Last week, Apple rolled back one of the key FaceTime features that was supposed to drop with iOS 12 and macOS Mojave this spring: group video chat. The feature, which would let you and up to 31 friends not-quite-make-eye-contact through their phones and laptops, was removed from the beta versions of each OS last week, and will now reportedly launch at a later date.

Apple keeps giving us reasons to say goodbye. iOS 11 is buggy as hell, with the most recent error making iPhones almost unusable and the latest version of macOS briefly exposed Mac owners to a major vulnerability. As for the iPhone X, it may be pretty sleek for an iPhone, but Apple's still playing catch-up to its Android competition.

They say a watched pot never boils, but it's unclear as to whether that addage applies to video calls. In a move I can only call "brilliantly lazy" one enterprising young man used his iPhone to monitor a pot of water he was trying to bring to a boil.

Patent-holding com nay VirnetX has been awarded almost US$440M in a long running patent dispute with Apple. A Federal Court judge in the Eastern District of Texas ordered the payment because of infringements relating to FaceTime and VPN on Demand. This is Apple's third loss in the matter, having lost and then won on appeal in previous cases. The four patents being disputed were purchased by VirnetX who have also had a crack at extracting cash from Microsoft and Cisco.

Google has released a video chatting app called Duo to rival Apple FaceTime. But unlike the case of Instagram ripping off Snapchat, Duo isn't just a carbon copy of FaceTime. Here's how Google has set Duo apart from Apple's popular iOS video calling feature, for better or for worse.