app.
Microsoft wasn’t impressed with Apple’s approach, calling it a “bad experience for customers.” This public spat has now boiled over into the courtroom battle between Epic Games and Apple, with lawyers on Epic’s side questioning Microsoft and Nvidia representatives about their struggles to bring cloud gaming apps to iOS.
Both Microsoft and Nvidia have had to give in to Apple’s restrictions and launch their cloud gaming services through the Safari web browser instead.
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