Riot Games is going to slowly introduce a WASD-based control scheme to League of Legends, which previously relied on point and click controls. “We believe that offering WASD controls will provide a fresh yet familiar way to play for both new players and veterans of the Rift without changing what makes League, League,” Riot says.

The company notes that WASD is “the most familiar control scheme for PC games today,” and by adding it as a control option, “we believe League will feel more intuitive to some players who come from other games.” However, Riot is also working to “ensure competitive balance” between the two different control styles, so it’s going to start with a test of the control scheme on League’s public beta environment before slowly rolling it out to non-ranked and eventually ranked and pro play.

League of Legends launched nearly 16 years ago, and while it’s a hugely popular game, it has a reputation for being pretty intimidating to get into. Despite having watched many hours of competitive League, whenever I’ve tried to play it myself, I’ve quickly bounced because of its complexity. WASD controls could lower the barrier to entry, and Riot says that they are “the first of a number of long-term projects we’re working on to help shape League’s future.” 

OpenAI just announced its GPT-5 AI model on Thursday, but you won’t be able to use it with Apple Intelligence’s ChatGPT integration until iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS Tahoe 26, Apple confirmed to 9to5Mac.

Apple Intelligence can rely on ChatGPT for things like helping answer certain Siri queries or alongside Apple’s Google Lens-like Visual Intelligence feature, but right now, it uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. Apple has only publicly said its next major software updates will arrive in the “fall,” and they’ll probably launch for everyone next month. But I’ve asked Apple if GPT-5 will be included with the developer and / or public betas of those updates, and if so, when it might be available.

GPT-5 was released to all ChatGPT users on Thursday, meaning that you’ll even be able to try it as part of the free tier. OpenAI says that ChatGPT is now used by about 700 million people every week.

At a White House press conference to discuss Apple’s new US manufacturing plans, CEO Tim Cook presented a gift to President Donald Trump: a “unique” piece of glass from iPhone glass manufacturer Corning that’s set in a 24-karat gold base.

The piece of glass is a large disc with the Apple logo cut into it. On the top of the glass, President Trump’s name is printed. On the bottom, there’s a signature that appears to be Cook’s as well as the message “Made in USA” and the year 2025. The glass was designed by a “former US Marine Corps corporal” who works at Apple, according to Cook. The base “comes from Utah.”

Cook is well known for his ability to foster a relationship with President Trump, and shortly after Trump was elected for his second term, CEOs reportedly looked to replicate Cook’s relationship-building skills. Trump has threatened Apple and other phone manufacturers with tariffs unless they bring manufacturing to the US.

Google’s Gemini AI now has a “guided learning” mode that tries to help you actually understand the problems you’re trying to learn about instead of just giving you the answer. Guided learning “acts as a learning companion” that guides you with “questions and step-by-step support,” CEO Sundar Pichai says in a blog post.

Answers from the guided learning mode can include things like images, videos, and interactive quizzes. The company worked with students, educators, researchers, and learning experts to ensure the mode is “helpful for understanding new concepts and is backed by learning science,” according to Pichai.

AI companies are increasingly pushing into education — perhaps in part to try and fight the reputation that AI tools have acquired that they help students cheat. Features like Gemini’s guided learning mode and ChatGPT’s similar study mode, which was announced last week, could theoretically help with actual learning, but the question is whether students will want to use these modes instead of just using the AI chatbots for easy answers. 

As part of its announcements on Wednesday, Google is now letting students 18 and older in the US, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, and Brazil sign up for 12 months of its AI Pro Plan for free, as long as they do so by October 6th. The company is also committing $1 billion in funding over three years for “American education, including AI literacy programs, research funding and cloud computing resources,” Pichai says.

Google’s August Pixel update includes a fix for Android’s three-button navigation and gesture navigation systems becoming unresponsive.

The issues appear to have started popping up shortly after the official release of Android 16 in June. Ever since that update, the user said that navigation has been “a complete mess” and that they ran into issues with buttons being “completely unresponsive” or delays of “over 30 seconds” on their Pixel 8 Pro. Another user said they had to occasionally press the back button “a few times” on their Pixel 9 to get the phone to register it. The swipe gesture to navigate back also occasionally stopped working, as noticed by Android Police’s Artem Russakovskii.

Google’s patch notes only vaguely say that the issues would happen under “certain conditions.” In addition to general stability improvements, the update also fixes an issue where a scheduled dark theme wouldn’t work. It also includes a security fix for a high severity remote code execution vulnerability.

The update is rolling out now for Pixel 6 devices and newer.

Apple is suing the owner of the Apple Cinemas theater chain, Sand Media, over alleged trademark infringement, as reported by Reuters. In the lawsuit, Apple alleges that Apple Cinemas and Sand Media have made efforts to “capitalize on the highly-regarded Apple brand in connection with the aggressive nationwide expansion” and that they have “refused to engage with Apple’s repeated efforts to resolve the matter amicably.” 

“Consumers should not go to an ‘Apple Cinemas’ theater thinking it is connected to the famous Apple brand, with all its goodwill and brand equity, when Apple Cinemas has no relation whatsoever to Apple,” Apple says.

Apple Cinemas didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Apple Cinemas has operated “outside a few suburbs and city outskirts in New England,” Apple says. However, Apple Cinemas recently opened a theater in the San Francisco Bay Area within 50 miles of Apple’s Cupertino headquarters and plans to open another soon. 

“Already, Defendants’ actions have confused customers and diluted Apple’s brand,” Apple says. The lawsuit includes screenshots of social media posts asking if Apple Cinemas is related to Apple. Apple also notes that “media coverage of the theater openings on both coasts found it necessary to explain that Apple Cinemas was not affiliated with Apple Inc.” and includes examples. Apple Cinemas is planning an “aggressive national expansion to 100 theaters,” according to the lawsuit.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that will suspend the de minimis exemption — which allows packages with goods valued less than $800 to enter the US duty-free — for all countries. Earlier this year, Trump ended the de minimis exemption for goods from China and Hong Kong.

The White House says the change goes into effect on August 29th. Per the executive order, for the next six months, goods shipped through the international postal system will either be charged the flat tariff rate based on country of origin (an ad valorem duty) or a specific duty ranging from $80 to $200 per item. After six months, all duties will be calculated as ad valorem duties.

The White House’s argument for ending the exemption is that packages using it are “subject to less scrutiny than traditional imports” and could “pose health, safety, national and economic security risks.” The White House claims that 98 percent of narcotics seizures (by “number of cases”) are from de minimis shipments. It also says that low-value packages from China and Hong Kong accounted for “the majority of de minimis shipments to the United States.”

Dropbox is discontinuing its password manager. The tool, Dropbox Passwords, will be discontinued on October 28th, and the company is recommending that you transfer your passwords to another app like 1Password ahead of that date.

The company will shut down Dropbox Passwords in phases. Starting August 28th, Dropbox Passwords will be view-only from both the mobile app and the browser extension, meaning you can’t add new information. At that time, Dropbox will also be deactivating autofill functionality. On September 11th, the mobile app will “stop working.” On October 28th, Dropbox Passwords will be fully shut down, meaning you can’t add or access information and everything that you had stored will be “permanently and securely deleted from our servers.”

Dropbox says it’s discontinuing Dropbox Passwords “as part of our efforts to focus on enhancing other features in our core product.” Dropbox launched Dropbox Passwords in 2020 after acquiring the password manager Valt in 2019.

Roblox and Fortnite are two of the biggest games around, and a huge part of why is because they aren't just one game: instead, they're vast platforms where you can party up with your friends, dress up in ridiculous digital outfits, and quickly jump from one experience to another. Back in the day, Fortnite copied PUBG by making a battle royale, and now, PUBG is mimicking Fortnite by trying to become more of a platform than a game.

As part of a roadmap released earlier this year, PUBG developer Krafton said that it would let players create their own modes as part of an alpha, and it revealed more details about the alpha this month. This week, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google is all-in on AI, and based on the company’s latest quarterly earnings, AI has been good for its bottom line. In a press release for Alphabet’s Q2 2025 earnings, CEO Sundar Pichai said that “AI is positively impacting every part of the business” and that features like AI Overviews and AI Mode are “performing well.”

The company is also planning to increase its planned capital expenditures for the year up to $85 billion, according to Pichai. That’s an increase of $10 billion, and could be a sign that Alphabet wants to keep pace with massive data center buildouts from companies like OpenAI and Meta. “Our updated outlook reflects additional investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers, and an acceleration in the pace of datacenter construction, primarily to meet cloud customer demand,” CFO Anat Ashkenazi said during Alphabet’s Q2 earnings call.

For the quarter, Alphabet reported revenue of $96.4 billion, up 14 percent year over year, with revenues for its “Google Search” segment reaching $54.1 billion.

Pichai’s comments in the press release on AI align with recent findings from Pew, which suggested that AI Overviews appear to be successful at getting people answers but at the expense of clicks through to the websites that would otherwise offer them. 

AI Mode also has more than 100 million monthly active users in the US and India, while AI Overviews has more than 2 billion monthly users across “more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages,” Pichai said during the call. “We are also seeing that our AI features cause users to search more as they learn that Search can meet more of their needs,” which is “especially true for younger users.” Pichai also said that the Gemini app now has 450 million monthly active users, “with daily requests growing over 50 percent from Q1.”

During the second quarter, Google hosted its annual I/O developer conference, which was jam-packed with AI-focused announcements like the rollout of AI Mode for Search (which news publishers have called “theft”), upgrades to its video and image generation models, Gemini AI in Chrome, and much more powerful smart replies in Gmail. (Based on that event, Google’s future is Google googling.) And just ahead of I/O, Google hosted an Android-focused show where it revealed the youthful new design language for Android 16.

At the same time, Google is anticipating the ruling from the remedy phase of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit, which took place during the second quarter as well. Last August, a judge ruled that Google “is a monopolist” in that antitrust case, and remedies could include Google getting broken up. (A lot of companies have expressed interest in buying Chrome.)

The company also changed its “G” logo for the first time in nearly a decade.

Alphabet will be hosting its earnings webcast beginning at 4:30PM ET.

Update, July 23rd: Added details from Alphabet’s earnings webcast.

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 90, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, hope you're staying cool, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

This week, I have been watching The Bear's fourth season, preparing for the deluge of Qi2.2 wireless chargers, pondering how I'll use the upcoming Bigfoot emoji to troll my group chats, studying the relaunched EmojiTracker, reading this giant profile of NBA star Joel Embiid, enjoying Pixar's Hoppers teaser trailer way more than I expected, learning who Alex Warren is, and wondering if I should actually watch all of S …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Switch 2 technically launched with an F-Zero game, as F-Zero GX was available on Nintendo Switch Online's premium tier as part of the GameCube lineup. But if you're looking for a new F-Zero or Wipeout, the console has a spiritual successor that costs just $14.99: Shin'en's Fast Fusion.

Fast Fusion pits you in futuristic sci-fi hovercraft races where you fly forward at hundreds of miles per hour. Races are all about managing boosts by collecting coins to build your boost meter and driving over boost zones on the tracks themselves. (You can boost into opponents to make them spin out to earn some extra coins, which never gets old.)

The ga …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Nintendo just announced the two leads of its live-action Legend of Zelda film, and unlike the celebrity-packed Mario movie cast, Zelda will star two young, lesser-known actors: Bo Bragason as Zelda and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as Link. You may not have heard of them, but there's a good chance they're going to be a part of the franchise for a while.

Choosing stars who are in their teens (Ainsworth) and early 20s (Bragason) makes a lot of sense. In the games, even the "older" Links and Zeldas are still typically young adults, so Bragason and Ainsworth seem like they'll fit the mold. (Yes, I know Link and Zelda are technically older than 100 in …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Hi! Welcome to Installer No. 89, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. My name is Jay Peters, and I will be taking care of Installer while David is on parental leave. All of us here at The Verge are very excited for him and his family, and he'll be back later this year.

It's a huge honor to be writing this. I look forward to Installer every week to see what awesome things David is obsessed with and what you all are into. (Thanks to everyone who sent over their favorite non-famous apps to get me started. Keep reading for some of those!) I'm really excited to keep the party going. (If you're new here, welcome, and also you …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It's been an agonizing wait for more Deltarune. The first chapter of the episodic, parallel story to Toby Fox's acclaimed RPG Undertale came out nearly seven years ago. But the newly released third and fourth chapters are so good that I highly recommend playing everything that's available right now - even if there are still three more episodes to go.

In Deltarune, you play as Kris, a teenager who lives in a town inhabited by friendly animals and monsters. Kris is assigned a group project with Susie, an aloof bully, and together they stumble into a place called the Dark World (hidden in a closet at school, naturally). There, they partner up …

Read the full story at The Verge.

When I was a kid, there was a moment when it felt like everyone was obsessed with yo-yos. I never got better than just being able to make the yo-yo go up and down. But with Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, I could pretend like I was halfway decent - all while playing a silly game that feels like a spiritual successor to the Game Boy Advance titles I loved growing up.

Pipistrello is a top-down adventure game, in which you use your yo-yo to attack enemies and traverse the world. You play as Pippit, a goofy bat who has dreams of yo-yo excellence but is also a freeloader who relies on financial support from his wealthy aunt, an energy magnate. In the opening minutes of the game, the aunt gets merged with your yo-yo as four big baddies steal her Mega Batteries, and your goal is to get the batteries back and help free her.

The game is quite charming. Pippit is a lovable doofus, and you'll also be tasked with ridiculous missions like rounding up people for a soccer fan club so you can get easier access to a stadium run by a corrupt boss, who wants people to gamble. The pixel art is great, too - it looks exactly like what I remember from GBA games, even though I played Pipistrello on my …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Reddit has become known as the place to go for unfiltered answers from real, human users. But as the site celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, the company is increasingly thinking about how it can augment that human work with AI.

The initial rollout of AI tools, like Reddit Answers, is "going really well," CTO Chris Slowe tells The Verge. At a time when Google and its AI tools are going to Reddit for human answers, Reddit is going to its own human answers to power AI features, hoping they're the key to letting people unlock useful information from its huge trove of posts and communities.

Reddit Answers is the first big user-facing piece of the company's AI push. Like other AI search tools, Reddit Answers will show an AI-generated summary to a query. But Reddit Answers also very prominently links to where the content came from - and as a user, you also know that the link will point you to another place on Reddit instead of some SEO-driven garbage. It also helps that the citations feel much more prominent than on tools like Google's AI Mode - a tool that news publishers have criticized as "theft."

"If you just want the short summary, it's there," Slowe says. "If you want to …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Adobe has a new computational photography camera app for iPhones – and one of its creators, Marc Levoy, helped make the impressive computational photography features that made some of Google’s earlier Pixel cameras shine.

The new app, called Project Indigo, was released last week by Adobe Labs. It’s free and available for the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max, and all iPhone 14 models and above. (Though Adobe recommends using an iPhone 15 Pro or newer.) It also doesn’t require logging into an Adobe account to use.

“Instead of capturing a single photo, Indigo captures a burst of photos and combines them together to produce a high-quality photo with lower noise and higher dynamic range,” according to the app’s description. Indigo tries to produce a natural, “SLR-like” look for photos, and it also offers a bunch of manual controls like focus, shutter speed, ISO, and white balance.

To really understand what’s going on under the hood of Project Indigo, though, I highly recommend reading a detailed blog post from Levoy, now an Adobe Fellow who joined the company in 2020 to build a “universal camera app,” and Florian Kainz, a senior scientist. The post covers things like why smartphone cameras are good, how its computational photography works, how it creates the natural look for its photos, and some details about its image processing pipeline.

It is here I must confess that I am not a camera expert by any means. But even I found the post pretty interesting and informative. The photos in the post do look great, and Adobe has an album of photos you can browse, too.

In the post, Levoy and Kainz say that Project Indigo will also be a testbed for technologies that might get added to other flagship products, like a button to remove reflections. And down the line, the team plans to build things like an Android version, a portrait mode, and even video recording.

“This is the beginning of a journey for Adobe – towards an integrated mobile camera and editing experience that takes advantage of the latest advances in computational photography and AI,” according to Levoy and Kainz. “Our hope is that Indigo will appeal to casual mobile photographers who want a natural SLR-like look for their photos, including when viewed on large screens; to advanced photographers who want manual control and the highest possible image quality; and to anyone – casual or serious – who enjoys playing with new photographic experiences.”

We’ve been waiting for Spotify’s lossless streaming for more than four years, but there are some new and promising hints that the feature might finally arrive sometime soon.

The X account for Spicetify, a command-line tool that lets you customize the Spotify client, says that a new version of Spotify includes some hidden mentions of lossless. In a screenshot the account shared, for example, lossless appears in the sidebar to connect a device. Another screenshot shows lossless as an option for streaming quality in the app’s settings. The Spicetify account also says it has seen code that lossless will be available on Spotify Connect and in the web player.

To be clear: Spotify’s lossless streaming still isn’t available yet. But these small lossless mentions and recent reporting indicate that the company may be ready to add lossless at long last.

Spotify initially announced a “Spotify HiFi” tier in 2021 that it intended to launch that year, but that didn’t happen. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in 2024 that the company was working on a “deluxe” version of Spotify. And in February, Bloomberg reported that Spotify was aiming to roll out a new “Music Pro” tier with features like higher-quality streaming by the end of this year. The tier could cost as much as $5.99 per month more than its current subscriptions, Bloomberg says.

Services like Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Tidal already offer lossless streaming.

The bosses in Elden Ring Nightreign are already pretty tough. But if you’ve gotten good and need a harder challenge, you’ll be able to take on “Everdark Sovereigns,” which are more difficult versions of the game’s Nightlord foes you face to conclude a run.

“These limited-time versions of the Nightlords are extremely challenging and pose an even greater threat to the Nightfarers with new moves and increased power,” according to a blog post from Bandai Namco.

The first Everdark Sovereign you can fight is a new version of Adel, Baron of the Night, aka Gaping Jaw. If you’ve beaten the normal version of that boss, you’ll be able to take on the new form. When you beat an Everdark Sovereign, you’ll get “Sovereign Sigils,” which you can exchange for “special Relics and other items.”

There are a couple caveats to be aware of. You can only fight Everdark Sovereigns while playing online. And Everdark Sovereigns will only be available for a limited time — the upgraded Gaping Jaw, for example, will stick around until June 25th at 8:59 PM ET.

Bandai Namco says a new Everdark Sovereign will be added every week, and over the “next few weeks,” Everdark versions of Sentient Pest and Darkdrift Knight will be added to the game. Other Everdark bosses will be added “at a later date.” Based on the blog post, it seems like Everdark variations will eventually return after they’ve disappeared.

At some point, the game will also get DLC that adds new playable characters and bosses. An Elden Ring movie is in the works, too.