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- 🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #265
🪅 Heap Heap Hurray Ed. #265
Daily dispatches from the world of technology.
Welcome to Monday - let's tackle those goals!
Geek Gossip
#Metaverse - Remember Metaverse? We’ll forgive you if you don’t. Seems like it’s a forgotten child for Meta / Mark Zukerberg. He's shifted focus to AI and Reality Labs is taking a huge loss, over $4 billion in just one quarter. Guess that's what happens when you try to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Latest Updates
Apple Relaxes App Store Rules
Previously, Apple required all apps that had a payment plan to route their payments through Apple (for purchases made through it’s devices) - Apple would take a 30% markup fee. A recent court ruling criticised Apple resulting in them changing their app store policy allowing such apps to redirect the user to their website instead - and not collect any markup.
Currently this is only implemented in USA (the court’s jurisdiction), but could soon be seen across the world. The impact is really big - Stripe and Spotify lost no time and have already launched an updated version of their app to make use of this while Epic Games is luring developers to its own App Store - offering incentives to developers.
Considering there’s an ongoing case with the Competition Commission of India about the same policy, we could see this as a ripple effect in India too.
Oyo Expands Into Food And Beverage Business
Travel tech startup OYO is set to enter the food and beverage business. It will introduce in-house kitchens and Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) carts at its company-serviced hotels. Guests will be able to order meals through the company's mobile app and website.
Maharashtra Cracks Down On Ride-hailing Apps
The Maharashtra government has made it mandatory for ride-hailing platforms like Uber, Ola, and Rapido to compensate passengers if a driver cancels or refuses a booked ride. This rider-friendly provision aims to curb a long-standing issue where drivers cancel trips arbitrarily.
Amazon Web Services Sees 17% Revenue Growth In Q1 2025
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing company owned by Amazon, and they just reported a revenue of $29.3 billion in Q1 2025, which is a 17% increase from last year. The CEO thinks it could become an even bigger business with AI.
Changelog
Redis - Switches to AGPLv3 license, restoring open source status and introducing new features in Redis 8.
Microsoft Account - New accounts now default to passwordless sign-in with passkeys, push notifications, and security keys.
Reddit - Integrates AI-powered Reddit Answers into main sitewide search.
Google Search - AI Mode now available for public testing, featuring multimodal search support, visual places and product cards, and search history recall.
Trending Projects / Code Repositories
Magnitude | Open source, AI-native testing framework for web apps
Logchef | Lightweight, single-binary log analytics interface for ClickHouse, focused on high-performance querying and visualization
Tsdown | The elegant bundler for libraries powered by Rolldown
In Case You Missed It
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Miscellaneous
GSAP Is Now Free
Front end web developers - GSAP is the go-to library for anything related to animations. And now, it’s free. Previously, one had to pay for it but after getting acquired by Webflow, it’s now being offered for free. Do check it out.
How I made $64k from deleted files — a bug bounty story
A researcher used automation to scan thousands of GitHub organization accounts, including lesser-known accounts like 'lab' and 'research', to uncover sensitive data and secrets. They used tools like TruffleHog to scan for active secrets and found that restoring deleted files significantly improved the success rate of finding secrets.
Screen Studio's Costly Bug
A simple bug in Screen Studio's auto-updater caused its macOS app to download a 250MB update file every 5 minutes, resulting in 9 million downloads and 2 petabytes of traffic on Google Cloud, highlighting the importance of careful coding and cloud cost monitoring.
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