Alphabet Inc. subsidiary Google is set to appoint manufacturing and policy veteran Sreenivasa Reddy as its top government affairs executive in India to tackle legal challenges and expand hardware assembly to the country. Sankalp Phartiyal for Bloomberg News: Reddy, currently a senior engineering executive at Microsoft Corp., is likely to join Google toward the end of this year, people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified as the matter is private. He previously worked in senior positions at Apple Inc.’s India regulatory team and headed government relations at the local unit of Swedish telecom-gear maker Ericsson AB, helping to drive domestic manufacturing at both companies. Reddy’s experience will come in handy at Google, which is scouting for…

Macworld The long-running legal dispute between Apple and Epic Games finally reached a verdict two years ago. But the battle, which began when Epic bypassed Apple’s 30 percent cut for in-app purchases and Apple responded by booting Fortnite out of the App Store, is far from over. And now it’s headed to the highest court in the land. Given that Apple hailed Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ 2021 ruling as “a huge win,” it was no surprise when Epic filed an appeal. Less predictably, Apple appealed too. In a filing this week, Apple attorneys argued that the court overreached in issuing a broad nationwide injunction applying to all developers, rather than just Epic. Maybe it wasn’t such a huge win after…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge If you’ve got an active Google account — or especially if you’ve got one you haven’t used in a while — you’ve probably got more apps and services hooked up to your account than you realize. There are all those places where you’ve “signed in with Google,” all those browser extensions you’ve given permissions to, all those add-ons that you’ve installed on top of Gmail and Google Drive, and so on. While it’s always a good idea to be selective and cautious in choosing which apps and sites get these privileges, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using your Google account instead of an email address and password combination or in giving another app…

Apple’s next-gen iPhone operating system, iOS 17, due this fall, will feature an update to autocorrect, powered by AI, that will no longer change the F-word to “duck.” Caroline Mimbs Nyce for The Atlantic: Apple’s much-maligned spelling software is getting upgraded by artificial intelligence: Using sophisticated language models, the new autocorrect won’t just check words against a dictionary, but will be able to consider the context of the word in a sentence. The next generation of autocorrect was one of several small updates to the iPhone experience that Apple announced earlier this month. The Photos app will be able to differentiate between your dog and other dogs, automatically recognizing your pup the same way it recognizes people who frequently appear…

The Japanese government is looking to force Apple to allow third-party app stores for iPhone and, presumably, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and even Apple Vision when it hits the market. The Japan Times: A government panel Friday drew up a set of regulations aimed at opening up the smartphone app stores of U.S. technology giants Apple and Google to competition. The two companies dominating the smartphone operating system market will be obliged to allow their users to download apps by using services other than their own app stores. The government hopes that the move will spur competition and lead to app price drops. MacDailyNews Take: The average prices for apps in the Apple App Store as of May 2023…

Illustration by Samar Haddad / The Verge When you read a review of a smartphone, you will usually be hit with a long list of screen specs: the display type, its dimensions and aspect ratio, its resolution in pixels, its HDR support (or lack of it), and its brightness, for example. Too often, it’s assumed that everyone understands the significance of each of these specs. So in this article, we’re going to focus on the basics of the refresh rate, which you’ll see in the specs of monitors and TVs as well. It tells you how many times the display is refreshed per second, typically measured in Hz (hertz). In other words, a 90Hz display refreshes itself 90 times a…