Snapchat is upgrading its visual search features, and putting them at the center of its app. The app is now rolling out changes it announced back in May during its Partner Summit event. The updates include more prominent placement of the “scan” feature — now located directly under the camera’s shutter button — and new capabilities that will suggest lenses and music based on your surroundings.

Snap has been experimenting with visual search, called “scan” since 2019. The feature allows Snapchat users to identify plants and music, solve math problems, and scan food and wine labels with the in-app camera. But up until now, much of this functionality was easily overlooked as it required a few extra taps to access. With the update now rolling out, “scan” visible whenever the camera is open.

Snapchat’s also adding a few new features it previewed earlier this year, like the ability to shop for outfits by pointing the camera at articles of clothing. It’s also adding Camera Shortcuts, which will suggest a combination of augmented reality lenses and music based on your surroundings. For example, pointing the camera at your pet may suggest AR lenses meant to work with dogs and music to go with your clip.

Though Snap has been working on its “scan” capabilities for some time, the fact that it’s now making the feature much more prominent underscores how big a priority it is for the company. Snap has also integrated scanning abilities into its latest AR Spectacles, which can similarly suggest lenses based on what’s around you (unlike previous versions of Spectacles, the newest ones aren’t for sale just yet). Visual search also help Snap compete for creative talent with rivals like TikTok and Instagram (which also happens to be working on its own visual search feature). The company told The Verge that it’s working on adding camera shortcuts to Spotlight to make it easier for people to riff on other users’ clips.

It’s been a long time coming, but if you depend on the Electrify America mobile app to find nearby charging stations, you can soon access the software through your vehicle’s Android Auto or CarPlay infotainment system. Electrify America announced today it's rolling out support for both systems this week.

The software allows you to find the location of all the approximately 650 charging stations the company operates across the US. You can also see details about each station, including the availability of individual chargers and their capacity. Once you’re at a station, you can then use the software to remotely start and stop a charging session.

While it’s something of a head-scratcher it took Electrify America until 2021 to offer Android Auto and CarPlay support, that functionality is at least now in place as the company works toward nearly tripling its network by the end of 2025. Critically, it’s also another way Electrify America needed to catch up to Tesla. The automaker’s Trip Planner, which you can access through your car’s touchscreen display, will route you to Supercharger locations that are on the way to your next destination.

Apple thinks it might have a simple way to attract wary publishers to Apple News — give them a larger slice of app sales. TechCrunchreports that Apple has launched a News Partner Program that lowers the tech firm's cut of App Store subscriptions from 30 percent to 15 percent "from day one" if qualified publishers provide their content in the Apple News Format. Outlets previously had to wait until an app's second year on the App Store before Apple's share dropped to 15 percent.

The apps themselves have to deliver "original, professionally authored" news and, unsurprisingly, allow auto-renewing subscriptions through the App Store. If a publisher isn't located in one of Apple News' existing markets (currently the US, UK, Australia and Canada), it can still qualify for the program by providing an RSS news feed.

The move could satisfy publishers that avoided Apple's in-app subscription system, if not the App Store entirely, due to the 30 percent initial cut. You might see more publications on Apple News (if not necessarily News+) as a result. However, it's not clear if antitrust regulators will be thrilled. The program does show that Apple can be more flexible with App Store fees, but it's also an incentive for publishers to dive deeper into Apple's ecosystem.

The GoPro Quik app is getting a bit more useful for subscribers. GoPro is giving them unlimited cloud backups at no extra cost. What's more, the app can back up photos and videos at full source quality.

The mural feature is designed to showcase your favorite memories and maybe free up some space on your phone. Not only can you send captures from your GoPro to the cloud, the app lets you save images and videos from anywhere on your device, including your camera roll, using the share sheet. The latest version of the Android app now includes limited mural storage, and the upgrade is coming to iOS soon.

Being able to upload unlimited images and videos at full quality is a solid improvement for GoPro Quik subscribers. At $2/month or $10/year, it might prove a more attractive storage option than Google One or iCloud. Those service's plans each scale up to $10/month for 2TB of storage. Google Photos ended free unlimited storage in June. You might even use GoPro Quik as a secondary, low-cost backup option for all of your photos and videos.

GoPro merged its namesake app with Quik earlier this year. Mural organizes photos and videos into events and the app can automatically generate highlight videos for you. There are editing tools for your images and videos, filters and access to royalty-free music tracks.

Tesla is rolling out a major update for its iOS smartphone app with new controls, improved management and cool visuals. Version 4.0 also gives you the choice between two different sized widgets for your iPhone home screen. As detailed by Tesla Software Updates, both feature the same information: the name of the car, battery percentage, location (or charging info), unlock status, an image of the vehicle and the time the information was last updated. Tesla previously had a "Today" extension for iOS that was nowhere near as comprehensive as the new widgets. 

In terms of controls, you can send commands to your car immediately upon opening the app, instead of waiting for the vehicle to wake up. There's also enhanced phone key support that essentially lets you unlock multiple Teslas.

An updated visual that should be immediately noticeable is the new 3D vehicle render. There are also new animations when you charge your car and in the climate and controls sections. Design-wise, Tesla has ditched the charging section and now displays that info when your car is plugged in. You can also view Supercharging history from within the app. While the speed limit, valet mode and sentry mode settings have been moved to a new category titled Security, which includes tips on how to use the Bluetooth, phone key and location services.

To sum up, this is the biggest update to the EV maker's iOS app in a while. Recently, Tesla has mainly focused on providing bug fixes and improvements, outside of the introduction of Virtual Power Plant enrolment in July.

Google's YouTube Music app for Wear OS is now live, a few months after the tech giant promised to release one for the platform. That certainly sounds like great news for users who've been waiting for it after Google retired Play Music for Wear OS in 2020. The bad news is, as noted by 9to5Google, it only currently works on Google's Wear OS 3 platform. Samsung's Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic wearables, which will be available on August 27th, will be the only devices that will be running the OS in the foreseeable future. 

The company killed off the Play Music app for Wear OS watches back in August 2020, weeks before it completely shut the service down in favor of YouTube Music. It quickly released a YouTube Music app for the Apple Watch, but Wear OS users have had to wait for their turn. And, based on what we know now, they may have to continue waiting, unless they're set to get Samsung's new smartwatches tomorrow. In comparison, Spotify's Wear OS app works even on older smartwatches and can be used to stream and download music.

In addition to extremely limited compatibility, the app can't actually be used to stream music. According to 9to5Google's hands-on experience, users will only be able to download tracks on the app. Further, the phone must be plugged in to be able to download anything. For those not bothered by all those limitations and will soon have access to a Galaxy Watch 4, the app is now available on Google Play.

We're not sure who or how many people use Microsoft Office on a Chromebook but if that's you, you're in for a downgraded experience. Microsoft will soon kill its Office app for Android on Chrome OS, the company confirmed Wednesday to About Chromebooks. The app will leave the Google Play Store on September 18th, at which point users will need to sign in through the web via Office.com or Outlook.com. As 9to5Google notes, the Office app will still be available on Android phones, even as it vanishes from Chrome OS.

Though signing in via the web app should work in a pinch, it's clearly an inferior experience to what the Android app has offered until now, not to mention what Google's G Suite can do on its native Google-controlled platform. In particular, be warned that the web app offers almost no offline access, something users have enjoyed on the Google Play Store version. 

It's unclear why Microsoft is making this change, except that the company described the move in a statement to About Chromebooks as an "effort to provide the most optimized experience for Chrome OS/Chromebook customers." Whatever the intention, this is likely to give Chromebook users another reason to give the G Suite a try, if they haven't already. Or hey, perhaps they'll ditch their Chromebooks and download the Android app on Windows 11.

Facebook’s first messaging app is officially 10 years old, and the company is celebrating the occasion with a handful of new features and birthday-themed updates.

Messenger is introducing “birthday” versions of several of its existing features, such as birthday soundmoji, AR effects, stickers, chat themes and other effects. Users will also be able to send cash to friends as a “birthday gift” with Facebook Pay, which is essentially like any other person-to-person payment in Messenger but adds some new celebratory animations.

The app is also adding a new type of mini game to chats with “poll games.” The feature allows friends in group threads to weigh in on lighthearted polls that ask which member of the chat is “most likely” to do something like miss a flight or fight zombies. Both the new birthday effects, poll games, and birthday gifting are rolling out now. Messenger also previewed a new “word effects” feature coming “in the near future” that allows users to pair an emoji with a specific word or phrase in order to trigger an in-chat animation similar to iMessage’s special effects.

The updates underscore just how much Messenger has changed in its first decade of existence. Originally launched in 2011, the app evolved from a basic chat app to one so bloated with features it’s been redesigned at leastthree times in the last two years. It’s been home to many of Facebook’s more ambitious — though not always successful — features over the years.

More recently, Facebook has been weaving Messenger more tightly into its other services by pushing users to link their Instagram DMs with their Messenger account. Facebook wants to bring this same kind of “cross-app communication” to WhatsApp as well, though the company hasn’t said much about how or when it could happen. Likewise, it’s still not clear when Messenger will turn on end-to-end encryption as a default setting.

During a call with reporters, Facebook’s Messenger chief Stan Chudnovsky said that the rollout of encryption as a default is moving slowly in part due to the sheer number of features in the messaging app. “We need to rebuild all these features in [an] end-to-end encrypted environment, and make them fully capable,” he said, noting that Messenger is still continuously adding new features. “It's almost like we are constantly trying to catch up with ourselves.”

Facebook has started testing a feature that gives users a way to place voice and video calls from within the main app itself, according to Bloomberg. Like with any of the social network's experiments, it will only be available to a limited number of accounts. But those who do get access to the test will be able to call friends on the platform without having to fire up the Messenger app. 

As the publication notes, this looks like a move Facebook is exploring to further streamline its services that include Messenger, which became a separate app in 2014, and WhatsApp. Connor Hayes, director of product management at Messenger, told Bloomberg that it's meant to reduce the need to jump back and forth between the company's main app and its Messenger service.

Facebook already has plans to unify its messaging apps. In September 2020, it enabled the ability to chat and send messages between Instagram and Messenger, and the social network previously said that WhatsApp would also get inter-app messaging capabilities. The company tested putting a simpler version of Messenger within the main app last year, as well. That's something the social network been considering since at least 2019 when Jane Manchun Wong found an experimental feature that takes users straight to a "Chats" section when they tap on the messaging icon. Currently, doing so automatically opens the Messenger app. 

Hayes told the publication that Facebook now considers Messenger as a service instead of a standalone app. We may see more of its technologies across the company's other apps in the future — in fact, Instagram, Oculus and Portal devices already use Messenger's technology for voice and video calls. "You’re going to start to see quite a bit more of this over time," he said.

Oculus is rolling out an update to its Quest VR headsets that includes several tweaks and improvements. The highlight is the ability to auto sync your saved photos and video files directly to the Oculus mobile app. That way, you can manage and share those in-game captures when you're outside of the headset. 

The feature can be activated by opening the Files App from your Quest app library and selecting the cloud icon in the top-right corner of the panel. Your saved files will then be available in the the “Synced Media” section under the Devices tab in the mobile app. Oculus says that media will be unsynced and automatically removed from the app after 14 days.

The improvement is the latest aimed at saved media. In the v29 update earlier this year, Oculus introduced a Browser app that let you download and upload files to websites, making the task more seamless than plugging the headset into a PC.

Additional features include the option to gift games directly from the headset — a process that was previously limited to browsers or the Oculus mobile app. You can now also interact with your Facebook and Oculus friends from the People tab in Messenger.

Finally, Oculus is changing up its fitness-oriented Move feature. It's moving to weekly workout goals instead of daily ones, which will be viewable on the redesigned calendar. Keeping the focus on long-term targets, you'll now see revised suggested calorie goals and move minutes. Plus, you'll be able to share your workout stats to Facebook, including Groups, Messenger, and your timeline.