It was a rough year for robotaxis — but not for Waymo

Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images

While its rivals have been stuck in perpetual testing or forced to shut down completely due to dry coffers, Waymo has quietly amassed a legitimate robotaxi business that continues to grow and evolve. And today, it showed off a few numbers that underscore just how far ahead of the rest of the industry it is.

Chief among those is the number 4 million, which is how many driverless rides the company provided in the three cities in which it operates: Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Waymo says it has provided a total of 5 million driverless rides in its three key markets, which means nearly all of its growth took place this year alone.

Waymo’s service area is small but growing — the company says that it services 500 square miles cumulatively across all three of its main cities, as well as Austin, where it is still operating with a waitlist. The company plans to launch in Atlanta and Miami and recently said it would test its vehicles in Japan.

Four million driverless trips in 2024

Waymo riders spent a cumulative 11 million hours in the company’s autonomous vehicles. And since switching over to electric vehicles only, Waymo has helped avoid over 6 million kilograms of CO2 emissions. (Assuming an avoided emissions rate of 237g / passenger mile, vehicle occupancy of 1.5 passengers, and average trip length of 4.1 miles.)

Today, every Waymo customer will receive their own personalized Year in Review through the company’s Waymo One app. Think of it as a Spotify Wrapped for fully driverless vehicles. They’ll see their own stats, including miles traveled, emissions avoided, favorite destinations, and more.

The most popular destinations in each city this year were Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, the Ferry Building in San Francisco, and The Grove shopping center in LA. The company only started providing 24/7 service to Phoenix’s airport in August 2024, so its ranking as the top destination in that city just goes to show how important airport service will be for the company.

The fact that Waymo has facilitated 4 million trips in three cities, while only serving one airport, is pretty amazing and could speak to the company’s future prospects as its technology continues to mature. Airports are a major source of revenue for human-powered ridehail companies like Uber and Lyft.

But Waymo is also facing an uncertain future with mounting regulatory and financial pressures. Tariffs on Chinese vehicles and software could stymie its growth plans. President-elect Donald Trump is said to want a regulatory framework for AVs — whatever that means. But lowering costs is going to be increasingly important for Waymo as it looks to expand to new cities.

Waymo is also facing an uncertain future with mounting regulatory and financial pressures

Alphabet doesn’t break out Waymo’s costs in its earnings report, but its “Other Bets” unit, which includes the robotaxi company, brought in $388 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2024, up from $297 million a year ago. And the unit’s losses decreased slightly to $1.12 billion from $1.94 billion in the year-earlier period. Alphabet recently led a $5.6 billion funding round for Waymo to help it cover costs as it eyes its next phase of growth.

As it grows, pricing will become a bigger challenge. So far, Waymo has settled into the “premium” tier of ridehail services like Uber Black. Those retrofitted Jaguar I-Pace vehicles cost a lot to equip with all the sensors and hardware that help them navigate the roads autonomously. And the 175,000 trips a week that Waymo is doing aren’t nearly enough to recoup those costs.

Another challenge will be expanding the types of service it provides. Right now, it’s only providing trips to one airport, in Phoenix. It will need to expand in its current and future markets if it wants to remain a viable mobility option. And it will need to get more comfortable riding on the highway, which it only does in limited cases.

Safety is also a big hurdle. While Waymo has published a number of studies that indicate its vehicles are safer than human drivers, there are still a lot of lingering questions around passenger safety. Waymo vehicles have been targeted for harassment and vandalism. And they have occasionally come into conflict with emergency vehicles.

But Waymo has novelty on its side — and its customers often give it high marks for the ability to customize their rides, such as playing their own music and setting the temperature to their liking. It may be enough to propel the company to another huge year in 2025.

Continue Reading…

The New Jersey drone hysteria exposes one salient truth: no one knows anything

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? | Image: Getty

Okay, I get it, we’re all sick of the drones. I went to two holiday parties over the weekend in the New Jersey suburbs, and it was all anyone wanted to talk about. The news coverage has been breathless, all-consuming, and most importantly, completely unhinged.

No one knows anything. The cops don’t know anything. The feds sure don’t sound like they know anything. Sure, everyone has a theory. Depending on where you fall on the DSM-5 spectrum for conspiracy-addled nonsense, they could be a few DJI Mavic enthusiasts having a laugh, a bunch of small planes, or a full-on alien invasion of our nation’s most consequential state.

But the people who are supposed to know things — the ones whose jobs are to have access to all the technology and equipment afforded by bloated law enforcement budgets, the ones who have security clearance and subpoena power and all the various trappings of authority that the vast majority of us can only dream of — don’t know shit. Actually, it’s worse than that: they think they know shit, and they are willing to confidently stand before the public and say as much, even when they actually don’t know shit.

Here are the best examples I could find of current and former elected leaders and government officials spouting utterly deranged nonsense about the drone sightings.

Jeff Van Drew

What we’ve uncovered is alarming—drones flying in from the direction of the ocean, possibly linked to a missing Iranian mothership.

This is a national security crisis we cannot ignore.

Bring them down now. pic.twitter.com/YicWkcoJR1

— Congressman Jeff Van Drew (@Congressman_JVD) December 11, 2024

Jeff Van Drew is a member of Congress from New Jersey, where the bulk of the sightings have taken place. He’s also a member of the House Judiciary Committee, which entitles him to high-level security briefings. He should know shit! But alas, he does not, as evidenced by his completely factless musings about the drones coming from an “Iranian mothership” anchored off the Jersey Shore.

“I’m going to tell you the real deal. Iran launched a mothership that contains these drones,” Van Drew told Fox News. “It’s off the East Coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones.”

When someone says they’re going to “tell you the real deal,” you know you’re about to get body-slammed with some grade-A horsepucky.

The Pentagon denied this, but Van Drew doubled down, slamming defense department officials for treating us like we’re “stupid” and withholding information about the drones. And fearing that his fearmongering about Iran was insufficiently fearful, he broadened the scope to include “China” and “somebody else.”

Literally one day later, he walked the whole thing back in a tersely worded statement. (No Fox News appearances for embarrassing mea culpas, I guess.) He acknowledged that the Iranian mothership he previously said on national television was off the coast of the United States was actually — get this — still in Iran.

“This new information only brings us closer to figuring out what is really going on,” Van Drew said. Yes, congressman, thank you for your service.

Larry Hogan

Last night, beginning at around 9:45 pm, I personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence in Davidsonville, Maryland (25 miles from our nation’s capital). I observed the activity for approximately 45 minutes.

Like… pic.twitter.com/Ipx8ctLmhs

— Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) December 13, 2024

The drone sightings hysteria has been a golden opportunity for politicians who like to get their hands dirty. If he was still in office, you could picture ex-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in some flight tower, wearing a parka and a headset, operating the radar equipment himself.

Instead, we’ve got grainy iPhone footage from former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, who claims he “personally witnessed (and videoed)” several large drones hovering over his home. See! It’s not just New Jersey! Maryland has unexplained phenomena, too.

I mean, sure, some of the lights Hogan spotted were just the constellation Orion, according to a community guidelines note appended to his tweet. And the stars Sirius and Procyon. But hey, at least he got some fresh air.

“Like many who have observed these drones, I do not know if this increasing activity over our skies is a threat to public safety or national security,” he said on X. (Last week, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security said that “many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft, operating lawfully” and weren’t a threat to public safety.)

Michael Melham

Belleville Mayor Michael Melham wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass. As mayor of a relatively small New Jersey suburb (population approximately 35,000), he knew he needed to use his preciously allotted five minutes on Fox 5 to say something that was going to get him noticed and generate some content. He needed to up the stakes.

What if the drones were looking to steal our nuclear secrets?

What if the drones were looking to steal our nuclear secrets?

“What might they be looking for,” Melham mused. “Well, potentially, we’re aware of a threat that came into Port Newark. Maybe that’s radioactive material. There was, and there is, an alert that’s out right now that radioactive material in New Jersey has gone missing, on December 2nd.”

First of all, Melham’s not technically wrong. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did say some radioactive material went missing in a recent alert. But it’s missing some important context, namely that said material is cancer screening equipment used to calibrate PET scanners. And the amount in question was “unlikely to cause permanent injury.” Not exactly the nuclear codes!

Donald Trump

pic.twitter.com/IVKeU3dqY6

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 14, 2024

It kind of feels like President-elect Donald Trump is the only one having fun with the drone sightings. In addition to trolling one of his favorite whipping boys, ex-NJ Governor Chris Christie, Trump is also totally in his element when he gets to spout inane bullshit about something on which nobody can agree what’s real and what’s not.

First, he said he was canceling his trip to his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, because drones were spotted there. (The Federal Aviation Administration had already issued temporary flight restrictions prohibiting drone flights over Bedminster as well as above the Picatinny Arsenal, a military installation.) He claimed, without evidence, that the military knew where the drones “took off from.” And in a social media post, he urged people to “shoot them down!!!”

Shooting in the air is a bad idea!

Shooting in the air is a bad idea! Especially in densely populated areas like New Jersey. Do not listen to this man.

I guess maybe that’s been the key takeaway to all this drone silliness. Do not listen to any of these people. Sure, they have official-sounding titles — congressman, mayor, president! — but really, they’re just like us. They don’t know shit, but they’re happy to pretend that they do. They look up in the sky and they see a few lights, and suddenly, they’re like one of those uncontacted Amazonian tribes that has never witnessed modern technology.

The FBI, Pentagon, Homeland Security, and FAA released a joint statement yesterday that essentially throws a bucket of cold water on all the speculation. Their assessment: “a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones.”

In other words, exactly what you would expect when you look up at night in a densely populated area in the year 2024. The most boring answer is usually the one that’s most likely to be right.

Continue Reading…

Flipboard’s Surf app is a big new idea about the future of social

Surf’s homepage is just feeds. It’s feeds all the way down. | Image: David Pierce / Flipboard

Mike McCue, the CEO of Flipboard and an internet entrepreneur since the Netscape days, is a true believer in the fediverse. He doesn’t love the word: he’d much rather call it “the social web.” But whatever you want to call the open, decentralized, interconnected social networking experience that apps like Mastodon and Bluesky promise, McCue is absolutely convinced it’s the future.

For the last year or so, McCue and his team have been completely overhauling the Flipboard platform to make it a part of the social web. Once the change is done, Flipboard will be a fully decentralized way to discover and read stuff from across the internet. The process seems to be going fine, though it doesn’t seem poised to take over the fediverse the way Threads could if it fully opened up.

At the same time, though, the Flipboard team has been working on something even bigger. That something is an app called Surf (not to be confused with the other recently launched Surf), which McCue called “the world’s first browser for the social web.” He first said that to me a little over a year ago, when Surf was mostly just a bunch of mock-ups and a slide deck. Now, the app has been in beta for the last few months — I’ve been using it most of that time — and a public beta is launching today. Not everyone can get in; McCue says he wants to bring in some curators and creators first, in order for there to be lots of stuff in Surf when everyone else gets access. And he promises that’s coming soon.

But wait, sorry, back to the whole “browser for the social web” thing. McCue’s best explanation of Surf’s big theory is this: in a decentralized social world, the internet will be less about websites and more about feeds. “You won’t put in, like, theverge.com and go to the website for The Verge, but you can put in ‘the verge’ and go to the ActivityPub feed for The Verge.” Your Threads timeline is a feed; every Bluesky Starter Pack is a feed; every creator you follow is just producing a feed of content.

Surf’s job, in that world, is to help you discover and explore all those feeds. The app can see three kinds of feeds: anything from ActivityPub, which means things like Mastodon and Threads and Pixelfed; anything from AT Protocol, which means Bluesky; and any RSS feed. You can search for feeds by topic, publisher, or creator; you can curate your own feeds by combining other feeds. And then you can share those feeds, which other people can combine and recombine. It’s all a little confusing. Just imagine a nicely designed, vertically scrolling feed, somewhere between a Twitter timeline and the Apple Newshomepage.

Image: David Pierce / Surf

You can have any kind of content in Surf — which means the app has to be good at absolutely everything.

A feed can be made up of almost any kind of content, which presents a tricky design problem for Surf. It has to be equally adept as a social network, a news app, a video platform, and a podcast player. Combining all that stuff into one place isn’t just the goal; it’s the whole point. And it’s very hard to do all of those things well.

Personally, the most eye-opening moment in my time testing Surf has been the way the app lets you automatically filter a feed. I set up a feed that’s just all my favorite stuff: my go-to podcasts, must-read blogs, a couple of can’t-miss YouTube channels, and my favorite folks on Bluesky. I can open that feed and see everything, in order, no matter what it is or who it came from. But I can also filter it to just show all the videos in the feed or tap on “Listen” to turn it into a podcast queue.

Surf isn’t yet a full-featured app for any of these uses, much less all of them, but it’s already a pretty useful app for all kinds of media. It presents videos like an endlessly scrolling TikTok feed, which is actually a pretty fun way to flip through a YouTube channel. Posts with links are formatted like news stories, with big images and headlines. It’s not a particularly dense timeline-scrolling experience, either — the whole thing is more like Flipboard’s flippy magazines than the For You pages we’re used to.

Because it’s trying to compile a bunch of disparate platforms into one, search can be messy — I found five profiles with my name and picture, for instance, and it’s not obvious which one is the one you’re looking for. Surf is also designed to be interactive, but right now, that pretty much only works if you’re a Mastodon user liking Mastodon posts. For most other things, it’s either kind of broken or entirely broken. For now, and probably for a while, Surf is going to be much better as a consumption tool than a social one.

McCue sees the social web as the beginning of an entirely new internet. He even uses old-web metaphors to explain these early products: the current era we’re in is like AOL back in the day, “a walled garden that contained all the innovation in the walled garden”; Surf is like old-school Yahoo, “a collection of feeds that other people have made.” He wants to enable paid feeds, so publishers, creators, and curators can make money on the platform. He has big ideas about custom designs for feeds, so they can look more like homepages.

There’s an awful lot left to build — not to mention a lot of protocols and tools left to convince all the internet’s platforms and publishers to work with. But I’ve been talking to McCue about this for two years now, and his conviction and optimism haven’t wavered a bit. When I tell him that I definitely wavered — that I was once all in on ActivityPub as the future but am worried seeing Bluesky grow on another protocol and hearing some of the issues Threads and others are having with ActivityPub — he just laughs. One, he says, that’s how it always goes in these early phases. Two, that’s what Surf is meant to fix.

To prove his point, McCue opens up a feed full of basketball content, created by David Rushing. Rushing was a big figure in early NBA Threads, a community that has splintered thanks to some of Threads’ moderation and community policies. Now, people are posting with #nbathreads on Bluesky and elsewhere, too. It’s messy. But Surf, McCue says, can bring it back together. He starts scrolling Rushing’s custom feed: “You’re seeing Bluesky posts, Mastodon posts, Threads posts, Flipboard posts, anything with the hashtag #nbathreads across the whole social web. If you post a podcast, if you post a YouTube video, anything with the hashtag #nbathreads, it’ll show up in this feed.” Rushing can add or remove individual posts or even use Flipboard’s filtering systems to get rid of anything that feels political, mentions gambling, or whatever else he wants to do.

McCue is practically giddy as he scrolls through all this basketball content. This is the whole thing, right here. “Ultimately,” he says, “you’re just not going to care whether something is on Threads — I don’t write you a separate kind of email because you’re on Gmail, right?” People will use lots of apps, there will be lots of communities, and that’s good. “There are nerds on Bluesky, there are nerds on Threads. How can all the nerds gather together?” That’s the question for the fediverse — sorry, the social web — and Surf looks like it might be the best answer anyone’s come up with so far.

Continue Reading…

Supreme Court will hear TikTok ban arguments in January

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on whether a bill that could ban TikTok violates the First Amendment. The arguments will take place on January 10th, just over a week before a potential ban could take effect.

While the outcome is far from guaranteed, SCOTUS’ decision to take up the case is a small win for TikTok, which is barreling toward expulsion from the US unless the court throws out or pauses the law, or its China-based parent company ByteDance agrees to sell it in time. The law at the center of the case, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, seeks to prohibit apps like TikTok from being owned by companies in a set list of foreign adversary countries.

The Department of Justice successfully defended the law as constitutional before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals by arguing the government had a compelling interest in protecting US national security from foreign influence. Congress voted overwhelmingly to pass the bill after classified briefings in which intelligence officials shared concerns over how China could potentially use the app to exert influence over the kinds of content US users see, and potentially access sensitive data — though publicly, the government has not come forward with declassified information showing such dangers are already happening.

The arguments before the Supreme Court will consolidate two cases against the law, from both TikTok and a group of creators on the platform. The parties will get a total of two hours to make their cases. The court said it would defer a decision on whether to halt the law until after the oral arguments. The lower court had declined to stop the law from taking effect pending the Supreme Court’s review.

TikTok filed for an emergency injunction to the Supreme Court just two days ago. That same day, CEO Shou Zi Chew was set to meet with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, who has noted his success on TikTok in the campaign, at one point seemingly promised to save the app, although his more recent comments post-election make it less clear how exactly he’d plan to do that. The deadline for the ban — unless the court stops it — is the day before Trump’s inauguration. The president has discretion to extend the deadline 90 days, though one big remaining question is whether China would even agree to let ByteDance sell the app.

Continue Reading…

Roku snaps up X Games streaming rights

Skateboarder Carlos Ribeiro during X Games Ventura 2024. | Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

Roku got the exclusive US streaming rights to next year’s X Games Aspen and a “soon-to-be-announced” X Games event in the summer, the company announced on Wednesday. Both events will air on Roku’s free 24/7 sports channel as the service continues its push into live sports.

Though the X Games were founded by ESPN in the ‘90s, the sports network sold majority ownership to MSP Sports in 2022. Since then, the X Games have streamed on various platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, ESPN, ABC, and the VR app Xtadium.

But now, X Games Aspen will appear on the Roku Sports Channel, a newly launched hub for Roku’s live Sunday MLB games, Formula E races, and other sports-related content. This channel lives within the overarching Roku Channel that comes pre-installed on most Roku devices and is also available on the web, as well as an app on third-party smart TVs and mobile phones.

Additionally, Roku launched a free ad-supported streaming TV channel dedicated to the X Games, which will air “programming highlights, clips, interviews, archival content, and more” leading up to the event. X Games Aspen takes place from January 23rd to the 25th, with more details to come on an “additional” X Games coming this summer.

Roku is just one of many streaming platforms getting into sports, with Netflix airing live NFL games on Christmas Day, Max launching a live sports add-on, and Amazon Prime Video picking up streaming rights to NBA games. Even the tournament series Street League Skateboarding signed a deal with the right-wing streaming platform Rumble.

Continue Reading…

Tech antitrust is about to get really weird

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump’s second term is a regulatory wild card hanging over Big Tech.

Read the full story at The Verge.

8 great games for your Steam Deck

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

2024 was filled with excellent portable PC games.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Alphabet’s Wing will deliver DoorDash by drone in Dallas-Fort Worth

Image: Wing

Wing, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, is expanding its drone delivery service to DoorDash customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Starting today, 50 merchants from malls in Frisco and Fort Worth will be available for drone delivery through the DoorDash app, dropping meals and items to homes “in as little as 15 minutes,” according to Wing.

The drones can fly at up to 65mph and reach a cruising height of about 150 feet before stopping to hover and safely lower orders to the ground at their delivery destinations. DoorDash customers will need an “eligible address” in Dallas-Fort Worth for the drone delivery option to appear on the checkout page. Locals can check the Wing website to see if they qualify.

Image: DoorDash / Wing

This option will only appear at the DoorDash checkout if the order is being delivered within the service catchment area.

Wing says the company has now completed more than 400,000 commercial deliveries worldwide following its first US pilot in 2019. The Alphabet drone service trialed similar DoorDash partnerships in Australia and Christiansburg, Virginia, though the latter was limited to delivering Wendy’s.

This isn’t the first service Wing has introduced to Dallas-Fort Worth, having previously teamed up with Walgreens to airdrop local deliveries. Walmart also operates its own drone delivery program in the area via partnerships with Wing and Zipline.

Continue Reading…

Seagate is getting ready to launch its first high-capacity HAMR hard drive

Image: Seagate

It’s been more than two decades since Seagate began working on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) — and now the company may finally be ready to release a hard drive using the technology. A new product page spotted by Tom’s Hardware shows an Exos M hard drive sporting up to 32TB of storage using Seagate’s Mozaic 3 Plus HAMR platform.

Seagate’s Mozaic 3 Plus technology allows for bigger hard drive capacities by making data bits smaller and closer together on each disk. To write data, a laser diode attached to the drive’s recording heads heats small areas of the disk. “Each bit is heated and cools down in a nanosecond, so the HAMR laser has no impact at all on drive temperature, or on the temperature, stability, or reliability of the media overall,” Seagate writes on its website.

Seagate says its Exos M hard drive has a 3TB per platter density, making it useful for enterprise applications like powering AI systems. We still don’t know when Seagate could release its Exos M hard drive, as its product page currently shows a link to “Stay Informed,” but a launch seems imminent.

As pointed out by Tom’s Guide, Seagate said in a filing earlier this month that it had “successfully completed qualification testing” for its HAMR hard drives with “several customers within the Mass Capacity markets, including a leading cloud service provider.” It says it will start shipping its HAMR-based hard drive to the unnamed cloud provider in the “coming weeks.”

The Verge reached out to Seagate with a request for more information but didn’t immediately hear back.

Seagate isn’t the only company working on high-capacity hard drives. In October, Western Digital launched a 32TB hard drive using energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR), while Toshiba recently demonstrated high-capacity hard drives with HAMR and microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR).

Continue Reading…

LG will bring its wireless TV tech to Mini LED models in 2025

Image: LG

Often at CES, you’ll see a very impressive new technology debut at exorbitant prices before trickling down to more affordable models a couple years later. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what we’re seeing with LG and its Zero Connect Box. We got our first look at it with the M Series OLED in 2023. Now the company is bringing that Zero Connect Box, which beams audio and video to the TV panel, to one model of its still-terribly-named QNED Evo Mini LED lineup.

The box can transmit 4K video at up to 144Hz, and by all accounts from reviews last year, it works as advertised and poses no issues for gaming. The only cable that runs to the TV screen itself is the power cable.

LG says the QNED Evo series is also ditching quantum dots this year for a “proprietary wide color gamut technology, Dynamic QNED Color Solution” that supposedly produces “pure colors that are as realistic as they appear to the eye in general life.”

Unfortunately, I predict we’re going to see a lot of hype about AI on TVs at CES 2025 — even more than usual — and LG is already backing up my theory. It’s even putting a new AI button right on the Magic Remote for this year’s TVs. In what’s destined to be a controversial decision, the AI button actually takes the place of the traditional inputs button:

A short press on the AI button guides users to relevant keywords and TV features, while a long press enables personalized searches based on a large language model (LLM4). For example, if a user is planning a trip to France, they can ask their remote, “Recommend movies to watch on my trip to Paris.” The AI will understand the context and suggest movies set in the French capital, including specific genre recommendations based on the user’s viewing preferences.

Do people actually want this functionality from their TV? I digress. LG claims AI will also allow for more advanced upscaling, more fine-tuned HDR, and the conversion of two-channel stereo sources to a virtualized 9.1.2-channel sound output. LG claims its new AI tricks can also better distinguish voices from background noise — a challenge that TV makers never seem finished addressing — and make them clearer.

LG hasn’t yet shared pricing or a release timeframe for the 2025 QNED Evo lineup. But again, this is how CES TV announcements always go. You hear about the flashy new tech and better-than-ever picture quality months before learning how much it’ll cost you. The Verge will be in Las Vegas in just a few short weeks for the show, so you can at least count on some first-hand impressions of LG’s latest TVs.

Continue Reading…

Death of a Unicorn’s first trailer brings a fairytale creature into a dark comedy

Image: A24

A24’s lineup of films for 2025 is starting to become stacked — with fantastical creatures, that is. While the fantasy adventure The Legend of Ochi is slated to hit theaters next February, the dark comedy Death of a Unicorn is due out in the spring. And you can get a feel for it in the brand-new trailer above.

The film follows a father and daughter (Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega) who are driving to a weekend retreat, and accidentally kill an animal ... which just so happens to be a unicorn. From there, it seems as though the dad’s rich boss (Richard E. Grant) and his family can’t help but see ways to exploit the creature’s magical powers for profit. While the vibe is light and funny early one, things not only get darker, but take a turn towards horror by the end of the trailer.

Death of a Unicorn is the directorial debut from Alex Scharfman, and it also stars Will Poulter, Sunita Mani, and Téa Leoni. Hereditary director Ari Aster serves as a producer, while horror legend John Carpenter.

Continue Reading…

This Z-Wave smart plug can work over a mile from your house

Image: Shelly

European smart device manufacturer Shelly is launching 11 automation devices that can connect to the home from over a mile away. Shelly says its new and updated Wave devices are built around the Z-Wave Long Range (Z-Wave LR) specification, and will be available in the US in the first half of 2025.

The benefits of Z-Wave LR are similar to those offered by Amazon’s Sidewalk IoT network in that both can extend connectivity to devices beyond your home Wi-Fi network, without the need for expensive LTE data.

Z-Wave LR was announced back in 2020, but products that actually use it are only just starting to hit the market. The wireless protocol touts several features that are beneficial for large homes and commercial environments, such as eradicating the need for a mesh network with multiple signal repeaters. Instead, Z-Wave LR devices operate on a star network topology, which connects directly to devices via a central gateway hub.

Z-Wave LR has a maximum line-of-sight wireless range of 1.5 miles when operating at full power with support for up to 4,000 devices on a single network. Supported devices also automatically adjust the radio output power, providing up to 10 years of battery life on a single coin-cell battery.

The upgraded Shelly Wave products include a smart plug, a humidity and temperature sensor, a door/window sensor, a motion detector, a remote controller for motorized blinds, and a range of lighting dimmers and smart switches. Three of the devices are battery-powered. Shelly hasn’t revealed the price of these new products yet.

Z-Wave LR is backward compatible with older Z-Wave products and networks, but a Z-Wave LR-supported hub (built on the Z-Wave 700 or 800 series platform) is required to take advantage of the extended range benefits.

Continue Reading…

Social networks in 2024: bless this mess

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

We didn’t all flock to a new platform or build on a thrilling new protocol. We went everywhere, and did everything, all at once.

Read the full story at The Verge.

US targets TP-Link with a potential ban on the Chinese routers

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

Authorities in the US are considering a ban on TP-Link internet routers over national security concerns due to their repeated links to Chinese cyberattacks. Investigators at the Commerce, Defense, and Justice departments have all launched probes into the company, according to the Wall Street Journal, with TP-Link reportedly being subpoenaed by an office of the Commerce Department.

The WSJ reports that US authorities may ban the sale of TP-Link routers within the country next year. Action taken against TP-Link would likely fall to the incoming Trump administration.

TP-Link holds roughly 65 percent of the US router market for homes and small businesses, and its internet communications products are used by the Defense Department and other federal government agencies. The company’s market dominance is at least partly driven by the extreme low cost of its routers. The US Justice Department is investigating whether TP-Link sells products for less than they cost to produce in violation of a law that prohibits attempts at monopolies, according to the WSJ.

The _WSJ’_s sources also say that TP-Link often fails to address security flaws that are routinely flagged in routers shipped to customers. In October, Microsoft disclosed a network of compromised network devices mostly manufactured by TP-Link that are regularly targeted by a Chinese government-linked hacking campaign.

An unnamed spokeswoman for TP-Link’s California-based business unit told the WSJ that the company assesses potential security risks and takes action to resolve known vulnerabilities. “We welcome any opportunities to engage with the US government to demonstrate that our security practices are fully in line with industry security standards, and to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to the US market, US consumers, and addressing US national security risks.”

Continue Reading…

The quickly disappearing web

Michelle Rohn / The Verge

The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t. What happens to our culture when websites start to vanish at random?

Read the full story at The Verge.

Intel finally notches a GPU win, confirms Arc B580 is selling out after stellar reviews

The Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition. | Image: Intel

Intel is having an incredibly rough year — but at long last, the company’s discrete graphics card initiative has produced a card worth celebrating. While we haven’t managed to review it ourselves due to a fluke issue, the $250 Arc B580 “Battlemage” GPU launched to nigh-universal praise, has already sold out most everywhere, and Intel tells The Verge it’s working to ship new units every week.

“Demand for Arc B580 graphics cards is high and many retailers have sold through their initial inventory. We expect weekly inventory replenishments of the Intel Arc B580 Limited Edition graphics card and are working with partners to ensure a steady availability of choices in the market,” Intel spokesperson Mark Anthony Ramirez tells The Verge.

To give you an idea, here are some of the headlines we’ve seen on reviews of this card:

• “The new $249 GPU champion has arrived”
• “The first worthy budget GPU of the decade”
• “The fastest mainstream GPU”
• “A New Mainstream King”
• “Intel Fixed Its Problems”

Mind you, in some ways the B580 is a glass of ice water in GPU hell, as its primary competition — the RTX 4060 and AMD RX 7600 — utterly failed to impress last year, following years of GPU prices that were more inflated than inflation itself. (Linus Tech Tips called the $300 4060 a “wet fart of a GPU” but considers the B580 “great and affordable” now.)

While reviewers have showed the B580 doesn’t beat the 4060 and 7600 in every game, especially for gamers who still play at 1080p resolution, it does seem to pull ahead on average, the drivers seem more mature than Intel’s earlier attempts, and the lower price and generous 12GB of video RAM make it relatively easy to recommend.

If you can find one at $250, that is — which you probably can’t, because they’ve sold out so quickly. For what it’s worth, Hardware Unboxed’s Steve Waltondoesn’t think this is a so-called “paper launch” where a manufacturer ships a token number of components for bragging rights instead of mass-producing a product; he said that manufacturers, retailers and distributors told him that supply of the card was “quite substantial.”

That said, AMD and Nvidia’s next GPUs are apparently right around the corner.

Newegg may restock the $250 “Limited Edition” model early next month, according to its listing, and it’s still “coming soon” at B&H. A $279 Acer model is listed as coming to Newegg in as soon as a few days. Some models started at far higher prices: you can still purchase several Gunnir variants from China at around the $400 mark.

Continue Reading…

The best fitness trackers to buy right now

Photo illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

From simple fitness bands and rugged sports watches to rings, these are the best trackers you can get.

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Verge’s favorite holiday gifts under $50

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The holidays are expensive, but they don’t have to be. From fitness trackers to smart speakers, here are the best gifts under $50.

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Verge’s 2024 holiday gift guide for dads

Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

If you’re unsure what to gift the father figure in your life this year, we have more than a few suggestions.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple’s App Store is inviting me to ‘search the way you talk’

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

I opened the App Store today to find an emulator I’d read about, and a new prompt appeared under the search bar inviting me to “search the way you talk.” I hadn’t seen the prompt before on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, and quite frankly, I had missed the iOS 18.1 update note about it.

As it describes, Apple's update in October added, “App Store search lets you use natural language to find what you’re looking for more easily.” It’s also not the only place Apple is adding natural language search with iOS 18, in addition to Photos, Music, and Apple TV.

While some others had seen a splash screen in October, I’d only spotted the same simple search prompts as before. When I asked around at The Verge, several others hadn’t seen it before, although closing the app and relaunching it caused the message to appear in at least one case, and a few social media posts have popped up from other people noticing it for the first time.

The prompt in the hint bubble suggested trying something like “Apps that help me work out,” so of course, I gave it a try.

Screenshot: iOS App Store

How well does it work? When I searched “emulators that feature multiple consoles,” the top result was the multi-console Delta app. Cool. “Apps that only emulate single consoles” gave me the PS Remote Play, PlayStation, and Xbox apps — less good, but it did follow those with Gamma, a PS1 emulator app. And when I asked for “Video games that can help me work out,” well...

Screenshot: iOS App Store

This isn’t exactly what I was looking for, but I certainly would never have found this otherwise.

Overall, it seems like an improvement to me. Twerk Race 3D is not an app that would help me work out, but it does seem like the search engine worked in spirit. I never felt like the App Store’s search was helpful for anything besides finding an app I already knew the name of. Plus, searching with the usual one-or-two-word terms might not give me the same variety as switching up how I phrase a natural language prompt.

Continue Reading…

Apple Maps on the web now has Look Around

Look Around Look Around at how lucky we are to have Apple Maps right now. | Screenshot: The Verge

Following the beta launch of Apple Maps on the web in July, Apple has now recently added Look Around street-level views for several cities to the site, 9to5Mac reports. You can activate Look Around as you would in the Apple Maps app on devices like the iPhone or iPad by selecting the binoculars icon on the bottom left of the map window. You can then click and drag on the map to see different first-person perspectives in many big cities.

At launch, the Apple Maps web beta included basic functionality like searching for points of interest, seeing ratings, browsing area Guides, and getting directions. With Look Around, the web version inches closer to matching functionality with the Apple Maps app on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS — albeit without personalization features such as searching addresses from your contacts or saving locations to your Library.

Personally, I use the Apple Maps app on my Mac more often than any other mapping software, and I often find Apple’s Look Around to be a smoother experience than Google’s Street View. However, I sometimes also have to switch to Google Maps anyway since Apple doesn’t support Look Around for my hometown of Baltimore, MD — even though I spotted an Apple Maps van in the city all the way back in 2017.

You can see the full list of cities where you can use Look Around on Apple’s website.

Continue Reading…

Grubhub pays $25 million for allegedly tricking customers and lying to drivers

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Grubhub has agreed to pay $25 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit that claimed the food delivery service misled customers and drivers while also damaging the reputation of restaurants. The proposed settlement will require Grubhub to make several changes to the platform, such as showing the total delivery cost when customers place an order.

Along with advertising “highly inflated hourly pay rates for drivers,” the FTC’s initial complaint accused Grubhub of hiding “the true cost of its services” by adding delivery fees that raised the price of customers’ final orders. The agency claimed that starting around 2019, Grubhub began advertising lower delivery fees to attract more customers but then began tacking on a “service” fee that increased the cost of orders anyway.

The FTC also alleged the company charged Grubhub Plus members for delivery despite advertising the subscription as having “free” or “$0” deliveries. The agency claimed Grubhub makes the plan easy to sign up for but difficult to cancel while also allegedly blocking the accounts of users with large gift card balances.

Screenshot: FTC

The FTC claimed Grubhub charged customers hidden fees, raising their total order price.

Additionally, the FTC accused Grubhub of adding restaurants to the platform even if they never signed up to sell food on the service. “Grubhub has had as many as 325,000 unaffiliated restaurants on its platform — more than half of all of the available restaurants on Grubhub,” the FTC claims. As a result, many customers wound up having issues with their orders, resulting in bad feedback for unaffiliated restaurants.

Grubhub is now required to show customers the full cost of delivery and can no longer add “junk fees” to orders. It’s also banned from listing unaffiliated restaurants on the platform, and can only make driver earnings claims “that it can back up with evidence and in writing.” Grubhub must also notify customers when they’re banned and offer a way to appeal the decision, as well as make it easier to cancel Grubhub Plus.

“While we categorically deny the allegations made by the FTC, many of which are wrong, misleading or no longer applicable to our business, we believe settling this matter is in the best interest of Grubhub and allows us to move forward,” Grubhub spokesperson Najy Kamal said in a statement to The Verge. The company also responded to the settlement in a post on its website.

Though Grubhub was initially ordered to pay $140 million, it is “partially suspended based on the company’s inability to pay the full amount.” The company's $25 million will go toward refunding affected customers, but the FTC says the full judgment will be due “immediately” if Grubhub “is found to have misrepresented its financial status.”

Continue Reading…

Threads starts testing scheduled posts

Image: The Verge

Threads is about to begin testing the ability to schedule posts, according to Instagram’s Adam Mosseri. “Replies cannot be scheduled,” he added, explaining that “we want to balance giving people more control to plan their Threads posts while still encouraging real-time conversation.”

Mosseri also makes sure to note that Instagram has been working on this feature “for months.” I’m choosing to take as a sign that the Instagram chief is fed up with the notion that Bluesky is the motivating factor behind every new improvement that comes to Threads. Last week, Threads introduced curated collections of people to follow, which drew comparisons to Bluesky’s starter packs.

Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads now has over 100 million daily active users, marking the first time that the company has revealed a DAU figure for its Twitter / X competitor. Threads also has more than 300 million monthly active users. No matter how Meta is calculating those figures, Bluesky objectively remains far smaller.

Instagram has long offered the option to schedule feed posts, and this week it announced the same convenience is being extended to DMs.

Continue Reading…

YouTube says that soon, its tech will be able to find AI copies of celebs and creators

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube is partnering with the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to help creators identify content using their AI-generated likenesses on the platform and submit removal requests. The company will test the controls with celebrities and athletes early next year before rolling it out to “top YouTube creators, creative professionals, and other leading partners representing talent.”

In September, YouTube announced plans for tools that would help manage AI-generated depictions of creators and their voices. Now, the company says it can give celebrities (and soon, creators) the ability to manage AI copies of their likeness, such as their face, “at scale.”

Last year, CAA introduced the CAAVault, which scans and stores the digital likenesses of its clients, including their faces, bodies, and voices.

YouTube is also working on “synthetic-singing identification technology” that will detect AI content that attempts to replicate creators’ singing voices. YouTube has already started letting music labels request the removal of AI content that simulates an artist’s voice, and also began requiring creators to label videos containing AI-generated content earlier this year.

Continue Reading…

Forbes is cutting ties with freelance writers, citing Google spam policies

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

Forbes will stop using freelancers for some types of stories indefinitely — and has blamed the change on a recent update to Google Search policies.

In recent days, Forbes has said it will stop hiring freelancers to produce content for its product review section Forbes Vetted, according to a journalist who has written for the site. In a note shared with The Verge, an editor at Forbes cited Google’s “site reputation abuse” policy for the change.

Site reputation abuse — also called parasite SEO — refers to a website publishing a deluge of off-brand or irrelevant content in order to take advantage of the main site’s ranking power and reputation in Google Search. Often, this piggybacking is concealed from users browsing the website. (For instance: those weird coupon code sections on newspaper sites that pop up via search engines but aren’t prominently displayed on the homepage.) Sometimes this spammy content is produced by third-party marketing firms that are contracted to produce a mountain of search-friendly content.

Forbes did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It’s not clear what other sections of Forbes the pause extends to. Writer Cassandra Brooklyn described receiving similar news last week.

Many news outlets (including The Verge) hire freelancers to write and report stories. But Forbes has an especially wide pool of outside contributors publishing to its site. Many of these writers are legitimate journalists who do fair, in-depth reporting. But there’s also the Forbes contributor network, a group of thousands of marketers, CEOs, and other outside experts who get to publish questionable content under the trusted Forbes name.

Some editorial content on the site may have drawn the ire of Google, which has been targeting the firehose of search engine-first content on the web. In November, Google further tightened its rules around parasite SEO, specifically taking aim at the “third party” nature of this type of content.

“Our evaluation of numerous cases has shown that no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content or the unfair, exploitative nature of attempting to take advantage of the host’s sites ranking signals,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Like other testing and review sites, Forbes Vettedmakes money every time a reader makes a purchase using links in the outlets’ articles. A writer who got word of the pause in freelance work says the editorial process on their past stories was rigorous — they would test products, go through multiple rounds of edits, and interview sources. In addition to the pause in work, the writerwas told that some of their stories may need to be completely re-reported and re-published by an in-house staff member.

“They clearly put a ton of resources into Forbes Vetted,” the writer says. “The big product reviews I was doing were $3,000 a piece, which is a huge amount of money to then be like, ‘Oh, we have to rewrite all this with staff in-house.’”

Google’s spam policies state that the existence of freelancer content in and of itself is not a running afoul of the site reputation abuse policy — it’s only a violation if that content is also designed to take advantage of the site’s ranking signals. Google spokesperson Davis Thompson directed The Verge to an FAQ section describing the freelancer policy.

Continue Reading…

AMD may launch its most powerful integrated GPU ever — in a gaming tablet

Did VideoCardz obtain an image of the PC, too? | Image: VideoCardz

In August, an Asus thermal engineer goofed by revealing the existence of possibly the most powerful tablet PC ever made — an Asus ROG Flow Z13 powered by an unannounced AMD “Strix Halo” chip, one boasting an incredible 80 watts of power for its GPU alone.

Now, VideoCardz is reporting that the chip (and tablet) are about to become official at CES 2025 next month — as the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395 Plus, a Zen 5 processor with Radeon 8060S graphics.

With 16 Zen 5 processor cores and an impressive 40 compute units worth of AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics, VideoCardz points out that it should be AMD’s fastest portable chip ever made — far outstripping previous chips in the graphics department in particular. (The Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 had just 16 GPU compute units — this is 2.5 times as many.)

The leaks suggest that not all AI Max / Strix Halo chips will be equal; variants tipped as the AI Max 390, AI Max 385, and AI Max 380 are expected to have as few as six CPU cores and as few as 16 RDNA graphics compute units. But online retailer leaks show the Asus tablet should offer the two highest-end parts with 40 compute units.

Otherwise, the early Asus ROG Flow Z13 leaks describe a tablet running Windows 11 on a 13.4-inch, 180Hz IPS touchscreen display, at a 16:10 aspect ratio, with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 1TB of storage.

I’m excited for what a huge leap in laptop/tablet graphics might unlock. It wasn’t that long ago that a new wave of AMD integrated graphics paved the way for the handheld PC gaming revolution.

VideoCardz writes that AMD is “set to announce” the new AI Max Plus series at CES.

Continue Reading…

Amazon’s video game anthology Secret Level is getting a second season

Image: Amazon

Amazon’s push into video game adaptations shows no signs of letting up. Today the company announced that Secret Level — an anthology of animated shorts all based on different video game properties — has been renewed for a second season on Prime Video. No other details about the new season have been announced yet.

Secret Level actually just premiered on Prime Video, and comes from the same team behind Netflix’s animated sci-fi anthology Love, Death and Robots. Its 15 episodes span a range of notable video game franchises, including Warhammer 40,000, Dungeons & Dragons, Mega Man, and the recently-shuttered Sony shooter Concord. It also awkwardly straddled the line between TV show and advertisement. In fact, one of Secret Level’s most infamous episodes — a bloody, dark reimagining of Pac-Man — turned out to be tied to an upcoming game.

Seriously, just look at it:

The news comes as Amazon continues to find its footing both developing and publishing video games, as well as adapting them for its streaming service. This year the company had a major hit with Fallout on Prime Video (which is also getting a second season) and followed it up with a live-action take on Yakuza. A Tomb Raider series is also in the works.

Continue Reading…

Honda and Nissan explore merger to navigate uncertain EV future

Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida with Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe at a press conference in March. | Image: Honda

Japanese automakers Honda and Nissan are in talks to merge to better compete with electric vehicle manufacturers like Tesla, BYD, and others. As reported by Nikkei Asia, the two have discussed signing a memorandum of understanding that outlines plans to split equity into a new holding company from which both will do business, according to anonymous sources.

Both Honda and Nissan are also discussing a plan to pull Mitsubishi into the party, which would be akin to how various Japanese electronics brands banded together — such as Konica Minolta, JVCKenwood, and others. Honda and Nissan were already working together to develop EV technology and software and had invited Mitsubishi to that party as well.

Of the two companies, it’s Nissan that’s really in trouble and reportedly will only survive another year unless another company (Honda) swoops in to buy Nissan shares. According the Reuters, Nissan’s net earnings in the middle of 2024 were down more than 90 percent year over year, and it had to cut its annual operating profit forecast by nearly 70 percent. Nissan and Honda relased statements to Reuters saying:

As announced in March of this year, Honda and Nissan are exploring various possibilities for future collaboration, leveraging each other’s strengths.

EV market growth has slowed worldwide, but Chinese brands are outpacing US, European, and Japanese manufacturers. According to Bloomberg, Japanese automakers are losing big market share in east and southeast Asia from China to Indonesia.

Honda is preparing to launch its new Honda Zero EV platform next year and is finding some success in the US with its GM-based electric Prologue SUV. Meanwhile Nissan had fumbled its early pioneering lead with the 2011 Leaf and has only released one other EV, the Ariya.

Both companies, along with domestic competitor Toyota, have added more hybrid models than full EVs to their product roadmaps. This year Nissan said it would have 16 “electrified” models by 2026, and Honda is looking to launch a really cool hybrid Prelude sports coupe next year.

Continue Reading…

Leaks: Nvidia’s RTX 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti and 5070 tipped with new ‘neural rendering’

This is the RTX 4080 Super, not the new cards. | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Nvidia’s new RTX 50 series graphics cards are looking like more of a lock for CES 2025 than ever, with Zotac and Acer now having leaked as many as five new GPUs — ones which may also have a new AI trick up their sleeves that we’ve never seen before.

Inno3D, an Nvidia graphics card partner, says it plans to “highlight” a wide slate of Nvidia AI features at the Las Vegas show, including “Neural Rendering Capabilities” that are allegedly “Revolutionizing how graphics are processed and displayed.” HardwareLuxx spotted the news.

It’s not 100 percent clear from the company’s vague teaser if that’s a new RTX 50-series hardware feature, but it appears alongside other features that are typically attributed to the cards, like “Improved RT cores”:

Image: Inno3D

Inno3D also writes the cards will feature “Advanced DLSS technology” — perhaps we’ll see higher image quality and faster framerates than ever with a possible announce of DLSS 4.0?

As far as the cards themselves, VideoCardz struck gold seeking out online retailer leaks this week, discovering that both Acer and Zotac had accidentally confirmed the existence of both an upcoming RTX 5090 with an unprecedented 32GB of GDDR7 memory, as previously leaked, and an RTX 5080 with 16GB of the same.

But the Zotac leak goes further, suggesting that Nvidia might announce not two, not three, but as many as five new cards at CES, including the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, an RTX 5090D for China, the RTX 5070 Ti whose specs have recently continued to leak, and even a base RTX 5070.

We’re not necessarily expecting any of these new cards to aim for affordability, but one can hope. If not, an RTX 5060 Ti and a vanilla RTX 5060 are reportedly on the way, though Wccftech reports that the RTX 5060 may stick with a paltry 8GB of video memory, while the 5060 Ti may be outfitted with 16GB.

32GB of video memory isn’t the only way that the RTX 5090 might physically be a beast: an early prototype leak suggested that its massive cooler might take up four slots in a computer case. But it’s possible that was just a prototype; reliable leaker kopite7kimi stated in September that Nvidia is going for a dual-slot design instead. Just a few days ago, the same leaker suggested its power consumption may have been revised downward from 600W, too.

Continue Reading…

Delta emulator triples Apple’s prices to encourage external clicks

Image: Riley Testut

The Delta gaming emulator is now providing a link to sign up for Patreon-exclusive membership perks directly within the iOS app in Apple’s US App Store. Developer Riley Testut is heavily encouraging users to click that external link by tripling the price you’d otherwise pay to Apple for In-App Purchase versions of those same Patreon tiers. Testut calls it the “do not buy sale.”

The update both embraces and protests the External Purchase Link Entitlement that Apple introduced in January, which allows developers to link to outside payment platforms in exchange for giving Apple a slightly reduced 27 percent cut of sales. The App Store policy change was made following rulings in the Epic vs Apple lawsuit that found Apple had acted anticompetitively by preventing developers from telling users about payment methods that bypassed its own payment system.

Image: Delta

Clicking this link within the Delta app settings will take you to the Patreon page to sign up directly.

Testut says Delta is likely the first app to use the entitlement. The $3, $5, and $10 monthly memberships on Patreon — which provide additional benefits like iPad and SEGA Genesis support, and private Discord access depending on the subscription tier — are listed in the iOS app at $10, $15, and $30, respectively.

“We really don’t want people to use in-app purchase,” Testut told The Verge. “We’ve been using Patreon for years, and it allows us to do things Apple’s IAP system can’t — such as issuing refunds and handling customer support — making it much more convenient for creators like us.”

Continue Reading…