Apps

Meta, X, and Snap are celebrating a new Utah law that will require Apple and Google to take responsibility for verifying users’ ages on their app stores and obtain parental consent for minors. The tech giants have been battling to determine which party should be responsible for age verificat

Instagram on Tuesday announced a new school partnership program aimed at expediting the handling of moderation reports submitted by verified school accounts. The program is currently available to all middle and high schools in the U.S. It allows schools to report posts or student accounts that may

Apple said today it is opening its catalog to let users build mix sets by integrating the platform with a number of tools. These tools include Algoriddim’s djay Pro software, hardware platforms AlphaTheta, Serato, inMusic's Engine DJ, Denon DJ, Numark, and RANE DJ. This will possib

Following a string of lawsuits and criticism for allegedly failing to protect its underage users from harm, Character AI, the startup that lets users create different AI characters and talk to them over calls and texts, said on Tuesday that it is rolling out a new set of parental supervision tools

Google is rolling out a new Gmail update that is designed to help you find the email you’re looking for more quickly. The company announced on Thursday that it will now use AI to consider factors like recency, most-clicked emails, and frequent contacts when surfacing emails based on your sear

Meta’s social network Threads, an X competitor with more than 320 million monthly active users, is now rolling out new features related to topics, reply controls, and video playback in the app, among other things. It’s also making political content suggestions more personalized to the u

On Wednesday, Spotify launched a new personalized playlist designed to help listeners discover upcoming concerts in their area. The playlist, titled “Concerts Near You,” is updated every Wednesday with 30 songs from artists performing nearby, along with full event details and ticket links. Spo

TikTok is partnering with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to bring real-time Amber Alerts directly to users’ For You feeds in the United States, the company announced on Thursday. With this new feature, if an Amber Alert is activated by law enforcement and y

Newsletter platform Ghost, an open source competitor to Substack, is now connected to the fediverse, also known as the open social web. Federated apps run on the protocol ActivityPub, which powers apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Threads, Flipboard, and others, allowing posts published on one app to b

Google Search and its Play Store app marketplace are suspected of breaching the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), per preliminary findings announced Wednesday by EU Commission enforcers of the bloc’s flagship market contestability law, who have been investigating the company f

Google announced on Wednesday that kids with Android phones can now tap to pay at stores using Google Wallet in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, and Poland. Parents and guardians in these countries can now allow their children to access digital payments on their Android devices

Chat platform WhatsApp said today that it will limit the number of broadcast messages individual users and businesses can send to curb spam on the app. In the coming weeks, the company will start testing limits on individual broadcast messages. Under these limits, WhatsApp will put a monthly limit

The world is bad sometimes, but it feels even worse if you can’t stop staring into the all-consuming abyss that is the 6-inch screen of a smartphone, following you through space and time. It taunts you with its compact, light build that’s small enough to slip into your pocket and take a

If you’ve ever spent way too long scrolling through endless feeds about nothing, you may have been advised to touch grass. It’s a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, basically telling you to log off and go outside. But one developer took the concept to the next level. Rhys Kentish launched an