AST SpaceMobile expects Blue Origin’s recent launchpad explosion will delay its direct-to-smartphone constellation by three to six months, investment bank William Blair said in an equity research note, pushing initial commercial services into the first half of 2027.
The post AST SpaceMobile sees New Glenn setback delaying initial commercial service into 2027 appeared first on SpaceNews.
ESA and China recently launched the joint SMILE magnetosphere mission after a decade of cooperation, but despite similar goals, another collaboration appears distant.
The post After cooperation on SMILE mission, ESA and China chart parallel but separate paths appeared first on SpaceNews.
One of the best parts about using Android is the good old-fashioned geeky fun that comes with finding new ways to improve your digital environment — and improve your day-to-day efficiency.
That capability manifests itself in all sorts of interesting freedoms that (cough, cough) other mobile platforms don’t trust their users enough to allow — from added on-screen elements to custom air gestures, advanced multitasking additions, and all sorts of other shape-shifting enhancements that can completely change the way you interact with your device.
Perhaps the most classic example of advanced Android customization, though, is a splendid little somethin’ called the home screen launcher — a fancy way of saying the system that controls how your home screen and app drawer look and work. Your phone has a built-in process that handles that by default, but here in the land o’ Googley matters, you can always replace that with something completely different and make your device adapt to the way you like to work instead of the other way around.
We’ve got no shortage of interesting Android launcher options, too, ranging from versatile blank slates for complete customization to carefully crafted frameworks for ergonomic efficiency and even throwbacks to mobile operating systems past.
The real beauty of this ecosystem, though, is how much power it gives to Android developers — and subsequently to us, as Android-appreciating animals who embrace these creations! — to experiment and try out all sorts of new concepts. Sometimes, an Android launcher approach speaks to you for its practicality. Other times, it’s just a refreshingly interesting take on how you can get around your phone and get stuff done.
Today, I’ve got a perfect example to share with you. It’s a whole new approach to the Android home screen that’s both unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in this arena and delightfully familiar, in a retro-tech sense.
Lemme show ya what it’s all about.
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My friend and fellow enlightened Android phone owner, allow me to introduce you to a creative little concoction called Key Launcher.
Key Launcher has only been out and available on the Play Store for a matter of weeks now, but it’s impressively polished — and, even more important, impressively original while also having some fantastic geek-tech throwback vibes.
To that end, the core distinctive element of Key Launcher is the T9-style dialpad that sits front and center on the lower third of its primary panel. It is quite literally the same set of letter-packin’ numbers and characters you’d see on an old-school phone — or in the dialer of your favorite Android phone app.
JR Raphael, Foundry
And in this context, it serves some pretty interesting purposes:
JR Raphael, Foundry
JR Raphael, Foundry
Function-packed as all of that may be, that dialpad is still just one piece of the Key Launcher puzzle. Above it sits a grid of app shortcuts that includes both your own pinned favorites and a dynamic selection of recently opened items. And above that is a handy built-in widget that shows a rotating array of upcoming calendar events from your agenda along with the local time and weather — and, in an especially neat twist, can also be customized to act as an interactive stack that lets you flip through your own set of standard Android widgets right then and there as well.
JR Raphael, Foundry
Speaking of widgets, if you swipe toward the left on Key Launcher’s dialpad, you’ll reveal the launcher’s built-in “Widget Center” panel — which is an entire screen dedicated to holding however many widgets you want, in any configuration you like, for easy ongoing access.
JR Raphael, Foundry
A swipe in the other direction will take you to an enlarged view of your active notifications, meanwhile, while a swipe downward can be set to launch either a quick search (of Google or whatever provider you prefer), a search of your apps, or a direct Android app shortcut within any app on your device.
JR Raphael, Foundry
And if all of that seems like a lot of productivity-boosting possibilities, just wait ’til you get into this thing’s settings. Key Launcher is overflowing with options to customize and control practically every facet of its operation, ranging from basic visuals to the specifics of how the dialpad works and even a toggle for optimizing the interface for left- or right-handed use.
JR Raphael, Foundry
Key Launcher is free on its base level with an optional Pro upgrade that unlocks certain limitations and more advanced features. That path is available for five bucks a year or $10 as a single lifetime purchase, and you get a month-long trial the first time you install the app so you can check it out in its full form.
JR Raphael, Foundry
Even if you just stick to the free version, though, this thing has an awful lot to offer — and it really is unlike anything else out there, with so many clever and potentially useful touches.
It’s that kind of creativity and constant discovery that keeps Android so interesting and advantageous, even after all this time — and that’s true whether you end up sticking with Key Launcher for the long haul or just giving it a go for a few hours and appreciating the deliciously original thinking it offers.
Keep the geeky goodies coming with my free Android Intelligence newsletter — three new things to try every Friday, straight from me to you.
O ranking da AnTuTu para os smartphones mais poderosos de maio tem um novo líder, o novo RedMagic 11S Pro+, com destaque ao chip Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 que equipa nove dos equipamentos.
The post RedMagic 11S Pro+ lidera top dos smartphones mais poderosos de maio com domínio do Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 appeared first on Tek Notícias.
No papel de um duplo de cinema que passou despercebido durante toda a sua carreira, em Ponchorado os jogadores terão de sobreviver dentro de um filme western inacabado e enfrentar uma série de inimigos.
The post Ponchorado mistura ação e aventuras no faroeste num universo inspirado nos desenhos animados dos anos 30 appeared first on Tek Notícias.
“The future of AI should be accessible, available, and open to people and builders everywhere, and it should not require an absurd amount of resources only available to a handful of cloud providers,” Paolo Ardoino, CEO, Tether.
About 700 million people use generative AIs like Gemini and ChatGPT weekly, but adoption is far from uniform. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI survey found that nearly half of respondents from companies with more than $5 billion in revenue have reached the AI scaling phase, compared with just 29 percent of those from companies with less than $100 million in revenue, a gap that only widens further down the chain, locking out smaller businesses, developers, and everyday users.
Retail and small businesses are limited to basic AI utilities that their facilities can power, such as text-based inference and multimedia generation, using base models. That is billions of end users, and developers locked out of full utilization and development of intelligent software due to high infrastructure demands.
Tether’s edge-first LoRA fine-tuning framework for Microsoft’s Bitnet LLM is an important step towards developing an infrastructure system that supports billions of AI agents and intelligent machines. By reducing the computational overhead of machine learning and enabling consumer-grade devices to perform advanced operations, Tether’s edge-first approach ensures greater leverage for the larger population.
Imagine a 13-billion-parameter model being fine-tuned on everyday handheld devices like Samsung S25 and iPhone 16, as well as on regular personal computers. The breakthrough combines resource-efficiency and platform-agnostic techniques to develop a fine-tuning framework for the ternary-quantized LLM.
Bitnet LLM was born out of the vision of an intelligent AI model that doesn’t consume outrageous computing resources even at full precision. Earlier attempts at resource-efficient AI relied on trade-offs, such as running small-parameter models at higher precision or larger-parameter models at lower precision, but neither approach fully solved the problem.
Bitnet takes a more fundamental approach. The result is a model that achieves linear efficiency while consuming only a fraction of the computing resources traditionally required.
The challenge, however, is that contemporary GPUs are optimized for the very floating-point operations Bitnet eliminates, creating a hardware compatibility gap. Compounding this, Bitnet was originally confined to its own Bitnet.cpp inference engine, limiting its broader utility. Tether’s breakthrough addresses both constraints at once by integrating a Vulkan and Metal GPU backend that unlocks true cross-platform capabilities for BitNet inference and LoRA fine-tuning on heterogeneous consumer GPUs, including mobile GPUs. Bitnet can now run on more mature, widely supported inference engines without sacrificing its efficiency advantages.
Vulkan’s cross-platform nature is key here. Unlike CUDA, which ties developers to NVIDIA hardware, Vulkan runs across a broad range of GPUs and operating systems, opening Bitnet to genuinely multi-platform deployment. Tether’s Bitnet fine-tuning framework implements a dynamic tiling technique to mitigate limitations in Vulkan driver buffer allocation on mobile GPUs.
The dynamic tiling algorithm technique was first applied in the fine-tuning framework for QVAC Fabric LLM, the AI model that powers Tether’s QVAC Workbench application.
This implementation demonstrates the efficiency of this approach: fine-tuning a 13-billion-parameter model across a range of consumer devices with varying GPU configurations.
The Bitnet LLM Fine-tuning framework is Tether’s latest achievement and part of a broader expansion into open-source AI and communication technologies that challenge current, slow, fragile, and controlled systems. These developments are open-sourced and packaged as modules in the QVAC SDK for easy deployment and to help developers build edge-first AI applications without needing anyone’s permission.
Tether envisions superintelligence as a foundational element possessed by its owner and is enforcing this through:
Synonymous with decentralized AI, “Local-first” AI aims to create sovereign AI solutions that do not rely on centralized infrastructure, such as data centers, to operate. They are considered cost-effective, relatively more sustainable, and unarguably more private than centralized AI. Tether is building AI applications that rely entirely on the device’s resources. These applications store data in device memory and use its processors for advanced operations, such as fine-tuning and inference.
Tether’s AI applications are built on the Pear runtime. Pear is a tooling platform for fully P2P applications that can operate without servers. Pear leverages the Holepunch tech stack. Holepunch is purpose-built for stable, direct communication between devices. Pear enables delegated inference for AI applications such as QVAC Workbench. Delegated inference enables a unified, dynamic workstation architecture where compute tasks are fluidly distributed between mobile and desktop environments, allowing either device to offload high-intensity processing to the most capable system. That is, you can start a task on your mobile device and delegate it to your desktop or laptop for completion.
The only way to scale intelligence to the needs of a ten-billion-strong society is to push it to the edge. This, in turn, depends on the progress made by experiments aimed at cost-effectively localizing AI computation.
Billions of AI agents and countless AI applications deployed by developers in every region of the world, running effectively on user-owned resources, is the only way we can democratize superintelligence and avoid creating another ‘luxury’ cutting-edge technology controlled by unicorns and fully accessible only to elites.
Tether is pioneering limitless superintelligence for an ever-growing society and applications. Follow the journey to truly local and edge-first AI solutions
Apple publishes its App Store fraud prevention report every year,. And when it does, the company presses the point that its curated system brings much value to developers and customers, including highly effective protection against fraud. It says it prevented more than $2.2 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions in 2025 alone.
The company said it has prevented $11.2 billion in such fraud in the last six years. That’s a lot of value for the 15% or lower commission that all but the biggest-selling developers are required to pay on their store sales.
Don’t believe the hype, as most developers are not generating the $1 million a year required before the 30% payment kicks in.
You might reflect that if there is an Apple Tax, it’s a progressive tax in which those with the broadest shoulders help support the wider developer community, which is probably why some tech billionaires don’t like it.
But I’m not here to write about taxation; I’m here to highlight the value the App Store brings. Apple diligently works to protect customers and developers against the ever-growing threat of cybercrime at a scale few other companies could hope to match. That matters in an environment dominated by ever more sophisticated attacks, including scenarios in which a developer submits a benign app for review and then modifies it once the app is online to commit financial fraud.
It’s not just fraud Apple protects App Store customers from. It also attempts to protect privacy. Look, we know that tech firms now exist for whom privacy is a roadblock to profit; they want to take all your information for free to sell it for money, or worse. Apple stands against this and has done so for years, which is why it is under steady attack by entities that want privacy destroyed to boost their bottom line. Nation states and nation-state-adjacent attacks don’t help in the battle for your private digital life, throwing huge resources at undermining personal protections.
Apple’s report gives you a solid glimpse at the anti-privacy environment. App Store rejected 443,000 app submissions for privacy violations; it also rejected 22,000 apps for holding undocumented anti-privacy features.
The upshot is that while Apple’s protections aren’t 100% perfect, they’re still industry leading. Where incidents do take place, they are resolved swiftly, and the bait-and-switch approach (in which an app pretends to be benign but carries malware) remains the biggest threat. That’s why customers should always verify they trust a developer before downloading apps.
The thing is, all of these threats are evolving, and Apple is equipped to evolve in parallel with them. In part, that’s because it has scale, in part because it has that huge 2.2-billion-device ecosystem, in part because the company entered the app store race with deep understanding of how online transactions were evolving in the first place. It didn’t run iTunes for years only to learn nothing.
Coming up over the hill we can see new-breed quantum-based threats. Along with artificial intelligence, that combination will likely spawn a mass attack of AI-generated, malware-infested apps being built and submitted at a record pace.
We will also likely see increased attacks made against developers in order to extract their Developer ID to help in the submission of such apps. And we will see increasingly sophisticated algorithmic hacks to attack security, identity, and even app ownership. Protecting against those consequential evolutions will be neither easy nor cheap. Doing so will require near state-level protection, a degree of security no small entity can meet. We have no idea if smaller app stores can even visualize such protection — and the EU doesn’t know, either.
In time, hopefully, new businesses will emerge offering quantum-safe security to protect online purchases. But for now, we’ll mostly need to look to large entities such as Apple, or payment services providers, to make the grade.
Will Apple put protection at scale in place to protect against these incoming threats against its App Store? It seems likely, given it is already investing in OS-level mitigations to protect encryption on its services, including around encrypted communications.
It is also in Apple’s interest to future-proof protection around payment services, ergo also the App Store. At the same time, as Apple’s latest fraud report confirms, the threat landscape remains highly volatile. Time will show that the store’s degree of protection is well worth the cost of Apple’s progressive App Store tax.
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