This week, Spotify finally unveiled a lyrics search feature. It allows users to look for a song using the words in it, instead of by artist or title. As Engadget noted, Apple Music launched a similar tool nearly two years ago.

The two leading music services often add features seemingly inspired by their competition; the latest is lyric search. A Spotify engineer tweeted earlier today that users can now input lyrics into the app’s search field to get song results, something that Apple Music has offered since late 2018. As you can see from the screenshot above, songs that include the lyrics you input will have a “lyrics match” label; they show up along side other potential results, so keep an eye out for that label if you’re specifically searching with lyrics.

Apple Maps feature ‘Look Around’  is now available in Phoenix, Arizona. Macrumors spotted the update, which recently arrived in cities in the UK and Ireland.

Apple recently expanded its “Look Around” feature in Apple Maps to Phoenix, Arizona, providing 3D street-level imagery that’s similar to Google’s Street View. Apple has been slowly adding the Look Around feature to new cities. It expanded to Chicago in April and several cities in Japan in August. Though not yet mentioned on Apple’s website, Look Around last week expanded to London, Dublin, and Edinburgh.

Apple Podcasts is now available on Amazon Echo and Fire TV devices in Germany like they are in the U.S, AppleInsider reported. The service can be set as the default via a skill. I very much hope this comes to other European countries, including the UK! At the moment, in these other countries, you can access podcasts on an Alexa device via TuneIn.

Tuesday was Instagram’s 10-year birthday. To mark the occasion, the Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform announced new anti-bullying features on its official blog.

In the last few days, we started testing a new feature that automatically hides comments similar to others that have been reported. We know from research that, while people don’t want to be exposed to negative comments, they want more transparency into the types of comments that are hidden. You can tap “View Hidden Comments” to see the comments. Comments that violate our Community Guidelines will continue to be automatically removed. We’re also expanding comment warning to include an additional warning when people repeatedly attempt to post potentially offensive comments. Since launching comment warning, we saw that reminding people of the consequences of bullying on Instagram and providing real-time feedback as they are writing the comment is the most effective way to shift behavior. These new warnings let people take a moment to step back and reflect on their words and lay out the potential consequences should they proceed. We just started testing this feature in select languages.

Rumors picked up on by Cult of Mac indicate that a HomePod mini could be on the way at Apple’s October 13 event, a topic discussed on Tuesday’s Daily Observations podcast. However, the same source suggests we may have to wait a bit longer for the second generation of the full-size version.

L0vetodream made the claim Tuesday on Twitter after Apple issued invites to its October 13 “Hi, Speed” event. Apple likely will unveil its final new hardware products of the year at that time… Given that Apple hasn’t updated the HomePod since 2017, it seems to be on Cupertino’s back burner. Perhaps that’s because a lot of smart speaker functionality, outside playing music, can be done on other Apple devices. But many people could be keen to buy a cheaper HomePod. Apple could find success, essentially following the model laid out by the iPhone SE and Apple Watch SE. HomePod SE, anyone?

Payment services like Apple Pay and Apple Card could be the company’s next multi-billion-dollar businesses as the fintech sector grows. That’s according to a note to investors from Cowen analyst Krish Sankar, seen by AppleInsider.

“While Apple has portrayed these digital services as complementary to its mobile hardware platforms, we believe future scaling out of these services globally coupled with increasing depth and sophistication of them could position Apple as an emerging contender in the fintech space,” Sankar writes. Within Apple’s fintech segment, the analyst expects Apple Pay to remain the cornerstone. The platform could see increasing acceptance at U.S. retailers, and Sankar predicts that the contactless payment service will be the largest revenue driver over the next few years, with an expected $800 million in growth annually. Sankar sees Apple Pay growing at an 18% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2023, and markets such as Asia and Europe could allow for even further expansion.

There have been rumors that amongst the iPhone 12 lineup will be a ‘mini’. Macrumors looked at the compromises this might involve and the features that might be missing. Most significantly, this includes reduced battery life.

As the smallest device in the ‌iPhone 12‌ lineup, the ‌iPhone 12‌ mini is also expected to have the smallest battery. Certifications have suggested that the battery capacity of the ‌iPhone 12‌ mini is 2,227mAh. Apple’s current smallest flagship ‌iPhone‌, the 5.8-inch iPhone 11 Pro, has a battery capacity of 3,046mAh battery, making the ‌iPhone 12‌ mini’s capacity 819mAh smaller. Although the A14 Bionic processor and OLED display are likely to improve energy efficiency, the fundamental limits of battery size in the ‌iPhone 12‌ mini are likely to result in an overall smaller battery life.

YouTube initially blocked iOS 14’s picture in picture function on its mobile website. However, Macrumors reported that the capability has now returned.

This is an apparent reversal of a change that YouTube explicitly made following the release of ‌iOS 14‌ which blocked such behavior. At that time, YouTube would only allow that capability for users with Premium accounts. Tonight’s change means that any YouTube visitor can use Picture in Picture in Safari. ‌iOS 14‌ introduced native Picture in Picture capability to the iPhone for the first time, however, apps have to explicitly support the feature. YouTube’s native app has never supported Picture in Picture for any of its users even though iPadOS has offered the capability for some time. There have been reports that YouTube has been testing this feature, but there have been no announcements.

So-called ‘digital upscalers’ have turned grainy footage from bygone eras into high-quality 4k clips. However, Wired reported, some historians are not very happy about it.

Digital upscalers and the millions who’ve watched their work on YouTube say they’re making the past relatable for viewers in 2020, but for some historians of art and image-making, modernising century-old archives brings a host of problems. Even adding colour to black and white photographs is hotly contested. “The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that’s not what photographs are,” says Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s School of Art History and Cultural Policy.

Apple is suing a Candian firm, Geep Canada, alleging it resold around 100,000 devices which it had received to strip down and recycle, AppleInsider reported. The companies have been working together since 2014.

According to The Logic, Apple estimates that Geep Canada stole around 100,000 iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches that it had been hired to recycle. Geep does not deny the thefts, but has filed a counter suit claiming that they were conducted by three “rogue” employees without the knowledge of the company. Apple argues that these employees were in fact senior management at the firm. Although the case has only now been publicly revealed, Apple filed its suit in January 2020 while Geep filed its countersuit in July. Seemingly, Apple discovered the alleged thefts at the end of 2017 or start of 2018, and at some point after that ceased working with Geep. In September 2019, Geep Canada merged with other firms to form Quantum Lifecycle Partners

Google is to invest $1 billion into partnerships with news publishers, CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a blog post on Thursday. The product is called News Showcase, and will start rolling out in Germany and Brazil today, before expanding into other countries.

News Showcase is made up of story panels that will appear initially in Google News on Android. The product will launch soon on Google News on iOS, and will come to Google Discover and Search in the future. These panels give participating publishers the ability to package the stories that appear within Google’s news products, providing deeper storytelling and more context through features like timelines, bullets and related articles. Other components like video, audio and daily briefings will come next… We’ve signed partnerships for News Showcase with nearly 200 leading publications across Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the U.K. and Australia. The publications include award-winning national titles like Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, Folha de S.Paulo,Band and Infobae alongside regionally and locally significant publications such as El Litoral, GZH, WAZ and SooToday. The number of news publications will grow as we work to expand News Showcase to other countries including India, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Some users of the England and Wales COVID-19 exposure notification app are mistakenly being sent messages that tell them to self-isolate. Sky News reported that they are test messages sent by Apple and Google, and this can be checked by trying to open the message to self-isolate.

The Department of Health and Social Care confirmed it was a “default message” sent by Google and Apple – the makers of the app’s technology – but it had already caused confusion… A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson confirmed that default messages from Google and Apple would disappear or not be able to be clicked on. An official Test and Trace instruction to self-isolate would produce a message inside the app which said: “Please stay at home and self-isolate to keep yourself and others safe.” Apple or Google notifications, the spokesperson said, could be called “COVID-19 EXPOSURE LOGGING” or “COVID-19 Exposure Notifications”. It is not currently possible to turn off default messages