Tech Roundup: Microsoft Recall Release, OpenAI Shopping & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• Google starts offering user choice billing in the U.K., initially to non-game developers; says over 90% of developers are satisfied with Google Play's native billing; comes as an appeals court agrees with India's antitrust regulator that Google's app store billing policy was unfair and restrictive, but cuts the fine from US$ 110 million to US$ 25 million.
• Global VR headset shipments fall 12% YoY in 2024, with Meta's market share rising to 84%; Vision Pro shipments drop 43% QoQ in Q4; global foldable smartphone shipments increase by just 2.9% YoY in 2024, with shipments expected to decline by about 4% YoY in 2025.
• Google adds multimodal capabilities to its search-centric AI Mode chatbot that allows users to take or upload a picture and receive a "rich, comprehensive response with links" about its contents; announces a new AI feature that uses Gemini AI to add events to Google Calendar based on emailed details in Gmail.
• Verizon says its satellite messaging service is now available to owners of Pixel 9 and Galaxy S25 series phones at no extra charge.
• Plex increases Plex Pass prices for the first time in a decade and makes remote playback for personal media a paid feature at US$ 1.99/month or US$ 19.99/year.
• Microsoft tests a redesigned Windows 11 Start menu design that's bigger and more customisable, allowing users to disable the recommended feed of files and apps; makes Recall available to all Copilot+ PCs nearly a year after launch, along with a new AI-powered Windows search and Click to Do, which works like Google's Circle to Search.
• Google brings its immersive Rewarded Video ads to Roblox, letting users watch ads in exchange for in-game benefits like virtual currency or power-ups.
• Google discontinues Nest Protect smoke alarm and Nest x Yale door lock as part of its move toward "building a platform that all device makers and developers can use to spur innovation in the home."
• Google co-founder Larry Page forms a new company, Dynatomics, that uses large language models (LLMs) to create highly optimised designs for various objects and then have a factory build them.
• Meta-owned chat platform WhatsApp says it will limit the number of broadcast messages individual users and businesses can send to curb spam on the app (The change comes as the service began limiting the number of marketing messages users get in a day); rolls out its long-awaited music integration for Status Updates, allowing users to add background music (up to 15 seconds for photos and 60 seconds for videos).
• Smashing, an AI-powered reading curation app launched by Goodreads' founder, Otis Chandler, in June 2024, shuts down after seemingly failing to gain traction.
• Google releases a slew of AI-powered updates across Search, Maps and Gemini to plan ternaries, export them to Docs or Gmail, or save them as a custom list in Google Maps, as it makes Gemini's Gems feature available to everyone for free; also adds an option to track hotel prices on mobile and desktop web and tests a ChatGPT-like scheduled tasks feature called "Scheduled Actions" to automate tasks even when users are offline.
• Atlassian-owned Trello releases new updates with a new Trello Inbox feature that allows users to add Siri-powered voice notes, Slack messages and emails to a to-do list; incorporates custom labels and checklists to customise boards and a Trello Planner to bring together tasks and events from Google Calendar and Microsoft Calendar.
• Google debuts a new Android metric called "excessive wake locks" that allows app developers to detect battery drain; says "by optimising your app's wake lock behaviour, you can significantly enhance battery life and user satisfaction."
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sues Uber over its subscription service; gets accused of using a "deceptive billing and cancellation process" for its Uber One subscription service and making it "unreasonably difficult for customers to cancel" after enrolling consumers without consent.
• X rival Bluesky adopts a new verification system that grants blue checkmarks to "authentic and notable" accounts, as well as allow some "trusted organizations" to verify users as part of a Trusted Verifiers feature.
• Google settles with the Competition Commission of India on a nearly four-year-old case related to alleged unfair business practices with respect to Android Smart TV market; pays 20.24 crore as settlement and agrees to modify its agreement with vendors by providing a standalone licence for the Play Store and Play Services for Android smart TVs in India, thereby removing the requirement to bundle these services.
• China-based startup Sand AI releases new video generation model called Magi-1 that can create videos from a prompt image; tests find that the service blocks image uploads of Xi Jinping, Tiananmen Square and Tank Man, the Taiwanese flag and insignias supporting Hong Kong liberation.
• A Moscow court finds Alphabet's Google guilty of disclosing personal data of Russian servicemen who died in Ukraine in a video uploaded to YouTube.
• Google adds a handy "Manage subscriptions" page to Gmail to let users unsubscribe from email subscriptions with a single tap; includes a native PDF reader within Chrome for Android with support for markup tools like pens and highlighters.
• The European Commission fines Apple €500M and Meta €200M under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and issues cease-and-desist orders to both companies; finds that Apple breached its anti-steering obligation and that "Meta breached the DMA obligation to give consumers the choice of a service that uses less of their personal data."
• The ruling requires the two companies to bring their platforms into compliance within 60 days or face "periodic penalty payments, as the White House says that fines on Apple and Meta by the E.U. are a "novel form of economic extortion" that the United States will not tolerate.
• Meta says "the European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards."
• Meta says it is opening Threads to all advertisers worldwide, but ads will only appear in select markets at launch, after testing ads in the U.S. and Japan; WhatsApp rolls out Advanced Chat Privacy, a new opt-in tool to block participants from sharing the contents of a conversation in traditional chats and groups.
• Google's YouTube rolls out a limited test to Premium subscribers in the U.S. that serves a new video results carousel which appears after entering certain search queries related to products or information about locations or things to do in those locations; says the "feature will use AI to highlight clips from videos that will be most helpful for your search query, providing another way to discover content when searching on YouTube as well as discover topics and information related to your search query."
• AI company Perplexity signs a distribution partnership with Motorola to preinstall its app on the new Razr series phones and access its chatbot through the Moto AI by typing Ask Perplexity.
• Movie streaming service Netflix rolls out a new option to show original language subtitles that display only the spoken dialogue without any audio cues. (Users can also select English (CC), which includes both dialogue and audio cues.)
• Google says its AI Overviews in Search now have 1.5 billion users per month, as Gemini usage hits 350 million monthly active users. (In comparison, OpenAI ChatGPT has 400-600 million monthly active users and Microsoft Copilot has around 20 million weekly users.)
• Meta launches an initiative to further crack down on spammy content; says it's lowering the reach of accounts sharing such content and investing more to remove accounts that coordinate fake engagement and impersonate others.
• OpenAI gives free ChatGPT users limited access to its Deep Research tool with a "lightweight version [that] is powered by a version of OpenAI o4-mini and is nearly as intelligent as the deep research people already know and love, while being significantly cheaper to serve."
• Meta's AI chatbots have been found having sexual roleplay conversations with accounts labeled as underage or if the chatbots were programmed as minors, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal; finds that chatbots using the voices of celebrities would engage in these sexually explicit conversations.
• The U.S. government passes the Take It Down Act to criminalise posting nonconsensual sexual images of others, including deepfakes, and require platforms to remove them.
• Alibaba unveils the Qwen3 family of open-weight "hybrid" AI reasoning models, as OpenAI says users made over a billion web searches in ChatGPT last week; announces that WhatsApp users can now message 1-800-ChatGPT to get up-to-date search results and that it will start showing product recommendations in ChatGPT, even for logged-out users, with buy buttons that link to merchants' sites.