Technologies

Stop Taking So Long to Reply to Texts. You’re Sabotaging Your Friendships

Commentary: You might think it’s no big deal to regularly leave your friends on Read. But it can irreparably strain your relationships.

Depending on who you ask, texting is either an easy way to keep in touch or an overbearing item on an ever-growing to-do list. What’s convenient for one person may be a burden to another, which can cause strains on some relationships.

So, how long can someone go without texting you back before they end up on the friendship chopping block? Not very long, if you ask me.

It might come across as harsh, but I believe healthy relationships are sustained by timely communication, instead of consistently leaving someone on Read or Delivered for a week. It becomes practically impossible to coordinate hangouts or share life updates if someone can’t bother to respond to your messages within a reasonable window, or otherwise call you if that’s how they prefer to chat.

Friends who take days to reply — if they ever do — come off as indifferent and uninterested, especially when they don’t arrange alternative ways to catch up. You might start to wonder how much they actually value your time and effort, and why they don’t prioritize communicating with you. Repeated offenses can make it tempting to throw in the towel and invest your energy elsewhere.

How long can you go without texting someone back?

I’ll first acknowledge my personal bias here: I have always enjoyed texting. It’s been my preferred method of communication since I got my first phone at 13 years old and discovered the magic of talking to my friends anytime, anywhere.

It’s no coincidence that some of my closest friends tend to be people with whom I regularly text. There’s a sense of familiarity that comes from sharing your day-to-day experiences and thoughts. It’s also a fun way to engage in banter and share relatable memes and videos.

And before I upset anyone — if I haven’t already — I’ll again acknowledge that for some people, texting isn’t enjoyable. But I still think people have a responsibility to communicate clearly and frequently with loved ones if they hope to maintain those relationships, whether it’s a text, phone call or in-person meetup.

So, what’s an acceptable window of time for someone to text you back?

Despite how unaccommodating I may come off in that frank introduction, I do like to give people chances. If someone takes days to reply to me the first time, or simply never gets back to me, I let it go. But if it happens again, that’s a strike. I believe you should always text someone back within a 24-hour period — notwithstanding special circumstances like travel or illness, etc.

Repeatedly taking several days to reply is not only inconsiderate, it also just kills the vibe. Why do I care if you laughed at a meme I sent you five days ago? At that point, I won’t even remember what I reached out to you about. And if I’m asking you about going to an event and you only respond after it’s over, that unlocks a whole other level of annoyance.

I believe the time and effort you invest in friendships includes replying to texts within a reasonable period (as long as your friend isn’t bombarding your inbox, of course). So if someone continuously takes days to reply, I take it as my sign to stop trying, and to put that energy into the friends who won’t leave me waiting.

A more personal way to stay in touch

As a teenager, my friends and I would text each other around the clock, sending a steady stream of messages and photos about anything and everything, most of it totally inconsequential. (Being young and unemployed made this all the easier.)

But as we got older and busier, and as social media began eating up our free time, text messages were largely supplanted by posting and consuming content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Our digital activity became less personal, more performative and less conducive to maintaining relationships. Social media gives the false impression of keeping up with someone without actually talking to them, so relationships tend to fracture.

Most people have witnessed the awkwardness of someone not replying to your text for days, but ceaselessly posting on social media. Time and energy goes into both activities, and choosing to bypass personal interactions for more public-facing ones can prevent you from feeling a genuine connection to the people who care to reach out to you. Taking 30 seconds to reply to a text could be the difference between making and breaking a meaningful relationship.

While phone calls and in-person meetups are undoubtedly the best ways to have an in-depth conversation with someone, finding a time that works for both parties can be a challenge, given how increasingly hectic our lives have become. Texting can be a comparatively low-lift way to build a true sense of camaraderie and connection.

So, the next time you think it’s not a big deal to leave someone on Read or Delivered, maybe reconsider what your actions (or lack thereof) may convey.

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

+17 More

See all photos

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.