Michael Friedman (via Abner Li):
Today, we’re bringing the Gemini app to macOS as a native desktop experience, designed to live right where you work. It’s always just a keyboard shortcut away, so you can quickly get the help you need without losing your focus.
[…]
With our new native desktop experience, you can share anything on your screen with Gemini to get help with exactly what you’re looking at, including local files. If you’re reviewing a complex chart, you can share your window and ask, 'What are the three biggest takeaways here?' to get an instant summary.
Juli Clover:
Gemini will need Accessibility access to read full pages in a browser window.
Nano Banana is available for creating images, and Veo can be used for generating videos.
[…]
Free access to Gemini is limited, and Google has subscription plans with increased usage limits. Google AI Plus is $7.99 per month, Google AI Pro is $19.99 per month, and Google AI Ultra is $249.99 per month.
John Voorhees:
Gemini can also interact with files, the contents of a window, Google Drive, Photos, and NotebookLM. It’s multimodal, too, with support for the generation of text, images, video, and music. Dig a little deeper into Gemini’s menus and you’ll find support for Canvas, Deep Research, Guided Learning, and Personalized Intelligence.
Chazak:
Downloaded it and deleted it 30 minutes later when I found it automatically installs a setting to open automatically as a log in item. Deleting it in system settings does not solve the issue. It automatically returns it to the auto login setting. It takes control of the setting. Invasion of my privacy and control over my own machine. I've returned to the web app version.
Josh Woodward:
We heard your feedback. We recruited a small team. They built 100+ features in less than 100 days. 🤯
100% native Swift. Lightning fast.
Sundar Pichai:
The team built this initial release with @Antigravity, and it went from an idea to a native Swift app prototype in a few days.
Gus Mueller:
Took a peak at it and … it contains 1,856 Objective-C classes whose class name starts with Java.
What in the world are they doing?
So I had Gemini analyze Gemini. Looks like there’s a lot of shared Android code in there, but compiled to Objective-C and Swift.
Previously:
Artificial Intelligence Google Gemini/Bard Java Login Items Mac Mac App macOS 15 Sequoia macOS Tahoe 26 Objective-C Swift Programming Language
Jeff Johnson:
First, Virus Protection for Phone is back in the App Store! The App Store URL is the same, and the developer is the same, Virtual Advisors Limited. The app version history shows a large gap, with version 1.8 released in February 2025, before my blog post, and version 1.9 released just a few days ago. In retrospect, I have no way of knowing whether Apple removed the app from the App Store. The notoriously secretive corporation certainly didn’t make any kind of statement. It’s possible that the app developer voluntarily unpublished the app after noticing the bad publicity.
The second update to the story is that the same scammer appears to have a second scam app in the App Store iPhone Cleaner - Virus Protect under a different developer account, Ranger Bookie Investments LLC. How did I discover this second app? The same way I discovered the first app: an advertisement on a sketchy video streaming website.
[…]
According to AppFigures, iPhone Cleaner - Virus Protect had 65,000 downloads and an estimated net revenue of $310,000 worldwide over the last month. That’s more money than I make in a year! I guess crime does pay.
[…]
For example, curiously, neither developer (they’re surely one and the same developer) identifies as a trader in the European Union, despite the fact that both apps have In-App Purchases.
Nicolas Magand:
Looking at the Top Free Apps list on the Mac App Store as I write this line, the 6th most popular app is called “AI Chatbot · Ask AI Anything 5.2”. It sits right after Microsoft Excel and CapCut, and before Microsoft PowerPoint. No, this app — unrelated to OpenAI — is not fishy at all (!) and the Mac App Store is very safe. The 12th most popular app on the list is “HP: Print and Support”. Great, great stuff.
Juli Clover (Hacker News):
A fake Mac app designed to look like the real thing snuck past Apple’s app review team, costing users $9.5 million in cryptocurrency.
According to CoinDesk, a fake macOS version of the Ledger Live crypto wallet app scammed people into handing over access to their cryptocurrency wallets. More than 50 people fell victim to the fake app between April 7 and April 13.
Ledger has an official Mac app, but it is distributed via the Ledger website and not through the Mac App Store.
David Price:
With unhappy timing, news of this scam broke in the same week as the banning of Freecash, as reported by Macworld’s sister site TechCrunch. In adverts, Freecash offered to pay users to scroll on TikTok, but this was a flimsy veil for its real purpose: harvesting sensitive data. By installing and running the app, users were giving up data about anything from their religion to their sexual orientation, which the makers happily sold on to third parties.
[…]
That decision would appear to indicate that Freecash does not, contrary to its makers’ protestations, meet the standards of Apple’s App Store. (The Android app is still showing up for me in Google search, but the URL it directs to no longer works. Presumably, then, it’s been kicked off Google Play too.) But once again, it’s unclear why Apple’s vetting team wasn’t able to spot this shortcoming before welcoming the app on to the company’s official storefront. Or why it took so long to take action against an app whose murkier practices had been highlighted by journalists months previously.
[…]
This week has been unusually bad, but stories of this sort don’t come as a surprise any more. The App Store of 2026 is absolutely stuffed with slop, scams, and clones, propped up by an ecosystem of fake reviews pushing undeserving apps to the top of the charts. Phil Schiller was complaining about “insane” scam apps 14 years ago, and to the casual eye it’s difficult to see that things have got any better.
Nick Heer:
Price calls the App Store “rotten” — is there any other word? — and says Apple should “give iPhone users the freedom to install from other places. Or just stop pretending the App Store monopoly is about anything other than revenue” if it cannot effectively police its wares. I imagine Apple would argue it enforces its rules all the time and sometimes things just get through.
But that kind of response only reveals the scale of the store and, consequently, the problem: nobody can effectively govern this many items, especially when they are all user-submitted.
Jeff Johnson:
Three scam apps I mentioned in my blog post are still in the crApp Store:
Stronix VPN, Reliable VPN, Privacy Pro VPN
Two mentioned apps are gone, but one already left and came back, so we don’t know if it was Apple or the developer who removed them.
Previously:
App Store App Store Scams Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency iOS iOS 26 Mac Mac App Store macOS Tahoe 26
Nicolas Magand:
I wonder what will happen with millions of extra Mac users.
Will the Neo help the Mac become a proper gaming platform?
[…]
Will the popularity of the MacBook Neo be an opportunity for Apple to mobilise more third-party developers to build apps for MacOS, now that the potential user base can be significantly larger? How many of these new apps will be truly native, and how many will be built on top of frameworks like Electron, since the majority of these new users probably won’t care?
[…]
How many of the new Mac users, brought to the platform via the Neo, will eventually become MacOS enthusiasts?
[…]
I am a little worried that a never-seen-before popularity for the Mac would encourage Apple to make MacOS look and behave more like iOS.
Tony Arnold:
Microsoft Teams is using 45% CPU while doing absolutely nothing.
[…]
I applaud Apple for the Neo, which is really putting heavy cross-platform framework developers on notice.
Alex Potenza:
Curiously, despite all the praise for Apple Silicon hardware, the Mac has not gained meaningful share since its introduction. On StatCounter’s worldwide desktop OS figures, Apple’s combined desktop OS share was 16.54% in November 2020, when the first Apple Silicon Macs arrived, and has dropped to 12.22% in February 2026 if you combine its current OS X and macOS categories.
[…]
I keep running into these problems myself when I show up to a hot desk with a Mac, and I keep seeing them when other people use my Mac. The interesting people are not anti-Apple diehards, but longtime iPhone users who otherwise like Apple products and still get tripped up by Macs. I wrote about many of these same issues when Ventura came out in 2022. The striking part is how many of the same screenshots and complaints still apply now almost half a decade later.
[…]
These docks are also much cheaper than Thunderbolt docks. US Amazon prices I found were roughly USD 40-50 for MST adapters, and USD 270-330 for Thunderbolt docks. That matters for something like a MacBook Neo, a cheap Windows laptop or Chromebook with an ordinary USB-C port can plug into one of these multi-display docks and use the setup just fine, while a new MacBook Neo user cannot.
[…]
Macs are not losing on CPU performance, battery life, thermals, security, or browser compatibility. They are losing on the cumulative cost of workflow mismatches that create rollout exceptions, retraining, accessory replacement, and extra support overhead.
Via Pierre Igot:
Maybe the MacBook Neo is a first step. But there are many more steps required, most of which involve… software. Sigh.
Eric Schwarz:
Despite SoC limitations for multiple displays, my M1 MacBook Pro could push enough pixels to run two 1080p displays easily, yet it can’t. Our even older, less-powerful HPs from our loaner pool can, despite struggling at a lot of other things. I don’t see why Apple couldn’t bake in DisplayPort MST and proper DisplayLink support (instead of forcing you to use a third-party driver.) This gets an easy win for working in a PC environment.
Steve Troughton-Smith:
The people most against Liquid Glass are the people who are really afraid of macOS becoming more closely aligned with iOS and iPadOS, which is perhaps why they’re overindexing on the little things and silly, fixable bugs instead of talking about the larger picture — the Mac is evolving to serve a different audience makeup (wait for the Neo effect), and some people are simply going to be left behind.
[…]
I’ve heard multiple Apple people call it ‘iOS Developer Edition’ in jest, but I’m not convinced they’re joking.
Previously:
Display Electron Mac MacBook Neo macOS Tahoe 26 Retina
