Maryland was one of the first states to make state IDs available on Apple’s Wallet app for iPhones, and now Google is beta testing support for the “Digital Driver’s License” in the Wallet app on Android phones. The Apple Wallet integration can already be used to get through TSA at airports like the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport that allow the use of digital state IDs, which should be similar on Android.
According to Google’s updated support page: users running Android 8.0 (or later) who are in the Google Play Services beta program (specifically, version 48.22) are eligible. After enabling Bluetooth and Nearby Devices, and also making sure your phone has a screen lock, you should now see a new option for “ID Card (beta)” when adding a new card to the Google Wallet app.
The feature was announced during Google’s developer-oriented I/O keynote in May, where it showed a slide with Maryland as the first ID available for the upcoming feature.
Android support for a digital state ID is part of this month’s Google System updates, which also includes other Play Services beta features for Wallet like Digital Car Key (for Xiaomi devices) and the ability to manage payment cards on Fitbit devices.
According to a Verge tipster, the process to add a Maryland ID goes as follows: scan the front of the ID > scan the back > take a short recording of your face > submit your application > and finally, wait for Maryland to accept the card. The process is very similar to that of adding a card to Apple Wallet.
As of writing, the Play Services beta program is full, so you might have to wait a while to try out the feature. Google recommitted to its Wallet app initiative after a period where it was deprecated in favor of a focused “Google Pay” offering. Now, Wallet contains Google Pay, transit cards, loyalty rewards, gift cards, and ID cards, making it a much more complete app.
We’ve confirmed that the feature works on newer Google Pixels, but it also works on devices like Samsung’s Galaxy S20 — though requirements to support the feature may vary. It’s confusing to figure out, but Senior Technical Editor for Esper (and former Editor-In-Chief for XDA Developers) Mishaal Rahman reached out to us to explain:
Under the hood, Google Wallet uses an API available in Android called Identity Credential to handle ISO 18013-5 compliant mobile driver’s licenses. This API was introduced in Android 11. In the same release, Google also introduced, basically, an enhanced version of the API that utilizes the device’s secure hardware to more securely store mobile driver’s licenses. This is what’s referred to as the Identity Credential HAL, and this is what very few devices support (and what Google wanted to expand support for by introducing new requirements in Android 13 that I mentioned in my article).
However, hardware support for Identity Credential is *not* required to support digital driver’s licenses. For older devices and devices without hardware support, Google offers a backward compatible version of the Identity Credential API. This is compatible with Android 8.0 and later and utilizes another API called the Android Keystore to store mobile driver’s licenses on the device. Keystore uses the device’s Trusted Execution Environment, which Android devices have been required to support for some time now.
Correction December 15th 2022 7:41PM ET: A previous version of this article stated that Digital IDs require Android 13. It’s possible to have Digital IDs on Android 8.0 and later, and we added an expert’s technical explanation on how it works. We regret the error.
Update December 19th 2022 11:50AM ET: Replaced the Maryland ID image with an up-to-date design.
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Tammy Ma was about to board a plane at the San Francisco International Airport when she got the call of a lifetime. She's a plasma physicist at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world's largest and most energetic laser. An experiment at the facility had just accomplished a breakthrough in nuclear fusion that scientists have been trying to achieve for decades.
"I burst into tears, and I was jumping up and down in the waiting area," Ma told reporters at a technical briefing on the achievement in Washington, DC, this week.
NIF shot 192 laser beams at a tiny target filled with fuel and achieved "fusion ignition" in a controlled setting …
The Death Stranding cinematic universe is getting a little bigger. Not long after a sequel to the 2019 video game was announced, now comes news that a film is also in the works.
The project will be a joint collaboration between developer Kojima Productions and Hammerstone Studios, led by Alex Lebovici, who served as a producer on the horror film Barbarian. According to a press release, the plot for the film is being kept quiet for now, but it will “introduce new elements and characters within the Death Stranding universe.”
The news shouldn’t be too surprising. Last year, Kojima Productions launched a film and TV division for just this sort of thing, and director Hideo Kojima is not shy about his love of film, which often results in Hollywood stars being featured in his games. The original Death Stranding starred Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, and Mads Mikkelsen, among others. No word yet on who might appear in the film. I’m particularly interested in who ends up in the role of BB.
The news also comes at a time when seemingly every big-name video game is being adapted, from The Last of Us on HBO to God of War on Prime Video.
“I couldn’t be more excited about this new partnership with Hammerstone Studios,” said Kojima said in a statement. “This is a pivotal moment for the franchise and I’m really looking forward to collaborating with them in bringing Death Stranding to the big screen.”
No word on a release time frame, but the companies say that the Death Stranding film “is on the fast track with development underway.”
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Apple is building on the success of its Apple TV Plus comedy about game development, Mythic Quest, with a new spinoff series titled Mere Mortals. The eight-episode series will be more like the excellent episodes in the main show that focus on a time and place outside of the primary settings and characters, Variety reports. “Mere Mortals will explore the lives of employees, players and fans who are impacted by the game,” according to Apple in a press release.
Ashly Burch, who plays Rachel in Mythic Quest, is part of the team writing Mere Mortals alongside John Howell Harris and Katie McElhenney. Megan Ganz, Rob McElhenney (Ian on Mythic Quest), David Hornsby (David Brittlesbee on Mythic Quest), and Charlie Day will be executive producers.
Apple didn’t share a release date for Mere Mortals, so we don’t know when it will be released. In the meantime, you can catch the main Mythic Quest show now, which is currently in its third season and has already been renewed for a fourth. I’m not caught up on the third season, but the one-off episodes from the first two like “A Dark Quiet Death” and “Backstory!” are some of my favorite episodes of TV in recent memory.
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The Echo Show 15 now comes with the Fire TV interface, thanks to a software update that started rolling out last week. Amazon's largest smart display already offered a few streaming apps, but the update brings more streaming services, more live TV options, and a native YouTube app on an Echo device for the first time since 2017. It makes the Echo Show 15 a better television but a slightly worse smart display.
If your main beef with the Show 15 was the limited video options, this is a great update. But it does remove some touch functionality from the Show 15 and makes it more reliant on either voice control through Alexa, a new physical remo …
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The Peacock original show Bel-Air doesn’t actually have anything to do with flying, but you may be able to watch it next time you’re in the air. JetBlue has announced that it’s partnered with NBC’s streaming service to bring some of its content to the seatback screens on its planes — including the Fresh Prince spinoff, Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin, and Rian Johnson’s comedy caper show Poker Face.
You’ll also be able to stream anything from Peacock’s catalog using your own device and the in-flight Wi-Fi, according to the airline’s Thursday press release, though you’ll need an active Peacock subscription to do so, according to JetBlue spokesperson Emily Martin.
The “exclusive” streaming partnership will go into effect in spring 2023. Currently, JetBlue’s in-flight entertainment has offerings from Showtime, HBO, ViacomCBS, and NBCUniversal, Peacock’s parent company.
JetBlue isn’t the only airline to bring a streaming service’s shows to its in-flight entertainment system. Delta has had partnerships with both Disney Plus and Hulu, and American Airlines has also worked with Peacock. Airlines have also been looking at other ways to enhance the experience of watching movies or shows during your flight, such as making it way easier to use your Bluetooth headphones with the in-seat screens.
Disclosure: Comcast, NBCUniversal’s parent company, is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.
Update December 15th, 1:32PM ET: Added info that you’ll need a Peacock subscription to access the full catalogue on your own device.
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Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 from PlayStation’s Insomniac Games will officially be launching on PS5 in fall 2023, Sony announced on Thursday. While we don’t have any more specific timing than that launch window, it means that there will be one more major game for next year that you might want to add to your list of things to look forward to.
Sony also shared a brief and vague synopsis. “Following the events of Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the Spider-duo of Peter Parker and Miles Morales are back in the next blockbuster action chapter of the Marvel’s Spider-Man series,” Sony’s De’Angelo Epps wrote. Sony debuted a brief teaser trailer for the game last year that revealed Venom will be featured as a villain.
While Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales have both been released for PS4, PS5, and PC, Spider-Man 2 will be launching exclusively on PS5. However, given Sony’s recent uptick in its PC launches, I’m guessing that patient PC gamers will be able to play Spider-Man 2 on their own rig at some point down the line.
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When Apple acquired classical music streaming service Primephonic back in 2021, the company revealed plans to launch a standalone app with many of Primephonic’s best features by the end of this year. But we’re now in mid-December. iOS 16.2 was just released without any sign of the app — believed to be called Apple Classical — and it’s not present in the latest iOS 16.3 betas, either.
With many Apple employees nearing holiday vacation, it seems increasingly unlikely that Apple Classical will be a year-end surprise.
In its original press release from August of last year, Apple said Apple Music Classical would combine “Primephonic’s classical user interface that fans have grown to love with more added features.” (The Apple Classical app name has been spotted in code strings within other Apple software.)
With time quickly running out on 2022, there are now three possibilities:
- Apple will release Apple Classical as a standalone app in the App Store and (maybe) meet its target. Some Apple apps (like the new Freeform) debut as built-in software through iOS, iPadOS, and macOS software updates. But others like Clips and the defunct Music Memos arrive in the App Store and thus can pop up at any time.
- Apple Classical has been delayed until 2023. I’m not sure what’s so hard about giving Primephonic a new coat of paint and adapting it to the backend of Apple Music, but maybe this project is proving more time-consuming than Apple originally envisioned.
- The company has changed its mind about releasing a standalone app altogether. Plans are always subject to change, so there’s also the possibility that Apple has decided to just bring whatever it can from Primephonic over to Apple Music.
This was already part of the plan, according to the press release:
With the addition of Primephonic, Apple Music subscribers will get a significantly improved classical music experience beginning with Primephonic playlists and exclusive audio content. In the coming months, Apple Music Classical fans will get a dedicated experience with the best features of Primephonic, including better browsing and search capabilities by composer and by repertoire, detailed displays of classical music metadata, plus new features and benefits.
Why is a standalone Apple Classical app even necessary?
It comes down to discoverability and organization. Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, and other mainstream services with tens of millions of subscribers aren’t cut out for the level of in-depth search and meticulous metadata accuracy that classical fans want — and that Primephonic happily provided.
Apple praised that aspect of the service when announcing the acquisition, crediting Primephonic for “search and browse functionality optimized for classical, premium-quality audio, handpicked expert recommendations, and extensive contextual details on repertoire and recordings.” A standalone classical app would give Apple Music a unique perk and leg up on other paid music services. Whether that would help move the needle on overall subscriber count is less clear.
It’s easier to provide classical fans with that type of in-depth functionality in a siloed app rather than cram everything into Apple Music. But Primephonic’s service shut down in September 2021 soon after the acquisition, leaving listeners without their tailored experience. And the wait for a replacement is dragging on longer than some had hoped.
Primephonic customers received six months of free Apple Music, but that access ran out in February. Curiously, February was also when “Apple Music Classical” and “Apple Classical” started showing up in some of Apple’s code. 9to5Mac did some legwork and found that much of the Primephonic team is now at Apple Music, so the band is mostly still together — even if the new app is MIA.
The Verge reached out to Apple spokespeople Jessica Bass and Sam Citron for comment on Monday and hasn’t yet received any updates on the status of Apple Classical.
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You're either on team flat or team curved when it comes to how you prefer your gaming monitors to look. Corsair's new $1,999 Xeneon Flex, a new 45-inch OLED option that's shipping early next year, doesn't make you pick sides. It can morph between the two modes - sadly, not by pressing a button - but by primitively squeezing the screen together with its two handles. It requires a surprising amount of force to pull it into a curve and to push it back into a flat panel, letting out faint clicks when each side has reached its destination.
After testing a non-final version of the Xeneon Flex for several days, my fear of breaking it has nearly s …
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Amazon’s latest foray into video game publishing will star Lara Croft. The company announced a new deal with developer Crystal Dynamics, which will see it publish the next entry in the long-running Tomb Raider series. Crystal Dynamics will handle development, with Amazon “providing full support and publishing the game globally.”
The studio revealed it was working on a new Tomb Raider earlier this year as part of a showcase for Epic’s Unreal Engine game-making tools. Very few details are available at the moment, but it’s described as “a single-player, narrative-driven adventure that continues Lara Croft’s story in the Tomb Raider series.” Amazon says the game, which will utilize Unreal Engine 5, will be multiplatform and is currently in “early development.” No word yet on when it might be released.
Previously, the franchise was published by Square Enix, but the company sold off numerous properties and studios this past May, including Tomb Raider and Crystal Dynamics.
Amazon’s fledgling game division is probably best known for developing the MMO New World, which launched last year, but it has also been making a big push into publishing of late. At the beginning of 2022, Amazon published the Diablo-style action game Lost Ark, which is developed by Korean studio Smilegate, and at this year’s Game Awards, it announced a partnership with Bandai Namco to publish the anime MMO Blue Protocol in 2023.
All of those titles are live-service, online games, so the Tomb Raider deal represents a somewhat new space for Amazon. “Amazon Games is committed to bringing players games of the highest quality, from the best developers, across all variety of platforms and genres, and we’re honored by the opportunity to work with this storied developer and franchise,” Christoph Hartmann, VP of Amazon Games, said of the deal in a statement.
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