Category: Technology

Tesla’s robotaxi service may have had some early hitches, but the company said it just successfully delivered a car autonomously. Using the same robotaxi technology, Tesla showed the delivery process of a Model Y from its Gigafactory Texas in Austin to a customer with a roughly 30-minute journey as seen in a video posted on X. Unlike the robotaxi service launch last week, the automated delivery had no safety monitor, nor anyone behind the wheel. Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, also posted on X that the delivery didn’t have any “remote operators in control at any point.”

The trip covers navigating through everything from the Gigafactory Texas’ parking lot to city streets, even managing to handle the highway without any incidents. This delivery comes just after Tesla’s rollout of its robotaxi service in Austin, with Musk promising that the “first Tesla that drives itself from factory end of line all the way to a customer house is June 28.” While impressive, it’s not the first time that a fully autonomous car has used the highway, since Waymo started allowing its employees access to self-driving rides on Los Angeles freeways earlier this year.

Tesla’s competing robotaxi service hasn’t been without its hiccups. As seen in a 10-mile trip posted on X, the Model Y using the robotaxi software struggled to make a left turn and corrected its course by entering the other side of the road briefly. In another launch day video, the robotaxi was seen braking hard twice after encountering police cars with their lights on, even though none of the emergency vehicles were on the road. The robotaxi pilot program has caught the attention of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which said that it reached out to Tesla for more information about these incidents. On top of the robotaxi concerns, recent demonstrations showed Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software failing to stop for a school bus’ flashing lights and stop signs, as well as for kid-sized mannequins who dart into the road.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/tesla-shows-off-its-first-fully-autonomous-delivery-to-convince-us-its-self-driving-cars-work-163805707.html?src=rss 

Facebook has been showing some users a pop-up message asking them if they want to allow the social network to create collages, recaps and AI restylings using photos they’ve yet to upload from their camera roll. According to TechCrunch, Facebook has been showing users the message when they upload a new Story on the app. It doesn’t pop up for everyone, however, since we weren’t able to replicate the event. In that notification, Meta wrote that in order to create ideas for users, it’ll select media from their camera roll and upload it to the company’s cloud “on an ongoing basis, based on info like time, location and themes.”

The message also said that the media won’t be used for ads targeting, but its wording raised concerns about the possibility of Meta using people’s camera roll files to train its artificial intelligence technology. Meta assued The Verge that it’s not “currently training [its] AI models with these photos.” The company’s comms manager, Maria Cubeta, told the publication that Meta “testing suggestions of ready-to-share and curated content from a person’s camera roll” as part of its efforts to explore ways to make content sharing easier. “These suggestions are opt-in only and only shown to you — unless you decide to share them — and can be turned off at any time. Camera roll media may be used to improve these suggestions, but are not used to improve AI models in this test,” she said. 

The test feature has a limited reach, but it has been ongoing for some time, seeing as some users have reported seeing it earlier this year. In fact, Facebook already has a Help page for it, giving users instructions on how to allow and disallow “creative ideas with camera roll cloud processing” on Facebook. For those who’ve previously clicked Allow when the message popped up for them, they can go to Settings and switch it off in the “Camera roll sharing suggestions” section under Preferences.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/facebook-test-uses-meta-ai-to-process-photos-youve-yet-to-upload-140021100.html?src=rss 

It’s that time of year again when Amazon is hosting deals on everything from wireless earbuds to air fryers. Starting July 8, Prime Day will run for four days with deep price cuts on smart home gadgets, including the Roomba Robot Vacuum and Mop Combo from iRobot that drops down to an all-time low of $140 from its original $275 price tag. While this Roomba was marked down to $149 earlier this year, the Prime Day deal is the first time we’re seeing a 49 percent discount. Just note that this deal is only for Prime members at the moment.

We ranked iRobot’s Roomba Robot Vacuum as our overall favorite budget option, but this Prime Day deal features a version that can both vacuum and mop. With the Prime Day price drop, the vacuum and mop combo is cheaper than the vacuum-only model, but it does double the work. The combo Roomba can even be set to only vacuum if you prefer to mop yourself, but you’d be missing out on the four-stage cleaning system that vacuums and mops in the same pass.

Since it’s a Roomba, it’s a straightforward setup process that takes a few minutes before you can set it and forget it. The robot vacuum can navigate through your house or apartment, avoiding furniture and stairs, thanks to onboard sensors. Once it drains through its battery, which can last up to 120 hours, the Roomba knows to return to its charging dock to recharge itself. You can even customize this combo Roomba with three levels of both suction power for vacuuming and water levels for mopping. For more control, you can program it to spot clean a single spot in your home or schedule cleaning times through the companion iRobot Home app.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/this-combo-roomba-that-vacuums-and-mops-is-nearly-half-off-for-prime-day-141013857.html?src=rss 

Kobo, a Rakuten subsidiary that sells ebooks and ereaders, has built its name on being a more open and author-friendly version of Amazon Kindle. However, a recent change to the company’s self-publishing business has some writers worried that reputation might change. Last month, the company updated its Terms of Service for Kobo Writing Life, its publishing platform, which opened the door to AI features on the platform. With that new contract language going into effect on June 28th, authors seem no clearer on what it will mean for their futures on Kobo.

For authors who haven’t broken into (or have opted out of) traditional publishing both Kobo Writing Life and Kindle Direct Publishing offer a way to sell books without needing representation or a publishing deal. If they can provide their work and the information needed to make a store page — and have a willingness to serve as not only author but marketer — they have everything they need to sell their books.

Agreeing to sell on one of these platforms comes with a list of conditions. The biggest is the split of sales. If an author sells their novel for $2.99 or more on Kobo Writing Life, they keep 70 percent of what they earn. On the considerably larger Kindle Direct Publishing platform, there are two royalty options — 35 percent and 70 percent — but both have a confusing litany of compounding factors, some of which can significantly reduce authors’ earnings. The calculus of fees vs. exposure makes authors develop strong preferences for the platform they choose. But the terms of service under which their work is published are also important — and apparently subject to change with little warning.

Engadget spoke with three authors who were surprised by Kobo’s decision to experiment with AI. All of them noticed the company had published new Terms of Service because of a simple banner notification in the Kobo Writing Life Dashboard. Even now, a month after the terms were changed, the company is unable to clarify how the new terms would apply to existing work. There also isn’t a means for authors to opt out. If anyone on Kobo is adamantly against any amount of AI use, their best and only option is to stop publishing there, and probably to pull their existing work from the platform.

The authors we spoke to were surprised that Kobo didn’t reach out about the proposed changes in advance, but also that the company was choosing to work with AI at all. “I appreciate their transparency in being candid about their use of AI,” Michelle Manus, a fantasy author on Kobo’s platform, wrote to Engadget over email. “What I think they vastly underestimated was the extent to which their user base dislikes AI.”

Kobo’s new terms are explicit in saying that the company does not plan to use authors’ work to train generative AI. It does, however, reserve the right to use “artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning algorithms or similar technologies” to “read, analyze, and process” writing for a variety of non-training purposes, including:

“Enhancing the discoverability of Works” with tagging and targeted customer recommendations

“Evaluating the suitability of Works” for sale in the Kobo store

“Generating resources” like “creating keywords, promotional content, targeted advertisements, customer engagement strategies and other materials”

“Providing recaps, reading assistance and accessibility features”

Authors have taken issue with the apparent lack of recourse provided to them. What happens if a work is incorrectly tagged as one genre when its author believes it more directly fits another? Or what if the “promotional material” Kobo generates includes some kind of hallucination? The biggest issue for the writers Engadget spoke to was the potential for Kobo to deploy AI-generated recaps. Amazon implemented a recap tool on Kindle in April, using generative AI to help readers get back into a series or remember where they were in a novel, and some authors have already found examples of the company’s AI inaccurately summarizing stories.

“We would have immediately gone, ‘Ah, okay, we see what you’re trying to do, but we don’t think that the thing you’re suggesting is going to work to address the problem that you’re trying to address,” Delilah Waan, a fantasy author and YouTube creator, told Engadget. Since self-published authors tend to be more responsive to their audience, these kinds of issues could actually jeopardize that relationship. “Authors frequently get pushback from readers about plot choices, and I can only imagine the levels to which that could rise if they are receiving incorrect recaps of what happened in a book,” Manus wrote.

All of the authors Engadget spoke to admired Kobo’s attempts to address complaints in public. On Bluesky, the company’s CEO Michael Tamblyn posted a long thread getting into the logic of including an AI clause in the company’s terms. Essentially, Tamblyn wrote, Kobo is trying to make the job of connecting readers with authors easier, and streamlining the moderation process that goes into maintaining the Kobo Store, all while avoiding trampling over copyright. “We are completely uninterested in creating new content using authors’ books, and don’t do anything that would allow us to do that,” Tamblyn wrote. “And we don’t want anyone else to do it either because we are in the business of selling books and would like to be able to keep doing that.”

Agreeing to not train generative AI with an author’s work is what all professional writers have been encouraged to demand from publishers by The Authors Guild, a professional organization that advocates for writers and is currently participating in a lawsuit against OpenAI. By choosing to not train generative AI on books, Kobo is starting on the right foot. The dubious nature of what material gets fed into an AI model still leaves many questions, though. “Keep in mind, all of the models right now are illegally trained, and I mean all of the big LLMs [Large Language Models],” Mary Rasenberg, the CEO of The Authors Guild, says. “So they may be using an AI system that’s not one of the big LLMs, but whatever system they’re using may be based on one of the big LLMs.” 

Kobo did not respond to a request for information about which LLM it plans to use. For work that might be misclassified or mislabelled, the company encouraged authors to contact them via its support email, which authors say has been responsive to complaints so far. The company says it has not begun testing what it describes as a “beta feature” for generating a “personalized recap” in the Kobo app. It notes that it’s “not interested in doing whole summaries of books.” Instead Kobo plans to make its recaps specific to each reader, around 150 words in length based on both the pages they read in their last reading session and the quotes they highlighted.

Ebook platforms are taking a cautious approach to AI broadly. Authors who publish through the Apple Books platform can have AI-narrated audiobooks generated from their work, but doing so is completely optional. Barnes & Noble’s Press platform doesn’t currently offer AI products. Amazon’s recaps are currently the most invasive use of AI across ebook markets, and authors can’t opt out of them.”It doesn’t matter how much money we’re making from Amazon. We all hate dealing with it,” Waan said. She made it clear that self-publishing authors are scared of Kobo changing because it currently has author-friendly answers to most of Amazon’s products. “I cannot describe how much we want Kobo to succeed, like we are rooting for them,” she said.

Every company seems keen to continue pushing the boundaries of where and how invasively it can implement AI. Waan’s hope now is that Kobo engages in some kind of open forum with authors about its proposed uses for the technology. “I think it’s really hard to decide, as an author, ‘am I going to pull my books?,'” Waan said. “Because the minute you pull your books it’s a whole headache, because you gotta update all the links. If you have ads running, you gotta pull them. It’s not as simple as turning off a light switch.” Difficult as it may be, that’s a decision self-published authors will increasingly be forced to make.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/ai-might-undermine-one-of-the-better-alternatives-to-the-kindle-123039955.html?src=rss 

Welcome to the latest edition of our indie game roundup. We’ve got quite a bit on deck this week, starting with a few nuggets of news.

In case you missed it, the Steam Summer Sale is upon us, which means there are bargains galore on the storefront (we’ve rounded up some of the tastier deals). If you’re anything like me, you’ll end up buying a bunch of games that you’ll never end up playing but hope to get to some day. In any case, good luck with your deal hunting!

I read an interesting story on Game Developer this week about Peak, a co-op climbing game from Aggro Crab (Another Crab’s Treasure, which I absolutely loved) and Landfall (Content Warning). A team of seven developers made the bulk of the game during a month-long retreat earlier this year. The two studios relied largely on their community managers — who’d done a fantastic job drumming up interest for their previous games — to hype up Peak.

A combination of factors such as smart marketing (that title is peak), the game’s ability to deliver funny moments that could go viral and a low price helped Peak to sell more than 2 million copies in 9 days. This is a cool success story for a game that cost about $200,000 to make. Here’s hoping more small studios find ways to collaborate like this. As a comparison, Remedy says FBC: Firebreak hit 1 million players after eight days, and that game is on PlayStation and Xbox subscription services.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has rubber-stamped a free, fan-made Halo-themed game in the vein of Vampire Survivors. Spartan Survivors, from JuanGGZ, is out on Itch.io and it’s coming to Steam and Xbox later this year.

New releases

After debuting on PC last year and making its way to iOS in February, I Am Your Beast landed on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S this week. From the remarkably prolific Strange Scaffold (Clickolding, TMNT: Tactical Takedown and El Paso, Elsewhere), this stylish, stealthy first-person shooter has been widely acclaimed and now console players can check out what the fuss is all about. In addition, the studio this week updated the iOS version of I Am Your Beast with all of the game’s DLC.

Ruffy and the Riverside is a 3D puzzle platformer with charming, hand-drawn art from Zockrates Laboratories and publisher Phiphen Games. The perspective switches to 2D in some sections, in a similar fashion to Super Mario Odyssey.

What might help this game stand out is that it has a feature called SWAP, which enables you to copy the texture from one item and paste it onto another. So you might turn a waterfall into foliage so you can climb it or convert ice into lava. Ruffy and the Riverside is out now on Steam, Epic Games Store, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.

Quantum Witch is an adventure platformer in which the plot is shaped by your decisions. Even the side quests have multiple endings, so it seems like there’s a lot going on here. Solo developer NikkiJay has described this as a “queer emancipation story” in which main character Ren takes back agency over her life.

I’m interested in checking this one out, not least because the pretty pixel art and droll humor remind me of the Monkey Island games I loved so much as a kid. Quantum Witch is out now on Steam.

Antro looks like it’s cut from a similar cloth as Playdead’s Limbo and Inside. However, this rhythm-based puzzle platformer (from Gatera Studio and publishers Selecta Play and Astrolabe Games) is set to the beats of hip-hop, drill, R&B and electronic music.

Here, you play as a courier in a city that emerges below the ruins of Barcelona following a global catastrophe. Music and freedom (among other things) are banned here, but a rebellion is rising against the tech-dominated dictatorship that’s in charge. Antro is out now on Steam, Xbox Series X/S and PS5.

Idle games that sit on your screen all day long are having a real moment. For instance, Bongo Cat is near the top of the Steam most-played charts with concurrent player numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Tiny Aquarium: Social Fishkeeping, from Lunheim Studios and publisher Future Friends Games, is one of the newest games in the genre.

This is billed as a cozy game in which you can hatch and sell fish, decorate your aquarium and (of course) go fishing. You can visit your friends’ aquariums (and those of other players) too. It all seems cute and charming enough, and I don’t think having it in the corner of my screen would distract me too much while I’m crafting the hottest of takes.

Upcoming

There are a lot of things I love about Flock Off! already. The name, the fact it’s set in my homeland of Scotland and that it’s an alternate history take on the story of Dolly the Sheep — the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.

In this first-person action title from Bunkhouse Games, you and up to three allies will have to use whatever’s at your disposal to fend off zombie sheep. Just about anything can be used as a weapon, including a baguette, leek, traffic cone, your friends and a lawnmower that you wield in the fashion of Dead Alive. Flock Off! is coming to Steam later this year, but it’s already alive in my heart.

Several years ago, we interviewed musician Sam Battle (aka Look Mum No Computer) about his wild DIY synth projects. Battle has since teamed up with developer The Bitfather and publisher Headup to make a twin-stick shooter in which you can make your own music.

In this game, also called Look Mum No Computer, you’ll craft and upgrade synth modules. These also function as your weapons that you’ll use to battle rogue components to fix electronics. It’s such a cool concept and it now has a release date. Look Mum No Computer is bound for Steam, Epic Games Store and GOG on July 24.

I have to admit, though I’ve been aware of Firefighting Simulator: Ignite for a while, it wasn’t really grabbing my attention. But the release date trailer included a very important piece of information. Those who pre-order this game — from Construction Simulator studio weltenbauer. Software Entwicklung GmbH and publisher astragon Entertainment GmbH — will get a pack that includes a cool vintage helmet and an absolutely adorable Dalmatian called Simi for their firehouse.

Firefighting Simulator: Ignite is a co-op firefighting game with more than 35 missions. It’s coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on September 9.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/puzzle-platformers-desktop-aquariums-and-other-new-indie-games-worth-checking-out-110029438.html?src=rss 

President Donald Trump said the US is ending trade talks with Canada, effective immediately, over a tax on digital services that will impact American tech companies. He also pledged to announce further tariffs on Canada within the next week, adding in a Truth Social post that “they will be paying to do business with the United States of America.”

Canada’s digital services tax (DST) is set to take effect on June 30, though it will be applied retroactively. According to The New York Times, US companies are preparing to pay around $2.7 billion to the Canadian government to cover a three percent tax on revenue they generated from users in the country. Companies including Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber and Airbnb are subject to the levy, as things stand. 

In his post on Friday, Trump called the DST “a direct and blatant attack on our country.” Amid trade talks with the US, Canada’s finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, said this month that the country had no plans to hit the pause button on the DST. Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney previously said they aimed to reach a trade deal by around July 20.

Since taking office in January, Trump has been using tariffs as a negotiating tactic with other nations. The US reached a trade deal with China over rare earth minerals this week, and it is soon set to reimpose some of the levies that were put on hold in April for 90 days. 

The DST has been a bone of contention between the US and Canada for years. The Biden administration formally challenged the levy last year under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. 

Other jurisdictions have considered or enacted a similar tax. It was reported in May that Germany is mulling a 10 percent levy on platforms such as Google and Facebook.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/trump-ends-trade-talks-with-canada-over-a-digital-services-tax-192322721.html?src=rss 

We know what you’re thinking: there just isn’t enough AI around right now. Luckily for you, Donald Trump emphatically agrees. According to a new report from Reuters, his administration is assembling a number of executive actions that would significantly increase the energy supply used for expanding artificial intelligence. The US and China are currently battling it out to lead the way in the rapidly growing sector, but American companies will need more infrastructure to make the advances Trump wants.

“With the right Government policies, we can solidify our position as the global leader in AI and secure a brighter future for all Americans,” he said back in January when signing an executive order in his first days in office that made clear his intention to reduce any regulatory hurdles to allow unchecked development in the area.

Reuters was told by sources that asked to remain anonymous that, if passed, the planned executive orders would “make it easier for power-generating projects to connect to the grid, and provide federal land on which to build the data centers needed to expand AI technology.” The Trump administration is reportedly also planning to release an “AI action plan” and schedule a number of public events that promote its ongoing efforts.

Power-hungry data centers are often large and not quick to build, but in an attempt to speed up the process, Trump’s actions may offer land managed by the Defense Department or Interior Department to AI project developers. A nationwide Clean Water Act permit, meanwhile, would mean permission to build would no longer operate on a state-by-state basis, making it easier for developers to get projects off the ground.

Donald Trump’s AI crusade has been ongoing since he took office. After initially taking an eraser to Biden’s extensive AI protection framework, the US House of Representatives narrowly passed a “big, beautiful bill” that places a 10-year ban on state AI regulations. It still has to pass through the Senate.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/donald-trump-is-reportedly-preparing-a-sweep-of-pro-ai-executive-orders-171856144.html?src=rss 

The New York Times ran a lengthy interview this morning between columnist Ross Douthat and venture capitalist and PayPal founder Peter Thiel. There’s a reason it was published in the opinion section.

Thiel, a Trump booster whose allies — including Vice President JD Vance — now litter the White House, was given free reign to discuss a variety of topics across over an hour of softball questions. Is Greta Thunberg the literal antichrist? Are the three predominant ideological schools in Europe environmentalism, “Islamic Shariah law” and “Chinese Communist totalitarian takeover”? Is AI “woke” and capable of following Elon Musk to Mars? Peter seems to think so! Perhaps the “just asking questions” school of journalism could add “hey, what the fuck are you talking about” to its repertoire. 

Admittedly, many of these assertions fall squarely into the realm of things that exist within Thiel’s mind palace rather than verifiable facts, with at least one notable exception. Relatively early in their chat, Peter tells Ross the following [emphasis ours]:

If we look at biotech, something like dementia, Alzheimer’s — we’ve made zero progress in 40 to 50 years. People are completely stuck on beta amyloids. It’s obviously not working. It’s just some kind of a stupid racket where the people are just reinforcing themselves.

It’s a pretty bold claim! It’s also completely untrue.

“There was no treatment 40 or 50 years ago for Alzheimer’s disease,” Sterling Johnson, a professor of Geriatrics and Gerontology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told Engadget. “What we’ve been able to do in the last 20 years has been actually pretty extraordinary. We’ve developed markers that help us identify when this disease starts, using the using amyloid markers and tau biomarkers, we know that the disease actually begins 20 years before the symptoms do, and that is a critical thing to know if we are going to prevent this disease.”

At the moment, Alzheimer’s remains incurable. But the absence of a miracle cure does not negate the accomplishments thus far in detection and prevention. “The first treatments were these window dressing treatments. It’s like treating the symptoms like you would treat a cold […] The first generation of amyloid therapy was that kind of approach where it just addressed the symptoms by amping up the neurons and increasing the neurotransmitters available to the to the brain cells.” Johnson, whose team runs one of the largest and longest studies on people at risk for developing Alzheimer’s diseases, added, “Now we have opportunities to actually modify the disease biology through the amyloid pathway, but also we’re focused on the other proteinopathy — which is tau — and there’s clinical trials underway.”

Thiel, a well-known advocate for advancements in radical life extension (including a reported interest in injecting himself with the blood of young people) sees the state of scientific research in this area as sluggish and risk averse. But the groundbreaking work is happening at this moment. Professor Johnson pointed to a monoclonal antibody called gantenerumab. In an early test of 73 participants with inherited mutations that would cause them to overproduce amyloid in the brain, it cut the number of participants who developed Alzheimer’s symptoms practically in half. “The big phase three prevention trials [of gantenerumab] are happening right now,” 

For someone who fashions himself as a heterodox thinker, Thiel certainly seems to have stumbled on a remarkably similar talking point to current Trump administration FDA head Robert F Kennedy Jr. “Alzheimer’s is a very, very good example of how [National Institute of Health] has gone off the rails over the past 20 years ago with research on amyloid plaques” Kennedy said at a Department of Health budgetary hearing last month. He claimed the NIH was “cutting off any other hypothesis” due to “corruption.”

Unsurprisingly, the Alzheimer’s Association has called this “demonstrably false.”

“In reality, over the most recent 10 years available (2014-2023), less than 14% of new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Alzheimer’s projects focused on amyloid beta as the therapeutic target,” the organization wrote, “As of September 2024, the National Institute on Aging was investing in 495 pharmacological and non-pharmacological trials. To state that Alzheimer’s research is focused on amyloid to the exclusion of other targets is clearly wrong.” 

If I, personally, wanted more robust medical research and a chance an eternal life (I don’t), greasing the wheels of an administration broadly gutting funding for science would be a strange way to make that happen. But this is the sort of incoherence we’ve come to expect from tech oligarchs: they say what benefits them, even if it’s nonsense on its face, even if a moment’s reflection reveals it to be patently false. What’s embarrassing is the paper of record giving them free reign to do it.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/peter-thiel-is-utterly-wrong-about-alzheimers-173206349.html?src=rss 

Whether you’re setting up a new device or helping a friend connect to your home network, sharing your Wi-Fi password doesn’t need to be a hassle. Today’s smartphones make it easy to share access without typing (or needing to remember) long strings of characters. Both iPhones and Android devices support features that let you send your Wi-Fi password quickly and securely, but the steps can vary depending on the devices involved. 

Of course, you can still go into your Wi-Fi settings to view your password and show it to your guest or copy and paste it into a group chat. But the methods outlined here avoid having to tell anyone what your long, complicated password might be and are generally more secure.

Below are the most reliable ways to share Wi-Fi passwords between iPhones, between Androids and across mobile platforms.

How to share your Wi-Fi password from iPhone to another Apple device

Apple has built-in functionality to simplify Wi-Fi sharing between its own devices that was introduced in iOS 11. This feature works on iPhones, iPads and Macs provided they’re running the latest versions of iOS, iPadOS or macOS.

Before you start:

Make sure both devices are running the latest software.

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth should be turned on for both devices.

Personal Hotspot should be turned off.

The Apple ID email address of the person you’re sharing the password with must be saved in your Contacts.

To share your Wi-Fi password:

Unlock both iPhones.

Ensure both devices are physically near each other.

On the receiving iPhone, go to Settings > Wi-Fi and select the same Wi-Fi network.

A pop-up will appear on the sender’s iPhone asking if you’d like to share the password.

Tap Share Password.

Once the password is sent, tap Done.

The receiving device will automatically connect to the Wi-Fi network without needing to type in the password manually.

How to share your Wi-Fi password from iPhone to Android

While Apple devices don’t natively support sharing Wi-Fi passwords with Android phones, there are still a couple of effective workarounds using QR codes. The most user-friendly approach is to create a QR code that an Android phone can scan to connect to the Wi-Fi network.

Option 1: Create a QR code using the Shortcuts app

If you’re using iOS 17 or later, you can build a shortcut to generate a QR code that contains your Wi-Fi credentials.

Open the Shortcuts app on your iPhone.

Tap the + button to create a new shortcut.

Select Add Action, then choose Text.

In the text box, enter your Wi-Fi credentials using the following format:
WIFI:S:NetworkName;T:WPA;P:Password;;
Replace NetworkName with your Wi-Fi network name and Password with your actual password.

Tap Add Action again and search for Generate QR Code.

Add a final action: Quick Look, which displays the generated code.

Run the shortcut. The QR code will appear on your screen.

Ask the Android user to scan the QR code using their camera app or a QR scanner. This should automatically connect their device to your Wi-Fi network.

Option 2: Use a third-party QR code generator

Alternatively, you can use an online tool like qifi.org to create a QR code.

Open your preferred browser and visit the QR generator website.

Enter your Wi-Fi network name (SSID), security type and password.

Generate the QR code.

Display the QR code on your iPhone.

Let the Android device scan the code to connect.

While not as seamless as iPhone-to-iPhone sharing, both methods are secure and help you avoid typing long passwords manually.

How to share your Wi-Fi password from Android to iPhone or another device

Most Android phones running Android 10 or later allow users to share Wi-Fi credentials through a QR code. This works well for sharing passwords with other Android devices and iPhones.

Open the Settings app on your Android phone.

Tap Network & Internet (or Connections, depending on your phone model).

Select Wi-Fi, then tap the name of the connected network.

Tap the Share or QR code icon. You may be prompted to verify your identity with a PIN or fingerprint.

A QR code will appear.

The iPhone user can scan the QR code using the Camera app or the built-in Code Scanner (found in Control Center).

Once scanned, the iPhone will automatically prompt you to connect to the network.

Additional tips for sharing Wi-Fi securely

Avoid sending Wi-Fi passwords over text or unsecured messaging apps.

Use QR codes or password-sharing features when possible to reduce typing errors.

If using a public or guest network, consider setting up a separate SSID and password to keep your main network private.

Always update your devices to the latest operating system to ensure compatibility and security.

When Wi-Fi sharing doesn’t work

If you’re having trouble sharing your Wi-Fi password:

Double-check that both devices have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on.

Restart both devices and try again.

Ensure both devices are unlocked and close to each other.

Make sure contact details are up to date and the correct Apple ID is saved.

For QR code scanning issues, check that the recipient is using a compatible QR code reader. iPhones can scan codes using the Camera app, while most Android devices have built-in scanners or third-party apps available.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/how-to-share-your-wi-fi-password-across-iphones-androids-and-other-devices-144533572.html?src=rss