In a couple of months, you'll be able to get Microsoft's mobile games from its own store. Xbox President Sarah Bond has revealed at the Bloomberg Technology Summit that the company is launching a web-based store where you can download its mobile games and get add-ons or in-app purchases at a discount. Bond said the company has decided to launch a browser-based store instead of an app to make it "accessible across all devices, all countries, no matter what" so that you don't get "locked to a single ecosystem."

Microsoft will only host its own games to start with, which means it will feature a lot of titles from Activision Blizzard. If you'll recall, it snapped up the gaming developer and publisher in a $70 billion deal that closed last year. You'll most likely find Candy Crush Saga, which has apparently generated $20 billion in revenue since it launched in 2012, and Call of Duty's mobile games in the first batch of titles available for download. Bond said that Minecraft may also be one of the first games you can get. 

An Xbox spokesperson told Bloomberg that this is "just the first step in [the company's] journey to building a trusted app store with its roots in gaming." Microsoft plans to open the app store to third-party publishers in the future, though it didn't share a timeline for that goal. 

The company first announced its intention to launch a gaming store for Android and iOS devices last year shortly before rules under the EU's Digital Markets Act became applicable. To comply with DMA rules, Apple and Google have to allow third-party app stores to be accessible on their platforms and to offer alternative billing systems for purchases. They're also compelled to allow app sideloading, which will be a massive change for Apple, a company known for its "walled garden" approach to business. 

Operators of third-party app stores will get to avoid some of the fees Google and Apple charge, but they'd still have to pay the companies for bypassing their mobile platforms' official stores. Both tech giants have already outlined how they're changing things up to comply with the DMA regulations. The companies' rivals found the changes they're making insufficient, however, prompting the European Commission to start investigating their compliance plans. 

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a Class I recall for the t:connect mobile app on iOS, which is used to monitor and control the t:slim X2 insulin pump used by people with diabetes. It was supposedly the first smartphone app that can program insulin doses that the FDA had approved. The agency issued the highest level of recall it could, because the app had serious software problems that could've have caused life-threatening conditions or even death. In fact, while there were no mortalities reported, the FDA received 224 injury reports as of April 15. 

According to the agency, version 2.7 of the t:connect mobile app had a bug that initiated a cycle wherein the app would crash and then would be relaunched by the iOS platform again and again. That apparently led to excessive Bluetooth communication that would drain the pump's battery and cause it to shut down earlier than the user would expect. Insulin pumps like the t:slim X2 are designed to automatically deliver insulin under the user's skin at set time intervals and whenever needed. They're supposed to take on the burden of managing the user's sugar levels so that they can go about their day without having to stop and inject themselves or if they're prone to getting hypo or hyperglycemia. 

If a pump shuts down without warning and before the user expects it to, it could lead to the under-delivery of insulin. As the FDA explained in its recall, that could result in hyperglycemia and even diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening complication caused by the inability of the body to turn sugar into energy due to the lack of insulin. Tandem Diabetes Care, the company behind the app and the pump, sent all affected customers an emergency notice back in March. It advised them to update their app, to monitor their pump battery level closely and to carry backup insulin supplies. The FDA's recall notice could reach potentially affected customers who may not have seen the manufacturer's alerts, however, or who may have brushed it aside. Malfunctioning insulin pumps had been linked to multiple deaths in the past, so users may want to keep a close eye on theirs regardless of the brand. 

Emails from the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google revealed how Microsoft executives were alarmed by and even envious of Google’s AI lead.

In an email thread, CTO Kevin Scott wrote he was “very, very worried” about Google’s rapidly growing AI capabilities. He said he initially dismissed the company’s “game-playing stunts,” likely referring to Google’s AlphaGo models. The emails reference Gmail’s autocomplete features, which execs called “scary good.” Microsoft struggled to copy Google’s BERT-large, an AI model that deciphers the meaning and context of words in a sentence. It took the company six hours to replicate the model, while Google inched further ahead on more elaborate, bigger models.

Scott said Microsoft had “very smart” people on its machine-learning teams but their ambitions had been curbed and that their company was “multiple years behind the competition in terms of ML scale.” This all led to a billion-dollar push into OpenAI in 2019. It’s since invested $13 billion.

— Mat Smith

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LinkedIn now has daily Wordle-style games

What connects you with a B2B marketer in West Virginia? Four letters.

LinkedIn, the career-centric social network, is getting into gaming. But the kind of earnest, word-based games your mom would let you play when you were a kid. LinkedIn describes them as “thinking-oriented games,” though the format will likely look familiar to fans of The New York Times Games app. You can only play each game once a day, and you can share your score with friends. And just maybe... strike up a conversation on how you can help each other with targeted SaaS projects. Yes, I have feelings about who hits me up on LinkedIn.

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TikTok might be trying to circumvent Apple’s in-app purchase rules

It appears to be directing users to “avoid in-app service fees.”

TikTok is allegedly violating Apple’s App Store rules, with the app allowing (even recommending) particular users to purchase its coins directly from its website. TikTok has apparently given some iOS users the option to “Try recharging on tiktok.com to avoid in-app service fees” — namely Apple’s 30 percent commission on purchases, which are more likely than not passed onto those users. It’s definitely not available to all users and seems to be there for TikTok users who have previously bought a large number of coins — the TikTok whales, if you will.

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Rabbit denies claims its R1 virtual assistant is a glorified Android app

Someone pulled the APK out and put it on an Android phone.

Rabbit

The Rabbit R1, a pocket-sized AI virtual assistant device, runs Android under the hood. Now early users have been able to tease out the R1 APK, install it on an Android phone and make it work — if not with all the features. If that’s the case, what’s the point in the $200 gadget?

In a statement sent to Android Authority, Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu, said the Rabbit R1 is “not an Android app.” He added the R1 ran on very bespoke AOSP (Android Open Source Project) build and lower-level firmware modifications, so a local bootleg APK won’t be able to access most R1 services. We’re wrapping up our own detailed review — stay tuned.

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Anthropic is making its Claude AI easier to access on mobile. The company has released a Claude mobile app for iOS that any user can download for free. Similar to the mobile web version of the chatbot, the app syncs users' conversations with Claude across devices, allowing them to jump from a computer to the app (or vice versa) without losing their chat history. Users will also be able to upload files and images straight from their iPhone's gallery — or take a photo on the spot — if they need Claude to process or analyze them in real time. They'll be able to download and access the Claude app whatever plan they're using, even if they're not paying for the service. 

If they do decide to pay for Claude, they now have a new option other than Pro. The new Team plan provides greater usage than the Pro tier so that members can have more conversations with the chatbot. It also enables users to process longer documents, such as research papers and contracts, thanks to its 200,000 context window. The Team plan gives users access to the Claude 3 model family, as well, which includes Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. It will cost subscribers $30 per user per month, with a minimum head count of five users per team. 

Back in March, Anthropic claimed in a blog post that its Claude 3 language model had outperformed ChatGPT and Google's Gemini in several key industry benchmarks. It was better at graduate-level reasoning, multilingual math and coding (among many other metrics), the company said, showing Claude 3's benchmark results against its staunchest rivals. The most powerful Claude 3 model, the Opus, even apparently showed "near-human" abilities with rapid response rates that make it ideal for more complex and time-sensitive tasks. 

Another day, another company tests Apple's resolve. This time, it's TikTok allegedly violating the company's rules for apps, with the video platform seemingly allowing some users to purchase its coins directly from its website. TikTok has apparently given some iOS users the option to "Try recharging on tiktok.com to avoid in-app service fees" — namely Apple's 30 percent commission on purchases.

According to photos shared on X (formerly Twitter) by David Tesler, co-founder of the app Sendit, TikTok is prompting users to save around 25 percent when purchasing coins (used to tip creators) thanks to lower third-party service fees. They can then use Apple Pay, PayPal or a credit or debit card to complete their transaction. It's unclear why only some users have access to this circumnavigation; one hypothesis is the feature was turned on for individuals who previously purchased a large number of coins.

Apple notably kicked Fortnite off its app store in 2020 after Epic Games introduced discounts on the game's currency for anyone who directly purchased it. The incident set off a multi-year legal battle, with Apple reinstating Epic Games' developer account in March after the European Union began looking into the situation. More recently, Apple has faced pushback from Spotify and rejected updates that would have displayed the music streamer's pricing and allowed in-app plan purchases. 

It's a post-Digital Markets Act (DMA) world, and Spotify continues to test what that means for its iOS app. The music streamer announced that it submitted an update for Apple's approval that would allow Spotify to display "basic pricing and website information" on its app in Europe and "the bare minimum outlined under the European Commission's ruling in its music streaming case." 

In the news, shared in a post on X (formerly Twitter), Spotify's chief public affairs officer Dustee Jenkins further stated, "By charging developers to communicate with consumers through in-app links, Apple continues to break European law. It's past time for the Commission to enforce its decision so that consumers can see real, positive benefits."

Apple and Spotify have consistently butted heads over what the latter can and can't do with its iOS app. Following the DMA going into effect, Spotify submitted an update to Apple that would have allowed users to purchase plans directly from the app, but Apple rejected it. Apple did so even though the European Union had just hit it with a nearly $2 billion fine for "blocking" alternative music apps. The EU is also investigating Apple, Meta and Google for self-preferencing and charging developers additional fees. As for how Apple will react to Spotify's latest test, we'll just have to wait and see.

Meta’s Threads app now has more than 150 million monthly users, an increase of about 20 million new users since February. Mark Zuckerberg shared the latest user numbers during Meta’’s first-quarter earnings call, saying that the app “continues to be on the trajectory that I hope to see.”

The update suggests Threads is continuing to grow steadily, though at a slower rate than its initial explosive growth. The app racked up more than 100 million downloads in its first week, but later saw a drop-off in engagement. But over the last six months, Threads has seen more consistent growth and Zuckerberg has speculated the service could eventually be Meta’s next billion-user app.

Notably, Threads seems to be out-performing X (formerly known as Twitter) by some metrics. Estimates from analytics firm Apptopia indicated Threads has more daily users in the United States than X, Business Insider reported earlier this week. (X has claimed 550 million daily users globally.) Threads also scored another significant win recently when Taylor Swift joined the platform to promote her latest album.

Threads is, for now, unique among Meta’s apps in that it doesn’t have advertising so the company doesn’t make money from the app directly. That will likely change at some point provided Threads continues to expand its reach. Zuckerberg has previously said the company would “focus on monetization” only after the app has grown sufficiently.

Roland has a new on-the-go podcasting setup with an eye-catching price. The company’s Go:Podcast studio includes a USB condenser mic (with support for four polar patterns) and a companion app that can stream to platforms like YouTube, Twitch and Facebook.

The company describes the Go:Podcast as “the simplest way to do high-quality live streaming with a mobile device.” For $140, you get the USB microphone and access to the companion app (iOS and Android), which supports live streaming, including dual-camera setups. The latter can work simultaneously with your smartphone’s front and back cameras, or you can pair a second “satellite” camera to complement your phone’s. It also supports wireless screen sharing for things like live-streaming mobile gameplay.

The microphone’s polar pattern options include cardioid (best for one person speaking), omni (multi-directional) and stereo (best for two people or musical performances). A fourth option lets you flip the stereo channels to match your video.

Roland

Somewhat confusingly, many of Roland’s product photos (like the one above) show a mini smartphone tripod and V-Moda headphones alongside the mic, but those accessories aren’t included. A Roland spokesperson clarified to Engadget that those were meant to illustrate an example of a complete mobile podcasting system with the mic and app at its center.

The Go:Podcast app includes perks like overlaying text and images, playing video clips and audio tracks, picture-in-picture and split screen. It has free-to-use background music tracks (which hopefully sound better than I imagine) along with stock photos and videos.

Roland’s $140 Go:Podcast studio will arrive in early May. You can learn more (and look out for more specific availability as its launch date approaches) at Roland’s website.

If you use Sonos speakers, chances are you’ve used their app and encountered at least a little frustration at some point. I don’t think it’s a bad app when you consider the many functions it needs to juggle: finding and playing music from dozens of services, managing multiple connected speakers, running people through setup and troubleshooting and so on. But at the very least, it’s fair to suggest that it’s a little long in the tooth. Sonos knows this, too, and is announcing a totally new app for Android and iOS that was written from the ground up. It’ll be available on May 7.

I spoke to Sonos VP of user experience and user research Neil Griffiths about the redesign, and he said that it came as a result of talking to hundreds of customers about their listening habits and the way they want to use the app. From those conversations came two principles the company followed for the new app. One was to make it easier for people to play back whatever audio content they have, whether it’s streaming music, podcasts, radio, audiobooks, devices plugged into Sonos speakers like TVs or turntables and more. The second is making the app into a hub that’s better-suited to getting to exactly what you want to hear.

The end result is a much simpler app — the old one had the usual five tabs along the bottom, three of which could be used to find music. Now, there’s a single, customizable home screen with a persistent search bar and rows of content. By default, you’ll see a “recently played” section at the top that pulls things in from any service you use; below that you’ll see a carousel of the different services you have hooked up to Sonos. There’s also an area that controls different inputs, like line-in to speakers that support it or TVs plugged into soundbars. That way, you can tap those to switch between streaming music and playing back the connected device.

Sonos

There’s still a “now playing” bar at the bottom of the app that you can tap to get the full playback controls and volume adjustments, but if you swipe up from the bottom of the screen you’ll instead get a view of your whole Sonos system. This shows all your speakers and what’s playing where; you can adjust volume for each from here or group speakers together.

Easily the best thing about this new app is the customizable home screen, though. Not only can you change the order of things that appear there, you can also pin content directly from within different apps so you can get to it immediately. For example, Spotify, Apple Music and basically every other music service typically have a “new releases for you” section that shows recent albums based on your listening habits. If you always want to see that, you can pin it straight to your home screen and it’ll dynamically update when Spotify has new picks. And you can re-order these carousels so your most-used one is right at the top of the screen.

The old Sonos home screen had a recently played section at the top and let you pin songs, albums, playlists and stations from across your services, so it had some degree of flexibility. But being able to add full, dynamically updating sections from the apps you use feels like a major step forward. I can easily see pinning a half-dozen lists from different apps to my home screen, which will make the process of starting music from the Sonos app itself a lot more fluid. I still mostly use AirPlay or Spotify Connect to broadcast to my speakers, but I think it’ll be worth setting up my home in this new app and see if I use it more. Pulling together content from the too many streaming apps I use in one place sounds like a nice improvement over jumping in and out of apps depending on what I want to hear.

Sonos also made it easier to jump right into the service of your choice. All of the streaming apps that you’re logged in to will appear in a carousel as well, with your default / favorite option always at the beginning of the list. The same goes for search — when you open the search bar and type something in, you’ll get the results from your favorite service first.

Sonos

The company is also replacing its existing desktop controller app for Mac and Windows with a web app that'll offer the same functionality and design as you get on your phone. That's probably a good call, as the Sonos controller feels pretty out of step with the company's current design and feature set, though I'm sure some will bristle at it being a web app. That should also start rolling out on May 7, and the existing Mac and Windows app will eventually be shut down.

For a lot of people, I wager the Sonos app will still be a “set it and forget it” kind of thing, used to get speakers set up and then tucked away in case something goes wrong. If you only have one or two speakers and do nearly all your listening through Spotify, for example, it’ll probably be preferable to just use the Spotify app itself still. But people who have a more involved speaker setup and use multiple sources for audio should find a lot to like here when the app arrives in a few weeks.

There’s a new invite-only app going semi-viral among VCs, tech execs and other Silicon Valley personalities. It’s called Airchat and it’s trying to revive the concept of an audio-first social media app.

The premise is similar to Clubhouse, the audio app that had a viral moment at the height of the pandemic in 2021 and inspired copycat features in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit before gradually fading into obscurity. But unlike the original version of Clubhouse, Airchat isn’t built around live audio streams that require users to all tune it at once. It’s more like Twitter or Threads, except posts can only be shared as voice notes.

The app uses a timeline format, and automatically plays audio clips as you scroll your feed. You do have the ability to pause the playback and read text instead — each post is accompanied by an AI-generated transcript — but posts and replies can only be shared by recording an audio clip. There don’t seem to be any time constraints on how long individual clips can be, I found at least one post where a user spoke for a full hour just to see if it would work (it did).

It sounds a bit gimmicky (because it is), but the app has all the hallmarks of the kind of social apps that briefly go viral among a certain segment of extremely-online Silicon Valley nerds. It’s led by a pair of well-connected tech founders: AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant and former Tinder exec Brian Norgard. It’s invitation-only and has drawn a number of well-known tech personalities among its early users: Y Combinator CEO and San Francisco political provocateur Gary Tan, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, OpenAI founder Sam Altman, VC and Elon Musk confidant Jason Calacanis.

Over on X, Airchat’s high-profile user base is building hype and creating FOMO for those who haven’t been able to score an invite. (The app had to briefly shut off invites over the weekend due to “an influx of new users,” according to Ravikant, Airchat’s CEO.)

It’s not clear exactly how many users Airchat has just yet, but it seems to be in the low tens of thousands. The app has been downloaded close to 50,000 times, research firm Appfigures told Engadget, but it’s likely some of those downloads have come from people who don’t yet have an invite. Ravikant, who seems to be one of the most-followed users, currently has just over 11,000 followers in the app.

Using Airchat is, well, noisy and a bit confusing. Upon joining, the app asks to tap your contacts list to find friends who are already on the app, but finding people to follow beyond that can be challenging. The app doesn’t have the equivalent of a “for you” feed with recommended content so your only options are to manually search for users or lurk in conversations that do appear in your feed and check out other users’ posts and follows.

When I signed up, there were four people from my contacts in the app, only two of whom are actual friends. I followed them and the app’s founders and a couple other familiar names. I then began randomly following other users as conversations began to appear in my feed. This was a terrible strategy as my feed was quickly dominated by the voices of a few especially active (but not terribly interesting) posters. With so many new users all joining at the same time, at one point my feed was just a bunch of people talking about Airchat.

It’s also somewhat jarring to actually hear the voices of people you’ve followed on social media for ages but haven’t interacted with IRL. The app defaults to playing back audio at 2x speed, which tends to make people’s speaking voices sound a bit unnatural, but is also kind of necessary for long-winded posts.

The bigger issue, though, is that it’s not entirely clear what Airchat is for. There are a handful of “channels,” smaller groups dedicated to chatting about specific topics like coffee or astrology or AI or war, but conversations are disjointed and hard to follow. There seem to be some corners with spirited discussion. The “coffee” channel has 755 members and has lots of earnest discussion of pour-over techniques and photos of latte art. The channel is also “moderated heavily,” according to Ravikant (Airchat’s moderation policy is “self moderation,” which means they expect you to make good use of blocking and muting features, though an FAQ states they will remove users for “harassment, impersonation, foul behavior, and illegal content.)

More creative users are also finding ways to play with the audio-centric format. I found an ASMR group that consisted mainly of people speaking in breathy whispers that kind of gave me the ick (one person did post a nice clip of their cat purring). I listened to a few poetry readings in the “poetry” channel, but didn’t have the patience, even at 2x speed. There’s also a lot of talk of in-app karaoke, though I have yet to see it actually happen.

Some might see these kinds of gimmicks as the start of some new paradigm, where people use their voices to unlock new ways of interacting. But all I can think about is how Clubhouse, at its peak, had similar gimmicks: in-app game shows, open mic nights and (very NSFW) “moan rooms.” It was new and interesting at a time when most people were stuck at home with nothing to do, but the novelty wore off quickly.

While Clubhouse’s initial success sparked copycat features from almost every other major social media company, many of those have since shut down due to lack of interest. Even Clubhouse itself is a shell of what it once was. While the app still exists, it’s an entirely different service than the one that briefly captured the attention of bored tech workers. The company laid off half its staff in 2023 and has since pivoted to audio-centric group chats.