After all the trouble caused by Apple’s AI summaries for news apps like the BBC and the New York Times, Apple is coming back for more. The company has announced that “review summaries” are officially coming to the App Store, aiming to squish the most common points from hundreds or thousands of reviews into one AI-generated summary.
First spotted by Macworld, Apple has announced the coming feature on its developer site. The beta will start in iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 as part of a phased rollout, beginning with English-only summaries for a limited number of apps.
Apple says the summaries will be refreshed at least once a week and will eventually appear for every app “with enough reviews.” It doesn’t mention how many reviews are considered “enough,” but we might get more information in the future.
As with a lot of AI summary features, this sounds like it could be useful if it can be trusted. However, it’s only been a few weeks since Apple’s AI incorrectly told people that tennis player, Rafael Nadal, had come out as gay — a perfect example of just how wrong AI can be about fairly important things.
Generating summaries for app reviews might not cause as much trouble as incorrect news headlines, but they could hurt app developers if things go wrong. If a summary accidentally includes an extreme opinion that only appeared in one out of thousands of reviews or just hallucinates something entirely, then app developers could find themselves losing out on downloads and purchases for no good reason.
Such inaccuracies wouldn’t benefit users either since they could miss out on a good app or end up downloading something that isn’t as good as the review summary made it out to be. However, it’s not impossible to do this well — Amazon has been using generated review summaries for nearly two years now, as has Microsoft.
Given Apple is playing catchup, it’s expected that this will have been tested to surface the right information — however, the rollout will be closely watched to see if the aggregation bugs have been ironed out for Apple.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.
Apple's next cheaper iPhone could get a brand-new processor while keeping its most stubborn display compromise. Digital Chat Station tips the iPhone 18e for a 2027 release with a 2nm A20 chip and a 6.12-inch OLED screen still limited to 60Hz.
The rumored camera setup includes a single 48MP rear camera and a possible 24MP selfie camera. There's new hardware to consider, but buyers hoping Apple would extend that upgrade generosity to smoother scrolling could be disappointed.