Google plans to begin verifying the identity of all developers who distribute apps on Android, even if it's outside the Play Store, starting September 2026 (Mishaal Rahman/Android Authority)
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-developer-verification-requirements-3590911/
Sources: Elon Musk is quietly pumping the brakes on his plans to start a US political party, telling allies he wants to focus his attention on his companies (Brian Schwartz/Wall Street Journal)
Anthropic to debut new rate limits for Claude Pro and Max on Aug. 28, likely curbing <5% of users, saying some run Claude Code "continuously in the background" (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/28/anthropic-unveils-new-rate-limits-to-curb-claude-code-power-users/
OpenAI announces that it will start showing product recommendations in ChatGPT, even for logged-out users, with buy buttons that link to merchants' sites (Reece Rogers/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-adds-shopping-to-chatgpt/
Elon Musk boosts a post disparaging the abilities of "women and low T men", advocating for a "Republic of high status males", and mentioning a "Reich effect" (Ellsworth Toohey/Boing Boing)
ISD: hundreds of extremist TikTok accounts are openly sharing Hitler-related propaganda, including Holocaust denial videos, and trying to recruit new members (David Gilbert/Wired)
A deep dive into how Bluesky is built, including its growth from three engineers to 12 in just over two years and its infrastructure move from AWS to on-prem (The Pragmatic Engineer)
Post.News, the news-focused social platform launched in 2022 that offered micropayments to publishers, is shutting down after failing to grow "fast enough" (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/19/24135011/twitter-alternative-post-news-shutdown
Source: Physical Intelligence, a startup making an AI model for "any robot or physical device", has raised $70M from Thrive, Khosla, Lux, OpenAI, Sequoia, more (Ashlee Vance/Bloomberg)
Match and Bumble have lost $40B+ in market value since 2021, as they struggle to grow their $4.2B in 2023 subscription revenue and young users balk at paying (J. Edward Moreno/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/business/dating-apps-tinder-bumble.html
Google updates Google Play game listings, including AI-powered FAQs and new ad formats, adds support for listing PC games, and says Play Points hit 220M members (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
Epic plans to charge non-game developers $1,850 per seat per year to use Unreal Engine in late April with version 5.4, as opposed to royalty-based game fees (Jon Porter/The Verge)
After criticism, Apple says iOS 17.4 won't remove Home Screen web apps in the EU, which will continue to be built on WebKit and its security architecture (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/01/apple-home-screen-web-apps-ios-17-eu/
The SEC says it is working with the FBI in investigating the false X post about spot bitcoin ETFs (Sarah Wynn/The Block)
Paris-based Mistral AI has raised €385M, or about $415M, with investors including a16z and Lightspeed; sources: the deal values Mistral at about $2B (Cade Metz/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/technology/mistral-ai-funding.html
Elon Musk's xAI has filed with the SEC to raise up to $1B in an equity offering, saying it has raised nearly $135M from four investors since November 29 (Hayden Field/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/05/elon-musks-ai-startup-xai-files-to-raise-1-billion-.html
Amazon expands its search and discovery features, including multimodal search and Find-on-Amazon, which lets users find similar products to those in a photo (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
Extremely Online book excerpt: how Julia Allison invented the concept of a content creator in the mid-2000s, for which journalists and others villainized her (Taylor Lorenz/Rolling Stone)
Sources: Instacart plans to target its IPO at roughly $8.6B to $9.3B valuation, well below the $39B valuation the company had in March 2021 (Wall Street Journal)
Magic Leap tells customers the Magic Leap 1 AR headset, which launched in August 2018, and its apps will "cease to function" from December 31, 2024 (David Heaney/UploadVR)
https://www.uploadvr.com/magic-leap-1-cease-to-function-2025/