Technologies

Apple Arcade: What to know about price, games, device compatibility, privacy and more

Interested in trying out Apple Arcade? We’ll tell you everything you need to know about Apple’s mobile gaming subscription service.

Apple released its mobile gaming subscription service, Apple Arcade, in September 2019. Apple Arcade lets you play games across the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Mac and Apple TV devices for $5 ( 5, AU$8) a month, or $50 annually.

Apple Arcade lets players download and play games offline (no streaming options, sorry). The service includes a number of Arcade-exclusive games, as well as remastered versions of App Store favorites. In addition to working on multiple devices, Apple Arcade offers support for third-party controllers like the PlayStation DualShock 4 for more varied gameplay.

Here’s everything you need to know about Apple Arcade.

What is Apple Arcade?

Apple Arcade is a subscription service of games, curated for users to browse instead of trying to navigate the App Store’s thousands of games and apps. Apple said that’s part of why it created Arcade, which it calls the world’s first game subscription service for mobile, desktop and living room.

At launch, Apple Arcade had just over 60 games for a wide range of players, as well as titles including multiplayer options. But the service recently crossed 200 available games, because Apple adds new ones regularly.

How much does Apple Arcade cost? Does it have a free trial?

Apple Arcade costs $5 for unlimited access after a one-month free trial for first-time subscribers. You won’t see ads or pay extra for add-ons or game updates; all that comes with the subscription. A subscription can be shared by up to six family members.

If you buy a new Apple device, you’ll get a three-month subscription to Apple Arcade (even if you’re already subscribed to the service). Another option is the Apple One subscription bundle, which launched last year. Apple One makes it easier and more affordable to get up to six Apple subscription services, Apple Arcade included, for one price. In May, the service teamed up with Verizon to offer a free year-long subscription with unlimited plans.

What games are available on Apple Arcade?

Since launch, Apple Arcade has amassed more than 220 games, with new games added almost every week. (You can check out a full, regularly updated list of the games on the service here.) Some of the top games, according to the Apple Arcade landing page in the App Store, include NBA 2K21 Arcade Edition, Lego Star Wars Battles, Sneaky Sasquatch and Angry Birds Reloaded.

Apple Arcade splits its catalog up into categories similarly to other game subscription services — action, adventure, casual, family, RPG and more. You can also delve deeper into categories like Arcade Originals — games exclusive to Apple Arcade. Some exclusive titles include Alto’s Odyssey: The Lost City, Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls, Star Trek: Legends and Fantasian.

You can also explore Timeless Classics and App Store Greats. These games are already available in the App Store, but in Apple Arcade, they have new content, and are free of paywalls and ads. These categories include games like Solitaire, Mahjong Titan, Fruit Ninja Classic, Monument Valley and more.

Which devices can I use to play Apple Arcade games?

You can play Apple Arcade games on iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, Macs and Apple TV devices. You can find the Apple Arcade tab in the App Store. Just click the little joystick icon to get started.

Does Apple Arcade offer any parental controls, screen time monitors or privacy protection?

A majority of Apple Arcade’s games are family-friendly, but you can always check the individual game’s age rating or search under the Family category.

As far as screen time monitors, you can adjust this in your device settings. Simply open the Settings app and tap Screen Time. From there you can customize your device generally, or more specifically for games. To focus on Apple Arcade games, tap App Limits > Add Limit > Games. From there, just choose which games you want to set time limits on. Tap Next, set the time limit and tap Add. Whoever is playing will get a notification five minutes before the cutoff time.

And your privacy is safe on Apple Arcade. Before you download a game on Apple Arcade, you can scroll down to App Privacy to see the developer’s privacy policy and any data that might be collected when you play. For example, Sneaky Sasquatch says it might collect usage data, but it’s not connected to your identity. You can look for individual permissions that give you control over what personal information you share with whom.

What else is Apple doing with Arcade?

In addition to hosting the service, Apple says it’s helping with the development costs of games and working with developers to bring their games to the service.

How do I cancel Apple Arcade?

Apple says Apple Arcade games can’t collect any data about you and can’t track information about how you play the game without your consent. Look for individual permissions that give you control over what personal information you share with whom.

To cancel your subscription on iPhone or iPad, follow these steps:

1. Open the App Store.

2. Tap the profile icon, and enter your Apple ID if requested.

3. Tap Manage Subscriptions.

4. Tap Apple Arcade.

5. Tap Cancel Free Trial or Cancel Subscription.

6. Confirm cancelation.

To cancel on Mac, follow these steps:

1. Open the App Store app.

2. Click on your profile icon.

3. Click View Information.

4. Click Manage.

5. Click Apple Arcade in the active subscriptions list.

6. Choose Cancel Free Trial or Cancel Subscription.

7. Confirm selection.

To cancel on Apple TV, follow these steps:

1. Open the Settings app on the Apple TV.

2. Select Users and Accounts and choose your account.

3. Enter your Apple ID password.

4. Select Apple Arcade.

5. Choose either Cancel Free Trial or Cancel Subscription.

6. Confirm your selection.

Cliff Colby contributed to this article.

Technologies

iOS 26: AI Summaries Come Back to iPhone News Apps, but With a Warning

Apple initially disabled these summaries in January.

Apple released iOS 26 on Monday, a few months after the company announced it at the June Worldwide Developers Conference. The update brings a new Liquid Glass redesign, call screening and hidden features to your iPhone. The update also brings AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps back to Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone.

Apple disabled AI notification summaries for news and entertainment apps in January. That came a few weeks after the BBC pointed out in December that the feature twisted the media organization’s notifications and displayed inaccurate information.

Here’s what to know about those AI summaries and the new warning.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

iOS 26 warns about summary inaccuracies

When I updated to iOS 26, I was greeted by some splash screens asking for various permissions. One splash screen was for the AI notification summaries. When you see this screen, you have two options: Choose Notifications to Summarize or Not Now. If you tap Not Now, the splash screen goes away.

If you tap Choose Notifications to Summarize, you’re taken to a new page where you’ll see three categories: News & Entertainment, Communication & Social and All Other Apps. Tapping one of these categories allows notification summaries for apps in that category. Beneath the News & Entertainment category, there’s a warning that gets outlined in red if you tap it.

«Summarization may change the meaning of the original headline,» the warning reads, adding, «Verify information.»

There’s also a warning across the bottom of the screen that reads, «This is a beta feature. Summaries may contain errors.»

After tapping the categories you want, tap Summarize Selected Notifications across the bottom of your screen. If you selected all the categories, this button will read Summarize All Notifications.

And if you don’t want these summaries, you can tap Do Not Summarize Notifications. If you allow these summaries and don’t like them, you can easily turn them off. Here’s how.

How to turn off AI notification summaries

1. Tap Settings.
2. Tap Notifications.
3. Tap Summarize Notifications.

4. Tap the Summarize Notifications toggle in the new menu.

You can also follow the above steps to turn AI notification summaries back on. You’ll have to select which categories you want these summaries for again, too.

For more on iOS 26, here’s my review of the OS, how to reduce the Liquid Glass effects in the update and how to enable call screening on your iPhone. You can also check out our iOS 26 cheat sheet.

Technologies

Amazon Prime Is Ending Shared Free Shipping. What to Know and When It Happens

How Prime Invitee program’s end could affect your free deliveries.

If you’ve been using someone else’s Amazon Prime membership for free shipping, but you don’t live in the same house, you may need to pay another subscription fee soon. According to Amazon’s updated customer service page, the online retail giant is ending its Prime Invitee benefit-sharing program Oct. 1.

Amazon’s Prime Invitee program is being replaced by Amazon Family, as reported earlier by The Verge. It includes many of the same benefits, but Amazon Family only works for up to two adults and four children living in the same «primary residential address» — a shared home.

You’ll still be able to use free shipping to send gifts elsewhere, but your Prime Invitees will no longer be able to use the perk.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Amazon isn’t the first company to prevent membership sharing between family and friends. The e-commerce giant is just the latest to follow Netflix’s account-sharing crackdown. While it’s unclear whether this change will work for Amazon, Netflix gained over 200,000 subscribers following its policy change. We also saw a similar account-sharing crackdown with Disney Plus and YouTube Premium.

Read more: More Than Just Free Shipping: Here Are 19 Underrated Amazon Prime Perks

What the Amazon Prime shipping crackdown means for you

If you’re the beneficiary of someone else’s Prime Invitee benefits, you have one more month to take advantage of the current program before the changes take effect.

Starting in October, you’ll have to get your own Amazon Prime subscription to benefit from the company’s free shipping program. First-time subscribers get a year of Prime membership for $15, but you’ll be stuck shelling out $15 a month to maintain your subscription thereafter.

Read more: Your Free Pass to Prime Day Deals (No Membership Required)

Why is Amazon ending the Prime Invitee program?

This move follows shortly after Reuters reported that Amazon’s Prime account signups slowed down recently despite an extended July Prime Day event. While the company reported blowout sales numbers, new Prime subscriptions didn’t meet internal expectations. In the US, they fell short of last year’s signup metrics.

According to Reuters, Amazon registered 5.4 million US signups over the 21-day run-up to the Prime Day event, around 116,000 fewer than during the same period in 2024, and 106,000 below the company’s own goal, a roughly 2% decline in both metrics.

By forcing separate households to have their own subscriptions, Amazon could be looking to attract more Prime accounts after previously failing to do so.

The new Amazon Family program (previously known as Amazon Household) offers Prime benefits to up to two adults and four children in a single home, including free shipping, Prime Video, Prime Reading and Amazon Music. The subscription also includes benefits for certain third-party companies, such as GrubHub.

Impulse Buys Under $25 on Amazon That Make Surprisingly Great Gifts

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Technologies

Pokemon TCG Pocket’s Pack Points System Needs an Overhaul Yesterday

The pack-opening pity points system is pitiful. There’s a very easy way to improve it.

Pokemon TCG Pocket is more than a mobile game: It’s a money-making machine. The virtual trading card app raked in more than $900 million in its first six months, eclipsing even Pokemon Go’s revenue in the same post-release time span. As it turns out, fake Pokemon cards are just as much of a hot commodity as the real thing.

People love ripping open card packs, hunting down ones with their favorite illustrations of fan-favorite Pokemon. It feels great to beat the odds by pulling an elaborately-inked full art or a shiny secret rare. But it really starts to irk me when I’m missing only one or two cards from a set and I can’t get lucky enough to pull them out of a pack.

Pokemon TCG Pocket has a «pity points» system that’s supposed to make this feel less terrible: Every time you open a pack, you earn five pack points, which you can directly trade in for a card of your choosing.

You can trade in 35 points for a common card, but if you want to get the rarest cards from a set, they could eat up 500 points, 1,250 points or even a whopping 2,500 points each. That means you’d have to rip open 500 card packs in order to earn a single copy of one of Pokemon TCG Pocket’s rarest cards.

It sounds absurd (and it is), but that’s to be expected for a free-to-play game, especially one where the developer makes money by encouraging players to pay for extra card pulls. My real big issue with pack points is that they’re restricted to the expansion set you earned them in.

For example, I have 210 pack points for the latest card set, Secluded Springs, and I’ve been exclusively pulling those packs since it was released. I also have 700 pack points for the game’s first-ever expansion Genetic Apex — but those points are locked to Genetic Apex, and can’t be used for any other set. I’ve accrued hundreds of pack points, but they’re essentially useless to me because they won’t help me complete the sets I’m still missing cards in.

Pokemon TCG Pocket expansion sets are released on a monthly basis, which means no one really has time to earn enough pack points for a rare card before the next shiny slate of cards is dangled in front of your eyes. It propagates a desperate sense of FOMO that I’ve criticized in the past, but there’s a simple solution that would make the problem disappear overnight.

Instead of locking pack points to any one set, they should be an account-wide currency instead. Every time you earn pack points, they should be added to one large pool that you can use on any of the in-game card sets. That way, players wouldn’t have to feel a manufactured sense of guilt for ripping open packs from older sets.

While it’s customary for gacha games to have a pity system that guarantees a certain reward after a certain amount of pulls, it’s by no means a requirement for these games to have these systems. In a sense, I’m grateful that the pack points exist in Pokemon TCG Pocket in the first place.

I think we should always argue for a more consumer-friendly experience in modern gaming. Overhauling the pity system so that pack points can be used universally across all of the in-game card sets will make the game fairer and give more players a real chance to get the rarest cards.

It creates a greater sense of parity between free-to-play and paying players, and it might even cause some people to spend more money on pack openings to boot. Universal pack points are a win-win for players and DeNA alike.