Meta

WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging app from Meta, has been working on a lot of new features recently. However, at the same time, the platform has been gearing up to release an update that will drop support for some older iPhone models.

In recent past, Bluesky has been growing substantially. It quickly ballooned to over 20 million users, and at a point, the service was adding over a million users a day. Between the ban on X in Brazil earlier this year, as well as the results of the 2024 US presidential election – a large group of people have been choosing to leave X.

But, they’re not leaving for Meta’s Threads, the more popular X alternative at the time – they’re going for Bluesky instead.

Apple’s Find My Friends (which is now integrated into the Find My app) lets you share your location in real time with other people. Soon, Instagram users will have access to a similar feature to share their location with friends and family right from the social network.

As we reported last week, Threads has begun to globally roll out Custom Feeds based on specific topics. And Meta seems to be really listening to users recently, as the company is now testing an option to let users set which feed they want to see by default.

Following an update that made Custom Feeds available to everyone, the Threads app is getting another huge new feature. Users can finally watch landscape videos in the mobile app – something essential that wasn’t available until now.

Earlier this year, Threads began experimenting with Custom Feeds as a way to let users better personalize their experience on the platform by seeing only specific content they want. A few months later, Meta is finally rolling out Custom Feeds globally to all users of the Threads app.

There’s a pretty cool update for Messenger out today. Meta has introduced phone and video calling voicemail, similar to FaceTime. The Facebook calling service is also adding AI video backgrounds and integrating Siri.

It was back in September when Meta first revealed an early prototype of its Orion AR glasses, and while they are a long way from becoming an actual product you can buy, the company does believe it can achieve this.

Indeed, Meta’s wearables chief thinks that Orion can in time become the AirPods of augmented reality devices …

One of the biggest problems with social media is that our feeds are full of things the algorithms think we want to see, rather than what we actually want to see.

If your Instagram recommendations seem increasingly removed from your interests, Meta is now offering you the chance to start again from scratch …

Meta released a brand new mixed reality headset about two week ago, the Meta Quest 3S. It’s their cheapest mixed reality headset by far, starting at a price of $299, compared to the $499 starting price of Meta Quest 3. Don’t get confused though, the S in 3S does not mean it’s better, even though you may think that.

It’s a great value for mixed reality – but something Apple would never make.

Instagram is introducing new measures to protect teens from sextortion, by making it harder for criminals to blackmail them.

Separately, it appears to be working on a new Social Library feature intended to make it easier to find posts you’ve shared, liked, or been sent in chat …

Threads, Meta’s microblogging platform, has gained a lot of new features since its launch last year. However, the company has just announced another new feature that users don’t seem to be happy about. Soon, other Threads users will be able to see when you’re online on the platform.

Meta last year confirmed its plans to finally release an iPad-specific version of WhatsApp right after launching a macOS app rebuilt from scratch. A beta version of the iPad app was released in late September, but a year later, WhatsApp for iPad is still a beta app.

Meta on Wednesday announced that it is expanding its AI features to 21 additional countries. Meta AI includes a chatbot that can be used for conversations or searches, as well a Studio to generate images based on text inputs.

Apple unveiled the first spatial computing product back at WWDC23 last June: Apple Vision Pro. It’s been over a year since that unveil, and just over 6 months since they actually shipped the product. Meta recently unveiled their new Orion AR glasses, and while that’s just a prototype, it does leave us wondering what Apple has in the pipeline for “spatial computing.”

Meta has been fined €91M ($101M) after it was discovered that to 600 million Facebook and Instagram passwords had been stored in plain text.

Some of those passwords had been unprotected since 2012, and were searchable by more than 20,000 Meta employees …

My colleague Filipe Espósito yesterday said that the prototype Meta Orion glasses are what he wants for the future of Apple Vision, and I agree that they are an incredible step in the right direction.

I’ve long said that an Apple Glasses product is what I really want to see, but as impressed as I am by what Meta has shown us, I still think it will be a few years before any of us will be wearing a pair of Apple Glasses …

Meta held a special event on Wednesday to announce updates for its platforms and also some new products. Among all the announcements, there was certainly one that caught all the attention: the Orion project. Orion is not a product coming soon to stores, but it’s a functional prototype of how Meta imagines AR glasses. And they’re exactly what I want for the future of Apple Vision.

In a new podcast interview this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed how he believes his company differs from Apple. As noted by Business Insider, Zuckerberg said that he thinks Meta is “like the opposite of Apple” in a lot of ways, and pointed out multiple flaws with Apple’s strategy.