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 / 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 (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud's biggest blunders ever: Google's Amazon Web Services competitor accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. UniSuper thankfully had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data, but according to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15.

UniSuper's website is now full of must-read admin nightmare fuel about how this all happened. First is a wild page posted on May 8 titled "A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian." This statement reads, "Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed 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. This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."

In the next section, titled "Why did the outage last so long?" the joint statement says, "UniSuper had duplication in two geographies as a protection against outages and loss. However, when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies." Every cloud service keeps full backups, which you would presume are meant for worst-case scenarios. Imagine some hacker takes over your server or the building your data is inside of collapses, or something like that. But no, the actual worst-case scenario is "Google deletes your account," which means all those backups are gone, too. Google Cloud is supposed to have safeguards that don't allow account deletion, but none of them worked apparently, and the only option was a restore from a separate cloud provider (shoutout to the hero at UniSuper who chose a multi-cloud solution).

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

OpenAI is eventually coming for the most popular website on the Internet: Google Search. A Reuters report claimed that the company behind ChatGPT is planning to launch a search engine as early as this Monday, but OpenAI denied that Monday would be the day.

The company recently confirmed it's holding a livestream event on Monday, though, but an OpenAI rep told Ars that "Despite reports, we’re not launching a search product or GPT-5 on Monday." Either way, Monday is an interesting time for an OpenAI livestream. That's the day before Google's biggest show of the year, Google I/O, where Google will primarily want to show off its AI prowess and convince people that it is not being left in the dust by OpenAI. Google seeing its biggest search competition in years and suddenly having to face down "OpenAI's Google Killer" would have definitely cast a shadow over the show.

OpenAI has been inching toward a search engine for a while now. It has been working with Microsoft with a "Bing Chat" generative-AI search engine in Microsoft's search engine. Earlier this week, The Verge reported that "OpenAI has been aggressively trying to poach Google employees" for an upstart search team. "Search.chatgpt.com" is already being set up on OpenAI's server, so it's all falling into place.

Enlarge / The Samsung Watch 6 classic. (credit: Samsung)

Wear OS was nearly dead a few years ago but is now on a remarkable comeback trajectory, thanks to renewed commitment from Google and a hardware team-up with Samsung. Wear OS is still in a distant second place compared to the Apple Watch, but a new Counterpoint Research report has the wearable OS at 21 percent market share, with the OS expected to hit 27 percent in 2024.

Counterpoint's market segmentation for this report is basically "smartwatches with an app store," so it excludes cheaper fitness bands and other, more simple electronic watches. We're also focusing on the non-China market for now. The report has Apple's market share at 53 percent and expects it to fall to 49 percent in 2024. The "Other" category is at 26 percent currently. That "Other" group would have to be Garmin watches, a few remaining Fitbit smartwatches like the Versa and Ionic, and Amazfit watches. Counterpoint expects the whole market (including China) to grow 15 percent in 2024 and that a "major part" of the growth will be non-Apple watches. Counterpoint lists Samsung as the major Wear OS driver, with OnePlus, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Google getting shout-outs too.

2023 are actual numbers, while 2024 is a forecast. (credit: Counterpoint Research)

China is a completely different world, with Huawei's HarmonyOS currently dominating with 48 percent. Counterpoint expects the OS's smartwatch market share to grow to 61 percent this year. Under the hood, HarmonyOS-for-smartwatches is an Android fork, and for hardware, the company is gearing up to launch an Apple Watch clone. Apple is only at 28 percent in China, and Wear OS is relegated to somewhere in the "Other" category. There's no Play Store in China, so Wear OS is less appealing, but some Chinese brands like Xiaomi and Oppo are still building Wear OS watches.

Enlarge / The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra. That red ring around the camera lens is how far it moves. (credit: Huawei)

Huawei is still out there making phones, even if it has been shunned by the US government and the US-aligned tech ecosystem. The latest phone has a new name: "Huawei Pura 70." While you wouldn't ever want to deal with the cobbled-together SoC or whatever is going on with Huawei's software, the "Ultra" model does have a cool party trick up its sleeve: a pop-out main camera lens.

In the years before the smartphone took over all entry-level photography, there used to be a thing called a "point-and-shoot camera." This was a purpose-built device that only took photos, couldn't go on the Internet, and wouldn't let you watch the latest TikTok videos. The trademark feature of these devices was a retractable camera lens, where the front lens (there was only one!) would grow out of the front of the camera when you turned it on. This would give your camera better, longer lens geometry to work with when the camera was on, and would collapse down for easier storage when it was off.

Huawei's latest phone is replicating that. The giant rear camera lens actually grows out of the phone somewhat, thanks to some complicated gearing inside the phone. It's only the tiniest few millimeters, but it's a start. Smartphone manufacturers often resist adding bigger lenses to their devices because they want to still have pocketable devices. A pop-up lens would give the camera engineers more room to work with while still maintaining pocketability.

Enlarge / The bigger Pixel 8 Pro gets the latest AI features. The smaller model does not. (credit: Google)

If you believe Google's marketing hype, AI in a phone is really, really important, the best AI is Google's, and the best place to get that AI is Google's flagship smartphone, the Pixel 8. We're five months removed from the launch of the Pixel 8, and that doesn't seem like a justifiable position anymore: Google says its latest AI models can't run on the Pixel 8.

Google dropped that news in a Mobile World Congress wrap-up video that was spotted by Mishaal Rahman. At the end of the show in a Q&A session, Googler Terence Zhang, a member of the Gemini-on-Android team, said "[Gemini] Nano will not be coming to the Pixel 8 because of some hardware limitations. It's currently on the Pixel 8 Pro and very recently available on the Samsung S24 family. It'll be coming to more high-end devices in the near future."

That is a wild statement. Gemini is Google's latest AI model, and it made a big deal of the launch last month. Gemini comes in a few different sizes, and the smallest "Nano" size is specifically designed to run on smartphones as a much-hyped "on-device AI." The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro are Google's flagship smartphones. Google designed the phone and the chip and the AI model and somehow can't make these things play nice together?

Enlarge / The Figure 01 and a few spare parts. Obviously they are big fans of aluminum. (credit: Figure)

Humanoid robotics company Figure AI announced it raised $675 million in a funding round from an all-star cast of Big Tech investors. The company, which aims to commercialize a humanoid robot, now has a $2.6 billion valuation. Participants in the latest funding round include Microsoft, the OpenAI Startup Fund, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions, Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest. With all these big-name investors, Figure is officially Big Tech's favorite humanoid robotics company. The manufacturing industry is taking notice, too. In January, Figure even announced a commercial agreement with BMW to have robots work on its production line.

"In conjunction with this investment," the press release reads, "Figure and OpenAI have entered into a collaboration agreement to develop next generation AI models for humanoid robots, combining OpenAI's research with Figure's deep understanding of robotics hardware and software. The collaboration aims to help accelerate Figure's commercial timeline by enhancing the capabilities of humanoid robots to process and reason from language."

With all this hype and funding, the robot must be incredible, right? Well, the company is new and only unveiled its first humanoid "prototype," the "Figure 01," in October. At that time, the company said it represented about 12 months of work. With veterans from "Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Archer Aviation," the company has a strong starting point.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google went ahead with plans to launch Gemini for Workspace today. The big news is the pricing information, and you can see the Workspace pricing page is new, with every plan offering a "Gemini add-on." Google's old AI-for-Business plan, "Duet AI for Google Workspace," is dead, though it never really launched anyway.

Google has a blog post explaining the changes. Google Workspace starts at $6 per user per month for the "Starter" package, and the AI "Add-on," as Google is calling it, is an extra $20 monthly cost per user (all of these prices require an annual commitment). That is a massive price increase over the normal Workspace bill, but AI processing is expensive. Google says this business package will get you "Help me write in Docs and Gmail, Enhanced Smart Fill in Sheets and image generation in Slides." It also includes the "1.0 Ultra" model for the Gemini chatbot—there's a full feature list here. This $20 plan is subject to a usage limit for Gemini AI features of "1,000 times per month."

The new Workspace pricing page, with a "Gemini Add-On" for every plan. (credit: Google)

Gemini for Google Workspace represents a total rebrand of the AI business product and some amount of consistency across Google's hard-to-follow, constantly changing AI branding. Duet AI never really launched to the general public. The product, announced in August, only ever had a "Try" link that led to a survey, and after filling it out, Google would presumably contact some businesses and allow them to pay for Duet AI. Gemini Business now has a checkout page, and any Workspace business customer can buy the product today with just a few clicks.

Enlarge / The iPhone 14. (credit: Apple)

Counterpoint has a new report on the top-selling phone models of 2023, and for the first time, the top seven sold models for the year are all iPhones. The report tracks worldwide sales of individual smartphone models, and while hundreds of new phones are released yearly, Counterpoint says this top-10 list represents a whopping 20 percent of the worldwide market.

The top three spots are all the iPhone 14 models, with the cheaper base model taking the top spot. 2023 saw the release of the iPhone 15, but only in September 2023. The iPhone 15 models rocketed to spots 5, 6, and 7 with only about three months of sales. Sandwiched in between the 14 and 15 models at No. 4 is the iPhone 13, the cheapest modern-looking iPhone Apple sells.

Counterpoint's 2023 smartphone chart. (credit: Counterpoint)

The actual cheapest iPhone, the iPhone SE, didn't make the list this year. The dated design and (maybe?) small size isn't resonating with consumers, and right now, the rumor mill suggests Apple won't be making another SE. The 2022 version of this report included the SE, so eight of the top 10 devices were Apple phones, but a Samsung phone crept in at spot No. 4.

Enlarge / The Google Gemini logo. (credit: Google)

One of Google's most lucrative businesses consists of packaging its free consumer apps with a few custom features and extra security and then selling them to companies. That's usually called "Google Workspace," and today it offers email, calendar, docs, storage, and video chat. Soon, it sounds like Google is gearing up to offer an AI chatbot for businesses. Google's latest chatbot is called "Gemini" (it used to be "Bard"), and the latest early patch notes spotted by Dylan Roussei of 9to5Google and TestingCatalog.eth show descriptions for new "Gemini Business" and "Gemini Enterprise" products.

The patch notes say that Workspace customers will get "enterprise-grade data protections" and Gemini settings in the Google Workspace Admin console and that Workspace users can "use Gemini confidently at work" while "trusting that your conversations aren't used to train Gemini models."

These "early patch notes" for Bard/Gemini have been a thing for a while now. Apparently, some people have ways of making the site spit out early patch notes, and in this case, they were independently confirmed by two different people. I'm not sure the date (scheduled for February 21) is trustworthy, though.

Enlarge / The indoor/outdoor, battery-powered (or wired) Google Nest Cam with battery.

Google's "Nest Aware" camera subscription is going through another round of price increases. This time it's for international users. There's no big announcement or anything, just a smattering of email screenshots from various countries on the Nest subreddit. 9to5Google was nice enough to hunt down a pile of the announcements.

Nest Aware is a monthly subscription fee for Google's Nest cameras. Nest cameras exclusively store all their video in the cloud, and without the subscription, you aren't allowed to record video 24/7. There are two sets of subscriptions to keep track of: the current generation subscription for modern cameras and the "first generation Nest Aware" subscription for older cameras. To give you an idea of what we're dealing with, in the US, the current free tier only gets you three hours of "event" video—meaning video triggered by motion detection. Even the basic $8-a-month subscription doesn't get you 24/7 recording—that's still only 30 days of event video. The "Nest Aware Plus" subscription, at $15 a month in the US, gets you 10 days of 24/7 video recording.

The "first-generation" Nest Aware subscription, which is tied to earlier cameras and isn't available for new customers anymore, is doubling in price in Canada. The basic tier of five days of 24/7 video is going from a yearly fee of CA$50 to CA$110 (the first-generation sub has 24/7 video on every tier). Ten days of video is jumping from CA$80 to CA$160, and 30 days is going from CA$110 to CA$220. These are the prices for a single camera; the first-generation subscription will have additional charges for additional cameras. The current Nest Aware subscription for modern cameras is getting jumps that look similar to the US, with Nest Aware Plus, the mid-tier, going from CA$16 to CA $20 per month, and presumably similar raises across the board.