Greg Bensinger, reporting for Reuters:

The latest effort, known internally as “Transformer,” is being developed within its devices and services unit, according to four people familiar ​with the matter. The phone is seen as a potential mobile personalization device that can sync with home voice assistant Alexa and serve as a conduit to Amazon customers throughout the day, the people said. [...]

As envisioned, the new phone’s personalization features would make buying from Amazon.com, watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music or ordering food from partners like Grubhub easier than ever, the people said. They asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss internal matters.

The problem with this pitch is that it’s not hard at all to buy from Amazon.com, watch Prime Video, listen to Prime Music, or order food from Grubhub using the phones we already have. All of those things are ridiculously easy. I mean, I get it. On an Amazon phone, your Amazon ID would be your primary ID for the system. So those Amazon services would all just work right out of the box. But you can’t get people to switch from the thing they’re used to (and, in the case of phones, especially iPhones, already enjoy) unless you’re pitching them on solving problems. No one has a problem buying stuff or using Amazon services on the phone they already own.

A key focus of the Transformer project has been integrating artificial intelligence capabilities into the device, the people said. That could eliminate the need for traditional app stores, which ​require downloading and registering for applications before they can be used.

This is just nonsense. No matter how good Amazon’s AI integration might be, it isn’t going to replace the apps people already use. If you use WhatsApp, you need the WhatsApp app. If you watching video on Netflix, you need the Netflix app. If you surf Instagram and TikTok, you need those apps. If Amazon tried shipping a phone without any of those apps — let alone without all of them — this new “Transformer” phone will be a bigger laughingstock than the Fire phone was a decade ago. And we’re all still laughing at the dumb Fire phone. Which means they can’t eliminate “traditional app stores”.

Sean Hollister, The Verge (gift link):

After doing something similar in its Google Discover news feed, it’s starting to mess with headlines in the traditional “10 blue links,” too. We’ve found multiple examples where Google replaced headlines we wrote with ones we did not, sometimes changing their meaning in the process.

For example, Google reduced our headline “I used the ‘cheat on everything’ AI tool and it didn’t help me cheat on anything” to just five words: “‘Cheat on everything’ AI tool.” It almost sounds like we’re endorsing a product we do not recommend at all.

What we are seeing is a “small” and “narrow” experiment, one that’s not yet approved for a fuller launch, Google spokespeople Jennifer Kutz, Mallory De Leon, and Ned Adriance tell The Verge. They would not say how “small” that experiment actually is. Over the past few months, multiple Verge staffers have seen examples of headlines that we never wrote appear in Google Search results — headlines that do not follow our editorial style, and without any indication that Google replaced the words we chose. And Google says it’s tweaking how other websites show up in search, too, not just news.

This is way past “jumping the shark” territory. This is Jaws 3-D totally-lost-the-plot territory. Jesus H. Christ.

Regarding my earlier post expressing confusion/discomfort with Bluesky announcing a $100 million funding round almost an entire year after it closed, I had an interesting back-and-forth with Adam Vartanian on Bluesky (natch), where he wrote:

If you see press reports that says a company “has raised” some money but no date on when the round closed, it probably happened some time in the past. Bluesky is actually unusual in disclosing a date that’s so far in the past.

I kept thinking that I must be missing something in this story, and this feels like it must be exactly that something. If true, it’s not unusual these days for a company to announce a seeding round long after it actually closed. What’s unusual in this case with Bluesky is that when they finally did announce it, they revealed the long-ago date it closed, too. That it was, in fact, an act of transparency, at least in comparison to many other venture-backed companies today.

Bluesky:

In April 2025, Bluesky raised $100 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Crypto, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Knight Foundation and True Ventures. In the months since, we’ve focused on scaling our team to meet the rapid growth of both the AT Protocol (atproto) and Bluesky app. We’re excited to share more as we move into a new era of leadership and further growth.

This raise was led by Bluesky founder Jay Graber, who recently transitioned to Chief Innovation Officer to focus on building the future of open social infrastructure.

I didn’t post about Graber’s stepping aside as CEO earlier this month because I didn’t make much of it. I’ve been bullish on Bluesky since its inception, but I haven’t been thrilled by it of late. I don’t think it’s gotten any worse, but its growth has stalled, leaving it in the limbo between ghost town and boom town. For many products/services/businesses/publications, a sustained popularity that’s less than booming is fine. Niches can work, or thrive even. Daring Fireball is clearly a niche publication. But for social networks, two decades of evidence suggests that anything less than booming is a problem.

But what the hell are we to make of a $100 million funding round that wasn’t announced for 11 months? Is this commonplace, and I just somehow never before took note of a company keeping a large funding round secret for a year? Or is this as weird as I’m thinking it is? I always thought big funding rounds were things companies wanted to immediately promote, not hide. This roundup of links at Techmeme suggests I’m not alone.

Update, 2 hours later: The explanation I’ve now heard, from a source in a good position to have an informed take, is that it is unusual. But basically it’s a unique series of events, at a unique time (post–2024 election, when Bluesky experienced a nice surge), for a unique company. So: weird, yes. Cause for alarm, probably not.

Second update: Interesting thread with Adam Vartanian, on Bluesky (natch), where he states:

If you see press reports that says a company “has raised” some money but no date on when the round closed, it probably happened some time in the past. Bluesky is actually unusual in disclosing a date that’s so far in the past.

I kept thinking that I must be missing something, and this feels like it must be exactly that something. If true, it’s not unusual for a company to announce a seeding round long after it closed. What’s unusual in this case with Bluesky is that when they finally did announce it, they revealed the date it closed, too. That it was, in fact, an act of transparency, at least in comparison to many other venture-backed companies today.

Quiche Browser is a rather astonishing app from the one-man indie developer Greg de J./Quiche Industries. (What a killer domain name that is.) Quiche Browser is a very robust, exquisitely designed, stunningly handsome web browser exclusively for iPhone. Just iPhone — although an iPad version is currently in beta. I switched to it as my default iPhone web browser last summer, thinking I’d only stick with it for a day or two before going back to Safari, and I wound up sticking with it for a few weeks. I did go back to Safari, but it was a remarkably close call. So close that, today, I’m going to give it another try. (And I was so enamored during my month-long affair with Quiche that I gladly subscribed to Quiche Plus for $27/year to support such a remarkable app.)

Out of the box, every single aspect of Quiche Browser’s UI and feature set is designed with obvious thought and care. But it also supports a rich array of settings to tweak the design. You can customize the appearance style of the toolbar, the location of the toolbar, the buttons on the toolbar. Quiche brings to iOS something very much akin to AppKit’s Customize Toolbar from the Mac, but if anything, what Quiche implements is more customizable. The typography throughout the app is exquisite. It doesn’t support Safari extensions but it has its own built-in content blocker. And, of course, it has built-in support for Kagi, the world’s best search engine.

What got me thinking about Quiche Browser again today was this tweet on Mastodon from the developer:

One of the many reasons I made Quiche Browser was to get a per-website JavaScript kill switch in my toolbar.

But these days I’m even tempted to disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it only where needed.

A simple one-tap “JS” button you can toggle on any website. I missed this button when I was test-driving Quiche a few months ago. Every browser should have this button. It’s almost unbelievable how much it improves so many websites.

That “JS” button alone isn’t why you should check out Quiche. It’s the whole thing. It’s just so thoughtful. So utterly modern in its appearance and features, but old-school in its hyperfocus on serving you, the user, through craftsmanship.