Final Android 13 beta arrives ahead of its official launch ‘in the weeks ahead’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google has released Android 13’s fourth and final public beta today, giving brave users the chance to try out the upcoming update ahead of its official release. But, more importantly, the beta gives developers an early look at the changes that are on the way so they can get their apps ready.

Google’s announcement post says the official release of Android 13 is “just a few weeks away.” For context, Android 12 released last October, while Android 11 released in September 2020.

There’s not much in the way of big changes with this latest update (Google already reached platform stability with the previous beta), but an additional round of fine-tuning should make for a more stable experience. Features that have already appeared in previous...

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Elden Ring publisher Bandai Namco confirms reports it was hacked

Bandai Namco, the game publisher behind popular titles like Elden Ring, Dark Souls, and Tekken, confirmed that it was the victim of a hack. According to a report from Eurogamer, the publisher says it experienced “unauthorised access” to its “internal systems” when the breach took place on July 3rd.

Reports that Bandai Namco suffered an attack surfaced earlier this week. On Monday, vx-underground, a group that tracks malware source code across the web, posted a screenshot on Twitter showing that the group behind the ALPHV ransomware, also known as BlackCat, added Bandai Namco to its list of victims with the words “data soon.”

“There is a possibility” customer information was compromised

While Bandai Namco’s statement confirms that a hack...

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Sony’s WF-1000XM4 noise-canceling earbuds hit a new low price at Prime Day

Great audio and sleek looks. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

While there are all kinds of deals going on during these consecutive days of Amazon Prime Day, a particular standout one to us is Sony’s WF-1000XM4 wireless earbuds for $198 at Amazon and Best Buy. That’s $81.99 off the regular $279.99 price for these excellent noise-canceling buds. If you’re a frequent reader of The Verge and Verge Deals, you may be familiar with these earbuds. We often track and flag when they go on notable sales, and that’s because they’re some of the best ones you can buy today — but this discount beats their usual best price by an additional $50.

The WF-1000XM4 come in black or silver, and you have your choice of the two colors at this Prime Day price. In addition to the fantastic sound quality, they feature the...

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The excellent Backbone One controller is $30 off in this Prime Day deal

Photo by Cameron Faulkner / The Verge

The Backbone One controller for iPhone is an awesome device. While not the first accessory to turn your phone into a little game console, of sorts, it’s the best one currently available, if you ask me. And now, as part of an Amazon Lightning Deal during Prime Day 2022, you can get one for $69.99 instead of its usual $99.99 price. The controller and its free companion software work with phones going back to the iPhone 6S, and the adapter included in the box lets even the biggest iPhones fit snugly.

A few other things that I like about the Backbone One include its slick design, the 3.5mm audio passthrough port (sometimes, wired listening is the preferred option), as well as a robust app that makes using the Backbone feel like a console. It...

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Twitter is testing custom-built timelines, starting first with one for The Bachelorette

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter is experimenting with custom-built timelines curated by developers, beginning first with one focused on The Bachelorette. The idea is that they’re topic-focused timelines you can swipe or click on from your main feed so you can scroll through the conversation about a specific subject.

Today we launched a new custom Timeline experiment - just one of the many things we’re working on over at @TwitterDev There is a lot of potential for the developer community to build features like this in the future, and we are just getting started. Congrats to the team! pic.twitter.com/sFToIN7a2s

— Amir Shevat (@ashevat) July 11, 2022

The Bachelorette custom Timeline will be available for 10 weeks as a “limited test” on the web for a “small...

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Twitter is testing alerts to remind you to add alt text to images

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter will begin testing a long-awaited accessibility feature today: reminders to add alternative text — or alt text — to image posts.

Alt text is a written description of what’s in an image and why it’s important. People who use screen readers, like blind and low-vision users, depend on alt text to understand tweets that contain a picture — think memes, screenshots of headlines, flyers for events, and more. Currently, anyone can write and add alt text for photos and GIFs they upload to Twitter, but it’s not required, and it takes a few clicks to add.

Twitter spokesperson Shaokyi Amdo says the feature will launch today, starting with a small group of users on iOS, Android, and web, with a wider rollout planned in the...

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Amazon Prime Day 2022: the best deals under $25

The fourth-gen Echo Dot is on sale for just $19.99, which is a 50 percent discount. | Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Even with Amazon Prime Day going on, deals on inexpensive tech can be hard to come by. Nevertheless, they do exist, and some products are currently on sale on Amazon for less than $25. These deals encompass a range of products, from great smart speakers and Bluetooth trackers to 4K streaming sticks and popular video games like Forza: Horizon 5, some of which are on sale for the lowest prices to date.

Below, we’ve curated a list of just some of the best tech deals under $25 so even those on the tightest of budgets can save big this Prime Day. And don’t forget: for even more sales, be sure to also check out our guide to the best Amazon Prime Day deals available. We’ve also put together guides to the best anti-Prime Day deals at Best Buy, T...

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Our Vergecast Hotline is up and running

Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the week’s most important technology news. On Wednesdays, editor-at-large David Pierce leads a selection of The Verge’s expert staffers in an exploration of how gadgets and software affect our lives — and which ones you should bring into your home.

Last week, we put a call out to people on Twitter about our new Vergecast Hotline, a phone line we set up for anyone to leave a message about a tech-related question they may have — whether it’s how to find your next router, when Spotify HiFi is actually coming, how to track when all of your favorite shows have new episodes, or whatever — so we can answer them on The Vergecast.

...

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EV owners won’t be able to pick their own low-speed noise after NHTSA scraps proposal

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge

Well, that’s a bummer. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration won’t be moving forward with a proposal to let electric vehicle owners pick their own low-speed sounds, citing a lack of “supportable data.” The move was first reported by Reuters.

Back in 2019, NHTSA introduced a proposed rule-making that would have allowed drivers to “select the sound they prefer from the set of sounds installed in the vehicle.” The idea was an amendment to a previous rule requiring EVs to make fake sounds at low speeds to prevent injuring pedestrians, especially people who are blind or visually impaired. But after soliciting feedback from the industry and consumer groups, the agency says it is scrapping the proposed rule.

No more airhorns or...

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Bayonetta 3 adds family-friendly mode with less nudity

Image: Nintendo

As fans (me, I mean me) are dancing in their living rooms to “Fly Me to the Moon (Climax)” while strapping cardboard guns to their ankles in preparation for their Bayonetta cosplay, PlatinumGames had one more announcement to make regarding the release of Bayonetta 3. For the first time ever, Bayonetta can keep her clothes on.

Relax, the witch is back and sexier than ever

We've added the revolutionary "Naive Angel Mode" to Bayonetta 3 so more people can fully enjoy it

By turning it on, you can play right in the living room without having to worry about what's on screen... we think #Bayonetta3 pic.twitter.com/SEs3vqrdYc

— PlatinumGames Inc. (@platinumgames) July 13, 2022

PlatinumGames is introducing a new setting to Bayonetta 3 called...

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Motorola Razr teaser confirms chin-less design and dual camera array for 2022

Image: Motorola

Motorola teased its upcoming Razr in a new trailer that shows off the device’s chin-less redesign (via GSMArena). The trailer, which Motorola posted to its Weibo account, gives us brief glimpses of the third-generation device’s smoothed edges, dual camera, new hinge, and what looks like a larger exterior display that matches up with a leaked version of the device we saw in May.

You can’t really make out much from the trailer, though, aside from the Motorola logo stamped on one of its edges and on the back of the device. Chen Jin, the general manager of the Lenovo Business Group in China, offered a separate look at the device at an in-person event (and with much better lighting). He posted the photos to Weibo and demonstrated what the...

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Meta and Ray-Ban’s Stories glasses are adding WhatsApp support

Photo by Amanda Lopez for The Verge

Meta and Ray-Bans’s Stories glasses are adding WhatsApp support, letting users make hands-free calls, send text messages, and hear messages read aloud. The addition follows the rollout of similar Facebook Messenger features last year, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says users will soon be able to directly reply to WhatsApp and Messenger messages with voice commands as well.

The new features, partially leaked in April, integrate Stories more closely into the Meta ecosystem. They continue Meta’s moves toward becoming a virtual and augmented reality company as well as a social networking one. They’re also a potential stopgap following Meta’s delay of its full-fledged consumer AR glasses rollout, building out audio-focused AR with its existing...

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The N64 controller for Switch is back in stock at the Nintendo store

Image: Nintendo

The official N64 controller for the Nintendo Switch has just been restocked at the Nintendo eShop. This $49.99 controller allows you to experience N64 games the way they were meant to be played — with a big gray controller that has an awkwardly placed central analog stick. This offer is exclusive to the Nintendo store and is only available to purchase if you’re a current Nintendo Switch Online subscriber (Note: you can only access the N64 games with the purchase of the Switch Online Expansion Pack).

Unlike some restocks for the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5, the method for purchasing this controller is very straightforward. Just sign in to your Nintendo account ahead of time, click “add to cart” and cross your fingers. Stocks of this...

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Vox and The Verge Collaborate on the Latest Season of Vox Media’s Award-Winning Land of the Giants Podcast

Land of the Giants, the Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-winning narrative franchise, today launched its latest season, The Facebook / Meta Disruption. Marking a collaboration between Recode by Vox and The Verge, the seven-episode season will tell the story of Meta, formerly known as Facebook, at a pivotal moment — both for the tech giant and for the billions of people who use its products. Hosted by The Verge’s deputy editor Alex Heath and Recode senior correspondent Shirin Ghaffary, the season will feature interviews with current and former employees and executives, from Meta’s top policy executive Nick Clegg and head of WhatsApp Will Cathcart to preeminent critics and tech leaders outside the company, like whistleblower Frances...

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Reddit and Giphy are bringing GIF comments to every sub that wants them

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Reddit is joining the GIF party with its new partnership with Giphy, a massive online hub where internet users upload and share GIFs. The new partnership, which will begin rolling out today, July 13th, requires that moderators of existing subreddits opt in to enable the feature. New subreddits will automatically opt in for GIFs in the comments, leaving mods the choice to opt out.

Reddit users would typically post a link to a GIF on a third-party host rather than simply viewing it, but the new partnership will take away the extra step of clicking on a linked GIF to see the image or animation. Reddit had tested adding GIFs to Reddit comments previously, but they were only available to those who paid for a Powerups subscription. After...

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Bayonetta 3 brings the witch to the Switch in October

Image: Nintendo

Let’s go, witches! Nintendo, in its inexplicable but welcome habit of revealing big news with no warning at all, has announced that Bayonetta 3 finally has a launch date. On October 28th, our beautiful badass bitch with hella bundles will be back — and just in time for Halloween.

This time, instead of beating on the angels of hell or the demons of heaven, Bayonetta will face a new threat that seems to come from the mortal world. She’s rejoined by her smoky-voiced ally Rodin, the smarmy but adorable Luka, and a new ally named Viola that kinda looks like a female Dante from Devil May Cry, big-ass sword and all. It seems like, in Bayonetta 3, you’ll play as more than just our favorite signature witch, as portions of the trailer show you...

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I became a Dish influencer to get a 5G NFT

Check me out on the leaderboard. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Or: how I learned a lesson about downloading crypto software half-cocked

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Why Medium failed

Photo By Vaughn Ridley/Sportsfile via Getty Images

Few tech CEOs can claim to have steered the course of online conversation more than Ev Williams. In 1999 he co-founded Blogger, which helped to take blogging mainstream with a well designed, free tool that sold to Google four years later. In 2006 Williams and his co-founder followed with Twitter, which remains one of the most influential social networks in the world.

Five years later, after a stint as Twitter CEO and much turmoil, Williams announced his next act: Medium, a publishing platform that sought to split the difference between blogs and tweets: medium-length posts, published occasionally rather than daily, that would seek to answer one question: “Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless,” Williams wrote in...

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Amazon Prime Day 2022: the best tech deals for day two

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

Welcome once again, friends, to the best tech deals Amazon Prime Day 2022 has to offer. It’s now day two, and our Verge Deals team is ready for another round of serving you up discounts and deals that are actually worth a damn. Instead of trudging through Amazon’s annual garage sale of overstock items yourself, let us help you.

There are definitely some worthwhile discounts for those in the market for wireless earbuds, smart home tech, phones, TVs, games, and some other odds and ends. For example, the Beats Fit Pro are some of the best earbuds around and they’re $40 off, and the unique Samsung M8 monitor / smart TV hybrid in green is $180 off.

Our goal is to focus on products that we know are good and ones with worthwhile discounts. So...

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The volunteer-run bots that make Twitter more accessible

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Alt text bots fill in gaps in accessibility

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My war on animation

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

We are surrounded by a world of motion and I would like to get off of it

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New emoji for iOS and Android include a high five and shaking face

Image: Emojipedia

It’s World Emoji Day on Sunday, so that means we’re getting a preview of the emoji that will eventually come to iOS and Android. While designs will vary per platform, Emojipedia has a draft list and sample images for Emoji 15.0. The Unicode Consortium only has 31 draft emoji this year that will likely be rolled out in 2022 and 2023. While the draft emoji can change between now and finalization in September, most (if not all) will make it through. Contenders include a shaking face and much-needed high five and wireless emojis.

The shaking face emoji will be primarily used for shock reactions, or it could become the official earthquake emoji thanks to its vibration-like attributes. While people often use the Folded Hands emoji as a high...

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TikTok is giving you new ways to control your For You page

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

TikTok is starting to offer users a new level of control over their For You page. The company announced today that you’ll be able to specify specific words or hashtags you don’t want to see in your feeds, and the app will automatically filter them out. TikTok’s examples are fairly simple — like when you’ve finished a reno and don’t want to see DIY videos anymore or decide you don’t want to see cooking tutorials using a certain type of food or meat. But these kinds of filters could be used to much more carefully control your feed.

The platform is also rolling out two new automated moderation and filtering tools. One, called Content Levels, ranks content based on “thematic maturity” and is designed to keep mature content of all types from...

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The best anti-Prime Day deals happening at Walmart

Illustration by Kristen Radtke

We’re in the midst of Amazon Prime Day, and yet some of the best Prime Day deals to be had aren’t on Amazon’s site at all. While Best Buy is calling its sales “Black Friday in July” — which makes even less sense than calling a two-day event Prime Day, singular — Walmart is running deals of its own. It’s commonplace to see Walmart and the others matching many of the deals Amazon throws out there, as well as promoting some unique ones of its own.

Some of these deals can be a little unexpected and especially good, while some are just what we’d call a fine discount on any other day of the year. However, if you happen to be a Walmart Plus subscriber, there may be added incentive to find these deals at your retailer of choice, like taking...

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A who’s who of CEOs is begging every school to teach computer science

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

More than 500 notable people in business, education, and the nonprofit sector are calling for governors and education leaders to update K-12 curriculums to allow “every student in every school to have the opportunity to learn computer science,” according to a new letter posted publicly at https://www.ceosforcs.com/. The list of signatories includes many prominent figures in technology, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, and Meta founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“The undersigned commit our support by collectively creating employment opportunities for computer science students in every city in the USA, and in every sector, from...

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Read the memo Google’s CEO sent employees about a hiring slowdown

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Google has told employees that it’ll be “slowing down the pace of hiring for the rest of the year,” according to an internal memo Tuesday by CEO Sundar Pichai obtained by The Verge.

Pichai says the company will have to “be more entrepreneurial” and work with “greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger than we’ve shown on sunnier days.” You can read the full memo below.

According to the memo, the company isn’t freezing hiring entirely; it’ll still hire for “engineering, technical and other critical roles.” But Pichai says that the pullback will mean “pausing development and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas.” Insider first reported Tuesday that Google had slowed its hiring plans_._

Google isn’t the only company that’s had...

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Match Group is bringing Tinder’s free background checks to more dating apps

More checks in more places. | Image: Match Group

Match Group is bringing Tinder’s free background checks to two of the other dating apps it owns: Match (formerly Match.com) and Stir, a dating site for single parents (via CNBC). The system works similar to the way it does on Tinder: people can use it to see if whoever they’re talking to or planning to meet up with has a history of “violent and harmful behavior,” as the company’s press release puts it, though there is some nuance there that we’ll talk about in a bit.

When Match Group added this feature to Tinder earlier this year, there was a bit of a multi-step process to running one of the checks. The company says the process should be a bit easier on the Match service — if you’re talking to someone about meeting up, a box will pop up...

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Twitter sues Elon Musk for attempting to abandon $44 billion acquisition

Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Getty Images

Twitter vs. Elon Musk is moving into the courts. The social media company filed a lawsuit against the world’s richest man on Tuesday, saying that he is refusing to “honor his obligations” under their agreement and seeking to make him complete the deal. Musk is trying to exit the $44 billion acquisition deal they announced on April 25th based on his claims Twitter has failed to satisfy his requests for information about bot activity and spam on the platform.

“Twitter brings this action to enjoin Musk from further breaches, to compel Musk to fulfill his legal obligations, and to compel consummation of the merger upon satisfaction of the few outstanding conditions,” Twitter writes in the lawsuit, which was filed in the Delaware Court of...

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Apple and Jony Ive are no longer working together

Photo credit should read NOAH BERGER/AFP via Getty Images

Apple has ended its consulting agreement with former chief design officer Jony Ive, according to The New York Times.

Ive left Apple in 2019 to start an independent design company called LoveFrom, and in a press release, Ive had said he looked forward to working with Apple “for many years to come.” Apple signed a contract at the time with Ive valued north of $100 million, though it “restricted Mr. Ive from taking on work that Apple found competitive,” The New York Times reports.

But now, three years later, it seems Ive and Apple have decided to call it quits. From The New York Times:

In recent weeks, with the contract coming up for renewal, the parties agreed not to extend it. Some Apple executives had questioned how much the company was...

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Canoo gets lifeline from Walmart after moving HQ to the retailer’s neck of the woods

Image: Canoo

Walmart is here to throw a life preserver to ailing EV manufacturer Canoo. It’s taking the form of a very helpful order of 4,500 all-electric delivery vehicles from the big box retailer / e-commerce giant, with the potential to buy up to 10,000. Walmart and Canoo became neighbors last year when Canoo’s headquarters moved out of California and onto Walmart’s turf in Bentonville, Arkansas — but the companies did not make any public deals at the time.

“We are proud to have been selected by Walmart,” said Canoo chairman and CEO Tony Aquila. Aquila says that Walmart’s size gives a strategic advantage in “today’s growing ‘need it now’ mindset,” and combined with Canoo’s American-made “lifestyle delivery vehicles,” it has a “winning algorithm...

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