Apple and Google have agreed to make changes to their app stores in the UK following an intervention from the UK markets regulator.
According to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the tech giants have committed to not giving preferential treatment to their own apps and will be transparent about how others are approved for sale, among other agreements.
It comes seven months after the regulator said Apple and Google had an ”effective duopoly” in the UK over their dominance in the sector.
The CMA’s head Sarah Cardell said the proposed commitments ”will boost the UK’s app economy” and were the first of many measures.
In 2010, one firm said the iPad “failed to convince buyers” after its unveiling because the number of people who said they were uninterested in the iPad nearly doubled. Small footnote to that survey that somehow didn’t make the headline: the number of people who said they _would_ like to buy an iPad tripled.
Spotify announced Tuesday that it hit 751 million total monthly active users (MAUs) for quarter-four of 2025. That record-high is an 11 percent jump from the year before and a significant bump from the third quarter’s 713 million MAUs.
The quarterly earnings report also showed a 10 percent jump year-over-year in Premium subscribers, from 263 million to 290 million. Europe makes up the greatest number of the Swedish company’s premium subscribers (36 percent), with North America coming second at 25 percent.
Last week, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s AI studio Primordial Soup and Time magazine released the first twoepisodes of On This Day… 1776. The year-long series of short-form videos features short vignettes describing what happened on that day of the American Revolution 250 years ago, but it does so using “a variety of AI tools” to produce photorealistic scenes containing avatars of historical figures like George Washington, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Franklin.
In announcing the series, Time Studios President Ben Bitonti said the project provides “a glimpse at what thoughtful, creative, artist-led use of AI can look like—not replacing craft but expanding what’s possible and allowing storytellers to go places they simply couldn’t before.”
Noble Audio has announced the Sceptre, a pocket-sized USB-C Bluetooth transmitter meant to boost wireless audio quality from phones, laptops and tablets. The device is intended to exceed the quality offered by a device’s existing hardware.
Sceptre is powered by Qualcomm’s QCC5181 Bluetooth chipset and supports LDAC, aptX Adaptive, AAC and SBC codecs. Of course, to take advantage of the high quality codecs you’ll need a pair of headphones that support them. The dongle has a reported wireless range of roughly 66 feet.
Listeners use the Noble app for initial pairing and can then move the dongle between compatible USB-C devices. It also supports pass-through charging with USB-C so users can charge their devices while listening. The company says Sceptre is compatible with iOS, Android and Windows, and the company confirmed with Engadget that iPhones 15 and newer are supported.
Alongside the iPhone 17e, Apple also has a refreshed base model iPad in the works. A new report from Macotakara highlights what we can expect from Apple’s update of its cheapest iPad.
Apple released the iPad 11, formally known as the iPad (A16), last March. While the A16 chip represented a notable upgrade from the previous model’s A14 chip, it wasn’t enough for Apple to offer Apple Intelligence support on the device.
That is set to change this year, though. Macotakara reports that this year’s iPad 12 will be powered by the A18 chip, which will enable Apple Intelligence support. It will also have 8GB of RAM, up from the current model’s 6GB of RAM.
With Apple Intelligence set to get significantly more useful this year, it’s good to know Apple is planning to make its cheapest iPad capable of running the features. This includes the more powerful Siri features first announced at WWDC 2024, as well as new chatbot features in iPadOS 27.
