New federal law targets deepfake porn, non-consensual image sharing
HOUSTON - A new bipartisan law signed by President Donald Trump aims to crack down on the growing threat of deepfake images and revenge porn, offering new protections to victims of non-consensual image sharing (NCCIs).
The "Take It Down Act," co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, criminalizes the distribution of intimate images without a person's consent — including AI-generated or digitally altered content.
"The Take It Down Act is an historic win for victims of revenge porn and deepfake image abuse," Senator Cruz wrote in a Monday post on X. "Predators who weaponize new technology to post this exploitative filth will now rightfully face criminal consequences, and Big Tech will no longer be allowed to turn a blind eye to the spread of this vile material."
Sharing sexually explicit images without consent is now a federal crime.
Deepfake and AI-generated explicit imagery are included in the legislation's scope.
Online platforms are required to remove flagged content within 48 hours.
Violators face up to three years in prison, hefty fines, and may also be subject to civil lawsuits from victims seeking damages.
The legislation passed both chambers of Congress with broad bipartisan support amid rising concerns over the misuse of artificial intelligence to create realistic but fake explicit content. Advocates say it fills critical gaps left by many state-level laws, which often don't cover manipulated or synthetic media.
Tech experts, however, warn the new rules could present significant enforcement challenges.
"It seems like a good idea on the surface, but it could be a nightmare to implement," said Juan Guevera-Torres, a Houston-based tech expert. "There are real questions about who decides what qualifies as a deepfake and whether this could lead to unintended censorship."
Still, supporters say the law is overdue.
The law has particular relevance in states like Texas, where cases of minors being targeted with explicit content have drawn national attention in recent years.
Online platforms found in violation of the 48-hour removal requirement could also face legal consequences, intensifying pressure on social media companies and content hosts to respond swiftly to reports of alleged abuse.
The Source
Fox 26 gathered information from recent press conferences including Senator Ted Cruz, President Trump and tech expert Juan Guevera-Torres.
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CNN
10 minutes ago
- CNN
Can Protestors Manufacture a Tipping Point? - The Assignment with Audie Cornish - Podcast on CNN Audio
Protest Noise 00:00:00 No more deportation! Just us go! Audie Cornish 00:00:05 It's been about a full week of protests and demonstrations against the ongoing immigration raids in L.A. Protestors 00:00:11 Get the f*** out of here! You guys are bad people! Period! Audie Cornish 00:00:17 'All of this ahead of President Trump's planned military parade on the streets of Washington, D.C. This weekend. It's the largest military parade the city's seen in decades, complete with dozens of tanks, about 7,000 soldiers, and a price tag potentially in the tens of millions of dollars. Now this celebration falls on the Army's 250th birthday and the president's birthday. No surprise, it's an event that's also drawn its share of opposition. In fact, in cities across the country, organizers are planning a No Kings protest. It's being billed as a nationwide day of defiance and the biggest single-day anti-Trump protest since the start of his second term. President Donald Trump 00:01:01 And we're going to be celebrating big on Saturday. We're going have a lot of... And if there's any protest that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force. By the way, for those people that want to protest, they're going be met very big force. And I haven't even heard about a protest. But, you know, this is people that hate our country. But they will met with a very heavy force. Audie Cornish 00:01:22 Now organizers started working on this long before the response to ICE out in LA, but I wanted to talk to them about what they're thinking now. Leah Greenberg 00:01:32 'We are working very closely with our folks to make sure that people are really trained and careful around security, around safety, around de-escalation, clear on non-violent principles. We want people to bring their kids. We want to bring people to their dogs. We want create, in these moments, a sense of community and support and care for each other. Audie Cornish 00:01:52 'Leah Greenberg is a co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive group, The Indivisible Project. How are they preparing? Are they changing their strategy in light of President Trump's willingness to use military force on US soil? I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment. Audie Cornish 00:02:14 'So just for people to understand, Indivisible has been around for a few years now, going back to the first Trump administration. Can you talk about, just so we have a sense of a tiny bit of that history, because I understand that in your mind, you had just experienced the kind of Tea Party protests, you were a legislative staffer, and all of a sudden you have this right-wing populist movement that spawned not just protests then, but senators and lawmakers and energy that politically we all live with now. What was it that you saw then that struck you? Leah Greenberg 00:02:55 'Well, so my husband, who's also my co-executive director at Invisible Night, we were congressional staffers during the early Obama years, which meant that we saw both the triumphs, like passing the Affordable Care Act, and the real frustrations of a legislative agenda that was bogged down by ferocious local opposition led by this movement of the Tea Party. And we got a lot of up close and personal interactions with those folks as congressional staffors. In 2016, when Donald Trump was elected and when we were suddenly watching everything that we had ever worked on and on the verge of being swept away by this incoming administration, as we were watching this rise of white Christian nationalism and authoritarianism, and as we are frankly seeing a democratic party that did not seem prepared to deal with any of it, we kind of like went back to those lessons. We were seeing this massive surge of people looking for answers for what to do. We were getting asked by previously non-political friends, like, how do I organize? Can I do this? Can I to that? And we decided that we were gonna take the lessons that we had learned from our own interactions with the Tea Party from their model. We were gonna to take out the racism and the bigotry and the violence, and we were going to turn it into a how to guide for people all over the country who are trying to figure out what is my power? How do I organized? How do make my voice heard to stop this? Audie Cornish 00:04:14 Trump menace. What is it that was specific about what the tea party air quotes had done? Because it also, I remember covering it, it started chaotically. Despite everyone's sort of determination that, oh the Koch brothers had astroturfed this and this was somehow a movement that was just like completely planned, in a lot of ways it wasn't. It was a coalition of fractious smaller groups that came together or maybe were backed by donors. But it was messy at first and it came together into something. What was it that you experienced that you wanted to replicate? Well, I first, I think... Leah Greenberg 00:04:50 'Absolutely right about that. It was messy and it was organic. I think that the lessons are actually capable of being adapted from either side. The Tea Party took much of their own organizing theory from Saul Alinsky, right? So we see the kind of like original left-wing community organizing getting repurposed by the Tea Party in their own theory of how to organize locally and then kind of pulling from what we had seen about how they operated. Audie Cornish 00:05:15 The reason why I'm asking that is because over the last decade or two, there were Occupy Wall Street, there was the Black Lives Matter mass movement, never mind the prior few years of backlashes that were city to city to policing. There have been all kinds of progressive street protest movements in the last few years and arguably none have been as successful as the Tea Party. Even indivisible, out raise the Tea Party, you know, and fundraising for a time, like, I don't have an Occupy Wall Street Senator, so to speak, you know, I don t have, there isn't a Ted Cruz and a Mike Lee or any of those folks that have permeated the politics. And so I'm trying to understand, based on what you learned from them, what do you think a movement should look like? And what do you consider success? Leah Greenberg 00:06:10 So what I tell people when I'm trying to recruit is that Indivisible is a movement for people who understand that politics is too important to be left up to the politicians and understand that when we come together and when we understand our own power, then we actually have far more than we think. Audie Cornish 00:06:25 And you tell them, if we do this, and if you do this with me, this is what we can achieve. What is the this? Leah Greenberg 00:06:33 What we can achieve is going to change based on the moment, right? We were born out of a moment of reaction. And so the initial conversation that we had with our folks, the initial guide we had that went viral and led to the formation of thousands of invisible groups was really about how you organize sustainable local infrastructure and then deploy a set of tactics that are designed to use leverage in relation to your elected officials right? Audie Cornish 00:06:55 So how you get people to leave their house, get together in groups, and take concrete, measurable action. Leah Greenberg 00:07:02 That's right. That's gonna change over time, right? Once you got communities of people together who are in motion, they found a ton of other things to do that were not in the original Indivisible Guide, right. Audie Cornish 00:07:13 And they had their own goals and their own ideas. Leah Greenberg 00:07:16 Absolutely, absolutely. And so, and we think that's good, right, because fundamentally, you know, we're not gonna get to scale on the kind of collective people power that we need in this country via nonprofits funded by grants, right we actually need to have. Audie Cornish 00:07:30 'Right, but the Tea Party found a way to focus, so that's what I'm asking about, finding a way to focus when you have lots of little groups. Sometimes, as a reporter, when I'm covering an organized protest, not a riot or a response, I notice there are so many different signs for so many different things. And as a result, sometimes you're not sure what you're looking at. You have a vague sense that it's left and left-leaning, but you're like, I don't know what they want in this moment. Leah Greenberg 00:07:59 You know, that can be a challenge. And especially in a moment like this, when just quite candidly, I could spend the rest of the conversation here just listing the number of harms and horrors that people are experiencing as a result of this administration. And so it is definitely one of the challenges around how do you maintain clarity about the core meta story that you are telling? Audie Cornish 00:08:20 Core meta story. Say that again. What value is that? The core meta story? Leah Greenberg 00:08:26 Well, I mean, humans understand the world through stories and frames much more than they understand it through policy positions, right? The right wing has a core story. It is the bad government is more focused on delivering for an other, sometimes a racialized other, sometimes a gender or sexuality based other, but some kind of other group than they are on you and they are hurting you in order to give benefits for immigrants for. Like trans people for people, right? This is the core story that the right wing uses and they plug everything that they're doing into some version of that story in order to distract from the fact that they are, in fact, a political movement dedicated to extracting wealth from the government to deliver it back to their donors. Now, on the left, like that core story can get harder to tell, right, like we are trying to construct something. Right now. Audie Cornish 00:09:17 Right now, I mean honestly, what is it? Leah Greenberg 00:09:20 'What it is right now. Well, the core story that we want people to understand right now, and I'm going to be clear, this is about the moment that we are in, not about the long-term and aspirational vision that we collectively need to build together, is this administration, this regime, they are out of control. They are wrecking the things that we care about, whether that is our services, whether that are our rights, whether it is the things that may give us the ability to live safe and healthy and dignified lives in this country. And they are doing it to benefit themselves. It's those three pieces, right? That they are seizing power for themselves, they are taking the things that we care about and they're doing it all to benefit themself. And that they know that this is not popular, they know this is the kind of stuff that will get checked in a democratic and accountable society. And so they're knocking out the checks and the balances that would normally stop someone from seizing power, implementing policies that hurt people and doing it benefit themselves Audie Cornish 00:10:15 'What's interesting to me is that, that story you've just told is not different from the story you might've told during the first Trump administration. In the second Trump administration, they're just taking everything further. So there's a lot to unpack there. Number one, second Trump Administration. Despite your organizing, despite your fundraising, despite the spread of sort of an anti-Trump non-profit infrastructure. He came to power again with the support of swing voters. And number two, the things you are now asking people to turn out for, they've heard and have been hearing for a long time. So what do you feel that you learned from the first time around? Leah Greenberg 00:11:01 We understood our job as the folks who were building this grassroots infrastructure, who were organizing. What we wanted to do was build the kind of popular opposition that would get Donald Trump out of office and then achieve the kind systemic reforms and accountability that would prevent him from getting back into power. And our movement was really aligned on the fact that we collectively were not, you know, our end goal was not getting him out. It was actually getting voting rights. It was getting structural democracy reform. It was seeing accountability for the perpetrators of January 6th. We were not the only deciders on what got on the agenda and how it moved. Audie Cornish 00:11:39 In the Biden years. But as a protest, go back to that list, because those things didn't come to pass in a lot of way, right? The voting rights thing you brought up, but even January 6, as all of them have now been pardoned. Yeah, it sounds like you identified specifically the things that didn't really pan out, if they were your even personal goals for the organization. Leah Greenberg 00:12:02 Well, I would say they were collectible movement goals. I think that there was actually a very clear thread that we were pulling out from across people who were organizing throughout this time that they got activated by Donald Trump, but they recognized very quickly that Donald Trump was a symptom, not a cause, right? That he was a manifestation of broader political forces around polarization, around kind of the longer term struggle for democracy in this country. And so there was there was broad support for a kind of like we actually can't just get him out We have to like fix the system in ways that makes democracy deliver for other people Audie Cornish 00:12:36 The reason why I'm asking all of these questions is because for a time when I was covering the South, the story that I sort of came to understand about the civil rights movement, the black civil rights movements of the late 60s and the moment when that became more multiracial is there were moments where protests could turn violent. There were moments when nonviolent protests was met with violence and that that was The goal, right? Before we had viral moments, we had people say to the Children's March in Birmingham, you may have to put yourself in harm's way so people understand what, quote unquote, we are dealing with here with segregationists in the South. You're going to be harmed doing that. I don't know if people are prepared to do all that today. And so what does that mean? For inviting people out into the streets to protest, like this weekend, when all week they've been watching on the news, a government that is prepared to respond violently. Leah Greenberg 00:13:48 'Well, it's a question we take enormously seriously, and also it's the question where we understand the answer cannot be to simply go along in advance, right? You know, we've got about 1900 events around the country. We have been doing intensive safety and deescalation training, both for hosts and making trainings available for attendees, including traditional know your rights, but also more intensive around, you know, how do you handle various kinds of scenarios? And escalations in the event of law enforcement, in the even of counter protests, in the events of agitators. We take those responsibilities to prepare people to have these events enormously seriously. And so we're in regular contact and support with the organizers of these events all over the country. Now, what I would say in terms of, how do you talk to people about risk in this moment is we can't, we're not gonna tell people that there's no risk. We're not going to tell people there's not reason to be concerned. And what we are going to say is that we are collectively going to be more powerful together. We are collectively going to embrace that commitment to nonviolence, right? We understand that it's gonna be really, really important for us collectively to show up in a nonviolent, as a non-violent movement. And we are working very closely with our folks to make sure that people are really trained and careful around security, around safety, around deescalation, clear on nonviolent principles. And we think that's a really important part of creating the conditions for bringing out as many people as possible. Audie Cornish 00:15:17 'I'm talking with Leah Greenberg. She's a co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive group, The Indivisible Project. Audie Cornish 00:15:25 I know that there are a lot of progressive activists who look at the choices that the Biden administration made when they came to office and were frustrated, right? Like that they somehow didn't carry forward some of the energy that had been in the streets. What's one thing you regret or you wish you did differently during that time? Leah Greenberg 00:15:47 'Yeah, I've thought about this a lot, and I have a really simple answer, which is that I think that after January 6th, everyone should have recognized that the most important thing that we could do was meaningful accountability for perpetrators and that that would require some political capital. That would require some reprioritization that- Audie Cornish 00:16:09 The average person, what do you mean by that? Because we know investigators went after them. Leah Greenberg 00:16:13 So what is it that you regret? So I think that there were decisions that we made as an advocacy community to prioritize the legislative agenda, right? We needed to go full force campaigning for a stimulus and relief package. We needed it to go, full force fighting for voting rights and structural Marx reform, full force for the Build Back Better package. And there was kind of a perception, I think for many folks, that the kind of political capital required to go. Fast on prosecutions and to really prioritize them in a way that the Merrick Garland Justice Department didn't, to prioritize a meaningful effort at a second impeachment, et cetera, that those were distractions from the ability to move key policy priorities. And I think that— Audie Cornish 00:16:52 So people said, let the law enforcement guys deal with January 6th. We don't need to spend time Leah Greenberg 00:17:00 Yeah, I mean, I think I think that collectively, you know, and again, oh, and I say this, I mean, me, I means everybody who made decisions about what we were talking to activists about and I mean democratic leadership. I think collectively, we needed to recognize that part of how you pull a democracy out of this, this descent into authoritarianism is you actually create some meaningful consequences for people who have attempted a violent coup. And the fact that we didn't do that. Created the conditions for Donald Trump to slink off, kind of lick his wounds for a little while, and for his movement to regroup and to reassert itself. And so fundamentally, I think it's a lesson that we all collectively have to take about the balance of what is necessary to ultimately pull out of a democratic backslide. Audie Cornish 00:17:49 That's interesting in the context of the way the administration is now using the word insurrectionist to describe people in L.A. on the street, right? Yeah, in a way you're saying that that word doesn't have the same consequences it might have. Leah Greenberg 00:18:04 Well, I think there's an enormously painful irony to the fact that Donald Trump, when asked to call out any kind of support for people who were under attack in the Capitol on January 6th, was notably unwilling to do so compared to his willingness to send in the National Guard over the objections of literally everybody in California in order to instigate his preferred brand of manufactured chaos. Audie Cornish 00:18:29 But I want to follow up on your idea, because you just said something I'd never heard before, which is you said we, as a movement, you use your political capital on legislation, big legislative goals, and not punishing and accountability for the actions of folks out of that movement on January 6th, and that maybe that would have been a more valuable place to spend your time. Am I hearing that correctly? Leah Greenberg 00:18:57 'I think there were certainly prosecutions of some of the people who were actually in the mob on January 6th. There was not a high level prioritization of accountability for the senior leadership who egged that on and who refused to intervene. When we look at what is the theory of the case around how democracies emerged from period of authoritarianism. Part of it has to be accountability for the people who have broken the law, who have attempted to seize power extra-legally. And there was a decision, and I think it's relatively similar to the decisions that were made after the Bush administration around Guantanamo too, there was the decision to kind of turn the page and move forward and not to prioritize the kind of accountability that would have meaningfully shifted the political landscape as of 2023, as of 2024. Audie Cornish 00:19:54 So what do you wish you did differently? Leah Greenberg 00:19:56 I wish I had said that at the time. I wish that we had collectively as a broader movement been willing to say, we can't simply turn a page. We actually have to address what just happened. People, these are the things that have happened and we can simply keep moving. Audie Cornish 00:20:12 To me, it seems like you're in a new landscape. You're in the landscape where more people have actually turned out to protest in a lot of ways in some cities. They've had that experience maybe in the last seven, eight years in some major cities. So why would they do it again? What is it that you're telling them now? One of the reasons why they may be feeling dispirited is not just because of the opposition, so to speak, not just of how the government is reacting, but because they actually feel like there was no significant change on the issues they cared about from those past protests. Leah Greenberg 00:20:48 'Yeah, so here's how I would talk about it. I'm going to say, I'm gonna do two versions of this, right? Okay, so I think we have a short-term crisis, which is that there is a would-be authoritarian who's rapidly running through every page of the authoritarian playbook, and we have to halt the democratic collapse that we are seeing. And then I think, we have longer-term crises, which is we have have a democracy that actually delivers for people in a way that they are invested in it because they experience it as something that is making their life better. That was not a test that this democracy passed in 2024, right? We know that we lost folks, not because they were like all in on Donald Trump. He has his core base, but we lost some set of folks who were simply so frustrated with the status quo, who had experienced the last four years as not what they needed, not what their, not making their own personal lives better, and who did not experience appeals to institutions or appeals to kind of abstract ideas about protecting democracy as relevant to. Or as more persuasive, then simply it's time for a change. And so we have a long-term challenge, which is about how do you actually break through that level of cynicism, and that's gotta be involved like actually having the systems and the structures for democracy that can deliver for people meaningfully in a way that they feel in their lives. Audie Cornish 00:22:01 It sounds like you're needing the people who might most believe in that era of invincibility to break that spell themselves. Or is it your visibility that helps break that spell, that helps make people feel less like, well, this is how things are. Leah Greenberg 00:22:19 'I think it's going to be a lot of things, right? Like breaking the aura of inevitability involves a thousand acts of individual courage or organizing or non-cooperation, right. It looks like people showing up to protest Elon Musk's actions at Tesla dealerships. It looks like students at Georgetown organizing a spreadsheet of big law collaborators and saying clear of these people. It looks like a boycott of Target for being one of the core corporations that threw out its DEI policies, in order to do the administration's bidding, it's going to look like a bunch of different societal, individual, and organized reactions that collectively create the conditions for courage across our country. It's going involve a lot of people doing something that the regime does not want them to do or not doing something it wants them to do. We won't even know the names of everybody who has done that across government, across institutions, across our own movements, but that is what it ultimately takes to start to build back conditions to recover democratic function. Audie Cornish 00:23:25 What are your hopes for the Monday after this weekend? What would you like to see, and do you see this moment as a turning point? Leah Greenberg 00:23:35 I would like us to get a surprising number of people in a surprising number of places out and I think it's worth noting that we've seen obviously very, very large protests in, in blue states and cities, but we're also seeing really significant turnout in places that you or I would think of like as quite red and quite conservative. I would for this to be understood as a moment in which Donald Trump attempted to send tanks to Washington DC, attempted to deploy troops to California and was collectively and roundly rejected by Americans for his fascist theatrics, for his attempts to harm our communities. I would like us to collectively harness the kind of political opposition that forces them to back off what they are doing to our immigrant communities and our immigrant neighbors. We want them to recognize that they have to back down from what they're doing. And then we wanna continue to build the conditions for courage across our society so that we mount that broader pushback against authoritarianism. Audie Cornish 00:24:38 'That was Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of The Indivisible Project. They are organizing No King's Day protests this upcoming weekend. 00:24:52 The Assignment is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Grace Walker and Lori Galarreta with assistance from Jesse Remedios and Madeleine Thompson. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is executive producer of CNN audio. We had support from Dan Bloom, Haley Thomas, Alex Manassari, Robert Mathers, Jon Dionora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Anderus, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow.
Android Authority
17 minutes ago
- Android Authority
After three days with iOS 26, I'm amazed by Apple's Liquid Glass redesign, but I have concerns
Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority The biggest buzz at WWDC 2025 was around Apple's spanking new Liquid Glass interface. From a unified year-based naming scheme for its platforms to what might be the most extensive visual overhaul to iOS in years, iOS 26 marks a significant shift in Apple's software approach. But is there substance beneath the divisive shiny sheen? I dove into the developer betas to give it a try. Let me preface this by saying this first beta is very buggy, and I wouldn't recommend installing it on your primary phone. Still, if you're eager to explore it, just go to the 'Software Update' section under Settings and select 'Beta Updates.' That's all it takes. Since last year, Apple has dramatically simplified the beta sign-up process. Regardless, I'd highly recommend waiting for next month's public beta before installing the update. With that said, here are some of the most significant additions to iOS 26. Liquid Glass: The most dramatic design overhaul since iOS 7 Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority Apple's biggest change this year is the introduction of a new design language called Liquid Glass. If you're a design enthusiast or have experience in web design, you're likely familiar with glassmorphism. Liquid Glass builds on that aesthetic and makes extensive use of transparency and floating elements. More importantly, this redesign spans every Apple platform from the iPhone to the iPad, Mac, Watch, TV, and even Vision Pro. It's Apple's first real attempt to unify the visual language across its entire ecosystem. Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority In practice, Liquid Glass means layers of translucent color, soft reflections, and depth that shift as you interact with your device. It's playful, dramatic, and distinctly Apple — for better or worse. The Home Screen shows this off best. App icons appear like digital glass, glinting based on the background. You'll notice bubble-like UI elements across the Photos app, the Fitness App, and even the Camera. On the Lock Screen and in Control Center, most flat backgrounds are now translucent layers. It's a subtle but impactful shift that makes everything feel like it's floating rather than just sitting on top of your wallpaper. Readability suffers under all that transparency — especially in Control Center. In day-to-day use, not everything works perfectly yet. Transparency can hurt readability, especially in Control Center when it overlaps busy apps like the music player. The Lock Screen has similar issues. Some animations also feel inconsistent. The interface tweaks continue on to the browser, where you now get a near-full-screen view of the webpage with glass-inspired elements that pop out. Similar to the rest of the interface, there is ample reason to be concerned about readability (especially for those with accessibility needs), and your experience is entirely dependent on the background. Still, this is early beta territory, and Apple typically refines this by the time of public release. Despite the mixed public consensus, I quite like the general direction that Apple is taking here. The interface looks futuristic to a fault, like something straight out of an Apple TV science fiction show, and I'm personally here for it. But even at this early stage, it is clear that a lot of pain points need to be addressed before the public rollout this September. The new camera experience Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority The Camera app, too, has received a major, and much-needed, overhaul. In fact, this is the first time in years that Apple has rethought the camera UI from the ground up. While the basics remain the same, Apple has refined the layout to provide quicker access to controls. The refreshed interface makes it easy to swipe between modes like photos, videos, portrait, and more with a single swipe along the bottom edge. This feels intuitive and much more useful when composing shots. Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority Similarly, a subtle but welcome touch is how Apple now surfaces adjustments. In some ways, the Camera app has finally gained the 'Pro' mode users have been waiting for. Features such as switching between different recording settings, LOG video, and camera resolution are infinitely more straightforward to access. While it's nowhere close to the level of Pro mode features in the best Android camera phones or dedicated third-party camera apps, it's a good compromise for casual enthusiasts who desire more control without sacrificing simplicity. A side effect of these changes is that the overwhelming amount of animations and floating elements makes the interface feel slower than it is, with everything taking just half a second too long. I can't say for sure if Apple will allow for toned-down animations, but as it stands, the floaty feeling of the UI wears you down pretty quickly. Apple Intelligence everywhere It's fair to say that Apple's initial AI push has been somewhat underwhelming. When Apple Intelligence was announced last year, well behind the competition, it distinguished itself with a strong promise of privacy. A year later, a large portion of last year's promised features are still unavailable, making it difficult to take Apple's 2025 claims entirely seriously. Regardless, among the newly announced features is deeper integration with the entire suite of on-device communication apps. Moreover, this year, Apple is opening up access to its on-device LLM to third-party developers. That is bound to open up some very interesting and innovative use cases. In Messages, FaceTime, and the Phone app, Live Translation now enables real-time language translation of both text and audio. It functions within message threads and during calls, providing quick responses without requiring you to leave the app. I couldn't find a way to activate the feature in the beta. Apple Intelligence still lags in effectiveness despite the interesting platter of system-wide integrations. Similarly, Visual Intelligence now understands what's on your screen and can surface related results, links, or suggestions. For instance, if someone sends you a product image, you can ask the on-device intelligence to show you similar items from the web or pull up information about it without ever leaving the thread. Think of it as Apple's take on 'Circle to Search' but leveraging the power of Apple's on-device LLM and ChatGPT. This is one of iOS 26's more exciting features, but once again, it is not yet available in the developer beta. Genmoji and Image Playground are also part of this AI layer. You can now combine emoji, photos, and descriptive phrases to generate custom stickers and images. While these tools feel like fun party tricks for now, their true power lies in deep system-wide integration. The feature works exactly as you'd imagine and lets you combine existing emojis, photos and text-based prompts to create custom emojis. The results are pretty good, as you can see in the screenshot above. It's not really something I'd use very often, but better on-device image and emoji generation is effectively table stakes, so an improved experience is very welcome. Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority The other feature that I found exciting was deeper integration of AI into Apple's on-device scripting service. Apple Intelligence is now available to the Shortcuts app, enabling you to create smarter automations. This means you can integrate Apple's on-device LLM or even ChatGPT into a shortcut and use it to parse data before passing it on to another app. I can envision use cases like instantly splitting a tab or summarizing any on-screen content, such as an Instagram post. In fact, it took me minutes to get a shortcut up and running to automatically create a note based on a shared Instagram post after passing it through the on-device LLM. That's very cool. A smarter battery dashboard Talking about everyday use features, Apple has finally overhauled the Battery section in Settings. The new interface replaces the 24-hour and 10-day views with a more digestible weekly breakdown. It then compares your average battery consumption to your daily usage, highlighting which apps are consuming power and why. Tapping into any given day reveals a split between active screen time and idle background use. It's very similar to the battery insights available to Android users and is a welcome addition. Dig deeper, and you'll also find a new Adaptive Power Mode. Unlike the static Low Power Mode, Adaptive adjusts in real time based on how aggressively you're using your phone. It can dim the screen or scale back background tasks without requiring user input. You still get the manual 80% charge limiter and battery health metrics, but the focus here is on smarter defaults. Settings, Keyboard, Messages, and other subtle improvements In addition to the big hits, numerous smaller quality-of-life improvements are sprinkled throughout the OS. The keyboard feels chunkier and more precise, with better haptic feedback. There's a new preview app that lets you perform a wide range of file-based functions, including previewing files, of course. The Settings app has undergone minor restructuring. While not a radical shift, the app feels cleaner and faster to navigate with its revamped font sizing and kerning. In Messages, you can now set custom backgrounds per conversation, adding a bit more personality to threads. Apple has also added a polls feature for group chats, something that arguably should have existed years ago. The Phone app has also received some attention. It now unifies the Recents, Favorites, and Voicemails tabs into a single, streamlined interface. The most significant addition is Call Screening. It screens unknown callers by gathering context and offering options to respond or dismiss them without ever answering. Hold Assist is another helpful tool. If you're stuck in a call queue with customer support, your iPhone can now wait on hold for you and alert you when a human finally joins the line. iOS 26 also introduces a dedicated Apple Games app. It acts as a central hub for all things gaming on your device, effectively serving as a lightweight but genuinely useful Game Center replacement. The app pulls in your installed games, offers personalized recommendations, and allows you to see what your friends are playing. Achievements, leaderboards, and Game Center invites are now neatly tucked into this space. Apple is clearly trying to make iOS gaming feel more like a platform and less like a series of one-off downloads, but it remains to be seen if there's significant adoption. So, is iOS 26 worth the hype? Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority It's hard to say definitively at this early stage. There's no doubt that Liquid Glass gives iOS a bold new face, and updated Apple Intelligence features feel like the beginning of something genuinely useful. But right now, it's mostly potential. iOS 26 is playful, dramatic, and distinctly Apple — for better or worse. Many features are buggy or half-baked, and even improvements like those in the camera app require further polish. To be fair, this is a developer beta. I'll reserve judgment until the final release rolls out later this year, but what is undeniable is that this is the most ambitious update Apple has shipped in years.
Android Authority
18 minutes ago
- Android Authority
AOSP isn't dead, but Google just landed a huge blow to custom ROM developers
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority TL;DR Google has made it harder to build custom Android ROMs for Pixel phones by omitting their device trees and driver binaries from the latest AOSP release. The company says this is because it's shifting its AOSP reference target from Pixel hardware to a virtual device called 'Cuttlefish' to be more neutral. While Google insists AOSP isn't going away, developers must now reverse-engineer changes, making the process for supporting Pixel devices more difficult. Earlier this year, Google announced it would develop the Android OS fully in private to simplify its development process. By focusing its efforts on a single internal branch, Google aimed to streamline work that was previously split. The news initially spooked some in the Android development community, but the controversy quickly subsided. The impact was minimal, as Google was already developing most of Android behind closed doors and promised that source code releases would continue. Now, however, a recent omission from Google has rekindled fears that the company might stop sharing source code for new Android releases, though Google has stated these concerns are unfounded. As promised, Google published the source code for Android 16 this week, allowing independent developers to compile their own builds of the new operating system. This source code was uploaded to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), as usual, under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. However, multiple developers quickly noticed a glaring omission from the Android 16 source code release: the device trees for Pixel devices were missing. Google also failed to upload new driver binaries for each Pixel device and released the kernel source code with a squashed commit history. Since Google has shared the device trees, driver binaries, and full kernel source code commit history for years, its omission in this week's release was concerning. These omissions led some to speculate this week that Google was taking the first step in a plan to discontinue AOSP. In response, Google's VP and GM of Android Platform, Seang Chau, refuted these claims. In a post on X, he addressed the speculation, stating that 'AOSP is NOT going away.' Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority He also confirmed the omission of Pixel device trees is intentional, stating that 'AOSP needs a reference target that is flexible, configurable, and affordable — independent of any particular hardware, including those from Google.' Instead of supporting AOSP builds on Pixel devices, Google will support the virtual Android device 'Cuttlefish' as its reference target. Cuttlefish runs on PCs, allowing Google and platform developers to test new hardware features. Google will also continue to support GSI targets, which are generic system images that can be installed on nearly any Android device. On one hand, this logic is sound. Google wants to move away from using Pixels as the AOSP reference device and is making changes to that effect. As Seang Chau notes, 'AOSP was built on the foundation of being an open platform for device implementations, SoC vendors, and instruction set architectures.' In that regard, Cuttlefish is a more appropriate reference target because it isn't a heavily customized piece of consumer hardware like a Pixel phone. However, since Cuttlefish is a virtual device, it can only simulate how hardware features behave, making it an imperfect reference in some ways. The more significant issue, however, is the impact this decision will have on developers who build custom ROMs — the community term for hobbyist forks of AOSP. Nolen Johnson, a long-time contributor and reviewer for the LineageOS project, says the process of building these ROMs for Pixel phones will become 'painful' moving forward. Previously, Google made it simple for developers to build AOSP for Pixel devices, but that support is now gone. Developers simply had to 'pull the configurations [that] Google created,' add their customizations, and then build. Now, however, they will need to take the old device trees that Google released for Android 15 and 'blindly guess and reverse engineer from the prebuilt [binaries] what changes are needed each month.' This is because making a full Android build for a device — not just a GSI — requires a device tree. This is a 'collection of configuration files that define the hardware layout, peripherals, proprietary file listings, and other details for a specific device, allowing the build system to build a proper image for that device.' While Google previously handled this work, developers must now create their own device trees without access to the necessary proprietary source code. Furthermore, Google's decision to squash the kernel source code's commit history also hinders custom development. The Pixel's kernel source code was often used as a 'reference point for other devices to take features, bug fixes, and security patches from,' but with the history now reduced to a single commit, this is no longer feasible. While Google is under no obligation to release device trees, provide driver binaries, or share the full kernel commit history (in fact, it's one of the few device makers to do these things), it has done so for years. The company's reason for doing so was because the Pixel was treated as a reference platform for AOSP, so developers needed an easy way to build for it. Google's decision to now discontinue the Pixel as an AOSP reference device is unfortunate, as it has pulled the rug from under developers like the teams at LineageOS and GrapheneOS who build Android for Pixel devices. These developers will still be able to build AOSP for Pixel devices, but it will now be more difficult and painful to do so than before. Got a tip? Talk to us! Email our staff at Email our staff at news@ . You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it's your choice.
