The next versions of macOS and iPadOS will be released to the general public on October 24, Apple announced today. From a report: The iPadOS 16 update runs on all iPad Pros, the 5th-generation iPad and later, the fifth-generation iPad mini and later, and the 3rd-generation iPad Air and later, dropping support for the venerable iPad Air 2 and a handful of other models (it will also ship on all the new iPads Apple announced today). The macOS Ventura update generally requires a Mac released in 2017 or later, dropping support for various models released between 2013 and 2016. Both updates will enable some iOS 16 features on iPads and Macs, including editing and deletion of iMessages, better search in Mail, passkey support in Safari, and a new large-screened Weather app and redesigned Home app, improved gamepad support, and more. Both also include a version of the Stage Manager window management feature, and Ventura includes a redesigned System Settings app.

AmiMoJo shares a report from MacRumors: iOS 16 continues to leak data outside an active VPN tunnel, even when Lockdown mode is enabled, security researchers have discovered. Speaking to MacRumors, security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry explained that iOS 16's approach to VPN traffic is the same whether Lockdown mode is enabled or not. The news is significant since iOS has a persistent, unresolved issue with leaking data outside an active VPN tunnel.

According to a report from privacy company Proton, an iOS VPN bypass vulnerability had been identified in iOS 13.3.1, which persisted through three subsequent updates. Apple indicated it would add Kill Switch functionality in a future software update that would allow developers to block all existing connections if a VPN tunnel is lost, but this functionality does not appear to prevent data leaks as of iOS 15 and iOS 16. Mysk and Bakry have now discovered that iOS 16 communicates with select Apple services outside an active VPN tunnel and leaks DNS requests without the user's knowledge.

Mysk and Bakry also investigated whether iOS 16's Lockdown mode takes the necessary steps to fix this issue and funnel all traffic through a VPN when one is enabled, and it appears that the exact same issue persists whether Lockdown mode is enabled or not, particularly with push notifications. This means that the minority of users who are vulnerable to a cyberattack and need to enable Lockdown mode are equally at risk of data leaks outside their active VPN tunnel. [...] Due to the fact that iOS 16 leaks data outside the VPN tunnel even where Lockdown mode is enabled, internet service providers, governments, and other organizations may be able to identify users who have a large amount of traffic, potentially highlighting influential individuals. It is possible that Apple does not want a potentially malicious VPN app to collect some kinds of traffic, but seeing as ISPs and governments are then able to do this, even if that is what the user is specifically trying to avoid, it seems likely that this is part of the same VPN problem that affects iOS 16 as a whole.

Sony has announced the availability of its first OTC hearing aids, the $1,000 CRE-C10 and $1,300 CRE-E10, built in partnership with WS Audiology. Engadget reports: The devices are built for daily use for those with mild to moderate hearing loss. They're controlled via Sony's "Hearing Control" app that guides users through setup and allows them to personalize settings like volume control. It also allows a "self-fit" that adjusts to appropriate pre-defined hearing profiles "based on thousands of actual, real-life audiogram results," Sony said. The CRE-C10 model (above) offers a battery life of up to 70 hours of continuous use. Sony says they're one of the smallest OTC hearing aids on the market, offering a discreet design that's "virtually invisible when worn" and "exceptional sound quality." It goes on sale this month for $1,000 at Amazon, Best Buy, and select hearing-care professionals.

Meanwhile, the CRE-E10 has a more earbud-like design, powered by a rechargeable battery with up to 26 hours of life between charges. It's Bluetooth compatible as well, so users can connect to devices and listen to streaming audio or music, though only on iOS, Sony says. Those will go on sale for $1,300 sometime this winter at Sony's website. In August, the FDA decided to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter and without a prescription to adults.

schwit1 shares a blog post from Signal, the popular instant messaging app: In the interest of privacy, security, and clarity we're beginning to phase out SMS support from the Android app. You'll have several months to export your messages and either find a new app for SMS or tell your friends to download Signal.

[...] To give some context, when we started supporting SMS, Signal didn't exist yet. Our Android app was called TextSecure and the Signal encryption protocol was called Axolotl. Almost a decade has passed since then, and a lot has changed. In this time we changed our name, built iOS and desktop apps, and grew from a small project to the most widely used private messaging service on the planet. And we continued supporting the sending and receiving of plaintext SMS messages via the Signal interface on Android. We did this because we knew that Signal would be easier for people to use if it could serve as a homebase for most of the messages they were sending or receiving, without having to convince the people they wanted to talk to to switch to Signal first. But this came with a tradeoff: it meant that some messages sent and received via the Signal interface on Android were not protected by Signal's strong privacy guarantees.

We have now reached the point where SMS support no longer makes sense. For those of you interested, we walk through our reasoning in more detail below. In order to enable a more streamlined Signal experience, we are starting to phase out SMS support from the Android app. You will have several months to transition away from SMS in Signal, to export your SMS messages to another app, and to let the people you talk to know that they might want to switch to Signal, or find another channel if not.

Android Developers Blog: Passkeys are a significantly safer replacement for passwords and other phishable authentication factors. They cannot be reused, don't leak in server breaches, and protect users from phishing attacks. Passkeys are built on industry standards and work across different operating systems and browser ecosystems, and can be used for both websites and apps. Passkeys follow already familiar UX patterns, and build on the existing experience of password autofill. For end-users, using one is similar to using a saved password today, where they simply confirm with their existing device screen lock such as their fingerprint. Passkeys on users' phones and computers are backed up and synced through the cloud to prevent lockouts in the case of device loss. Additionally, users can use passkeys stored on their phone to sign in to apps and websites on other nearby devices.

Today's announcement is a major milestone in our work with passkeys, and enables two key capabilities: Users can create and use passkeys on Android devices, which are securely synced through the Google Password Manager. Developers can build passkey support on their sites for end-users using Chrome via the WebAuthn API, on Android and other supported platforms. To try this today, developers can enroll in the Google Play Services beta and use Chrome Canary. Both features will be generally available on stable channels later this year. Our next milestone in 2022 will be an API for native Android apps. Passkeys created through the web API will work seamlessly with apps affiliated with the same domain, and vice versa. The native API will give apps a unified way to let the user pick either a passkey or a saved password. Seamless, familiar UX for both passwords and passkeys helps users and developers gradually transition to passkeys.

For the end-user, creating a passkey requires just two steps: (1) confirm the passkey account information, and (2) present their fingerprint, face, or screen lock when prompted. Signing in is just as simple: (1) The user selects the account they want to sign in to, and (2) presents their fingerprint, face, or screen lock when prompted. A passkey on a phone can also be used to sign in on a nearby device. For example, an Android user can now sign in to a passkey-enabled website using Safari on a Mac. Similarly, passkey support in Chrome means that a Chrome user, for example on Windows, can do the same using a passkey stored on their iOS device. Since passkeys are built on industry standards, this works across different platforms and browsers - including Windows, macOS and iOS, and ChromeOS, with a uniform user experience.

Meta is warning Facebook users about hundreds of apps on Apple and Google's app stores that were specifically designed to steal login credentials to the social network app. From a report: The company says it's identified over 400 malicious apps disguised as games, photo editors, and other utilities and that it's notifying users who "may have unknowingly self-compromised their accounts by downloading these apps and sharing their credentials." According to Bloomberg, a million users were potentially affected. In its post, Meta says that the apps tricked people into downloading them with fake reviews and promises of useful functionality (both common tactics for other scam apps that are trying to take your money rather than your login info). But upon opening some of the apps, users were prompted to log in with Facebook before they could actually do anything -- if they did, the developers were able to steal their credentials.

The Connectivity Standards Alliance and its members that include Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and other smart home manufacturers, today announced the official launch of the Matter 1.0 smart home accessory standard. MacRumors reports: Companies that have agreed to support Matter now have all of the resources that they need to begin implementing Matter into their platforms, so we could see Apple integrating Matter into HomeKit very soon. In fact, iOS 16.1 is already laying the groundwork for Matter, so Matter could be announced with the launch of the update. With the Matter 1.0 launch, authorized test labs are now available for product certification, tools are available, and the open-source reference design SDK is complete. Alliance members with devices that have already been deployed and with plans to update their products with Matter support can do so as soon as their products are certified. The Connectivity Standards Alliance says that the first release of Matter will support a variety of smart home products such as lighting, HVAC controls, window coverings, safety and security sensors, door locks, media devices, controllers, and bridges. "What started as a mission to unravel the complexities of connectivity has resulted in Matter, a single, global IP-based protocol that will fundamentally change the IoT," said Tobin Richardson, President and CEO of the Connectivity Standards Alliance. "This release is the first step on a journey our community and the industry are taking to make the IoT more simple, secure, and valuable no matter who you are or where you live. With global support from companies large and small, today's Matter 1.0 release is more than a milestone for our organization and our members; it is a celebration of what is possible."

Further reading:
Google Explains Why It's All In On Matter, the First True Smart Home Standard
Amazon Promises Most Echo Speakers Will Support the Matter Smart Home Platform

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg would like you to please stop asking Tumblr to bring back porn because it isn't going to happen. After widespread and inaccurate speculation that Tumblr would lift its ban on adult content, Mullenweg posted a long explanation yesterday of why Tumblr will never go back to the old days. Or, in his words: "the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible." That doesn't mean Tumblr's policies will stay the same. Mullenweg has said before that Automattic (which bought Tumblr in 2019) wants to loosen the rules its old owner Verizon implemented in 2018, and he reiterated that here, echoing comments he made earlier this week. Verizon's ban "took out not only porn but also a ton of art and artists," Mullenweg wrote in his post. "This policy is currently still in place, though the Tumblr and Automattic teams are working to make it more open and common-sense." Tumblr is supposed to implement those policies soon, putting the site more in line with Automattic's WordPress.com blogging platform.

"That said, no modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007," Mullenweg wrote, quoting Tumblr's old liberal policy slogan. (If you're wondering, it was "go nuts, show nuts.") "I agree with 'go nuts, show nuts' in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible." On Tumblr, that era helped produce a lot of unique, often queer, blogs with sexual content. The 2018 ban changed the tenor of the site for good -- and this week, many users were enthusiastically but prematurely celebrating its end. Why is returning to that era impossible? For now, it's largely because of intermediaries that play a massive role in how people access the web. Payment processors have long been leery of adult content, and they've stepped up enforcement in recent years, in part because of concerns about child abuse and nonconsensual pornography. Apple's iOS App Store has been staunchly opposed to it since launch. And without those two pieces of infrastructure, running a for-profit site is incredibly difficult. "If Apple permanently banned Tumblr from the App Store, we'd probably have to shut the service down," Mullenweg noted. Some nonprofit sites that do allow things like explicit artwork -- primarily the Archive of Our Own fanworks site -- have remained persistently web-only despite years of requests for apps. [...]

If you reached this article through Twitter or Reddit, you might have a fairly obvious question right now, and Mullenweg raises it: why can both those platforms, fairly unusually for modern social networks, allow a lot of porn? "Ask Apple, because I don't know," says Mullenweg. He speculates that Tumblr and Reddit are both too big to ban -- although Apple has forced moderation changes even for giant services like Facebook. The overall upshot, to Mullenweg, is this: "If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you'd need to be web-only on iOS and side-load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don't go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don't dox your users, and make a ton of money. I do hope that a dedicated service or company is started that will replace what people used to get from porn on Tumblr. It may already exist and I don't know about it. They'll have an uphill battle under current regimes, and if you think that's a bad thing please try to change the regimes. Don't attack companies following legal and business realities as they exist."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Questions about what's going on with Microsoft's support of the predictive SwifKey keyboard app for iOS have been bubbling up over the past few weeks. A Reddit thread from a month ago highlighted the lack of updates to the app for more than a year. When a reader asked recently for an update on the situation, I asked Microsoft. The official word is in. On September 28, a spokesperson emailed the following statement, attributable to Chris Wolfe, Director Product Management at SwiftKey: "As of October 5, support for SwiftKey iOS will end and it will be delisted from the Apple App Store. Microsoft will continue support for SwiftKey Android as well as the underlying technology that powers the Windows touch keyboard. For those customers who have SwiftKey installed on iOS, it will continue to work until it is manually uninstalled or a user gets a new device. Please visit Support.SwiftKey.com for more information." I asked for the official reason why Microsoft had made this decision and was told officials had nothing more to say.

Apple has removed the iOS apps belonging to VK, the technology conglomerate behind Russia's version of Facebook called VKontakte, from its App Store globally. From a report: In a translated statement on its website, VK said that its apps "are blocked by Apple" but that it will "continue to develop and support iOS applications." In response to an inquiry by The Verge, Apple spokesperson Adam Dema confirmed that VK's apps have been removed and its developer accounts shut down.

"These apps are being distributed by developers majority-owned or majority-controlled by one or more parties sanctioned by the UK government," Dema said in a statement. "In order to comply with these sanctions, Apple terminated the developer accounts associated with these apps, and the apps cannot be downloaded from any App Store, regardless of location. Users who have already downloaded these apps may continue to use them."

During Intel's Innovation keynote today, Samsung Display showed off a prototype PC that slides from a 13-inch tablet into a 17-inch display. Intel also announced that it's been experimenting with slidable PC form factors. The Verge reports: The prototype device that Samsung Display and Intel have shown off today essentially turns a 13-inch tablet into a 17-inch monitor with a flexible display and a sliding mechanism. Intel was quick to demonstrate its new Unison software on this display, which aims to connect Intel-powered computers to smartphones -- including iPhones. The slidable PC itself is just a concept for now, and there's no word from Intel or Samsung Display on when it will become a reality.

Intel has announced an intriguing new app called Unison, which aims to "seamlessly" connect Intel-powered computers to smartphones -- not just Android phones but iOS devices as well. From a report: Following what Intel says is a "simple pairing process," the Unison app will allow PCs to replicate four key features of the connected phone. They can answer and make calls; they can share photos and files (pictures taken with the phone will show up in a specific Unison gallery on the PC); they can send and receive texts; and they can receive (and, in some cases, respond to) notifications that the phone receives -- though if Unison is closed, they'll go to the Windows notification center. "The advantage we can bring to a PC user that's got a well-designed Windows PC is not having to choose their device based on the PC they have. They have an iPhone, they have an Android phone, any device they want to use will be able to connect with this capability," Josh Newman, Intel's VP of mobile innovation, told The Verge. "When you're ... on your laptop, and you get notifications or texts on your phone, you can keep it in your bag and get right back into the flow of your work."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Are smartphones ever entirely secure? It depends on one's definition of "secure," particularly when dealing with corporate environments. Most companies with bring-your-own-device policies install apps or agents on workers' smartphones to help secure them, leveraging the management capabilities built into operating systems like Android and iOS. But those might not be sufficient. That's what Cloudflare argues, anyway, in the pitch for the new services it's launching this week. Today, the company announced Zero Trust SIM and Zero Trust for Mobile Operators, two product offerings targeting smartphone users, the companies securing corporate phones and the carriers selling data services. Let's start with Zero Trust SIM. Designed to secure all data packets leaving a smartphone, Zero Trust SIM -- once launched in the U.S. (to start) -- will be available as an eSIM deployable via existing mobile device management platforms to both iOS and Android devices. It'll be locked to a specific device, mitigating the risk of SIM-swapping attacks, and usable either in a standalone configuration or in tandem with Cloudflare's mobile agent, WARP.

In a recent email interview, Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming made the case that Zero Trust SIM can accomplish what VPNs and other secure layers can't: cell-level protection. A SIM card can act as another security factor, and -- in combination with hardware keys -- make it nearly impossible to impersonate an employee, he argued. "Zero Trust SIM provides defense in depth. A VPN layer is one of those components, but doesn't remove the need to still deploy cellular connectivity across all of your mobile devices today, and traditional 'AnyConnect-style' VPNs do nothing to stop attackers moving laterally once they're inside the VPN," Graham-Cumming said. "We continue to see organizations breached due to challenges securing their applications and networks, and what was once a real-estate budget is quickly becoming a 'secure my remote and distributed workforce' budget from an IT security perspective." Specifically, Graham-Cumming said that Zero Trust SIM will enable Cloudflare to rewrite DNS requests leaving a device to instead use Cloudflare Gateway for DNS filtering.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Meta was sued for allegedly building a secret work-around to safeguards that Apple launched last year to protect iPhone users from having their internet activity tracked. In a proposed class-action complaint filed Wednesday in San Francisco federal court, two Facebook users accused the company of skirting Apple's 2021 privacy rules and violating state and federal laws limiting the unauthorized collection of personal data. A similar complaint was filed in the same court last week. The suits are based on a report by data privacy researcher Felix Krause, who said that Meta's Facebook and Instagram apps for Apple's iOS inject JavaScript code onto websites visited by users. Krause said the code allowed the apps to track "anything you do on any website," including typing passwords.

According to the suits, Meta's collection of user data from the Facebook app helps it circumvent rules instituted by Apple in 2021 requiring all third-party apps to obtain consent from users before tracking their activities, online or off. Meta has said it expected to miss out on $10 billion in ad revenue in 2022 because of Apple's changes. The Facebook app gets around Apple privacy rules by opening web links in an in-app browser, rather than the user's default browser, according to Wednesday's complaint. "This allows Meta to intercept, monitor and record its users' interactions and communications with third parties, providing data to Meta that it aggregates, analyzes, and uses to boost its advertising revenue," according to the suit. A Meta spokesperson said the allegations are "without merit" and the company will defend itself. "We have designed our in-app browser to respect users' privacy choices, including how data may be used for ads," the company said in an emailed statement.

As antitrust regulators around the world dial up scrutiny of platform power, Mozilla has published a piece of research digging into the at times subtle yet always insidious ways operating systems exert influence to keep consumers locked to using their own-brand browsers rather than seeking out and switching to independent options -- while simultaneously warning that competition in the browser market is vital to ensure innovation and choice for consumers and, more broadly, protect the vitality of the open web against the commercial giants trying to wall it up. TechCrunch: "Billions of people across the globe are dependent on operating systems from the largest technology companies. Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Meta each provide their own browser on their operating systems and each of them uses their gatekeeper position provider to preference their own browsers over independent rivals. Whether it is Microsoft pushing Firefox users to switch their default on Windows computers, Apple restricting the functionality of rival browsers on iOS smartphones or Google failing to apply default browser settings across Android, there are countless examples of independent browsers being inhibited by the operating systems on which they are dependent," Mozilla writes in a summary of its findings. "This matters because American consumers and society as a whole suffer. Not only do people lose the ability to determine their own online experiences but they also receive less innovative and lower quality products. In addition, they can be forced to accept poorer privacy outcomes and even unfair contracts. By contrast, competition from independent browsers can help to drive new features, as well as innovation in areas like privacy and security."

Weeks after Twitter's ex-security chief accused the company of cybersecurity mismanagement, Twitter has now informed its users of a bug that didn't close all of a user's active logged-in sessions on Android and iOS after an account's password was reset. From a report: This issue could have implications for those who had reset their password because they believed their Twitter account could be at risk, perhaps because of a lost or stolen device, for instance. Assuming whoever had possession of the device could access its apps, they would have had full access to the impacted user's Twitter account. In a blog post, Twitter explains that it had learned of the bug that had allowed "some" accounts to stay logged in on multiple devices after a user reset their password voluntarily. Typically, when a password reset occurs, the session token that keeps a user logged into the app is also revoked -- but that didn't take place on mobile devices, Twitter says. Web sessions, however, were not impacted and were closed appropriately, it noted.

Apple has responded to user complaints regarding an annoying pop-up in iOS 16 that asks for user permission if an app wants to access the clipboard to paste text, images, and more. From a report: The new prompt was added to iOS 16 as a privacy measure for users, requiring that apps ask for permission to access the clipboard, which may have sensitive data. The prompt, however, has become an annoyance for users as they install iOS 16, as it constantly asks for permission whenever they wish to paste something into an app. As user annoyance with the behavior boils high, Apple has finally responded, saying the constant pop-up is not how the feature is intended to work. MacRumors reader Kieran sent an email to Craig Federighi and Tim Cook, complaining about the constant prompt and advocating for Apple to treat access to the clipboard the same way iOS treats third-party access to location, camera, microphone, and more. Ron Huang, a senior manager at Apple, joined the email thread saying the pop-up is not supposed to appear every time a user attempts to paste. "This is absolutely not expected behavior, and we will get to the bottom of it," Huang said. Huang added that this behavior is not something Apple has seen internally but that Kieran is "not the only one" experiencing it. Responding to the suggestion that clipboard access should be added within the Settings app on a per-app basis, Huang said it would make a "good improvement" and added that Apple "certainly need to fix and make apps like Mail just work even without this setting, but it's nonetheless helpful for apps which users want to share data with even if they didn't initiate it." "Stay tuned," he added.

In an update coming to iOS 16 later this year, Apple plans to add a new "Clean Energy Charging" option in the United States. MacRumors reports: The information was shared in Apple's iOS 16 press release, and it says that clean energy charging will optimize charging times for when the grid is using cleaner energy sources. With Clean Energy Charging, Apple is aiming to decrease the carbon footprint of the iPhone. This is the first we've heard of clean energy charging, and it's not a feature that Apple has previously highlighted.

"The GNOME desktop environment is one of the most popular user interfaces and suites of apps available for desktop Linux distributions," writes Liliputing.

"Now a team of developers have been working to bring GNOME to mobile devices running Linux-based operating systems." GNOME Shell for mobile provides a touch-friendly user interface optimized for smartphones and tablets. And while it looks a bit like Android or iOS at first glance, there are a few key differences. The GNOME team have outlined some of them in an article about recent updates to GNOME Shell on mobile.

Like other modern mobile user interfaces, you interact with GNOME shell using taps, swipes, and other gesture-based navigation. What's different is that Android has three different views for navigation: a home screen, app drawer, and multitasking view. iOS has two: home screen and multitasking. But GNOME Shell has a single screen that allows you to view and launch apps and switch between running apps using gestures. There's no need to wait for a new screen to load. In a nutshell, you can swipe up from the bottom of the any screen to view a list of installed apps, thumbnail images showing all currently running apps, and a search box. You can tap an app icon to launch a new app, enter a term in the search box to find an app, or swipe between running apps to switch which app runs in the foreground.

You can also keep swiping upward to shrink the multitasking thumbnails and provide more room for app icons. And you can flick thumbnail previews upward to remove an app from the multitasking section. Typing in the search box will bring up relevant results including apps and settings.
"One interesting new feature here is that notifications can be swiped away horizontally to close, and notification bubbles can be swiped up to hide them..." the developers point out. "While the current version is definitely still work in progress, it's quite usable overall, so we feel it would make sense to start having experimental GNOME OS Nightly images with it."

But Liliputing also notes that it's not the only GNOME-based UI for mobile devices. There's also Purism's Phosh UI — the default UI for the PureOS on its Librem 5 smartphone (and available for other mobile Linux distros including Debian).

And Purism recently bragged that its smartphone is now also "the first mobile computer with a truly convergent OS" — meaning it can run on multiple hardware platforms, with apps adapting to their hardware. The Librem 5 [smartphone] uses the same convergent PureOS as our Librem 14 laptop and Mini PCs, with the same adaptive applications that make the Librem 5 more than merely a phone, it's a mobile computer in your pocket that can shape shift into a laptop, tablet, desktop, or even a server.... Scale your Librem 5 up to be a full laptop by attaching the Nexdock. Because our core apps are adaptive, they are ready to run on whatever screen you have....

With phosh-mobile-settings installed, you can flip the nexdock around and use the big screen just like a tablet.... Don't have a laptop dock? The Librem 5 can also act like a desktop computer when connected to a screen, keyboard, and mouse using our USB-C dock. Using the beta phom virtual mouse app, you can turn your Librem 5 into a touchpad mouse while it's connected to the big screen.

With the Librem 5, you can keep your desktop computer in your pocket and connect to a bigger screen at home or at the office and use the same apps on the bigger screen without restarting....

With the Librem 5 phone, you're getting much more than smartphone to run mobile-only apps; you're getting a laptop, tablet, desktop, all running software that respects your privacy and freedom.

Today is Disney+ Day, and, as part of its perks, the company is offering Disney+ subscribers a new AR experience in conjunction with the short film "Remembering," starring and produced by "Captain Marvel" Brie Larson and directed and written by filmmaker Elijah Allan-Blitz. The eight-minute-long movie features a companion augmented reality app that allows users to scan their TV with an iOS device to watch an extension of the movie on the small screen. TechCrunch reports: In "Remembering," Larson plays a writer who forgets an idea she had when her phone rings and interrupts her thoughts. The writer's inner child -- played by the young actress Dusty Peak -- helps her recover her lost idea, which is represented as a flying and talking cluster of light, also voiced by Larson. The inner child lives in "The World of Imagination," a fantastical wonderland full of rainbows, shooting stars and dolphin-shaped clouds. The movie aims to spark a discussion about why it is essential to remember your younger self and all the creativity you once had. In doing so, it explores concepts like the origin of ideas and why adults can sometimes be reluctant to use their imaginations.

In years past, Disney has created a number of AR experiences, but this is the first AR app that connects directly to content on the Disney+ platform, the company told TechCrunch. It's an experiment in seeing if AR can serve to enhance movie storytelling even when viewers are watching in their living rooms. The "Remembering" AR component itself is designed to bring "The World of Imagination" alive to viewers by having them engage with the film using their smartphones. [...] The AR app is only available on iOS devices. There are currently no confirmed plans for the app to become available on Android devices. Viewers aren't required to download the app to watch the film and can choose to have a passive viewing experience instead.