Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact.

Wheels aims to be your all-in-one digital skate journal, allowing you (presuming you’re a skater) to track all things skating. It helps track your rides, your skateboards, and offers a clean interface to manage it all.

Ever since early 2021, Apple has been releasing new Black Unity bands for the Apple Watch. 2025 marks the fifth year of this tradition, giving a number of options to pick from. Among the five bands, Apple has released two sport bands, two sport loops, and one braided solo loop. All of them remain available for purchase on the Apple Store today.

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Full-time remote work has changed how people approach day-to-day work, but it’s also brought new challenges—like spending hours in Zoom/Google Meet meetings. Wearing AirPods 8 hours a day daily isn’t great for your battery, nor do I find it comfortable. The AISPEECH M6 Conference Speakerphone offers a nice option that I’ve been using day to day: a high-quality, AI-enhanced speakerphone that frees your ears from 8-hour-a-day Bluetooth, saves your AirPods battery, upgrades your audio experience, and includes compatibility with an AI-driven note-taker tool.

Apple introduced Apple One in 2020, providing an easy way for avid Apple users to subscribe to multiple services at once, and get a nice bundle discount for doing so. It offers three tiers, and its remained that way since it launched. However, I think Apple would benefit greatly from offering a fourth tier, capturing a key demographic.

I was someone who grew up with a Gameboy Color in my hands. I would play games like Pokemon, Ray-Man, and Super Mario until my fingers cramped. So, last year, when Apple opened the gates and allowed emulator apps like Delta into the App Store, I was all over it. It was awesome playing my old games on my iPhone. Although the app does a great job with haptic feed to mimic physical buttons, there is really nothing like the real thing. So when I saw the GAMEBABY at CES this year, I knew I had to get my hands on it.

In this jam packed launch episode, Sophia Tung and Zac Hall dive deep into DeepSeek’s arrival to the AI race, how NVIDIA and OpenAI are responding, and the state of current AI tools; this week’s biggest tech surprises, what has us excited and what has us concerned, and much more. 

2025 is set to be a big year for Apple hardware launches, and that will even be true for a variety of rarely-updated products. Here are six new products coming that will have waited about three years (or more) between hardware updates.

iOS 18 introduced a major redesign to Control Center across iPhone and iPad. Here are the three controls that have made a big difference for me over several months of use.

From time to time, I see some nostalgic posts about the good old days when iPods were everywhere. Personally, the iPod was responsible for getting me to like Apple products. But years after the iPod was discontinued, I don’t think people really want the iPod back even though they claim they do – and here’s why.

This fall, the iPhone lineup is getting a brand new model: the iPhone 17 Air. Apple plans to drop its Plus model in favor of an iPhone with a fresh form factor that could tempt a lot of Pro users. Here are seven features coming to the iPhone 17 Air.

Bad news for fans of bad products. Apple won’t be shipping a pair of augmented reality glasses that require a tethered connection to the Mac after all. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has the exclusive development, including a thorough description of how the product would have worked. Based on Mark’s reporting, this project was buried in compromises that ultimately made it undesirable.

Severance season 2 just released its third episode, but that’s not the only new debut related to the Apple TV+ hit. The You You Are, the book from Dr. Ricken in the show, is now available in a free extended excerpt in Apple Books.

Smart locks have made our homes more secure and easy to access in recent years. For a long time, the market felt stagnant, but in the past few years, we’ve seen a few vendors hop on board in a major way. is a great option with Apple HomeKit integration, built-in Wi-Fi, and versatile ways to lock and unlock your door. Whether you’re looking for advanced features like fingerprint ID or simple convenience with Siri voice control, the Ultraloq Bolt delivers it all (almost).

Apple TV+ kicked off 2025 with two big returning series—Severance and Mythic Quest—that will continue airing new episodes throughout February. But the streamer also has a varied lineup of fresh debuts coming in the month ahead. Highlights include the Anya Taylor-Joy movie The Gorge, medical drama Berlin ER, a new season of Surface, a sports docu-series, new children’s show, and more. Here’s everything coming to Apple TV+ in February.

Google’s $20 billion per year search deal with Apple was ruled last summer to violate antitrust law. Though Apple isn’t a defendant in the case, its outcome could have a big impact on the company. As a result, Apple has just asked for a stay on proceedings.

Your Friday edition of 9to5Toys Lunch Break is now ready to go with a fresh batch of discounts to save you some cash. Firstly, we just caught the very best Amazon price ever on the Jet Black and silver Apple Watch Series 10 GPS + Cell models at $80 off, alongside ongoing Black Friday pricing on the rest of them from $329. From there, we move over to the new M4 Pro MacBook Pro – the 16-inchers with 24GB of RAM are now $250 off the going rate – as well as some official Apple iPad cases – a rare return low on the M2 iPad Air Folio and the M4 iPad Magic Keyboard. We also have some rare Valentine’s Day deals on the super popular metal Arc Pulse Bumper iPhone cases. All of that and more awaits down below. 

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Tired of hearing about DeepSeek yet? The China-based LLM chatbot beached itself onto the scene this week, dominating the tech news cycle and even taking #1 on the App Store, where it still sits as of writing. However, its rapid popularity has led to a wave of new phishing campaigns, investment scams, and macOS malware disguised as real DeepSeek applications. Here’s the latest.

You’re reading 9to5Mac Security Bite, where each week, I share insights on data privacy, discuss the latest vulnerabilities, and shed light on emerging threats within Apple’s vast ecosystem of over 2 billion active devices.

The basic design of the iPhone hasn’t changed much in the last few years. New models get better annually, but the average person probably wouldn’t use the word ‘innovation’ to describe Apple’s recent upgrades. According to Tim Cook though, the iPhone roadmap looks especially exciting and there’s ‘a lot of innovation’ ahead.

TikTok has bounced back from its time offline according to traffic logs, but creators are worried about the uncertain future of the app.

Some are assuming the worst, and preparing for the platform to shut down, while others feel TikTok has a unique role and it would be difficult to replicate their success on other platforms …

Today CalDigit took the wraps off its first Thunderbolt 5-enabled device, the nine port, and aptly-titled Element 5 Hub. The follow up to the company’s original eight-port Element hub, the $249 Element 5 features four Thunderbolt 5 ports supporting 80Gb/s, plus a whole host of additional features and tidbits to consider. Let’s take a closer look.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently isn’t very happy about employees leaking things he says during internal company-wide meetings. The company issued a memo threatening to fire people for leaking internal comms – and that memo was of course immediately leaked …

Way back in 2018, a class action lawsuit was filed against Apple, alleging a defect in early Apple Watch models that could cause the display to crack or detach from the casing.

While Apple has acknowledged some issues related to swollen batteries, and offered free service, it refused coverage for cracked or detached screens. The company has now agreed to a financial settlement for this …

Compared to Android, only some of Google’s iOS apps use the latest version of Material Design. Gmail for iPhone and iPad was finally updated with a Material 3 redesign today.

Apple Maps is about to get a notable upgrade that will lead to more efficient EV routing suggestions for Ford Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning drivers.