Steve Thomas - IT Consultant

TikTok is teaming up with streaming music services, including Spotify and Amazon Music, on a new feature that will allow users to save the songs they hear in TikTok videos directly to their preferred streaming music app. The addition comes at a time when TikTok’s influence is increasingly a factor in music’s top charts and […]

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Pebble, a startup that took on Twitter and failed, has returned from the dead — as a Mastodon instance, it seems. The company announced last month that it was shutting down its Twitter/X alternative citing the increasingly competitive landscape, X’s ability to retain users and its own failure to gain traction with a wider audience. […]

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The company formerly known as Twitter is preparing to roll out a “major update” to its algorithm, according to a recent post by X owner Elon Musk. While today the app’s For You feed surfaces popular and trending posts from its broader network alongside highlights from those you follow, the new algorithm will surface posts […]

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In response to user feedback, Instagram’s Threads will now let users turn off automatic sharing of their Threads posts to other apps, including Instagram and Facebook — a move that had not gone down well with Threads users. Hoping to gain more traction and interest in its Twitter/X rival, Meta in late August began displaying […]

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This week, WordPress.com owner Matt Mullenweg confirmed his company would be shifting the majority of Tumblr’s workforce to other areas at parent company Automattic in light of the social blogging site’s continued financial woes. After acknowledging and explaining the meaning behind a leaked internal memo detailing the staff changes, Mullenweg then went on to field […]

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Though Match settled its antitrust case with Google over Play Store fees for north of $300 million, Fortnite maker Epic Games proceeded to take its case to trial this week. The game maker argues that Google’s commissions on in-app purchases are anti-competitive and that Google has exerted its power in the marketplace to unfairly compete […]

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Meta may have abandoned its efforts around live shopping on Facebook and Instagram, but the social networking company still believes in its apps’ potential as a shopping platform. That leads to today’s news that the company is now working with Amazon to allow customers to link their Facebook and Instagram accounts to their Amazon account […]

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Last week, Google and Match reached a settlement in the app store antitrust case where Match had sought the right to offer its users an alternative to Google Billing in an effort to avoid Google’s Play Store commissions on in-app purchases. As a part of the agreement, Match said it would implement Google’s new User […]

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Snap confirmed that a workforce reorganization has resulted in a small number of layoffs for the app maker, impacting people in product management roles. The layoffs were not directly tied to specific products, however, even though Snap recently shuttered its enterprise services division after less than a year. Instead, the reorganization of the Product team […]

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Google today is announcing strengthened protections for Android developers publishing apps to its Google Play store. The changes are a part of Google’s broader efforts at keeping low-quality and unsafe apps out of its app store and off consumers’ devices, which also recently included the launch of a new real-time app scanning feature to combat […]

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End-to-end encrypted messaging app, Signal, is getting closer to launching a much anticipated feature that will allow users to share only a username in order to connect with other users, rather than having to reveal the phone number linked to their account, as is the case now. Other secure messaging platforms, such as Telegram and […]

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AI is already transforming the way we search, gather information, create, code, decipher data, and more, and now it may democratize the process of building an app, too. A new AI-powered startup called Sutro promises the ability to build entire production-ready apps — including those for web, iOS, and Android — in a matter of […]

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