At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, former Facebook Inc. product manager Frances Haugen didn’t need to convince lawmakers that the company has a big problem. Republicans and Democrats were, for once, united on her side, at several points even calling her a “hero.” What they needed was direction…

All the world has heard about and seen photos of Amazon.com Inc.’s $1,000 home robot. But that was not the company’s biggest product launch this week. Far more important, and carrying wider ramifications for Amazon’s business, is New World — the company’s first major video-game hit. The…

It’s an open secret: The user experience is deteriorating for many of the largest technology companies’ core products. At fault is the steady, inexorable creep of advertising. More and more companies are allowing ads to infiltrate every facet of their services. It’s easy to see why: With tech…

There’s a joke on Twitter about Twitter that goes like this: The biggest innovation the company achieved after spending more than $3 billion on research and development over the last five years was doubling the character count of a tweet. That characterization isn’t exactly fair, but there’s enough…

For the more than 1 billion iPhone enthusiasts around the world, no product unveiling is more anticipated than Apple Inc.’s annual reveal of its newest lineup of smartphones. Except for maybe this time. On Tuesday, the Cupertino, California-based company introduced four iPhone 13 models with…

Apple Inc.’s dominance over the mobile-app economy has just suffered its first significant setback. It could mark the beginning of a real antitrust reckoning for the technology giant that may benefit the livelihoods of millions of app developers. On Friday, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez…

GameStop Inc. announced its latest quarterly earnings late Wednesday and investors responded the way they have after every release going back a year: They sold the stock. Each of the prior reactions proved to be short-sighted. It’s likely this one will as well. Here’s how I think about GameStop:…

It’s time for Apple Inc. to get off its easy-money addiction and go for a bigger score: developing its own search engine. For years, the smartphone maker has benefited financially from a lucrative deal in which Alphabet Inc.’s Google paid Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine…

China is not a fan of video games. Earlier this week, a government agency announced new rules that would restrict the time that minors’ can play online games to about three hours a week — down drastically from a prior limit of roughly 10 hours. Beijing has said the constraints were imposed to…

When a powerful technology company wants everyone to know it has made large concessions in its business practices, it pays to look at the fine print. Sometimes the details don’t match up with the rhetoric. That seems to be the case regarding Apple Inc.’s class-action settlement with app developers…