The best apps download superpowers to your smartphone. The Verge covers the new and noteworthy Android apps, iPhone apps, and games, highlighting great design, impressive utility, and novel features. If it belongs on your phone, you’ll find it on The Verge.
The highlights: Beeper is “gradually” deprecating Beeper Cloud in favor of connecting directly to other messaging networks, and there’s a new Beeper Plus subscription tier with some useful features. You can get an idea of the updates in bento box below or read all the details in Beeper’s blog post.
The new app, called Candl, puts your contacts’ birthdays into a single calendar where you can track and sort through upcoming birthdays, as well as see whose astrological sign you’re most compatible with, as reported by TechCrunch.
Candl can also help you “grow your birthday network.” If you don’t have a contact’s birthday, but one of your mutual friends does, their birthday will surface in your app.
Meaning founder and former Verge reporter Ellis Hamburger on the ethical vacuum in AI and what founders aren’t saying publicly.
The new iOS app is called Capture and is coming first to test markets such as Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, Bloomberg reports. It’s set to become available in the US later this summer.
The head of Hinge on AI, monetization, and the future of online dating.
Yesterday, a global outage on the Google Cloud platform knocked out Google Home, Spotify, Snapchat, and even some Cloudflare features, and today the company released a mini incident report as it continues to investigate.
For Cloudflare’s part, its report says the Google failure took out a central data store for one of its services.
From our initial analysis, the issue occurred due to an invalid automated quota update to our API management system which was distributed globally, causing external API requests to be rejected. To recover we bypassed the offending quota check, which allowed recovery in most regions within 2 hours. However, the quota policy database in us-central1 became overloaded, resulting in much longer recovery in that region.
