Tech Roundup: ChatGPT App Store, Google Disco & More

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

• OpenAI opens app submissions for review and publication in ChatGPT, where users can discover or search for apps in a new app directory.
• Google doubles down on transparency efforts with the ability to determine if a video clip is AI-generated, following a November 2025 rollout of AI image detection within Gemini; makes Gemini 3 Flash the default model in the Gemini app and Search's AI mode, and says Gemini 3 Flash has Pro-grade reasoning with lower latency, outperforming 2.5 Pro "while being 3x faster at a fraction of the cost."
• Samsung and Google partner to bring Google Photos to TizenOS-powered TVs; to launch in March 2026.
• Apple asks the U.K. Court of Appeal to overturn a £1.5 billion ($1.76 billion) antitrust ruling that found the company abused its dominant position by charging excessive commissions on ‌App Store‌ purchases between 2015 and 2024.
• Mozilla promises to offer an option to completely turn off AI features in its Firefox browser after it announced plans to become a "modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions."
• Apple settles with a Brazilian regulator to allow alternative app stores; to charge a 5% fee for alternative app stores and 15% on App Store link-outs.
• Italy's antitrust authority orders Meta to suspend its policy that bars rival AI chatbots from using WhatsApp's business tools to offer their own AI chatbots on the popular chat app; Meta calls the decision "fundamentally flawed" and says the emergence of AI chatbots has "put a strain on our systems that they were not designed to support."
• India raises concerns about the misuse of Indian phone numbers on WhatsApp, which has banned 9.8 million Indian accounts per month on average in 2025.
• Starlink says it hit 9 million "active customers" across 155 countries, territories, and other markets, up from 8 million in November, 7 million in August and 4.6 million in December 2024.
• China's AI regulations, which require chatbots to pass a 2,000-question ideological test, have spawned specialised agencies that help AI companies pass, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.
• The European Commission says Apple will bring AirPods-like pairing and iPhone notification access to third-party devices under the DMA in iOS 26.3 in 2026.
• The U.S. Federal Communications Commission bans imports, marketing, and sales of new foreign-made drones and components, including from China's DJI and Autel, citing national security concerns.
• Alphabet agrees to acquire data centre company Intersect for $4.75 billion in cash, plus its existing debt, as part of its push to expand its AI data centre footprint.
• Google plans to charge developers $2.85/app and $3.65/game if a U.S. user follows a link that takes them outside of the Play Store to install it within 24 hours.
• Italy's competition watchdog fines Apple €98.6 milllion, saying the company's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) rules are "disproportionate" and "harmful" to app developers and advertisers.
• OpenAI rolls out Your Year with ChatGPT, a Spotify Wrapped-like feature, to Free, Plus, and Pro users in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand; adds new teen safety rules to ChatGPT as lawmakers weigh AI standards for minors, and introduces a framework to evaluate chain-of-thought monitorability and a suite of 13 evaluations designed to measure the monitorability of an AI system.
• Google says it needs more time to upgrade Assistant to Gemini on most Android devices, extending the company's earlier plans to complete the transition by the end of 2025; expands Gemini for Home Early Access program to Canada.
• Pirate activist group Anna's Archive says it scraped 86 million music files and 256 million rows of track metadata from Spotify, and releases them in about 300TB of torrent files.
• AI coding service Cursor continues its acquisition spree by purchasing AI code review assistant Graphite.
• Anthropic makes its Claude Chrome browser plugin available to all Claude subscribers, allowing users to easily access to its AI and let Claude navigate websites on their behalf.
• Google sues data scraping company SerpApi, alleging it used millions of fake search requests to access copyrighted content and sold it to third-parties.
• Google's YouTube's says viewers streamed over 700 million hours of podcasts on TV in October, up from 400 million hours in October 2024; terminates Screen Culture and KH Studio, two large channels that used AI to create fake movie trailers.
• Google adds a new Android feature that shows users a status bar alert when apps access a device's location, expanding beyond similar indicators when for microphone and/or camera.
• Italy's competition regulator says it is scrutinizing a Meta policy excluding rival AI chatbots from WhatsApp, broadening the scope of a probe started in July 2025.
• Meta-owned Instagram pilots new feature that caps hashtags to five per post in a bid to tackle an endless list of hashtags; unveils its first TV app, initially available on Amazon's Fire TV as a test with plans to expand to other TV platforms
• Google adds Data Tables to its NotebookLM artificial intelligence research platform, allowing users to collect and synthesise information across multiple sources into a chart that can be exported to Google Sheets.
• Epic Games says Fortnite is not coming to iOS in Japan as promised because of the fees imposed by Apple's new App Store rules; claims Apple did not comply with Japan's Mobile Software Competition Act "honestly" and instead "launched another travesty of obstruction and lawbreaking in gross disrespect to the government and people of Japan." (The development comes after Apple has announced a sweeping set of changes to iOS in Japan that will allow alternative app marketplaces along with a new fee structure and default controls, third-party payment processing and non-WebKit browser engines. The new legislation went into effect on December 18, 2025.)
• Luma AI launches Ray3 Modify, which lets users to modify existing footage by providing character reference images, as well as define start and end frames.
• Anthropic launches Agent Skills as an open standard with a specification and SDK; says VS Code, GitHub, Cursor, Goose and others already support the format.
• OpenAI releases GPT-5.2-Codex with improvements on long-horizon work through context compaction and stronger performance on large code changes; updates ChatGPT Images to generate images up to 4x faster and edit more precisely, and adds a new section in ChatGPT's app and website for images.
• Amazon rolls out Alexa+ on the web to early access users, with chat functionality, smart home controls, file management and cross-device conversations.
• Mistral launches Mistral OCR 3, featuring improvements in processing forms, scanned documents, complex tables and handwriting.
• Apple says it will roll out more App Store ads in 2026 "to increase opportunity in search results"; Apple's website says more than 800 million users visit the App Store weekly.
• Meta says it has "paused" its third-party Horizon OS headset program, announced in April 2024 with Asus and Lenovo as its first partners to build the headsets; tests limiting Facebook professional accounts and Pages to posting just two links per month, unless they subscribe to its $14.99+/month Meta Verified program.
• Google gives Google Chat users the option to block messages from unknown senders; rolls out a AI feature to Google News called News Audio Briefing, which takes popular stories from around the web and turns them into an easily consumable piece of audio.
• Bluesky launches a privacy-focused "Find Friends" feature without invite spam; says the contact-matching feature is opt-in and that user data won't be used to spam friends.
• Google is reportedly working on a new initiative to make its AI chips run PyTorch better as part of a deeper partnership with Meta; brings its vibe coding tool Opal to Gemini on the web, letting users create their own custom AI-powered mini apps called Gems.
• Coursera announces plans to acquire rival online learning platform Udemy in an all-stock deal that values the combined company at $2.5 billion.
• An online marketplace is selling code modules that simulate the effects of cannabis, ketamine, cocaine, ayahuasca and alcohol when they are uploaded to ChatGPT, according to a new report from WIRED.
• Google rolls out Preferred Sources to English users globally after testing it in the U.S. and India, letting users customise "top stories" in Search; debuts new YouTube Gaming feature called Playables Builder that lets select YouTube Creators use a "prototype web app built using Gemini 3" to make bite-sized games without requiring any coding knowledge.
• Meta launches prompt-based sound separation model SAM Audio in its Segment Anything Playground, letting users isolate individual sounds from complex recordings.
• OpenAI launches FrontierScience, a benchmark to measure models' expert-level scientific reasoning with 700+ questions, finding GPT-5.2 is its strongest model.
• DoorDash launches Zesty, a standalone AI-powered social app for users to find nearby restaurants, in public testing in San Francisco and New York.
• Google launches CC, an experimental AI assistant that delivers a personalized daily "Your Day Ahead" briefing email based on users' emails and calendar.
• Netflix announces a partnership with iHeartMedia to exclusively publish 15+ video podcasts from early 2026.
• X updates its ToS to claim rights to the "Twitter" trademark and countersues Operation Bluebird after the startup filed an application to trademark the term.
• Perplexity updates its iPad app to improve multitasking and focus on research tools as part of a push to add business customers, after launching Comet on Android.
• Xiaomi releases MiMo-V2-Flash, an open-weight MoE model with 309B total and 15B active parameters; says it excels in reasoning, coding and agentic scenarios.
• Adobe adds a prompt-based video editor to its Firefly app that uses Runway's Aleph model; adds image and video models from Black Forest Labs and others.
• Global smartphone shipments in 2026 are expected to shrink 2.1% due to rising memory costs, led by Chinese OEMs, as DRAM prices could further raise costs by 10%-15%, Counterpoint Research says.
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, along with 21 states and D.C., files an amended complaint against Uber, alleging deceptive billing and cancellation practices related to Uber One.
• Global internet traffic grows 19% in 2025, with ChatGPT emerging the most popular AI service and global traffic from Starlink surging 2.3x times.
• General Motors adds native Apple Music to select vehicles, and rolls out support for digital keys, after it started phasing out CarPlay in 2023.
• Meta discontinues Messenger app for desktop, but remains usable via the web, Facebook app, and through the mobile app for iOS and Android.
• Amazon launches Amazon Now, a new service that aims to deliver household essentials and groceries in about 30 minutes or less in Seattle and Philadelphia.
• Apple expands Fitness+ to 28 new markets in the service's largest international rollout since launch, accompanied by new language dubbing and a K-Pop music genre.
• Amazon rolls out Ask This Book to the Kindle iOS app, letting readers ask questions about plot or characters; says authors can't opt out of the program.
• Google has removed dozens of AI videos from YouTube that depicted Disney characters, after Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter flagging the links, accusing the company of "massive scale" copyright infringement and using AI to "exploit and distribute" the content.
• Disney and OpenAI sign a three-year deal to bring over 200 Disney characters to Sora, and makes a $1 billion investment in the company; says the OpenAI deal "does not in any way represent a threat to the creators at all" because it doesn't include name, likeness, or character voices.
• Google launches Disco, a Gemini 3-powered experiment that suggests and creates GenTabs, which are custom web apps based on the user's open browser tabs and Gemini chat history; DeepMind launches an enhanced Gemini Deep Research agent accessible to developers via its new Interactions API, along with a new DeepSearchQA benchmark.
• Amazon pulls its AI recaps on Prime Video, which it began testing in November, for Fallout, Bosch and other shows after users noticed errors in the Fallout recaps.
• Google expands Google Translate's live speech translation from Pixel Buds to any headphones, supporting more than 70 languages, in beta on compatible Android phones.
• Switzerland launches a preliminary investigation into whether Apple's terms for granting third-party access to NFC tech on iPhones violate its antitrust laws.