The iOS app for conservative-leaning social media platform Parler is back in the Apple App Store today, after what the company says were “months of productive dialogue with Apple.”
“The entire Parler team has worked hard to address Apple’s concerns without compromising our core mission,” Parler interim CEO Mark Meckler said in a statement emailed to The Verge on Monday. “Anything allowed on the Parler network but not in the iOS app will remain accessible through our web-based and Android versions. This is a win-win for Parler, its users, and free speech.”
Parler, which bills itself as a free speech alternative to Facebook or Twitter, was banned by Apple, Google, and Amazon following the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol. The companies said Parler had not adequately handled violent threats and hateful content on its platform that encouraged the riot.
Apple reaccepted Parler last month, after initially rejecting its application for re-entry in March; Apple said at the time Parler still had “highly objectionable content,” including Nazi imagery and other hate symbols. Parler says its algorithm can now “automatically detect violent or inciting content, while still preserving user privacy. Such content has always violated Parler’s guidelines.”
Parler remains banned in Google’s Play Store, although users can still sideload the app on Android. Parler sued Amazon, which had provided the site’s web hosting, but the suit has so far not fared well in court.
As Meckler noted in his statement, Parler’s iOS app adheres to Apple’s requirements and “excludes some content that Parler otherwise allows,” the company said in a press release. “However, that content is still visible, at the user’s discretion, on the web-based and Android versions of the platform.”
After the January deplatforming, Parler struggled to resurface on the web. Former CEO John Matze said at one point even the company’s vendors and lawyers had “ditched” him. Matze was fired in February, he said, by a board that included Rebekah Mercer, of the prominent conservative Mercer family.
Microsoft is launching the personal version of Microsoft Teams today. After previewing the service nearly a year ago, Microsoft Teams is now available for free personal use amongst friends and families. The service itself is almost identical to the Microsoft Teams that businesses use, and it will allow people to chat, video call, and share calendars, locations, and files easily.
Microsoft is also continuing to offer everyone free 24-hour video calls that it introduced in the preview version in November. You’ll be able to meet up with up to 300 people in video calls that can last for 24 hours. Microsoft will eventually enforce limits of 60 minutes for group calls of up to 100 people after the pandemic, but keep 24 hours for 1:1 calls.
Microsoft Teams’ Together mode feature.Image: Microsoft
While the preview initially launched on iOS and Android, Microsoft Teams for personal use now works across the web, mobile, and desktop apps. Microsoft is also allowing Teams personal users to enable its Together mode — a feature that uses AI to segment your face and shoulders and place you together with other people in a virtual space. Skype got this same feature back in December.
Speaking of Skype, Microsoft hasn’t announced any plans to replace Skype with Microsoft Teams on the consumer side yet. Microsoft said it was “fully committed to Skype” last year when it launched the preview of this personal version of Microsoft Teams, but the rise of Zoom during the pandemic certainly highlighted Skype’s irrelevance amongst consumers.
As we noted last year, the personal version of Microsoft Teams is part of a broader effort by Microsoft to remain relevant with consumers after a series of exits from consumer-friendly services. Microsoft isn’t looking to compete with iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or other chat apps, but it’s clear Zoom is in the company’s sights after its huge rise with consumers during the pandemic.
If you’re interested in trying out Microsoft Teams for personal use, you can download the iOS, Android, or desktop apps, or simply head to Teams on the web and avoid downloading anything at all.
Barely two weeks after strong suggestions of an Apple Music Hi-Fi tier began circulating – an Apple offering to combat the hotly-anticipated Spotify HiFi – it seems we may not have to wait much longer.
Apple is said to be planning a new HiFi tier for its Apple Music streaming service (which some sources claim will coincide with the launch of its AirPods 3 true wireless earbuds) and a few clues have now been spotted within the Apple Music source code.
As noted by 9to5Mac, new references to ‘Lossless’ and ‘Hi Res Lossless’ have appeared within the source code of the Apple Music web app, as have the words ‘Dolby Audio’ and ‘Dolby Atmos’.
(Image credit: 9to5Mac (via Apple) )
These new mentions presumably indicate that tracks in Apple Music will soon be available in two higher-quality lossless formats. This corresponds with a report from 9to5Google, which claims that Apple Music for Android is readying support for two ‘lossless’ bit rates: 24-bit/48kHz and 24-bit/192kHz.
The strings in the Android app suggest that the highest quality lossless stream will consume up to 36MB of data for a single three-minute track – but there’s apparently no mention of Dolby Atmos or Dolby Audio in the code of Apple Music 3.6 for Android. To clarify: Apple had made a reference to both, in iOS 14.6 beta 1, but then removed any mention of a high-fidelity service in beta 2.
The mentions of ‘Dolby Atmos’ and ‘Dolby Audio’ in the Apple Music web app could mean that some songs will be labelled in this way and may support Apple’s Spatial Audio feature found in AirPods Pro and AirPods Max.
If high-quality streaming does indeed arrive with iOS 14.6 (set to drop in late May or early June) there’s every chance the Cupertino giant will beat arch rival Spotify to the punch.
MORE:
Try 30 Apple Music tips, tricks and features
Need new music? 10 Apple Music playlists to listen to right now
It seems Spotify HiFi is missing something – but will it matter?
Read up on the best music streaming services 2021: free streams to hi-res audio
The first project from Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata’s new studio JP Games will finally be released next month, the company has announced. The Pegasus Dream Tour is a mobile RPG themed around the Paralympic Games, the first game ever to carry the official Paralympics license. It was initially announced more than two years ago, but the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics were postponed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and there’d been radio silence on the project ever since.
JP Games describes The Pegasus Dream Tour as an “avatar RPG” set in Pegasus City. You can create a character based on a selfie from your phone, and train them in various para-sports. The game features illustrated versions of nine real-world para-athletes who compete in sports like javelin, athletics, and wheelchair basketball. Popular Japanese robot cat mascot Doraemon is also included as a guide to Pegasus City.
Badminton player Rie Ogura, who is featured in The Pegasus Dream Tour. The athletes are illustrated by Japanese artist Godtail.
The teaser trailer doesn’t give too much information away about how The Pegasus Dream Tour will actually play, with very brief glimpses at the in-game action. The style and scope of the game appear to have changed quite a bit since its initial announcement, and Tabata suggests the Games’ delay altered the focus of the project.
“The format of The Pegasus Dream Tour, which was originally planned to be a “Para-Sports RPG” was switched to that of an “Avatar RPG” in the wake of the global pandemic and the postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Games,” Tabata says in a statement. “This is because I felt that the Tokyo Paralympics, which would be held after the postponement, could allow humanity to overcome their divisions and help bring our spirits together. No matter what the outcome of the Tokyo 2020 Games is, it is my wish that people everywhere will come and receive the positive energy that is abundant inside Pegasus City.”
The Pegasus Dream Tour will be available for iOS and Android on June 24th. It’s a free download with in-app purchases; JP Games says some of the profits will go to the Agitos Foundation, an organization that helps people with disabilities get involved in sports. Pre-launch registration for the game will open today.
After launching its Android app a week ago, social audio platform Clubhouse said Sunday it will roll out to more countries in the coming week. The Android app will be available in Brazil, Japan, and Russia on Tuesday, India and Nigeria by Friday, and the “rest of the world” throughout the week.
Android rollout continues!
Japan, Brazil & Russia coming Tuesday Nigeria & India on Friday AM Rest of world throughout the week, and available worldwide by Friday afternoon
— Clubhouse (@Clubhouse) May 16, 2021
For the first year, Clubhouse was only available on iOS devices. Despite its early limited access Clubhouse grew to 10 million users in its inaugural year, and was recently valued at $4 billion after a new funding round. Whether it can keep up that momentum remains to be seen, as competitors— Twitter’s Spaces, Discord’s Stage Channels, and other better-known social media platforms—enter the audio market.
Clubhouse remains invite-only and has been criticized for not providing automatic captions for Deaf and hard-of-hearing users. The platform has lately focused on creators, and recently announced the results of an accelerator program which will fund 50 audio Clubhouse shows. CEO Paul Davison said during the weekly Clubhouse town hall that next on the company’s roadmap are in-room tipping for creators, paid events, and subscriptions.
Just ahead of Google I/O, which gets underway on Tuesday, a new leak purporting to be a preview of what’s coming during the annual developers’ conference gives some insight into what Android 12 might look like. A new video from Jon Prosser shows what appear to be slides from a presentation of Android 12.
The first slide sets up what to expect: “A beautiful new experience,” “Stronger privacy and security protections,” and “All of your devices work better together.”
The usual caveats about leaked materials apply, of course; there’s no guarantee this is what the final interface will look like, or how much may be announced during I/O. But the most interesting slide in Prosser’s video shows what appears to be a new user interface for Android 12, including a new media widget, a brightness toggle, a weather widget, an analog clock widget, a snooze/dismiss toggle, and stacked notifications (in the lower right corner of the screen grab):
A slide purporting to be part of a Google I/O presentation for new Android 12 features shows new UI elements.Jon Prosser/Front Page Tech
Previous leaks of Android 12 have shown stacked widgets, which look similar to the Smart Stacks introduced in iOS 14. We’ve also seen earlier leaks via XDA Developers that showed new themes and a conversation widget for Android 12. And Google’s own developer previews of Android 12 have included a lot of small tweaks and developer-focused features, while hinting at some significant UI changes that have been rumored, including the stacked widgets and a new lock screen with larger clock text.
Prosser shows a what he says is a video from I/O that shows updated notifications, a new keyboard design, and a new lock screen with a larger clock, which seem to confirm the earlier leaked info.
If the details in the latest leak roundup are accurate, Android 12 could be the biggest overhaul of the OS in several years. We’ll find out more in a few days when the annual I/O conference kicks off.
As part of iOS 14.5, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency forces developers to ask permission for something they used to be able to do for free: track iOS users. Today, Twitter is joining the ranks of other developers and adding a prompt that asks users to enable tracking on iOS (via MacRumors).
Twitter’s main justification for listening to its request is straightforward — having the feature enabled allows it to serve “better” ads. The company includes a link to settings so you can make those changes, but read Twitter’s explanation before you decide:
Keep ads relevant to you by allowing Twitter to track data from other companies on this device, like apps you use and websites you visit.
The company also includes a link to a support post in the Twitter help center which explains why it has to ask for permission, includes a link to its current App Privacy Policy, and goes over what enabling or disabling tracking does in iOS.
The new Twitter ad tracking prompt.
It’s a surprisingly low-key attempt to get users to allow Twitter to track them, considering the company highlighted Apple’s addition of App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5 as a potential risk in its recent earnings statement (PDF):
We continue to expect total revenue to grow faster than expenses in 2021, assuming the global pandemic continues to improve and that we see modest impact from the rollout of changes associated with iOS 14.5. How much faster will depend on various factors, including our execution on our direct response roadmap and macroeconomic factors.
Facebook and Instagram took a far more aggressive approach to convince users its use of ad tracking is on the up-and-up — even going as far as including a vague threat that enabling tracking will “help keep Facebook/Instagram free of charge.”
Companies like Twitter and Facebook rely on tracking users to support their separate, often very lucrative ad businesses. After all, it’s usually ad sales that pay for free social networks, and customer data helps to target those ads. As a company that’s more interested in selling hardware and subscription services, Apple doesn’t really have to worry about things like that, but brash changes like the new tracking permissions can leave developers scrambling.
App Tracking Transparency has proven popular, though — around 96 percent of US users are opting out of tracking according to some recent surveys. And with Google considering developing its own methods for blocking tracking on Android, we might just have to get used to apps coming to us and begging for free data.
Massively popular game creation tool Roblox is now a massively popular experience creation tool Roblox, possibly in response to the ongoing Epic v. Apple trial.
Roblox allows a variety of user-created projects on its platform, and until earlier this week, these were all grouped under a tab called “Games” on Roblox’s website. Roblox creators could create and manage “games” through an editor, and individual games had a user limit called “max players.”
That’s all changed now. The “Games” tab now reads “Discover” on the web, although it still points to an address of “roblox.com/games.” Developers can create and manage “experiences,” and experiences have “max people” allowed. The word “game” has been replaced by “experience” across nearly the entire Roblox website, and the iOS and Android apps now have a Discover tab instead of a Games tab — although both apps are currently classed as games in their respective stores. Roblox acknowledged a message from The Verge, but it didn’t offer an explanation for the latest change by press time.
Roblox has used the term “experience” in place of “game” before, and CEO David Baszucki called Roblox a “metaverse” rather than a gaming platform last year. But this change happened days after a legal fight over whether Roblox experiences are games — and by extension, whether Roblox itself should be allowed on the iOS App Store.
The Epic v. Apple antitrust trial has produced a weeks-long, frequently hilarious debate over the definition of a video game. Epic wants to prove that its shooter Fortnite is a “metaverse” rather than a game, pushing the trial’s scope to cover Apple’s entire App Store instead of just games. Apple wants to prove that Epic is an almost purely game-related company and that the App Store maintains consistent, user-friendly policies distinguishing “apps” from “games.” It also wants to defend a ban on “stores within a store” on iOS.
Roblox blurs the line between a large social game and a game engine or sales platform. Users don’t enter a single virtual world like Second Life; they launch individual experiences created by users. Developers can sell items within those experiences, and there are full-fledged game studios that build with Roblox instead of, say, the Unity or Unreal engines. But all of this activity happens within a single Roblox app, instead of as a series of separately packaged games.
Apple has apparently worried about this fuzziness. In a 2017 email, Apple marketing head Trystan Kosmynka said he was “surprised” that Roblox (which he referred to as “Roboblox”) had been approved for the App Store. The email chain indicates that App Store reviewers raised concerns in 2014, but Roblox was approved without ever resolving the issues. Epic brought the decision up again in court, hoping to cast doubt on Apple’s App Store review process.
Instead, Kosmynka justified the choice by saying that neither Roblox nor its user-built projects should be defined as games. “If you think of a game or app, games are incredibly dynamic, games have a beginning, an end, there’s challenges in place,” he testified. “I look at the experiences that are in Roblox similar to the experiences that are in Minecraft. These are maps. These are worlds. And they have boundaries in terms of what they’re capable of.” Kosmynka said Apple considered Roblox itself an app (rather than a game) because the company used that label in the App Store, although this doesn’t appear to be accurate.
Besides the crucial factors of “beginning,” “end,” and “challenges,” Kosmynka seemingly argued that these experiences weren’t games because Roblox contained their code in a safe, Apple-vetted Roblox sandbox — making them less objectionable than standalone installable games. But Apple doesn’t use that same logic for cloud gaming services, which stream video of games from remote servers. In fact, it requires these services to list each game as a separate app. That would probably be a nightmare for Roblox, where experiences range from full-fledged professional projects to tiny personal spaces.
Some Roblox users have left irritated messages on Twitter, Reddit, and other platforms. But Roblox has promoted itself as a general-purpose metaverse in the past. It’s got virtually nothing to gain by deliberately stepping into Apple’s minefield of iOS gaming rules, particularly after such an extended courtroom debate about its status. On iOS, it turns out, the only winning move is to not play — or at least not tell anyone you’re playing.
Apple might have bigger plans for next week than initially thought. The new iMac, iPad Pro, and Apple TV 4K are all set to start shipping to early preorder customers on or around May 21st, but now it seems there could be two surprise announcements: a hi-fi streaming tier of Apple Music, and maybe even AirPods 3.
The Apple Music part seems extremely likely when you factor in a report from 9to5Google. Digging into the latest Apple Music for Android beta app, they discovered direct references to high-resolution audio that didn’t exist previously
These are the prompts found in the app’s code, though they’re not user-facing quite yet:
Lossless audio files preserve every detail of the original file. Turning this on will consume significantly more data.
Lossless audio files will use significantly more space on your device. 10 GB of space could store approximately: – 3000 songs at high quality – 1000 songs with lossless – 200 songs with hi-res lossless
Lossless streaming will consume significantly more data. A 3-minute song will be approximately: – 1.5 MB with high efficiency- 6 MB with high quality at 256 kbps- 36 MB with lossless at 24-bit/48 kHz- 145 MB with hi-res lossless at 24-bit/192 kHzSupport varies and depends on song availability, network conditions, and connected speaker or headphone capability.
It doesn’t get much more direct and clear than that, with Apple warning about both the higher data consumption of streaming lossless music and the added storage space that will be necessary to download it for offline listening. The fact that Apple has now added this data to its Android app suggests that this could all be happening sooner than later. I say that because Apple’s Apple One bundle showed up in Apple Music for Android just days before its public announcement.
The Android app code also reveals that Apple Music will offer two choices for lossless playback:
Lossless ALAC up to 24-bit/48 kHz
High-Res Lossless ALAC up to 24-bit/192 kHz
So it sounds like Apple has every intention of matching what Tidal, Amazon Music HD, and services like Qobuz currently deliver. It’s also worth noting that there’ve been recent references to Dolby Atmos spatial audio in Apple Music on iOS, according to 9to5Mac.
Apple has for years stuck to its customary 256kbps AAC files for both iTunes and Apple Music. When iTunes Plus debuted all the way back in 2007, that was a substantial upgrade over heavily compressed MP3s that people were downloading from peer-to-peer apps like Napster and Limewire during the height of music piracy. And it’s still perfectly adequate. Mastering of tracks has just as much influence on the listening experience as encoding details do, and Apple has tried to play to this aspect with its “Apple Digital Masters,” which aim to get the most dynamic range and detail from songs on its platform.
But in terms of pure music fidelity, Apple has objectively been surpassed by companies like Tidal and Amazon over the last several years. My friend Micah Singleton has a great piece over at Billboard about how we’re entering the hi-fi era of the streaming music wars. Amazon Music HD is performing strongly, with subscriptions up 100 percent year over year. Spotify has also promised the launch of “Spotify HiFi” for later this year.
There’s money to be made, and the ingredients are all there: Apple now sells premium headphones in the AirPods Max, and wireless carriers continue to talk up the promise and speeds of their growing 5G networks. I can’t imagine 5G will be required for lossless Apple Music streaming, but it’s a nice flex of the technology right in the middle of the iPhone 12 cycle.
What about those AirPods 3, though?
There have already been quite a few leaks that revealed details about Apple’s next iteration of AirPods, but the real question has been around release timing. Yesterday, a report from a site called AppleTrack suggested that the new AirPods could be announced alongside this new lossless tier of Apple Music. I don’t quite follow the logic, myself; no one really thinks of regular AirPods as the right choice for audiophile listening, but maybe Apple just wants new hardware of some sort to launch in tandem with the new service.
Taken on its own, the AirPods rumor seems “sketchy” as 9to5Mac said. But the sudden discoveries about lossless audio in Apple Music for Android seem to add some fuel to the fire.
Google is rolling out the ability to access Chat messages right from Gmail to more iOS and Android users, after introducing it as a feature for Google Workspace users last July (via 9to5Google). It’s still a test feature, so getting access to it can take a bit of work, and it may not be available to your depending on your account settings (my colleagues and I were able to enable it on personal accounts, but not our work accounts). If you can get it working, though, you’ll be rewarded with a new tab at the bottom of the Gmail app, giving you access to your IMs.
To enable the feature on iOS or Android, open the side menu and scroll down to Settings. If you have multiple accounts, select the one you want, then look for “Chat (early access)” under General. Flipping the toggle will turn it on (after you restart the app).
Turning on the Chat toggle will give you access to personal and group chats in Gmail.
If you don’t see the Chat option, you may need enable it in the desktop version of gmail first, by going to https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/chat, then selecting Google Chat in the Chat menu. After restarting the Gmail app on your phone, the toggle should appear.
You may have to enable Chat on desktop before you can get it on your phone.
Chat is Google’s replacement for Hangouts, which it has slowly been moving users away from. Chat’s also available as a separate app, but if you’re the type of person who doesn’t like having a ton of messaging apps on your phone, having it just exist as a tab in Gmail could be your kind of thing (especially if you live in email all day).
Pretty much just like having the chat app, but in Gmail.
Sometimes I reflect on my life and wonder where I went wrong, such that I am sitting on a wooden pew in federal court, watching a Google search for Candy Crush Saga on the display monitor. This is a huge trial with major stakes for tech companies. It is also a crashing bore.
On the stand is Lorin Hitt, professor of operations, information, and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton, looking uncomfortable behind his face shield. During his direct examination in the ongoing Epic v. Apple trial, Hitt testified that he didn’t think having to access an app like Candy Crush through a browser instead of the app counted as “friction” for the user — and that it certainly was less friction than “real-world” alternatives, such as leaving a convenience store and then crossing the street to go to another convenience store.
The point of Hitt’s earlier testimony was that game developers “multi-home” games to PC and mobile. He’s Apple’s expert witness, and he is here to convince the judge that being blocked from the App Store isn’t a huge barrier to developers. Epic — whose game Fortnite is in fact blocked from the store — has taken Apple to court to show otherwise. And the picture Hitt painted on his direct examination was largely dismissive of Epic’s concerns.
Epic attorney Yonatan Even, also in a face shield, is now doing his best to blow a hole in Hitt’s testimony. I am doing my best to follow a confusing spreadsheet that includes games that Hitt has promised are on both PC and mobile phones. Even begins by pointing out some of these games are not, in fact, available for PC. One game, Words Story, is listed as available on PC on the document, but does not say this on the developer’s website. In the Microsoft store, a “Words Story” with the same art exists, but it’s not the same developer. “Sir, this is not the same developer and not the same game, is it?” Even says. “It’s what is called a ‘fake game.’”
We go through this tiresome process for several games: Helix Game, Crowd City, BitLife, Happy Glass, Paper.io 2, and Mr. Bullet. I have never heard of any of these small-potatoes games, which makes them sort of a weird point of comparison for the most popular game in the world. The app developer pages suggest they are not available on PC, despite Hitt’s document to the contrary. Things are getting contentious, and Hitt is beginning to have a hang-dog “Rick Moranis in Honey I Shrunk the Kids” vibe. Did Hitt double-check the data to make sure it was the same developer across stores? Can he tell the court under oath that a certain app is from the same developer?
“Can you give the court sworn testimony that you have seen with your own eyes that this game is also available on PC?” Even asks.
Hitt can’t guarantee all the games listed in the unintelligible spreadsheet are from the same developer across all platforms, it turns out. He says his team of researchers did the analysis, and he trusts his team.
Hitt said earlier that he’d identified eight games that let people buy things on the iOS web browser, and then use them in iOS apps; these are identified in the spreadsheet. Epic has complained that this process isn’t good enough — and certainly isn’t ubiquitous. Now, Even raises the “frictionless” process that Hitt had blithely testified to earlier in the day. Candy Crush Saga is the example Even chooses. We go to the website, and press “install,” where we are promptly sent to the App Store. We tab back to the website. The only possible way to play on the web is on desktop. The Facebook option for Candy Crush, too, is desktop.
“That’s part of the frictionless process you have envisioned?” Even asks, somewhat sarcastically.
We try another game, Clash Royale, developed by Supercell. We go to Supercell’s FAQ, where it emerges that payment processes are only through Apple’s App Store or Google play. Supercell itself doesn’t keep payment information “And yet you believe that your team managed to go into a website and buy legitimate Clash Royale money and go back to the app? That’s your testimony?” Even asks.
Then he twists the knife: The typical user of Clash Royale doesn’t have a research team, Even observes.
I am terrified we are going to go through all eight apps, but thankfully Even spares us the exhaustion. According to Even, there are three apps that support buying something on the web, then using it in an app: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Roblox and… Fortnite. (Fortnite, however, is now banned from iOS.) Does Hitt have any basis to dispute this?
Hitt says he trusts his team. I am feeling very bad for the team, which has largely been thrown under the bus by Hitt here.
On redirect, Apple’s Cynthia Richman tries to stop the bleeding. Sometimes developers license games to other developers — which might explain some of the cases where the developers don’t match. Hitt also tells us that Even’s rather brutal examples aren’t typical. Hitt has personally purchased V-bucks on a mobile browser, he tells us proudly.
“It looked pretty difficult given the examples you provided,” says Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. What’s the explanation for why we couldn’t do these things during the cross-examination? Well, Hitt says, there were other links in the spreadsheet.
That may very well be true. But Even’s point stands: most of us do not have research teams. I wish I did — I could send them to the trial in my stead and blame them if the work was subpar. Instead, I am personally sitting through excruciating expert testimony. Why am I focusing on this, specifically? It’s the most interesting thing that happened all day.
Can you imagine being able to actually search Twitter to find a conversation, instead of just scrolling through endlessly to hopefully find what you’re looking for? That could be a reality for Twitter DMs in the near future.
First off, the company’s finally bringing a DM search bar to Android today, nearly two years after it first appeared on iOS. More importantly, it’s going to drastically expand how helpful that bar is by surfacing older conversations and even actual words you’ve typed in those conversations sometime “later this year.” (Currently, you can only search for the names of the people you’ve spoken to.)
We’ve brought the DM search bar to Android and are rolling out an improved version that lets you search for all of your old convos, not just the most recent ones.
Waiting for the option to search your DMs for message content? We’re working on releasing that later this year! https://t.co/wAQxSokJt6
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) May 13, 2021
Frankly, I’ve rarely ever bothered to try Twitter search on mobile, since I’ve largely been an Android guy — and because Twitter’s mobile search doesn’t give you anywhere near the power of Tweetdeck or Twitter’s advanced search on desktop web.
Speaking of which, here’s an easy way to find your own tweets: drop https://twitter.com/search?q=YOURSEARCHQUERY%20(from%3AYOURTWITTERNAME)&src=typed_query in your web browser, and see what you get. That’d be a nice feature on mobile, too.
There’s only supposed to be one way to hear exclusive podcast content from sports host Scott Wetzel: by paying $5 a month to subscribe to his Patreon. But the show’s also been available on a smaller podcasting app for free. In fact, leaked podcast feeds from dozens of subscription-only shows, including Wetzel’s and The Last Podcast On The Left, are available to stream through Castbox, a smaller app for both iOS and Android, just by searching for them.
Two people in the podcast space tell me they’ve reached out to Castbox multiple times, only for the company to remove a show and then have it pop up again, an infuriating cycle for someone trying to charge for their content. “It’s a little bit like playing whack-a-mole with them,” says one source, who asked to remain anonymous because of their ongoing work in the space.
Podcast subscriptions have existed for years, but they’ve gained wider attention this past month. Apple, which makes the dominant podcasting app, introduced in-app subscriptions with a button that lets people directly subscribe to a show from the app. Spotify announced its own subscription product, too, but with caveats — the main one being there’s no actual in-app button.
Prior to both of these proprietary solutions, the podcasting world’s subscription products mostly centered on private RSS feeds, or links typically assigned to individual listeners that allow them to access shows. The links can be pasted into any supporting podcast app, like Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and Pocket Casts, and for the most part, the system’s worked. Podcasting remains a mostly open ecosystem, and although this content is paywalled, shows still benefit from seamless RSS distribution. Notably, podcasters don’t have to manage multiple backends across services and can publish all their subscribers’ content at once.
But private feeds still have a glaring downside: these links can be easily shared, and anyone with the link can access private content. Piracy might become a growing concern, too, as the industry looks toward subscription and exclusive models. Already we’ve seen pirated shows on Anchor, and re-uploads of the Spotify-exclusive The Joe Rogan Experience on Castbox, as well. Although Castbox is small enough that the leaks likely aren’t on most podcasters’ radars, they still illustrate the problems one weak link in the distribution chain can create.
“This is the beauty and the mess of the open system — the web is amazing and allows us to publish content everywhere, but restricting access to content is always going to be tricky,” says Justin Jackson, co-founder of podcast hosting service Transistor.fm.
He adds that, inevitably, people will find ways to subvert the system, whether that’s recording audio and distributing it on their own or sharing their private feed links among friends.
To prevent situations like this, software has been touted as a possible solution. Slate’s Supporting Cast — which powers multiple membership-oriented shows, including Slate’s own Slate Plus network — monitors private RSS feeds for suspicious activity, like thousands of downloads on what’s supposed to be someone’s single-person feed. The software also monitors the IP addresses where someone is listening and the podcast app they’re using to see if anything seems out of the ordinary.
So far, the issue hasn’t become a huge problem. Supporting Cast CEO David Stern says the team has only had to take action fewer than 100 times in the year and a half that the automated monitoring has been active.
“You could always share a username and password to Hulu or Netflix, and that’s sort of okay. The companies let you get away with that,” Stern says. “You’ve got to strike a balance. We’re not talking about national security secrets here.”
The software-side workarounds can be effective — especially considering RSS, the backbone upon which the podcast industry was built, doesn’t allow for many technical improvements. However, it’s an investment that not every company might want to make. So the broader solution for locking down private feeds is simpler: tags, or literal snippets of text, that are part of a podcast feed’s metadata.
Multiple distribution companies and hosting platforms now verify the owners of RSS feeds through tags. These tags list an owner’s email address, which the platforms then use to verify the person uploading the feed, thereby preventing people from trying to pass an already established show off as their own. Feeds can also be “locked,” a separate tag that, if respected, stops platforms from importing a show. A third and final tag, which is particularly relevant to private RSS feeds, instructs podcast apps not to index a particular show. Google Podcasts, as an example, scours the web to index shows and include them in the app, similarly to how its search engine populates results. If this tag is placed in an RSS feed, as it likely would be for a private feed, the app won’t index it.
“What most platforms are doing is making it as difficult as they can for people to pirate podcast feeds – for people to submit podcast feeds to the directories — but still, at the same time, trying to make it easy for folks [who listen],” Jackson says.
The catch with tags, though, is they’re only as good as the platforms allow them to be. You might tell a platform not to index a program, but it doesn’t have to obey that request.
Jackson posits that this appears to be happening in Castbox’s case. These RSS feeds likely aren’t being verified when they’re submitted and, if a feed’s metadata requests that it not be indexed, Castbox isn’t heeding that ask.
None of these feeds appear to have been uploaded maliciously to Castbox and most have a small number of plays — the damage is minimal. I reached out to the owner of the private RSS for Wetzel’s podcast, and he confirmed that he only meant to listen to this podcast on his own, not to make it public. He “didn’t give it any thought” that the show would become public when he added the RSS feed to listen on Castbox. (The Joe Rogan Experience copycat, however, has more than 400,000 plays and over 14,000 subscribers.)
It’s unclear what’s happening on Castbox’s end. The company says it supports private RSS feeds, but presumably doing so wouldn’t mean making them public. Verifying a feed should also prevent it from going public, as should some of these tags. We’ve reached out to Castbox to confirm the details, but seemingly, the industry’s safeguards failed.
Podcasters and app developers clearly see paid memberships as part of the industry’s future, but the risks of private RSS feeds could compromise the industry’s headway. It might even give Spotify and Apple a leg up on competitors that have built entire businesses around locking down the open technology. But even a proprietary solution can’t prevent piracy entirely, and for podcasters, they’ll likely have to accept some risk and rely on the good faith of the podcasting players themselves to keep their shows from going wide.
(Pocket-lint) – There are numerous speakers within the Sonos portfolio but if you’re looking at the smaller end of the range, the choice likely comes down to the Sonos Roam or the Sonos One, or One SL.
You can read how all the Sonos speakers compare in our separate feature, but here we are focusing on the differences between the Sonos Roam and the Sonos One, and One SL, to help you work out which could be the right starting point for you into the Sonos system, or which you should add to an existing one.
Sonos Roam vs Sonos Move: What’s the difference?
squirrel_widget_4281834
Design
Roam: 168 x 62 x 60mm, 430g, IP67, portable
One: 161.5 x 119.7 x 119.7mm, 1.85kg
One SL: 161.5 x 119.7 x 119.7m, 1.85kg
The Sonos Roam is triangular prism shaped and comes in Shadow Black and Lunar White colour options. It is IP67 water and dust resistant and it is small, light and portable – around the size of a water bottle – so you can pick it up and bring it wherever you go.
On the top, there are tactile controls for microphone, play/pause, skip and rewind, and the Roam can be positioned vertically or horizontally. There is a wireless charger sold separately that the Roam will magnetically attach to, or you can charge it via the USB-C port.
The One and One SL meanwhile, are a little shorter and fatter than Roam in terms of physical measurements, but the main difference is they are mains-powered devices and not portable – or waterproof. They can also only be positioned vertically.
One comes in black and white colour options and it has capacitive controls on top, with a microphone on/off button, play/pause and skip and rewind. There’s a pairing button on the back, next to the power port and an ethernet port.
The One SL has an almost identical design to the One, but it doesn’t have a microphone array or button on its top controls.
Features
Roam: Multi-room audio, stereo pairing, smart assistants, Sound Swap, Auto Trueplay, Bluetooth
One SL: Multi-room audio, stereo pairing, surrounds, Trueplay
The Sonos Roam and Sonos One both come with all the features offered by all Sonos speakers, like support for over 100 streaming services, stereo pairing, EQ adjusting through the Sonos app and of course, seamless multi-room audio, among plenty of others.
The Roam and One also both have built-in support for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant – meaning they are both smart speakers. You can’t have both assistants running at the same time but you can switch between them. One SL doesn’t have built-in support for the assistants but it can be controlled via a Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa device.
Both Roam and One have Trueplay tuning on board, enabling you to tune them according to their surroundings, though Roam does this automatically, whereas One and One SL require you to do it manually with an iOS device.
From here, Roam then takes the lead in the feature department compared to the One and One SL. It offers Bluetooth connectivity – automatically switching between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi – meaning you can use Roam as a traditional Sonos speaker when on Wi-Fi, or as a traditional Bluetooth speaker when you leave the house.
There’s also a feature called Sound Swap on the Sonos Roam where you push and hold the play/pause button to send the music playing on Roam to the nearest Sonos speaker. The Sonos One and One SL can receive the music from Roam if they are closest and they will continue playing whatever tunes you were listening to.
The Sonos One and One SL don’t have Bluetooth connectivity and they don’t offer Sound Swap, but they can both be grouped with a Sonos Arc, Beam, Playbar or Playbase and Sonos SUB to act as surrounds. The Roam can’t be grouped with a Sonos soundbar or the Sonos SUB.
squirrel_widget_167290
Hardware
Roam: Two Class-H digital amplifiers, one tweeter, one mid-woofer, microphones, AirPlay 2, Bluetooth
One: Two Class-D amplifiers, one tweeter, one mid-woofer, microphones, AirPlay 2
One SL: Two Class-D amplifiers, one tweeter, one mid-woofer, AirPlay 2
The Sonos Roam features two Class-H digital amplifiers, one tweeter and one mid-woofer under its hood. There’s also a far-field microphone array, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on board.
The Sonos One and One SL have two Class-D amplifiers, a tweeter and a mid-woofer. The One also has a far-field microphone array – the One SL doesn’t – and they both have Wi-Fi on board, but no Bluetooth capabilities.
All three speakers offer Apple AirPlay 2 support.
In terms of sound output, the Sonos One delivers a little extra than the Roam, but the Roam is an excellent sounding speaker for its size and all three speakers have no problem filling a standard room with sound. They also all sound great so you’re unlikey to be disappointed with any of them in this department.
Price
The Sonos Roam is the cheapest of the Sonos speakers being compared here, costing £159 in the UK and $169 in the US.
The Sonos One costs £199 in the UK and $199 in the US, while the Sonos One SL is a little more expensive than the Sonos Roam but cheaper than the Sonos One at £179 in the UK and $179 in the US.
squirrel_widget_148504
Conclusion
The decision between the Sonos Roam and Sonos One will come down to what you want your speaker to deliver.
The Roam offers the best of both worlds, giving you an excellent multi-room Sonos speaker when on Wi-Fi and an excellent Bluetooth speaker when out and about. It also has some great features, like Sound Swap, automatic Trueplay tuning and Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa support.
The One is a little more expensive and it isn’t portable, though it delivers a little extra punch in terms of sound compared to Roam, two can be grouped with a Sonos soundbar and SUB and used as surrounds (which Roam can’t) and it still has some great features, like the smart assistant support and manual Trueplay.
The One SL meanwhile, delivers the same sound capabilities as the One, but it isn’t a smart speaker. It’s the one you’d pick if you wanted a small Sonos speaker but you aren’t bothered about portability or having Google or Alexa, or if you want two as surrounds to your Beam or Arc.
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.
After a couple of generations making phones with flip-out cameras and increasingly large displays, Asus has taken the ZenFone 8 in a totally different direction: small.
The flipping camera concept lives on in the also-new ZenFone 8 Flip, but it’s no longer a standard feature across this year’s ZenFone lineup. Instead, priced at €599 (about $730), the ZenFone 8 lands in the upper-midrange class with a conventional rear camera bump and a much smaller 5.9-inch display. As a side note, final US pricing is TBD — Asus says somewhere between $599 and $799 — but it will be coming to North America, unlike last year’s model.
Rather than an attention-grabbing camera feature, the focus of this design has been to create a smaller phone that’s comfortable to use in one hand, which Asus has done without skimping on processing power or higher-end features.
It’s an Android iPhone mini, and it’s fantastic.
Asus designed the ZenFone 8 with one-handed operation in mind.
Asus ZenFone 8 screen and design
The ZenFone 8 may be small, but that hasn’t kept it from offering the latest flagship processor: a Snapdragon 888 chipset, coupled with 6, 8, or 16GB of RAM (my review unit has 16GB). I can’t find fault with this phone’s performance. It feels responsive, animations and interactions are smooth, and it keeps up with demanding use and rapid app switching. This is performance fitting of a flagship device.
The display is a 5.9-inch 1080p OLED panel with a fast 120Hz refresh rate that makes routine interactions with the phone — swiping, scrolling, animations — look much more smooth and polished than a standard 60Hz screen or even a 90Hz panel. By default, the phone will automatically switch between 120 / 90 / 60Hz depending on the application to save battery life, but you can manually select any of those three refresh rates if you prefer.
The display’s 20:9 aspect ratio was carefully considered by Asus. The company says it settled on this slightly narrower format so the phone would fit more easily into a pocket, and it does. I can’t get it all the way into a back jeans pocket, but it mostly fits. More importantly, it fits well inside a jacket pocket and doesn’t feel like it’s going to flop out if I sit down on the floor to tie my shoes. The ZenFone 8 is rated IP68 for dust protection and some water submersion.
The front panel is protected by Gorilla Glass Victus and houses an in-display fingerprint sensor, while the back uses Gorilla Glass 3 with a frosted finish that’s on the matte side of the matte / glossy spectrum. The front panel is flat, but the rear features a slight curve on the long edges for an easier fit in the hand. At 169 grams (5.9 ounces), it’s heavy for its size, and it feels surprisingly dense when you first pick it up. The phone’s frame is aluminum, giving the whole package a high-end look and feel. There’s even a headphone jack on the top edge as a treat.
The power button (an exciting shade of blue!) is well-positioned so my right thumb falls on it naturally with the phone in my hand. Same for the in-screen fingerprint sensor: the target appears to be positioned higher on the screen than usual, but that actually puts it within a comfortable reach of my thumb.
I’ll admit up front that I have a personal bias toward smaller phones, but the ZenFone 8 just feels great in my hand. I’ve spent a lot of time using big devices over the last six months, and I’ve gotten used to it. But the ZenFone 8 is the first device that feels like it was adapted to me, not something I’ve had to adapt to using.
A smaller phone means a smaller battery.
Asus ZenFone 8 battery and software
The phone’s small size makes a smaller battery a necessity — 4,000mAh in this case, much smaller than the ZenFone 6 and 7’s 5,000mAh. I felt the difference in using this phone versus a battery-for-days budget or midrange phone, but I had no problem getting through a full day of moderate use. I even left Strava running for 20 hours by accident, and the battery still had some life in it the next morning. The ZenFone 8 supports 30W wired charging with the included power adapter, which takes an empty battery to 100 percent in a bit more than an hour. Wireless charging isn’t supported, which makes the ZenFone 8 a bit of an outlier in the flagship class.
Asus offers a ton of options to help stretch day-to-day battery life as well as the overall lifespan of your battery. There are no fewer than five battery modes to optimize phone performance or battery longevity on a daily basis, and different charging modes let you set a custom charging limit or stagger charging overnight so it reaches 100 percent around the time of your alarm for better battery health. You won’t find class-leading battery capacity here, but rest assured if you need to stretch the ZenFone 8’s battery, there are plenty of options.
The ZenFone 8 ships with Android 11, and Asus says it will provide “at least” two major OS with security updates for the same timeframe. That’s on the low side of what we’d expect for a flagship phone, especially compared to Apple’s typical four- or five-year support schedule. An important note for US shoppers is that the ZenFone 8 will only work with AT&T and T-Mobile’s LTE and Sub-6GHz 5G networks; you can’t use this phone on Verizon, and there’s no support for the fast, but extremely limited, millimeter-wave 5G networks.
The ZenFone 8 offers standard wide and ultrawide rear cameras.
Asus ZenFone 8 camera
There are just two cameras on the ZenFone 8’s rear camera bump, and they are both worth your time. Rather than cram in a depth sensor, macro, or some monochrome nonsense, Asus just went with a 64-megapixel main camera with OIS and a 12-megapixel ultrawide. They’re borrowed from last year’s model, minus a telephoto camera and the flipping mechanism.
As in the ZenFone 7 Pro, the 8’s main camera produces 16-megapixel images with vibrant color and plenty of detail in good light. Images can lean a little too far into unnatural-looking territory, and some high-contrast scenes look a little too HDR-y for my liking. But overall, this camera does fine: it handles moderately low-light conditions like a dim store interior well, and Night Mode does an okay job in very low light, provided you can hold the phone still for a few seconds and your subject isn’t moving.
Ultrawide camera
Ultrawide camera
Ultrawide camera
A skin-smoothing beauty mode is on by default when you use portrait mode, and it is not good. Skin looks over-smoothed, unnaturally flat, and brightened, like your subject is wearing a couple of layers of stage makeup. Turning this off improves things significantly.
The ultrawide camera also turns in good performance. Asus calls it a “flagship” grade sensor, and while that might have been true in 2018, it’s at least a step up from the smaller, cheaper sensors often found in ultrawide cameras. Likewise, the front-facing 12-megapixel camera does fine. Beauty mode is turned off by default when you switch to the selfie camera, and thank goodness for that.
There’s no telephoto camera here, just digital zoom. On the camera shooting screen, there’s an icon to jump to a 2x 16-megapixel “lossless” digital zoom to crop in quickly, which works okay, but it isn’t much reach, and it just makes the limitations of the small sensor and lens more obvious.
On the whole, the camera system is good but not great. The lack of true optical zoom or a telephoto camera is a disappointment, but you can’t have everything on such a small device, and I’d personally take an ultrawide before a telephoto any day.
The ZenFone 8 doesn’t sacrifice a flagship experience to achieve its small form factor.
The ZenFone 8 fills a void in the Android market for a full-specced, small-sized device. The Google Pixel 4A is around the same size, but it’s decidedly a budget device with a step-down processor, plastic chassis, and fewer niceties like an IP rating or a fast-refresh screen. Aside from battery life, which is manageable, you give up very little in the way of flagship features to get the ZenFone 8’s small form factor.
You have to look to iOS for this phone’s most direct competition: the iPhone 12 mini, which it matches almost spec-for-spec from the IP rating down to the camera configuration. The 12 mini is actually a little smaller than the ZenFone 8, and when you factor in storage capacity, it’s likely to be the more expensive choice at $829 for 256GB. However, when you consider that the 12 mini will probably get a couple more years of OS and security support, it may be the better buy in the long run, if you’re flexible in your choice of operating system.
I like the ZenFone 8 a lot, but I’m not sure it’ll find a big audience, at least in the US. Apple is having trouble selling the iPhone 12 mini, and if there’s one thing Apple is good at, it’s selling phones to US customers. As much as I hate to entertain the idea, maybe we’ve gotten used to giant phones. I love how the ZenFone 8 feels in my hand and in my pocket, but I do notice how much smaller the screen and everything on it seems compared to the bigger phones I’ve used recently.
There are also a few important considerations, like the lack of compatibility with Verizon and the comparatively short support lifespan of the phone. If you need the absolute best in battery life the ZenFone 8 can’t offer that, and if you want a class-leading camera, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
All that said, the ZenFone 8 will be the right fit for a specific type of person, and I can heartily recommend it to my fellow small phone fans. You’ll get flagship-level build quality and performance quite literally in the palm of your hand.
Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
