For me, NetNewsWire is the perfect app for macOS. NetNewsWire 7.0, released this Tuesday (27th), reinforces this distinction. The implementation of Liquid Glass is so good that the app looks better (screenshots), without losing its identity. Extra points for the icon-free menus, mitigating one of the silliest problems in macOS 26 Tahoe. Now I’m looking forward to the iOS version.
Apple
RCS, SMS via the internet, is good, but that doesn’t matter
In 2024, Apple made a gesture of goodwill to European regulators and opened iOS 18 to RCS, the evolution of the old SMS. Great, but too late.
RCS, which stands for Rich Communication Services, is SMS via the internet with all the benefits that come with this improvement, such as support for high-quality images, read receipts, typing indicators, and audio messages.
In other words, it is the “WhatsApp version” of SMS.
Emoji design convergence review, 2018–2026 
blog.emojipedia.org
If emojis are a new language, divergent representations can render meaning lost in translation between platforms. In 2018, Emojipedia hypothesized that different emoji vendors would converge their designs. The prediction came true with Apple as the benchmark. Why?
Apple is widely regarded as the “default” emoji design set in the West. This status dates back to 2008, when Apple introduced emoji support on the iPhone years before emoji were formally incorporated into Unicode in 2010.
[…]
Market realities for over a decade have also reinforced this influence. Apple continues to command a dominant share of the mobile phone market in the United States.
A reminder that big tech companies also shape much of our lives in the details.
The article is filled with examples of convergence, controversies (remember the bright green water pistol?), and a new wave of disruptions to the semantic unity of emojis (the culprit starts with “x” and ends with “x”), all richly illustrated.
iOS 26 still struggles to gain traction with iPhone users cultofmac.com
Ed Hardy found some very interesting data in StatCounter's figures:
[…] Roughly four months after launching in mid-September, only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed. That’s according to data for January 2026 from StatCounter. Instead, most users hold onto previous versions.
For comparison, in January 2025, about 63% of iPhone users had some iOS 18 version installed. So after roughly the same amount of time, the adoption rate of Apple newest OS was about four times higher.
The adoption curve for iOS 26 is atypical, and by a wide margin. Previous years (2023, 2022) delivered numbers more similar to those of 2024, for iOS 18.
I thank all my friends who remain steadfast with iOS 18. I couldn't resist and updated mine, and although I find iOS's Liquid Glass to be the least worst among all the devices I've used so far, it's still the weirdest version since I started using an iPhone over a decade ago.
I hope these numbers set off an alarm in Apple's design department.
Update (5h10 PM): It’s possible, though unconfirmed, that a change in Safari’s user-agent is messing with StatCounter’s numbers. Other sources, however, support the suspicion of slower iOS 26 adoption, albeit to a lesser degree.
Tech companies are finding out everything is political
Framework, which makes and sells modular, repairable computers, is facing a small uprising on its official forum after announcing sponsorships of the Hyprland and Omarchy projects — a Linux window manager and a pseudo‑distro based on Arch, respectively.
It’s impossible to evaluate your sleep with only one number
iOS 26 brought a new score to the Health app: sleep quality. (It’s not exclusive to the Apple Watch; any band or watch compatible with iOS can contribute to that number.)
I’m skeptical of scores like this. It’s reductive and can be misleading to assign a single score to something as complex as sleep. And, in a great irony, my numbers (!) kind of prove that.
Liquid Glass
Major redesigns of graphical user interfaces (GUI) always provoke surprise and complaints. With Liquid Glass, Apple’s new visual language, it’s no different.
The good news is that beneath the new buttons, unreadable text blocks and modernized effects, the way you use systems like iOS and macOS hasn’t changed. People familiar with the previous versions will be able to find their way around the new ones.
That doesn’t mean Liquid Glass is a success. At the risk of contradicting myself later, I think Apple missed the mark.
Apple forgot the “Compact” tab layout in macOS Safari
I’m not in a hurry to update my Apple devices to the 26 “crop” of OSs, but Safari on macOS… why not?
Every year Apple ships the big update to its browser for older macOS releases. It’s an exception to the rule of updating native apps only with the OS. The list of changes is always long and this year’s is no different.
Unfortunately, Safari 26 is broken for the five people who use the “compact” tab layout. And yes, I am (or was) one of them.
Wireless earphones: a belated review
Since the early days of this Manual, my goal has been the “slow web,” which here translates to being the last to cover a topic. Even so, I didn’t expect I’d ever write about something eight years late.
Anyway — here we are. Let’s talk wireless earphones.
Substack subscriptions in the iOS app: inflated prices and a new “walled garden” for newsletters
If you host a paid newsletter on Substack, pay attention to the platform’s new in-app subscription offering for iOS. The company published a long FAQ about the change.
Apple requires all apps that sell digital content to use its in-app payment system — the one that charges a 15–30% fee. Substack relied on a loophole created by the recent Epic Games ruling in the US to make its iOS app compliant with App Store rules, giving iOS users the (default) option to subscribe via the web and avoid Apple’s fee.
The problem is that this exception applies only to the United States.
How to remove “stuck” iCloud Tabs in Safari
Things at Apple work great until the day they don’t. A silly example that really bugs me is “stuck” iCloud tabs on Safari — a glitch in Apple’s tab syncing feature that lets me access tabs from one device on others.
In the lawsuit where the US Justice is deciding which “remedy” to give to Alphabet, following its conviction for monopolizing the search engine market, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, said that in April, the volume of searches made via Safari shrank for the first time in history — that is, in almost two decades.
Eddy attributes the decline to the rise of generative AI assistants that deliver pre-digested search results, such as Perplexity (with whom Apple is reportedly in talks), ChatGPT, and Claude.
Alphabet (Google) shares took a 7.5% dive following the Apple executive’s statement, as reported by Bloomberg. The company released a statement disputing the information, saying that “we continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platform”
Who to believe? I don’t know, but if there were doubts that a seismic shift is underway, data like this helps dispel them.
Eddy Cue also said that Apple is considering changing Safari so that the browser can incorporate AI assistants, and that he has lost sleep over the possibility of losing the annual USD 20 billion that Google pays as a “sweetener” to be Safari’s default search engine. I almost feel sorry for him.