It was a rough quarter for the cloud infrastructure market as companies looked for ways to cut back on spending in an uncertain economy. When you combine that with the strong dollar and a weak Chinese market, the market slowed to 21% growth, a precipitous drop from the 36% growth we had seen the year prior.

While we aren’t seeing the gaudy growth of years past, Synergy Research still found the market exceeded $61 billion for the quarter with the 12 month trailing revenues of over $212 billion, a hefty sum by any measure, even with the slowdown.

Also of note was that while each of The Big Three saw growth slow in Q4 2022 from the previous quarter, Microsoft still managed to gain market share ground on Amazon. Microsoft increased its share from 23%, up from 21% the prior quarter, while Amazon fell from 34% to 33% and Google remained steady at 11%. The Big Three cloud providers accounted for 66% of worldwide cloud revenue.

That comes out to approximately $20 billion for Amazon, $14 billion for Microsoft and $7 billion for Google. Per usual, this is looking at IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services. It doesn’t include SaaS, which is measured separately.

Image Credits: Synergy Research

Amazon cloud revenue grew a modest 20% over the prior year, and the company acknowledged in the earnings call that growth dropped even further to the mid-teens in the first month of the year. Meanwhile Microsoft reported cloud growth of 22%, down from 24% the prior quarter and Google Cloud revenue grew 32%, down from the 38% growth the previous quarter.

Amazon was first to market and has had a long head start, but it seems as the market slows after years of steady growth, it’s giving its chief competitor, Microsoft, a bit of an opening to gain on them. It could be partly due at least to the fact that Amazon’s market maturity is finally catching up to it, and Microsoft is able to gain some advantage in spite of spending slowing overall.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy says there were three key reasons for this quarter’s drop-off, which he believes are short-term issues, and he remains optimistic for the future. “There are three main factors. The strengthened US dollar diminishes the apparent growth rate of many non-US markets; the large Chinese market remains constrained by pandemic issues and local policies; and the worsened economy has caused some enterprises to more closely review spending on cloud services. These factors should be primarily short term in nature and Synergy forecasts that growth rates will remain strong over the next few years,” he said in a statement.

It will be interesting to watch the market in 2023 and see how the macro economic environment affects revenue, and if the slower growth we’ve been seeing continues to work in favor of Amazon’s competitors by enabling them to gain more ground.

Even as cloud infrastructure market growth slows, Microsoft continues to gain on Amazon by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

The Biden administration is calling out Apple and Google’s app stores for stifling competition. A new report, issued on Wednesday by the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), said it had investigated the competitive conditions in the mobile app ecosystem and found that it’s “not a level playing field, which is harmful to developers and consumers.” The report also made several policy suggestions that could improve the ecosystem and open up competition.

The investigation had been initiated as part of a 2021 Executive Order on competition and involved consultations with various industry stakeholders in the private industry, civil society, and academia, NTIA said. It also included a review of over 150 comments filed in response to a request for public comment last April.

The report summarizes what industry watchers already know: that the innovations made possible by mobile phones and downloadable apps have begun to be overshadowed by the barriers to entry to the market facing developers, the excessive and restrictive rules, the overcomplicated app review process, and the sizable commissions that developers are forced to pay for access to consumers’ devices.

“Our review suggests that the mobile app store model has provided a range of benefits to both app developers and users, but has also created conditions of competition that are suboptimal,” the report states. “The policies that Apple and Google have in place in their own mobile app stores have created unnecessary barriers and costs for app developers, ranging from fees for access to functional restrictions that favor some apps over others. These obstacles impose costs on firms and organizations offering new technology: apps lack features, development and roll-out costs are higher, customer relations are damaged, and many apps fail to reach a large number of users.”

Both Apple and Google took issue with the report’s findings. (The AP printed their comments here.) Largely, Apple’s position was the same as always — that its rules are focused on providing consumer safety and security. Google, meanwhile, points out it offers more competition and choice. (Android, for instance, already allows sideloading.)

In addition to summarizing the state of the market, the new report makes a variety of recommendations as to how various areas can be improved to boost competition. The report suggests, for example, there should be a more transparent app review process; limits on pre-installed apps and self-preferencing; bans on rules that restrict other means of installing apps, like sideloading; support for third-party payments; support for links to developers’ websites from apps; and more.

It also said tech giants should be restricted from using confidential business data acquired from third-party developers to help launch their own competing apps — a practice so common at Apple, it’s even been dubbed “sherlocking” after a famous example.

The recommendations, however, are just that — ideas, not policy. The report only helps to solidify and clarify the Biden administration’s position on app store competition. As the report points out, “Congress should enact laws” and “relevant agencies should consider measures” to limit anticompetitive conduct. It also suggests there are areas that warrant further study, like “choice screens” (which some argue only offer the perception of choice), and whether or not laws should ban preinstallation of apps or other agreements between Apple and Google and device manufacturers and carriers.

In other words, any real action is still in the hands of regulators and lawmakers, as it was in the months before the report’s release.

The Biden administration, so far, has seen mixed success in actually holding tech giants accountable. On the one hand, the Department of Justice is now suing Google over its digital ad monopoly, while on the other, Meta is winning against the FTC to move forward with its latest acquisition. The DoJ has yet to sue Apple, though it has been building a case and weighing in on Epic Games’ antitrust lawsuit. In the meantime, record lobbying spending from tech giants, including Apple and Google, has helped to block bipartisan bills that would curb anti-competitive behavior from advancing in Congress.

President Biden, of course, already made his position on big tech abuses known, in an op-ed published in The Wall St. Journal earlier this month. With regard to competition, he stated there was still more than needed to be done.

“When tech platforms get big enough, many find ways to promote their own products while excluding or disadvantaging competitors—or charge competitors a fortune to sell on their platform,” he wrote. “My vision for our economy is one in which everyone—small and midsized businesses, mom-and-pop shops, entrepreneurs—can compete on a level playing field with the biggest companies.”

The Biden administration says Apple and Google’s app stores are stifling competition by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

In its fourth-quarter earnings, Spotify announced today its User Choice Billing program has now expanded to more than 140 markets worldwide, allowing the streaming music service to reduce the commissions it pays to Google over Play Store purchases associated with its Android app. The User Choice Billing pilot program gives Android users the option to pay an app developer directly. It had been introduced last spring, with Spotify planned as an initial tester. But neither company had shared an update on the program’s progress until this past November when they announced Spotify would then begin to roll out its tests in select markets.

At the time, Spotify said the program would become available in only a few markets to start and would roll later out to others in the “coming weeks.” It did not share which markets would see the third-party billing option or when it expected the choice to reach its global Android app user base.

Today, the company confirmed it’s made solid progress on the program’s deployment. As part of its earnings announcement, where the company also beat on user growth targets with 205 million paid subscribers, it shared that its November deployment of User Choice Billing had then become available to users in “10+ markets.” Over the past several months, Spotify said it’s expanded the option to now more than 140 markets around the world.

However, Spotify has not yet published a detailed list of countries where the program is offered but told TechCrunch it anticipates implementing the option in “every market” where it offers Spotify Premium today and where Google Play Billing is available. Currently, Spotify Premium subscribers can be found across 184 global markets, according to the company’s website.

Image Credits: Spotify

It’s not surprising that Google picked Spotify as a debut tester of its new billing offering, given the streaming music service has long been a fierce app store critic, sharing its complaints over the required commissions with the U.S. Department of Justice and EU regulators. If an outspoken voice like Spotify could be placated by a reduced commission on in-app purchases, Google hopes it could mitigate concerns over its alleged abuses of market power now being investigated.

In March, Google introduced the third-party billing option to Android app developers, as looming threats of antitrust litigation and increased regulation grew nearer. Already, the tech giant had been forced to support alternative billing systems in South Korea, with the passing of a new law, and being sued by top app makers, including Fortnite’s Epic Games, over antitrust issues. However, the User Choice Billing option didn’t offer much in the way of savings for app developers, as Google only reduced the required commissions on app purchases and in-app payments by 4%.

This past November, Google said it was opening up the User Choice Billing pilot further to new markets, including the U.S., Brazil and South Africa, and invited other developers to participate. Dating app Bumble then joined Spotify as one of the early adopters.

Developers who participate in the program have to follow certain UX guidelines Google sets, which detail how to implement the feature in their apps. These guidelines currently require developers to display an information screen and a separate billing choice screen. The information screen only has to be shown to each user the first time they initiate a purchase, but the billing choice screen must be shown before every purchase.

While the general terms offer a 4% reduction on the commissions paid to Google when third-party billing is used, Spotify wouldn’t comment on its confidential deal with Google, only noting it meets the company’s “standards of fairness.” It’s unclear if the streamer has been offered more favorable terms as an early tester.

Spotify’s agreement with Google could potentially provide a boost in subscription revenues at a time when the streamer is facing an increased push from investors to increase its margins and make the service profitable. As Spotify chased investments in areas like adtech, podcasts, audiobooks and more over prior years, its losses widened last year, leading its market cap to decline by over 60%.  In a note published to Spotify’s website this month, as the company announced layoffs impacting 600 people, CEO Daniel Ek admitted the situation was the result of being “too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth.” 

The company’s solid progress on user growth in the fourth quarter saw its shares pop after announcing results earlier this morning. In addition to its 205 million paid subscribers, up 14% year-over-year, it also announced total users were up 20% year-over-year to 489 million. Revenue came in at €3.17 billion, just ahead of estimates of €3.16 billion, but Spotify’s loss per share was €1.40 ($1.52), larger than the expected loss of €1.27.

Spotify’s third-party billing option has now reached over 140 global markets by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to the latest “State of Mobile” report by data.ai (previously App Annie). However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time in mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Top Stories

Temu’s continued rise

Image Credits: Temu

Temu, a shopping app from Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo, has been having quite the run as the No. 1 app on the U.S. app stores. The mobile shopping app hit the top spot on the U.S. App Store in September and has continued to hold a highly ranked position in the months that followed, including as the No. 1 free app on Google Play since December 29, 2022. More recently, Temu once again snagged the No. 1 position on the iOS App Store on January 3 and hadn’t dropped since as of earlier this week.

Offering cheap factory-to-consumer goods, Temu provides access to a wide range of products, including fast fashion, and pushes users to share the app with friends in exchange for free products, which may account for some of its growth. The app has seen 5 million U.S. installs this January alone, up 19% from 4.2 million in the prior 22 days from December 10 through December 31, Sensor Tower says. This brings it to a total of 19 million lifetime installs across the App Store and Google Play, more than 18 million of which came from the U.S.

The growth now sees Temu outpacing rival Shein in terms of daily installs. In October, Temu was averaging around 43,000 daily installs in the U.S., the firm said, while Shein averaged about 62,000. In November, Temu’s average daily installs grew to 185,000 while Shein’s climbed to 70,000, and last month, Temu averaged 187,000 installs while Shein saw about 62,000.

The app appears to be leveraging a similar growth strategy to TikTok, which heavily spent on marketing to gain users. According to Meta’s ad library, Temu has run some 8,900 ads across Meta’s various platforms just this month. The ads promote Temu’s sales and its extremely discounted items, like $5 necklaces, $4 shirts and $13 shoes, among other deals. These ads appear to be working to boost Temu’s installs. But dig into the app’s reviews and you’ll find similar complaints to Wish, including scammy listings, damaged and delayed deliveries, incorrect orders and lack of customer service. Without addressing these issues, which helped bring down Wish, Temu seems more likely to go the way of Wish, not TikTok, no matter what it spends.

Walmart’s chatbot shopping didn’t go well

Image Credits: Screenshot of Walmart Text to Shop

Walmart recently introduced a new way to shop: via text. Last month, the retail giant launched its “Text to Shop” experience, which allows mobile consumers across both iOS and Android devices to text Walmart the items they want to purchase from either their local stores or Walmart.com, or easily reorder items for pickup, delivery or shipping. However, the chat experience as it stands today does not come across as fully baked, our tests found. The chatbot said confusing things and the user interface at times was difficult to navigate, despite aiming to be a simpler, text-based shopping experience.

We tested the experience, which leverages Apple’s Message app on iPhone, and it did not go well. The bot responded twice at times, offered only a few options for generic requests like “eggs,” asked everytime if an item was for pickup or delivery, provided inaccurate responses and spoke nonsense when confused — like when it returned options for “la croix organic eggs.” We’d say stick with the Walmart app for now.

Read the full review here.

Apple’s Reality Pro details

Could the next big app platform be Apple’s AR/VR headset? That’s the news from Bloomberg, which leaked details of Apple’s upcoming headset, the $3,000 Reality Pro due out later this year. The headset will attempt to create a 3D version of Apple’s operating system, the report said, and will include features like FaceTime videoconferencing (with avatars), the ability to watch immersive videos, play VR games and use Apple’s apps — including the Safari web browser, photos, mail, messages, calendar, App TV+, Apple Music, Podcasts and the App Store.

The report described an interface with a grid of app icons and widgets, and said Siri could be used when you needed to input text. However, the interesting details involved how users could interact with on-screen items. Apparently, the device would have external sensors to analyze the user’s hands and sensors inside to track the user’s eyes. This would allow the user to select items on the screen by looking at them, then pinch their thumb and forefinger together to activate the task — without needing to hold additional hand controllers like rival headsets, Bloomberg said. It may also have its own Digital Crown, like Apple Watch, for switching between AR and VR and its iOS-like interface.

Additionally, Apple is reported to be building software that allows users, including those who don’t know how to code, to build their own AR apps for its upcoming mixed-reality headset.

There are of course still a lot of unanswered questions about the headset’s capabilities, though it does sound like a very “Apple” attempt at getting VR right. But the device’s price point will make it a premium product for the time being — and one launching during a down economy — which could limit its growth.

App Updates

Apple Updates

• The new iOS 16.3 update included notable security features like the expansion of the new Advanced Data Protection for iCloud feature to markets outside of the U.S. The update also added Security Keys for Apple ID and a change to the Emergency SOS call system that now requires users to hold the side button with the up or down volume button and then release it in order to prevent inadvertent emergency calls. The update also fixed a CarPlay bug, among other things.
• The iPhone 5S also received a security update with iOS 12.5.7, which addresses a vulnerability that may have been actively exploited, Apple said.

Google/Android Updates

• Google announced it’s shutting down Optimize and Optimize 360 — tools that helped marketers run A/B tests to improve their website or app’s user experience. The tools will no longer be available after September 30, 2023. However, Google clarified that Firebase A/B Testing, which is powered by Optimize and used for testing app experiences, will continue to be supported in the future and will not be impacted by this change.
• A deadline to target the latest Android API level is arriving. Originally, Google’s deadline for developers was November 1, 2022, but it was extended to January 31, 2023 to give devs more time. The change was announced last year, when Google also said that as of November 1, 2022, existing apps that didn’t target an API level within two years of the latest major Android release version will not be available for discovery or installation for new users with devices running Android OS versions higher than apps’ target API level.

Gaming

• Pokémon GO maker Niantic tries again to replicate its AR flagship’s success, this time with the launch of NBA All-World, an AR game for iOS and Android. The game includes nods to basketball culture, minigames and avatars of NBA players like Jordan Poole, Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins.
• Select Fortnite versions will become unavailable to players under 18, the company said. (Though the game was removed from mobile app stores, users who still had it installed could continue to play.) The FTC fined the game maker $520 million for COPPA violations and tricking people into making purchases. The company said it would no longer allow users of the 13.40 build on iOS, Mac and Google Play from spending V-Bucks.

Entertainment

• Netflix and Bumble partnered on a new dating app experience that lets users bond over popular TV shows. The dating app will launch a weekly Netflix question-and-answer game that users can play against their match to break the ice.

Image Credits: Bumble

• YouTube Music launched a new beta testing program called “Listening Room,” where it invited users to try out new features. The program was almost immediately filled up.
• Clubhouse introduced a new feature called Instant Invite, which lets users invite their friends to join House rooms and lounge conversations with a one-tap invite link. The company hopes the feature will reduce the friction involved with joining the app.

Messaging

Image Credits: Meta

• Facebook Messenger expanded its tests of end-to-end encryption. The app will also allow users to take advantage of features like themes, chat emoji, reactions, group profile photos, link previews and active status while in E2EE chats. Millions of people will be alerted over the coming months as the E2EE option becomes available.
• WhatsApp launched a beta version of its macOS app with native Apple Silicon support. Mac users with Apple’s own chip and macOS 11 Big Sur or newer will be able to try it, as well as Intel Macs that can run apps built with Catalyst.

Social

• Instagram introduced a new profile photo feature that lets users showcase both their profile photo and their avatar by offering an interface where you can flip between both options.
• Meta is exploring the use of AI tools to make its ad systems less dependent on user data, after Apple’s ATT privacy changes impacted its ads business, The WSJ reported. AI tools have already helped boost Reels viewership by 20%.

Etc.

• RevenueCat released a massive report digging into data around the subscription economy, powered by its insights into 22,000 subscription-based apps. The report offers actionable insights and never-before-seen benchmarks around factors like app pricing, retention, conversion, renewals, trial strategies and much more. The whole thing is worth a look here.
• Top U.S. banks are again planning a mobile wallet to compete with Apple Pay and PayPal, The WSJ said. The wallet will be developed by Early Warning Services, which is also behind Zelle. The banks tried and failed to get a similar initiative (CurrentC) off the ground in years past.
• Dating app Match Group revamped its executive leadership team. Among the changes was the addition of former vice president of Product at Snap, Will Wu, who will now become Match’s CTO, in a newly created role.
• Read-it-later app Pocket, acquired by Mozilla in 2017, revamped its mobile reading experience with new features. One addition adds more organization and recommendations to the Home tab. It’s also rebranding its “My List” tab as “Saves” and enhancing its functionality with filters and bulk edit tools. The features are launching on Android first.
• Popular wearable Oura Ring updated its mobile app to integrate with another wearable, Apple Watch. The companion app can display info like Readiness, Activity, Sleep Scores, heart rate, body temperature, ring battery level and more, similar to the iPhone counterpart.
• Samsung users are advised to update the Galaxy Store app on their devices due to the discovery of vulnerabilities that would allow a hacker to install any app from the store on their phone without their knowledge.
• Uber Eats added a new feature that shows users how much of their personal information is shared with the delivery person when they place an order on the app. Uber proper already had a similar feature called “View as Driver.”

Government, Policy and Lawsuits

• France’s privacy regulator, the CNIL, fined French hypercasual game developer Voodoo €3 million for violating the French Data Protection Act. The fine was issued over Voodoo’s use of the IDFV, or ID for Vendors, without user consent on iOS devices.
• The FTC finalized a consent order settling charges that the credit services company Credit Karma had used dark patterns to misrepresent that consumers were “pre-approved” for credit card offers.
• The FBI and DoJ are investigating Snapchat’s role in the spread of fentanyl-laced pills as part of a counterfeit drug probe underway.
• TikTok has shifted its approach in its dealings with U.S. officials in the wake of government bans, after two years of confidential talks with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States about ByteDance’s relationship with the Chinese government, The NYT reported. The video app is now going on the PR offensive, more aggressively lobbying and speaking out more publicly, the report noted.

Funding and M&A

• Strava, an activity tracking and social community platform used by more than 100 million people globally, acquired European 3D mapping company Fatmap for an undisclosed sum. Strava aims to integrate Fatmap’s core platform into its app eventually, but for now they’ll remain separate products.
• Voice AI company SoundHound raised $25 million in equity from undisclosed investors after laying off 40% of staff. Part of the funding will be used to provide laid off employees with severance.

Downloads

Ivory goes live

Image Credits: Tapbots

Tapbots, the makers of the popular third-party Twitter app Tweetbot that was recently killed by Twitter’s API changes, this week publicly launched the company’s next new product. Hoping to fill the void that Tweetbot leaves behind, the company is now making its anticipated Mastodon client app Ivory available on the App Store as an Early Access release.

The “Early Access” label is a subtitle that Tapbots put on its release to indicate there will still be features missing as it debuts, the company told us. However, by launching publically on the App Store, Tapbots is able to put Ivory into more people’s hands after filling up the limited number of TestFlight slots it had for its test version.

For longtime Tweetbot users, Ivory will offer a familiar experience. But instead of serving as a client for Twitter’s network, the company has now embraced the promising open source platform Mastodon. Though not quite as simple to use or understand as Twitter, Mastodon has gained traction in the months following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

At launch, it sports dozens of features, ranging from support for baseline functionality to clever bells and whistles, like being able to theme the app or change its icon.

The app also supports multiple accounts, and lets you view your local and federated timelines, trending posts, post statistics, notifications and more. It also enables Mastodon-specific options that weren’t available on Twitter — like the ability to add content warnings to posts — as well as more common features, like the ability to post GIFs and polls.

There are other thoughtful touches designed to appeal to power users, too, like hashtag tracking, mute filters with regex support and timeline filters that let you show or hide posts that meet certain criteria you set. This could appeal to Mastodon’s older users, as well, who may want to mute and avoid some of the posts shared by Mastodon newcomers who are bringing Twitter’s culture to the platform, leading to unwanted posts without content warnings in their timelines.

Pestle (Update)

Image Credits: Pestle

Pestle, a handy and well-designed recipe app for iOS is getting a notable update on January 28. The app is adding a number of features for power users, including “Smart Folders,” which are automatically created folders that organize recipes based on user-set criteria, plus PDF and image import features. The latter allows users to import the recipes they had saved in other formats, while Smart Folders simplify the otherwise tedious process of organizing recipes. For instance, you could create Smart Folders that automatically add any saved recipe with a specific ingredient, or a dessert folder with additional rules. The app itself is a free download but offers subscriptions of $1.99/mo or $19.99/year (or $39.99 lifetime) for pro users.

This Week in Apps: Temu’s hot streak, Walmart’s m-commerce & an Apple XR App Store by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Last week, we learned Google’s in-house R&D group, Area 120, had been severely impacted by the broader Google workforce reduction, impacting teams working on some of Google’s more experimental ideas. However, we understand now that at least three Area 120 projects have been spared from these latest cuts, and will go on to “graduate” to other parts of Google later this year. These include Aloud, an automated and less costly video dubbing solution; a privacy platform for app developers called Checks; and Liist, a consumer app quietly acquired by Google last year.

Most Area 120 projects have been developed in-house, making Liist a rare exception. The startup, which had raised $1.1 million in seed funding according to Crunchbase, offered a social bookmarking tool for saving places you find on the internet, including through apps like TikTok and Instagram. At Google’s Area 120, the team had been tasked with building a new consumer product.

While Aloud and Checks have obvious utility, easily fitting into other parts of Google’s organization, Liist is perhaps the more intriguing of the three Area 120 survivors. Ahead of Liist’s acquisition, Google had spoken about the threat to its core search and advertising businesses posed by TikTok and Instagram. At an industry event, Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs Google’s Knowledge & Information organization, told an interviewer that the search giant’s own research found that young people now often didn’t start their searches for places on Google.

“In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search,” he said. “They go to TikTok or Instagram.”

When live, Liist’s bookmarking app had touted a variety of use cases which included things like saving places for travel inspiration, planning nights out with friends, creating lists of date night spots, and more. Users could vote on where they wanted to go or could plan trips together, too. The app was also among the first to integrate with TikTok’s Jump platform, which allows users to jump from videos to experiences provided by third parties — like saving a recipe to Whisk’s app after watching a video where the recipe is demonstrated, for instance.

Liist’s app was shut down when the team joined Google, but co-founder David Friedl’s LinkedIn states the team has been working on a “Gen Z consumer product” within Area 120. No other details were provided.

According to an internal email to the Area 120 team shared with TechCrunch, Liist and the other remaining Area 120 projects will now come under the purview of Area 120 Managing Partner Elias Roman, as they move forward. The email was penned by veteran Googler Clay Bavor, who you may recall had taken over Area 120 as well as other AR and VR projects as part of a 2021 reorg, which branded this group of projects “Google Labs.”

Roman will also now lead a set of “applied A.I.” products under Senior Director of Product Management at Google Labs, Josh Woodward.

While the Area 120 layoffs are only a small percentage of Google’s recent cuts impacting 12,000 people, or 6% of its global workforce, the R&D group had spearheaded several innovations over the years that found success and exited to other parts of Google.

These included the HTML5 gaming platform for emerging markets called GameSnacks, which integrated with Google Chrome; the technical interview platform Byteboard, a rare external spinout; an AirTable rival called Tables which exited to Google Cloud; an A.I.-powered conversational ads platform AdLingo, which also exited to Cloud; video platforms Tangi and Shoploop, which exited to Google Search and Shopping, respectively; and the web-based travel app Touring Bird, which exited to Commerce, among others.

There were growing concerns, however, that Google no longer saw Area 120 as a key investment. Last September, the company slashed Area 120’s fourteen projects in development to just seven and told impacted employees they’d need to find new roles within Google. At the time, a Google spokesperson explained the group would be shifting its focus to projects that “build on Google’s deep investment in A.I.” and ” have the potential to solve important user problems.”

Bavor’s new email to Area 120 employees similarly highlights how Google’s experimentation is now more intensely focused on the impacts of A.I. across Google products, not the other types of projects that Area 120 become known for in prior years. As Bavor writes:

It’s clear that, as a company, we continue to face macroeconomic uncertainties. At the same time, there are enormous opportunities ahead of us in applying AI to reimagining so many of Google’s core products. With this as backdrop, I’ve made the difficult decision to wind down the majority of Area 120. For nearly seven years, Area 120 has been a source of bottom-up innovation across Google, and from it we’ve learned many lessons on how best to pursue zero-to-one opportunities. But with the unprecedented opportunities ahead of us, we need to shift to a model of new product development that is opinionated and focused.

…

I know this change is significant and unsettling. What hasn’t changed is the size of the opportunity ahead of us, especially in applied AI. Across our domains, I believe that Labs is doing some of the most important and potentially impactful work at Google. And now more than ever, the company is looking to us to execute well. I have full confidence that we will navigate this moment as a team and deliver in 2023.

The email comes in addition to Google and Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai’s email about the layoffs, which was publicly shared on Google’s “The Keyword” blog.

Google declined to comment.

Google spares three Area 120 R&D projects, including team working on a ‘Gen Z consumer product’ by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

The global app economy slowed for the first time last year, as consumer spending on apps dropped 2% to $167 billion, according to a recent annual report put out by data.ai. At the same time, downloads were up 11% year-over-year — a seemingly positive indication that app adoption was still taking place, driven in particular by emerging markets. But a deeper analysis of the fourth quarter points to more recently slowing download growth during a time of year that’s typically a boon for the app ecosystem. The holiday season tends to bring new phones and more free time for consumers to try new apps and games, which makes these new figures all the more surprising.

According to app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, mobile app adoption across the App Store and Google Play Store leveled off in Q4 2022, declining a slight 0.1% year-over-year to reach 35.5 billion new installs in the quarter.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Its analysis is on a per-user basis, meaning additional downloads of an app by the same person on different devices aren’t counted towards the total. It also doesn’t count app re-installs in order to show only new download growth. However, its figures are only estimates.

While the fourth-quarter trends weren’t enough to pull down the overall year-over-year download growth metrics, it seems, it’s another signal of a stagnating app economy — one, no doubt, still normalizing after outsized growth during Covid and one that remains impacted by the overall macroeconomic forces, which also play a key a role in app marketing spend.

But there’s another argument to be made here, as well, and that’s that the years of high-priced commissions on app sales and in-app purchases across the global app stores have finally begun to impact the innovation taking place in the wider app ecosystem. If companies have to share up to 30% of their revenues just to distribute their apps and games to a mobile audience, it’s more difficult for them to weather a storm like a down economy. And entrepreneurs may be less inclined to build for mobile, specifically, when other areas of the market are less restrictive. Look at the developments around crypto and Web3, for example — they couldn’t fully expand to mobile because of app store guidelines and the platforms’ need to profit from in-app purchases. With so much pressing down on app innovation, it’s not surprising to see downloads and spending suffer.

This trend isn’t only apparent in the metrics surrounding the stagnating app install rates and declining spending.

Another example of the ecosystem’s floundering is visible in Apple’s editorially selected top app of 2022. An accolade meant to reflect the opportunity to be had in building for mobile, the Cupertino company highlighted the Gen Z social networking app BeReal as its “App of the Year.” While arguably a breakout success with younger people, it’s also an app whose daily active users fell far behind its download figures and one that has no business model at present — the app doesn’t yet generate revenue. Its continued existence is being fueled by VC funding, not app stores’ ability to provide a platform where new ideas can easily monetize. And its developers are struggling to come up with what sort of subscription or in-app purchases they could convince their young users to pay for — the result of an app marketplace that sold consumers for years on the idea that mobile software should be free.

Then there are the apps that are at the top of Sensor Tower’s list of the most-downloads apps in Q4 2022 — they are the apps from tech giants like Meta and ByteDance, angling each other for the top spots. For years, it’s been rare to see any newcomers find a way onto this list, and that remains true in the fourth quarter.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Worldwide, Instagram edged out TikTok for the No. 1 spot, and Meta’s other apps found a place in the top 10 (Facebook at No. 3, WhatsApp at No. 5, Messenger at No. 8, and WhatsApp Business at No. 9.) ByteDance’s CapCut, an extension of TikTok’s workflow, is No. 4. Other top apps include the usual suspects, like Snapchat, Telegram, Spotify, Amazon, Flipkart, Twitter, and more big names.

In games, Subway Surfers was No. 1, followed by Garena Free Fire, Stumble Guys, Roblox, FIFA Mobile, Ludo King and Candy Crush Saga. Subway Surfers had ended the year with nearly 292 million installs, up 48% from 2021. Newcomer Stumble Guys gained the No. 3 spot with over 184 million downloads, which is notable given it was only launched in 2021 while the other top five apps were released in 2017 or earlier — a bright spot in what was otherwise a quarter-over-quarter decline for mobile game installs.

On the App Store, game downloads declined 6.9%, on Google Play, they gained a small 0.6%.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Still, the games category continues to drive app installs. On the App Store, it’s responsible for almost three times as many installs as the No. 2 Category, Utilities, the report noted. But worryingly, the App Store’s games category dipped below 2 billion for the first since Q1 2019.

On Google Play, the games category was responsible for more installs (11.7 billion) than all categories on the App Store combined (8.1 billion), but the Play Store’s non-game categories were down 1.5% year-over-year, to 15.8 billion installs.

It’s too soon to say whether or not current trends represent a final cooling off of the app store gold rush, given how wider economic forces are clearly playing a role here in app adoption and spending. Plus, new app markets are coming online which means there will be more people downloading apps for the first time. But for the time being, the trend is a signal that there’s some saturation in top app markets and suggests that further innovation and growth may need to be kickstarted by forcing the app stores to engage in increased competition.

App downloads were stagnant in the fourth quarter, new analysis finds by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Flutter, Google’s open-source framework for building multi-platform apps for mobile, web and desktop, is hosting its Flutter Forward event in Nairobi, Kenya today. As the name implies, the team is using the event to showcase up-and-coming features of the framework — most of which are still very early in their development cycle. The main highlights here are massively improved graphics performance, the ability to more easily embed Flutter code into existing web and mobile apps, and support for new architectures like Web Assembly and RISC-V. Virtually all of these capabilities still sit in canary branches and behind experiment flags, but they do show where Google plans to take this project in the months ahead — and help the overall open-source ecosystem around it understand where some complimentary work could be useful (about 40% of contributors to Flutter are outside of Google).

Tim Sneath, Google’s director of product and UX for Flutter and the Dart programming language, told me that the team decided to completely rewrite Impeller, Flutter’s rendering runtime. This new version aims to fix some of the existing glitches of the previous engine but also greatly improves performance — all while still offering support for hot reloads and other core Flutter features.  “It’s such a different sort of experience. It’s just so silky smooth,” he said. “Essentially, we’re able to build a graphics rendering engine that’s tailored for Flutter rather than leveraging a general-purpose renderer.”

To enable this performance, the engine now features pre-compiled shaders, avoiding the frame drops of the previous engine during shader compilation. There’s also now support for custom shaders and pixel shaders, which enables a number of new effects — which in turn will enable developers to build a host of new experiences on top of Flutter. Underneath all of this sit the low-level Vulkan and Metal 3D graphics APIs of Android and iOS. Currently, the team is focusing its work here on mobile, though many of these new graphics capabilities should also work on macOS and Windows already. “Our general model for Flutter is take it everywhere you can paint pixels,” Sneath said.

Talking about taking Flutter everywhere, another new feature the team is previewing is element embedding. For web developers, that means they can use this to easily embed Flutter content using a standard <div> element. While one could obviously write an entire application with Flutter and Dart, a lot of developers may want to integrate this new code into existing apps that may have been written in a different language.

The team is also working on a new package that enables better JavaScript and Dart interoperability, as well as new tooling that will allow Flutter to more easily call system APIs on Android and iOS. It already had that ability before, but getting this to work involved writing a lot of boilerplate code for developers.

Looking ahead, the team is also launching its first efforts to compile Flutter to WebAssembly. With the hype around this binary format growing rapidly — and both browser support and server-side tooling maturing — it’s maybe no surprise that the Flutter team is also interested in this technology. For the most part, this is about getting additional performance from Flutter, Sneath explained. “Dart transpiles into very tightly compiled JavaScript code, but it’s still JavaScript code so it’ll be loaded and interpreted — and, for us, WebAssembly looks like it’s going to give us some improved time to load, reduce the size and number of megabytes transferred over the wire. That seems interesting,” he said. “The potential for WebAssembly is — both on the web and even beyond — to become this new sort of portable lingua franca. I like the idea that we can take and use other code in other languages in WebAssembly as well.”

The RISC-V-based ClockworkPi DevTerm Kit.

As for RISC-V, the open standard royalty-free chip architecture that is also starting to get traction across the industry, Sneath noted that it is still very early days (though he said he really enjoyed playing with the RISC-V-based ClockworkPi DevTerm Kit) but he believes supporting this architecture may open up new platforms for Flutter, especially in the embedded space. With Google’s Android team also investing in this architecture, it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on what Google is doing here, even as the number of developers who are specifically targeting this architecture is surely still quite low.

Finally, the Flutter team is also launching an interesting new toolkit for news publishers, which builds on the success of a similar initiative the team launched for game developers at Google’s I/O developer conference last year. This toolkit should enable new publishers to quickly build a new-centric mobile app with support fo authentication, ad integrations, notifications and more — all without having to design these elements from scratch.

Google’s Flutter showcases new graphics capabilities, WebAssembly and RISC-V support by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Google over alleged antitrust issues, claiming the search giant has monopoly control of the digital ad market. The DOJ is joined by eight states in its complaint, including New York, California, and Colorado. Together they aim to “halt Google’s anticompetitive scheme, unwind Google’s monopolistic grip on the market, and restore competition to digital advertising.”

This action, clearly contemplated for some years, is distinct from a 2020 antitrust suit over Google’s dominance in the online search market, another brought by Epic, and of course its various woes in the European Union.

The lawsuit, filed today in Virginia’s Eastern District federal court, describes a pattern going back to the company’s purchase of DoubleClick in 2008. This “vaulted Google into a commanding position over the tools publishers use to sell advertising opportunities, complementing Google’s existing tool for advertisers, Google Ads, and set the stage for Google’s later exclusionary conduct across the ad tech industry.” The DOJ argues ill intent by Google in architecting the digital ad market in a way that unfairly favors its own products. From the complaint:

One industry behemoth, Google, has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising. Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies.

From there, Justice describes the company’s behavior as follows:

Google’s plan has been simple but effective: (1) neutralize or eliminate ad tech competitors, actual or potential, through a series of acquisitions; and (2) wield its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products while disrupting their ability to use competing products effectively.

…Each time a threat has emerged, Google has used its market power in one or more of these ad tech tools to quash the threat. The result: Google’s plan for durable, industry-wide dominance has succeeded.

The enormous complexity of the ad tech market and tools is gone into in considerable detail over the course of the 153-page document. But fortunately Justice was able to deploy a suitable analogy early on, coined by none other than Google itself via one of its executives in an internal communication:

“Is there a deeper issue with us owning the platform, the exchange, and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.”

You don’t have to be a judge in a federal court to get the feeling that yes, there’s something amiss in that arrangement.

For its part, Google has frequently reiterated that the digital ad market is healthy and competitive, citing strong competitors including Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft, to name a few. The company is also likely to point to growing competition from platforms including TikTok and Instacart, which have cut into the significant market share owned by Alphabet and Meta for most of recent history. TechCrunch has reached out to the company for comment and will update this post if they respond.

If you want a good grounding in the ad tech world and what Google has done to dominate and manipulate it — this part seems undeniable even if a jury rules it is not monopolistic — the opening section of the lawsuit provides a very readable and chronological account in fairly easy to understand language.

Justice Dept v. Google by TechCrunch on Scribd

[This story is developing and the article has been substantially updated throughout.]

US sues Google over “anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful” ad tech monopoly by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to the latest “State of Mobile” report by data.ai (previously App Annie). However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time using mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Top Stories

The end of the Twitter app era

It’s incredible how third-party Twitter clients had been able to survive Twitter’s ups and downs over the years, including its various API changes and constantly fluctuating business objectives and policies, only to be unceremoniously killed in 2023 by the whims of a billionaire. This week, in what has been one of the more depressing moments in tech history, longtime Twitter apps like IconFactory’s Twitterific, Tapbot’s Tweetbot and others like Birdie, Fenix, Echofon and many more were unceremoniously cut off from being able to access Twitter’s API and serve their customer base.

Instead of warning developers that Twitter’s policies were changing and giving them time to wind down their operations and communicate with their longtime users and subscribers, Twitter quietly, callously and deliberately revoked their API access. They “fixed the glitch,” so to speak.

Users and developers found out about the change as the apps stopped working, but not because of any official communication from Twitter itself. As backlash and outrage grew, Twitter then made matters worse by trying to gaslight its community about the situation. The company tweeted it was only enforcing its “long-standing” rules, then rushed to update its documentation to reflect what those rules actually were.

Of course, there was a time when Twitter tried to shut down the Twitter app ecosystem: you know, 12 years ago. Following its acquisition of Tweetie, which became Twitter’s own native app, the company in 2011 told developers they should stop trying to compete with Twitter on clients and instead focus on other API use cases, like data and verticals. It was the sort of classic, misguided move Twitter always seemed to make. The company never quite got a grip on the power Twitter had as a platform, and how an ecosystem of tools and apps that worked with Twitter was a better investment of its resources than spending eons trying to do things like tweak the structure of a thread or adding other bells and whistles that users didn’t really care about.

At the time of the proposed shutdown over a decade ago, those Twitter apps had been responsible for 42% of tweets on the platform. While slightly down from the 55% of tweets made in 2009 (or as high as 60% in 2010, another analysis found), the apps still served a large audience of power users that Twitter wanted to simply cut off and walk away from.

As entrepreneur Nova Spivack warned Twitter back then, its failure to incorporate its API into its future plans could ultimately hamper its potential as a company:

I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in a direction where they end up missing out on their biggest potential win. If Twitter continues to go down the media company path, without incorporating their API into the plan, that could not only force a large part of their ecosystem to go elsewhere, but it could deprive them of a much larger potential infrastructure revenue opportunity, and could even end up costing them the company. After all, Silicon Valley is littered with the burned out wreckage of once-great media companies that failed create and keep third-party app ecosystems: AOL, Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo – to name a few. It’s very hard to maintain leadership as an online media company without an ecosystem of outside apps increasing reach, innovation, and stickiness.

He was right. Twitter over the years struggled to grow its daily active user base, even making up its own metrics, and trying to convince Wall Street that its business should be evaluated by something besides user growth. It didn’t work.

Twitter historically often ignored the innovation emerging from its ecosystem of apps, even as those apps contributed meaningfully to what Twitter would become. Twitterific coined the word “tweet,” was the first to use the bird icon and delivered the first native Mac and iOS apps, among other things. Tweetie introduced the pull-to-refresh gesture. Brizzly made it possible to tweet photos, long before Twitter did. And all, arguably, demonstrated the market for premium apps (Tweetbot for Mac was $20 in 2012!) and app subscriptions, despite arriving at a time when Twitter’s focus was on cramming ads into its timeline — something that was once dubbed its #dickbar feature.

The company could have found an altogether different trajectory if it had embraced the innovation taking place in the broader app ecosystem, instead of constantly trying to squash it. Twitter users for years had no choice but to sit back and watch as their favorite third-party apps were slowly pruned. Long before TikTok, an app that began as a “video Twitter,” Seesmic, had to exit back in 2012. Favstar, a popular app for tracking top tweets, closed up shop in 2018. Twitter acquired TweetDeck, then abandoned it, despite surveys that indicated users would be willing to pay for premium features and subscriptions. Twitter almost seemed to revel in destroying various parts of its ecosystem. It bought Vine (a TikTok precursor) and Periscope (an early livestreamer), and killed them. (And when Twitter managed to come up with creative ideas of its own — like a music discovery app called #Music — it would give up on them, too. Now music discovery takes place on TikTok.)

Despite its fumbling, third-party Twitter clients managed to survive and even thrive, thanks to dedicated user bases, all while the company kept tweaking its API to make them less useful. In 2018, for example, the app makers told their customers they would have to disable or degrade certain features. And yet, the apps’ customers remained.

Now, at a perilous time in Twitter’s history — when analysts are predicting it will lose some 32 million users by 2024 — Twitter is removing access to some of its most beloved entry points to its ecosystem. And while these clients may not be the powerhouses of a decade ago, they deserved the opportunity to close up shop in a dignified manner that reflected the impact they had on Twitter’s own history and community.

What’s ironic here is that Twitter in more recent years almost seemed as if it was trying to right the ship. It was revamping its API and bringing back its developer conference. Its head of product for the developer platform, Amir Shevat, understood the potential. The company was beginning to spin up in-Twitter apps users could interact with and was even toying with ideas around a Twitter app store. But his team was cut from 100 people to two amid the Twitter layoffs, signaling the end of Twitter’s platform ambitions. And, we should have realized then, the end of the Twitter ecosystem of apps, too.

As Shevat warned in December: “Let this be my personal notice to Twitter developers: The team is gone; the investment has been undone. Love does not live here anymore.”

Trial set in Epic & Match’s antitrust case against Google

A date has been set for a trial by jury in a significant antitrust case against Google involving its alleged abuses of power in the Android app market. Fortnite maker Epic Games and dating app giant Match Group, joined by more than three dozen state attorneys general, have accused Google of unfairly leveraging its market dominance and harming competition through its Google Play Store terms and practices. In particular, the plaintiffs take issue with the commissions Google requires on app sales and in-app purchases as well as the control Google has over Android app distribution in general. The case will now proceed to a jury trial on November 6, 2023, a judge in the Northern District of California has ruled.

Epic and Match filed to amend their complaint in October by adding new antitrust counts to their case. Google in October asked the court to disallow these requests, saying, among other things, the claims were filed too late. (The court granted the motion to amend the complaint in November.)

The Android ecosystem antitrust case is a bit different from the Epic-Apple battle because Google allows Android apps to be sideloaded. The app makers will instead aim to prove other ways the company leveraged its market power — like paying developers to not leave the Play Store, for instance.

In a more recent hearing related to this case, a California federal judge criticized Google for not preserving evidence from employee chats, after learning internal communications were taking place in Google Chat, where messages were automatically deleted after 24 hours. Though employees can change the auto-delete setting, Google apparently did not enforce this setting to be turned on. The U.S. District Judge James Donato asked the parties how many of the 260 Google employees who received a litigation hold notice had chosen not to preserve their chats, according to a report from Law360.

The judge also threatened Google with a “substantial, trial-related penalty” if the court found evidence related to the trial was destroyed. This should be an interesting trial to watch, it seems.

Instagram adds a “Quiet Mode”

Instagram announced this week it’s expanding its selection of time management tools with the launch of a new feature called “Quiet Mode.” The feature aims to reduce users’ anxiety about taking time off from the app by silencing incoming notifications, auto-replying to DMs and setting your status to “In Quiet Mode” to inform friends that you’re not active on the app at present. The company said it will prompt teen users to enable the feature if they’re using the app late at night.

With the new Quiet Mode feature, the app is aiming to address the real-world impacts that accompany trying to step away for a bit from an app that you regularly use — and one where others expect you to be available.

The launches come as Instagram works to make its app less of a target for regulators and lawmakers who have been concerned with social media’s potential harms, particularly for teenage users. To date, Instagram has added several teen safety features, including those to protect teens’ privacy and reduce unwanted adult contact, limit ad targeting, restrict teens’ access to mature content and others to help parents monitor and manage their teens’ Instagram use through parental controls.

The update is one of several changes that rolled out, which also included tweaking its parental control tools and adding other tools to manage recommendations. For example, you’ll now be able to remove things from your Explore page and block terms from influencing your recommended content, too.

Weekly News

Android Updates

• Google fixed the issue that led to missing app changelogs on the Play Store’s website.
• Google’s clock app for Android now lets you record your own alarm sound. That could be fun. (Also ripe for pranks).

Apple News

• Apple seeded the release candidates (RCs) for iOS 16.3, iPadOS 16.3, tvOS 16.3 and watchOS 9.3. The release signals the public version is now likely days away.
• The iOS 16.3 public release will bring the new iCloud Advanced Data Protection feature to users worldwide. The opt-in feature offers end-to-end encryption for nearly all iCloud data, including messages, photos, device backups and more.
• Apple commemorated Black History Month with exclusive content, including a special-edition Apple Watch Black Unity Sport Loop, a new matching watch face and iPhone wallpaper.
• Apple is reportedly working on an iPad-bases smart display with smart home controls, FaceTime and video support. It’s also developing a faster Apple TV, reported Bloomberg.

Gaming

• Roblox’s estimated bookings grew 17-20% year-over-year, to $430 million-$439 million and daily actives jumped 18% to 61.5 million, Roblox said in its December 2022 metrics report.
• Google officially shut down its cloud gaming service Stadia this week, only two months shy of its third birthday. Though Stadia users were disappointed, Google did do some things right by offering both hardware and software refunds, save game transfers and more.
• 45% of game developers said they don’t believe in the promise of the metaverse, a new industry survey shows.
• Nintendo is increasing production of its six-year-old Switch console starting in April 2023, as consumer demand remains strong.

Entertainment

• Netflix made waves with the news that its founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings would step down after two decades of running the company. The news came on the heels of solid earnings, where the company reported adding 7.66 million subscribers, jumping to 230.75 million globally, and revenue of $7.85 billion, in line with estimates.
• Netflix also gave its iPhone app a makeover. The revamp included a new billboard layout, new card transitions, new animation for both the launch and profile screens, updated haptics and more.
• Wattpad Webtoon Studios signed with talent agency UTA for worldwide representation. The deal aims to help the global entertainment and publishing arm of Webtoon and Wattpad as it further expands into TV, movies, animation and more.
• YouTube TV refreshed its Live Guide and Library with a new design and the addition of recommendations on what to watch.
• Audio chat room app Clubhouse brought its “House Lounges” to the web. The always-on feature allows users to catch up, message and hang out with friends in private rooms. The feature first launched on mobile.
• TikTok expanded the reach of its “state-controlled media” label to more than 40 additional countries, to alert users when videos they’re seeing on the app are being published by entities whose “editorial output or decision-making process” is subject to influence by a government.
• Spotify, Deezer, Proton, Basecamp and others wrote a letter to the EU’s antitrust regulator’s Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, urging the Commission to take action against Apple over antitrust practices. The Commission has been investigating the claims for years, following Spotify’s filing of an antitrust complaint in 2019.
• Amazon is increasing its Amazon Music Unlimited’s monthly prices by $1 and £1 to $10.99 and £10.99 in the U.S. and U.K. on February 21. The new prices will match the increase Apple Music implemented last fall.

Security & Privacy

• Period tracker Flo added an “anonymous mode” that lets users track their period without providing their name, email or other identifiers. Period tracker privacy has become a hot-button topic following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, as app users are worried how their private data could be used against them.

Twitter Drama

• Twitter launched an annual subscription for Twitter Blue that costs $84 per year, but is only available on the web. The subscription saves users 12% over a monthly web subscription or 36% over an iOS subscription, where the price is jacked up to cover App Store fees.
• The next day, it launched Blue for Android users, at the same pricey $11 per month it charges iOS users. The subscription is $3 per month cheaper on the web.
• Twitter killed off third-party clients, claiming it was only enforcing its long-standing API rules. But internal messages showed Twitter targeted the clients specifically, impacting classic apps like Tweetbot, Twitterific and others.
• A reverse engineer claims Twitter could be working on a video chat feature, based on findings in the app’s code.
• An ad industry leak indicated that Twitter’s fourth-quarter revenue had fallen 35% year-over-year to $1.025 billion, or 72% of its Q4 goal. It expects to earn $732 million in the first quarter this year, which would be down by 39% year-over-year.
• Twitter’s referral traffic to 12 major news outlets fell 12%, on average, from November to December 2022, per Similarweb data. The only two outlets that gained during this time were Fox News and NY Post.

Etc.

• Fintech Robinhood tapped tech editor Josh Topolsky to run Sherwood Media, an independent brand that will serve as the home to Robinhood’s Snacks newsletter.
• Dating app Hinge is testing a $50-60 per month premium tier, its equivalent of Tinder Platinum.

Layoffs

• Music app SoundHound laid off around 200 people, or nearly 50% of staff, with two weeks of severance that will only be paid if the company raises more money.
• Fandom laid off staff across its properties, including GameSpot, Metacritic and Giant Bomb. Most of Fandom’s properties are websites, but it also runs a Fandom News app for mobile devices.
• In addition to the Big Tech layoffs this week impacting Google (12,000 people), Amazon (18,000 people) and Microsoft (10,000 people), Amazon-owned comics publisher and distributor ComiXology laid off around 50% of staff, as well. The company offers an app that allows users to experience 23,000 comics, manga and graphic novels on mobile devices.
• Indian food delivery service Swiggy is cutting 380 jobs after raising $700 million in January 2022. The company has around 6,000 people employed.

Government & Policy

• The U.K. Online Safety bill was amended to make senior execs criminally liable for their companies’ failure to protect minors from harmful content.
• India’s Supreme Court declined to block an antitrust order that would require Google to change its Android business model, in a major setback for the tech giant. The Competition Commission of India ruled in October that Google exploited its market power by forcing device makers to pre-install Google’s apps. It had also fined Google $161 million. Google said it will challenge the ruling but will cooperate with the authorities “on the way forward.”
• Meta’s WhatsApp has been fined €5.5 million (just under $6 million) for failing to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules around data processing.
• Brazil’s antitrust regulator, CADE, is now investigating a complaint against Apple over alleged App Store antitrust issues, similar to investigations by other antitrust authorities in other markets.
• More TikTok bans cropped up in the U.S. Following crackdowns by numerous state governments, the video app has been banned on some college campuses, including Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Arkansas State University, the University System of Georgia’s dozens of universities and colleges, the Montana University System and Boise State University, NBC reported. Some experts believe the bans, which now reach more than two dozen U.S. states, are an overreaction.
• China’s government gave Didi the right to republish its apps on app stores after more than a year in regulatory limbo.

Funding and M&A

• Discord bought teen compliments app Gas for an undisclosed sum. Gas is an anonymous app that sent teens compliments purportedly from their peers. Founder Nikita Bier previously sold his app tbh to Facebook.
• Another teen compliments app, Slay — this one based in Germany — raised a $2.63 million (€2.5 million) pre-seed funding round led by Accel. Other investors included 20VC, Supercell co-founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen, Behance founder Scott Belsky, football star Mario Götze, Kevin Weil (Scribble Ventures) and musician Alex Pall (The Chainsmokers).
• Chinese fast fashion shopping app Shein is said to be raising up to $3 billion from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, Sequoia and PE firm General Atlantic, at a $64 billion valuation, the FT reported. That would be down from its $100 billion valuation as of its last funding round in April.
• Walmart-backed Indian payments app PhonePe raised $350 million from General Atlantic at a $12 billion+ valuation, and plans to raise as much as $1 billion in tranches.
• Zitti, an app offering food costs and other insights for restauranteurs, raised $3.5 million in a seed round from Oceans Ventures, Serena Ventures and Crossbeam. In total, the company has raised $7.5 million to date.
• Cloud services provider Shadow made its first acquisition with a deal for French Android emulation startup Genymobile, the company behind Genymotion. Deal terms weren’t disclosed.
• Share Creators, a platform that helps game developers store and manage large media assets, raised $5 million in funding, including $3 million from China’s 5Y Capital and $2 million from PDF reader Foxit.

Downloads

Smores

Image Credits: Smores

This week, TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta took a look at a new iOS app, Smores, that allows users to discover new music through a TikTok-like feed. The app lets you listen to a short clip of a song, recommended based on your own listening history. You can then swipe through the vertical feed to skip to the next song clip, or like the current song with the heart button, which saves the like to your Spotify account. The liked tracks will appear in a new playlist called “Smores Discovery,” or you can add the track to another pre-existing playlist if you choose. The team says they may later bring the app to Apple Music or Android users.

Ice Cubes

Image Credits: Ice Cubes

This new Mastodon client for iPad, iPhone and Mac was oddly rejected from the App Store numerous times on its path to launching, as Daring Fireball highlighted, but the SwiftUI app from developer Thomas Ricouard looks like a solid addition to the Mastodon app ecosystem, which includes several new apps built by former Twitter app makers, including apps like Ivory from Tapbots and Mammoth from Aviary’s app developer. (Both are still in TestFlight.)

Ice Cubes, however, promises to bring a fast and reliable Mastodon experience to the desktop, allowing users to browse their timelines, interact with posts (“toots”) and even quote toot — a feature Twitter expats have been missing. You can also access more advanced functions like lists, filters, an explore tab and more.

This Week in Apps: Twitter kills third-party apps, Instagram adds Quiet Mode, Google’s antitrust trial gets a date by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

A date has been set for a trial by jury in a significant antitrust case against Google involving its alleged abuses of power in the Android app market. Fortnite maker Epic Games and dating app giant Match Group, joined by over three dozen state Attorneys General, have accused Google of unfairly leveraging its market dominance and harming competition through its Google Play Store terms and practices. In particular, the plaintiffs take issue with the commissions Google requires on app sales and in-app purchases as well as the control Google has over Android app distribution, in general. The case will now proceed to a jury trial on November 6, 2023, a judge in the Northern District of California has ruled.

Epic Games began its path to suing the app store giants, Apple and Google, back in 2020 when it introduced a direct payment option in Fortnite to its iOS and Android apps, prompting Apple and Google to boot the mobile game from their respective app stores.

Epic then sued both companies for antitrust abuses. Apple largely won its case, but both sides appealed the ruling as Epic still wants Apple held accountable for anti-competitive practices, while Apple didn’t want to change its terms to permit third-party payments, as the district judge had decided would be required. In an appeal hearing in November, the DoJ voiced its concerns over how the lower court had misinterpreted U.S. antitrust law — a signal of the increased interest the U.S. government has in the prosecutions of the tech giants. (The DoJ is also said to be in the early stages of filing its own suit against Apple.)

Epic’s claims against Google, while largely similar to Apple’s, have to take into account the differences with Google’s app distribution platform. Unlike Apple, which prevents any other means of installing apps on iOS devices outside its own App Store, Google permits apps to be sideloaded on Android devices. In fact, Epic Games chose to distribute Fortnite to users outside the Play Store when it launched on Android, and after the game was kicked out of Google Play for terms violations.

To aid its case, Epic has focused part of its antitrust claim on the other alleged means Google used to maintain market power, including an internal program where Google paid game developers hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives to keep their games on the Play Store. Google, however, maintains the program is “proof that Google Play competes fairly with numerous rivals for developers,” it said.

Match Group had also sued Google over its Play Store practices, accusing Google of charging developers “exorbitant fees.” Google shot back, saying Match just wants to get out of paying for the services it provides the company as part of its platform.

Epic and Match filed to amend their complaint in October by adding new antitrust counts to their case. Google last month asked the court to disallow these requests saying, among other things, the claims were filed too late.

In a more recent hearing related to this case, a California federal judge criticized Google for not preserving evidence from employee chats, after learning internal communications were taking place in Google Chat, where messages were automatically deleted after 24 hours. Though employees can change the auto-delete setting, Google apparently did not enforce this setting to be turned on. The U.S. District Judge James Donato asked the parties how many of the 260 Google employees who received a litigation hold notice had chosen not to preserve their chats, according to a report from Law360.

The judge also threatened Google with a “substantial, trial-related penalty,” if the court found evidence related to the trial was destroyed.

“I think there’s little doubt from the evidence that I’ve heard so far that Google’s chat function could in fact have contained evidence relevant … to this case,” the judge said.

Dkt 373 – 2022.11.10 -Google Chat Deletions by TechCrunch on Scribd

Epic and Match’s lawsuit against Google also includes participation from 39 Attorneys General (38 states plus the District of Columbia). A consumer class action is involved, too, and is seeking $4.7 billion in damages, Reuters reported. The amount is based on what the plaintiffs believe consumers were overcharged due to the Play Store’s fees — increases that developers passed along to their own customers. This number is likely going to be disputed, given that it’s not clear if developers would have offered consumers any additional savings if developers could sidestep fees, rather than keeping the money for themselves.

The case is one of two notable antitrust complaints involving Google. The other is the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Google over its search engine practices. In this one, the DoJ alleges that Google illegally maintains its position as the No. 1 search engine by paying out billions of dollars to Apple, Samsung, and other telecoms to be the default search engine on mobile devices.

Epic and Match’s antitrust case against Google heads to jury trial on November 6 by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to the latest “State of Mobile” report by data.ai (previously App Annie). However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time using mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Top Stories

State of Mobile 2023 arrives, consumer spending slows

Data.ai’s anticipated review of the app ecosystem, “State of Mobile 2023,” arrived this week, finding that consumer spending on apps has been hit by the same macroeconomic forces impacting the broader economy. That led to a first-time drop in consumer spending after years of record growth. However, there are some bright spots in the report’s findings. For starters, it seems that non-game apps are more resilient than games in a down economy. Though consumer spend on mobile games dropped 5% to $110 billion, spending on non-game apps increased 6% to $58 billion — driven by streaming subscriptions, dating apps and short-form video apps.

Image Credits: data.ai

The data also indicated that despite the tightening of wallets, consumer engagement on mobile continues to grow. Across top mobile markets, consumers were spending 5 hours, 2 minutes per day in 2022 using their apps, up 9% from 2020. That’s remarkable, given that 2020 was the onset of the COVID pandemic, which tied everyone to their phone and rapidly changed consumer behavior. However, there is a caveat to this news: Much of mobile users’ time is monopolized by three app categories, which accounted for half the time spent on mobile: Social Media/Communication (19.5% of total time); Entertainment/Short Video (17% of total time); and Entertainment/Video Sharing (12.7% of total time).

Image Credits: data.ai

In addition, while mobile ad spend growth will also slow alongside the economy, it will not decline. Data.ai is forecasting that mobile ad spend in 2023 will hit $262 billion, up from $336 billion this year as short video apps drive growth. TikTok, for example, became the second-ever non-game app to top $6 billion in all-time consumer spending, the report noted.

The first category — Social Media/Communication — includes WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Telegram, LINE and Discord, while the Entertainment and Short Video category is where you’ll find TikTok as well as Kwai, Vido Video, Baidu Haokan and Snack Video. The last category of Entertainment and Video Sharing includes long-form video like YouTube, YouTube Kids and bilibili.

Image Credits: data.ai

One finding that jumped out at me is that TikTok this year lost its No. 1 position on the Top Charts by Downloads to Instagram, the Meta-owned social app that has been desperately trying to clone TikTok’s feature set with Reels. Data.ai’s report indicated that Meta had a bit of a comeback this year, with Instagram bumping TikTok on downloads, though TikTok remained No. 1 by consumer spending. However, in terms of real-world use, TikTok is much further down the charts.

In 2022, the top four non-game apps by monthly active users were all owned by Facebook. In order, they were Facebook, WhatsApp Messenger, Instagram, then Facebook Messenger. TikTok was No. 5. Amazon, which was No. 5 last year, slipped to No. 7 while Telegram moved up to No. 6 from No. 7 in 2021. Twitter, Spotify and Netflix rounded out the charts.

Image Credits: data.ai

The report delves into other interesting trends related to specific categories of apps (some of which we may get into later), but one particular area of interest to us involved the detailed habits of Gen Z consumers. Unlike the top apps used by older generations, which tend to be more utilitarian and practical (think Amazon, eBay, Walmart, The Weather Channel, Waze, Ring, PayPal and others), Gen Z is still devoted to video apps, user-generated content and mindfulness apps, data.ai said. (Ah, youth!) They also have a preference for Meta’s Instagram over Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Netflix and Spotify.

Another trend driven by younger users was the rise of BeReal, a more authentic photo-sharing app that prompts users once a day to take candid photos of themselves and what they’re doing. Data.ai found that no other social app added more new users in the U.S. over the past five years than the 5.3 million users BeReal gained in August 2022. But the firm suggested BeReal may struggle to grow engagement since the app only asks people to use it for brief periods. However, in speaking with those close to the company, we understand BeReal is purposefully trying to build a non-addictive social app — it just doesn’t know how to monetize that sort of creation.

Another app category driven by Gen Z trends is friend-finding, which includes apps like Yubo, Hoop, Bumble (for its BFF feature), Live Talk and others.

Image Credits: data.ai

Meanwhile, in terms of gaming, the Gen Z demographic showed a preference for party, simulation and shooters, and counted Roblox as their No. 1 app. If there’s any wonder why Meta is spending billions trying to develop a virtual gaming landscape with Horizon Worlds, just look at Roblox’s growth and traction among the younger demographic. “Creative Sandbox” games like Roblox as well as Minecraft saw a global increase in time spent last year, up 25% from 2021 to 2022.

Image Credits, above and below: data.ai

A few other interesting highlights:

• The most-searched iOS App Store keywords in the U.S. for entertainment apps were, in order: netflix, disney+, hulu, HBO max, paramount, paramount+, amazon prime, peacock tv, prime video and tubi. Maybe Netflix will be okay after all.
• Genshin Impact reached $3 billion in in-app purchases in Q2 2022.
• Game publishers in China drove a third of consumer game spending.
• Crypto apps’ downloads fell in 2022, even as other fintechs grew.
• Average MAUs among the top five neobanks in the U.S. climbed from 1.4 million in 2020 to 2.2 million in 2022. Chime is the market leader in both active users and user engagement.

Image Credits: data.ai

• Consumers spent nearly 110 billion hours in shopping apps in 2022, up 9% globally. Cost-conscious shoppers drove growth.
• Total time spent in social apps climbed 17% year-over-year to over 2 trillion hours on Android phones in 2022. The U.S. accounted for more than one-fourth of social app consumer spending.
• Sports betting app downloads hit 4.3 million at the start of the 2022-2023 NFL season, up 8% year-over-year from 2021.
• Language learning apps saw 31% year-over-year growth as travel returned post-pandemic.
• Consumer spend in dating apps grew 12% year-over-year in 2022, and 91% year-over-year compared to pre-pandemic spend.

Apple let scammy “ChatGPT” apps flood the App Store

What, no I mean, what is going on with App Review? For years, Apple has been caught off guard at times, allowing violative apps to slip through its review process to be published on the App Store until users or the media called out the mistake.

But in the case of the scam “ChatGPT” apps that flooded the App Store over the past couple of weeks, one has to wonder if Apple is even paying attention at all. ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI doesn’t offer a public API, so that should have been a red flag to reviewers about any app claiming a ChatGPT or OpenAI connection in its name or description, then charging money for access. One app, called “ChatGPT Chat GPT AI With GPT-3,” even managed to reach the Top Charts in the productivity category in multiple countries as a result of consumer demand for ChatGPT and Apple’s inattention. (The app was removed shortly after reporters, including ourselves, reached out to Apple for comment. Apple never answered our emails.)

Google Play had the same problem, but frankly, consumers expect more from Apple’s App Store. In fact, Apple’s argument against antitrust concerns, like its ban on sideloading and third-party app stores, has to do with the safety and security of its users. Apple says only it should be trusted to keep consumers safe. But surely that means Apple should also be protecting consumers from scam apps and subscription scams. But it is not.

And while no system is perfect, it seems like the apps that are at the top of the App Store’s charts — or those that quickly moved up the charts for unknown reasons — should go under an additional review by Apple, just to make sure they’re playing by the rules. Developers have long argued that Apple should be cracking down on apps with high-priced subscriptions or those that are charging users for basic utilities or otherwise free features — in other words, the apps that are profiting from scamming users. If it did so, a subscription-based app that appeared to be charging for access to a free service with a non-public API wouldn’t have made the cut.

These things aren’t hard to spot either — third-party app intelligence services can parse customer reviews for negative sentiments and keywords, so surely Apple could implement a system of its own, if it wanted to. In the case of the scammy ChatGPT apps, customer reviews called the apps fake and non-functional, warning others not to get scammed. Where was Apple on this issue? Until the media coverage, it was quietly collecting its cut of the scammers’ subscription revenues.

In other App Store news, activist investors have pressured Apple for more insight into app removals, the FT reported, but their interest lies in wanting a better understanding of when Apple acquiesces to foreign governments’ requests. The company will begin including additional information in its Transparency Report about whether removals are related to local laws and how many apps were pulled in each country.

Goodbye, Instagram Shop. Move over, Reels. 

Image Credits: Instagram

Instagram announced this week it will simplify its in-app navigation after years of confusing changes designed to push various products like Instagram Shop and Reels. The company said, starting in February, it will return the Compose button (the plus sign “+”) to the front and center of the navigation bar at the bottom of the app and it will remove the Shop tab entirely.

As a result, the Reels button will now move over to the right of Compose, losing its prime spot.

The earlier changes that had pushed Reels over Compose had been fairly controversial as Instagram users felt as if the company was forcing them to use the app’s new products at the expense of the overall user experience. Instagram defended the changes in prior years as a way to introduce users to its new products. But in more recent months, there’s been increased backlash over how far Instagram has deviated from its original mission. Even the Kardashians criticized the app for “trying to be TikTok.”

Instagram said shopping on Instagram will continue to be supported despite the removal of the tab. We’ll see.

Weekly News

Android Updates

• Google is working to fix a Google Play issue impacting missing app changelogs, according to an Android Police report.
• The latest stable release of the official IDE for building Android applications, Android Studio Electric Eel (2022.1.1), arrived. The release includes updates and new features that cover design, build & dependencies, emulators & devices, and IntelliJ, Google said.
• Google released the Extension SDK to developers, bringing features like the Android 13 Photo Picker API and AdServices APIs to Android 11 and up.

Apple News

• Second developer betas for iOS 16.3, iPadOS 16.3, watchOS 9.3, macOS Ventura 13.2 and tvOS 16.3 have arrived. One notable change impacts the new Emergency SOS feature. The “Call with Hold” option is renamed to “Call with Hold and Release,” as now the call to emergency services won’t go through until users let go of the buttons they press down to start the SOS call. More here. The change may be an attempt to address issues over mistakenly triggered calls.
• Seems like Apple pushed Flickr to update its SafeSearch filtering. The company said it updated the feature so it won’t return results for “bad words” when it’s enabled in order “to act in compliance with Apple’s policies.”
• Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that iOS 17 is going to be a smaller release with fewer changes as Apple focuses on its mixed-reality headset.
• Apple Maps now lets businesses update their listings and tout promotions via a new Apple Business Connect portal. No plans yet for any sort of Maps ads offering, however.
• In a year-end review, Apple announced it has now paid out a record $320 billion to app developers since 2008 — a number that reflects the revenue apps have generated, minus Apple’s commission. The company now has more than 900 million paid subscriptions across Apple services, with subscriptions on the App Store driving a “significant” part of that figure, it said.

Image Credits: Apple

Gaming

• Google and Nvidia shared concerns with the FTC as to how Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal would give it an unfair advantage in cloud, subscription and mobile gaming.
• JioGames, part of Reliance Industries’ telecom platform Jio, announced a 10-year strategic partnership with France’s Gamestream. The latter will assist JioGames in bringing cloud gaming to “1.4 billion” Indians by helping scale the JioGamesCloud platform. JioGames’ titles can be played on Android, web (PC, Mac and iPhone), and Jio’s set-top boxes.
• Roblox could be coming to a new platform: Meta Quest. Sources told The Verge that Roblox will be expanding its VR footprint — it already works on Rift and HTC’s Vive — by releasing to Meta’s Quest, which doesn’t require a PC to play.
• Stardew Valley’s big update, patch 1.5, finally reached iOS and Android users. The update, which arrived on consoles in 2021, includes a number of new features and changes, including a new beach farm layout, new NPCs and enemies, ostriches (!!) and a new location called Ginger Island.

Image Credits: Stardew Valley

Twitter Drama

• Twitter’s API began experiencing issues that are impacting third-party Twitter apps like Tweetbot, Echofon and Twitterrific. The app makers confirmed the problems have been causing log-in issues for users and their apps no longer work.
• Online publishing platform Medium, originally created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, announced that it’s embracing the open source Mastodon platform by creating its own instance to support its authors and their publications. Access to the instance will be offered through a Medium membership, which means in a way, it’s the first paid instance to come to Mastodon.
• Twitter’s Blue subscription, which is the new way to be verified and get your checkmark — degrading the value of checks in the process! — rolled out to Japan. Users can subscribe for ¥980 (around $7.40) per month on the web and ¥1,380 ($10.42) per month on iOS, a bit lower than U.S. prices of $8 per month on the web and $11 per month on iOS.
• Twitter made the algorithmic timeline the default and renamed it the “For You” feed. (Eye roll). You can now swipe between the For You feed and a chronological timeline, as well as lists.

Entertainment

• TikTok is alpha testing a Talent Manager Portal with select talent agencies. The service would allow creators’ agents and reps to oversee, execute and analyze brand deals their clients are being offered.
• Apple Music and the Apple TV apps quietly launched on the Microsoft Store — a few months after Microsoft said the apps would be coming to Windows 11.
• YouTube will begin sharing ad revenue with Shorts creators on February 1, and will update its YPP terms to reflect this. (Take that, TikTok!)

Etc.

• Failed discount movie tickets service MoviePass is trying for a comeback with funding from crypto backers, Animoca Brands.
• Google added emoji reactions to Meet video calls, starting on iOS and web, with Android to follow. The feature was announced last year.
• Not so super. Tata Group’s super app Tata Neu is expected to meet only half its sales target in its first year — $4 billion versus an $8 billion target. The app had been modeled on successful apps like Alipay and WeChat.
• Tinder and other Match dating apps will introduce tips on how to avoid romance scams. Someone watched “The Tinder Swindler,” apparently!

Government & Policy

• TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, met with senior European Union lawmakers to answer a number of questions including privacy, data protection, DSA compliance, child safety, Russian disinformation and the transparency of paid political content. The inquiry follows what’s expected to be increased regulatory scrutiny of the app, including possible oversight by the European Commission.
• After being fined $400 million by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission over how Instagram handled minors’ accounts and data, Meta announced it would remove the ability for advertisers to target teen users by gender. The company will also end personalized ad targeting to users under 18 based on in-app activity, like who they follow on Instagram and what Facebook pages they like.
• New Jersey and Ohio have now joined 20 other U.S. states in banning TikTok on government-owned devices over security concerns.
• The U.S. Supreme Court declined to block a lawsuit filed by WhatsApp that challenged the alleged mass phone hacking by Israeli spyware maker NSO Group. The spyware maker had argued the suit should be dropped because it was acting on behalf of a foreign government, but the Supreme Court rejected this claim.

Funding

• A Twitter rival called ‘T2’ raised its first outside funding, with $1.1 million from a group of high-profile angels including Bradley Horowitz, Rich Miner and the former CEO of Wikipedia, Katherine Maher. T2 founder Gabor Cselle has sold startups to Twitter and Google previously.
• Payments technology platform Butter Payments raised $21.5 million in Series A funding led by Norwest at a ~$100 million valuation. The company leverages AI to help end accidental churn.
• Kakao Entertainment, which publishes apps for popular animated shows and novels, raised $930 million from Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Singapore’s GIC.
• A company developing a cognitive behavioral therapy platform for ADHD, Inflow, raised $11 million in Series A funding. Inflow’s self-help app offers daily exercises and challenges focused on habit development, mindfulness techniques, community support and more.
• Social crypto wallet app The Easy Company raised $14.2 million in seed funding. The iOS and Android app offers an Instagram-like experience for showcasing NFTs.

Image Credits: The Easy Company

Layoffs

• Tokyo-based news aggregator SmartNews laid off 120 people in the U.S. and China, with plans to implement a voluntary workforce reduction in Japan.
• Fintech for kids Greenlight, which lets kids use a debit card and app with parental monitoring, laid off 104 employees — or more than 21% of its total headcount of 485 employees.
• Crime-reporting app Citizen laid off 33 employees, including at least 10 engineers. The app uses public police blotters to notify users about verified incidents in their area, but also allows users in select markets to upload their own reports and livestream.
• Right-leaning Twitter alternative Parler’s parent company laid off 75% of staff and chief execs, leaving Parler with just 20 employees. Kanye, as many expected, didn’t actually buy it.

This Week in Apps: ChatGPT app scammers, Instagram revamp and a consumer spending slowdown by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Google today is announcing a HD version of its vehicle mapping solution. Unlike Google Maps, Google’s HD map is not a consuming-facing application, but an additional layer of data that’s served to the vehicle’s L2+ or L3 assisted driving systems through Google Automotive Services.

The additional information sits on top of Google Maps’ data and delivers details such as precise lane makers and localization of objects (road signs) to help assisted driving vehicles orient themselves on the road. The driver will not be able to see or access the HD map or data directly. It’s not clear at this time if the driver will even know if the vehicle is using the HD mapping, though, presumably the vehicle’s assisted driving skills will be improved when it’s in use.

According to a Google spokesperson, the HD mapping is initially focused on high-traffic roads like freeways, but the spokesperson stopped short of saying exactly which cities or freeways. They said Google is working with automakers to determine where the HD map is most helpful.

Google’s HD map is now available to automakers using Google Automotive Services. Volvo and Polestar announced that the HD map will soon be available in the Volvo EX90 and the Polestar 3.

Google launches HD maps for vehicles, Volvo and Polestar first to integrate by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch