During last week’s GlowTime event, Apple announced that iOS 18 will include a feature that may allow users with mild to moderate hearing loss to make use of AirPods as hearing aids.

But Apple was still waiting for FDA approval—approval that was announced just days later. The FDA described it as the primary “over-the-counter hearing aid software,” and certainly one of its leaders suggested it could possibly be “another step that increases the availability, affordability, and acceptability of hearing support for adults with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss.”

TechCrunch’s Brian Heater tried out a partial version of the feature last week. It won’t be available to those with standard AirPods, just like the ones I’m wearing now; you will need the corporate’s latest premium headphones, the AirPods Pro 2, since the feature leverages the Pro’s passive noise cancellation and H2 chip.

In today’s TechCrunch Minute, we discuss how Apple’s hearing test works and the way it’s changing the hearing aid market.

AWS announced today that it’s moving to a new edition Open searchits open source fork of the popular Elasticsearch search and evaluation engine to the Linux Foundation with the launch of the OpenSearch Foundation.

AWS first launched the OpenSearch project in 2021, after Elastic modified the license for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own proprietary license, the Elastic License. At the time, several open source vendors made similar changes, largely to stop large cloud providers—especially AWS—from offering hosted services based on their software.

Ironically, the move comes just weeks after Elastic announced it might be re-offering Elasticsearch and Kibana under an open source license, AGPL-ewhich requires users to publish the entire source code in the event that they make any changes. Interestingly, Elastic decided to make this selection available alongside its own, more restrictive license because, as the company said, “we have people who really like ELv2.”

When AWS created OpenSearch, there was loads of skepticism surrounding the project. After all, AWS had never managed a project of this size before. Mukul KarnikAWS general manager for search services, admitted as much.

“When we started OpenSearch at the time, Amazon and AWS were new to taking an open source project and developing it,” he told me in an interview before today’s announcement. “Our goal from the very beginning was to be community-driven and see how we could get more community members to participate and contribute to the project.”

Karnik noted that AWS has step by step opened up the project, encouraging each input and broader governance. “It’s become more organic, in a sense, where we’re taking these organic steps to figure out how to get more people to participate in the project.”

With today’s launch, many other major corporations have joined the Foundation, including SAP and Uber, who’ve change into premium members, while Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, Digital Ocean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal26 have change into general members.

Karnik noted that AWS expects its contribution to OpenSearch to extend.

In 2021, the foundation wasn’t on the roadmap yet, but now moving the project into its own foundation looks like a natural next step, Karnik said. He also noted that the OpenSearch ecosystem has added quite just a few innovations of its own to the project, including moving it from a cluster-based system to a more cloud-native architecture. He also noted that the project has recently introduced updates like separating compute and storage, in addition to segment replication. With the advent of artificial intelligence, interest in OpenSearch as a vector database has also increased, Karnik said.

The recent Foundation will operate under the standard Linux Foundation governance model, with an oversight board and a technical steering committee.

“The Linux Foundation is excited to provide a neutral home for open and collaborative development around open source search and analytics,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “Search is something we rely on every day, for both business and consumer use, and we look forward to supporting the OpenSearch community and helping them deliver powerful search and analytics tools to organizations and individuals around the world.”

Like many similar foundations, one of the reasons AWS has decided to contribute to the project now could be to achieve access to the Linux Foundation’s services and expertise in managing and developing open source projects. Additionally, the move helps OpenSearch shed its perception of being primarily an AWS-driven project, a key step for continued growth and broader adoption.

Ten years after the disappearance of the wildly popular Flappy Bird game, a corporation calling itself The Flappy Bird Foundation announced plans “re-hatch the official Flappy Bird® game.”

But this morning, the game’s creator Dong Nguyen posted a characteristically concise comment stating that he had nothing to do with the revival and that he “didn’t sell anything.” He added: “I don’t support cryptocurrencies either.”

To be clear, Nguyen’s comments don’t contradict anything in the inspiration’s announcement, which described the group as “a new team of passionate fans who want to share the game with the world” and he said he had “acquired rights from Gametech Holdings, LLC.” (Apparently Gametech successfully submitted application for termination (Flappy Bird, Nguyen’s trademark from just a few years ago.)

However, it’s clear from the post that Nguyen just isn’t involved within the new project and doesn’t seem particularly completely happy about it.

As for Nguyen’s reference to cryptocurrencies, while the inspiration’s current PR materials don’t mention anything related to cryptocurrencies, Varun Biniwale did make several searching hidden pages ON Flappy Bird Foundation website and located a reference to a Flappy Bird game that “flies higher than ever on Solana, soaring towards Web 3.0,” though it’s unclear whether this refers to approaching features or abandoned plans.

Flappy Bird — a comparatively easy side-scrolling game with retro graphics — was first released in 2013, eventually becoming a viral hit and probably the most downloaded app on each the iOS and Android app stores. However, Nguyen deleted the app in February 2014, declaring, “I can’t take it anymore.”