Back in March, Google started testing the ‘Jump Ahead’ button in the YouTube app for Android by making it available to a small number of people. Pressing this button skips the part of the video that most people have skipped. Well, 9To5Google says that the company is now rolling out the Jump Ahead button more widely by making it available to Premium subscribers in the United States as an experimental feature.
With this feature enabled, when you double-tap on the display to fast-forward a video, YouTube shows the Jump Ahead button at the bottom-right corner of the screen. Once you click it, the app will say “Jumping over commonly skipped section” and it will “jump you to where most viewers typically skip ahead to.” According to Google, Jump Ahead “combines watch data and AI to help identify the next best point a viewer typically skips ahead to.”
Google says that the new feature is available for only videos that are in the English language, and “not available on every video.” To get the new feature. To get the new feature, open to the YouTube app and go to You » Settings » Try experimental new features and click on ‘Try it out’ on the Jump Ahead banner. Hopefully, Google will make the feature available in more regions and platforms soon.
Sony coming to the PS5 that should streamline the whole process of wrangling people into a multiplayer game. The new tool will let you invite people into a game even when they aren’t at a console or using the PlayStation app. The system generates a link, via the app, that can be shared anywhere online. When the recipient clicks the link, they will be able to hop into a multiplayer session. You don’t even have to be friends. Easy peasy. That sure beats having to (side-eyes Nintendo.)
The obvious use case scenario here? You meet some people online via social media and want to jump into a game quickly, without having to pass usernames back and forth. Sony says you’ll be able to “start playing together right away.” The tool will also generate a QR code along with the link, which is something PS5 owners are already familiar with when it comes to multiplayer games.
There are some caveats. This feature isn’t coming until later in the year and it’s only for PS5 games. Sony also warns that some titles may require an update before everything works seamlessly. Of course, most PS5 games require a PlayStation Plus subscription to use multiplayer, and those .
Sony has even developed a custom live widget for multiplayer invites in Discord. When you share a link via Discord, the widget automatically refreshes to show whether or not a multiplayer session is active or not, so you won’t jump into an empty lobby to watch tumbleweeds roll by. Just like the forthcoming invite tool, the Discord widget is only available for PS5 games.
Sony
Finally, the company’s working on a related tool that will let people share their PlayStation Network profile on any messaging or social app by generating a link on the PlayStation app, similar to how the aforementioned feature will work. This is also coming later this year.
When Paul Zimmer-Harwood volunteered to be intentionally infected with SARS-CoV-2, he wasn’t sure what to expect. He was ready for a repeat of his first brush with COVID-19, through a naturally acquired infection that gave him influenza-like symptoms. But he hoped his immunity would help him feel well enough to use the indoor bicycle trainer that he had brought into quarantine.
It turned out that Zimmer-Harwood, a PhD student at University of Oxford, UK, had nothing to worry about. Neither he nor any of the 35 other people who participated in the ‘challenge’ trial actually got COVID-19.
Scientists deliberately gave people COVID — here’s what they learnt
The study’s results, published on 1 May in Lancet Microbe1, raise questions about the usefulness of COVID-19 challenge trials for testing vaccines, drugs and other therapeutics. “If you can’t get people infected, then you can’t test those things,” says Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London. Viral strains used in challenge trials take many months to produce, making it impossible to match emerging circulating variants that can overcome high levels of existing immunity in populations.
Researchers use challenge trials to understand infections and quickly test vaccines and therapies. In March 2021, after months of ethical debate, UK researchers launched the world’s first COVID-19 challenge trial. The study2 identified a minuscule dose of the SARS-CoV-2 strain that circulated in the early days of the pandemic that could infect about half of the participants, who had not previously been infected with the virus (at that time, vaccines weren’t yet widely available).
In parallel, a team led by Helen McShane, an infectious-disease researcher at Oxford, launched a second SARS-CoV-2 challenge study in people — including Zimmer-Harwood — who had recovered from naturally caught SARS-CoV-2 infections, caused by a range of variants. The trial later enrolled participants who had also been vaccinated.
Evolving strains
The first participants got the same tiny dose of the ‘ancestral’ SARS-CoV-2 strain as did those in the first trial. When nobody developed a sustained infection, the researchers increased the dose by more and more in subsequent groups of participants, until they reached a level 10,000 times the initial dose. A few volunteers developed short-lived infections, but these quickly vanished.
These volunteers want to be infected with disease to aid research — will their altruism help?
“We were quite surprised,” says Susan Jackson, a study clinician at Oxford and co-author of the latest study. “Moving forward, if you want a COVID challenge study, you’re going to have to find a dose that infects people.”
An ongoing COVID-19 challenge trial at Imperial College London, in which participants have been exposed to the Delta SARS-CoV-2 variant, has also encountered problems with infecting participants reliably, says Christopher Chiu, an immunologist and infectious-disease physician at Imperial who is leading that trial and was involved in the other challenge trials. Some participants have experienced infections, but probably not enough for a study testing whether a vaccine works, adds Chiu.
“We need a challenge strain that’s more representative of what’s circulating in the community,” says Anna Durbin, a vaccine scientist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, who was a member of the board that oversaw the safety of the latest ‘reinfection’ trial.
Viral strains used in challenge trials are produced under stringent conditions, a process that can take six months or longer, say scientists, making it impossible to match circulating variants perfectly. McShane and Chiu are readying a challenge trial using the BA.5 Omicron subvariant that emerged in 2022.
Raising doses
Researchers are looking at other ways to give people COVID-19. Jackson says that an even higher SARS-CoV-2 dose might be needed — one similar to doses used in influenza challenge trials, in which participants have substantial immunity. Another method could be giving participants multiple doses. Chiu says that his team is exploring the possibility of screening potential participants to identify those with low levels of immune protection against the BA.5 variant and any future challenge strains.
Chiu is leading a consortium that in March was awarded US$57 million by the European Union and CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations in Oslo, to use challenge trials to test inhaled and intranasal COVID-19 vaccines that might also block transmission. He’s hopeful that such changes to trial protocols will do the trick. “What you really want is a model that replicates a genuine infection and ideally one that cause some symptoms,” he adds.
Scientists sampled genomic data from 279 graves at a cemetery in Rákóczifalva, Hungary, where people of the medieval Avar culture were buried.Credit: Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University Múzeum, Budapest, Hungary
Most people know about the Huns, if only because of their infamous warrior-ruler Attila. But the Avars, another nomadic people who subsequently occupied roughly the same region of eastern and central Europe, have remained obscure despite having assembled a sprawling empire that lasted from the late sixth century to the early ninth century. Even archaeologists have struggled to piece together their history and culture, relying on spotty and potentially biased contemporaneous chronicles that, in many cases, were authored by the Avars’ adversaries.
A deep dive into 424 genomes collected from hundreds of Avar graves is filling in crucial gaps in this story, revealing a wealth of insights into the Avars’s social structure and culture1. “These people basically didn’t have a voice in history, and we are kind of looking into them this way — through their bodies,” says Zuzana Hofmanová, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and one of the study’s lead authors.
The work was published today in Nature.
Nine generations
The researchers focused on four cemeteries in Hungary that were once at the heart of the khaganate, as the former Avar empire was known. Importantly, all four sites were fully excavated, giving the researchers access to DNA from every grave and enabling them to use genetic data to map relatedness for entire Avar communities.
This effort got an important boost from a computational method called ancIBD, which can connect even distant family members on the basis of their shared chromosomal sequences2. Co-lead author Johannes Krause, an archaeogeneticist at Max Planck, says that scientists have generally struggled to reassemble DNA-based family trees that extend past third-degree relatives, such as first cousins or great-grandparents. But by using tools such as ancIBD, Krause and colleagues were able to chart much more convoluted Avar family trees, including a massive nine-generation pedigree comprising 146 family members.
The data suggest that, after migrating to Europe, the Avars retained many cultural practices from their place of origin on the northeast Asian steppes3. For example, the Avars were very strict about avoiding inbreeding. There were no observed instances of marriage between relatives — even at the level of second cousins. Krasue says that was surprising, given that unions between first cousins were not unusual during much of European history. “It’s really remarkable that they can keep track over nine generations who is related to whom, and who can have children with whom,” he says.
On the other hand, there was also limited intermarriage with non-Avar neighbors: about 20% of the genomic sequences in the sampled Avar DNA could be traced to central European ancestry.
A gold figurine excavated from an Avar burial site in Rákóczifalva, Hungary.Credit: Institute of Archaeological Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University Múzeum, Budapest, Hungary
The researchers recorded several examples of ‘levirate unions’, in which a widow married a male from the family of her deceased spouse, such as a brother. Such marital patterns were atypical in much of Europe, but were established features of Asian steppe-dwelling cultures, notes co-lead author Tivadar Vida, an archaeologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. “It was archaeologically very interesting to see the conservativism in the Avar society, lasting nine generations,” says Vida.
The Avars were also strictly patrilineal, with men acting as heads of family and daughters leaving their communities to join their husbands’ households. At the largest cemetery sampled, in the village of Rákóczifalva, Hungary, Hofmanová notes that there was only a single instance of both a mother and her adult daughter being interred.
Power play
The kinship data reveal what seems to be a shift in local political power that would have been difficult to detect with sparse DNA sampling. In the graves at Rákóczifalva, the researchers found that one male lineage predominated early in Avar history, but was displaced by a different Avar bloodline by the late seventh century. Intriguingly, archaeological evidence collected from those graves suggests that the subsequent family had different diets and burial rituals than did the displaced one, indicating that Avar culture shifted over time despite relatively modest levels of intermarriage with non-Avar individuals.
Carles Lalueza-Fox, a palaeogenomicist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, says that this work demonstrates the richness of the insights that can emerge when researchers have the opportunity and resources to broadly survey and analyse DNA at sites of historical interest. “Only this scale of analysis would allow you to obtain a reliable picture of kinship and social processes,” he says, adding that his group is now embracing a similar approach in their archaeogenomic research. “I think ancient genomics is moving toward this direction to obtain a more democratic and nuanced view of the past.”
Recent leaks claim Google is working on further integrating satellite connectivity to their Pixel phones and could introduce support for the tech in Google Maps. This information comes from two industry insiders: AssembleDebug who shared his findings with PiunikaWeb and Nail Sadykov over on Telegram. Beginning with the former, users will apparently be able to share their location with others via satellite connection.
Hints of the location-sharing tool were found in the strings of code on the latest Google Maps beta. It’s unknown exactly how it’ll work. The report doesn’t go into detail. They do, however, say people “will be able to update their location” in the app every 15 minutes to maintain accuracy. But there’s a catch – you can only refresh your whereabouts “up to five times a day.” It makes sense why Google would implement some sort of restrictions.
This is supposed to be an emergency, potentially life-saving feature akin to Emergency SOS on the iPhone and Google may not want people messing around with it.
Setting up a satellite connection
As for the other update, Nail Sadykov states he found evidence of something called the Android Satellite Pointing UI.
It appears to be a help guide for Pixel that’ll teach people how to connect their smartphone to an orbiting satellite. A video posted to the unofficial Google News channel on Telegram shows how the process could work.
Users will have to hold their phone in front of them and physically move it around to find a satellite. Once found, you’ll need to keep moving the device until a blue satellite icon reaches the middle of an on-screen circle and stays there for several seconds. Holding the icon in place allows the device to establish connection. If you don’t connect, you’ll receive an on-screen message telling you the session failed.
(Image credit: Nail Sadykov)
Sadykov goes on to say the guide will be a part of the Pixel’s “Adaptive Connectivity Service (ACS) app”. It’s unclear if he meant the currently available feature or if there will be a new app solely for ACS.
Get the hottest deals available in your inbox plus news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more from the TechRadar team.
He says it’ll be possible to minimize the window into a floating widget on the home page so you can continue texting while trying to establish a connection. When it’s all done, Pixel owners can see Satellite SOS running by swiping down on Quick Settings. You’ll also receive a short message in the menu telling you to avoid buildings, trees, and mountains to ensure a clear view of the sky and not interrupt service.
Potential arrival date
An arrival date for everything you see here is unknown, although both sources believe their respective features will launch on the Pixel 9. The two groups mention a third leak from April 15 about the Pixel 9 series possibly receiving the Samsung Modem 5400 to enable satellite connectivity. The same satellite icon (albeit red) and guide animations from Sadykov’s post were found in the earlier report. PiunikaWeb also mentions seeing the same symbol.
So what we’re seeing today could be the fruits of this new labor – at least potentially. Things could always change at the last minute. Be sure to take all this info with a grain of salt.
Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.
Dust storms turned skies yellow on 27 March 2024 in Erenhot, Inner Mongolia.Credit: VCG via Getty
Many Asian countries are facing an annual problem: dust storms linked to increased deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory conditions. These storms — like the ones that battered Beijing over the weekend — occur when strong winds sweep across dry areas, such as deserts, picking up dust particles from the ground and lifting them into the air, sometimes to as high as 1,500 metres. Researchers in the region have been applying artificial intelligence and climate modelling to better predict the timing, location and severity of the annual phenomenon.
Heat stress caused by global warming could mean some octopuses will struggle to survive. Scientists exposed Octopus berrima and their embryos to three different temperatures: a control of 19 ℃, current summer water temperature of 22 ℃, and 25 ℃ — a possible ocean temperature in 2100. Octopus embryos exposed to 25 ℃ expressed significantly lower levels of key eye proteins, and had a higher rate of mortality. Loss of vision would greatly affect octopuses as they rely on sight for survival: about 70% of the octopus brain is dedicated to vision. Octopuses are thought to be highly adaptable, but this new work suggests they could suffer with warming of only three degrees.
Dinosaurs buck Bergmann’s rule, a more than 170-year-old biological principle suggesting that species from colder environments are generally larger than close relatives from warmer climates. An analysis of more than 300 dinosaur species showed no correlation between size and latitude. Bergmann’s rule is generally applied to mammals and birds, but the researchers discovered that birds’ body sizes show only a modest temperature trend — and that it’s absent in mammals. “This suggests that Bergmann’s ‘rule’ is really the exception rather than the rule,” says palaeontologist and study co-author Lauren Wilson.
As a botanist, Erin Zimmerman was unafraid to travel, climb trees, face snakes or rodents. But she worried about what having children would do to her career, and her fears were well-founded: in the United States, 43% of women with full-time jobs in science leave the sector or take on part-time roles after having their first child (compared to 23% of new fathers). Overworked, in pain, accused of having ‘brain fog’, dismissed for her concerns about working in a pesticide-sprayed greenhouse while pregnant and, later, longing for her infant daughter, Zimmerman eventually switched to science journalism. In her new book Unrooted, Zimmerman finds parallels between the obstacles faced by women in science and global threats to plants.
Researchers are uncovering the complex social lives of viruses, including behaviours that resemble cheating, cooperation and interaction. ‘Sociovirologists’ are moving away from viewing viruses as isolated particles to studying how they engage as members of a group. “We think of them as part of a community,” says virologist Carolina López, “with everybody playing a critical role.” Some of these insights could lead to new therapies against viral diseases.
In Australia, scientists are using techniques, ranging from crossbreeding to gene editing, to alter the genomes of endangered native wildlife, hoping to give them traits they need to survive. Some interventions aim to rescue inbred populations before they disappear forever. But the work challenges traditional ideas of species purity, and carries risks of destabilising ecosystems in unpredictable ways. “We’re searching for solutions in an altered world,” argues ecologist Dan Harley. “We need to take risks. We need to be bolder.”
Upbringing and life experience matter more than genetics when it comes to being a good navigator. For example, people who live in cities with chaotic street layouts tend to have better wayfinding skills than those from places with grid-like streets. In places where women face cultural restrictions on exploring their environment, researchers found a navigation gender gap. The ability to build and refer to a mental map seems essential for good navigation, more so than being able to follow a route using landmarks. “To get good at navigating, you have to be willing to explore,” says cognitive scientist David Uttal.
Hanik Humaida is an analytical chemist at the Centre for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.Credit: Gaia Squarci for Nature
Analytical chemist Hanik Humaida takes measurements of the world’s largest acid lake, which sits in the crater of Indonesia’s Ijen volcano. “Its 36 million cubic metres of acidic water could be very dangerous to the surrounding population if there is an eruption,” she explains. Analysing the lake’s chemistry helps to monitor the volcano’s activity. “When the activity changes, so does the chemical composition of the water — as well as its colour, which ranges from white to turquoise blue.” (Nature | 3 min read)
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, who died last week at the age of 94, had a strong social conscience and was active in the nuclear disarmament and environmental movement, writes particle physicist Christine Sutton. (Nature | 5 min read)
Jitao David Zhang (left) with his apprentices Jannick Lippuner (centre) and Giulia Ferraina.Credit: Matthew Lee
Giulia Ferraina and Jannick Lippuner, both 19, are my latest apprentices in the pharmaceutical research unit of F. Hoffmann-La Roche, a global company, at its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland. Both are in their fourth and final year of vocational education and training (VET), specializing in informatics and communication technology. Coaching them, just like discovering drugs, is a rewarding part of my job as a research scientist.
Giulia and Jannick attend vocational schools for one or two days a week. Besides studying professional topics, such as how to build a computer network or an app, they also acquire life knowledge and skills. These include setting a household budget, forming a family or partnership and even starting their own company.
The rest of their time is divided between working in my team as software developers for drug discovery and attending the company’s dedicated learning centre. Besides writing software that helps to find better drugs, they learn advanced informatics topics, such as cybersecurity and artificial intelligence (AI), and acquire crucial skills such as project management and presentation. Within four years, they will become software engineers with industrial work experience.
Vocational education is common in German-speaking countries. At around the age of 16, teenagers in Switzerland make a choice between general education in an upper secondary school and a VET apprenticeship in one of more than 250 professions. Defined and organized by a partnership between the Swiss federal government, professional associations and individual regions of Switzerland called cantons, VET combines on-the-job training with classes in schools. Each profession has its own educational plan, which specifies a nationwide standard of skills to be mastered by the apprentices. After finishing the training, which takes between two and four years depending on the profession, and passing a final exam, apprentices receive a diploma that certifies their qualification to work or to pursue higher education. Apprentices are paid a salary, which usually starts at 600–1,000 Swiss francs (around US$700–1,170) per month and increases in each year of training.
I stumbled on the apprenticeship culture in Germany while doing my PhD in computational biology in the 2000s at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg. Until then, I had no real idea about vocational training — but I did harbour some unfair stereotypes. When I was in secondary school in Tianjin, a city in northern China with prosperous industries and booming businesses in the 1990s, vocational training was often seen as an inferior choice to general education. An apprenticeship was stigmatized as the last resort for low achievers and problematic children. My stereotypes were banished as soon as I started working with and coaching apprentices in Heidelberg. The young people amazed me with their technical expertise and diligent work, and became co-authors of scientific software and publications. Coaching them improved my leadership and communication skills, especially across cultures, because neither German nor English, spoken by the apprentices, was my first language.
Nature Spotlight: Switzerland
I moved to Basel to take up an industry position in 2011. It soon became clear to me that Swiss people also consider the apprenticeship a respected education. Statistics confirm my impression. Two-thirds of young people in Switzerland opt for an apprenticeship, and one-third of businesses train them. Despite the trend in recent years for more students to choose general education over vocational training, high-quality apprenticeship openings remain competitive. My company trains around 300 apprentices across 15 professions in the Basel area every year. For 6 informatics and computer-technology positions, we usually receive more than 100 applications.
Giulia and Jannick are my fourth and fifth trainees. In their third year, Jannick automated a bioinformatics pipeline (see go.nature.com/49uegts) and Giulia developed several software widgets for chemists that help them to predict the properties of molecules to be synthesized. Currently, both are building a system that helps biologists to visualize and interpret omics data. Apprentices advance scientific research while honing their skills. Their education is an early-access, paid-for opportunity to gain the combination of theoretical knowledge and practical skills that is normally offered by universities.
Giulia and Jannick learn much from solving real-world problems such as fixing a bug. They learn more from making mistakes and getting feedback in a working environment. After attentive learning followed by good sleep (the working hours of underage apprentices are legally limited to a maximum of 9 hours a day), they become capable, productive and keen to learn more.
Doing an apprenticeship is not without risks and downsides. I can imagine that, for some 16-year-olds, it must be a formidable task to decide on a profession and to become self-disciplined and professional almost overnight. Also, the quality of education can vary by profession, school and company. Moreover, some might consider apprenticeships outdated in an age of automation and disruptive technologies such as AI potentially replacing human jobs. A German friend of mine who learnt book binding had to do another apprenticeship and study to get a job as an accountant. Will my apprentices and their peers face a similar fate?
Although the honest answer to this is ‘I don’t know’, two observations make me cautiously optimistic.
First, the Swiss apprenticeship system is constantly evolving. The educational plans are updated every few years with feedback from all parties. Teachers and vocational trainers such as me meet, exchange and receive continuous education regularly. Apprentices are incentivized to explore and adopt new technologies to enhance their productivity. For instance, apprentices in information and communications technology can already use tools such as ChatGPT in their final examination, as long as they declare the prompts they have used. A springboard from classroom to career, apprenticeship prepares one for changes in life.
Second, the apprenticeship system fosters individual growth. Beyond learning from experienced colleagues and working under supervision, apprentices are encouraged to lead activities — for instance, building a website for a project or advising schoolchildren about their career choices. Besides day-to-day work, my apprentices and I are required to hold a formal discussion every semester. We examine their professional and personal development, give each other feedback (from which I learn a lot about myself) and set goals for the coming six months. Apprentices acquire soft skills such as creativity, empathy, compassion, resilience and teamwork that will serve them well in life.
I am therefore convinced that an apprenticeship, if done right, is a valuable education. The short feedback circuit between what is needed and what is taught, as well as an education focusing on self-actualization and collaboration, prevent the formation of a chasm that is sometimes apparent between academia and industry1. Pondering my own journey to become a research scientist in industry, I wish that I had learnt earlier about how to recognize and solve real-world problems, the power of knowledge gained from experience, the importance of building trust-based relationships and the fulfilment gained by focusing on the growth and development of people around me.
Like most of my previous apprentices, Giulia and Jannick both want to attend university when their apprenticeships end. Before that, Jannick is with us for another year (including a six-month company internal exchange in the United States) before undertaking his military or civil service, which is mandatory for men of his age in Switzerland. Giulia will study informatics part-time while working as a software developer at our company. Both have promising careers ahead: ex-apprentices abound among Swiss political and business leaders. Other countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States and China, are also expanding and updating vocational training programmes. The world should perhaps take more notice of the Swiss model.
Micheal Douse, head of publishing at Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios, has reflected candidly on the current state of the video game industry and described the ongoing wave of mass layoffs as “an avoidable f***-up.”
It comes in a recent interview with gaming newsletter Game File, where Douse said that “it’s incorrect to believe that huge companies are run necessarily by incredibly intelligent people that have the means to do the right thing all the time.”
He argued that many game development companies “definitely don’t have to” fire staff. “None of these companies are at risk of going bankrupt. They were just at risk of p***ing off the shareholders.”
Douse attributed some of the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 to the fact that Larian, as a privately held company, is not beholden to shareholder demands and explained that he believes this will not change any time soon. “Going public might give us more money, but it would be antithetical to the quality part of what we’re trying to do. So it wouldn’t make our games better. It would just make us rushed.”
He later suggested that the development of a sprawling game like Baldur’s Gate 3 might be incompatible with the usual expectations of AAA video game development, which often begins with careful consideration of timescales and budgets. “If you asked us what Baldur’s Gate 3 would look like, how much it would cost and how it would feel three years ago, I wouldn’t know. We just took it day by day.”
It’s clear that this approach has paid off though, as Baldur’s Gate 3 was one of the most well-received and commercially successful games of last year. In our detailed Baldur’s Gate 3 review we described it as “a fine contender for one of the best video game RPGs ever made” and highlighted its complex characters and excellent writing.
Get the hottest deals available in your inbox plus news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more from the TechRadar team.
Gmail wasn’t the first email service provider, but 20 years on from its launch, it’s certainly one of the most popular ones out there today.
If you exclude the Apple email client, which dominates due to the prevalence of iOS, macOS and iPadOS devices, Gmail is number one across the world with a 31.2% share of users as of 2024, accoridng to Litmus. Its closest competitor, Microsoft’s Outlook, only enjoys a little under 5% of all users, by comparison.
But how did such a service, which even many at Google seemed reluctant pursue, come to dominate the space?
Not so much a challenger, but a disruptor
The landscape was very different back in 2004 when Google first launched its Gmail client. Yahoo Mail and Microsoft‘s Hotmail were dominant back when the tech giant was buildings its email service, with 1.2 million and 30 million active users respectively, reported CNBC, so it seemed a long shot that another entrant could threaten their dominance.
The idea for Gmail came from Google’s 23rd employee Paul Buchheit, who according to TIME, started creating an email program in the late 1990s. Originally code-named Caribou, the project began with Buchheit building a search engine for his own email server – and that’s its defining that propelled it from the status of challenger to disruptor.
Other services didn’t offer a search function at the time, and as a result the service offered far more inbox capacity than the 4MB that the likes of Hotmail offered. Specifically, each user was granted 1GB of space after considering different amounts.
“A lot of people thought it was a very bad idea, from both a product and a strategic standpoint,” Buchheit saidt. “The concern was this didn’t have anything to do with web search. Some were also concerned that this would cause other companies such as Microsoft to kill us.”
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
Since then, the service has become the most popular non-Apple service and has innovated with various new features over the years. Gmail has increasingly been integrated into other Google products and across the broader suite. Most recently, Google has leaned heavily into artificial intelligence (AI) features that, for instance, help you compose an email, or even let you reply to messages with pre-prepared answers. This has received a boost thanks to the forthcoming Gemini integration.
Much like its announcement seemed like a spoof at the time, an email began circulating this year suggesting that Google was sunsetting Gmail in August 2024. That, by all accounts, was a hoax – and Google confirmed Gmail is here to stay, and likely to persist for many years to come.
Despite what my hairline would imply, Craig Federighi is not family. Just friend. Image: D. Griffin Jones/Cult of Mac
You can quickly tag photos on your iPhone with the names of your friends, family members and pets so you can easily find pictures of them later on. The Photos app will detect pictures of people automatically — you just need to give them a name.
If you want to fine-tune the results, I’ll show you how to do that. And now in iOS 17, you can even tag pets (cats and dogs) in your photos.
How to tag photos on iPhone with faces and pet names
In the Photos app, tap the Albums tab and open the People album. You should see some faces in there already — your iPhone works in the background to identify faces, even if it doesn’t know their names.
Review and confirm additional photos
Tap the ⋯ menu in the top-right corner and select Review Photos to make sure the app identified images correctly. Tap to uncheck images that are of someone else.
At the bottom, tap Review More Photos. It’ll scan your photo library for extra pictures that might be the person you have open, where it just needs you to confirm.
Tap Done to finish.
Tap on a person or pet and enter a name
Tap on a person, then tap Add Name at the top. Match it to someone in your contacts if possible.
When it comes to pets, the system officially supports only dogs and cats, according to Apple Support. However, I found some success in tagging raccoons as well. No such love for birds, fish, hamsters or lizards.
Merge two people
If one of your friends changed appearance, or if you have pictures of someone from when they were a baby all the way into adulthood, someone might appear in your People & Pets album twice.
To merge them into one, just tap and hold on a face and drag it into another one. You’ll see a confirmation dialog, “Is this the same person?” Tap Merge Photos to merge them or Cancel if it was a mistake.
Manually tag photos with faces
On the iPhone, if you’re looking at a picture, swipe up to show more information. You’ll see picture metadata — where it was taken, which lens, what time, etc. — but you’ll also see a small row of faces along the bottom of the picture.
Tap on one of these faces to make sure the app correctly identified the people in the photo. In several cases, Photos thought a friend of mine in a particular set of pictures was a brand-new person. Tap Add Name, enter the person’s name, and they’ll be merged with the rest of the photos.
Photos only shows a new person in the People & Pets area if there are a lot of pictures of them spread out over time. If there’s only one or two pictures of a face the app can’t identify, you need to root them out if you want the album to be fully accurate.
Tagging photos is a lot easier on Mac than on iPhone. In the menu bar, click View > Show Face Names. You’ll see faces circled with their name written underneath, so you can quickly and easily identify if a picture is correctly tagged.
How to use smarter search
Once you’ve tagged all the faces of people you know, you can take advantage of Photos’ smart search feature. You can combine criteria like dates, times, people, locations and even the contents of the picture. Like “scout, indy, christmas tree” for holiday photo shoots with my dogs (Scout and Indy), or “griffin, italy” to find vacation pictures.
Note: We originally published this post on January 26, 2024.
