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.

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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

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.

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to multiple year-end reports. Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

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

App Store significantly expands pricing options

Apple this week loosened its requirements around how developers have to price their apps as legal and regulatory pressure over its tight control of the App Store intensifies. The company announced an expansion of its App Store pricing system to offer developers access to 700 additional price points, bringing the new total number of price points available to 900. It will also allow U.S. developers to set prices for apps, in-app purchases or subscriptions as low as $0.29 or as high as $10,000, and in rounded endings (like $1.00) instead of just $0.99. Similar new policies to reduce restrictions around price points will roll out in global markets, alongside new tools aimed at helping developers better manage pricing outside their local market.

The changes initially became available starting on December 6, 2022, for auto-renewable subscriptions. They’ll become available to paid apps and in-app purchases in spring 2023.

Developers will also be able to now publish prices that end in $.00 instead of $.99 or €X.99 or those that begin with two repeating digits, like ₩110,000.

Plus, new pricing tools are being made available that allow developers to set their subscription prices in their local currency as the basis for automatically generating pricing across the other 174 storefronts and 44 currencies. When the pricing is set automatically, pricing outside a developer’s home market will update as foreign exchange and tax rates change. Developers can also still choose to set prices manually if they prefer. And they’ll be able to make in-app purchases available by storefront.

The changes rolled out after Apple last year settled a class action lawsuit with U.S. app developers, which included a number of concessions, one of which was an agreement to expand the number of price points available from fewer than 100 to more than 500.

Debate over top app Lensa AI

Image Credits: Lensa AI on Instagram (opens in a new window)

The photo editing app Lensa AI has been going viral over a new feature that offers to create “magic avatars” from a series of uploaded selfie photos. The avatars are created using the open source Stable Diffusion model to transform your photos into those that look like they were created by a digital artist. But there’s controversy surrounding how these images are made.

The feature isn’t quick or cheap — the processing time can take half an hour or even multiple hours to complete. Lensa’s pricing model is also fairly crafty. It’s either $3.99 for 50 unique avatars (five variations of 10 different styles) if you’re a subscriber, or $7.99 if not. If you want more avatars, it costs $11.99 for 100 unique avatars (10 variations of 10 styles) or $15.99 for 200 avatars (20 variations of 10 styles) — which again, can be discounted by 50% if you subscribe. This sort of hybrid pricing was hailed as both clever and opportunistic. It’s also one of those apps that uses dark patterns to try to get users to subscribe immediately upon first launch, with a pop-up splash screen you have to bypass to use the app for free.

But the big backlash isn’t over the cost, it’s about Stable Diffusion, the AI generator powering the service. The AI was originally trained on 2.3 billion captioned images from the internet, some of which are watermarked and copyrighted works, as well as a number of images from sites like Pinterest, Smugmug, Flickr, DeviantArt, ArtStation, Getty and Shutterstock. The issue at hand is that artists didn’t opt in to have their work included in the training data, nor can they now opt out.

Artists, understandably, are concerned. Now their unique styles are being duped by an AI model, meaning their original art will become lost among the now numerous auto-generated copycats. Some see this not only as an existential threat, but also as a form of unregulated stealing. Consumers, meanwhile, were simply enjoying the photos they had paid for without an understanding of how the tech worked, then became subject to backlash or shaming from those who did. More conscientious objectors soon realized they had just thrown away their money on profile pictures they now didn’t feel ethically comfortable in using. These are complex problems that need more discussion. At least when Instagram first launched its filters, they were donated by an artist, Cole Rise. (While he may have later regretted giving up his art to the company, the filters weren’t stolen.)

In addition, the app maker faced another serious issue, when people discovered it was easy to use to make non-consensual nude images in the app. If users uploaded Photoshopped images of topless models with someone else’s face, for example, the AI disables its NSFW filter and will create higher-quality AI avatars of the person whose face was uploaded on the topless photo. The company said it was working to prevent this from occurring and noted attempting to make NSFW content was in violation of its terms of use.

Image Credits: Lensa AI

Third-party Twitter app developers are now building for Mastodon

There’s a subtle stirring in the Twitter app ecosystem as third-party developers are beginning to rethink their dependence on Twitter’s API.

Now having grown to 3.3 million+ active users, the open source Twitter alternative Mastodon has been gaining interest from third-party Twitter app developers in recent days. The makers of popular Twitter clients, including Aviary and Tweetbot, have set their sights on building similar apps for the growing Mastodon user base.

Image Credits: Tapbots

App developer Tapbots, known for its popular Twitter app Tweetbot for iOS and Mac, is building an app for the Mastodon community. The app is similar to Tweetbot, which is hailed as one of the third-party Twitter clients that keeps improving with age. This year’s release of Tweetbot 7, for example, added features like picture-in-picture, a stats tab and widgets. Now, Tapbots is working on Ivory, a subscription-based app for Mastodon that includes access to key features like your home timeline, @ mentions, favorites, search and trends, and your own user profile. Tweetbots’ developer Paul Haddad said the goal is to first ship a stable 1.0, then start adding more Mastodon-specific features, as well as some features that he had wanted to add to Tweetbot but couldn’t because of technical limitations.

Aviary’s developer, Shihab Mehboob, meanwhile, is building a Mastodon client, called Mammoth. The new app will be a paid download with a yet-to-be-determined price, and will include the latest Mastodon API features when they’re released, as well as 4.0 features like editing posts and edit history.

App makers aren’t the only developers impacted by the chaos at Twitter. As TechCrunch reported, Typefully, a Twitter thread-making app backed by Ev Williams, is now planning to shift focus to LinkedIn. Scheduler Chirr App is also working on a Mastodon integration, and Tweepsmap just launched a post scheduler for Mastodon, too.

Developer News

• iOS 16.2 RC has arrived ahead of next week’s public release. This is one of the bigger updates, as it will bring the new Freeform app, the just-announced karaoke experience called Apple Music Sing, the 10-minute AirDrop limit that hit China first, new Sleep and Medication widgets, new Home app architecture and, with iPadOS 16.2, the ability to use Stage Manager on iPads with an external display, among other things. It will also bring 5G support to iPhones in India.
• A day after Apple revamped its App Store pricing, RevenueCat said it would roll out A/B price testing features.
• Apple is launching Advanced Data Protection, a feature that offers end-to-end encryption on iCloud backups, Notes, Photos and more in the U.S. in 2022, then globally, including China, in 2023. There will be 23 data categories protected, with the exception of iCloud Mail, Contacts and Calendar, because of the need to interoperate with other systems. The FBI is not happy.
• Apple also announced an iMessage feature that will help users verify they’re messaging only the people they intended, plus Apple ID support for hardware security keys.
• However, the company said it’s pausing its efforts in launching a CSAM detection tool for iCloud Photos.
• The developer series “Ask Apple” is returning December 12-16, for another week of one-on-ones and group Q&As around app building.
• Google’s Pixel update brings the Google One VPN and Clear Calling (call enhancement) feature to Pixel 7/7 Pro and automatic speaker labels in the Recorder app to Pixel 6 and up. All Pixel devices will also gain a new privacy hub for settings.

App Updates

Image Credits: TechCrunch

• Reddit rolled out its fun end-of-year Recap experience to users, which includes stats about your time on site, the communities you engage with the most and more. This year, seemingly inspired by the popular Spotify Wrapped experience, Reddit is also doling out personalized, sharable cards that include fun stats, like your most upvoted comment or if you’re team cat or dog, among other things.
• Snap announced at its annual Lens Fest it now has 300,000 developers building AR products and will soon allow creators to build Lenses that feature digital goods that can be purchased with Snap Tokens. Users will be able to unlock power-ups, AR items and extra tools within select Lenses as part of this test. Snap also announced a partnership ith Adidas for a Bitmoji Fashion Drop.

Image Credits: Snap

• Twitter is going to launch dual pricing for its upcoming Twitter Blue subscription relaunch. App Store users will pay $11 per month due to the “Apple tax,” while those who pay on the web will only be charged $7 per month.
• Calm’s meditation app is catering to gamers with the addition of new auditory environments from games like “Halo Infinite” and “Sea of Thieves,” which can help some people focus and boost their mood.
• Instagram’s latest feature will inform creators and brands if their content is ineligible for recommendation and why.

Image Credits: Instagram

• Celeb greetings app Cameo debuted Cameo Kids, offering personalized video messages from popular kids’ characters like Santa and Thomas the Tank Engine.

Image Credits: Cameo

• Epic Games launched Cabined Accounts for kids under 13 in Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys.
• Microsoft Teams wants to reach consumers with its new Communities feature for clubs and groups who need to organize and communicate. Slack and Discord also target this market, as do Facebook Groups and WhatsApp’s new Communities.
• Telegram is letting users sign-up without a SIM, by offering virtual numbers for purchase via “toncoins” in partnership with Fragment. The company also announced the 1 million subscriber milestone.
• WhatsApp added 3D avatars. Users can set the personalized avatars as their profile photo or choose from one of 36 stickers reflecting different emotions and actions.

Image Credits: WhatsApp

• TikTok released its year-end trends list. Apparently, a chocolate giraffe was very popular, as was a collection of dumb life hacks.
• Yelp takes on Angie’s List (now, just called Angi) with a new way to hire service professionals in the app.
• Amazon Luna now allows Prime members to play already purchased Ubisoft games on Luna without having to subscribe.
• YouTube is rolling out its own take on Twitch emotes.
• Snapchat-owned social mapping app Zenly is shutting down. RIP.
• Facebook Dating is now going to test the same age verification tech that Meta is currently testing on Instagram. ID uploads or selfie videos may be required for users suspected of being underage.
• Robinhood added a waitlist for a new Robinhood Retirement feature, which will offer IRAs with a 1% match on every dollar contributed.
• Roblox is going to allow users 13 and up to import their contacts and will introduce friend recommendations.

This Week in Twitter Drama

Image Credits: TechCrunch

A lot happened at the chaotic bird app company this week! In case you haven’t been keeping up with the drama, here’s a quick review:

• Twitter is trying to lure back advertisers with huge incentives, like matching $500,000 to $1 million in spending, up to $1 million cap. Twitter’s ad revenue is said to be 80% below expectations as of the World Cup’s November 20 start.
• Elon Musk made a big deal about publishing internal emails over Twitter’s Hunter Biden laptop drama. He’s calling these reveals “The Twitter Files.” But the hyped event fell a little flat as they only seemed to show a company having conversations over difficult content moderation decisions, ultimately resulting in the company taking the unusual step to limit the reach of a news story at the time over concerns it came from a hack and leak campaign by a Russian group and would violate Twitter’s anti-doxing policy. Twitter had already admitted, in hindsight (and with the aid of further information and reporting), the decision was wrong.
• Twitter’s new VP of Trust and Safety Ella Irwin said the company will now focus on using automation to moderate content, not removals.
• Twitter later released another “Twitter File” that again showed the company simply doing the difficult business of moderation, in this case conflating shadowbanning with de-amplification, as former Twitter exec Kayvon Beykpour pointed out, calling the characterization either “a lazy interpretation or deliberately misleading.”
• Additional concerns were raised as to whether or not the reporter tweeting the story (who is not a Twitter employee) was given internal systems access, as she included screenshots of Twitter’s internal systems in the posts.
• Musk also “exited” deputy general counsel Jim Baker, claiming there were concerns over Baker’s “possible role in suppression of information” related to the so-called Twitter Files.
• Musk said a later Twitter update will show users if they’ve been shadowbanned and why.
• Twitter allowed Andrew Anglin, a neo-Nazi and founder of the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, back on the app.
• Major brands’ ads appeared on the pages of two white nationalists after their accounts were restored by Musk. Ads from Amazon, Snap, Uber and others were among those impacted. Twitter later emailed advertisers to say it will launch controls to prevent ads from showing up next to certain keywords.
• Twitter is facing multiple lawsuits over layoffs, which could cost it millions in arbitration fees. Some workers on H-1B visas also said they didn’t get adequate immigration support.
• Twitter’s iOS app has been facing issues with a number of key security features, including the ability to protect tweets or toggle DM settings.
• Twitter will offer two different prices for Twitter Blue: a $7 per month subscription if you buy from the website, or $11 if you buy via in-app purchase, to offset the “Apple tax.”
• In the meantime, it started savagely changing legacy verified users‘ checkmarks to inform users who clicked that “this is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be notable.”
• Twitter shut down various developer-focused projects like Twitter Toolbox and others.
• Musk is now promising to delete 1.5 billion inactive accounts to free up usernames.

We’re Thinking About…

Image Credits: Facebook/Meta

A Facebook Twitter clone?

The New York Times took a look at the new startups and social apps capitalizing on Twitter’s chaos after the Musk takeover, also dropping the bombshell reveal that Meta may be cranking up its clone machine to dupe Twitter. The company had already been testing a short message-sharing feature in Instagram called Instagram Notes, but was now wondering if that sort of product should be its own standalone app or another feed within Instagram. While there’s a clear opportunity to gain traction amid Twitter’s transition when some users are looking for an out, we hope Meta doesn’t add even more clutter to the already overwhelmingly busy Instagram app and instead chooses to take a real risk here.

Meta hasn’t successfully launched a new app in years, so it’s easy to see why it wouldn’t want to try now. But it would be so, so interesting if it made a text-heavy, simplified version of Facebook — let’s call it FB Classic, (Gen Z loves nostalgia!) — where the News Feed instead becomes a real-time Twitter-like feed instead. No complicated navigation, no private groups, no Reels, no marketplace or game streams, or all the other detritus of today’s Facebook. Have it all run through Facebook’s existing systems for reporting and moderation. Let people privately post to friends or choose to be more public. Imagine if Facebook’s duped Twitter’s core feature set around posts, replies and threads, favorites and the like, but didn’t take on extra features. Perhaps even offer the ability to sync select posts from Facebook (and the forthcoming IG Notes) to the app’s Twitter-like feed for a minimalistic feed to get everyone started…I mean, I know Meta is building the metaverse now, but…a Twitter 2.0 arms race between Meta and Twitter itself would be wild to watch.

A Microsoft Super App?

Microsoft has discussed debuting a super app with web search, news and shopping to better compete with Google, according to The Information. It’s crazy to imagine how expensive and difficult it would be to get users to download another search app at this point in time, when even Google is complaining it’s losing search market share to TikTok and Instagram. Hey, maybe Microsoft should index TikTok and launch a Gen Z marketing campaign on the app, calling its new super app a better search engine for TikTok videos! Ha! After all, it did consider buying TikTok. Okay, okay, I kid. But if a Microsoft Super App is to succeed, it’s definitely going to need more than Bing (still cannot believe they named it that) to lure in the next generation of users.

Government, Policy and Lawsuits

• Meta failed in its attempt to annul a $267 million fine over WhatsApp’s breaching of GDPR transparency obligations.
• Indiana’s attorney general sued TikTok for deceiving users over China’s access to user data and exposing kids to mature content.
• EU regulators ruled that Meta can’t use its Terms of Service to require users to see personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram.
• Texas banned TikTok on government-issued devices. Other states have done the same, including South Dakota, South Carolina and Maryland.
• The SEC is investigating whether or not the social events app IRL misled investors. The company raised $170 million from SoftBank at a $1.17 billion valuation last year, but some employees told The Information they didn’t believe the app had the 20 million users it claimed to.
• Uber Eats settled a lawsuit with the City of Chicago for listing local restaurants in the Uber Eats and Postmates apps without the restaurants’ consent and charging excess commission fees. Uber will pay $10 million, $5 million of which will go toward paying damages to restaurants.

2023 Predictions

Data.ai released its annual report predicting the next big mobile trends for 2023 (below). The full report is here. Of particular interest is its bet that mobile ad spend will reach $362 billion next year.

Image Credits: data.ai

Funding and M&A

Norwegian grocery delivery app Oda raised 1.5 billion Norwegian crowns in equity (about $151 million) in funding at a lowered valuation of $353 million. The service operates in its home market as well as Finland and Germany.

Singapore super app Osome raised $25 million in Series B funding. The app helps business owners with administrative tasks like payroll, accounting and tax reporting and serves over 11,000 businesses.

Saudi Arabia-based food delivery service Jahez is acquiring The Chefz in a cash and stock deal for $173 million.

Downloads

Lensa AI

Image Credits: Lensa AI on Instagram (opens in a new window)

Well, you probably still want to see it! The avatars Lensa AI makes with Stable Diffusion are impressive, despite the controversy. It’s a great demo of a potential use case for AI, even if ethically fraught. Demand for AI avatars is clearly strong. Lensa’s popularity is having a knock-on effect across the App Store’s Top Charts, as now apps like AI Art, Image Generator; Meitu, Photo Editor & AI Art; Wonder, AI Art Generator; Dawn, AI Avatars; and Prequel, Aesthetic AI Editor have all entered the top 30. The apps are benefitting because they have “AI” in their names — and, in some cases, have bought App Store Search ads.

Also:

• Proton: The E2EE cloud storage service launched iOS and Android apps offering 1GB of storage for free, 200GB for $4 per month, or 500GB for $10 per month.
• Copilot: The popular budgeting and finance app launched a Mac counterpart.

This Week in Apps: Apple App Store’s new pricing, Twitter app makers shift to Mastodon, debate over Lensa AI by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

It seems perhaps the rules of fairness your parents taught you as children also apply to large multi-billion dollar defense contracts. This week the DoD announced that it was awarding four big tech companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle – an equal opportunity to share in a $9 billion contract to bring the department to the cloud.

The new program, which is dubbed the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), has a five and a half year window through 2028 with the four companies having an equal opportunity to access the $9 billion in funds, but with none being actually allocated as of yet to any of them.

“No funds will be obligated at the time of award; funds will be obligated on individual orders as they are issued,” the department said in a statement.

“The purpose of this contract is to provide the Department of Defense with enterprise-wide globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge.”

Whether this new contract solves the issues that arose around the original ill-fated DoD cloud procurement deal remains unclear. For those of you unfamiliar with the saga, the DoD cloud journey has been a long and twisted one.

It began in 2018 when the department announced the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure orJEDI for short. The cutesie Star Wars reference aside, the deal came under intense scrutiny because of its winner-take-all component, which immediately had companies complaining and jockeying for position for what was a $10 billion deal.

Oracle, which you’ll note has equal access in this deal, was particularly vocal, complaining that Amazon had an unfair advantage for a variety of reasons. In the end, it wasn’t Amazon that won the deal though, it was Microsoft. But that wasn’t the end of the story as Amazon challenged the result in court, claiming the previous president had a bias against former Amazon board chair (and former CEO) Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post newspaper.

After a lot of additional drama, the department finally pulled the plug on the whole thing in July 2021 and went back to square one.

And this week’s announcement is the culmination of that decision. The fact that it left the entire thing open-ended this time begs the question how this will all finally get resolved, but we have another five years to figure it out and see if the DoD can finally enter the cloud age without making the four major players (really, three and Oracle) unhappy again with who gets what.

Maybe mom really was right, and life isn’t cut up into equal pieces of pie.

This time, the DoD gives four tech titans equal shot at piece of $9B cloud contract by Ron Miller 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.

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

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

Twitter, Spotify, Meta and Coinbase all bash Apple’s App Store

Elon Musk wasn’t happy with Apple this week. The new Twitter exec claimed Apple threatened to remove the app from the App Store — which was not likely true. Instead of taking on the claims directly and starting a Twitter fight, Apple CEO Tim Cook invited Musk to Apple’s campus, where they took a walk and resolved their differences. Or at least that’s how Musk put it, referring to the potential Twitter ban as a “misunderstanding.”

“Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so,” said Musk regarding Twitter’s potential App Store removal.

That’s not to say Apple wouldn’t ever ban Twitter one day if it found itself so unmoderated that it was allowing unchecked hate speech or stoking violence. It once took action against Parler, and Twitter could see App Store policy enforcement if it devolved as well.

The Musk-Apple drama stirred others to tweet their App Store issues, too.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, for example, tweeted a long thread referencing Spotify’s anti-competitive complaints against the company, pointing also to Musk’s recent tweet railing against the 30% Apple tax.

Another longtime Apple critic, Coinbase, also posted a Twitter thread this week where the company claimed that users could no longer “send NFTs” in Coinbase Wallet on iOS because Apple decided to block the app’s last release until the feature was disabled. “Apple’s claim is that the gas fees required to send NFTs need to be paid through their In-App Purchase system, so that they can collect 30% of the gas fee,” the company’s official Twitter account stated. “For anyone who understands how NFTs and blockchains work, this is clearly not possible,” it said. “Apple’s proprietary In-App Purchase system does not support crypto so we couldn’t comply even if we tried.”

Gas fees are part of making transactions on a blockchain, but not a part that Coinbase profits from. Although some NFT marketplaces allow consumers to purchase NFTs using dollars instead of cryptocurrencies, that’s not the case here. Today, if a Coinbase user is trying to transfer an NFT to another person for free, they’d still have to pay a gas fee to complete the transaction — in cryptocurrency, not U.S. dollars. This fee goes to the blockchain’s validators, not Coinbase. And it fluctuates constantly based on a variety of factors, including how many transactions are taking place on that blockchain at the time.

Still, Apple’s new rules around NFTs require the use of in-app purchases for things like “minting, listing, and transferring,” they say. What’s not clear here is if an App Reviewer made a mistake in trying to apply Apple’s tax on what’s already sort of a tax or if Coinbase was intentionally trying to stoke consumer outrage. If the latter, it may have worked — the tweets made headlines, and prompted Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose company is currently suing Apple and Google over monopolistic practices, to chime in.

“If they can lawfully add a 30% Apple Tax to all NFT transactions, then they can lawfully add a 30% Apple Tax to all online banking and stock trading transactions,” Sweeney said.

Apple, in response to the Coinbase situation, said it would continue to work with Coinbase, as it does with all developers, to “explore viable solutions in this evolving space.” Hmm. 

Meanwhile, speaking at The NYT’s Dealbook conference this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had some sharp comments for Apple as well, with regard to its control of the app ecosystem.

“Apple has sort of singled themselves out as the only company that is trying to control unilaterally what apps get on a device,” Zuckerberg said. “I don’t think that’s a sustainable or good place to be.” The exec also noted that Google at least allowed users to sideload apps, which is what Meta plans to do with its VR ecosystem and AR headsets.

Hive’s security was so bad, it had to shut down 

Image Credits: Vlad Georgescu (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The team at the newly popular Twitter alternative Hive is in over its head. The company this week took the fairly radical step of fully shutting down its servers for a couple of days in response to concerns raised by security researchers who discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities on Hive, several of which they say remain unfixed. The issues they found would allow attackers access to all data, including private posts and messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages, as well as the ability to edit other people’s Hive posts.

The researchers, a part of a German collective called Zerforschung, claimed they confidentially reported the security vulnerabilities to Hive’s team, noting it was initially difficult to reach a point of contact at the company. Several days later, Hive replied, claiming the issues to be fixed, a Zerforschung blog post explains. However, the researchers found this was not the case, so they took their concerns to the public, warning people against using Hive’s app.

Shortly after, Hive announced it was temporarily shutting down its servers to address these problems. It also claimed, across several tweets, that they never told the researchers the issues were “fixed” but that they were “fixing” them, eventually deciding to go offline until problems were addressed.

It’s an unusual way to patch bugs, to say the least, and one that raises questions about the development workflow at the company. Is there not a dev environment where code is fixed, then staged for a release? How bad was the code that it requires a full stop of company operations to rework it?

Hive said the app will come back online after the issues are fixed and hinted it was raising funds that would allow it to implement more protections in the future. The company claims to have 2 million users, but data.ai only sees around 1.7 million total downloads.

Kanye West won’t buy Parler

In October, Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, announced alongside Parler’s owner that he would be purchasing the conservative-leaning social network for an unknown sum. But that deal is now off. The news followed West’s antisemitic statements during an interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, where the rapper praised Hitler and Nazis. In a statement, Parler’s owner Parlement Technologies confirmed the two have parted ways, saying the company “has mutually agreed with Ye to terminate the intent of sale of Parler.”

“This decision was made in the interest of both parties in mid-November. Parler will continue to pursue future opportunities for growth and the evolution of the platform for our vibrant community,” the statement read.

Apple & Google pick the Best Apps of the Year, and BeReal scores

Image Credits: Apple

It’s time for the annual app store awards. This year, relative newcomer BeReal — which hasn’t managed to ship a new feature all year — made it to the top of both stores’ “best of 2022” lists. Apple dubbed the photo-based social network its “App of the Year” while Google Play gave it the User’s Choice award. The app is a curious pick for a winner. Though BeReal has clearly gained a following, especially among younger Gen Z users, the company has yet to find a business model. That means Apple and Google make no money off the app’s promotion. Call me cynical, but it’s surprising the app platforms would tout an app that doesn’t directly benefit their bottom line in some way or one that at least makes clever use of some newer technology they’re trying to promote, like AR or GameKit. Instead, BeReal is a fairly basic app — you take photos and post them. They later disappear.

Perhaps Apple wanted to make a point by promoting an app that had no in-app purchases or one that would allow it to remind consumers (and developers!) that the App Store still produces relevant hits.

Other Apple winners included GoodNotes 5 for iPad, MacFamilyTree 10 for Mac, Vix for Apple TV and Gentler Streak for Apple Watch.

Apex Legends Mobile was iPhone game of the year and Google’s best game winner, while Moncage was the winner for iPad.

Google picked  Dream by WOMBO as this year’s Best App in the U.S., and released variations of its top list across its global markets.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• Apple announced it would once again keep its App Store open during the holiday season, though with slower review speeds. Typically, Apple says 90% of apps are reviewed in less than 24 hours, but times may lag during December 23 through December 27. Apple, in the past, would close the App Store to submissions over the holidays, but ended that practice last year.
• Apple is making digital car keys shareable in its iOS 16.1 software. The new functionality will allow iPhone users to share car keys in their Wallet with non-iPhone users, starting with Google Pixel devices, and later expanding to other Android phones. Keys can be shared via email, text message and WhatsApp.
• Apple released iOS 16.1.2, which included various security updates, improved compatibility with wireless carriers and crash detection optimizations for iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro models.
• Apple introduced a new “Today at Apple” session for kids in celebration of Computer Science Education Week. The session, “Coding Lab for Kids: Code Your First App,” is for kids 10+ and aims to introduce app development concepts.

Platforms: Google

• Google rolled out its latest Android update which introduced features like an accessible reader mode, a new YouTube Search widget, shareable digital car keys, new action tiles for WearOS and other special holiday features, like new designs for photo collages in Google Photos, among other things.
• As part of the update, Google launched a new Reading Mode app that helps people with visual imparities and dyslexia read content on the screen, especially articles.
• Google detailed CameraViewfinder, a new artifact from the Jetpack library that allows developers to quickly implement camera previews with minimal effort. The component “internally uses either a TextureView or SurfaceView to display the camera feed, and applies the required transformations on them to correctly display the viewfinder,” Google says.

E-commerce & Food Delivery

• Temu, a shopping app operated by China’s Pinduoduo, moved into the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store on November 12, after topping more than 5 million installs in the U.S.
• Food delivery app JOKR confirmed it’s closing down its operations in Santiago, Chile and Medellin, Colombia, which will see it letting go of 22 employees and 19 employees, respectively.
• Livestream shopping startup Firework, which built tech to enable live shopping, laid off 10% of staff just months after its SoftBank-led $150 million Series B.

Augmented Reality

Image Credits: Snapchat

• Snapchat partnered with Disney and rolled out an AR Lens to promote Disney’s release of “Avatar: The Way of Water” which turns the end user into a Na’vi. The film releases in theaters on December 16 in the U.S.
• Epic Games’ RealityScan app, which lets you scan real-world objects and turn them into 3D models for video games or other AR projects, launched to the public on iOS. The app had been a in limited beta release since April.

Fintech

• Venmo added support for in-app charitable donations, allowing users to give to the tens of thousands of certified charities available through the PayPal Giving Fund. The app also revamped its “send money” screen to make it easier to see who you’re sending funds to and the amount.

Social

• Pinterest is shutting down its Creator Rewards program that had allowed creators to earn money by creating content for the social network. The program will end on November 30, 2022, it said.
• TikTok began testing a research API, which provides access to public and anonymized data about the content and activity on its app. Members of TikTok’s Content and Safety Advisory Council will test an early version of the API to offer feedback on its usability.
• Meta rolled out new privacy updates for teens on Facebook and Instagram that will set all new users under the age of 16 (or 18 in some countries) to “private” accounts by default when they sign up. The company will also push teens already signed up on Facebook to choose more private settings in terms of who can see their friends’ list, posts they’re tagged in, who can comment on public posts and more.

Image Credits: Meta

• The Indian social network Koo has been gaining popularity in Brazil but has been struggling with moderation and security issues. In one case, hackers took control of a popular influencer Felipe Neto’s Koo account for a time, warning users about Koo’s lack of security.
• Twitter hired hacker George Hotz, who recently left Comma.ai, the driver assistance system startup he founded. Hotz is “interning” at Twitter, which actually means he’s taking a paid position for 12 weeks to fix issues with Twitter’s search engine which have been left unaddressed for years.
• Twitter also declared “general amnesty” for banned users, and is now working to reinstate 62,000 accounts with 10,000K+ followers. It had earlier allowed Kanye West back on the service after a suspension but had to ban him again for posting antisemitic tweets in violation of its rules. “FAFO,” Elon Musk tweeted, about his decision to ban Ye.
• Twitter said it will start showing users more algorithmic recommendations in the timeline, which it said would help users see more of the best content on the platform — something that could help newcomers get better situated and find interesting people to follow, as Twitter tries to grow.
• Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told employees they have to be in the office 80% of the time, 3-4 days per week, as of February 2023.
• Community reviews app Yelp introduced Spotlight Ads that allow businesses to reach consumers using video through the app’s homescreen.
• Discord opened up paid Server Subscriptions, a feature that began piloting last year, to allow more servers to offer premium memberships in exchange for server-specific perks. Subscriptions range in price from $2.99-$199.99 and subscribers choose their own perks. Discord takes a 10% cut.

Messaging

• WhatsApp launched a company directory on its Business Platform in Brazil, the U.K., Indonesia, Mexico and Columbia after initially testing the feature last year in São Paulo. The service helps users browse and discover local small businesses in their neighborhoods. The company also introduced the ability to find larger businesses from within the app through a Business Search feature.
• WhatsApp also launched a “Message Yourself” feature that allows users to send notes, reminders and shopping lists to themselves in the messaging app.
• Google will begin testing end-to-end encryption for RCS-based group chats on its Messages app. The feature will roll out to select users that are part of the app’s open beta program in the coming weeks.
• Substack’s Chat feature, which allows writers and creators to have discussions in a chat-like environment inside the Substack app, has expanded from iOS to Android.
• In response to a court order in India, Telegram disclosed the names of administrators, their phone numbers and IP addresses of channels that were accused of copyright infringement. Unrelated, the company also said it plans to build a decentralized crypto exchange and noncustodial wallets.
• LinkedIn rolled out a focused inbox and messaging safety tools in order to get a better grip on spam and scammers.

Dating

• Dating app Grindr closed its NYSE debut up 213.84% at $36.50 per share, CNBC reported. The app is trading under the ticker GRND after a SPAC merger to go public.
• Bumble launched a message-before-match feature, “Compliments,” allowing users to send a note to another person before connecting in the app. Tinder offers a similar option through its “Fast Chat” feature.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Spotify

• Spotify Wrapped 2022 officially arrived. Though other music services, including Apple Music and YouTube Music, also put together their own year-end retrospectives, Spotify’s personalized and interactive Wrapped experience remains the one to beat. The feature saw 30 million users accessing Wrapped in 2017, which grew to 120 million last year. This year’s big addition was something called “My Listening Personality,” which translates users’ listening behavior into one of the 16 personality types.
• Wattpad Webtoon Studios, the entertainment and publishing arm of the user-gen storytelling apps, announced an expansion of its exec ranks, bringing on Jason Goldberg as Director of Film, North America and Danni Xin as a Television Development Executive. Goldberg previously was VP of Scripted Film & TV at Gunpowder & Sky and Xin worked in original series development at Topic Studios.
• Google announced that Google TV and Android TV will be requiring Android App Bundles that are archivable starting in May 2023. The change is meant to help save storage for users.
• Spotify expanded its new audiobooks service across more English-speaking markets, including he U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Users will have access to over 300,000 titles which have to first be purchased through Spotify’s website instead of in-app as the company is trying to avoid app store fees.
• After the Instafest web app blew up, allowing Spotify users to make festival posters from their listening history, the originator of a similar trend is doing the same. LineupSupply — an app that lets you make playlists from real-world concert posters — added a new Rewind function that creates a poster based on your listening history over a select period of time.
• YouTube experienced an hours-long outage, which saw the iOS app crashing when users tried to watch videos.

Gaming

Image Credits: Netflix

• Netflix launched 9 more mobile games, including Gameloft’s Farmville clone, Country Friends. Others include Reigns Three Kingdoms, a card-swiping strategy game; Skies of Chaos, an arcade-style shoot-em-up game; Flutter Butterflies, a game for butterfly collectors and Cats & Soups, a relaxing cooking game; Hello Kitty Happiness Parade; Immortality; a new Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales; and a TV-only game, Triviaverse.
• In Epic Games’ court case against Google, the Fortnite maker was said to have allegedly paid around $360 million over three years to keep Activision Blizzard from launching its own app store to compete with Google Play.
• Indian social network ShareChat, backed by Twitter, Tiger Global and Temasek, is closing its fantasy sports app Jeet11 and has laid off 5% of staff.
• Norwegian artist Aurora is hosting an in-game concert, but it’s not in Fortnite, Roblox or Minecraft. Rather, the artist’s December 8 performance will be within the popular game Sky: Children of the Light, which has more than 160 million downloads across iOS, Android and Switch.

Government & Policy

• The U.K.’s antitrust watchdog is looking into the iOS-Android mobile duopoly, with a focus on mobile browsers and cloud gaming. The government is concerned the companies are restricting competition and harming consumers.
• The U.K. government also said it’s expanding the scope of online safety legislation by criminalizing the encouragement of self-harm on online platforms following a teen’s suicide. The teen had viewed thousands of pieces of online content about self-harm and suicide on Instagram and Pinterest.

Security & Privacy

• 1Password said passkey support for secure user logins to apps, including iOS and Android apps, will launch in early 2023.
• TikTok and Bumble said they plan to use StopNCII.org’s database of hashtags of nude images and videos in order to block revenge porn on their apps. Meta has been using it since 2021.

Funding and M&A

Mark Cuban-backed streaming app Fireside, which offers podcasters and other creators a way to host interactive, live shows with audience engagement, acquired the open streaming TV platform Stremium. The deal, for an undisclosed sum, will allow Fireside’s shows to become available to a range of connected TV devices, including Amazon Fire TV, Roku, smart TVs and others.

Cobee, a Madrid-based app offering employee benefits, raised €40 million in Series B funding, co-led by Octopus Ventures and Notion Capital. The app helps employees browse and activate the benefits their employer offers, including programs for meals, transportation, day care, training, gift cards, rent, life and health insurance and soon, more.

Fizz, a social media app for college students, raised $12 million in Series A funding led by NEA. The app co-founded by Stanford dropouts Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer is now led by seed investor Rakesh Mathur and is now live on 25 college campuses and is only available to college students. Students can publish text posts, polls and photos anonymously — a formula for fast growth that typically comes with serious repercussions at scale.

Daylight, an LGBTQIA+-friendly digital bank, raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Anthemis Group. The fintech differentiates itself by offering debit cards with customers’ chosen names, which don’t always match their ID, and it offers 10% cash back when they support queer and allied business partners, in addition to more standard mobile banking features.

Digital photo frame maker Aura raised $26 million in a mix of debt and equity led by Lago Innovation Fund. The company’s app, which now nears 3 million users after selling 1 million photo frames, helps connect family members connect and share their photos across devices.

Feature phone platform startup KaiOS raised $3.4 million in the form of a convertible note from Finnfund, an impact investor out of Finland. The company previously raised $50 million from Cathay Innovation, Google and TCL in 2019. The company says over 170 million KaiOS devices have shipped.

New Delhi-based diabetes management app BeatO raised $33 million in Series B funding led by Lightrock India. Flipkart and others participated in the round. The startup wants to reach over 10 million people by 2025.

Ivory Coast finance app Djamo raised $14 million in funding from YC, alongside three lead investors — Enza Capital, Oikocredit and Partech Africa — for its app providing financial services to the underbanked and unbanked population.

Zoe, the maker of a COVID-reporting app, shifted back to its original mission and raised $30 million in new funding to refocus on nutrition and health.

The Truth Social SPAC was put on hold. Digital World Acquisition Corp. said investors voted to extend the deadline to merge with Truth Social — in a SPAC that would take the company public. The merger has been pushed back to September 2023, as regulators are investigating the deal.

Downloads

Lensa AI

Image Credits: Lensa AI on Instagram (opens in a new window)

An older app called Lensa AI is having a moment. The photo and video editing app first launched in 2018, but a new feature that allows users to create “magic avatars” has driven the app to the No. 1 spot on the App Store’s competitive Photo & Video chart following the feature’s late November launch. Using a selection of 10-20 photos, the app uses Stable Diffusion to generate avatars of you that look like they were created by a digital artist — perfect for sharing across social media. The free version of the app doesn’t include the magic avatars. Instead, users will need to pay either $3.99 for 50 (five variations of 10 styles) or subscribe to the unlimited plan ($39.99/year). You can read more about the feature and how it works here.

Indie App Santa

Image Credits: Indie App Santa

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for free and discounted iPhone apps, that is. Indie App Santa is back! The initiative started to help smaller app developers reach new audiences without having to pay for expensive App Store ads. The event, which began in 2020, is now entering its third year, offering both a Twitter feed of deals as well as an Advent calendar-style app of its own where iPhone users can unlock one premium app either for free or for a sizable discount every day. The deals started December 1, 2022 and will run through January 10, 2023. It’s sort of like a month-long Black Friday event, but only for indie apps. This year, there will be 40 deals, half of which include free apps. Read more about Indie App Santa here.

This Week in Apps: The year’s best apps, Twitter rival Hive’s security woes, App Store backlash grows by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch