AI.com Just Sold for $70 Million. Is the Hype Worth It?

AI.com Just Sold for $70 Million. Is the Hype Worth It?

Nadia Malik Leave a comment

AI.com might be the most expensive two letters on the internet—and a excellent snapshot of how wild the AI gold rush has become.

Kris Marszalek, CEO and co-founder of Crypto.com, just bought the domain AI.com for around $70 million (about Rp 1.17 trillion). That instantly puts it in the conversation as one of the priciest domain deals in history.

The bigger question for anyone who actually cares about tech (and not just headlines): what are you really buying for $70 million in 2026?

Two Letters, One of the Priciest Domains Ever

AI.com is about as clean as it gets for branding. Two characters, a .com TLD, and a buzzword that everyone from chipmakers to dating apps is trying to slap on their pitch decks.

Domain names are just human-readable pointers to IP addresses—nothing magical there. But scarcity is real: there’s exactly one AI.com, and Marszalek now owns it.

The reported $70 million price tag pushes it into rare territory. For context, Cars.com was once valued as an intangible asset at around $872.3 million back in 2014. While that wasn’t a straight cash domain sale like this one, it shows how seriously companies treat ultra-generic, high-intent domains with mainstream appeal.

AI.com is the same idea, updated for 2026. In the late 90s, it was all about generic commerce domains. Now, it’s the AI keyword lottery.

Why Crypto.com’s CEO Wants a Second Empire

Despite the eye-watering price, AI.com isn’t replacing Crypto.com’s main identity. Marszalek says he’ll be running two separate entities: Crypto.com and AI.com.

Crypto.com stays in its lane as a crypto exchange platform. Trading, tokens, and everything that lives and dies on speculative markets.

AI.com, meanwhile, is supposed to be a new company focused on AI agents—software-based autonomous agents that don’t just answer prompts but take action on your behalf.

So this isn’t just a domain flip. It’s a pivot: from crypto speculation to AI automation, without abandoning the original business. In other words, diversification—with a $70 million .com as the front door.

AI Agents: Ambitious Pitch, High-Risk Reality

According to Marszalek, AI.com will be a platform for autonomous software agents. Not just chatbots that give you answers, but entities that:

  • Manage tasks
  • Send messages
  • Run workflows across apps
  • Build projects
  • Trade stocks
  • Even update your dating app profiles

This is the logical next step in AI hype: not just talking to an assistant, but letting it actually touch your accounts, data, and money.

In theory, this is powerful. Imagine telling an agent: “Reschedule my meetings, move my investment allocation out of volatile positions, and refresh my dating profile photos,” and it quietly gets everything done.

In practice, this is a minefield. You’re basically handing over control hooks into your digital life and financial footprint to a software platform and trusting it not to:

  • Misinterpret your intent
  • Execute bad trades
  • Send the wrong messages
  • Leak or misuse extremely sensitive personal data

AI.com is being pitched as a secure system, with agents operating inside a setup that uses user-owned encryption keys. That’s the right thing to say in 2026, when everyone is side-eyeing data collection and model training. But there’s a big gap between promising encryption and delivering an end-to-end secure, auditable system that everyday people don’t accidentally misconfigure.

Security, Privacy, and a Massive Trust Problem

The most important part of this whole story isn’t the domain price—it’s the power AI.com wants to have.

If AI agents are going to execute trades, trigger cross-app workflows, and modify your online identities, you’re effectively creating a new attack surface that connects finance, productivity, and personal life in one place.

Marszalek claims these agents will operate in a secure environment using user key–based encryption. That’s promising on paper. User-controlled keys usually mean you have at least some guarantee that data access requires your cryptographic approval.

But people in the real world:

  • Reuse passwords
  • Lose keys
  • Click random links
  • Authorize things they don’t fully understand

The more powerful an AI agent platform is, the more damage a single compromise can cause. A stolen session or hijacked key doesn’t just leak a few emails—it could trigger trades, message contacts, and rewrite your public identity across apps.

For a company already associated with risk-heavy crypto markets, convincing users that this new AI platform is safe won’t be trivial. A giant domain and a Super Bowl ad won’t fix a single security incident if one happens.

Super Bowl Ad + $70M Domain = Old-School Playbook

The timing of AI.com’s launch was matched to a Super Bowl LX commercial in the US. Buy the massive domain, buy the massive ad, blast the brand into the mainstream. Very 2010s Silicon Valley energy.

On one hand, it’s smart. The general public doesn’t care about model architectures, vector databases, or encryption primitives. They remember simple, loud things: a short domain, a catchy ad, a big promise.

On the other hand, the AI space is already drowning in big promises. Everyone claims their agents will change how you work, live, and socialize. Most users just want something that doesn’t hallucinate key details or break when an app UI changes.

AI.com is trying to jump the line by owning the most obvious domain and attaching itself to the biggest ad stage around. Whether the underlying product can justify that spend is a completely different question.

What This Means for the AI and Domain Markets

From a domain perspective, AI.com is a signal: the .com era isn’t dead, even with a flood of new TLDs like .meme and everything else ICANN keeps greenlighting. Generic, high-intent .coms are still assets people will throw tens of millions at.

From an AI perspective, this move is a bet that the next phase of the market is:

  • Less about chat interfaces
  • More about autonomous execution
  • Deeply intertwined with finance, productivity, and identity

It also hints at where crypto and AI narratives are merging: encrypted, user-key-controlled autonomous systems that can touch money and data. It’s a neat story. It’s also one that can go badly if execution is sloppy or if regulation catches up faster than expected.

Right now, AI.com is mostly a symbol: of how expensive hype can get, and how eager founders are to pivot from one hot sector (crypto) into the next (AI agents).

Whether it becomes more than that will depend on boring, unsexy details: security audits, governance models, user controls, and how safely these agents are allowed to plug into your digital life.

Until we see that, AI.com is a $70 million question mark with a great URL.

Check back soon as this story develops.

Global Tablet Market 2025: Apple Dominates, Android Brands C

Global Tablet Market 2025: Apple Dominates, Android Brands Chase

Nadia Malik Leave a comment

The global tablet market quietly stabilized in 2025, and Omdia’s latest numbers make one thing clear: Apple still owns this space, while Android vendors are fighting for whatever’s left.

Apple’s Tablet Lead Gets Even Bigger

Omdia’s Q4 2025 report puts Apple firmly at the top of the global tablet rankings.

Apple shipped around 19.6 million iPads in the last quarter of 2025, up 16.5% year-on-year. That’s not a small bump; it’s a sign that demand for tablets is far from dead, at least in Apple’s ecosystem.

Those shipments translate to a massive 44.9% market share worldwide. Nearly one out of every two tablets shipped in Q4 was an iPad.

According to Omdia, this performance is driven by strong demand for the 11th‑generation iPad and the latest iPad Pro line powered by Apple’s M5 chip. That combination gives Apple a clear split strategy: a more mainstream iPad for general users, and a high-performance Pro line targeting productivity and creative workloads.

Samsung Holds Second, But Slides Back

In Android land, Samsung is still the default alternative if you don’t want an iPad, but Q4 2025 wasn’t exactly a victory lap.

Samsung shipped about 6.4 million Galaxy tablets in Q4 2025. That’s a noticeable 9.2% decline compared to the same period a year earlier. Instead of riding the overall market growth, Samsung lost some ground.

The company ended the quarter with around 14.7% global market share, firmly in second place but far behind Apple’s 44.9%. The gap between first and second is enormous, and the distance isn’t shrinking.

For Android users, this matters. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab line is still the main high-end Android option, especially for people who pair a tablet with a Galaxy phone and Galaxy Buds. But the shipment drop suggests Samsung is either facing stronger competition on price, weaker demand for premium Android tablets, or both.

Lenovo Emerges as the Fastest Riser

The most eye-catching growth in Omdia’s ranking comes from Lenovo.

Lenovo took third place globally with 3.9 million tablets shipped in Q4 2025. That’s a huge 36.2% year-on-year jump — the strongest growth among the top five.

While Omdia’s numbers don’t break down specific models, Lenovo’s strategy has generally leaned on value-focused Android tablets and productivity-friendly form factors, often competing on price in markets where Samsung and Apple are expensive.

For Android users, Lenovo’s surge is a signal that mid-range and budget tablets are gaining traction. If that growth continues, it could push more brands to take Android tablets seriously beyond just “big phone” media slabs.

Huawei and Xiaomi Round Out the Top Five

Behind Lenovo, two familiar Chinese brands fill out the rest of the global top five: Huawei and Xiaomi.

Huawei sits in fourth place with around 3 million MatePad units shipped in Q4 2025. That’s a 14.8% year-on-year increase and gives Huawei a 6.9% share of the global tablet market for the quarter.

Xiaomi completes the top five with 2.8 million units shipped in Q4, up 10.1% year-on-year. Across the full year of 2025, Xiaomi’s tablet shipments grew about 25% compared to 2024, making it another clear growth story in the Android camp.

The split is interesting: Huawei is leaning on its MatePad line, while Xiaomi is catching up via consistent growth across 2025. Neither is close to Samsung yet, but both are clearly chipping away at the lower and mid-range segments.

Q4 2025: Strongest Quarter in a Rebounding Market

Omdia’s data also gives a useful macro view of the tablet landscape, beyond just brand rankings.

Q4 2025 was the strongest quarter of the year for tablets globally. Total shipments reached about 44 million units worldwide.

That number reflects almost 10% growth compared to the same quarter in the previous year. After years of talk about the tablet market being stagnant or shrinking, this kind of quarterly rebound suggests there’s still real demand — especially when vendors hit the right mix of performance, price, and ecosystem.

Apple captured just under half of those 44 million units. Samsung took a bit under one-sixth. The rest was split among Lenovo, Huawei, Xiaomi, and smaller players.

What This Means for Android Tablet Buyers

Omdia’s Q4 2025 ranking essentially confirms two things: tablets are not dead, and Android tablet competition is alive but fragmented.

Apple’s dominance means any Android tablet has to justify itself either on price, specific features, or tight integration with a brand’s broader ecosystem. Samsung can still do that with its Galaxy lineup and software layer, but its shipment decline shows that position isn’t unshakeable.

Lenovo, Huawei, and Xiaomi are all growing from different angles: value, regional strength, and aggressive year-on-year expansion. For users, that likely translates into more choices in the mid-range and budget tiers, and potentially better specs for less money over time.

The missing piece from Omdia’s numbers is the software and app story, where Android tablets still have to fight perception issues against iPadOS. But in pure hardware shipments and market share, the picture is clear: Apple is in control, and the Android side is a three-to-four-way race beneath it.

If that competition keeps pushing prices down and specs up, Android tablet users are the ones who stand to benefit.

Stay tuned to IntoDroid for more Android updates.

US Users Are Walking Away from TikTok — And Fast

US Users Are Walking Away from TikTok — And Fast

Nadia Malik Leave a comment

US TikTok users are deleting their accounts in droves, and the app’s latest policy shift is the tipping point.

What’s Actually Happening with TikTok in the US?

In the past few days, a wave of US TikTok users have publicly announced that they’re leaving the platform and deleting their accounts. This isn’t just quiet churn; people are calling it out directly on other social networks, especially Meta’s Threads.

The common thread is disappointment and discomfort with TikTok’s new policies and the direction of the platform. TikTok is no stranger to controversy in the US — it was close to being blocked early last year — but this time the backlash is coming from users themselves, not just lawmakers.

Threads Becomes the Public Uninstall Wall

If TikTok is where people scroll, Threads is where they’re venting about quitting. Several US-based creators and users have posted that they’ve fully deleted their TikTok accounts, not just uninstalled the app.

One Threads user, @bookwormshayhudr, summed up the mood bluntly: they decided to delete their TikTok account because they no longer felt safe. In their words, keeping the app didn’t feel wise or secure anymore, even though they described their time on TikTok as a fun journey up to this point.

Another user, @awesomelybrie, shared a screenshot of TikTok’s updated terms of service and policy notification. Their post framed this update as the clear breaking point and a signal that an era had ended for the platform.

These aren’t vague complaints about “vibes.” They’re direct responses to policy and ownership changes being pushed inside the app.

The Ownership Shift That Sparked the Backlash

A key source of the current anger is an ownership change. According to users citing TikTok’s updated terms, TikTok has moved under a US corporate entity. That’s a big narrative shift for an app that’s been heavily scrutinized for its Chinese ownership.

In one viral Threads post, @awesomelybrie claimed, “TikTok has officially moved ownership to a US corporate entity,” and urged others not to hit Agree on the new terms. Instead, they told people to just close the app, calling it “the end of that era.”

Another user, @barrettpall, took a harsher line, telling followers to delete TikTok immediately and tying the new ownership to political figures aligned with Donald Trump. The message was simple: if those people now control TikTok, it’s not worth staying on the platform.

The sentiment isn’t subtle — users aren’t just annoyed with UI tweaks or algorithm changes. They’re reacting to who’s perceived to be in charge of the app and what that might mean for their data and their feed.

Safety, Trust, and Why People Say They Don’t Feel “Secure”

For many of these US users, the core issue is trust. The phrase “not safe” comes up explicitly. That can mean a few things in practice: data handling, political influence, or a general discomfort with the new corporate structure behind the app.

The user who said they no longer felt it was “wise” or “safe” to keep using TikTok reflects a bigger mood shift: once people lose trust in the platform operator, no feature set or algorithmic recommendation can compensate. The new terms of service update forced users to confront that relationship again.

And unlike slow-burn privacy concerns that often get ignored, this change is happening visibly in real time, via in-app prompts, screenshots, and public posts urging others not to comply.

Sensor Tower Data: Uninstalls Are Spiking

This isn’t just anecdotal noise. Market research firm Sensor Tower reports that daily US user deletions of the TikTok app have surged.

According to their data, average daily uninstalls in the US jumped nearly 150 percent in the five days after the new policy went into effect, compared to the three days before it. That’s a massive short-term swing for an app of TikTok’s scale.

A spike like that doesn’t automatically signal a long-term collapse, but it does confirm that the backlash is real and measurable, not just a few loud posts on Threads.

What This Means for Android Users and the Social App Landscape

From an Android user’s perspective, none of this is about performance, UI latency, or feature parity. It’s about whether you’re comfortable keeping TikTok installed on your phone at all.

If you’re in the US and opening TikTok, you’re likely seeing — or about to see — prompts about updated terms and policies tied to the new corporate structure. The users who are leaving are doing so at that exact moment of friction, choosing to hit delete instead of Agree.

Other platforms are indirectly benefiting. Threads is where many of these uninstall decisions are being documented. Creators who walk away from TikTok will look for reach elsewhere: Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or smaller short-form video platforms.

For now, though, this is less about where they’re going and more about why they’re leaving.

Should You Delete TikTok Too?

No one can answer that for you, but the pattern is clear. A subset of US users no longer trust the app under its new policies and ownership structure and are deleting their accounts entirely, not just taking a break.

If you’re on Android and still using TikTok, the practical decision point is the new terms prompt. The users quoted here see that as a hard line: they refuse to hit Agree and would rather walk away than accept the new conditions.

Others may weigh the same information and decide the reach, entertainment, or community on TikTok is still worth it. The uninstall spike shows more people are questioning that trade-off, even if they don’t all hit delete.

For now, TikTok is facing a visible trust test in one of its most important markets, and a growing chunk of its US user base is voting with the uninstall button.

Stay tuned to IntoDroid for more Android updates.

Why Your Fast New Gaming Phone Feels Slow After a Year

Nadia Malik Leave a comment

More than half of smartphone users say their phone feels noticeably slower within the first year of use—and if you’ve owned a gaming phone, you’ve probably felt that shift even sooner.

You unbox a new device, fire up a few games, jump between camera, chat, and browser, and everything feels instant. Fast app launches, smooth animations, no stutter when switching tasks.

Then, months later, the same phone starts feeling like it has aged a decade. Apps take longer to open, the keyboard sometimes lags while you’re typing, image processing feels sluggish, and just moving around the UI no longer feels snappy.

So what’s actually going on?

Performance Doesn’t Get Worse — Your Workload Gets Heavier

In most cases, your phone’s hardware doesn’t become slower in a year. The Snapdragon or Dimensity chip inside, the RAM, and the storage controller all run at the same rated clocks.

The problem is everything around that fixed hardware keeps getting heavier.

The operating system receives updates with more features and visual effects. Apps get new functions, better-looking interfaces, extra toggles, and background automation. Your photos, videos, and app data pile up and eat into storage.

So the phone is trying to handle bigger workloads with the same CPU, GPU, and memory. That mismatch is what you feel as “lag”.

OS and App Updates: More Features, More Load

Modern Android skins constantly add new tricks—extra camera modes, smarter suggestions, new notification styles, and more animation polish.

Each OS and app update doesn’t just patch bugs. It often adds:

  • New features that need more processing power
  • Heavier visual effects and transitions
  • Extra background services to support those features

The source explanation is straightforward: every update tends to require more processing and memory than the previous version, while your hardware stays exactly the same.

So the same Snapdragon 8-series or mid-range chip that felt overkill on day one starts to feel average, and then borderline strained, as software keeps gaining weight.

Too Many Apps, Too Many Background Processes

Gaming phones make this even worse because they encourage you to install a ton of apps: multiple social networks, several game launchers, voice chat tools, streaming overlays, and performance-tracking utilities.

Even if you don’t actively open them, many of these apps run processes in the background, such as:

  • Syncing data
  • Refreshing feeds
  • Checking for new messages
  • Fetching content for notifications

The source mentions social media apps, messaging services, and productivity tools as typical culprits. These love to sit in RAM and poke the network whenever they can.

Over time, you end up with dozens of installed apps, many of which you rarely use but which still:

  • Consume memory
  • Wake up the CPU for background tasks
  • Compete for bandwidth and system resources

That means less headroom for the things you actually care about—like a smooth 120 Hz home screen or a stable frame rate in your favorite game.

Storage Bloat: Photos, Videos, and App Data

The other slow-burn problem is storage.

As you keep using your phone, photos, videos, and app data stack up. The article points to this growing data load as another key reason performance drops.

When storage is nearly full, several things can happen:

  • The system has less space for caching
  • App updates and installs take longer
  • File access and indexing become less efficient

For gaming phones, large game assets plus clips of recorded gameplay and screenshots accelerate that storage crunch.

The result is subtle but noticeable: longer loading times, slower media processing, and a UI that doesn’t feel as effortless as when the phone had plenty of free space.

Why This Hurts Gaming Phones in Particular

You might think a phone sold as a “gaming phone” should be immune to this. After all, these devices usually launch with:

  • High-end SoCs
  • Plenty of RAM
  • Fast storage

But the slowdown logic doesn’t spare them.

Even performance-focused devices still:

  • Get heavier OS updates
  • Run multiple background apps (chat, overlays, stream tools)
  • Accumulate large game files and media data

So the gap between launch-day performance and year-later performance is still there. The difference is that, on a gaming phone, your baseline is higher, so the slowdown might show up later—but it does show up.

The cautiously optimistic angle here: because the core reasons are software load and data growth, smarter OS design and better app behavior can meaningfully extend how long a gaming phone feels fast. The hardware is not the real bottleneck in the first couple of years.

So, Is Your Phone “Dying” or Just Overloaded?

The core takeaway from the source is simple: performance slows because the phone is forced to handle more work while its physical capabilities stay the same.

That’s mildly depressing, but also a bit hopeful.

It means your year-old device isn’t necessarily “old” in hardware terms. It’s just being buried under:

  • Feature-heavy OS and app updates
  • Too many installed apps with background activity
  • Growing piles of photos, videos, and cached data

If manufacturers dialed back unnecessary visual effects, optimized background activity, and gave users better tools to manage storage and app behavior, that “new phone fast” window could last longer.

Until then, the performance curve for most Android phones—including gaming models—will keep following the same pattern: fast, then fine, then frustrating.

Have thoughts on this? Share them in the comments.