Mobile

New York City Verizon customers complained about problems on Monday night as they experienced slow or intermittent internet connections reflected in this data from the connectivity trackers at Netblocks.

The number of reports on Downdetector had already been dropping, and Verizon spokesperson Ilya Hemlin confirmed it’s fixed in a statement sent to The Verge:

On Monday evening, some Fios customers in NYC briefly experienced intermittent network issues. The issue was quickly resolved and service is operating normally.

Update: The service is now back online.

Mosseri, who now heads up Instagram, talked a bit about the project in response to a post from our EIC Nilay Patel about the HTC First.

If you want to do some time-traveling, check out Dieter Bohn’s review from 2013.

Ryan Broderick of the excellent Garbage Day newsletter has a new podcast exploring “viral freakouts” like Tide Pods and NyQuil chicken. A recent episode featuring Michael Hobbes covers The Anxious Generation and the notion that smartphones have created a teen mental health crisis. It’s a good listen and a more nuanced discussion of the subject than anything in Haidt’s book.

The OhSnap Snap 4 is thinner than a camera bump, yet there’s so many more ways to use it than a PopSocket. While the earlier Snap 3 broke on my colleague Victoria, this new model is holding up great for us both. Plus, Best Buy’s got it for $27.99 right now. Watch my video for caveats, though!

Note: If you buy something from these links, we might get affiliate revenue.

Google, too, wouldn’t confirm or deny whether it worked with Samsung on the feature, which is now the target of a new Epic Games lawsuit against both companies.

Instead, Google tells The Verge that it’s “a meritless lawsuit”; Samsung tells us it plans to “vigorously contest Epic Game’s baseless claims.”

We want our kids to grow up in a world that’s better than this one. I grew up in an awesome world for developers and opportunity, the early days of Apple II computers and PCs, and anybody growing up, coming of age in this industry right now, is best case going to be an Apple and Google serf. That has to change. That must change.

Not surprising to hear the man behind “Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite” say this, but it really does encapsulate his war with the tech industry. More on the latest lawsuit here.

Not as fast as Epic might have hoped — it’s targeting 100 million by the end of the year — but CEO Tim Sweeney tells journalists that goal is still “totally achievable.”

Meanwhile, it’s suing Samsung and Google over the “Auto Blocker” feature that, by default, stops users from installing that store on new Samsung phones.

Balatro, the super popular to the point of active concern poker roguelike, is now available on mobile. The game went live earlier today on Apple Arcade / iOS, and after a brief technical issue with Google Play, is also available on Android.

I’m getting ready to dig in myself and I’m looking forward to future news stories lamenting a sudden drop in worker productivity.

The company is announcing the 14T and 14T Pro with an additional bit of news: the Xiaomi Mix Flip is coming to Europe. It’s Xiaomi’s first flip-style phone, offering a large 4.01-inch screen and a couple of Leica-branded cameras. It’s yet another cool phone not coming to the US.

In an interview with The Verge, Zuckerberg said phone makers like Apple and Google can do a lot with AI in phones that app developers can’t:

If I were at any of the other companies trying to design what the next few versions of iPhone or Google’s phones should be, I think that there’s a long and interesting roadmap of things that they can do with AI that, as an app developer, we can’t.

T-Mobile is invoking the major questions doctrine, which the Supreme Court strengthened in 2022, to explain why the FCC shouldn’t make companies unlock phones within 60 days of activation for use with other carriers. These are just comments, not a lawsuit — but they’re not hard to read as a signal of a potential future legal fight.