When we first built Murror, our AI would automatically surface emotional patterns after every journal entry. "You've mentioned feeling anxious about work 4 times this week." "Your mood tends to dip on Sunday evenings."
Users loved it in demos. They called it "impressive" and "insightful." Our internal metrics looked great -- pattern detection accuracy was 87%.
Since July, App Store Connect asks whether your app has social media capabilities. From September, you can't submit a new app or an update without answering.
Apple posted on 9 July that the age rating questionnaire now includes questions about social media capabilities, and that "beginning in September 2026, responses will be required when submitting new apps or updates to the App Store, or when submitting apps for notarization for alternative distribution." September ends tomorrow, so if you have a build in flight, this is the week you meet it.
China and California both moved to rein in AI companion apps this month and the whole debate hinges on a question most builders never ask: what happens when the user closes your app?
Two weeks ago, on July 15, China rolled out rules specifically aimed at curbing emotional dependence on AI companion bots. Platforms now have to detect distress, intervene in a crisis, cap excessive use, and hand users real control over their data. California, meanwhile, became the first U.S. state to pass legislation regulating companion chatbots, forcing developers to build in actual safety protocols.
For three months, the #1 feature request in Murror was "let me share my journal entries with my partner."
It made perfect sense. Murror helps you understand your emotions and relationships. Sharing seemed like the obvious next step. Our roadmap was built around it. We designed the UI, built the sharing flow, even wrote the notification copy.
The Digital Omnibus pushed high-risk obligations out to December 2027. Article 50 transparency was not pushed anywhere - it applies now. And if your generative feature shipped before 2 August, your marking deadline is 2 December, twelve weeks out.
Every summary I read of the Digital Omnibus said some version of "Brussels blinks, AI Act delayed." That's accurate about the part of the Act most small teams will never touch, and misleading about the part most of us are already inside. I went and read the Commission's own pages this week rather than the coverage, and the gap between the two is wide enough to be worth twenty minutes of your time.
Pew measured the click collapsing from 15% to 8% when an AI summary appears. A separate read of 35,000 ChatGPT citations shows where the decision moved to and it's mostly places you don't own.
Start with the one number here that isn't someone's marketing. Pew Research put browsing software on 900 US adults and watched 68,879 real Google searches in March 2025. Not a survey about how search feels. Actual behaviour.
There's a pattern I keep noticing across the AI products that actually stick with people vs. the ones that get tried once and forgotten.
The forgettable ones try to be impressive. They show off what the model can do -- generate faster, automate more, produce output at scale. And they're genuinely cool for about 15 minutes.
Last month I pulled our engagement data expecting to celebrate. Daily active users up. Session length up. Entries per week up. Every growth chart pointed right and up.
Then I read what our most active users were actually writing.
