Google's billing system for app developers is "unfair and discriminatory," India's antitrust regulator said in the initial findings of an extensive investigation, paving the way for potential penalties in future. From a report: The Competition Commission of India found Google discriminated against developers in its Play store billing policy, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News. The findings come after a months-long investigation triggered by protests from developers, who've complained the U.S. internet giant charges an unfairly high fee in return for using Android app stores and its proprietary payments service.

Alphabet, Google's parent, and Apple have come under pressure from regulators around the world who accuse the twin mobile giants of forcing developers to use their payment systems, then taking an outsized cut of revenue. In South Korea, Google was forced to provide an alternative billing system after regulatory action. In that market, Google said it was reducing app makers' fees by 4%. "Google is imposing unfair and discriminatory conditions in violation" of regulations, the Indian agency said in its preliminary report dated March 14.

slack_justyb writes: After the failure of the Chrome user-tracking system that was called FLoC, Google's latest try at topic tracking to replace the 3rd party cookie (that Chrome is the only browser to still support) is FLEDGE and the most recent drop of Canary has this on full display for users and privacy advocates to dive deeper into. This recent release shows Google's hand that it views user tracking as a mandatory part of internet usage, especially given this system's eye-rolling name of "Privacy Sandbox" and the tightness in the coupling of this new API to the browser directly.

The new API will allow the browser itself to build what it believes to be things that you are interested in, based on broad topics that Google creates. New topics and methods for how you are placed into those topics will be added to the browser's database and indexing software via updates from Google. The main point to take away here though is that the topic database is built using your CPU's time. At this time, opting out of the browser building this interest database is possible thus saving you a few cycles from being used for that purpose. In the future there may not be a way to stop the browser from using cycles to build the database; the only means may be to just constantly remove all interest from your personal database. At this time there doesn't seem to be any way to completely turn off the underlying API. A website that expects this API will always succeed in "some sort of response" so long as you are using Chrome. The response may be that you are interested in nothing, but a response none-the-less. Of course, sending a response of "interested in nothing" would more than likely require someone constantly, and timely, clearing out the interest database, especially if at some later time the option to turn off the building of the database is removed.

With 82% of Google's empire based on ad revenue, this latest development in Chrome shows that Google is not keen on any moves to threaten their main money maker. Google continues to argue that it is mandatory that it builds a user tracking and advertising system into Chrome, and the company says it won't block third-party cookies until it accomplishes that -- no matter what the final solution may ultimately be. The upshot, if it can be called that, of the FLEDGE API over FLoC, is that abuse of FLEDGE looks to yield less valuable results. And attempting to use the API alone to pick out an individual user via fingerprinting or other methods employed elsewhere seems to be rather difficult to do. But only time will tell if that remains true or just Google idealizing this new API. As for the current timeline, here's what the company had to say in the latest Chromium Blog post: "Starting today, developers can begin testing globally the Topics, FLEDGE, and Attribution Reporting APIs in the Canary version of Chrome. We'll progress to a limited number of Chrome Beta users as soon as possible. Once things are working smoothly in Beta, we'll make API testing available in the stable version of Chrome to expand testing to more Chrome users."

Russia's biggest internet company has embedded code into apps found on mobile devices that allows information about millions of users to be sent to servers located in its home country. From a report: The revelation relates to software created by Yandex that permits developers to create apps for devices running Apple's iOS and Google's Android, systems that run the vast majority of the world's smartphones. Yandex collects user data harvested from mobiles, before sending the information to servers in Russia. Researchers have raised concerns the same "metadata" may then be accessed by the Kremlin and used to track people through their mobiles. Researcher Zach Edwards first made the discovery regarding Yandex's code as part of an app auditing campaign for Me2B Alliance, a non-profit. Four independent experts ran tests for the Financial Times to verify his work.

Yandex has acknowledged its software collects "device, network and IP address" information that is stored "both in Finland and in Russia," but it called this data "non-personalised and very limited." It added: "Although theoretically possible, in practice it is extremely hard to identify users based solely on such information collected. Yandex definitely cannot do this." The revelations come at a critical time for Yandex, often referred to as "Russia's Google," which has long attempted to chart an independent path without falling foul of Russian president Vladimir Putin's desire for greater control of the internet. The company said it followed "a very strict" internal process when dealing with governments: "Any requests that fail to comply with all relevant procedural and legal requirements are turned down."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Collecting satellite data for research is a group effort thanks to this app developed for Android users. Camaliot is a campaign funded by the European Space Agency, and its first project focuses on making smartphone owners around the world part of a project that can help improve weather forecasts by using your phone's GPS receiver. The Camaliot app works on devices running Android version 7.0 or later that support satellite navigation. Researchers think that they can use satellite signals to get more information about the atmosphere. For example, the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere can affect how a satellite signal travels through the air to something like a phone.

The app gathers information to track signal strength, the distance between the satellite and the phone being used, and the satellite's carrier phase, according to Camaliot's FAQs. With enough data collected from around the world, researchers can theoretically combine that with existing weather readings to measure long-term water vapor trends. They hope to use that data to inform weather forecasting models with machine learning. They can also track changes in Earth's ionosphere -- the part of the atmosphere near space. Creating better ionospheric forecasts could be relevant in tracking space weather and could eventually make Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) more accurate by accounting for events like geomagnetic storms. Camaliot could eventually expand to include more attempts at collecting data on a massive scale using sensors present in "Internet of Things" connected home devices. According to The Verge, these are the steps to take to begin using the Camaliot app on your Android phone:

1. Select "start logging" and place your phone in an area with a clear sky view to begin logging the data
2. Once you have measured to your liking, select "stop logging"
3. Then, upload your session to the server and repeat the process over time to collect more data. You can also delete your locally-stored log files at this step.

"In addition to being able to view your own measurements against others accumulated over time, you can also see a leaderboard showing logging sessions done by other participants," adds The Verge. "Eventually, the information collected for the study will be available in a separate portal."

In January the virally-popular game Wordle was sold to the New York Times for between between $1 million (£758,345) and $5 million. Now the Independent reveals why the game's creator took that step.

"Because so many people were cloning it and making money from it without his permission." Josh Wardle, a Welsh software engineer who now lives in Brooklyn, New York, said in a talk on Thursday that selling to the Times was "a way to walk away" from the pressure he felt to stop his creation being exploited.... The game's success inspired numerous smartphone apps that simply copied Mr Wardle's version while adding ads, in-app-purchases, or subscription fees, many of which were later removed from Apple's app store.

Speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mr Wardle said: "That isn't money that I would have made, because I said I don't want to make money, but something about that felt really deeply unpleasant for me. And so selling to the New York Times was a way for me to walk away from that. I didn't want to be paying a lawyer to issue cease and desists on the game that I'm not making money from. It felt like it was all going to get really, really complicated in a way that just [made me] pretty stressed out, truthfully."

Answering a question from The Independent after the talk, Mr Wardle added that he felt "an enormous amount of pressure" and a sense of limited time to act because so many people were trying to copy the game.
Besides the outright clones, Wordle has also led to some interesting variations, including Nerdle (which challenges players to guess the digits and symbols in an eight-digit equation).

There's Dordle (which challenges players to guess two words at the same time), as well as a four-word variation called Quordle, and even an eight-word version called Octordle.

In a recent article in Tom's Guide (titled "I don't like Wordle — but I love these alternatives") they also recommended Heardle and Framed. "The former tasks you with guessing a song based on a short audio clip, and the latter asks you to name a movie based on a single frame." (As well as Adverswordle, where you choose the word while an AI tries to guess it.)

And then there's the excruciatingly difficult Semantle...

To date, Google has released three Assistant Smart Displays. 9to5Google can now report that the company is working on a new Nest Hub for 2022 with a dockable tablet form factor where the screen detaches from a base/speaker. From the report: According to a source that has proven familiar with Google's plans, the next Nest Smart Display will have a removable screen that can be used as a tablet. It attaches to the base/speaker for a more conventional-looking smart home device. This new form factor comes as Google has spent the last few months adding more interface elements to the 2nd-gen Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max. Swiping up from the bottom of the screen reveals a row of "apps" above the settings bar. You can open a fullscreen grid of icons from there. Applications and games on the Nest Hub are essentially web views, so this is technically a launcher for shortcuts.

Speaking of the web, Google also spent the end of last year adding a more feature-rich browser that even features a Gboard-esque keyboard. You can also send sites directly to your phone and enable text-to-speech. Both of these additions can be seen as laying the groundwork for a tablet-like experience, with web browsing obviously being a popular task on big screens. Many questions about the implementation remain unknown, including what OS/experience the undocked tablet will run. Chrome OS is likely too power-hungry (and as such costly) considering the affordability of Nest devices, while Android would open the door to existing apps and the Play Store.

Google announced on Wednesday that it would test letting Android developers use their own billing systems in their apps, the first step in what could lead to a dramatic reshaping of the app economy. However, Epic Games, which has been a strong proponent for opening app marketplaces and sued Google after the search giant removed Fortnite from Google Play for including direct payments, still isn't happy. From a report: It plans to continue advocating for an app ecosystem that offers more choices, according to a statement the company shared with The Verge. "Apple and Google continue to abuse their market power with policies that stifle innovation, inflate prices and reduce consumer choice," Corie Wright, Epic's VP of public policy, said in the statement. "One deal does not change the anticompetitive status quo. We will continue to fight for fair and open platforms for all developers and consumers and work with policymakers and regulators to hold these gatekeepers accountable for their anticompetitive conduct."

An anonymous reader shares a report: After seemingly forgetting that Android tablets existed for a while, Google is suddenly very invested in the market. Android 12L is in development to support larger-screened devices, and one of the platform's co-founders, Rich Miner, has rejoined the team with the title "CTO of Android tablets." Now, speaking to developers during an episode of Google's The Android Show, Miner explained the opportunity the company is seeing. [...] The other reason he cites is that tablets can be "very capable, less expensive than a laptop." That spurred Google's work on Android 12L to optimize its system UI for use on bigger devices, as well as the way it formats apps to fit on big screens.

Miner is making the pitch for developers to look at their apps and consider taking advantage of the tools Google's building to improve tablet support or even building apps that approach the market as a tablet-first experience. He points to 2020 sales data, where "tablet purchases actually started to approach the number of laptop shipments... I actually think there's going to be a crossover point at some point in the not too distant future where there are more tablets sold annually than there are laptops. I think once you cross over that point, you're not going to be coming back."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last year, the Google TV app user interface was completely redesigned and transformed into a hub for browsing movies and shows from your favorite streaming apps all in one place. It now appears that more changes are coming to the platform as Google has announced that in May 2022, movies or TV shows will no longer be available in the Google Play store. Instead, the Google TV app will be the official home for buying, renting, and watching movies and shows on your Android device. Other apps, games, and books will continue to live on the store. On Google TV, the experience of using Google Play Movies & TV will still be the same and users will get access to the latest new releases, rentals, and deals. When taking a look at the new Google TV app, customers will see a Shop tab where they can find all the titles that the tech giant offers.

Amid increasing global regulations over app stores and their commission structures, Google today announced the launch of a pilot program designed to explore what it calls "user billing choice." From a report: The program will allow a small number of participating developers, starting with Spotify, to offer an additional third-party billing option next to Google Play's own billing system in their apps. While Google already offers a similar system in South Korea following the arrival of new legislation requiring it, this will be the first time it will test the system in global markets.

As the debut pilot partner, Spotify will introduce both their own billing system alongside Google Play's own when the pilot goes live. Google did not say which other developers it has lined up for future tests, but noted Spotify was a "natural first partner" on the effort given its reach as one of the "world's largest subscription developers with a global footprint" and its "integrations across a wide range of device form factors." Spotify, of course, has also been one of the larger developers to push for regulatory changes to app stores' existing billing systems, having testified before Congress on the matter, joined lobbying groups, and backed app store legislation, including the Open Markets Act, that would require companies like Apple and Google to permit alternatives to existing app stores.

Google's Messages and Dialer apps for Android devices have been collecting and sending data to Google without specific notice and consent, and without offering the opportunity to opt-out, potentially in violation of Europe's data protection law. From a report: According to a research paper, "What Data Do The Google Dialer and Messages Apps On Android Send to Google?" [PDF], by Trinity College Dublin computer science professor Douglas Leith, Google Messages (for text messaging) and Google Dialer (for phone calls) have been sending data about user communications to the Google Play Services Clearcut logger service and to Google's Firebase Analytics service.

"The data sent by Google Messages includes a hash of the message text, allowing linking of sender and receiver in a message exchange," the paper says. "The data sent by Google Dialer includes the call time and duration, again allowing linking of the two handsets engaged in a phone call. Phone numbers are also sent to Google." The timing and duration of other user interactions with these apps has also been transmitted to Google. And Google offers no way to opt-out of this data collection. [...] Both pre-installed versions of these apps, the paper observes, lack app-specific privacy policies that explain what data gets collected -- something Google requires from third-party developers. And when a request was made through Google Takeout for the Google Account data associated with the apps used for testing, the data Google provided did not include the telemetry data observed.

The board members of the FIDO alliance include Amazon, Google, PayPal, RSA, and Apple and Microsoft (as well as Intel and Arm). It describes its mission as reducing the world's "over-reliance on passwords."

Today Wired reports that the group thinks "it has finally identified the missing piece of the puzzle" for finally achieving large-scale adoption of a password-supplanting technology: On Thursday, the organization published a white paper that lays out FIDO's vision for solving the usability issues that have dogged passwordless features and, seemingly, kept them from achieving broad adoption....

The paper is conceptual, not technical, but after years of investment to integrate what are known as the FIDO2 and WebAuthn passwordless standards into Windows, Android, iOS, and more, everything is now riding on the success of this next step.... FIDO is looking to get to the heart of what still makes passwordless schemes tough to navigate. And the group has concluded that it all comes down to the procedure for switching or adding devices. If the process for setting up a new phone, say, is too complicated, and there's no simple way to log in to all of your apps and accounts — or if you have to fall back to passwords to reestablish your ownership of those accounts — then most users will conclude that it's too much of a hassle to change the status quo.

The passwordless FIDO standard already relies on a device's biometric scanners (or a master PIN you select) to authenticate you locally without any of your data traveling over the Internet to a web server for validation. The main concept that FIDO believes will ultimately solve the new device issue is for operating systems to implement a "FIDO credential" manager, which is somewhat similar to a built-in password manager. Instead of literally storing passwords, this mechanism will store cryptographic keys that can sync between devices and are guarded by your device's biometric or passcode lock. At Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference last summer, the company announced its own version of what FIDO is describing, an iCloud feature known as "Passkeys in iCloud Keychain," which Apple says is its "contribution to a post-password world...."

FIDO's white paper also includes another component, a proposed addition to its specification that would allow one of your existing devices, like your laptop, to act as a hardware token itself, similar to stand-alone Bluetooth authentication dongles, and provide physical authentication over Bluetooth. The idea is that this would still be virtually phish-proof since Bluetooth is a proximity-based protocol and can be a useful tool as needed in developing different versions of truly passwordless schemes that don't have to retain a backup password. Christiaan Brand, a product manager at Google who focuses on identity and security and collaborates on FIDO projects, says that the passkey-style plan follows logically from the smartphone or multi-device image of a passwordless future. "This grand vision of 'Let's move beyond the password,' we've always had this end state in mind to be honest, it just took until everyone had mobile phones in their pockets," Brand says....

To FIDO, the biggest priority is a paradigm shift in account security that will make phishing a thing of the past.... When asked if this is really it, if the death knell for passwords is truly, finally tolling, Google's Brand turns serious, but he doesn't hesitate to answer: "I feel like everything is coalescing," he says. "This should be durable."
Such a change won't happen overnight, the article points out. "With any other tech migration (ahem, Windows XP), the road will inevitably prove arduous."

At the 2022 Google for Games Developer Summit where its Stadia B2B cloud gaming platform was unveiled, Google announced the long-awaited availability of Steam on Chromebooks. 9to5Google reports: Google specifically said that the "Steam Alpha just launched, making this longtime PC game store available on select Chromebooks for users to try." That said, no other details appear to be live this morning, but we did reveal the device list last month. As we noted at the time: "At a minimum, your Chromebook needs to have an (11th gen) Intel Core i5 or i7 processor and a minimum of 7 GB of RAM. This eliminates almost all Chromebooks but those in the upper-mid range and high end."

Google today said "you can check that out on the Chromebook community forum." The post in question is now live, but without any actual availability timeline beyond "coming soon." However, we did learn that the "early, alpha-quality version of Steam" will first come to the Chrome OS Dev channel for a "small set" of devices.

Meanwhile, Google also said Chrome OS is getting a new "games overlay" on "select" Android titles to make them "playable with user-driven keyboard and mouse configurations on Chromebooks without developer changes." It will launch later this year in a public beta. Further reading: The part of the keynote where this announcement was made can be viewed here.

Google's Domain Name Registrar is Out of Beta After Seven Years

"We're here to mourn the passing of YouTube Vanced," writes the site Android Police: If you weren't too fond of the official YouTube app, there were many alternatives at your disposal. One of them was YouTube Vanced — a modded version of the original app that added features like ad blocking, background playback, and many more without charging users like YouTube's Premium tier. We even put it on our list of the best indie apps you can get. It further gained popularity by bringing back dislike counts in videos just as Google removed them from their service...

The folks behind the project announced Sunday in the app's official Telegram channel and on the Vanced Twitter account that it will be discontinued. No clear reason was given as to why it was killed off, so we can only speculate — but it's likely due to Google's legal department taking notice of Vanced...

Vanced was never the only alternative YouTube app. Others include open-source NewPipe, which is more lightweight than the official app. But YouTube Vanced had a huge user base, and we'll miss it. It won't be updated anymore, but you can still get the last version. Do it quickly, though — the download links will soon be gone.

Twitter is rolling out a change that, frustratingly, makes it a bit more difficult to see your chronological feed. From a report: The design change, which lets you swipe between your Home (algorithmically served) and Latest (reverse chronological) timelines, was announced Thursday. To set it up, you tap the sparkle icon in the top right corner, and you'll see the option to pin your "Latest timeline," and if you select that, you'll see both "Home" and "Latest Tweets" tabs at the top of the iOS app. If you use pinned lists on the iOS app, the layout might look familiar. The feature is available first on iOS, and it's coming "soon" to Android and the web, Twitter says. To my great disappointment, however, I've found that after testing the feature, now I can't make the chronological feed the default. Instead, I can only have Home as my default or set up the two Home and Latest Tweets tabs and swap between them as needed.

Google is updating the default "Messages" app to include a number of new features, such as the ability to handle iMessage "Tapbacks." TechCrunch reports: Other coming updates include nudges to remind you to reply to messages you missed, separate tabs for business and personal messages, reminders about birthdays you may want to celebrate, support for sharper videos via a Google Photos integration and an expanded set of emoji mashups, among other things. After the update, reactions from iPhone users will be sent as an emoji on text messages on Android. As on iMessage, the emoji reaction -- like love, laughter, confusion or excitement -- will appear on the right side of the message. (On Android, it's the bottom right.) This feature is first rolling out to Android devices set to English, but additional languages will follow. [...] Android's interpretation of which emoji to use varies slightly from iPhone, however. For instance, the "heart" reaction on Android becomes the "face with the heart eyes" emoji. And the iMessage's exclamation mark reaction becomes the "face with the open mouth" emoji.

Google is also integrating Google Photos into the Message app to improve the video sharing experience. While the modern RCS standard allows people with Android devices to share high-quality videos with each other, those same videos appear blurry when shared with those on iPhone, as iMessage doesn't support RCS. By sending the link to the video through Google Photos, iPhone users will be able to watch the video in the same high resolution. This feature will later include support for photos, too. This addition aims to push Apple to adopt the industry standard by shaming the company over video quality.

As Google announced today, version 99 of Chrome on macOS manages to score 300 points on the Speedometer benchmark, which was originally developed by Apple's WebKit team. This, Google points out, is the fastest performance of any browser yet. TechCrunch: Speedometer 2.0 tests for responsiveness, which makes it a good proxy for user experience. It's been a while since competition in the browser market focused on speed, especially now that most vendors bet on the same Chromium codebase to build their browsers (with the exception of Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's WebKit-based Safari). But that doesn't mean that the various development teams stopped thinking about how to speed up the user experience. As with a lot of mature technologies, we're just not seeing major breakthroughs these days. That doesn't mean the rivalry between the different vendors has stopped, even as they are now getting together as part of Interop 2022 to better align their browsers with web standards.

Briefly banned in Ukraine, U.S. mobile-phone app Premise does defense work globally and has faced contributor safety issues. From a report: In 2019, Ukrainian users of a U.S.-based mobile-phone app offering paid, short-term tasks got what sounded like a straightforward assignment: Go into rural Ukraine and take smartphone photos of certain fields and farms around Odessa and Kyiv. But for one contributor, the job turned out to be anything but ordinary when one of the fields turned out to lie next to a military checkpoint. The contributor was chased off by armed soldiers, according to people familiar with the matter. The app's owner, Premise Data, said it immediately deleted the task from its platform after learning of the military checkpoint.

What that and other Ukrainian gig workers were doing was harvesting data for a U.S. Defense Department-funded research project. Descartes Labs, a government contractor that works with U.S. military and intelligence agencies, hired Premise to have its gig workers gauge how accurately the company's satellite algorithms were performing, the people said. Could they, for example, accurately tell barley from wheat in photos taken from space? Descartes's work was funded by DARPA, a research arm of the Pentagon, a Defense Department spokesperson said. Descartes declined to comment. Based in San Francisco, Premise is one of a number of companies offering a service that uses iPhone and Android smartphones around the world as tools for gathering intelligence and commercial information from afar, sometimes without the users knowing specifically who they are working for. The business model of companies like Premise has prompted questions about the safety and propriety of enlisting such people for government work --especially in potential or active conflict zones.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Microsoft on Wednesday announced Reading Coach (video), software that allows children to practice reading out loud and receive personalized feedback. Reading Coach will be integrated into Word Online, OneNote, Teams, Forms, and many other places in M365 later this summer.

The Reading Coach announcement comes 15 years after a 2007 paper from Microsoft Research employees that described an Automatic Children's Reading Tutor, which could track children's oral reading against story texts, detect reading miscues, measure the level of reading fluency, diagnose the nature of the miscues, and provide feedback to improve reading skills. The same Microsoft team described in a 2008 paper an implementation of the Automatic Reading Tutor software on a PDA running Windows Mobile 6, which they dubbed 'Reading Coach'.

Microsoft's 2022 Reading Coach comes after the release of read-aloud helper software from other tech giants — Amazon's Reading Sidekick and Google's Read Along. Efforts to use software to help develop early reading skills are hardly new — in 1994, CMU researchers described a NeXT implementation of A Prototype Reading Coach that Listens as part of Project LISTEN — although widespread adoption has proved elusive. But with advances in tech, schools seeking ways to help students catch up on unfinished learning from the pandemic, and 1:1 computing for most students, could things truly be different this time? When the 2022-23 school year comes around, will Microsoft's Reading Coach be a 15-year 'overnight success' with teachers and parents?

In a statement to TechCrunch, a Samsung spokesperson said the company will release a software update to allow users to have more control over throttling. "Samsung has not provided details about when the update will roll out to users," notes the report. From the report: "Our priority is to deliver the best mobile experience for consumers. We value the feedback we receive about our products and after careful consideration, we plan to roll out a software update soon so users can control the performance while running game apps," a spokesperson from Samsung said in an email.

Samsung's promise follows reports that the tech giant's phones are throttling the performance of around 10,000 apps, as first reported by Android Authority, and via Twitter complaints, plus Samsung's Korean community forums. The company's Game Optimizing Service (GOS) software, which optimizes the performance of CPU and GPU to prevent excessive heating when playing a game for a long time, appeared to be at the core of the issue, but the list of affected apps wasn't limited to games. However, Samsung has disputed claims that Game Optimizing Service was throttling non-gaming apps. "The Game Optimizing Service (GOS) has been designed to help game apps achieve a great performance while managing device temperature effectively. GOS does not manage the performance of non-gaming apps," the spokesperson said.