Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: After a nearly five-year hiatus, Fortnite is back on the App Store for iPhone and iPad users in the United States. Epic Games announced the return of the battle royale gaming app this afternoon, and you can head to the App Store now to download it...

Taegan Goddard:

When Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) asked Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem for the definition of “habeas corpus,” Noem incorrectly described it as a right that the President of the United States has to deport people.

You can go the Latin route (“produce the body”) or the English common-law route (the accused have a right to be shown the evidence against them and defend themselves in court). Noem went the “biggest clown of the clown-car Trump 2.0 administration” route.

Link: politicalwire.com/2025/05/20/kristi-noem-doesnt-know-what…

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

With Apple blocking Fortnite from returning to the U.S. App Store, Epic Games told the court that Apple was violating the injunction and asked that Apple be forced to approve the app. The judge overseeing the case responded to Epic’s request today, and she is sounding more and more fed up with Apple’s continued defiance and Epic’s grousing.

“More and more fed up” is perhaps euphemistic, given Gonzalez Rogers’s tone today.

Link: macrumors.com/2025/05/19/apple-fortnite-us-app-store…

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John Siracusa, in a piece that, in a bit of rhetorical deftness, only mentions Tim Cook by name once: What should be motivating Apple to make improvements — the desire to make great products — seems absent. What should not be motivating Apple — the desire for power, cont...

The reader who sent me this video said, “I’ve never seen a more Star Wars + Gruber combo on Instagram” and — right down to the profanity — I have to agree.

Link: instagram.com/reel/DJZ7uYbvN_O/?igsh=aWZhaGZham1zNWlp

The president of the United States, on his blog: Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT...

Rolfe Winkler and Yang Jie, reporting last week for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link, but also here’s a News+ link): Apple is weighing price increases for its fall iPhone lineup, a step it is seeking to couple with new features and design changes, accord...

Some “thank god some of you remembered because I thought I was going nuts” follow-up regarding my remembrance the other day, “15 Years Later: ‘Very Insightful and Not Negative’”. I wrote: So, what would you do if Steve Jobs was quoted in a viral blog post saying, “We thi...

My thanks to Bolt for sponsoring last week at DF. You can prompt, run, edit, and deploy full-stack web and mobile apps with Bolt, the AI-powered web development agent that brings coding to your browser.

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Month-old news but I’m cleaning up tabs today. I love everything about this pickup except the fact that it doesn’t have a speaker system built-in. No one wants to put a Bluetooth boombox in their cabin and, worse, isn’t that sort of an obvious safety hazard? You get in a cra...

Tyler Pager, The New York Times: Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was diagnosed Friday with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office said in a statement on Sunday. The diagnosis came after Mr. Biden reported urinary symptoms, wh...

There’s an accompanying blog post too, but the video (around 18 minutes) is (unsurprisingly, from Top Gear) better. It’s just a great tour of everything from how you set it up to what it offers, and what the various “themes” look like — and how you switch between them. The ...

Scheduled to drop Monday, but you can click-through to pre-download it now. If you’re not familiar, Puzzmo is sort of a collection of “newspaper puzzle games for the online age”. (Which is also a good description for recent DF sponsor Lex.Games.) One of Puzzmo’s cofounders i...

There’s an old adage in poker: If you look around the table and you can’t tell who the fish is, that means you’re the fish.

If you’re surprised at how this publicity stunt from Epic has turned out, especially if you’re a reporter and ran a piece accepting Tim Sweeney’s word that Fortnite was — not might be, but was — coming back to the US App Store as a fact, then you are Tim Sweeney’s fish.

Link: x.com/markgurman/status/1923404412090782109

Earlier this week Nilay Patel was working on the show notes for the episode of Decoder I guested on, and he texted me to ask if I could recall the time Steve Jobs sent some random developer a link to an article I wrote about the App Store. He wanted to cite it as an example ...

Nilay Patel: There’s a lot of tactical stuff you might talk about in the aftermath of this ruling — about what Apple might do next, how it might impact revenue, and how developers might respond. But I really wanted Gruber to talk about Apple’s big picture and how a compa...

Speaking of Jacob Eiting, his company RevenueCat today posted some interesting findings from a test comparing conversions rates for IAP vs. web checkout for the same app: Two weeks ago, there was a court order in the Apple vs Epic case that forced Apple to allow develope...

Andy Allen, of Not Boring Software, last week on Threads: While the focus on the App Store injunction has been mostly on the commission rate, what’s been overlooked is just how far the tools of the App Store have fallen behind. There’s a long and growing list of feature...

Some interesting follow-up on that piece yesterday about the warning — with a prominent red “!” icon — in App Store listings for apps in the EU that use their own payment processing. Apple told me that exact same warning has been in place since the very beginning of their DM...

Dr. Drang, writing at And Now It’s All This: Back before the LaserWriter and PostScript (it’s an all InterCaps day here at ANIAT) made resolution independence commonplace, most printers were of the dot-matrix variety, usually at a fairly low resolution. The original Imag...

Jacob Parry, reporting last week for Politico: “We have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for,” said Apple spokesperson Emma Wilson. “Despite countless meetings, the Com...

Arjun Kharpal, reporting for CNBC: “I had a little problem with Tim Cook yesterday,” Trump said. “I said to him, ‘my friend, I treated you very good. You’re coming here with $500 billion, but now I hear you’re building all over India.’ I don’t want you building in India....

Apple Newsroom: Starting today, CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, is available with new Aston Martin vehicle orders in the U.S. and Canada, and will be available for existing models that feature the brand’s next-generation infotainment system through a softw...

Variety: The surprise announcement, made less than two months after Max tweaked its logo to look more like the classic black-and-white HBO color scheme, was revealed at Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfront presentation to ad execs in New York on Wednesday. In a press releas...

The app in question, Instacar, is not available in the US App Store, but multiple people in the EU have confirmed this warning on its App Store page is real: This app does not support the App Store’s private and secure payment system. It uses external purchases. The wa...

Following up on my gripe regarding the alternative a glyph used in Apple Notes, here’s Kevin Fox, tweeting on Threads: While we’re waxing nostalgic on the Original Mac, a Daring Fireball post today (below) reminded me of another piece of Mac 128k trivia. Until shortly b...

Kyle Feldscher, CNN:

Major League Baseball on Tuesday removed Pete Rose and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson — two of the sport’s most famous players who were previously kicked out of baseball for gambling on the game — from the league’s permanently ineligible list.

The historic decision by MLB commissioner Rob Manfred allows Rose to be considered for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, an honor that had been ruled out as part of the settlement he reached with Major League Baseball. Rose died in September, and Manfred ruled that his lifetime ban ended with his death.

Like a stopped clock displaying the correct time twice a day, even Rob Manfred occasionally makes a correct decision for baseball.

Link: cnn.com/2025/05/13/sport/pete-rose-shoeless-joe-jackson-mlb…

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at DF. Modern authentication should be seamless and secure. WorkOS makes it easy to integrate features like MFA, SSO, and RBAC. Whether you’re replacing passwords, stopping fraud, or adding enterprise auth, WorkOS can help you build frictionless auth that scales.

New features they launched just last month include:

• WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
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• AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

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Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=RSS&utm…

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