Zac Hall, writing for 9to5 Mac on Friday:

Meta’s new Muse AI agent app has taken the top spot on the free iPhone charts for the U.S. App Store, displacing OpenAI’s ChatGPT from the first place.

Muse by Meta only launched this month, although the app has been around for a couple of weeks. This means new installs are picking up and boosting the app on the App Store’s top charts beyond the day-one launch.

Just yesterday, Meta expanded Muse app availability to include the Mac. The desktop version of the app doesn’t contribute to the App Store ranking, however, as it’s downloadable from the web.

Four days later and Muse still holds the #1 spot in the U.S. iOS App Store. Here’s the top 15 today (with the full, sometimes insipid, name of each app, and my own commentary in brackets):

1. Muse from Meta
2. ChatGPT
3. Vinted: Pre-loved marketplace [if this crap was loved why did they sell it?]
4. StoryReel: Drama Shorts & TV
5. Google Gemini
6. Polymarket: Trade Live Sports [trading, not gambling!]
7. PineDrama — Short Dramas
8. TikTok Pro — Events
9. Depop — Buy & Sell Clothes
10. CapCut: Photo & Video Editor
11. Kalshi: Trade Football & more [but the “more” is definitely not gambling!]
12. Claude by Anthropic
13. Google
14. The White House
15. Threads

Hit apps come and go. Temu had been at or near the top for a long while, but now sits at #20. But ChatGPT has been at or very near the top for years now. Anthropic is on the cusp of a record-breaking IPO based on the strength of its enterprise success. #12 is nothing to sneeze at — clearly, Claude is a consumer hit. But it’s behind Gemini, and all of these apps are typically behind ChatGPT.

The odds are that Muse won’t stay at the top for long. And eventually, ChatGPT will decline in popularity. But Muse is off to a big start. And ChatGPT’s persistence atop the App Store is quite remarkable.

Apple Developer:

Xcode now supports a JSON-based project format (.xcproj) that’s more readable, merge-friendly, and easier for coding agents to edit. Enable it in the file inspector. Projects using .xcproj also open in earlier versions of Xcode 27.

Apple released, on GitHub, a Swift library (and CLI tool) for reading, writing, and manipulating this new project format. Michael Tsai has a list of developer reactions, which are universally positive. A sampling:

Simon B. Støvring:

Developers have been screaming for a friendlier Xcode project format for years. I’m one of them.

Tony Arnold:

I’ve been waiting for something like this for most of my career! 🎉

Rob Napier:

It does feel like another case of “we’ve quickly done a thing to help AI that we’ve been unwilling to do for years to help humans.” I’m seeing that happen across the industry.

It is very welcome and appreciated, and lots of thanks to the teams involved. It’s also frustrating that it took “it can help AI” to make it happen.

The old .pbxproj project format was not XML; it was an old NeXT-style “ASCII” property list — a file format that is surprisingly JSON-like considering that it predates not only JSON, but JavaScript (JSON = JavaScript Object Notation). The problem developers have long had with the old .pbxproj project file isn’t about the old plist format, but instead the way the object graph was represented in it. Everything was represented by opaque ID values; one small change in Xcode often resulted in multiple changes on different lines in the .pbxproj file. While technically that format is a human-readable (and thus LLM-readable) text file, it effectively needed to be treated as a binary file.

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

In May, Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle a U.S. class action lawsuit over Siri AI’s delayed launch, and the settlement website is now live.

Apple will pay an estimated $25 per eligible iPhone to eligible customers, who can submit a claim via the settlement website between September 21 and December 21 of this year. The exact payment may be higher or lower than $25 depending on the total number of valid claims submitted and other factors, with the maximum amount set at $95.

Apple denies all of the allegations made in the lawsuit. Apple agreed to the settlement to avoid the costs and risks of a trial.

I went ahead and filled it out for the iPhone 16 Pro I purchased in September 2024. I’d call it borderline whether it was worth my time for $25. It was a pain in the ass every step of the way.

For the eventual payment, your choices to receive the dough are PayPal, Venmo, ACH (bank transfer), or check. I tried to get it via PayPal and it just wouldn’t complete the connection to my PayPal account. After wasting time on a few tries, I tried ACH next, and the web form had pasting disabled on the fields for the routing and account numbers. Ridiculous. I was able to get around that to paste the numbers in, because I use StopTheMadness. But most people don’t. The only reason I can think of that they try to block pasting on those fields is to make it difficult.

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I first recommended Strategery back in May 2009, including a link to Friedman’s review at Macworld. I described it thus:

Strategery is a beautiful $2 Risk-like strategy game for the iPhone. Lots of fun and the gameplay has a great feel.

Still lots of fun and still has a great feel. It now costs $5, but, if you’re an existing user — even if you only paid $2 back when I told you to 17 years ago — it’s a free update. And it’s a great story: the original Strategery game finally gave up the compatibility ghost with iOS 27. Friedman made his own version of the game, including multiplayer support, but before releasing it on his own under a new name, he reached out to the original developers and it turns out everyone was happy to make a deal. Sometimes all you need to do is ask.

(First thing you should do after installing the new version is go into settings and turn on “Classic Hex Edges”. The default style — Lex edges? — doesn’t look right.)

Joanna Stern, on X:

GM has confirmed it is NOT rolling phone projection to GM EVs. Instead this announcement is specific to JUST their new gas powered light-duty pickups, which have always supported Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

MLB:

Comerica Park has had several alternate identities since it became the Tigers’ home in 2000. Some have called it Comerica National Park for its spacious dimensions. Some fans simply came to call it Comerica, or abbreviated it to CoPa, as they grew comfortable with it over the years.

Starting next year, the Tigers’ ballpark will have a new formal name: Fifth Third Park.

Filth Turd Park. Rolls right off the tongue.