2026-04-05 09:00:00
My thanks to Material Security for sponsoring this week at DF. Most security teams don’t have a talent problem, they have a noise problem. Manual phishing remediation, chasing risky OAuth permissions, and auditing file shares shouldn’t be a full-time job.
Material Security unifies your cloud workspace, bringing detection and response for email, files, and accounts into one place. It’s security that actually works: augmenting the native gaps in Google and Microsoft without the usual enterprise bloat. Stop fighting fragmented consoles and start focusing on strategy. It’s time to simplify your SecOps.
2026-04-05 08:59:00
Sponsorships have been selling briskly, of late. Knock on wood. As of yesterday, the next opening on the schedule wasn’t until the very end of July. However, due to some schedule rejiggering, next week is now open. After next week, though, the next opening remains the week starting July 27.
If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch — especially if you can act quick for next week’s opening. I’m also booking sponsorships for Q3 and Q4 2026, and over half of those weeks are already sold.
2026-04-05 08:44:00
One more follow-up point after I spent two days using an iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.7.7 as my main phone. At some point late in the iOS 26 beta cycle last summer, it became obvious that Apple had sped up a bunch of system-level animations. Prime example: the animation when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen to go back to the Home Screen. People noticed. But it hasn’t gotten a lot of attention since.
But man, if you want to notice, do what I did and spend two days back on iOS 18. So many little things feel slower. I don’t know if anything actually is slower, but because the animations are slower, it looks slower, and that means it feels slower. Apple should speed up some of these animations again this year. (And/or offer a system-wide setting to make them faster. I do not want to eliminate these animations. I just want them to go very very fast.)
2026-04-05 08:32:57
Ashley Belanger, reporting for Ars Technica:
Using developer tools, the lawsuit found that opening prompts are always shared, as are any follow-up questions the search engine asks that a user clicks on. Privacy concerns are seemingly worse for non-subscribed users, the complaint alleged. Their initial prompts are shared with “a URL through which the entire conversation may be accessed by third parties like Meta and Google.”
Disturbingly, the lawsuit alleged, chats are also shared with personally identifiable information (PII), even when users who want to stay anonymous opt to use Perplexity’s “Incognito Mode.” That mode, the lawsuit charged, is a “sham.”
Everything about Perplexity looks like a scam.
2026-04-04 03:28:36
Jason Snell:
Last December I complained that Apple was withholding iOS 18 security updates from iPhones capable of running iOS 26, leaving users who didn’t want to upgrade to Apple’s latest OS version yet in some security peril.
Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news: As of Wednesday April 1, Apple is pushing out iOS 18.7.7 to all devices running iOS 18. This update, released last month for devices that were not capable of running iOS 26, is now available even for compatible devices. If you’ve got auto-update turned on but have not gone through the steps to do a full upgrade to iOS 26, this update can be automatically pushed and applied. This is good news, as those who have opted not to run iOS 26 will get to take advantage of several sets of security releases.
Now the bad news: This is happening because of some really bad security breaches like DarkSword and Coruna.
It feels a bit spiteful that Apple doesn’t support staying a year behind the major version of iOS like they do — thankfully — with MacOS. The vast majority of iPhone and iPad users just do what Apple encourages — they accept the default setting to auto-update when Apple pushes updates to their devices. People who update manually do so by choice, and if that choice is offered, it ought to be supported.
That said, after buying an iPhone 17 Pro, I left my year-and-a-half-old iPhone 16 Pro on iOS 18, so I updated that phone to 18.7.7 the other day when this became available. I’ve kept that phone on the old OS mostly for comparing what’s changed in iOS 26. I took this opportunity to switch back to that phone, full-time, for two days. It was, to be honest, no big deal. For all the consternation over “Liquid Glass” overall, on iPhone, nothing really sticks out to me switching from iOS 26 back to iOS 18, or vice-versa. iOS 26 just feels visually tweaked, not radically changed.
I like iOS 26 just fine, but I also still like iOS 18, and the differences just don’t seem that significant. For me at least, it’s nothing like switching between MacOS 15 Sequoia and 26 Tahoe. iOS 26 makes some highly opinionated choices, but it feels like it was thoughtfully designed by people who know and love the core longstanding idioms of iOS. MacOS 26 Tahoe feels like it was carelessly designed by people who’ve never used a Mac and wish it would just go away.
See also: Michael Tsai’s roundup.
2026-04-04 02:20:04
John Voorhees, at MacStories:
It’s a new month and you know what that means: time for a roundup of everything coming to Apple TV and Apple Arcade for April 2026.
What’s still not coming: Jessica Chastain’s political thriller The Savant, originally set for September, but rescheduled for “at a later date” out of cowardice.
Apple’s “at a later date” is looking more and more like Trump’s “in two weeks”.
