Enlarge (credit: Fitbit)

Google's continued abuse of the Fitbit brand is continuing with the shutdown of the web dashboard. Fitbit.com used to be both a storefront and a way for users to get a big-screen UI to sift through reams of fitness data. The store closed up shop in April, and now the web dashboard is dying in July.

In a post on the "Fitbit Community" forums, the company said: "Next month, we’re consolidating the Fitbit.com dashboard into the Fitbit app. The web browser will no longer offer access to the Fitbit.com dashboard after July 8, 2024." That's it. There's no replacement or new fitness thing Google is more interested in; web functionality is just being removed. Google, we'll remind you, used to be a web company. Now it's a phone app or nothing. Google did the same thing to its Google Fit product in 2019, killing off the more powerful website in favor of an app focus.

Dumping the web app leaves a few holes in Fitbit's ecosystem. The Fitbit app doesn't support big screens like tablet devices, so this is removing the only large-format interface for data. Fitbit's competitors all have big-screen interfaces. Garmin has a very similar website, and the Apple Watch has an iPad health app. This isn't an improvement. To make matters worse, the app does not have the features of the web dashboard, with many of the livid comments in the forums on Reddit calling out the app's deficiencies in graphing, achievement statistics, calorie counting, and logs.

Enlarge / The Pixel 8. (credit: Google)

Google's June Android update is out, and it's bringing a few notable changes for Pixel phones. The most interesting is that the Pixel 8a, Pixel 8, and Pixel 8 Pro are all getting DisplayPort Alt Mode capabilities via their USB-C ports. This means you can go from USB-C to DisplayPort and plug right into a TV or monitor. This has been rumored forever and landed in some of the Android Betas earlier, but now it's finally shipping out to production.

The Pixel 8's initial display support is just a mirrored mode. You can either get an awkward vertical phone in the middle of your wide-screen display or turn the phone sideways and get a more reasonable layout. You could see it being useful for videos or presentations. It would be nice if it could do more.

Alongside this year-plus of display port rumors has been a steady drum beat (again) for an Android desktop mode. Google has been playing around with this idea since Android 7.0 in 2016. In 2019, we were told it was just a development testing project, and it never shipped to any real devices. Work around Android's desktop mode has been heating up, though, so maybe a second swing at this idea will result in an actual product.

Enlarge / Google Pay is dead! (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Google has killed off the Google Pay app. 9to5Google reports Google's old payments app stopped working recently, following shutdown plans that were announced in February. Google is shutting down the Google Pay app in the US, while in-store NFC payments seem to still be branded "Google Pay." Remember, this is Google's dysfunctional payments division, so all that's happening is Google Payment app No. 3 (Google Pay) is being shut down in favor of Google Payment app No. 4 (Google Wallet). The shutdown caps off the implosion of Google's payments division after a lot of poor decisions and failed product launches.

Google's NFC payment journey started in 2011 with Google Wallet (apps No. 1 and No. 4 are both called Google Wallet). In 2011, Google was a technology trailblazer and basically popularized the idea of paying for something with your phone in many regions (with the notable exception of Japan). Google shipped the first non-Japanese phones with the feature, fought carriers trying to stop phone payments from happening, and begged stores to get new, compatible terminals. Google's entire project was blown away when Apple Pay launched in 2014, and Google's response was its second payment app, Android Pay, in 2015. This copied much of Apple's setup, like sending payment tokens instead of the actual credit card number. Google Pay was a rebrand of this setup and arrived in 2018.

The 2018 version of Google Pay was a continuation of the Android Pay codebase, which was a continuation of the Google Wallet codebase. Despite all the rebrands, Google's payment apps were an evolution, and none of the previous apps were really "shut down"—they were in-place upgrades. Everything changed in 2021 when a new version of Google Pay was launched, which is when Google's payment division started to go off the rails.

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  The AIs are learning to cooperate! Siri talks to ChatGPT. [credit: Apple ]

Reports of Apple signing a deal with OpenAI are true: ChatGPT is coming to your Apple gear.

First up is Siri, which can tap into ChatGPT to answer voice questions. If Siri thinks ChatGPT can help answer your question, you'll get a pop-up permission box asking if you want to send your question to the chatbot. The response will come back in a window indicating that the information came from an outside source. This is the same way Siri treats a search engine (namely, Google), so how exactly Siri draws a line between ChatGPT and a search engine will be interesting. In Apple's lone example, there was a "help" intent, with the input saying to "help me plan a five-course meal" given certain ingredient limitations. That sort of ultra-specific input is something you can't do with a traditional search engine.

Siri can also send photos to ChatGPT. In Apple's example, the user snapped a picture of a wooden deck and asked Siri about decorating options. It sounds like the standard generative AI summary features will be here, too, with Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi mentioning that "you can also ask questions about your documents, presentations, or PDFs."

Enlarge / A South Korean flag, left, and Samsung Electronics Co. flag fly outside the company's headquarters in Seoul, South Korea. (credit: Jean Chung/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Samsung Electronics workers are on strike. As The New York Times reports, Nationwide Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU) has about 28,000 members, or about one-fifth of Samsung's workforce, walking out of the job on Friday. It's Samsung's first workers' strike.

Specifically, the walkout is in Samsung's chip division, which makes RAM, NAND flash chips, USB sticks and SD cards, Exynos processors, camera sensors, modems, NFC chips, and power and display controllers. Depending on how each quarter goes, Samsung is often the world's largest chipmaker by revenue thanks to this division, and its parts are in products from a million different brands. It's probably hard to find a tech product that doesn't have some kind of Samsung chip in it.

As you might expect, the union wants higher pay. Samsung's workers have gotten as much as 30 percent of their pay from bonuses, and there were no bonuses last year. UnionVP Lee Hyun Kuk told the Times that “it feels like we’ve taken a 30 percent pay cut.” The average pay for a union member is around $60,000 before bonuses.

Enlarge / The Humane AI Pin.

The Humane AI Pin has launched, crashed, and burned, with founders already looking to sell the company just one month after launch. The New York Times has an article detailing exactly how the company got to the point of launching a dead-on-arrival product and provided a few updates on the sales of the product and the company.

Humane, if you haven't heard, is a company founded by two former Apple employees, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, in 2018. The company raised $230 million from some big-name investors like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and, before launch, was valued at $1 billion. The product, the AI Pin, is sort of trying to be a Star Trek communicator. You magnetically clip it onto your shirt and can tap it for voice commands. It has "no apps" (the founders bragged about this feature) and is mostly just a voice assistant box with a touch panel, battery, camera, and speaker/microphone. There's no traditional screen, but a laser projector can shoot a smartwatch-like UI onto your hand that you control with gestures.

The going rate for one of these things is $700, plus a $24 a month subscription, a hard sell in the face of a $400 Apple Watch. It also doesn't really work and was universally panned in reviews, with conclusions ranging from The Verge's "not even close" to Marques Brownlee's "the worst product I've ever reviewed." Apparently, the voice commands are very slow, the battery life is an awful two to four hours, it's heavy and drags down your shirt, and the projector doesn't work well in many lighting conditions. It's also reportedly a fire hazard, with Humane emailing customers this week and telling them to "immediately stop using and charging" the battery case because some units with defective batteries "may pose a fire safety risk."

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  The Motorola Edge 2024. [credit: Motorola ]

Motorola's newest phone is the Motorola Edge 2024. This is a mid-range phone with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2. It costs $550 and will be in stores June 20. Every Motorola phone nowadays looks exactly the same, but Motorola assures us this is new.

The Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 is the bottom of Qualcomm's "7 series" lineup and features four Cortex-A78 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores built on a 4 nm manufacturing process. The phone has a 144 Hz, 6.6-inch 2400×1080 OLED panel with curved sides. It has 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a 5000 mAh battery, 68 W wired charging, and 15 W wireless charging. Cameras include a mid-range 50 MP Sony "LYTIA" 700C, 13 MP wide-angle, and a 32 MP front camera. The phone has NFC, Wi-Fi 6E, an in-screen fingerprint reader, and—a big addition compared to other Motorola devices—an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance.

Just like on the Moto G Stylus, this phone has a "vegan leather" back option that should be softer than the usual plastic, but it's still plastic. Unlike that phone, there's no headphone jack or MicroSD slot. A customizable hardware button on the left side of the phone lets you open the Google Assistant or whatever other app you choose.

Enlarge / Pixel devices. (credit: Google)

Google has changed its repair policy in response to criticism from repair advocate Louis Rossmann. Rossmann dug through the Google Store's "Service & Repair Program Terms & Conditions" for its first-party mail-in repair service and found the same style of onerous bans on third-party parts that Samsung was recently caught using. Section D, article 4 of the terms include the rather incredible line "Unauthorized Parts: You will not send in a Device containing non-Google-authorized parts – if You do, Your Device will not be returned to you." That's right, according to the terms, Google would keep a device sent in for repair, and you wouldn't get it back.

We asked Google for a comment on Rossmann's video, and a spokesperson says the terms will be updated:

If a customer sends their Pixel to Google for repair, we would not keep it regardless of whether it has non-OEM parts or not. In certain situations, we won't be able to complete a repair if there are safety concerns. In that case, we will either send it back to the customer or work with them to determine next steps. Customers are also free to seek the repair options that work best for them. We are updating our Terms and Conditions to clarify this.

That sounds a lot more reasonable.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Alexander Koerner)

Google apparently accidentally posted a big stash of internal technical documents to GitHub, partially detailing how the search engine ranks webpages. For most of us, the question of search rankings is just "are my web results good or bad," but the SEO community is both thrilled to get a peek behind the curtain and up in arms since the docs apparently contradict some of what Google has told them in the past. Most of the commentary on the leak is from SEO experts Rand Fishkin and Mike King.

Google confirmed the authenticity of the documents to The Verge, saying, “We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information. We’ve shared extensive information about how Search works and the types of factors that our systems weigh, while also working to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation.”

The fun thing about accidentally publishing to the GoogleAPI GitHub is that, while these are sensitive internal documents, Google technically released them under an Apache 2.0 license. That means anyone who stumbled across the documents was granted a "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license" to them, so these are freely available online now, like here.

Enlarge / Someone really likes Google Chrome. (credit: Isaac Bowen / Flickr)

Google Chrome will be shutting down its older, more capable extension system, Manifest V2, in favor of exclusively using the more limited Manifest V3. The deeply controversial Manifest V3 system was announced in 2019, and the full switch has been delayed a million times, but now Google says it's really going to make the transition: As previously announced, the phase-out of older Chrome extensions is starting next week.

Google Chrome has been working toward a plan for a new, more limited extension system for a while now. Google says it created "Manifest V3" extensions with the goal of "improving the security, privacy, performance, and trustworthiness of the extension ecosystem."

Other groups don't agree with Google's description, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which called Manifest V3 "deceitful and threatening" back when it was first announced in 2019, saying the new system "will restrict the capabilities of web extensions—especially those that are designed to monitor, modify, and compute alongside the conversation your browser has with the websites you visit." It has a whole article out detailing how Manifest V3 won't help security.

Enlarge

Earlier this month, Google Cloud experienced one of its biggest blunders ever when UniSuper, a $135 billion Australian pension fund, had its Google Cloud account wiped out due to some kind of mistake on Google's end. At the time, UniSuper indicated it had lost everything it had stored with Google, even its backups, and that caused two weeks of downtime for its 647,000 members. There were joint statements from the Google Cloud CEO and UniSuper CEO on the matter, a lot of apologies, and presumably a lot of worried customers who wondered if their retirement fund had disappeared.

In the immediate aftermath, the explanation we got was that "the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription." Two weeks later, Google Cloud's internal review of the problem is finished, and the company has a blog post up detailing what happened.

Google has a "TL;DR" at the top of the post, and it sounds like a Google employee got an input wrong.

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  Whether you want to call it "Google Business Messaging" or "Google Business Profile Chat," the chat buttons in Google Maps and Search are going away. [credit: Google ]

Google is killing off a messaging service! This one is the odd "Google Business Messaging" service—basically an instant messaging client that is built into Google Maps. If you looked up a participating business in Google Maps or Google Search on a phone, the main row of buttons in the place card would read something like "Call," "Chat," "Directions," and "Website." That "Chat" button is the service we're talking about. It would launch a full messaging interface inside the Google Maps app, and businesses were expected to use it for customer service purposes. Google's deeply dysfunctional messaging strategy might lead people to joke about a theoretical "Google Maps Messaging" service, but it already exists and has existed for years, and now it's being shut down.

Search Engine Land's Barry Schwartz was the first to spot the shutdown emails being sent out to participating businesses. Google has two different support articles up for a shutdown of both "Google Business Profile Chat" and "Google Business Messages," which appear to just be the same thing with different names. On July 15, 2024, the ability to start a new chat will be disabled, and on July 31, 2024, both services will be shut down. Google is letting businesses download past chat conversations via Google Takeout.

Google's Maps messaging service was Google Messaging Service No. 16 in our giant History of Google Messaging article. The feature has undergone many changes, so it's a bit hard to follow. The Google Maps Messaging button launched in 2017, when it would have been called "Google My Business Chat." This wasn't quite its own service yet—the messaging button would either launch your SMS app or boot into another dead Google messaging product, Google Allo!

Enlarge (credit: Samsung)

IFixit and Samsung were once leading the charge in device repair, but iFixit says it's ending its repair partnership with Samsung because it feels Samsung just isn't participating in good faith. iFixit says the two companies "have not been able to deliver" on the promise of a viable repair ecosystem, so it would rather shut the project down than continue. The repair site says "flashy press releases and ambitious initiatives don’t mean much without follow-through."

iFixit's Scott Head explains: "As we tried to build this ecosystem we consistently faced obstacles that made us doubt Samsung’s commitment to making repair more accessible. We couldn’t get parts to local repair shops at prices and quantities that made business sense. The part prices were so costly that many consumers opted to replace their devices rather than repair them. And the design of Samsung’s Galaxy devices remained frustratingly glued together, forcing us to sell batteries and screens in pre-glued bundles that increased the cost."

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  Samsung's screen replacement parts usually require buying the display, battery, phone frame, and buttons, which is a big waste. [credit: iFixit ]

A good example of Samsung's parts bundling is this Galaxy S22 Ultra "screen" part for $233. The screen is the most common part to break, but rather than just sell a screen, Samsung makes you buy the screen, a new phone frame, a battery, and new side buttons and switches. As we said when this was announced, that's like half of the total parts in an entire phone. This isn't a perfect metric, but the Samsung/iFixit parts store only offers three parts for the S22 Ultra, while the Pixel 8 Pro store has 10 parts, and the iPhone 14 Pro Max store has 23 parts.

Enlarge / The now-normal "AI" results versus the old-school "Web" results. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Google)

If you're tired of Google's AI Overview extracting all value from the web while also telling people to eat glue or run with scissors, you can turn it off—sort of. Google has been telling people its AI box at the top of search results is the future, and you can't turn it off, but that ignores how Google search works: A lot of options are powered by URL parameters. That means you can turn off AI search with this one simple trick! (Sorry.)

Our method for killing AI search is defaulting to the new "web" search filter, which Google recently launched as a way to search the web without Google's alpha-quality AI junk. It's actually pretty nice, showing only the traditional 10 blue links, giving you a clean (well, other than the ads), uncluttered results page that looks like it's from 2011. Sadly, Google's UI doesn't have a way to make "web" search the default, and switching to it means digging through the "more" options drop-down after you do a search, so it's a few clicks deep.

Check out the URL after you do a search, and you'll see a mile-long URL full of esoteric tracking information and mode information. We'll put each search result URL parameter on a new line so the URL is somewhat readable:

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  Ads in AI Overview. They're below the fold in this example. [credit: Google ]

Google's AI Overview is a complete transformation of what Google Search is, changing from a product that searches the web to show relevant links, to a place that scrapes the web of information and shows it directly to users. Google is not done making changes, though, and next for AI Overview is ads! We're all so excited.

The Google Ads & Commerce blog shows what this will look like, with ads landing at the bottom of the AI Overview box. The overview box was already a massive, screen-filling box, and ads make it even longer, pushing what's left of the web results even further down the page. Google's demo shows the ads at the bottom of the overview box, and you have to scroll down to see them.

Google's ad placement will surely be changed and tweaked a million times in the future, and Google mentions that "in early testing, we’ve heard that people find the ads appearing above and below the AI-generated overview helpful." Leaving aside the unique perspective that ads are "helpful," there's your confirmation of the usual above-the-fold ad placement.