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The best apps download superpowers to your smartphone. The Verge covers the new and noteworthy Android apps, iPhone apps, and games, highlighting great design, impressive utility, and novel features. If it belongs on your phone, you’ll find it on The Verge.

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Opera’s mobile browser is getting a lot of new users in the EU.

The company credits the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) for the 164 percent increase in new iOS users it saw from March 5th to the 7th. Opera also saw significant user growth in specific countries, including a 402 percent spike in France and a 143 percent boost in Spain.

Apple started letting iPhone users choose their default browser as part of its compliance with the DMA earlier this month. Besides Opera, Brave and Firefox are also seeing more iPhone users in the EU.


A chart seeing user growth for Opera’s browser
Image: Opera
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OpenAI’s custom chatbots are easier to make than market.

The Information reports on GPT Store developers disappointed by a lack of customers for their ChatGPT-style products and limited analytics support. One developer claims his role-playing chatbot “could have gotten more traffic by partnering with a small influencer on TikTok” after being featured for two weeks.

Verge reporter Emilia David had questions about the value of the GPT Store after struggling to “find a use” for chatbots made by other users, and it’s not clear if there are any great answers yet.


Google Drive on the web goes to the dark (mode) side.

You may find that your Google Drive account has Dark mode on the web now — I have it on just one of mine, so far.

If Google has blessed you with the update, you’ll get a “New! Dark mode” prompt at login. After, the option lives under the gear icon > Settings > General > Appearance. Check the gallery below for more.


A screenshot of the Google Drive Dark mode notification.

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Be careful when you Drive in the dark.
Screenshot: Wes Davis / The Verge

A better way to find stuff to watch

Plus, in this week’s Installer: how the Apple Car failed, a great Cold War doc, an AI texting app, and much more.

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You can now browse Vision Pro apps on the web.

It’s essentially the same thing you’d see if you were browsing the store in the Vision Pro itself — a few curated lists of native apps here, some recommended iPad apps there.

But at least there’s a way to casually cruise those sweet spatial apps without popping the headset on now.


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How to get free, on-demand music in the pre-streaming service era.

I’ll be telling my grandchildren this was Napster.


Is YouTube Music testing Google’s Hum to Search feature?

A Reddit commenter posted a screenshot today showing what they said is the Hum to Search option in the YouTube Music on iOS

Google has let you search by humming a tune for years and started testing it in the Android YouTube app in August. Like 9to5Google, I’m not seeing it on my own iOS or Android devices. Are you?


A screenshot showing a new icon of a waveform next to the search field
Is Hum to Search coming to YouTube Music?
Image: Izmir_Stinger / Reddit
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Would you like to play a game?

Screenshots posted by App researcher Nima Owji show that LinkedIn is testing games, with companies ranked on how well their employees do. TechCrunch published some official screenshots supplied by LinkedIn, which confirmed the games.

Pour one out for the first team that gets berated by their boss over their company’s Crossclimb score.


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The sports streaming mega-service now has a CEO.

Pete Distad has been named CEO of the upcoming sports streaming service from ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. Distad has had lengthy stints at both Apple — where he had a big hand in getting Apple TV Plus off the ground — and Hulu. He left Apple back in May.

The as-yet-unnamed service will launch this fall and is expected to cost around $50. “Pricing is going to be in the higher ranges of what people have talked about,” Fox Corp CEO Lachlan Murdoch said in early March.


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TikTok faces a $10.9 million fine in Italy over child safety concerns.

Italian regulators imposed the fine after finding that TikTok “failed to implement appropriate mechanisms” to monitor content on its platform, “particularly those that may threaten the safety of minors.”

It cites the “French scar” challenge as one of the “potentially dangerous” types of content disseminated by TikTok’s algorithm, which involves users pinching their face so hard it leaves a mark.


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Apple Sports’ first update adds March Madness and more.

The app, which lets you get the latest on your favorite sports teams, view stats, and find betting odds, will now let you follow the NCAA’s March Madness tournament as part of its version 1.1 update. Apple Sports will also add data from the MLB when the season officially kicks off later this month.


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Proton Mail’s desktop app has officially arrived.

The Windows and macOS apps first launched in beta last December, but now they’re finally here, offering access to Proton’s end-to-end encrypted email service and calendar. A Linux version of the app is now available in beta as well.


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Firefox saw an increase in users following Apple’s default browser changes in the EU.

Firefox spokesperson Christopher Hilton tells The Verge that the browser has seen a more than 50 percent jump in users in Germany and a nearly 30 percent increase in France:

Despite less than ideal compliance, the recent implementation of the DMA choice screen is a promising step toward true competition online in the EU... Still, there is a lot of room for improvement, and we’ll continue to fight for a web that puts people over profits, prioritizes privacy and is open and accessible to all.

Brave saw a similar increase in users after Apple started letting users choose their default browsers on iOS 17.4 in the EU last week.


Pinterest launched an AI tool that lets users filter search results by body type.

The filter starts with “a visual cue to select between four body type ranges.” It’s only available in the U.S. for women’s fashion and wedding-related items, but it will expand to men’s fashions later this year.

Pinterest says this will make its site a more “inclusive” place, but with 16 choices, it’s hard to represent every body type, even with the power of AI, and a prompt to save your selection didn’t appear in our tests.


Pinterest’s new body range tool shows row rows of different body types
Image: Pinterest
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YouTube Music may be laying the groundwork for a “trim silence” podcast feature.

It appears Google is further optimizing YouTube Music for podcasts as it prepares to sunset Google Podcasts at the end of this month.

9to5Google reports spotting a line of code that indicates it is building out a “trim silence feature,” which is standard on Google Podcasts and other podcast listening apps. It automatically skips long stretches of silence that appear in an episode, saving the listener a bit of time.


The “new” Threads desktop app is available for Windows PCs.

Yes, Windows users can get the Threads app Mark Zuckerberg is showing here from the Microsoft Store

But once it’s installed, you’ll get the same desktop web app experience (loaded in Microsoft’s Edge web browser) that we’ve had access to since August.


Slack gives the gift of GIF selection.

Slack has started rolling out a GIF picker that uses the Tenor search engine owned by Google.

This is a true blessing for anyone who has never fully trusted that they wouldn’t send their dumb search term, rather than the GIF itself, when using the “/giphy” command.


Animated GIF of Slacks animated GIF searching feature.
Imagine it, a built-in GIF search!
Image: Slack
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Apple might add a new Freeform feature in iOS 18 and macOS 15.

The rumored feature could let you mark certain parts of your boards as “Scenes,” according to a report from MacRumors. This will reportedly let you quickly jump to those areas of the board and start editing them, even while working with other users.


Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft teamed up on a new web browser benchmark test.

Gecko (Firefox), Blink (Chrome / Edge), and WebKit (Safari) are the engines behind most web browsers, and the developers who make them have collaborated on a new benchmark to measure performance with browsing and web apps.

Announced in December 2022 and already used to optimize the browser engines listed above, Speedometer 3.0 is now available to test “key scenarios” like rendering a news site — if that’s the kind of thing you enjoy doing.

Correction March 11th, 4:29PM ET: An earlier version of this post incorrectly swapped the browser engines for Chrome and Firefox, it has been correct. We regret the error.


Screenshot of Speedometer 3.0 browser benchmark showing a simulated news site titled The Daily Broadcast, with placeholder text articles and blank spaces for images.
The Daily Broadcast, a test news site browsers render as part of the Speedometer 3.0 test.
Image: WebKit.org
There might be a “TikTok Photos” app in the works to take on Instagram.

TheSpAndroid found code within the TikTok app that suggests it’s working on a photo-sharing platform called “TikTok Photos.” One line of code says, “TikTok Photos will be launched soon,” while others invite users to share their posts on the platform.

However, it’s still too early to tell whether TikTok is actually planning to launch a photo-sharing app or if this is all just an experiment.


Image og a logo for “TikTok Photos” app with a layered icon of the letter “P”
The supposed “TikTok Photos” logo
Image: TheSpAndroid

The perfect music streaming app does not exist

Plus, in this week’s Installer: the new Nothing Phone, Rivian’s upcoming crossover, the M3 MacBook Air, and much more.

Google Wallet can now import movie tickets and boarding passes automatically.

Google’s release notes say that passes will be transferred to the Wallet without user action when confirmation emails show up in Gmail from “some global movie chains and airlines.” (The company says it’s “working to expand this.”)

Wallet users can also now manually archive “most passes.” Check out a screenshot below from Android expert Mishaal Rahman.


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Who among us can’t relate to being in “cloud storage hell”?

Charlie Warzel has written a piece at The Atlantic that will likely resonate with many of you. He’s got years worth of photos and videos spread between Apple’s iCloud Photo Library and Google Photos and now feels indefinitely beholden to these services as a result.

In my case, you can add Lightroom to the mix. What’s the endgame in these situations? Do we just keep paying a handful of companies forever? I don’t have a great answer.


Google Chrome will soon let you install any webpage as a desktop web app.

A Chrome Canary update spotted by X user Leopeva64 (via Android Police) introduces a new “install page as app” button in the settings menu for all the websites you visit. You can try out the feature before it’s rolled out by downloading Canary and enabling these flags:

• chrome://flags/#web-app-universal-install

• chrome://flags/#shortcuts-not-apps


Image: Leopeva64

Apple kills Epic’s iOS game store plans over App Store criticism

After Epic CEO Tim Sweeney criticized how Apple is rolling out alternative app stores on iOS in the EU, Apple terminated its developer account and called the company ‘verifiably untrustworthy.’