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.

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Elon Musk is buying Twitter…again…maybe

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Elon Musk delivered another week of Twitter deal drama. After initially trying to worm out of the now-overpriced deal, the Tesla and SpaceX exec this week decided he would go through with the purchase after all. It was speculated that Musk may have seen the writing on the wall, and realized this legal battle was one he couldn’t win. (After all, he can’t simultaneously claim he wants to fix the Twitter bot problem by buying the network and then claim that there are just too darned many bots here — and that Twitter is lying about them, when in fact, its SEC filings indicate otherwise. Right?!)

But it had also come to light that Twitter had been given the go-ahead by the judge to proceed with a probe that would allow it to seek out information as to whether the Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko had contacted Musk’s lawyers before he tried to exit the deal.

It seems that Twitter’s discovery had uncovered an anonymous email claiming to be a former Twitter exec involved with Twitter’s Trust & Safety team that had been sent to Musk’s attorney on May 6. And Twitter wanted to find out if the legal team or Musk followed up to determine the sender’s identity. A judge agreed Twitter could dig in — and this was just before Musk changed his mind to move forward with the purchase. So perhaps it was this deep dive into more files and communications that Musk wanted to avoid? Maybe he didn’t want to be asked about this under oath?

In any event, Musk said the deal was on and Twitter’s stock jumped over 22% on the news. But the matter wasn’t immediately resolved.

As it turned out, Musk and Twitter hadn’t reached an agreement to end their litigation, and neither party had filed anything to stop the court case from proceeding. So the judge alerted them that the trial was still on and would start on October 17, 2022, as planned. But!… Twitter wasn’t ready to take Musk at his word about this sudden change of heart. The judge, however, agreed to give Musk’s team until October 28, 2022 — the date Musk’s team said they could close by — to see if the transaction goes through. If not, the parties will be given November 2022 trial dates, the judge said.

Now the deal is hinging on the “receipt of the proceeds of the debt financing,” Bloomberg reported. Morgan Stanley and half a dozen banks underwrote the debt financing for the deal, and given the market conditions, they may find it more difficult to find buyers for the bonds and loans — possibly taking a loss on portions of the package, the report said. But they’re not likely to back out or find a legal means of doing so. Which means…Elon is buying Twitter again. We think!

Go ahead, edit Your tweets

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

And if that wasn’t enough Twitter news for the week, then there’s this other small tidbit: Twitter’s Edit button has arrived.

The long-requested feature has now rolled out to Twitter Blue’s U.S. subscribers, in addition to subscribers in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The feature allows users to edit their tweets for up to 30 minutes after posting — something that could help users clarify or correct a mistake in their tweet, fix a small typo or add hashtags, among other things. The edits are logged and visible to the public to prevent abuse. Additionally, Twitter said users can only edit their tweets five times within the 30-minute period, which is also meant to cut down the feature’s abuse.

But many are still concerned that bad actors will find a way to take advantage of the addition to edit tweeting in misleading ways. Plus, it comes at a time when user demand for an edit button may have been quelled, given that Twitter last year introduced an “Undo Tweet” feature for its subscribers. This lets users quickly fix a typo after they post — likely cutting down on one of the major use cases for an Edit button. With “Undo Tweet,” users can delay their tweets for up to a minute, giving them time to re-read posts and fix errors, if needed.

The edit feature was also one of Musk’s big ideas for fixing Twitter, we should point out. Shortly after taking a board seat at Twitter (remember when that was the big Twitter news?!), he polled his 80.5 million followers to ask if they wanted an edit button — either a tease of the planned announcement or a desire to look like he was already taking action at Twitter. A day later, Twitter announced an edit button was actually in the works after years of saying the opposite. But Twitter denied it was Musk’s idea.

While the edit option is now live, its impact may be limited. The majority of Twitter’s users are not paying for a subscription to Twitter Blue at this time, and it’s unclear that this feature’s addition — however much they had clamored for it — will change that.

Google gets serious about wearables

Image Credits: Google

The other big news this week in the mobile realm took place at Google’s annual hardware event. While the event focused on Google’s new line of Pixel devices, including the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel Watch, it’s the latter that may be of more interest to app developers as it signaled Google’s intention to get serious about its wearable strategy. While Google had competed in this space with Android Wear and Wear OS, the new Pixel Watch is the company’s first smartwatch.

The device differentiates itself from the Wear OS-powered watches from other brands, like Samsung, with a unique look and feel. It’s smaller, rounded and looks more like a premium device. This is an interesting entry point, given that Apple’s new high-end watch, the Apple Watch Ultra, has gone in the opposite direction — with a hefty, oversized version that can look ridiculous on smaller wrists. The Pixel Watch won’t have that problem.

Google had signaled its interest in wearables long before now, with its $2.1 billion Fitbit deal, $40 million acquisition of Fossil IP and Samsung partnership. Fitbit’s health-tracking features make the new Pixel Watch a more serious competitor to Apple, with additions like heart rate monitoring, ECG/AFib detection, sleep detection and more. But Google is also considering the wider app ecosystem alongside its hardware investment. The company also recently revamped Google Play to make it easier for users to search and filter for non-smartphone apps, including those for smartwatches and tablets — another area Google plans to take more seriously.

At the event, Google teased its upcoming Pixel tablet, to be released next year, which will continue the Pixel line to a bigger screen. It also plans to offer a clever charging speaker dock that will allow consumers to use their tablet as they would any other smart display or smart screen in their home.

Separately, Google also announced a series of updates to Google Assistant alongside the Pixel 7 launch, which will see the smart assistant improving its abilities in areas like voice typing, navigating businesses’ phone menus, voice message transcription and more. One of the better improvements here is the Google Duplex-powered “Direct My Call” service which will now display a business’s phone tree options on the smartphone’s screen when you call, so you can just tap the button you need instead of listening to all the choices.

Instagram’s ad load increase

Image Credits: LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP / Getty Images

Meanwhile, Meta this week began exploring a way to stem its advertising revenue losses.

Following another quarter that saw marketers pull back on their ad spending, Meta announced it’s increasing its ad load on Instagram with the launch of two new ad slots. The company said it will now allow advertisers to run ads on the Explore home page and in profile feeds and will debut a new ad format for Facebook Reels.

The Explore home refers to the page people land on when they first tap on Instagram’s Explore tab. Here, users can browse a page of suggested and trending content, or tap on buttons at the top of the screen to dive into various trends. Historically, Instagram had only placed ads on Explore within the Explore feed — that is, when a person taps on a post and scrolls. But now, it’s expanding to the Explore home page itself, as it says it sees users spending meaningful time there, Instagram told TechCrunch. This is already rolling out globally.

It will also insert ads in the profile feed which is the feed that appears when a user visits another person’s profile on the app and then taps on one of their posts and scrolls. And in Facebook Reels, it’s adding “post-loop” ads — four- to 10-second skippable ads and standalone video ads that play after a Reel has ended before the Reel resumes and loops again.

These additional ad units serve to boost the company’s ability to pull in revenue at a time when Meta has been seeing declining ad sales. It also follows Meta’s report of its first-ever quarterly revenue decline in Q2, which came shortly after its first decline in daily active users. While its revenue dropped only 1% in Q2, from $29.07 billion in the second quarter of 2021 to $28.82 billion in Q2 2022, Meta has worried investors with its troubling Q3 forecast. The company said it saw third-quarter revenue potentially declining between 2% and 11% year-over-year to somewhere in the range of $26 billion to $28.5 billion.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• iOS 16.1 beta testers were disappointed to find out that the “Adaptive Transparency” toggle that appeared in their AirPods settings was actually a bug, and not a promise of bringing the feature to older AirPods models. Apple confirmed this by removing the setting in the new beta release.
• Meanwhile, another feature in the latest iOS 16.1 beta shows Apple tweaking the design of the Dynamic Island to include a light gray border around the outside of the feature when it’s activated on a darker background or wallpaper.
• Apple seeded iOS 16.1, tvOS 16.1 beta 4 and iPadOS 16.1 beta 5 for developers, as well as the tenth developer beta of macOS Ventura.
• Apple named new vice presidents for its Maps, Services and Silicon teams, Bloomberg reported. Twenty-year Apple veteran Max Muller will become a VP overseeing Maps. Payam Mirrashidi is a new VP of engineering in Services. And Johny Srouji, Charlie Zhai and Fabian Klas are becoming VPs in the Silicon group. The appointments follow the firing of VP of Procurement Tony Blevins over sexist comments he made in a TikTok video.
• App developers who applied for a share of Apple’s $100 million App Store class action settlement, which saw the creation of the Small App Developer Assistance Fund, have been alerted that the distribution of their payments should occur before the end of October.

Platforms: Google

Image Credits: Google

• Google’s anticipated iOS 16 Lock Screen widgets have begun to arrive. The launches arrived starting last week with updates to the Chrome and Drive apps, and this week saw new widgets appear for its Gmail and Google News apps, as well. Still on its way are Search and Maps widgets. Google hasn’t explained why Calendar is not included, however.

E-commerce and Food Delivery

• DoorDash announced a new service, Drinks with DoorDash, that allows users to order food from one place and drinks from another — like a nearby liquor, convenience or grocery store. (Yep, dashers are going to love this.)
• In the same week, Grubhub and Gopuff partnered on grocery and alcohol delivery, allowing Grubhub customers to shop thousands of products from moe than 500 Gopuff locations via the membership program, Grubhub+.
• Recelery, a pantry tracker app and online marketplace for select food items, relaunched this past weekend to tweak a number of its features. It expanded the limit of pictures that users can post, introduced new markers to show the specific date when an item was added and now allows users to sell up to 25 items at a time.

Augmented Reality

Image Credits: Snap

• Snapchat is embracing Halloween via AR. Starting October 11, the app will roll out an AR shopping experience that allows users to virtually try on and buy costumes of some of their favorite TV and movie characters, including those from “Hocus Pocus,” “Squid Game,” “Stranger Things,” “Power Rangers,” “Transformers,” “The Office,” “Harry Potter” and others.
• Lucky Charms upgraded its cereal box with an AR game built using Niantic’s 8th Wall platform.

Fintech

• Sen. Warren’s office released a report that said fraud and scams are taking place on P2P payments app Zelle, but banks are refusing to refund customers for 53% of the defrauded funds.
• Venmo rolled out Charity Profiles in the app that allows charitable organizations to raise funds directly if they’ve already received confirmed charity status from Venmo parent PayPal.
• Investing app Stash, which raised $125 million from investors in a Series G round last year, announced it’s adding crypto to the set of products it offers its 2 million users.

Social

• TikTok added a handful of editing tools that will allow users to adjust clips, sounds, images and text in new ways. The additions include tools to stack, trim, split and speed up and slow down clips, plus others for cutting, trimming and setting the durations for sounds used in videos. Others focus on text placement and images, including a new Photo Mode feature for sharing a carousel of images that automatically display one after another.

Image Credits: TikTok

• ByteDance reported its revenue grew to $61.7 billion in 2021, but operating losses reached $7.15 billion due to investments in growth, a report to staff said, per The WSJ.
• Pinterest partnered with Headspace to offer creators a free six-month subscription in 20 countries worldwide, making it the first platform to provide such an offering, it said.
• A new lawsuit in California, filed by the Social Media Victims Law Center, targets companies Meta, Snap, Discord and Roblox for making platforms that contain features designed to encourage addiction to “the detriment of their minor users.” It brings up mental health issues, including suicide attempts, which it alleges are linked to use of these platforms.
• Twitter rolled out a new feature that lets users post images, videos and GIFs in a single tweet. It also expanded its experimental Status feature, for tagging tweets with moods and activities, to more of its users.
• Reddit began testing a new live chat feature in a chat tab in its app. Users who have access to the test will see three options to filter chats: live chats, Messages and requests — or they can view “All” chats.
• Facebook introduced new tools that allow users to customize their feeds by telling the app which posts they want to see more or less of, from across their friends, groups and other post recommendations. The feature will also be tested with Reels.
• Meta settled a lawsuit with BrandTotal and Unimania, companies engaging in scraping operations of Facebook and Instagram data. The settlements terms weren’t disclosed, but in addition to agreeing to stop the practice, Meta said the companies agreed to pay a “significant sum.”

Messaging

• WhatsApp for iOS expanded its feature called “View Once,” which lets users send photos and videos that disappear after they’re opened for the first time, similar to Snapchat. The feature first launched last year and will now work with screenshots and screen recordings, too.
• Even Signal is copying Stories now. The feature is now in beta and the Stories will disappear after 24 hours.

Dating

Image Credits: Tinder

• Tinder rolled out a new feature to help its users get ready to vote in the U.S. midterms. The dating app maker partnered with BallotReady to launch an Election Center within the app’s Explore section where users can register to vote, find their polling stations and access breakdowns of their local ballot measures.
• Bumble is testing a speed-dating feature that allows users to chat before matching, similar to Tinder’s own Fast Chats feature. The feature is live in the U.K. already.
• A Wired investigation found there were an increasing number of fake profiles of men on the Match-owned Hinge dating app. The profiles appear to be using AI-generated images and oddly written profile text that indicates English isn’t their first language. In chatting with the profiles, the reporter discovered they weren’t bots, but rather scammers hiding behind the fake accounts.

Streaming & Entertainment

• Apple Music announced a new milestone of reaching 100 million songs — a 100,000x increase since the debut of the original iPod some 21 years ago. To celebrate, Apple launched a new Apple Music Today series that will pick a new song every day and dive into its history.
• YouTube has been experimenting with asking some users to purchase a Premium subscription in order to watch videos in 4K resolution, currently a free feature.

Reading & News

• Facebook killed its Substack competitor, Bulletin, the newsletter service launched last year. Bulletin writers will earn subscription revenue until the platform’s closure in 2023, but will then need to migrate subscribers to another sevice.
• Substack launched its Reader app on Android, which allows users to access all their Substack subscriptions in one place alongside their RSS feeds.

Image Credits: Substack

Productivity

• Readdle launched a new version of its email app Spark, for desktop and mobile devices, which now offers subscription-based email management. The app, reviewed here by The Verge, organizes emails into bundles like newsletters and notifications, and elevates emails from real people. The app includes a bevy of other features, like focus schedules, thread muting, a gatekeeper function (to permit or deny access to your inbox) and more.

Utilities

• Alongside its new Nest Doorbell and faster Wi-Fi router, Google launched a redesigned version of its Home app for Android. The redesigned app arrived in parallel with the release of the Matter 1.0 standard, and includes faster Matter pairing and other new customization options to personalize the app to end users.

Government & Policy

• Russia fined TikTok 3 million rubles (around $51,000) for violating its anti-LGBTQ laws. Russia claims TikTok failed to delete content it called propaganda. It also fined Twitch for hosting an interview with a Ukrainian political figure, which it said contained fake information.

Security & Privacy

• Meta’s security team disclosed it had identified more than 400 malicious apps posing as photo editing tools, games, utilities, lifestyle apps, VPNs and more that were actually malware. The apps would prompt users to enter their Facebook login credentials to use the app, but this information was then stolen, allowing scammers to gain access to the user’s Facebook account and any other account that used the same username/password combo. Meta said it’s not able to determine how many people fell for this scam, but identified at least 1 million potentially impacted users.

Funding and M&A

Montana-based onX, the maker of navigation apps for hunting, hiking, off-roading and other outdoor activities, raised an $87.4 million Series B led by Summit Partners.

Spotify said it’s acquiring Dublin, Ireland-based content moderation tech company Kinzen, to aid with its global content moderation efforts. Deal terms were undisclosed. Kinzen, a Spotify partner since 2020, uses a combination of ML and human expertise to alert and flag dangerous misinformation and harmful content — something the streamer is facing more issues with as it invests heavily into podcasting and other forms of audio. Joe Rogan, for example, created a headache for Spotify when he spread COVID-19 vaccine-related misinfo on his show.

Duolingo acquired its first startup, a Detroit-based animation studio, Gunner, that created art for the company and others, including Amazon, Dropbox, Spotify and Google. Deal terms weren’t disclosed.

An anonymous social app for college kids, Fizz, announced its raise of $4.5 million in seed funding, led by entrepreneur and investor Rakesh Mathur, who also joined the Stanford student-founded startup as its CEO. Lightspeed, Octane and other angels also invested in the app that claims to have deep penetration on college campuses.

South Korean search giant Naver announced plans to acquire the secondhand apparel marketplace Poshmark for $1.2 billion in cash. The deal values publicly traded Poshmark at $17.90, or a 15% premium over the closing price at the time of the announcement.

Mobile banking app Jiko raised $40 million in Series B funding in a round led by Red River West, bringing the company’s total raise to date to $87.7 million. The app has evolved from a consumer-focused model to B2B, and now gives companies low-cost access to short-term treasury bills.

Singapore-online shopping rewards app ShopBack raised $80 million more to extend its Series F round to more than $310 million. The new investor is the state investment giant’s late-stage fund, Temasek Holdings Pte. The company is now valued at nearly $1 billion.

Downloads

Neeva (European launch)

Image Credits: Neeva

An ad-free search engine, Neeva, launched to the U.S. last year is now heading to Europe — specifically, the U.K., France and Germany. The service promises a way to both search the web and private, personal accounts like Gmail or Dropbox from any device, without having to view ads or have user data compromised. It does this by offering a premium membership, which provides additional privacy tools and other benefits to paid subscribers.

The service is available on desktop via a Chrome extension and on iOS and Android via native mobile apps.

This week, TechCrunch’s Paul Sawers sat down with Neeva co-founder and CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy in London to get an update on the three-year-old company as it expands to new markets. (You can read that interview here and learn more about Neeva’s business.)

This Week in Apps: Twitter gets an Edit button, Instagram increases ads, Google gets serious about wearables by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Google’s anticipated iOS 16 Lock Screen widgets have now begun to arrive. Alongside the launch of Apple’s new mobile operating system, iOS 16, the search giant last month had teased its plans to support the iPhone’s newest feature that allows users to place widgets directly on their phone’s lock screen, offering information and easy access to favorite apps. Google said it would soon release widgets for a number of its top apps, including Search, Maps, Gmail and others.

Google’s set of iOS 16 widgets are now becoming available, following rollouts that began last week with updates to the Chrome and Drive apps.

With the latest set of app updates, Google users can add Lock Screen widgets for popular apps like Gmail and Google News, as well. However, the two most in-demand widget releases — Search and Maps — are still pending. And Google has yet to announce plans to launch a Google Calendar widget, for some reason, despite the fact that easy access to your daily schedule is one of the better use cases for iOS 16 Lock Screen widgets.

The new Gmail widget comes in all three sizes: circular, rectangular and inline. The first two are meant to be placed below the clock on the Lock Screen, while the inline widget appears above as a line of text.

In Gmail’s case, the inline widget will display a shortened date (like “Wed 7”) followed by the number of messages in your inbox. (In case you like to stress every time you look at your iPhone!) Meanwhile, the rectangular widget breaks down how many new messages are in each category — like Social, Updates or Promotions — which helps you to determine if the emails you’ve received are actually important. The smaller, circular widget just displays how many new messages you have.

Image Credits: Google

The newly added Google News widget brings short headlines to the Lock Screen as a rectangular widget. When tapped, you’ll be taken directly to the Google News mobile app to read the full story. This one can be a bit hard to read for those with poor eyesight as it may try to cram as many as four lines of text into the small space provided. While you can likely see that fine in the blown-up image below, viewing this on a phone screen is more difficult.

Image Credits: Google News widget

Drive and Chrome’s widgets arrived a few days ago. The former offers a rectangular widget for quick access to Drive’s “suggested files,” as well as two circular widgets to either search your files with a tap or access your Starred files.

Chrome’s widget offers a variety of options, including a circular widget that you can tap to launch Google Search within Chrome — a good workaround until the default Search widget arrives — and three others for launching incognito search, voice search and even Chrome’s “Dino Game” that typically appears on the desktop when you’re offline.

We anticipate the launch of the Search and Maps widgets soon. Search, similar to Chrome, will let you start a Google search from the Lock Screen, including a voice search. But we’re awaiting the Google Lens and Google Translate widgets that ship with this one. Lens, in particular, is where a lot of Google’s innovation today lies as it prepares to expand its multi-search experiences that combine both text and images for more advanced queries.

Maps, of course, will be useful to regular communters who want to see real-time traffic updates and estimated travel times to places like your office or home address.

Google hasn’t yet offered a time frame for its other widget releases, but given the cadence of these updates, they should be here soon.

Google begins rolling out its iOS 16 Lock Screen widgets by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

At its Search On event this afternoon, Google announced a number of shopping-related changes and new features across areas that include visual shopping, personalization and buying with the help of trusted reviews. The additions aim to help the company better attract online consumers to shop on Google, instead of starting their searches directly on Amazon — as has become the norm for many online shoppers today.

Of significant concern, Amazon has been steadily eating into Google’s core search advertising business over the years and is projected to capture 14.6% of the U.S. digital ad revenue market share by 2023, data from Insider Intelligence indicates. Google’s share meanwhile, is expected to drop to 24.1% by that time, down from the 31.6% share it had in 2019, the report said.

To combat this threat, Google has been investing heavily into its Google Shopping services, including by making listings free for merchants then integrating those free listings into Google Search results. Now, the search and ads giant has grown its shopping graph to 35 billion product listings — a figure that’s increased by nearly 10 billion over the past year, the company notes.

One of the new ways Google hopes to better compete is to make shopping on Google feel more fun for consumers than if they simply ran a product search on Amazon’s site.

On this front, the company is launching a new feature called “Shop the Look” in the U.S. which will be discoverable as part of the now more visual shopping experience on Google. This feature will position a shoppable display of products alongside lifestyle imagery, guides, and other tools in your search results. It can also be triggered by typing the word “shop” ahead of your query, like “shop bomber jackets,” for instance.

Image Credits: Google

To “shop the look,” users will be able to view the product they had searched for — like a jacket — along with other items that complete the outfit, which can also be shopped from the same tool, similar to features previously launched with Google Lens.

They’ll also be able to see trending products that are popular right now within the same category of the item they searched for from across different brands and designers. (Google defines trending as those products that meet a certain threshold for an increase in searches and user interactions over the past week, it says). These features will arrive in the U.S. this fall.

To make shopping listings themselves more compelling, Google will soon begin to pilot test a 3D shopping feature for shoes, to follow up on its existing support for 3D home goods — a change that Google claims delivered increased engagement. Users interacted with 3D images almost 50% more than static images, the company said.

Initially, the 3D imagery will be tested with a handful of retail partners to start before scaling up. To support this, the company developed a way to automate 3D asset creation. Via machine learning improvements, Google can now use just a handful of product photos to build the 3D image. This new model relies on a neural radiance field technology, a type of neural network also known as NeRF, which can create novel views of 3D scenes using 2D images, Google explains.

Initially, the pilot will include a handful of merchants like Van’s and Skechers, but Google expects to add more over time, including smaller sellers.

“While some merchants have this kind of 3D imagery available, for many others — especially the smaller merchants — creating these types of 3D assets can be really expensive and time-consuming,” said Lilian Rincon, Senior Director of Product for Shopping at Google. “We really think has the potential to change the game for small merchants and we’re excited to get it out,” she added.

Image Credits: Google

Another new feature is designed to help people make more complex shopping decisions that typically require a lot of research.

Typically, consumers will read a variety of sources to make a decision about a more high-value product, including product reviews, news, online articles, recommendation sites, customer reviews, and more. To simplify this process, Google has introduced a new “Buying Guide” which will aggregate the most helpful resources from across a range of trusted sources, including Google user reviews, articles, product reviews and more. This feature has launched in the U.S. but will expand to include more insight categories soon.

Image Credits: Google

In addition, Google will add a new tool called “Page Insights” to the Google app in the U.S. in the months ahead. This will allow consumers to learn more about the products on a website, including their pros and cons and star rating. They can also opt-in to receive price drop updates on the items they’re tracking.

However, one of the biggest changes coming to Google Shopping is the addition of opt-in personalization, arriving in the U.S. later this year.

While companies like Meta and Snap have struggled with the impact of Apple’s privacy changes (App Tracking Transparency) that allowed users to opt-out of tracking, limiting sites’ ability to show them personalized ads, Google’s response to the privacy crackdown is to allow consumers to directly choose to personalize their shopping experience with intentional clicks.

To do so, consumers can tap buttons to direct Google to remember the types of categories they want to shop — like “Women’s Department” instead of the “Men’s Department,” for example — or even tap to choose favorite brands to ensure those are highlighted in their future Google Shopping search results. The company says the idea was prompted by its user research, as consumers told the company they were frustrated with seeing irrelevant search results.

Google says the user is in control of these settings and can turn them on or off at any time.

“We’ve taken a lot of time to do this very carefully because we absolutely want to make sure that people feel like they’re in control…if you, at any point, don’t want to share this information with Google — if you want to turn it off…you can do that,” says Rincon.

Image Credits: Google

Google is also adding new shopping filters that appear on pages as you search for various products, which will now adapt to search trends. That is, you might see “wide leg” or “bootcut” appear when shopping for jeans right now, because those styles are currently popular across Google.com searches. These “dynamic filters” are live now available in the U.S., Japan, and India, and will arrive in more regions over time.

Finally, the Google mobile app will highlight suggested styles based on your past shopping searches and what others have been shopping for on Google. You can tap on these suggestions and see where to buy the products via Google Lens.

Image Credits: Google

Combined, Google believes these changes will help to make shopping on its platform easier and, in some cases, more fun for consumers. But the larger reality here is that Google needs to find a way to keep users from diverting their searches to other sites, like Amazon, as doing so impacts its ability to sell ads and its bottom line.

Google revamps shopping with 3D images, shoppable looks, buying guides, and more personalization by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

A new Google feature that will allow users to search using both images and text combined in to find local retailers who offer the apparel, home goods or the food you’re looking for will soon roll out to users in the U.S., Google announced today at its “Search On” event. The company had first previewed this feature at its Google I/O developer conference this May, signaling a development that seemed to be built in a future where AR glasses could be used to kick off searches.

The capability builds on Google’s A.I.-powered “multisearch” feature introduced in April, which let users combine a photo and text to craft custom searches, initially around shopping for apparel. For instance, you could search Google using a photo of a dress but then type in the word “green” to limit search results to just those where the dress was available in that specific color.

Multisearch Near Me, meanwhile, expanded this functionality even further, as it could then point the user to a local retailer that had the green dress in stock. It could also be used to locate other types of items, like home goods, hardware, shoes, or even a favorite dish at a local restaurant. 

“This new way of searching is really about helping you connect with local businesses, whether you’re looking to support your local neighborhood shop or you just need something right away can’t wait for the shipping,” said Cathy Edwards, VP and GM of Search at Google.

Image Credits: Google

At Google’s developer conference, the company had previewed how the feature would work, as users could leverage their phone’s camera or upload an image to begin this different type of search query. The company also demonstrated how a user could one day pan their camera around the scene in front of them to learn more about the objects in front of them — a feature that would make for a compelling addition to AR glasses, some speculated.

However, this feature itself was not yet available to users at the time — it was just a preview.

Today, Google says Multisearch Near Me is going to roll out to U.S. users in the English language “this fall.” It didn’t give an exact launch date.

Plus, the multisearch feature itself (without the local component) will also expand to support over 70 languages in the next few months.

Google to launch its image and text-based ‘Multisearch Near Me’ local search feature in the U.S. by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Google today announced it’s revamping the traditional Google Search experience to allow users to more naturally explore information. To accomplish this, the company is introducing a number of new features, including tools to drill down into topics and other changes that will make using search a more visual experience, highlighting maps snippets, imagery and even video in new ways.

The update follows Google’s disclosure earlier this year of internal research which indicated younger people had begun turning to other services, like TikTok and Instagram, instead of Google to kick off their web searches. The changes it’s introducing now show it’s taken some inspiration from how younger people use the web — preferring easily accessible and visual content, as well as more guidance as they begin to make queries.

To start, one new feature will introduce shortcuts to some of Google’s helpful tools directly on the home screen of the Google app, under the search box. Here, users will be presented with buttons that let users take quick actions to do things like translate text using their camera, solve a math homework problem, identify music, or shop from your screenshots, for example.

Some of these are clearly aimed at younger audiences, like those who grew up Shazam’ing music or online shopping then saving images of favorite products, as well as those who are comfortable trying out newer technology, like Google Lens.

These buttons don’t necessarily link to new features, but to Google’s services that may not be as well-known as they could be because they’ve not necessarily been well-highlighted in the past.

Image Credits: Google

Another change will improve Google’s search refinement tools for text-based queries by expanding upon its existing list of auto-complete suggestions to provide buttons below the search box that can help you drill down into various sub-topics as you search.

For instance, if you were researching a place or vacation destination, the buttons might suggest topics like culture, history, weather or other things you may need to know.

Image Credits: Google

More Visual Search

However, the biggest change coming to Google Search is how it will present information to users for some of its search results. While it’s not abandoning the list of blue links, it is giving its informational boxes known as “Knowledge Panels” a visual makeover.

Here, Google will pull in a variety of information from various sources and in a range of formats.

Image Credits: Google

If researching a place, for example, you may find photos, a small map showing its location, directions, weather, and even short videos. These aren’t presented as a list of links or in a text-heavy format, but rather in colorful, card-style blocks interspersed with media and imagery.

“This builds on our launches over the last year of introducing this really browsable visual-first results as well as continuous scroll on mobile,” noted VP and GM of Search Cathy Edwards, in a briefing ahead of today’s event.

In some cases, these visual search results will highlight YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok content, Google says.

The tech giant has been thinking about how to best showcase creator content in Google Search results for some time. In 2020, it began piloting a feature that aggregated short-form videos from TikTok and Instagram into their own carousel in the Google app. The following year, The Information reported it was seeking search deals with Instagram and TikTok that would allow it to get the data it needs to index and rank videos.

The company today is downplaying any specific agreements it may have, though, noting that TikTok’s content is all indexable on the public web — which means, for now at least, Google can access it and present it however it sees fit. YouTube Shorts content will also be indexed in the same way, she added.

“We index content and we return it when we think it’s relevant to the user’s results. And we’ll continue to do that,” Edwards said.

Image Credits: Google

Google has other plans to better integrate TikTok into its search results, as well, but didn’t go into detail on that front, beyond acknowledging the user demand for more easily searchable TikToks.

“We definitely know that there is a class of user who really does like the results that they see on TikTok,” Edwards acknowledged. “I think part of that is just because TikTok has reduced the barrier to entry for content creation, so there’s some really good content there. And we are looking at more ways to bring that into our search results,” she said.

This visual update won’t impact all Google Search results, however. Instead, it will begin to appear on search result pages where the visual format would be more helpful, like travel searches, Google said.

Image Credits: Google

The updated Google Search experience was one of several changes the company announced today at its Search On event, which focused on improvements to various Google products like Search, Maps, Translate, Shopping and more.

There’s a very real sense amid these updates that Google is trying to adapt its business to a world where users are often no longer starting their queries on its own platform, as they did in the earlier days of the web. Google’s own research showed that almost 40% of young people would often just search TikTok or Instagram to find a place to for lunch, instead of Google or Google Maps, said Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs Google’s Knowledge & Information organization, when speaking at a tech conference earlier this summer.

While Google won’t go so far as to admit Gen Z’s web usage is driving the change, it did acknowledge their influence.

“There’s definitely this really strong preference for visual there,” Edwards said, referring to Generation Z, but noted that Google had a responsibility to develop products for a larger user base than just one segment. Still, she added, “we certainly are particularly interested in these user segments and they did give us some ideas.”

Google unveils a more visual search experience for the TikTok generation by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Google is revamping its Play Store in an effort to help users better discover and install apps to other devices via their phone. The company announced a series of changes to the Google Play Store that will enable cross-device discovery and new tools to help developers better showcase their non-phone apps, it says.

Among the new features now coming to the Google Play Store phone app, is the addition of homepages dedicated to non-phone devices. Google notes that Android users today are in search of apps that can run on their watches, tablets, TVs and even in their cars, which is why it wanted to make those different types of apps more easily found.

Another feature allows users to access a new device search filter that helps them find apps and games for other devices besides their phones. The search results that appear when using this filter will only include those apps and games that are compatible with the selected device. That way, you don’t have to waste time trying to figure out if the Android app you liked had a watch counterpart, for example.

Image Credits: Google

And, when users find an app or game they want to install, they’ll be able to now click a button to remotely download that app to their non-phone device through the Play Store phone app. This works similarly to the functionality available today which allows users to remotely install to other phones under their same Google account.

The changes follow the recent launch of a major Google Play Store redesign on the web which now allows users to access the website on their PC or non-Android phone to remotely install apps to their various Android devices, as well. This update also included simplified navigation, improved accessibility and other changes to the way information is presented to end users with the goal of making it simpler to find non-phone apps.

For developers, the combination of updates should allow the ability to help them better market their non-phone apps to consumers as they’ll no longer be crowded out in search by those that are phone-only or that don’t support the given device. And if their app is exclusive to one platform, they may even now have a better chance at being discovered, for this same reason.

Google officially announced the updates on Tuesday, but the features had already begun rolling out to global users in the weeks prior.

Google updates the Play Store to make it easier to find non-phone apps by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Hi, friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we very quickly sum up the most read TechCrunch stories from the past week.

Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Get it here.

most read

• GTA 6 footage leaks: Roughly 90 clips of the next Grand Theft Auto game leaked out this week, with the uploader claiming to have hacked Rockstar Games’ internal Slack. Rockstar confirmed the “network intrusion,” adding that they are “extremely disappointed” to see things leaked this way but that development will “continue as planned.”
• Wipro fires 300 employees for moonlighting: India’s IT giant Wipro “has fired 300 employees in recent months who were found to be moonlighting for competitors,” writes Manish, with Wipro chairman Rishad Premji calling moonlighting an “act of integrity violation.”
• Revolut hacked: Banking/financial services startup Revolut confirmed this week that hackers were able to breach details for a “small percentage” of its customers. The company declined to get specific about exactly how many customers that works out to, but a breach disclosure filed with authorities in the company’s home country of Lithuania suggests it’s around 50,000.
• Brelyon’s wild monitor: Want something more immersive than a standard monitor but don’t want a VR headset strapped to your face? Brelyon is trying to reimagine the display, and they’ve raised $15 million from a pretty impressive roster of investors to get it done.
• Kia and Hyundai sued over design flaw: Earlier this year, a TikTok went viral that publicized a not-very-complicated way to steal certain models of Kia and Hyundai vehicles. Now a class action lawsuit has been filed against the automakers, with the complaint claiming the cars were “deliberately” built without “engine immobilizers,” which Rebecca describes as an “inexpensive and very common device” meant to prevent this issue.
• Google’s new Chromecast: Two years ago, Google launched a 4K version of the Chromecast — the first Chromecast to come with a dedicated remote, rather than requiring a smartphone for everything. They’re now bringing the same design plus a remote to the more affordable HD (1080p) model. The HD model will cost $30, while the 4K version will cost $50.
• Facebook users sue Meta over iOS tracking: “The complaint,” writes Taylor, “alleges that Meta evaded Apple’s new restrictions by monitoring users through Facebook’s in-app browser, which opens links within the app.”

audio roundup

You like podcasts? We’ve got podcasts! Good ones. Great ones. Award-winning ones, even! This week:

• The Equity team asked, “What does breaking into venture capital look like today, and how is it changing?”
• My friends on Found talked to the co-founders of Change about how/why they built a crypto-centric API for charitable giving.
• The Chain Reaction crew talked about — what else? — the recent massive changes to the way Ethereum works, and the perhaps-surprising impact “the merge” had on the market.

techcrunch+

Most stuff on TechCrunch is free. So what’s behind the TechCrunch+ paywall? Here’s what TC+ members were reading most:

• Why did ETH tumble after “the merge”?: Was the market just correcting after a stretch of hype? Did they “alienate a core demographic?” Jacquelyn does a deep dive on the possibilities.
• Stop spending so much time on your product when pitching to investors: That may seem like wild advice, but Haje makes good points here. Your product might be everything to you, but it’s really not the only thing investors are considering.
• YC’s Seibel clarifies “misconceptions” about the accelerator: What do people get wrong about Y Combinator? YC’s Michael Seibel stopped by the Equity podcast to chat, and Natasha and Alex pulled some key excerpts out of the transcript for your perusal.

GTA 6 footage leaks, Revolut gets hacked, and Wipro fires 300 for “moonlighting” by Greg Kumparak originally published on TechCrunch

As antitrust regulators around the world dial up scrutiny of platform power, Mozilla has published a piece of research digging into the at times subtle yet always insidious ways operating systems exert influence to keep consumers locked to using their own-brand browsers rather than seeking out and switching to independent options — while simultaneously warning that competition in the browser market is vital to ensure innovation and choice for consumers and, more broadly, protect the vitality of the open web against the commercial giants trying to wall it up.

Mozilla is not a bystander in the browser arena, as it of course developers the Firefox browser and the Gecko engine that underpins it. But it’s a non-profit, free software developer, rather than a commercial player. It also remains the underdog in market share terms — with the market being dominated by Google’s Chrome browser and Apple’s Safari (especially on mobile); and by the technical infrastructure the pair develop via their respective Blink and Webkit browser engines. Just those three browser engines (Blink, Webkit, and Mozilla’s Gecko) are the only ones left in play — powering all browsers available to consumers. (Microsoft’s Edge, for example, runs on Google’s Blink).

Perhaps the most striking thing about Mozilla’s report is how unexceptional most of its conclusions are.

It’s hardly news that Google bundles Chrome with Android and Apple preloads Safari on iOS and that most mobile users won’t bother changing those defaults — especially as neither mobile platform makes it easy to switch default browser, even as their brand name familiarity exerts its own stickiness discouraging consumers from seeking out smaller, less well known alternatives.

Nor is it a news flash that Windows-maker Microsoft bundles its own Edge browser on desktops running its operating system. Although some of the sneaky tactics it uses to promote its browser to users and actively discourage the downloading of alternatives might be new if you’re not a regular Windows user. (Examples cited in the report include a “recommended browser settings” pop-up which pushes consumers to pick Edge as their default browser by deploying messaging that implies the pre-selected choice is a necessary setting for security; or the tech giant actively targeting Firefox users with an ad for Edge that appears as “suggested” content in the Windows start menu, alongside the message “Still using Firefox? Microsoft Edge is here”.)

But the visibility and extent of operating system lock-ins — combined with increasingly low diversity in browser engine technology — should act as a wake up call to regulators, galvanizing the case for intervention.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority signalled recently it’s intending to probe Apple and Google market power in mobile browsers, after taking a deep dive look at the mobile market, so scrutiny around browsers does look to be — finally, tardily — on the rise.

“Billions of people across the globe are dependent on operating systems from the largest technology companies. Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Meta each provide their own browser on their operating systems and each of them uses their gatekeeper position provider to preference their own browsers over independent rivals. Whether it is Microsoft pushing Firefox users to switch their default on Windows computers, Apple restricting the functionality of rival browsers on iOS smartphones or Google failing to apply default browser settings across Android, there are countless examples of independent browsers being inhibited by the operating systems on which they are dependent,” Mozilla writes in a summary of its findings. 

“This matters because American consumers and society as a whole suffer. Not only do people lose the ability to determine their own online experiences but they also receive less innovative and lower quality products. In addition, they can be forced to accept poorer privacy outcomes and even unfair contracts. By contrast, competition from independent browsers can help to drive new features, as well as innovation in areas like privacy and security.”

Firefox gets a privacy boost as Total Cookie Protection becomes the default for all users

US consumers stuck on defaults

One perhaps (more) surprising finding from the report — which is entitled Five Walled Gardens: Why Browsers are Essential to the Internet and How Operating Systems Are Holding Them Back — is that US consumers were found to be among the most affected by pre-installations and defaults across the five markets Mozilla’s researchers looked at.

For the report, Mozilla conducted a survey of more than 6,000 people in five markets (the US, UK, France, Kenya and India) to learn about attitudes and preferences to web browsers and search engines — and generally found what it describes as a “complex” picture, with many people expressing confidence in having a wide choice of browsers and saying they knew how to install a browser but a similarly large proportion not actually thinking about the browser or search engine they use and many never changing defaults or installing an alternative browser.

“The research showed that U.S. respondents were the least likely to know how to install browsers across desktop/laptop and smartphone devices. They were also among the least likely to know how to change default browser settings and the least likely to actually do so on desktop/laptops computers,” it writes in a summary of its findings. “Between one third and one quarter of U.S. respondents reported being uncomfortable or ‘very uncomfortable’ with downloading and installing or changing the default browser on their device. We know from this data that people who were less comfortable with downloading browsers and changing defaults were significantly less likely to do so.”

Table from Mozilla Survey Study: The Installation, Use, and Personalization of Web Browsers, 2022

“These findings point to the importance of operating systems offering consumers clear and easy routes for American consumers to change their software and select alternatives. However, in reality, operating system providers have the ability and incentive to preference their own browsers; we found many examples of them using dark patterns and negative design practices to undermine consumer selection of independent browsers,” Mozilla adds.

The report looks timely given rising FTC attention to dark patterns — with a recent report by the US regulator warning firms against using deceptive design tactics to, for example, trick consumers into sharing data. (Another of the egregious Microsoft examples cited in Mozilla’s report is a Windows 10 setup screen that users a “time pressure” tactic to push users to accept sweeping Microsoft data-sharing defaults at the point of set-up — with the pre-selected “express setting” that’s being recommended by Microsoft meaning users who accept it are agreeing to send Microsoft and unknown third parties (“trusted partners”) their location, location history and ad ID, as well as sending browsing data to Microsoft.)

Citing other recent research on negative online choice architecture (OCA), Mozilla highlights the case for regulation to focus on mild or subtle uses of dark patterns — which were found to be much more likely to be effective than more aggressive ones which tend to generate a powerful customer backlash.

“OCA is a neutral term; there is of course nothing inherently wrong with companies marketing their services. However, where these marketing messages are in fact deceptive design practices used by powerful platforms to undermine consumer choice and prevent switching away from their affiliated browsers, it harms competition and ultimately consumers,” Mozilla adds in the report. “Similarly, companies are and should be free to build their brands. But where branding is used by gatekeeper operations systems alongside negative OCA, or brands are built and promoted using harmful design practices, it also leads to consumer harm.”

Mobile sameness and sludge

Mobile browsers were found to be particularly sticky and prone to consumers not switching, with Mozilla noting that combined factors of pre-installation satisfaction, utility, lack of differentiation and inertia meaning consumers are “even less likely to seek out alternative mobile browsers that may better suit their needs, align with their values or offer more privacy and security”.

“The experience of mobile browsers as basic utilities and the perceived lack of differentiation among them mean that the browser that comes pre-installed on a device is at a huge advantage,” it writes in the report. “This benefits the operating system and not necessarily the consumers. Many people are hesitant to switch to a new browser because they quickly become accustomed to their pre-installed browser and do not have a strong incentive to seek out an alternative, or may be hindered from discovering one. This conditioning of consumer behavior over a long period of time means that moving away from a satisfactory pre-installed browser is an active choice that takes some amount of cognitive effort. If people are busy or if the process is too confusing, people put off making a change or decide not to make it all. For many people, it is easier to simply continue with the status quo or put off the decision for a later time.”

The report also throws up an interesting link between desktop and mobile browser use — with Mozilla saying that “nearly all” users of Firefox’s (alternative) mobile browser also using Firefox on their desktop computers.

“Our research shows that in the U.S. less than 6% of people who use a desktop browser other than Firefox report using Firefox on their smartphone,” it notes. “This suggests that the more people use Firefox or another alternative browser on their desktop computer, the more likely they may be to try that browser on their mobile device.”

That in turn implicates Microsoft’s aggressive promotion of its own browsing software to Windows users — and especially the anti-Firefox messaging it injects into its desktop OS — as contributing to reducing Firefox’s share of the mobile browser market (despite Microsoft not having a mobile platform in play these days).

However it’s clear there are a combination of factors making competing on mobile especially tough going for indie browser makers. And the report underlines how the mobile space is challenging on account of it being a more tightly controlled and/or integrated (and branded so bundled) experience than desktop OSes. 

Google, for example, uses contract restrictions with OEM partners to maximize the proportion of Android devices that come with own-brand services such as its Chrome browser preloaded, despite Android being open source. (And the tech giant has of course got into antitrust hot water over some of these restrictions — such as in the EU, where it has been forced to offer a choice screen promoting search engine rivals).

However consumer familiarity (and comfort) with Big Tech products can clearly work in lock-step with lock-ins — albeit, again, platforms may well seek to shape that outcome by actively over-selling integration benefits through suggestive messaging (and/or by creating friction for alternatives).

“Our research shows that many consumers have a perception that Chrome is the browser that works best on Android phones, and that products from the same company will perform better together (e.g. Gmail will work better in Chrome),” notes Mozilla — pointing to Google’s use of such messaging as part of its “cross-product promotion” as one example.

“It is also closely linked to web compatibility issues and the extent to which operating system providers restrict or allow interoperability of third party browsers, including accessing the same features and APIs afforded to their own browsers,” it goes on, also critically discussing Apple banning alternative browser engines from its App Store which limits differentiation for competing with Safari since rivals must also develop on Webkit (which, historically, slowed down their ability to compete and continues to restrict how much difference they can offer).

“Feature development remains at a standstill for alternative browsers on iOS because Apple — in control of both the browser engine and operating system — does not make available to rivals some of the necessary APIs and functionality, thereby limiting differentiation.”

Choice undermined

Mozilla’s report also highlights instances where even where a consumer has succeeded in selecting an alternative browser as their default, a platform may still revert to a self-serving choice — bypassing their election to resurface their browser in certain circumstances, such as when performing a ‘lookup’ after selecting text in iOS (which it notes “would historically always open web search results in Safari, regardless of which default browser is selected by the user”); or opening up a web link in the Windows search bar or icon — which opens Edge (“again regardless of the default browser setting; or using the search widget on Android — which “will always open results in a Google browser”.

“This demonstration of OCA highlights just some of the practices used by operating systems to preference their own browsers and undermine consumer choice. Lawmakers and policymakers in some countries have started to take action against deceptive patterns to protect consumers. And others have begun to address the lack of effective competition in digital markets, including through introducing regulation. However, very few have recognized the connection between these issues and the importance of browser competition, or studied the role of OCA practices as a way to implement (or thwart) consumer choice and welfare,” Mozilla argues.

“We believe that if people had a meaningful opportunity to try alternative browsers, they would find many to be compelling substitutes to the default bundled with their operating system. These opportunities have been suppressed for years through online choice architecture and commercial practices that benefit platforms and are not in the best interest of consumers, developers or the open web. It is difficult to underestimate the impact of years of self-preferencing and undermining consumer choice, including its effect on consumer behavior. It is also difficult to estimate the disruptive innovation, alternative products and features, and the independent competitors which have been lost as a result of these practices.”

Mozilla’s report does not go into specific recommendations for regulatory interventions to force platforms to “do better for consumers and developers”, as it puts it — as it says it plans to publish further work on remedies in the coming months — but it urges lawmakers to act to prevent “further harm to consumers from continued inaction and competitive stagnation”.

“As these companies have so far failed to do better, regulators, policymakers and lawmakers have spent considerable time and resources investigating digital markets. They should therefore be in a good position to recognize the importance of browser competition and to act to prevent further harm to consumers from continued inaction and competitive stagnation,” it suggests.

“We call on them to enforce the laws which already exist and the laws and regulations which will soon come into force. And where existing laws and regulations are lacking, we call for them to be introduced and their importance for the future of the internet to be highlighted. Regulators, policymakers and lawmakers in many jurisdictions can take this moment to create a new era in the internet’s story — one in which consumers and developers benefit from genuine choice, competition and innovation.”

As noted above the EU has taken antitrust enforcement action in relation to Google’s Android contract restrictions that has led to a choice screen being offered to users in the EU — at least for default search engine. However Mozilla’s report is generally dismissive of existing remedies that have featured online choice architecture and software design, arguing: “The remedies that have so far been deployed have had many limitations and have largely failed.”

Its conclusion is backed up by the lack of a meaningful shift in Google’s market share for search on mobile in Europe — where it holds a 96.6% market, which is a drop of only 0.3% since 2018 when the Commission fined the company $5BN and ordered it to case infringing consumers, as not-for-profit Google alternative, Ecosia, recently pointed out.

Google rival DuckDuckGo has also called for regulators to go much further in regulating choice screen remedies — arguing in recent years that the design and integration of such tools must enable a truly ‘one-click’ and universally accessible experience if they are to actually move the competition needle against ingrained platform power.

Google fails to overturn EU’s €4BN+ Android antitrust decision

The Web Foundation is taking on deceptive design

Mozilla urges action to unpick platform browser lock-ins by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

In recent months, Google has been steadily adding new tools to help consumers choose more sustainable options when using its services like Google Maps, Google Flights, and hotel search. On Tuesday, the company announced it’s expanding these efforts with the addition of a handful of new features that allow travelers to better filter their searches to make sustainable choices when booking flights or hotels as well as improved options for trains.

The new features complement Google’s existing options that have allowed consumers to view eco-related information about their travel choices — like the estimated carbon emissions on flights, or whether or not the hotels carry an “eco-label” from a trusted third-party group, Google noted.

Now, web searchers will be able to directly filter their flight and hotel searches to remove non-sustainable options from their search results entirely, and they’ll be able to more easily book trains through Google’s services.

To address the needs of eco-conscious air travelers, Google Flights is adding a “Low Emissions” filter that will allow you to see only those flights that have lower emissions compared with similar trips when performing searches.

Image Credits: Google

Similarly, when searching for hotels on Google.com/travel, you can click on a new “eco-certified” filter to browse a list that only contains eco-certified properties.

Google noted it had worked directly with organizations including the U.S. Green Building Council, which provides LEED ratings, and the Global Sustainable Tourism Council in order to improve the accuracy of its travel search results by importing their databases of eco-certified hotels.

The company is also making it easier to book trains through its travel services — something that had been difficult to do previously as finding both prices and schedules required separate searches, it said. Now, a new module will appear when you search for a train-related search like “Berlin to Vienna trains” which will let you pick a departure date, then compare the various schedules.

This allows travelers to consider trains, which can be the more sustainable option over car or plane travel, but it’s only launching in select countries to start — Germany, Spain, Italy, and Japan.

Google said it would expand this feature to more locations over time as it onboarded other rail providers and is working to create a similar feature for bus tickets as well.

Google rolls out a new set of search tools for eco-conscious travelers by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Hello, friends! Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly sum up the most read TechCrunch stories from the last sevenish days. The goal? Even if you’ve had a busy week, a quick skim of WiR should keep you in the (tech) loop.

Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

This week was a bit all over the place, with another big story breaking every couple hours. Let’s just drop right in, shall we?

most read

• Cutbacks at Area 120: Area 120 is Google’s in-house incubator, meant to let Googlers with potentially big ideas tap the mega company’s resources to turn said ideas into something real. This week, however, Google confirmed that it’s slashing half of the Area 120 projects currently in development, with the incubator “shifting its focus” to AI projects. Impacted employees are being given until early 2023 to find a new job within Google.
• Adobe buys Figma: In one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time, Adobe announced this week its intent to buy the collaborative/web-based design tool Figma for a whopping $20 billion. Figma saw ridiculous growth throughout the pandemic, as many, many tech teams went remote and adjusted their workflows accordingly. Even for a company as big as Adobe, winning that part of the workflow back would’ve been tough.
• Layoffs at Twilio: Twilio confirmed this week that it’ll lay off roughly 11% of its workforce — somewhere between 800 and 900 people — as the company focuses on reaching profitability in 2023.
• iOS 16 goes live: As expected, iOS 16 rolled out to Apple devices this week. Want our thoughts on it? Find Romain’s review here. Want to know all of the not-so-obvious new features hiding within the update? Check out Ivan’s list. Most of our readers seem to be looking for interesting ways to use those new Lock Screen widgets.
• South Korea issues an arrest warrant for Terraform Labs’ founder: “A court in South Korea has issued an arrest warrant for Do Kwon, the founder of Terraform Labs,” writes Manish, “escalating its probe into the crypto ecosystem whose two tokens lost $40 billion in value in a span of days earlier this year.”
• Uber hack: Late Thursday night, Uber confirmed that it’s “responding to a cybersecurity incident” after a hacker seemingly breached the company’s internal network, with the hacker reportedly announcing their presence (and protesting how Uber pays its drivers) right within Uber’s Slack.

audio roundup

If you like TechCrunch for your eyes, check out TechCrunch for your ears. This week in TechCrunch podcast land, the Equity team talked about how Y Combinator has evolved in recent years, the Chain Reaction crew “dug into the institutional embrace of blockchains by stodgy financial powerhouses,” and the Found team went all “greatest hits” by revisiting an interview with Figma founder Dylan Field from earlier this year.

techcrunch+

Want to know what TC+ members are reading most behind the paywall? I’ve got that list below. Want to become a TC+ member yourself? Sign up here and use promo code “WIR” for 15% off an annual pass.

• How Zoho became a $1B company without external investment: Ron Miller takes us on a deep dive of the history of Zoho, the web-based business tool company that has grown, slowly but surely, into a billion-dollar powerhouse without “so much as a penny of external investment.”
• Alex looks at the current state of the early-stage startup market: “Call it the glass half-full/glass half-empty seed market,” he writes. “If you are bullish, there’s good news aplenty. And if you are bearish, well, we have enough data to make that argument as well.”
• Has France figured out YC?: Anna takes a look at France’s growing presence within Y Combinator, and the eight French startups from this latest batch.

Adobe buys Figma, Uber gets hacked, and Google shrinks Area 120 by Greg Kumparak originally published on TechCrunch

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, speaking at the Code Conference last week, suggested the tech company needed to become 20% more efficient — a comment some in the industry took to mean headcount reductions could soon be on the table. Now, it seems that prediction may be coming true. TechCrunch has learned and Google confirmed the company is slashing projects at its in-house R&D division known as Area 120.

The company on Tuesday informed staff of a “reduction in force” which will see the incubator halved in size, as half the teams working on new product innovations heard their projects were being canceled. Previously, there were 14 projects housed in Area 120, and this has been cut down to just seven. Employees whose projects will not continue were told they’ll need to find a new job within Google by the end of January 2023, or they’ll be terminated. It’s not clear that everyone will be able to do so.

According to Area 120 lead Elias Roman, the division aims to sharpen its focus to only AI-first projects, as opposed to its earlier mandate to fuel product incubation across all of Google.

TechCrunch learned of the changes from a source with knowledge of the matter. Google confirmed the changes in a statement.

“Area 120 is an in-house incubator for experimental new products. The group regularly starts and stops projects with an eye toward pursuing the most promising opportunities,” a Google spokesperson said. “We’ve recently shared that Area 120 will be shifting its focus to projects that build on Google’s deep investment in AI and have the potential to solve important user problems. As a result, Area 120 is winding down several projects to make way for new work. Impacted team members will receive dedicated support as they explore new projects and opportunities at Google.”

Over the years, the division has launched a number of successful products, including the HTML5 gaming platform GameSnacks, now integrated with Google Chrome; 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; the web-based travel app Touring Bird, which exited to Commerce; and a technical interview platform Byteboard, a rare external spinout.

One of the projects now being cut with the changes is Qaya, a service offering web storefronts for digital creators, launched late last year. Similar to “link in bio” solutions available today like Linktree or Beacons, Qaya additionally integrated with Google Search and Google Shopping. It could also be linked with a YouTube Merch Shelf, to promote the creator’s products and services.

The other six projects being canceled weren’t yet launched, but included a financial accounting project for Google Sheets, another shopping-related product, analytics for AR/VR, and, unfortunately, three climate-related projects. These latter projects had focused on EV car charging maps with routing, carbon accounting for I.T., and carbon measurement of forests.

The changes follow last year’s reorg of the Area 120 team, which saw the group moved into a new “Google Labs” division led by veteran Googler Clay Bavor. The incubator was then grouped alongside other forward-looking efforts at Google, like its virtual and augmented reality developments and its cutting-edge holographic videoconferencing project known as Project Starline. We understand Google Labs and Starline are not impacted for the time being.

Pichai announced in July that Google would slow its hiring and sharpen its focus, but the company had said larger layoffs were not planned — it would still hire in engineering, technical and other critical roles. However, as part of its renewed emphasis on productivity, the company acknowledges it may need to restructure teams, deprecate products or even, at times, eliminate roles.

As for the Area 120 team members whose projects have now been discontinued, Google’s recruiters will work to help them find new roles, though placement is not a given in situations like these.

Google has north of 170,000 full-time employees. Area 120 had over 170 employees at the beginning of the year but is now under 100.

Editor’s Note: The article was updated moments after publication with Google’s comment. 

Google cancels half the projects at its internal R&D group Area 120 by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

As consumer social apps shift their focus to video for social expression and adopt more creative tools, like those for collage-making, Google Photos’ often more utilitarian app will now do the same. The company today announced an upgrade to Google Photos and its app for mobile devices that will better highlight users’ videos, create visual effects with photos set to music, introduce its own collage editor, and more.

The additions are a part of a larger upgrade to Google Photos’ Memories feature, first introduced in 2019.

A combination of something like Stories and Facebook’s Memories, Google Photos Memories similarly helps users look back at their older photos, organized into collections at the top of the app’s main screen — where Stories are often found in social apps. Last year, Google Photos upgraded Memories using machine learning technology to identify patterns across your photos, and added other types of Memories, like those that highlighted things like events and holidays.

Now, Google is rolling out another redesign to Memories, which introduces more video into the experience.

The service will automatically select and trim the best snippets from your longer videos using machine learning as part of this enhancement, Google says.

The changes come at a time when tech companies are seeing increased use of video among users. Meta earlier this year said Reels was making up 20% of time users spent on Instagram and video overall makes up 50% of the time users spent on Facebook, for example. Google Photos is seeing a similar trend. The company tells TechCrunch video uploads grew 4 times faster than photo uploads over the past two years, which is why it’s chosen to invest in more video tools.

The updated version of Google Photos will also do more with music, including by adding music to more Memories and setting multiple still photos to music in its “Cinematic Photos” visual effect feature. Launched in 2020, Cinematic Photos leverages machine learning to create 3D versions of your photos by predicting the image’s depth, then animating a smooth panning effect. It later expanded this effect to include stitched-together photos it called Cinematic Moments, which also give an illusion of a more 3D-like image.

Another new set of features in today’s update is focused on enhancing creativity and social sharing.

This includes a new feature called Styles, which automatically adds graphic art to your Memories by placing them on colorful backgrounds, for instance. Artists Shantell Martin and Lisa Congdon contributed to this feature at launch.

And as demand for Pinterest’s new collage maker Shuffles heats up, Google Photos is jumping on this trend with its own collage editor that will let users select a design, pick out and edit photos, then rearrange their layout using drag-and-drop controls.

Image Credits: Google

Photo Memories can also now be shared with friends and family, starting on Android with iOS and web to come.

A smaller, but interesting addition — and one not noted by Google’s official announcement — involves how you navigate through Memories following the update.

While you can still tap left or right to move between the photos within a given Memory — as you would with most Stories — when you move through Memories, you’ll now swipe up and down.

This user interface design choice, of course, is a nod to TikTok, whose vertical video feed has infiltrated so many top consumer apps.

And with Memories becoming more video-heavy with this update, it’s possible that some users’ retrospectives will now feel more like personal, private TikToks rather than static Stories going forward.

The updates are rolling out today to Google Photos and its mobile app.

Google Photos redesigns its Memories feature with vertical swiping, more video, and other creative tools by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch