Instant messaging

The green bubble stigma faced by Android users who send messages to their friends with iPhones is real—even the U.S. government acknowledges it.Hey Google, Where Did My Watch's Battery Life Go?“Many non-iPhone users… experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame” when messaging people with iPhones, the Department of Justice stated in its landmark antitrust lawsuit against Apple on Thursday. However, the problems go way beyond simply the color of a text message. In the complaint, the DOJ highlighted the friction and…

Tushar Mehta / Digital Trends Amid the rise of third-party messaging apps, texting remains a popular means of messaging in the U.S. If you own an Android phone, you’ve likely used or heard of Google Messages, which is positioned as the default text messaging app for Android. It is the culmination of Google’s long history with multiple messaging platforms. Google has pursued smartphone companies to use its Dialer and Messages apps as their default since at least 2017 and now mandates them to use Google Messages as the…

X owner Elon Musk is dreaming of a world where people ditch their cell phones and instead make audio and video calls on the social media platform. Musk’s vision has elicited nearly collective horror from users of his platform—as well as potential risks to their IP addresses.Is USB-C Finally Coming To iPhone?X began rolling out the audio and video calling feature, which was previously restricted to paid users, to everyone last week. However, hawk-eyed sleuths quickly noticed that the feature was automatically turned on,…

Robert F. Kennedy Jr once said that artificial intelligence “could kill us all” if it were used improperly. Still, concern about the misuse of AI apparently hasn’t stopped RFK Jr. from arguably misusing it. Instead, the long-shot presidential candidate, who has a lot of kooky ideas, allowed some of those kooky ideas to be ingested into his campaign’s AI-fueled chatbot. Until recently, the chatbot was known for regurgitating many of Kennedy’s more controversial talking points, including his views on vaccine safety. No…

Graphic: GizmodoIt’s day 2 of Gizmodo’s March Madness bracket challenge to crown the greatest app of all time! The mighty Fart App has fallen to Instagram in our first round and today’s challengers are WhatsApp vs Dark Sky. Will Mark Zuckerberg win again? That’s up to you. Threads Needs These Five Missing Features to Be a Twitter KillerIf you’re just tuning in, you can read all about our selection criteria for this historic contest right here. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.In this corner, with around 2 billion…

Apple has rolled out an update to iMessage encryption, the likes of which includes post-quantum protections that the company calls the “most significant cryptographic security upgrade” in the messenger’s history. The M3 MacBook Pro: Made Dark for HalloweenIn a blog post published Wednesday, Apple announced the arrival of PQ3, a new encryption protocol designed to seriously upgrade the messenger’s security. Since its launch in 2011, iMessage has offered end-to-end encryption—which is a nice thing to have if you want to…

A Canadian tribunal has ruled that Air Canada must pay damages to one of its passengers for misleading advice given by its customer service chatbot, which resulted in the passenger paying nearly double for their plane tickets.No Google AI Search, I Don’t Need to Learn About the “Benefits of Slavery” The case centered on the experience of Jake Moffatt, who flew round-trip from Vancouver to Toronto after his grandmother died in 2022. At the time, Moffatt visited Air Canada’s website to book a flight using the company’s…

Elon Musk is still trying to make X audio and video calls happen, even though, like the infamous “fetch,” we all know it’s not going to happen. His latest tactic: Giving up his phone number and using X exclusively for calls and texts.Threads Needs These Five Missing Features to Be a Twitter Killer“In a few months, I will discontinue my phone number and only use X for texts and audio/video calls,” the billionaire said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, in an early morning tweet on Friday. If Musk goes through…

Microsoft’s history is littered with the discontinuation of once-beloved applications. Most recently, WordPad, the renowned text editor app, was conspicuously absent from the latest beta build of Windows 11, indicating an end to its 28-year-long journey. I have fond memories of using the app back in my college days when Microsoft Office was too pricey for me. WordPad is far from the only app to get canceled by Microsoft over the years. From pioneering productivity tools to nostalgic multimedia players, let’s…

This year, at least some countries will have to say goodbye to the Netflix Basic subscription tier, the last cheap(ish) way to watch Netflix without ads. While the streaming giant had already severed the $12 Basic subscription tier for new or returning subscribers, anybody who chose to keep paying their monthly tithe…Read more... This year, at least some countries will have to say goodbye to the Netflix Basic subscription tier, the last cheap(ish) way to watch Netflix without ads. While the streaming giant had already…