The death of Setapp Mobile matters. In fact, more than you might think, as I outline for TapSmart.
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Spotify goes all-in on AI. According to Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, the company says its best developers haven’t written a line of code since December. I can’t imagine what horrors are now lurking in the codebase. The company is depressingly light-touch regarding AI music too.
Apropos of nothing, Bandcamp and Deezer have both come out against AI ruining the music industry.
Children are lazy! Apparently. Or at least, that appears to be what Ofsted chief inspector Sir Martyn Oliver is inferring in his utterances over at LBC, in a piece by Katy Dartford. He argues it’s bizarre the school year was “determined around harvesting” and then, inevitably, argues children are in school for a “ridiculously low percentage of the year” and calls the six-week summer holiday to be scrapped. What’s actually bizarre: adults constantly slamming school children for not being in school enough, rather than recognising that they need lives beyond the classroom. Enough.
Squid Bits is awesome. Ending on a brighter note, I’ve long hoped Jess Bradley’s very silly comic strip for The Phoenix would get a collection. And that’s now happening. Hurrah!
Liquid Glass still sucks. I made a video about yet another glitch that provides more evidence Apple didn’t do nearly enough accessibility testing. Or, you know, actual design. Still, my hope is that Sebastiaan de With’s return to Apple (TapSmart) might herald improvements across the board.
Apple Watch sleep score is a joke. I’ve gone back and forth on this, wondering whether the sleep tracking is helpful. The one good thing is it’s given me a reality check about when I fall asleep. But the ratings are laughably awful. I’ve been ill and a few nights back ended up barely sleeping at all before 3am and was then fully awake for another two hours. I eventually passed out and stayed in bed until almost 11. Cue: Apple. In bed on time? YES. Enough sleep? SORTA! Disturbances? NOT MANY! 74/100. I can only assume to get under 50, you’d need to go to bed at 4am yet stay awake and spend the remainder of the night dancing. And even then you’d get 49.
Social media bans have consequences. As the Australians are finding out (Eelemarni Close-Brown for the Guardian). Advocates claim the ban is protecting children, but it’s not that simple. In many cases, it’s isolating them from their friends – especially those who found online activity to be a safe space, or their only way to socialise (for example, if they are housebound). Slow hand clap for everyone who was warned about this and hurried the legislation through anyway. I imagine the same will happen soon enough in the UK, before our own round of OH NO CONSEQUENCES.
Free iPhone games can be great. Here’s the latest update to my round-up for Stuff, now including unhinged party game Astro Party Ex.
VHS was always awful. Yet the rumblings of a revival are never far away. My take is over at Stuff: I love retro tech, but a VHS revival is the last thing we need. If you look very carefully at that title, you might just be able to figure out my opinion of this format.
Fancy a new iPhone photo editor? I’m a fan of Obscura Studio, by the same creator as the excellent Obscura Camera. If you’re interested in trying it, check out my Obscura Studio deep dive, for TapSmart.
‘Phones vs TV’ is increasingly a thing. Various TV show creators have noted that streaming services demand clunky exposition to be woven throughout episodes, because viewers are too often distracted by their phones. But phones can be a boon to TV and movie fans – if you have the right apps. Just, you know, stop looking at your phone when you should be looking at the TV, eh?
Is Apple the new Microsoft? This Betteridge-baiting headline sits atop an interesting piece by Shannon Carroll for Quartz. I don’t agree with everything in it, and I’m not convinced about the title. But this quote totally chimed with me: “Now, Apple doesn’t need every customer to feel delighted, it just needs them to feel locked in – and to keep paying.”
Apple made loads of money. Huge non-shock in Apple reporting it raked in yet more billions over the recent quarter. Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber neatly burst the party bubble: “It is difficult to get a company to see that certain of its core competencies are in severe decline when the company is making more money than ever.” Agreed. Modern Apple appears to equate success solely with profits. Which might account for why it’s making a horrible mess of software, developer relations, and more.
I’m tired of Apple and accessibility. Every year, I write to Apple multiple times about accessibility concerns, primarily in the field I know best: vestibular triggers. To be fair, Apple has taken on board some of what I’ve recommended. But over the past year, it feels like things have slipped. Triggers show up in an operating system and they’re never removed. And most of this stuff is extremely simple to test for: turn on Reduce Motion and check if there are any problematic animations. It appears no one did this for the new Pixelmator Pro for iPad, given that it’s chock full of triggers. Not good enough.
VPNs might be age-gated in the UK. Or they might not. The Lords (UK upper/revisioning chamber) has been debating the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which looks to be about as well conceived as the Online Safety Act. That is, not very. Amendment 92 seeks to age-gate VPNs, which would cause untold problems in industry and be extraordinarily difficult to enforce anyway. And, for good measure, Amendment 94a appears to further a move towards a ban on social media for the under-16s. I wrote about smartphone bans a while ago (Stuff bumped it back up the feed last week) and feel much the same about these new amendments: we need better education, more parental action, and fewer blunt weapons that are setting up cliff edges while simultaneously causing inconsistency. On the plus side, given that the amendments are from the opposition, there’s a reasonable chance the Labour government will ignore them. That said, they seem exactly like the sort of thing this Labour government will wish it had come up with itself.
FUN THINGS! If you’ve made it this far, congratulations. Your reward is an update to my Stuff feature on best browser games, which now includes Hill Climb Racing Lite, and news that superb Bubble Bobble ROM hack Lost Caves has been converted to the C64. “Now, it is the beginning of a fantastic story!!”
The best retro gaming handheld? There are dozens of the things. Still, I had a crack at recommending a solid option for five different use cases over at Stuff. If you’re keen to have decades of gaming in your mitts, packed into a dedicated and affordable device, check out Best budget retro gaming handhelds in 2026 to emulate classic consoles and video games.
Apple forcing iOS 26 upgrades is not OK. I’m still swatting iOS 26 away from my main iPhone, because it’s so unfinished and broken. It’s so bad from a vestibular accessibility standpoint that I’m not sure I can safely use it. Read my Swipe/TapSmart column on why Apple should rethink.
The iPhone Fold is on the way.Here’s what I want from Apple’s first crack at this type of device. Again, this one’s for Swipe/TapSmart.
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Apple’s making App Store ads even worse.Reports say it’s A/B testing making them harder to differentiate from standard results. Elsewhere, it’s preparing to roll out more ads within search results. This is a disgrace, but then I’m not sure we should expect anything else from this iteration of Apple, which prizes the bottom line over everything. So much for Apple always being guided by its “commitment to privacy and a phenomenal customer experience”.
It’s The Muppet Show! For years and years, I’ve wondered why the original Muppet Show format wasn’t resurrected. Perhaps it was lightning in a bottle or just of its time. But Disney+ is giving it another shot, with a special that all reports suggest is a backdoor pilot. Here is the trailer.
Exercise! That’s a thing. Definitely a thing that people want to start doing more when the new year rocks up. These iPhone trackers should help you meet your goals.
Lego Pokémon is on the way. And also ludicrously expensive. But there is one set that’s not wallet-punchy, and a new – surprisingly affordable – Zelda set is on the way too. Check both out in my upcoming Lego refresh for Stuff.
Pico-8 is great. Pico-8 not running natively on Android is not great. Which is why it’s great that it DOES now run natively. Hurrah! (And there’s even initial ES-DE integration too.)
Wikimedia Enterprise has partnered with AI. “In the AI era, Wikipedia’s human-created and curated knowledge has never been more valuable” says cherished online encyclopaedia selling its soul to the slop machine. But all the AI companies were scraping Wiki anyway and regurgitating it in their output. So Wiki may as well make some cash rather than not. But this still feels… bad. And I’ll bet it turns at least some contributors off Wiki entirely.
Apple UI design is broken, part 4,397. Having kept my iMac off Tahoe and using Moom for 90%+ of my window management, I hadn’t realised that we’d now reached the point where you can’t drag a macOS window corner to resize it. You have to drag empty space next to the window corner. Good grief. Norbert Heger explains. Apple’s new UI head has a lot of work to do… (Related: Héliographe jokes that if you “put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design”. Hashtag funny because it’s somewhat true.)
I’m in two minds about the sub myself, and not thrilled about the direction Apple’s taking. Sure, some products are still available as one-time purchases, but only on Mac, and not even all of them. (From what I can tell, Pixelmator Pro 4.0 is Creator Studio-only.) Apple’s also killed the iPhone version of Pixelmator entirely (although, to be fair, Pixelmator Team had done little with it for years), and Photomator’s long-term survival prospects are unclear.
Apple locking specific features behind the sub isn’t a good sign either. And it’s nonsensical in certain cases, such as having to buy a bundle that includes audio workstation Logic if you want access to AI features in Apple’s spreadsheet app, Numbers.
Bandcamp comes out against AI. While Spotify raises prices and says AI-gen audio slop is actually perfectly fine, Bandcamp states “Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp” and that using AI to “impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited”. Good.
