Roku just gave its mobile app a facelift. Among other changes, “Roku says it’s moving the navigation to the bottom of the app,” TechCrunch reports. “That’s a more traditional design than the big buttons it used before.” Additionally, “From left to right, you can access Channels, a new section called ‘What’s On,’ the Remote, a ‘Photos+’ section, and the app’s settings.”

All is not well at Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi. As such, “Xiaomi has forgone its tradition of revealing how many smartphones it sold the previous year,” TechCrunch reports. “The strategy yielded many headlines for the highly-regarded Chinese outfit, but today its CEO admitted that Xiaomi has been in transition after growing ‘too fast.’”

Promising to decrease data loads, Google Research has developed a technique for keeping image size to an absolute minimum without sacrificing quality. “So good is this new technique that it promises to reduce the size of an image on disk by as much as 75 percent,” PC Mag writes. “With unlimited data plans becoming increasingly expensive, or subscribers being forced to ditch their unlimited data due to overuse, anything that can reduce the amount of data we download is welcome.”

Amending its policy that Apple TV apps be limited to 200MB in size, Apple is now accepting larger tvOS “binaries.” In other words, “This means that developers can now submit apps as big as 4GB,” 9To5Mac writes. “With today’s change, tvOS apps can now be just as big as iOS apps, which are also capped at 4GB.”

Upon further inspection, Consumer Reports has decided to recommend Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops. The publisher previously refused to do so over concerns about inconsistent battery life, CNN Money notes. “Apple worked with Consumer Reports over the holidays to analyze the battery tests and find a fix in response to the influential product reviewer’s criticisms,” it writes.

Opera just debuted Neon -- an experimental desktop browser for Windows and Mac, which “tries to reimagine what a modern browser should look like,” in the words of TechCrunch. Among other unique traits, “There is no task bar or bookmarks bar (though the team kept the concept of the URL bar alive),” it writes. “Instead of having tabs at the top, you get round bubbles on the right.”

A new proposal presented by the European Commission could spell tougher user-tracking rules for WhatsApp, iMessage, Gmail, and other online messaging services. “The web players will have to guarantee the confidentiality of their customers’ conversations and get their consent before tracking them online to serve them personalized ads,” Reuters reports.

At least in part, Apple has figured out why Consumer Reports gave its new MacBook Pro models such a poor battery-life score. “It turns out that Consumer Reports turns off Safari’s local cache for their browsing test,” TechCrunch reports. “It means that the browser will fetch a website’s data from the internet every time.” Normally, “When the cache is on, Safari stores images on your hard drive so that you don’t have to load them up every time.”

WeChat parent company Tencent Holdings is rolling out a suite of Web apps for smartphone users. With the move, the Chinese company is “moving into turf long ruled by Apple and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, through its Android operating system,” TheWall Street Journal notes. As Jia Mo, an analyst at Canalys, told The Journal: “Tencent was conveying that they want to play a leading role in the next decade.”

Compared to Amazon’s aggressive Alexa strategy, Apple is missing a big opportunity with HomeKit, The Verge suggests. “HomeKit is Apple’s platform for letting all kinds of third-party smart home gadgets — from security cameras to ceiling fans — talk to each other through your iOS devices,” it notes. At CES this year,”There are more than a dozen companies presenting HomeKit devices -- but, for better or worse, they’re all pretty boring.”