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Apple has explained why it's disabling progressive web apps (PWAs) in the EU, it wrote in updated developer notes seen by TechCrunch. The news follows users noticing that web apps were no longer functional in Europe with recent iOS 17.4 beta releases. Apple said it's blocking the feature in the region due to new rules around browsers in Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Web apps behave much like native apps, allowing dedicated windowing, notifications, long-term local storage and more. European users tapping web app icons will see a message asking if they wish to open them in Safari instead or cancel. That means they act more like web shortcuts, creating issues like data loss and broken notifications, according to comments from users seen by MacRumors.

The problem, according to Apple, is a new DMA requirement that it allow browsers that don't use its WebKit architecture. "Addressing the complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines would require building an entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS and was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps," the company wrote.

However, the Open Web Advocacy organization disagrees, as it writes in its latest blog: 

Some defend Apple's decision to remove Web Apps as a necessary response to the DMA, but this is misguided.

Apple has had 15 years to facilitate true browser competition worldwide, and nearly two years since the DMA’s final text. It could have used that time to share functionality it historically self-preferenced to Safari with other browsers. Inaction and silence speaks volumes.

The complete absence of Web Apps in Apple's DMA compliance proposal, combined with the omission of this major change from Safari beta release notes, indicates to us a strategy of deliberate obfuscation. Even if Apple were just starting to internalize its responsibilities under the DMA, this behaviour is unacceptable. A concrete proposal with clear timelines, outlining how third party browsers could install and power Web Apps using their own engines, could prevent formal proceedings, but this looks increasingly unlikely. Nothing in the DMA compels Apple to break developers' Web Apps, and doing so through ineptitude is no excuse.

The change, spotted earlier by researcher Tommy Mysk, arrived with the second iOS 17.4 beta, but many observers first thought it was a bug. "The EU asked for alternative app stores and Apple took down web apps. Looks like the EU is going to rue the day they have asked Apple to comply with the #DMA rules," he posted on X.

According to Apple's App Store Guidelines, web apps are supposed to be an alternative to the App Store model. Considering that that the EU's DMA is designed to break the App Store monopoly, the move to disable them altogether is bound to cause friction. The EU, Japan, Australia and the UK have previously criticized the requirement for WebKit to run PWAs, according to the Open Web Advocacy (OWA). 

Apple said it regrets any impact to the change, but said it was required "as part of the work to comply with the DMA." The company has already been accused by developers of malicious compliance with the DMA over fees for developers to bypass the App Store, with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek describing it as "extortion.". 

If you've enjoyed playing Alan Wake 2 over the last few months, you're far from alone. Remedy Entertainment announced that Alan Wake 2 had sold 1.3 million units since its October 2023 release — making it the developer's fastest-selling game. Alan Wake 2 sold three times as many digital copies over its first two months as fellow Remedy game Control did during its first four months. 

The high sales have been a big coup for Remedy's continued expansion. "The successful launch of Alan Wake 2 has supported our other game projects: Condor, Control 2 and Max Payne 1 and 2 remake have all increased development pace thanks to the personnel released from Alan Wake 2, and we expect these projects to reach their next development stages during the first half of 2024," Remedy CEO Tero Virtala stated. 

For anyone who hasn’t played it yet, Alan Wake 2 follows 2010 original Alan Wake and delves deeper into Remedy’s Connected Universe. Players encounter monsters, ghosts, demonic possession, shifting realities, rock operas and paranormal murder. The story will continue with Remedy adding two paid DLCs to Alan Wake 2 in the near future.

Control 2 will likely extend that further, giving Remedy fans a whole lot of paranormal, inter-connected content to enjoy in the coming months and years.

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Disney+ has released the first trailer for its upcoming animated series X-Men '97, and it feels like a blast from the past for fans of the animated series that aired in the 90s. Its story picks up from where the old series left off, with the trailer showing how the team makes an effort to work together after the death of Professor X who was seriously injured by the end of the Saturday morning cartoon. That means viewers can expect the same roster of mutants from the original show, including Cyclops as team leader, Wolverine, Jean Grey, Beast, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Jubilee and Bishop. By the end of trailer, we also get a glimpse of Magneto, who apparently inherited everything Professor X had left behind. 

X-Men: The Animated Series was arguably the best adaptation of the comic books. The new show has a similar look and feel to it, but its animation quality thankfully looks a lot better. It features voice actors already known for the role, including Alison Sealy-Smith as Storm and Cal Dodd as Wolverine, but it also features new ones like Ray Chase as Cyclops. According to Entertainment Weekly, Divergent star Theo James is also part of the cast, but showrunner Beau DeMayo refused to reveal who he's voicing other than saying that it's a "fan-favorite character." Marvel Animation's X-Men '97 starts streaming on Disney+ on March 20 and will have 10 episodes in all. The streaming service has yet to reveal its release schedule, but it typically adds an episode a week for its shows — whether it'll also release an episode every Saturday morning remains to be seen. 

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Game Pass, Microsoft’s subscription service for games, has 34 million subscribers as of February 2024. Microsoft revealed the number in a blog post where it shared its plan about the future of the Xbox business.

The latest number reveals that Game Pass growth has slowed down drastically. It took Microsoft three years since Game Pass launched in 2017 to get to 10 million subscribers in April 2020. In the next five months, the company added five million subscribers, and hit 18 million subscribers by January 2021, a growth rate of nearly 90 percent per year. A year later, the company announced that Game Pass had 25 million subscribers. Over the last two years, Game Pass has added nine million subscribers, which would be an average annual increase of just 18 percent.

Game Pass lets players pay a monthly fee to Microsoft for unlimited access to an evolving library of games that they can play on their consoles or PCs. In an announcement on Thursday, the brand’s leaders revealed plans to bring Xbox games to more platforms including the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch, both of which have far more users than Xbox. There are currently no plans to offer Game Pass on either Sony or Nintendo's platforms.

The first Activision Blizzard game to join Xbox Game Pass will be Diablo IV, and it's due to land on March 28. The move means Diablo IV will be playable on Xbox and PC at no extra charge to Game Pass members — of which there are 34 million, Xbox announced today. 

This is just the first step in Xbox's broader plan to offer Activision Blizzard titles in its monthly subscription service, now that Microsoft fully owns the studio.

"There will be even more to play as we begin to fulfill our commitment to offer Activision and Blizzard games with Game Pass, both new releases and classic games from its legendary catalog," the Xbox Wire reads. Xbox plans to share more information about additional Activision Blizzard titles hitting Game Pass "soon."

Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in October 2023, after nearly two years of antitrust investigations from authorities in the United States and abroad. The deal was worth nearly $69 billion, the largest in Microsoft's history. As part of negotiations with regulators, Microsoft agreed to offload the streaming rights for Activision Blizzard games onto Ubisoft, opening the door for their inclusion in Game Pass, Ubisoft+ and other cloud services.

In the US, the FTC is continuing to investigate the acquisition and recently accused Microsoft of misrepresenting its plans for Activision Blizzard following a round of layoffs in January that affected 1,900 employees across the company's gaming segments.

Times are a-changing at Xbox. The brand's leaders have confirmed plans to bring more Xbox games to other platforms, most likely PlayStation and Nintendo Switch. 

On the latest edition of the Official Xbox Podcast, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer says his team is bringing four of its games to "the other consoles." He didn't name the titles, but contrary to previous rumors, Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are not coming to PS5 or Switch for now. 

"The teams that are building those games have announced plans that are not too far away. As we know, game teams put a lot of energy into their announcements with the partners," Spencer said. "So I don't want to take anything away from those teams. So I won't be talking about the titles specifically. But I think when they come out, it'll make sense."

Reports have suggested that Hi-Fi Rush, Sea of Thieves, Halo and Gears of War would be among those crossing the great divide. Spencer did confirm that the Xbox games that are coming to PlayStation and Switch have been on Xbox and PC for at least a year already. "A couple of the games are community-driven games, new games, kind of first iterations of a franchise that have reached their full potential, let's say, on Xbox and PC — there's always growth, franchises that we obviously want to continue to invest in," he said. 

"Two of the other games are smaller games that were never really meant to be built as kind of platform exclusives and all the fanfare that goes around that, but games that our teams really wanted to go build that we love supporting creative endeavors across our studios regardless of size," Spencer added. "And as they've realized their full potential on Xbox and PC, we see an opportunity to utilize the other platforms as a place to just drive more business value out of those games, allowing us to invest in maybe future iterations of those, so equals to those, or just other games like that in our portfolio."

This story is developing; refresh for updates.

OpenAI on Thursday announced Sora, a brand new model that generates high-definition videos up to one minute in length from text prompts. Sora, which means “sky” in Japanese, won’t be available to the general public any time soon. Instead, OpenAI is making it available to a small group of academics and researchers who will assess harm and its potential for misuse.

“Sora is able to generate complex scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and accurate details of the subject and background,” the company said on its website. “The model understands not only what the user has asked for in the prompt, but also how those things exist in the physical world.”

One of the videos generated by Sora that OpenAI shared on its website shows a couple walking through a snowy Tokyo city as cherry blossom petals and snowflakes blow around them.

Another shows realistic-looking wooly mammoths walking through a snowy meadow against a backdrop of snow-clad mountain ranges.

OpenAI says that the model works as a result of “deep understanding of language,” which lets it interpret text prompts accurately. Still, like basically all AI image- and video-generators we’ve seen, Sora isn’t perfect. In one of the examples, the prompt, which asks for a video of a Dalmatian looking through a window and people “walking and cycling along the canal streets,” omits the people and the streets in the video entirely. OpenAI also warns that the model can struggle to understand cause and effect — it can generate a video of a person eating a cookie, for instance, but the cookie may not have bite marks.

Sora isn’t the first text-to-video model around. Other companies including Meta, Google and Runway, have either teased text-to-video tools or made them available to the public. Still, no other tool is currently able to generate videos as long as 60 seconds. Sora also generates entire videos at once, instead of putting them together frame-by-frame like other models, which makes sure that subjects in the video stay the same even when they go out of view temporarily.

The rise of text-to-video tools has sparked concerns over their potential to more easily create realistic-looking fake footage. “I am absolutely terrified that this kind of thing will sway a narrowly contested election,” Oren Etzioni, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in artificial intelligence, and the founder of True Media, an organization that works to identify disinformation in political campaigns, told The New York Times. And generative AI more broadly has sparked backlash from artists and creative professionals concerned about the technology being used to replace jobs.

OpenAI said that it was working with experts in areas like misinformation, hateful content and bias to test the tool before making it available to the public. The company is also building tools capable of detecting videos generated by Sora and including metadata in the generated videos for easier detection. The company declined to tell the Times how Sora had been trained, except stating that it used both “publicly available videos” as well as videos licensed from copyright holders.

The Apple Vision Pro is officially two weeks old, and the apps are starting to roll in. TikTok was conspicuously absent on launch day, but now our long national nightmare has come to an end. The Vision Pro has a native TikTok app.

This isn’t just the iPad app with a new coat of paint. There are some neat features here that take advantage of Apple’s well-regarded and prohibitively-expensive headset. The navigation bar and like button are moved entirely off-screen, giving users an uninterrupted view of video content.

TikTok

This extends to comment sections and creator profiles, as they both now appear as expansions alongside the feed, which TikTok says provides “a more immersive content viewing experience.” To that end, TikTok integrates with the headset’s immersive environments, so people can watch short-form videos on the moon or surrounded by the lush flora of Yosemite.

TikTok also works with the Vision Pro’s Shared Space feature, allowing the app to exist somewhere in your peripheral as you work on other stuff. The location of the app will remain static, so it’ll be in the same place every time you put on the headset (provided you are in the same room.)

You may notice that these features are primarily intended for content consumers, and not creators. Engadget reached out to TikTok to ask about creator-specific features and we’ll update this post when we hear back.

The app’s available for download right now, though it likely won’t be accessible for TikTok’s core userbase of 10 to 19 year olds. The Apple Vision Pro costs $3,500. That’s like an entire childhood of allowances.