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WhatsApp:

In addition to reading and responding to messages, for the first time WhatsApp on Apple Watch will now support many requested features:

• Call notifications: You can see who’s calling without needing to look at your iPhone.
• Full messages: You can read full WhatsApp messages on Apple Watch — even long messages are visible directly from your wrist.
• Voice messages: You can now record and send voice messages.
• React to messages: We’ve added the ability to send quick emoji reactions to messages you receive.
• A great media experience: You’ll see clear images and stickers on your Apple Watch.
• Chat history: You can see more of your chat history on screen when reading messages.

All of these features have long been available on the Apple Watch apps for Apple’s Messages and Phone apps. But it’s an interesting sign that Meta sees Apple Watch as an important platform for personal communication. Not just for notifications that you need to act upon using your phone, but for actually using on your watch itself. And I think it speaks to how hard Meta is pushing to make WhatsApp the new universal baseline for texting and calling. By keeping iMessage and FaceTime to its own devices, Apple has ceded this opportunity to WhatsApp, and Meta is trying to capitalize on it.

I know there are many people who spend time wearing their Apple Watch while away from their iPhone — often while working out — who want or even feel they need these features. For me though, one of the things I like least about wearing an Apple Watch is getting badgered on my wrist with notifications. I feel not so much like I need less screen time, but rather that I need less notifications time. I feel good when I have time where I’m unreachable by texts, calls, and news alerts. I spent my recent month-plus semi-hiatus wearing only a mechanical watch, and I didn’t miss the lack of notifications-on-my-wrist at all.

News from Apple’s Podcasts for Creators site, regarding new features in the iOS 26.2 beta releases:

When you supply chapters in your episode description or in your RSS feed, they display in Apple Podcasts. If you submit chapters through your hosting provider, you can include images. For shows in English, when chapters aren’t provided, Apple Podcasts generates them for you and an “Automatically created“ label appears in the chapter list. If you prefer not to use automatically created chapters, you can disable this feature in Apple Podcasts Connect. Learn more about chapters.

It’s unclear to me whether this feature is actually exclusive to iOS/iPhone, or will be available across Apple’s 26.2 OS releases. This strikes me as a great use of AI, but I also think most multi-topic podcasts should include human-created chapters.

Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge:

The details of how, when, and where Google would charge its fees are complicated, and they seem to be somewhat tailored to the needs of a game developer like Epic Games. Google can charge 20 percent for an in-app purchase that provides “more than a de minimis gameplay advantage,” for example, or 9 percent if the purchase does not. And while 9 percent sounds like it’s also the cap for apps and in-app subscriptions sold through Google Play, period, the proposal notes that that amount doesn’t include Google’s cut for Play Billing if you buy it through that payment system.

That cut will be 5 percent, Google spokesperson Dan Jackson tells The Verge, confirming that “This new proposed model introduces a new, lower fee structure for developers in the US and separates the service fee from fees for using Google Play Billing.” (For reference, Google currently charges 15 percent for subscriptions, 15 percent of the first $1M of developer revenue each year and 30 percent after that, though it also cuts special deals with some big developers.)

If you use an alternative payment system, Google might still get a cut: “the Google Play store is free to assess service fees on transactions, including when developers elect to use alternative billing mechanisms,” the proposal reads. But it sounds like that may not happen in practice: “If the user chooses to pay through an alternative billing system, the developer pays no billing fee to Google,” Jackson tells The Verge.

According to the document, Google would theoretically even be able to get its cut when you click out to an app developer’s website and pay for the app there, as long as it happens within 24 hours.

This seems as clear as mud, other than being music to Epic Games’s ears.

John Dvorak back in 2014, two months before Apple Watch was announced:

I got a lecture from a potential buyer, who will only purchase an iTime as a replacement for the iPhone rather than an accessory. But all evidence leads me to believe this device will be an accessory.

Doing that limits the appeal to people who were promised a sleeker gadget profile, which they desperately need, because they never manage to pare down anything. It’s tablet computing all over again.

If he’d meant that Apple Watch would be like the iPad, in terms of being a durable long-term many-billion-dollars-in-sales-per-quarter platform, he’d have been correct. But he meant that both were duds.

Dvorak is still writing, but alas, only occasionally.