Techin' Geek

Apple may be developing its own AI wearable, according to a report published Wednesday by The Information. The device will be a pin that users can wear on their clothing, and that comes equipped with two cameras and three microphones, the report says.

Should the rumored device come to market, it would mark another sign that the AI hardware market is heating up. This news follows comments made Monday by OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane, who told a Davos crowd that his company will likely announce its highly antipated, first AI hardware device in the second half of this year. Additional reporting suggests that the device may be a pair of earbuds.

Apple’s device is described as a “thin, flat, circular disc with an aluminum-and-glass shell,” which engineers hope to make the same size as an AirTag, “only slightly thicker.” The pin will also have two cameras (one with a standard lens and another with a wide-angle) for pictures and video, as well as a physical button, a speaker, and a FitBit-like charging strip on its back, according to the report.

Apple may even be in the process of trying to accelerate development of this product to compete with OpenAI’s. The pin could potentially be released in 2027 and involve 20 million units at launch, the report notes. TechCrunch reached out to Apple for more information.

But it remains to be seen if consumers want this kind of AI device. Two Apple alums previously founded Humane AI, a startup which also sold an AI pin. Humane’s pin also included built-in microphones and a camera. However, it floundered upon release, and the company had to shut down operations and sell its assets to HP within two years of its product launch.

Last year was a tumultuous one for the U.S. semiconductor industry.  

From leadership changes at legacy companies to continuously changing dialogue around AI chip export controls, a lot has happened. If the first few weeks of 2026, which saw new chip tariffs and international semiconductor deals, are any indicator — this year will be as unexpected as the last.  

But before we get too deep into 2026, here is a final look at everything that happened in the U.S. semiconductor industry in 2025:  

December

Nvidia finds gold with Groq 

December 24: Nvidia announced that it struck a non-exclusive licensing deal with chip maker Groq. While this wasn’t an acquisition, Nvidia hired Groq’s founder and president, in addition to other employees. The company also bought $20 billion worth of Groq’s assets.  

Chips to China 

December 8: The U.S. Department of Commerce decided that Nvidia and AMD can send AI chips to China after all, a stark reversal to past messaging. The U.S. government specifically said Nvidia could sell its H200 chips, which are much more advanced than its H20 chips, to approved customers.  

November 

Nvidia keeps climbing 

November 19: Nvidia reported record results in its third-quarter earnings report. The company racked up $57 billion in revenue in Q3, a 66% increase over the same quarter in 2024. A large portion of that revenue came from Nvidia’s data center business.  

October

Intel makes processor progress 

October 9: Intel announced a new processor, dubbed Panther Lake, that is part of the company’s Intel Core Ultra processor family. This will be the first one built on the company’s 18A semiconductor process and will be exclusively made at Intel’s Arizona fab factory.  

September

A taste of tariffs 

September 26: We got the first inkling of what the Trump administration’s semiconductor tariffs could look like at the end of September. Rumors started swirling that the administration would require semiconductor companies to produce the same volume of chips domestically as they do internationally, or they would otherwise be subject to tariffs.  

China shuts out Nvidia 

September 17: China’s campaign against Nvidia continued when the country told its domestic companies not to buy Nvidia’s chips. The Cyberspace Administration of China banned local companies from buying Nvidia’s chips in an effort to boost domestic chip sales.  

China calls out Nvidia

September 15: Despite being given a loose green light to start selling chips again in China, the process was not going to be smooth sailing for Nvidia. China’s State Administration for Market Regulation ruled that Nvidia violated the country’s antitrust regulations regarding the company’s 2020 acquisition of Mellanox Technologies.  

A leadership shakeup

September 9: Just a few short weeks after the U.S. government took an equity stake in Intel, the company made some notable leadership changes. Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the chief executive officer of Intel products, departed after three decades. The company also created a central engineering group.  

August

Nvidia reports record quarter

August 27: The turmoil in the semiconductor market over the year had clearly not hurt Nvidia. On August 27, the company reported that it had record sales in the second quarter. The highlights were the growth of its data center business, which saw its revenue grow 56% year over year.

U.S. Government takes equity stake in Intel

August 22: The U.S. government announced it was converting existing government grants into a 10% stake in Intel. The deal was structured to penalize Intel if the company’s ownership in its foundry program dropped below 50%.

SoftBank takes a stake in Intel

August 18: Japanese conglomerate SoftBank announced it was taking a $2 billion stake in Intel. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son called the deal “strategic.” The transaction was announced as rumors were swirling that the U.S. was going to take a stake in the company.

Chip companies strike a deal to sell in China

August 12: Nvidia and AMD announced that they struck a deal with the U.S. government to gain the necessary license to sell their AI chips in China. Both companies agreed to pay the U.S. government 15% of revenue from their chip sales in China.

Trump and Lip-Bu Tan meet

August 11: Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan went to the White House to meet with President Trump. The pair talked about Tan’s past and how Intel can help the U.S. with its goal of bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the U.S. Both called the conversation productive.

Trump comes for Lip-Bu Tan

August 7: President Donald Trump demanded that Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan “resign immediately” due to “conflicts of interest” in a Truth Social post. While Trump didn’t clarify what the conflicts of interest were, this came the day after Republican Senator Tom Cotton sent a letter to Intel’s board of directors inquiring about Tan’s ties to China.

Trump says tariffs are coming for the industry

August 5: President Donald Trump told CNBC’s Squawk Box that he was planning to announce tariffs on the semiconductor industry as soon as the following week. At the time, he didn’t mention specifics on what these tariffs could look like. As of September 5, no tariffs have been announced for this industry.

July

Intel spins out business unit

July 25: Just one day after its second-quarter earnings call, Intel confirmed that it was spinning out its Network and Edge group, which is responsible for making chips for the telecom industry. The business unit produced $5.8 billion in revenue for the semiconductor company in 2024.

Intel continues to look for efficiency

July 24: Intel announced that it was pulling back on some of its manufacturing operations. The company said it will longer pursue its previously announced projects in Germany and Poland and that it was consolidating its test operations. Intel also announced it plans to end this year with around 75,000 employees.

Trump’s AI Action Plan

July 23: The Trump administration unveiled its much-anticipated AI Action Plan alongside multiple related executive orders. While the plan included a lot regarding the need for U.S. chip export controls and for the U.S. to coordinate with its allies on this effort, it didn’t provide concrete information on what those restrictions would look like.

Groundbreaking UAE AI deal reportedly on hold

July 17: The Trump administration helped foster a groundbreaking deal in May that resulted in a commitment from the United Arab Emirates to buy billions of dollars’ worth of AI chips from Nvidia. But now that deal was reportedly on hold as the U.S. worked through national security concerns and fears that those chips could be smuggled from the Middle East to China.

Nvidia is a bargaining chip

July 16: A day after semiconductor firms like Nvidia and AMD got the green light to resume selling certain AI chips to China, we found out why. U.S. Commerce Security Howard Lutnick said the plans to allow U.S. companies to start selling AI chips in China are tied to ongoing trade discussions between the U.S. and China regarding rare earth elements.

U.S. chips head back to China

July 14: Nvidia said it was filing an application to restart sales of H20 AI chips in China, confirming rumors from a few weeks prior. The company also announced that it would be selling a new chip, the RTX Pro, which was designed specifically for the Chinese market.

Malaysia fights chip smuggling

July 14: Malaysia announced that it was launching trade permits for U.S.-made AI chips. Under this new restriction, any individual or business would need to give the Malaysian government 30 days’ notice before exporting any U.S. AI chips.

June

Intel appoints new leadership

June 18: Intel announced four new leadership appointments that Intel said will help it move toward its goal of becoming an engineering-first company again. Intel announced a new chief revenue officer in addition to multiple high-profile engineering hires.

Intel began layoffs

June 17: Intel began laying off a significant chunk of its Intel Foundry staff in July, according to various media reports. The company later confirmed it was restructuring. Reports said it planned to eliminate 15% to 20%, of workers in that business unit. These layoffs weren’t a shock: Layoffs were rumored back in April, and Intel’s CEO Lip-Bu Tan had said he wants to flatten the organization.

Nvidia won’t report on China

June 13: Nvidia wasn’t counting on the U.S. backing off from its AI chip export restrictions. After the company took a financial hit from the newly imposed licensing requirements on its H20 AI chips, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company will no longer include the Chinese market in future revenue and profit forecasts.

AMD acquired the team behind Untether AI

June 6: AMD made another acquisition — this time focused on talent. The company acqui-hired the team behind Untether AI, which develops AI inference chips, as the semiconductor giant continues to round out its AI offerings.

AMD is coming for Nvidia’s AI hardware dominance

June 4: AMD continued its shopping spree. The company acquired AI software optimization startup Brium, which helps companies retrofit AI software to work with different AI hardware. With a lot of AI software being designed with Nvidia hardware in mind, this acquisition isn’t surprising.

May

Nvidia laid out the impact of chip export restrictions

May 28: Nvidia reported that U.S. licensing requirements on its H20 AI chips cost the company $4.5 billion in charges during Q1. The company expected these requirements to result in an $8 billion hit to Nvidia’s revenue in Q2.

AMD acquired Enosemi

May 28: AMD kicked off its acquisition spree. The semiconductor company announced that it acquired Enosemi, a silicon photonics startup. Enosemi’s tech, which uses light photons to transmit data, is becoming an increasing area of interest for semiconductor companies.

Tensions started to flare between China and the U.S.

May 21: China’s Commerce Secretary didn’t like the U.S. guidance, issued on May 13, that warned U.S. companies that using Huawei’s AI chips “anywhere in the world” was a U.S. chip export violation. The commerce secretary issued a statement that threatened legal action against anyone caught enforcing that export restriction.

Intel began the process to offload units

May 20: Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan seemingly got right to work on his plan to spin out Intel’s non-core business units. Back in May, the semiconductor giant was reportedly looking to offload its Networking and Edge units, which make chips for telecom equipment, and was responsible for $5.4 billion of the company’s 2024 revenue.

The Biden administration’s AI Diffusion rule was officially dead

May 13: Just days before the Biden administration’s Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule was set to go into place, the U.S. Department of Commerce formally rescinded it. The DOC said that it plans to issue new guidance in the future, and in the meantime, companies should remember that using Huawei’s Ascend AI chips anywhere in the world is a violation of U.S. export rules.

A last-minute reversal

May 7: Just a week before the “Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion” was set to go into place, the Trump administration planned on taking a different path. According to multiple media outlets, including Axios and Bloomberg, the administration wouldn’t enforce the restrictions when they were supposed to start on May 15 and is instead working on its own framework. 

April

Anthropic doubles down on its support of chip export restrictions

April 30: Anthropic doubled down on its support for restricting U.S.-made chip exports, including some tweaks to the Framework for Artificial Intelligence Diffusion, like imposing further restrictions on Tier 2 countries and dedicating resources to enforcement. An Nvidia spokesperson shot back, saying, “American firms should focus on innovation and rise to the challenge, rather than tell tall tales that large, heavy, and sensitive electronics are somehow smuggled in ‘baby bumps’ or ‘alongside live lobsters.’” 

Planned layoffs at Intel

April 22: Ahead of its Q1 earnings call, Intel said it was planning to lay off more than 21,000 employees. The layoffs were meant to streamline management, something CEO Lip-Bu Tan has long said Intel needed to do, and help rebuild the company’s engineering focus. 

The Trump administration further restricts chip exports

April 15: Nvidia’s H20 AI chip got hit with an export licensing requirement, the company disclosed in an SEC filing. The company added that it expected $5.5 billion in charges related to this new requirement in the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year. The H20 was the most advanced AI chip Nvidia can still export to China in some fashion. TSMC and Intel reported similar expenses the same week. 

Nvidia appears to talk its way out of further chip exports

April 9: Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang was spotted attending dinner at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, according to reports. At the time, NPR reported Huang may have been able to spare Nvidia’s H20 AI chips from export restrictions upon agreeing to invest in AI data centers in the U.S. 

An alleged agreement between Intel and TSMC

April 3: Intel and TSMC allegedly reached a tentative agreement to launch a joint chipmaking venture. This joint venture would operate Intel’s chipmaking facilities, and TSMC would have a 20% stake in the new venture. Both companies declined to comment or confirm. If this deal doesn’t come to fruition, this is likely a decent preview of potential deals in the industry to come. 

Intel warned it will spin off non-core assets

April 1: CEO Lip-Bu Tan got to work right away. Just weeks after he joined Intel, the company announced that it was going to spin off non-core assets so it could focus. He also said the company would launch new products, including custom semiconductors for customers. 

March

Intel names a new CEO 

March 12:  Intel announced that industry veteran and former board member Lip-Bu Tan would return to the company as CEO on March 18. At the time of his appointment, Tan said Intel would be an “engineering-focused company” under his leadership. 

February

Intel’s Ohio chip plant gets delayed again

February 28: Intel was supposed to start operating its first chip fabrication plant in Ohio this year. Instead, the company slowed down construction on the plant for the second time in February. Now the $28 billion semiconductor project won’t wrap up construction until 2030 and may not even open until 2031.

Senators call for more chip export restrictions

February 3: U.S. senators, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo), wrote a letter to Commerce Secretary Nominee-Designate Howard Lutnick, urging the Trump administration to further restrict AI chip exports. The letter specifically referred to Nvidia’s H20 AI chips, which were used in the training of DeepSeek’s R1 “reasoning” model. 

January 

DeepSeek releases its open “reasoning” model

January 27: Chinese AI startup DeepSeek caused quite the stir in Silicon Valley when it released the open version of its R1 “reasoning” model. While this isn’t semiconductor news specifically, the sheer alarm in the AI and semiconductor industries DeepSeek caused continues to have ripple effects on the chip industry. 

Joe Biden’s executive order on chip exports

January 13: With just a week left in office, former president Joe Biden proposed sweeping new export restrictions on U.S.-made AI chips. This order created a three-tier structure that determined how many U.S. chips can be exported to each country. Under this proposal, Tier 1 countries faced no restrictions; Tier 2 countries had a chip purchase limit for the first time; and Tier 3 countries got additional restrictions. 

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei weighs in on chip export restrictions

January 6: Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei co-wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal endorsing existing AI chip export controls and pointing to them as a reason why China’s AI market was behind the U.S. He also called on incoming president Donald Trump to impose further restrictions and to close loopholes that have allowed AI companies in China to still get their hands on these chips.

This story was originally published on May 9, 2025, and is regularly updated with new information.

Meta on Wednesday announced it’s expanding ads on Threads to all users globally. The expansion, which starts next week, will be gradual, the company says, noting it may take months for the full rollout to complete.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly praised the social app and X rival, which has now grown to over 400 million monthly active users, as the company’s next big hit. Shortly after the app’s debut, the exec told investors that Threads had a good chance of reaching 1 billion users in a few years’ time.

The app has rapidly grown since its July 2023 debut, reaching 200 million users by mid-2024, 320 million as of January 2025, and then adding another 30 million as of last April, before reaching its latest milestone.

Though Threads hasn’t yet hit that milestone, the company has been testing ads for some time. A year ago, Threads began testing ads in the U.S. and Japan, and last April, the platform opened up to global advertisers.

The company has made it easy for existing advertisers to expand their reach to include Threads by allowing them to automatically place ads through both Meta’s Advantage+ program and via manual campaigns. Supported formats include image and video, ads, including the newer additions of the 4:5 aspect ratio format and carousel ads. Advertisers can manage their Threads ads alongside those for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in their Business Settings, which simplifies cross-posting.

In addition, Meta expanded the third-party verification already available on Facebook and Instagram (including feed and Reels) to the Threads feed through Meta Business Partners. This provides advertisers with independent brand safety and suitability verification for Threads — a useful feature when Threads’ nearest rival is dealing with a scourge of illegal deepfakes.

The company didn’t share how often users would see ads in their feed, but noted that ad delivery initially would remain “low” as the feature scaled to global users.

Days ahead of a scheduled trial, social media company Snap has settled a lawsuit accusing the platform of causing social media addiction, according to reports from multiple outlets.

According to the New York Times, the settlement was announced Tuesday in the California Superior Court in Los Angeles County. The lawsuit against Snap was brought by a 19-year-old known in court documents as K.G.M., accusing the social media app of designing algorithms and features that caused addiction and mental health issues.

The terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

The lawsuit also names other platforms, including Meta, YouTube, and TikTok. No settlement has been reached with these platforms. Notably, Snap is still a defendant in other similar social media addiction cases filed against it.

According to documents unveiled in the ongoing cases, Snap employees raised concerns around risks to the mental health of teens dating back at least nine years. The company has said these examples were “cherry-picked” and were taken out of context.

Plaintiffs in these cases are drawing parallels to Big Tobacco — referring to lawsuits in the 1990s against cigarette companies that concealed health risks — alleging that the platforms obscured information about potential harms from their users. They argue that features like infinite scroll, auto video play and algorithmic recommendations have tricked users into continuously using apps, leading to depression, eating disorders, and self-harm, according to NYT.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel had been scheduled to testify in the trial, which would have marked the first time a social media company faces a jury in an addiction lawsuit — no platform has lost such a case at trial yet. The remaining case against Meta, TikTok, and YouTube is set to proceed with jury selection beginning next Monday, January 27, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expected to take the witness stand.

If plaintiffs prevail, legal experts predict the cases could result in multibillion-dollar settlements and potentially force platforms to redesign their products. But the companies have so far defended themselves in part by arguing that those same design choices — like algorithmic recommendations, push notifications, and infinite scroll — are similar to a newspaper deciding what stories to publish and are protected speech under the First Amendment.

Snap did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Industry reports and the growth of voice model companies in the Indian market suggest that there is a growing demand for voice AI solutions in the country. Voice is a popular medium for communication among people and businesses in India. That’s why enterprises and startups are eager to use voice AI to be more efficient at customer support, sales, customer acquisition, hiring, and training.

But recognizing market demand is one thing — proving businesses will pay is another. Y Combinator rejected the application from Bolna, a voice orchestration startup built by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times before finally accepting it into the fall 2025 batch, skeptical that the founders could turn interest into revenue.

“When we were applying for Y Combinator, the feedback we got was, ‘great to see that you have a product that can create realistic voice agents, but Indian enterprises are not going to pay, and you are not going to make money out of this,’” Wagh told TechCrunch.

The startup applied with the same idea for the fall batch but was able to show it had revenue of more than $25,000 coming in every month for the last few months. At that time, the company was running $100 pilots to help users build voice agents. Now the startup is pricing those pilots at $500.

The momentum has continued. The startup said on Tuesday that it has raised a $6.3 million seed round led by General Catalyst, with participation from Y Combinator, Blume Ventures, Orange Collective, Pioneer Fund, Transpose Capital, and Eight Capital. The round also includes individual investors, including Aarthi Ramamurthy, Arpan Sheth, Sriwatsan Krishnan, Ravi Iyer, and Taro Fukuyama.

The product and customers

Bolna is building an orchestration layer — essentially a platform that connects and manages different AI voice technologies — akin to startups like Vapi, LiveKit, and VoiceRun, to suit the idiosyncrasies of interactions in India, including noise cancellation, getting verification on the caller ID platform Truecaller, and handling mixed languages.

Feature-wise, the company has built specific nuances for Indian users, such as speaking numbers in English regardless of the core language, or allowing for keypad input for longer inputs.

Wagh noted that the key differentiation of Bolna is that it makes it easy for users to build voice agents by just describing them, even if they don’t know much about the underlying technology, and start using them for calls. The company said that 75% of its revenue is coming from self-serve customers.

He also said that because Bolna is an orchestration layer, it doesn’t depend on a single model, so enterprises can easily switch when there is a better model available.

“Our platform allows customers to switch models easily or even use different models for different locales to get the best out of them. An orchestration layer is necessary for enterprises to ensure they are getting the best models because one model can be better today and another one can be better tomorrow,” Wagh said.

The company has a range of clients, including car reselling platform Spinny, on-demand house-help startup Snabbit, beverage companies, and dating apps. Most of these are small to midsize businesses that use Bolna’s self-serve platform.

Separately, Bolna is pursuing large enterprise deals. For these large enterprises and custom implementations, Bolna has a team of forward-deployed engineers — specialists who work directly with clients on-site or closely with their teams. The startup has signed two large enterprises as paying customers and has four more in the pilot stage. Currently, Bolna employs nine forward-deployed engineers and is adding two to three people to that team every month to support this enterprise push.

Bolna has seen steady growth in both call volumes and revenue. It say it’s now handling over 200,000 calls per day and on the verge of crossing $700,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). The company noted that while 60% to 70% of call volume is in English or Hindi, other regional languages are steadily rising.

Akarsh Shrivastava, who is part of the investment team at General Catalyst, said that the firm found Bolna impressive because its orchestration layer is flexible for various kinds of customers.

“Bolna allows you the freedom to choose any model and has a stack behind it to mold it according to your requirement. It’s a good option for people who want to own some part of the stack, want flexibility in model picking, and want to be able to maintain those products themselves,” Shrivastava told TechCrunch over a call.

Ethos Technologies has priced its initial public offering and the expectation is that it will go public on Thursday, making it one of the first tech IPOs of the year. 

If it lands in its current price range of $18 to $20 a share, it will enter the day valued at $1.26 billion on the high end — raising $102.6 million for itself and about $108 million for its selling shareholders. Should investor interest be high, it could wind up pricing higher. That means a bigger valuation and more money raised.

The company, which offers software to sell life insurance, is backed by Sequoia, Accel, Alphabet’s venture capital arm GV, Softbank, General Catalyst, and Heroic Ventures. Sequoia and Accel are not selling shares in the IPO, the company disclosed.

Ethos was a rising startup star in the pre-AI era, raising one big round after another through 2021. In its early rounds, it was backed by a who’s who of family offices, including those of Will Smith, Robert Downey Jr., Kevin Durant, and Jay Z, the company told TechCrunch in 2018. 

It hit a $2.7 billion valuation in 2021 having raised $400 million by then, most of it that year. It completed only very small fundraises after that, Pitchbook estimates.  

Ethos is profitable and has been for years, its IPO documents disclose. In the nine months ending September 30, Ethos generated almost $278 million in revenue and just under $46.6 million in net income. 

ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has now become the No. 3 most-blocked account on Bluesky, after receiving its official verification on Friday, according to third-party trackers. Bluesky users, unsurprisingly, are angry about the government account being hosted on the platform. Many are recommending that others block the account directly or subscribe to a block list that includes all of the U.S. government’s official accounts.

The blocklist was introduced after the White House and other government agencies under the Trump administration signed up for Bluesky last October to post messages blaming Democrats for the government shutdown. The accounts that joined at the time included the Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Transportation, the Interior, Health and Human Services, State, and Defense, in addition to the White House itself.

The move made the White House one of the most-blocked accounts on Bluesky, and today it remains in the No. 2 position, just behind Vice President J.D. Vance, per stats shared on the tracking site Clearsky. (The site leverages Bluesky’s API to track which accounts are the most blocked and other blocking activity.)

ICE, however, did not join Bluesky in October. According to Bluecrawler’s Join Date Checker, the account @icegov.bsky.social joined the social network on November 26, 2025.

The account was verified a few days ago according to the independently-run Verified Account Tracker, which suggests that either Bluesky’s team didn’t have enough information to apply the verification checkmark, was somehow unaware of the account’s existence (doubtful!), or was internally debating how to handle the issue. Bluesky hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

One tracker now shows the ICE account as being over 60% of the way to being the most-blocked Bluesky account.

ICE today has many accounts across other social media sites, including X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. These accounts tend to be verified on platforms that have a verification mechanism, with YouTube being an exception.

The decision from Bluesky to host and verify ICE establishes the social network as one that’s now fitting in more with other, larger social media giants, rather than with the original ethos of the open social web known as fediverse, where the user community is more in control of which accounts gain attention and traction.

The fediverse, which represents a network of independent but interconnected social media platforms, includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard, and, to some extent, Instagram Threads, though Meta’s app isn’t fully federated. The U.S. government doesn’t have Mastodon accounts, but users can follow accounts like @potus on Threads from their Mastodon accounts, if they choose.

One reason for avoiding Mastodon, an open source federated app that runs on the ActivityPub protocol, could be its smaller size. But also, any government account joining this network could be easily blocked by individual server operators. This wouldn’t prevent the account from setting up its own server to post to the fediverse, but other communities could refuse to federate (interoperate) with that server, greatly diminishing its reach.

Mastodon’s founder Eugen Rochko, who stepped down as CEO in November, citing burnout, recently posted an anti-ICE message on Mastodon, noting that “Abolish ICE” doesn’t go “nearly far enough” to address the problem in the U.S.

A day later, he announced he was opting his account out of the bridge that connects Mastodon with Bluesky.

Bridging technology, which includes the project known as Bridgy Fed, is meant to allow different decentralized platforms to connect with each other, even if they run different protocols, as is the case with Bluesky, which runs on AT Protocol. Coincidentally, Bridgy Fed today launched a way to add domain blocklists to bridged accounts, which would conceivably allow fediverse users to block the government agencies posting on Bluesky.

Reached for comment, Rochko wouldn’t confirm whether or not ICE’s participation on Bluesky was a factor in his decision to leave the bridge, saying that the decision was a “personal” one.

However, there has often been tension between the fediverse and the atmosphere, or the decentralized social platform that includes Bluesky and other, newer networks and apps like Blacksky, Northsky Social, and more. Because the networks have different approaches to decentralization, they each have their own supporters and critics, some of whom can’t even agree that the networks should be bridged in the first place.

One of the more prominent alternative app stores that emerged in the EU as a result of the region’s Digital Markets Act is shutting down. The store, Setapp Mobile, from the Ukrainian-based developer MacPaw, first launched in September 2024, offering dozens of apps across categories like productivity, finance, video, photo, creativity, and more.

Its model offered consumers access to all of Setapp’s mobile apps through a $9.99 monthly subscription, provided the user’s Apple ID was associated with an EU member state.

Now, the company says all applications will be removed from Setapp Mobile by the end of the sunset date, February 16, 2026. Applications that are available on Setapp Desktop will not be affected, the company told TechCrunch.

The news of the shutdown, announced on Setapp’s support site, was first spotted by MacRumors.

MacPaw stated that “still-evolving and complex business terms that don’t fit Setapp’s current business model” are the reason for its decision.

The “complex business terms” being referenced here are Apple’s complicated set of fees for apps operating under its new business terms in the EU, which include a controversial Core Technology Fee that charges developers €0.50 for each first annual install over one million in the past 12 months.

The tech giant revised its fee structure last year to avoid further penalties for noncompliance with the Digital Markets Act (DMA), but instead of simplifying the fees, it made them more complex.

One result of these constant changes is that developers can’t properly plan how to grow and monetize their business. It also suggests the fees, as they stand, don’t make running an alternative app store in the EU a viable option.

In a statement shared with TechCrunch, Setapp said it found its business model was not “viable,” as the commercial conditions continued to change. The statement reads:

“Setapp Mobile was a bold, breakthrough project that aimed to provide EU iOS users with access to alternative app marketplaces – creating a new app ecosystem where both developers and users could thrive. We are proud of what we have accomplished with it over the past two years and still believe passionately in this vision. As a result of still-evolving commercial conditions, we have determined that it is not viable to continue development or support for Setapp Mobile within Setapp’s current business model. While we are disappointed to discontinue Setapp Mobile and let down our user base and developer community in the EU, we are looking forward to pursuing the development of other innovations.”

There are still other alternative app stores operating in the EU, including, most notably, the Epic Games Store from the maker of Fortnite, and the open source AltStore.