Apple to boost App Store revenue

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In today's Techpresso:

🍎 Apple plans to squeeze more revenue from the App Store

🚕 Uber co-founder returns to robotaxi race

🚀 Europe launches first commercial rocket

💿 CD sales are making an unexpected comeback

🤖 China readies humanoid robots for combat

🛑 OpenAI scientist urges labs to slow down

Plus: 🎁 14 other news you might like, 🧰 6 tools, and 📚 5 papers.

🍎 Apple plans to squeeze more revenue from the App Store LINK

Apple is exploring new ways to pull more recurring revenue and higher margins from the App Store, which already brings in an estimated $30 billion a year, according to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

New CEO John Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue are driving the push, while Phil Schiller, who ran the store, stepped away, reportedly believing such moves would only anger developers and governments.

The effort comes as App Store income slips: Apple's U.S. commission revenue has dropped 18 percent since early 2026, and it stopped charging fees on U.S. link-out purchases in April 2025 after a court order.

🚕 Uber co-founder returns to robotaxi race LINK

Travis Kalanick, who was pushed out as Uber's CEO in 2017, is jumping back into the robotaxi business through his startup Atoms, which is preparing to hire aggressively and buy several companies to build self-driving technology.

Atoms, founded in March and formerly called City Storage Systems, raised $1.7 billion in June, with Uber putting in $100 million and reportedly holding talks about using the robotaxi technology across its ride-hailing network.

Soon after closing the round, Atoms bought Pronto, an autonomous mining startup led by Anthony Levandowski, the former Uber self-driving chief convicted of stealing Google trade secrets before Trump pardoned him in 2021.

🚀 Europe launches first commercial rocket LINK

Isar Aerospace became the first commercial European company to reach orbit and release satellites, launching its Spectrum rocket from the Andoya spaceport in northern Norway on Saturday night during only its second flight.

Spectrum stands 28 meters tall and carries 1,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit, far less than a Falcon 9, but chief executive Daniel Metzler says the smaller size helps place satellites into specific orbits.

Isar raised EUR 270M this year and signed a roughly EUR 200M deal with the European Space Agency in August, with defense clients now making up about 60% of orders and its schedule booked through 2028.

💿 CD sales are making an unexpected comeback LINK

CDs are making an unexpected comeback in 2026, with the RIAA reporting the format's revenue climbed 58.6% to $171 million in the first half of the year, reversing a steady decline in the discs' sales.

The industry group counted 17.5 million CDs sold from January through June, up 45.7% from about 12 million a year earlier, though the figure leaves out used discs bought at thrift stores or handed down by parents.

The rebound rides a wider hunger for simpler tech among Gen Z, from dumbphones to typewriters, and it lifted overall physical media revenue 25.9% to $731 million, helped by a 17.7% rise in vinyl sales.

🤖 China readies humanoid robots for combat LINK

China is speeding up work to turn humanoid robots into military "combatants," with its army newspaper urging researchers to move the technology from labs to training grounds, according to a Reuters review of over 100 documents.

The plan pairs humanoids with robot dogs and unmanned vehicles for jobs like reconnaissance, patrols, and clearing enemy buildings room by room, with one research paper saying the gear could be ready in five to ten years.

Chinese makers shipped about 95% of the world's humanoid robots in 2025, though the machines still fall over on rough ground, drain power fast, and raise doubts about telling fighters from surrendering civilians.

🛑 OpenAI scientist urges labs to slow down LINK

OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published an essay on Sunday urging AI labs to pause voluntarily, warning that no one is ready for the fast rise of machine intelligence, days after his own company shipped GPT-6 Astra.

A companion post shared internal figures: by mid-August the median researcher spent over $600 a day on inference, and agents were producing 3.1 workdays of effort for every human workday on the research team.

Pachocki wants safety commitments like OpenAI's Preparedness Framework made mandatory and audited, arguing that chain-of-thought monitoring is weakening as models get better at hiding and manipulating their own reasoning.

Other news you might like

• UN rights chief calls AI ‘existential threat' as OpenAI scientist warns of slipping human controlLINK

• Our new contrail avoidance trial in Asia-PacificLINK

• Authors push back as publishers and agents seek share of Anthropic settlementLINK

• Chinese businesses are giving away AI tokens with coffee, credit cards, and dumplingsLINK

• ByteDance is preparing a real-time spatial video model under Zhang Yiming, Bloomberg reportsLINK

• LG Smart TVs found scanning home networks for nearby devicesLINK

• Huawei, Xiaomi launch new foldable smartphones ahead of Apple eventLINK

• Taiwan pledges $20bn more in US chip investment while courting the EU, Reuters reportsLINK

• Banking giant UBS wants all new employees to have AI skillsLINK

• Australia to set out world-first rules allowing users to opt out of Big Tech algorithmsLINK

• ‘Model fatigue’ sets in as AI labs race to roll out new versions at frenetic paceLINK

• Nvidia now holds $99bn in shares of the companies that buy its chipsLINK

• OpenAI says it reached its goal of creating an automated research internLINK

• Hackers drain $320M in Bitcoin from Liquid Network, claim they're the good guysLINK

🧰 Trending tools

dif.sh: open-source feature flags stored as markdown files beside your code, reviewed in PRs, with agent-friendly context and optional A/B testing and analytics.LINK

AI Toolbox 3.0: a Chrome extension that searches, folders, tags and exports your ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok chats, plus saves reusable prompts.LINK

PostBox: turns your MacBook notch into a drag-and-drop hub for posting exports to X, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Dribbble, and more at once.LINK

Notify.domains: monitors domains for expiry, auction, marketplace, DNS and SSL changes, alerting you via email, Slack, Telegram, or webhook so you never miss acquisition opportunities.LINK

DocsAlot Visual Editor: create, manage, and publish documentation from a single visual interface, streamlining docs workflows without wrestling with raw markup or config files.LINK

Tadata: an AI employee inside Slack that connects to your tools, learns your company, and handles tasks like meeting briefings and daily prep.LINK

📚 Trending papers & reports

Bitcoin price forecasting gets a tuned recipe for adapting a general-purpose language model to predict short-term crypto moves, beating eight rival forecasting models on accuracy while running on limited hardware.LINK

Allegro's shopping recommender now tells apart items truly bought to work together, like a camera and its lens, from things merely purchased side by side, giving 20 million monthly shoppers smarter basket suggestions.LINK

Field-adapting robots keep learning safely after deployment on their own hardware, matching a standard system's performance with ~2.5x fewer training runs, so machines can handle new situations without forgetting old skills.LINK

Cause-and-effect tracking automatically spots when the relationships in changing data shift into new patterns and maps what drives what within each phase, beating existing tools on detecting these shifts in real IT monitoring data.LINK

Sound-based body tracking reconstructs the 3D poses of multiple people in a room using only audio, the first system to do so, offering a camera-free way to sense movement even in the dark.LINK

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