Apple is officially cutting support for progressive web apps for iPhone users in the European Union. While web apps have been broken for EU users in every iOS 17.4 beta so far, Apple has confirmed that this is a feature, not a bug. Commenting on Apple's move, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted: I suspect Apple's real reason for killing PWAs is the realization that competing web browsers could do a vastly better job of supporting PWAs -- unlike Safari's intentionally crippled web functionality -- and turn PWAs into legit, untaxed competitors to native apps.

Apple has now offered an explanation for why iOS 17.4 removes support for Home Screen web apps in the European Union. Spoiler: it's because of the Digital Markets Act that went into effect last August. 9to5Mac reports: Last week, iPhone users in the European Union noticed that they were no longer able to install and run web apps on their iPhone's Home Screen in iOS 17.4. Apple has added a number of features over the years to improve support for progressive web apps on iPhone. For example, iOS 16.4 allowed PWAs to deliver push notifications with icon badges. One change in iOS 17.4 is that the iPhone now supports alternative browser engines in the EU. This allows companies to build browsers that don't use Apple's WebKit engine for the first time. Apple says that this change, required by the Digital Markets Act, is why it has been forced to remove Home Screen web apps support in the European Union.

Apple explains that it would have to build an "entirely new integration architecture that does not currently exist in iOS" to address the "complex security and privacy concerns associated with web apps using alternative browser engines." This work "was not practical to undertake given the other demands of the DMA and the very low user adoption of Home Screen web apps," Apple explains. "And so, to comply with the DMA's requirements, we had to remove the Home Screen web apps feature in the EU." "EU users will be able to continue accessing websites directly from their Home Screen through a bookmark with minimal impact to their functionality," Apple continues.

It's understandable that Apple wouldn't offer support for Home Screen web apps for third-party browsers. But why did it also remove support for Home Screen web apps for Safari? Unfortunately, that's another side effect of the Digital Markets Act. The DMA requires that all browsers have equality, meaning that Apple can't favor Safari and WebKit over third-party browser engines. Therefore, because it can't offer Home Screen web apps support for third-party browsers, it also can't offer support via Safari. [...] iOS 17.4 is currently available to developers and public beta testers, and is slated for a release in early March. The full explanation was published on Apple's developer website today.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For some Apple Vision Pro buyers, the honeymoon is already over. It's no coincidence that there's been an uptick on social media of Vision Pro owners saying they're returning their $3,500 headsets in the past few days. Apple allows you to return any product within 14 days of purchase -- and for the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, we're right about at that point.

Comfort is among the most cited reasons for returns. People have said the headset gives them headaches and triggers motion sickness. The weight of the device, and the fact that most of it is front-loaded, has been another complaint. Parker Ortolani, The Verge's product manager, told me that he thought using the device led to a burst blood vessel in his eye. At least one other person noted they had a similar experience with redness. (To be fair, VR headset users have anecdotally reported dry eyes and redness for years.)

Andrew Cunningham reports via Ars Technica: For around three years now, the team of independent developers behind the Asahi Linux project has worked to support Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, despite Apple's total lack of involvement. Over the years, the project has gone from a "highly unstable experiment" to a "surprisingly functional and usable desktop operating system." Even Linus Torvalds has used it to run Linux on Apple's hardware. The team has been steadily improving its open source, standards-conformant GPU driver for the M1 and M2 since releasing them in December 2022, and today, the team crossed an important symbolic milestone: The Asahi driver's support for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES graphics have officially passed what Apple offers in macOS. The team's latest graphics driver fully conforms with OpenGL version 4.6 and OpenGL ES version 3.2, the most recent version of either API. Apple's support in macOS tops out at OpenGL 4.1, announced in July 2010.

Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig wrote a detailed blog post that announced the new driver, which had to pass "over 100,000 tests" to be deemed officially conformant. The team achieved this milestone despite the fact that Apple's GPUs don't support some features that would have made implementing these APIs more straightforward. "Regrettably, the M1 doesn't map well to any graphics standard newer than OpenGL ES 3.1," writes Rosenzweig. "While Vulkan makes some of these features optional, the missing features are required to layer DirectX and OpenGL on top. No existing solution on M1 gets past the OpenGL 4.1 feature set... Without hardware support, new features need new tricks. Geometry shaders, tessellation, and transform feedback become compute shaders. Cull distance becomes a transformed interpolated value. Clip control becomes a vertex shader epilogue. The list goes on."

Now that the Asahi GPU driver supports the latest OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards -- released in 2017 and 2015, respectively -- the work turns to supporting the low-overhead Vulkan API on Apple's hardware. Vulkan support in macOS is limited to translation layers like MoltenVK, which translates Vulkan API calls to Metal ones that the hardware and OS can understand. [...] Rosenzweig's blog post didn't give any specific updates on Vulkan except to say that the team was "well on the road" to supporting it. In addition to supporting native Linux apps, supporting more graphics APIs in Asahi will allow the operating system to take better advantage of software like Valve's Proton, which already has a few games written for x86-based Windows PCs running on Arm-based Apple hardware.

Apple researchers have unveiled a new AI tool called "Keyframer," (PDF) which harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) to animate static images through natural language prompts. From a report: This novel application, detailed in a new research paper published on arxiv.org, represents a giant leap in the integration of artificial intelligence into the creative process -- and it may also hint at what's to come in newer generations of Apple products such as the iPad Pro and Vision Pro. The research paper, titled "Keyframer: Empowering Animation Design using Large Language Models," explores uncharted territory in the application of LLMs to the animation industry, presenting unique challenges such as how to effectively describe motion in natural language.

Imagine this: You're an animator with an idea that you want to explore. You've got static images and a story to tell, but the thought of countless hours bending over an iPad to breathe life into your creations is, well, exhausting. Enter Keyframer. With just a few sentences, those images can begin to dance across the screen, as if they've read your mind. Or rather, as if Apple's large language models (LLMs) have. Keyframer is powered by a large language model (in the study, they use GPT-4) that can generate CSS animation code from a static SVG image and prompt. "Large language models have the potential to impact a wide range of creative domains, but the application of LLMs to animation is under-explored and presents novel challenges such as how users might effectively describe motion in natural language," the researchers explain.

After climbing the charts of Apple's App Store, the trendy Kimi app, with its collection of bootlegged movies, has disappeared. From a report: Pretending to be a spot-the-difference vision-testing game, the widely downloaded app ranked above Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video in Apple's charts this week for free entertainment apps before it was removed. Without having to pay for anything or log in to any kind of account, iPhone owners could previously use Kimi to browse a wide selection of bootlegs for popular movies and TV shows. Many of the movies up for Best Picture at this year's Oscars were on Kimi, at varying levels of quality.

Poor Things was included in a grainy, pixelated state, but a high-quality version of Killers of the Flower Moon was on Kimi to stream, although an intrusive ad for online casinos was splashed across the top. That definitely isn't the viewing experience Martin Scorsese imagined for audiences. Not just limited to movies, viewers were also able to access episodes of currently airing TV shows, like RuPaul's Drag Race, through the Kimi app. Who was behind this piracy app? It remains a mystery. The developer was listed as "Marcus Evans" in the app store before Kimi was taken down, and this was the only app listed under that name, likely a pseudonym.

Now that it can be strapped to our faces and worn to strange places, opinions about Apple's Vision Pro are flying left and right. Entering the chat is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has more at stake than perhaps anyone on earth if Apple does to headsets what the iPhone did to smartphones. From a report: In a video posted to his Instagram account on Tuesday, Zuckerberg gives his official verdict on the Vision Pro versus his company's latest Quest 3 headset: "I don't just think that Quest is the better value, I think Quest is the better product, period." While being filmed by the Quest 3's video passthrough system in his living room, Zuckerberg highlights the tradeoffs Apple made to get the fanciest display possible into something that can be worn on your head in an acceptable form factor. He says the Quest 3 weighs 120 grams less, making it more comfortable to wear for longer. He also says it allows for greater motion due to its lack of a wired battery pack and wider field of view than the Vision Pro.

He thinks the Quest's option of physical hand controllers and hand tracking for input is better, though he says he's a fan of eye tracking for some use cases and teases that it will return to future Meta headsets after debuting in the Quest Pro. He says the Quest has a better "immersive" content library than Apple, which is technically true for now, though he admits that the Vision Pro is a better entertainment device. And then there's the fact that the Quest 3 is, as Zuck says, "like seven times less expensive."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple's iMessage will avoid regulation requiring interoperability with other messaging platforms under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), following the conclusion of an investigation by the regulator (via Bloomberg). The probe concluded that the iMessage platform and Microsoft's Bing do not hold a dominant enough position to be brought under the DMA's strict rules for services provided by big tech's so-called digital "gatekeepers," which include Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon, and TikTok, according to the EU.

The EU has been working on legislation under the DMA that would have required Apple to make changes to iMessage to make it available on other platforms. The interoperability rules would have meant that Meta apps like WhatsApp or Messenger could request to interoperate with Apple's iMessage framework, and Apple would have been forced to comply within the EU. However, the EU probe found that iMessage falls outside the legislation because it is not widely used by businesses. The reprieve for Apple is part of a five-month market investigation by the European Commission. It's not all good news for Apple, though. The DMA is still forcing the company to implement updates that will allow iPhone and iPad users to download and install apps outside the App Store through alternative app marketplaces. The changes will arrive with iOS 17.4 in March.

Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr is calling on the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Apple's response to Beeper Mini -- the app that briefly brought iMessage to Android. From a report: During the State of the Net Conference on Monday, Carr said the FCC should look into whether Apple's move "complies with the FCC's Part 14 rules" about accommodating users with disabilities.

Beeper Mini launched last year, allowing Android users to gain access to iMessage features, including blue message bubbles and the ability to send high-quality photos and videos. However, Apple quickly blocked Beeper Mini users and continued to shut down attempts to make the app work, leading its developers to eventually just give up. The FCC's Part 14 rules lay out requirements that "advanced communications service," such as iMessage, must follow to ensure they're accessible.

In 2022 Apple filed a lawsuit against startup Rivos. The lawsuit said that in one year Rivos had hired more than 40 former Apple employees to work on competing system-on-a-chip technology, according to Reuters, "and that at least two former Apple engineers took gigabytes of confidential information with them to Rivos."

But Friday Bloomberg reported that the two companies told a judge that they'd "signed an agreement that potentially settles the case." "The agreement provides for remediation of Apple confidential information based on a forensic examination of Rivos systems and other activities," according to the filing in federal court in San Jose, California. "The parties currently are working through that process."
More details from Engadget: Apple also accused the defendant of instructing the employees it hired away to steal presentations and other proprietary information for unreleased iPhone chip designs that cost billions of dollars to develop. Rivos countersued Apple last year, accusing the larger company of restricting employees' ability to work elsewhere and of hindering emerging startups' growth by using anticompetitive measures.

The court dismissed Apple's trade secret claims against Rivos in April 2023, though the company was allowed to file a revised complaint. Apple already settled with its six former employees who filed a countersuit against the iPhonemaker along with Rivos after they dropped their claims against each other last month.

Both companies are now requesting the court to put their cases on hold until March 15, when they expect the settlement to be completed.

An Apple executive lobbied against a strong right-to-repair bill in Oregon Thursday, which is the first time the company has had an employee actively outline its stance on right to repair at an open hearing. 404 Media: Apple's position in Oregon shows that despite supporting a weaker right to repair law in California, it still intends to control its own repair ecosystem. It also sets up a highly interesting fight in the state because Google has come out in favor of the same legislation Apple is opposing. "It is our belief that the bill's current language around parts pairing will undermine the security, safety, and privacy of Oregonians by forcing device manufacturers to allow the use of parts of unknown origin in consumer devices," John Perry, Apple's principal secure repair architect, told the legislature. This is a quick about-face for the company, which after years of lobbying against right to repair, began to lobby for it in California last fall. The difference now is that Oregon's bill includes a critical provision that Google says it can easily comply with but that is core for Apple to maintain its dominance over the repair market.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: The Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices apps that Apple has been testing for Windows machines have officially launched, ending a long preview period and bringing an end to the iTunes app on some computers. The Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Devices app are part of Apple's effort to split iTunes on PC into multiple platforms to mirror how these apps work on Macs. On Windows 10 and later, PC customers can download the three separate apps to manage devices and access Apple Music and Apple TV content. Microsoft first announced plans for Apple Music and Apple TV apps for the Microsoft Store back in October 2022, so the split from iTunes has been in the works for more than a year.

The Apple Music app gives Windows users a way to listen to and manage music from their iTunes library, including iTunes Store purchases, while the Apple TV app allows users to watch and manage movies and TV shows from iTunes. Both of the apps also give access to Apple's streaming services, Apple Music and Apple TV+. The Apple Devices app is designed to allow PC owners to update, back up, and restore and manage their iPhones and iPads, and sync content from their PCs. Using the standalone apps requires Windows 10 or later, and all three apps must be installed to transition away from iTunes. After the apps have been added to a PC, iTunes is used only to access podcasts and audiobooks. The iTunes library should not be deleted, because it is used by the Apple Music and Apple TV apps.

LastPass is warning that a fake copy of its app is being distributed on the Apple App Store, likely used as a phishing app to steal users' credentials. From a report: The fake app uses a similar name to the genuine app, a similar icon, and a red-themed interface made to appear close to the brand's authentic design. However, the fake app's name is 'LassPass,' instead of 'LastPass,' and it has a publisher of 'Parvati Patel.' In addition, there's only a single rating (the real app has over 52 thousand), with only four reviews that warn about it being fake.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has argued for years that developers who don't want to abide by its rules for native iOS apps can always write web apps. It has done so in its platform guidelines, in congressional testimony, and in court. Web developers, for their part, maintain that Safari and its underlying WebKit engine still lack the technical capabilities to allow web apps to compete with native apps on iOS hardware. To this day, it's argued, the fruit cart's laggardly implementation of Push Notifications remains subpar.

The enforcement of Europe's Digital Markets Act was expected to change that -- to promote competition held back by gatekeepers. But Apple, in a policy change critics have called "malicious compliance," appears to be putting web apps at an even greater disadvantage under the guise of compliance with European law. In the second beta release of iOS 17.4, which incorporates code to accommodate Europe's Digital Markets Act, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) have been demoted from standalone apps that use the whole screen to shortcuts that open within the default browser. This appears to solely affect users in the European Union, though your mileage may vary. Concerns about this demotion of PWAs surfaced earlier this month, with the release of the initial iOS 17.4 beta. As noted by Open Web Advocacy -- a group that has lobbied to make the web platform more capable -- "sites installed to the home screen failed to launch in their own top-level activities, opening in Safari instead."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: While the world awaits closing arguments later this year in the US government's antitrust case over Google's search dominance, a California judge has dismissed a lawsuit from 26 Google users who claimed that Google's default search agreement with Apple violates antitrust law and has ruined everyone's search results. Users had argued (PDF) that Google struck a deal making its search engine the default on Apple's Safari web browser specifically to keep Apple from competing in the general search market. These payments to Apple, users alleged, have "stunted innovation" and "deprived" users of "quality, service, and privacy that they otherwise would have enjoyed but for Google's anticompetitive conduct." They also allege that it created a world where users have fewer choices, enabling Google to prefer its own advertisers, which users said caused an "annoying and damaging distortion" of search results.

In an order (PDF) granting the tech companies' motion to dismiss, US District Judge Rita Lin said that users did not present enough evidence to support claims for relief. Lin dismissed some claims with prejudice but gave leave to amend others, allowing users another chance to keep their case -- now twice-dismissed -- at least partially alive. Under Lin's order, users will not be able to amend claims that Google and Apple executives allegedly sealed the default search deal on the condition that Apple would not create its own general search engine through "private, secret, and clandestine personal meetings." Because plaintiffs showed no evidence pinpointing exactly when Apple allegedly agreed to stay out of the general search market, these meetings, Lin reasoned, could just as easily indicate "rational, legal business behavior," rather than an "illegal conspiracy."

Users attempted to argue that Google and Apple intentionally hid these facts from the public, but Lin wrote that their "conclusory and vague allegations that defendants 'secretly conducted meetings' and 'engaged in conduct to obfuscate internal communications' are plainly insufficient." Sharing bystander photos documenting Google's Sundar Pichai and Apple's Tim Cook meeting at a restaurant with a manila folder tucked under Pichai's elbow did not help users' case. Lin was also not moved by users demonstrating that Google has a history of destroying evidence, because "they put forth no specific factual allegations that defendants did so in this case." However, users will have 30 days to amend currently "inadequately" alleged claims that "Google's exclusive default agreement, under which Apple set Google as the default search engine for its Safari web browser, foreclosed competition in the general search services market in the United States," Lin wrote. If users miss that deadline, the case will be tossed with no opportunities to further amend claims.

Apple has released a new open-source AI model, called "MGIE," that can edit images based on natural language instructions. From a report: MGIE, which stands for MLLM-Guided Image Editing, leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret user commands and perform pixel-level manipulations. The model can handle various editing aspects, such as Photoshop-style modification, global photo optimization, and local editing. MGIE is the result of a collaboration between Apple and researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The model was presented in a paper accepted at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024, one of the top venues for AI research. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of MGIE in improving automatic metrics and human evaluation, all while maintaining competitive inference efficiency.

MGIE is based on the idea of using MLLMs, which are powerful AI models that can process both text and images, to enhance instruction-based image editing. MLLMs have shown remarkable capabilities in cross-modal understanding and visual-aware response generation, but they have not been widely applied to image editing tasks. MGIE integrates MLLMs into the image editing process in two ways: First, it uses MLLMs to derive expressive instructions from user input. These instructions are concise and clear and provide explicit guidance for the editing process. For example, given the input "make the sky more blue," MGIE can produce the instruction "increase the saturation of the sky region by 20%."

Apple is building prototypes of at least two iPhones that fold widthwise like a clamshell, The Information reported Wednesday. From the report: If Apple ends up launching a foldable iPhone, it would be one of the biggest hardware design changes in the product's history. The foldable iPhones are in early development and aren't on the company's mass production plans for 2024 or 2025, the person said. Apple recently approached at least one manufacturer in Asia for components related to two foldable iPhones of different sizes, they said. The products could be canceled if they don't meet Apple's standards, they said.

Apple is making changes to iOS in Europe to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act cracking down on Big Tech gatekeepers. The act demands interoperability, fairness and privacy measures including allowing competing browser engines on iOS. Despite better browser choice, Google and Mozilla are unhappy with Apple's proposed changes. Mozilla says restricting browser engine integration to EU apps burdens rivals to build separate implementations. Mozilla's comment: "We are still reviewing the technical details but are extremely disappointed with Apple's proposed plan to restrict the newly-announced BrowserEngineKit to EU-specific apps. The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations -- a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear. Apple's proposals fail to give consumers viable choices by making it as painful as possible for others to provide competitive alternatives to Safari. This is another example of Apple creating barriers to prevent true browser competition on iOS." Google's VP of engineering for Chrome, Parisa Tabriz, commented on DeMonte's statement, saying, "Strong agree with Mozilla. Apple isn't serious about supporting web browser or engine choice on iOS. Their strategy is overly restrictive, and won't meaningfully lead to real choice for browser developers."

Government hackers last year exploited three unknown vulnerabilities in Apple's iPhone operating system to target victims with spyware developed by a European startup, according to Google. TechCrunch: On Tuesday, Google's Threat Analysis Group, the company's team that investigates nation-backed hacking, published a report analyzing several government campaigns conducted with hacking tools developed by several spyware and exploit sellers, including Barcelona-based startup Variston. In one of the campaigns, according to Google, government hackers took advantage of three iPhone "zero-days," which are vulnerabilities not known to Apple at the time they were exploited. In this case, the hacking tools were developed by Variston, a surveillance and hacking technology startup whose malware has already been analyzed twice by Google in 2022 and 2023.

Google said it discovered the unknown Variston customer using these zero-days in March 2023 to target iPhones in Indonesia. The hackers delivered an SMS text message containing a malicious link that infected the target's phone with spyware, and then redirected the victim to a news article by the Indonesian newspaper Pikiran Rakyat. Google did not say who was Variston's government customer in this case.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple Vision Pro owners who forget the passcode they set will need to take the device to an Apple retail location to get it reset, reports Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. There is apparently no on-device way to reset a Vision Pro passcode if it is forgotten. [...] Customers who have forgotten their Vision Pro passcodes have been told by Apple that they will need to visit a retail store for a fix or will need to ship the headset to Apple if there isn't a nearby store. Like Apple's iOS devices, the incorrect passcode cannot be entered too many times or the device will be disabled, with a waiting period before a passcode can be entered again. Removing the passcode requires erasing all content on the Vision Pro. [...]

There is an erase content setting on the Vision Pro, but there is no way to get into the reset mode using a combination of button presses. Erasing Vision Pro can only be done through the Settings app. Customers who have the $300 Developer Strap may be able to wipe the device from a Mac, but most users will not be able to get this accessory as it is limited to registered developers in the United States.