Apps

What was once a list is now a slider. According to 9to5Google, YouTube is rolling out a redesigned mobile UX for choosing your preferred playback speed.

I’m old fashioned and watch at normal speed — and no, I don’t want to know how much of my life I’ve wasted on YouTube. But Nilay says the 1.75x option is now harder to get to.

Apple might soon add a new auto-generated review summary for apps in the App Store, according to 9to5Mac.

It sounds similar to Amazon’s AI-generated “Customers say” summary section at the top of the reviews on some product pages.

I’ve recommended Omnivore a lot to people looking for a place to save articles, PDFs, and other stuff to read later. Now the app’s going away, since Omnivore has been acquired by ElevenLabs. And PSA: you only have about two weeks to export your data before Omnivore goes away.

If you’re looking for alternatives, we have a great roundup of the options. Personally I’m a Readwise Reader user, though it is too expensive.

Our friends at New York peek into Wonder, the rapidly-expanding fancy food hall / delivery app that partners with fancy chefs and restaurants to bring their signature dishes to more locations. The back-end is, well, food kits?

Once items make it to the larger menu, they’re prepped in a centralized commercial kitchen in New Jersey and sent daily, mostly as kits, to Wonder’s stores, where everything is finished to order. (Not for nothing, Wonder acquired the meal-kit service Blue Apron last year.) It’s not heat-and-eat, as Blue Apron is, or even reheated, Wonder’s CMO, Daniel Shlossman, assured me, but it is true that all of the finishing can be done in the restaurants’ all-electric kitchens by non-chef staffs, which are outfitted with quick-cooking ovens, hot-water baths, and electric fryers. There are no flames in Wonder kitchens.

One the one hand: brilliant. On the other: weird!

Its $15 million funding round was led by Blockchain Capital, a venture capital group that has invested in crypto firms, like Kraken, OpenSea, and Coinbase. Despite this, Bluesky says it’s not changing its stance on blockchains:

This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)

Zoom says its AI Companion 2.0 is better at summarizing and synthesizing information across Zoom Workplace and connected third-party apps, allowing it to provide more relevant answers about your meetings and documents.

The upgraded assistant can offer suggestions by “understanding” what users see on Zoom and “remembering” previous interactions. As part of its AI upgrade, Zoom is also planning to launch AI avatars next year.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite chip comes with ultra wideband baked in, and it won’t require smartphone makers to add extra hardware to take advantage of it, reports Android Authority.

Not every Android phone supports UWB, which is used for precision location features (think AirTags). Perhaps that’ll change with the 8 Elite, given Qualcomm’s chips’ popularity with Android device makers.

WABetaInfo spotted the feature in a recent beta for the Android version of the app, though it’s not yet accessible to normal beta testers.

The chatbot will reportedly be able to remember things when users ask and will apply that when giving things like food recommendations, say, by avoiding foods the user says they’re allergic to.