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 data.ai’s “State of Mobile” report. 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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Google I/O 2023 Recap

This week, Google held its annual developer conference, which meant there was a tidal wave of news about new Google products — like its midrange Pixel 7a smartphone, Pixel Tablet (with its great magnetic combo stand and speaker) and its first folding phone — the pricey ($1,800) Pixel Fold.

But the real star of the show was, of course, AI, and how Google is integrating it into a range of products and services from the workplace to coding to translation — and yes, even into Google Play and app developer tools.

If you missed the big event, TechCrunch has a Google I/O wrap-up, where you can find all the news, including AI announcements, like its next-gen large language model PaLM 2, other developer updates, like updates to Vertex AI and an ML Hub to train AI models, new Search features, a new GitHub Copilot competitor and more.

Android and Wear OS

In terms of news of note for Android developers, however, there was still quite a bit, including a preview of Android Wear OS 4, new marketing tools for apps, Android 14 updates and more.

For starters, we got a look at the first “foldable” apps. Though it’s not likely the Pixel Fold will gain a large market share, given its price point, a number of app developers have already optimized for Google’s first foldable phone. Google said apps from Microsoft (Office, Minecraft), Zoom, Netflix, Disney (Disney+, Hulu), Roblox, eBay, Spotify, Amazon (Shopping, Kindle), Canva and others will be optimized for the Pixel Fold at launch. The new device has a 5.8-inch external display (when folded) with a 17.4:9 aspect ratio and a 7.6-inch internal (unfolded) display with a 6:5 aspect ratio.

Google’s own apps, like Gmail and YouTube, are also Fold-ready, of course.

Coinciding with I/O, Google released the second beta of Android 14, which includes enhancements around camera and media, privacy and security, system UI and developer productivity, as well as improvements to large-screen devices.

The company teased Wear OS 4, as well, promising the update will bring improved battery life and accessibility features, an easier way to swap out your phone or watch without having to reset the device and new tools for building watch faces in collaboration with Samsung.

Plus, in news not tied to Wear OS 4, specifically, Android smartwatches are gaining access to Spotify’s AI DJ, and updated Google apps like Gmail and Calendar. And Google gets to brag it has the first smartwatch version of the WhatsApp messaging app.

Google showed off a new way to build Wear OS watch faces. Developers will get access to a new declarative format to design and build their watch faces, using the Jetpack Watch Face library. The format is basically just an XML file, so there is now no executable code involved.

Android Auto is poised to hit a milestone, the company also said, as it should be available in around 200 million vehicles by year-end. Meanwhile, Google built-in, powered by Android Automotive OS, is getting YouTube, GameSnacks and more Assistant integrations. Android Auto will add web conferencing support from Cisco, Teams and Zoom. And developers will now be able to bring Internet of Things (IoT) and weather apps to cars with Android Auto.

AI Everywhere

Image Credits: Google

The bigger news from this week’s event was not the aggregated updates, but Google’s plans for AI. The company is looking to showcase how AI will become a part of the tools and products people already use, like Google’s Workplace apps and Search, including Shopping, Android and more.

The company had been dropping AI updates for some time, having already announced plans to bring features that use AI to write text in Gmail, Docs, Sheets and Slides, for example. At I/O, it expanded on that to note it was also bringing automatic table generation in Sheets and image creation in Slides while also expanding the AI features already announced for Gmail and Docs to support mobile. And it unveiled a “Sidekick” tool for Docs that provides suggestions based on the document’s context as well as imagery or summaries.

On Android, Google is leveraging generative AI to allow users to personalize their phones with wallpapers created using prompts. The wallpapers use Google’s text-to-image diffusion models, the company said, and the color palette of your Android system will automatically be set to match the new wallpaper. In addition, new cinematic wallpapers will use on-device learning to turn photos into 3D images, arriving alongside new emoji wallpapers. Suddenly, iOS’s Lock Screen 3D wallpaper effect feels dated.

Google also introduced a new feature that combines Android’s guided customization with its advances in generative AI to help people compose more personal messages. The feature, called Magic Compose, can be used within conversations in Google Messages to rewrite texts in different styles. For instance, you can set the text to sound more positive or more professional — or, for fun, to sound as if Shakespeare wrote it.

Image Credits: Google

Another of the more fun additions involved the AI advances coming to Google Photos: the soon-to-launch “Magic Editor” feature. This demo caught people’s attention during the event as it showed off a practical, everyday use case for AI.

With Magic Editor, users will be able to make edits to specific parts of the photos — like the foreground or background — as well as fill in gaps in the photo or even reposition the subject for a better-framed shot. For instance, you could fill in the sky to turn a gray, overcast day into a bright blue sky with fluffy clouds, or you could “cut out” the subject of the photo and move them around to a better spot. The latter is similar to Apple’s image cutout feature in iOS 16 but actually put to use.

Image Credits: Google

The niftiest gimmick, however, was using AI to fill in gaps in a photo when you move things around. In one example, a photo of a child holding balloons while sitting on a bench was dragged closer to the center of the photo and AI created more of the bench and balloons to fill in the gaps. How well this works in real-world photos remains to be seen, of course.

Still, the ease of creating images via AI will lead to its own issues, which is why Google also introduced new tools for identifying and labeling AI photos in Search and elsewhere.

Image Credits: KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP / Getty Images

In terms of the Android app ecosystem, the company announced several ways for developers to use AI to build and optimize their apps for Google Play alongside other new tools. Notably, developers will now be able to use a Generative AI helper to draft new Play Store listings using Google’s PaLM 2 model. This will initially be available in English and as an experimental tool. Developers could use the tool to generate listings or customize listings for different types of users, among other things.

AI will also be used to summarize users’ app reviews for the Play Store. A new machine translation tool will use AI to translate apps and listings into other languages.

These arrived alongside other Play Store updates aimed at helping developers grow their businesses, like tools to lure back lapsed users, expanded subscription features, and broader access to promotional content, including more ways to market in-app events. Plus developers will be able to now prompt users on certain app versions to update their apps, Google said.

And more…

• Google’s multi-platform application framework, Flutter, announced a milestone of over 1 million published apps and expanded its support for web apps and WebAssembly.
• On Chromebook, Google enabled app streaming through Phone Hub in ChromeOS Beta. The feature lets people use apps from their Android phone in a dedicated window on a Chromebook. The feature works only with select Pixel and Xiaomi devices.
• There are two new options for deploying ML features on Android, Google explains in this I/O dev talk — ML Kit and Android’s custom ML stack.
• Jetpack Compose got a slew of updates.
• Android Studio got an AI-powered coding assistant, Studio Bot. Built on top of Codey, Google’s new PaLM 2-based foundation model specifically trained for coding, the feature is coming to the U.S. first.

Google I/O: Other App Updates

Also at I/O, the company announced a good handful of updates to existing apps, like Home and Maps, some of which involved the use of AI. It also took the waitlist off its AI chatbot Bard, announced plans for AI image generation (via an Adobe partnership) and integrations with third-party apps like Instacart and OpenTable. And it launched a new AI music-making feature in its AI Test Kitchen.

Google Maps

In Maps, Google unveiled Immersive View for Routes — a new feature that builds on the existing AI-powered Immersive View addition announced last year, which fuses Street View and aerial images together to create a digital model of the world. With Immersive View for Routes, you can preview a route ahead of taking it, as opposed to having to click through Street View. Google says you’ll be able to see bike lanes, sidewalks and parking along your journey, and get weather and traffic estimates based on historical data. The feature will start to roll out in the months ahead in 15 cities (Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin, Florence, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Paris, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Tokyo and Venice).

Image Credits: Google

Home

Google’s app for controlling your smart home devices, Google Home, was also updated this week with a redesigned interface that includes a new Favorites tab, easier ways to view cameras — including original Nest cameras, support for more Matter-enabled devices, expansion of Matter support to iOS and the ability to do more with Home from Wear OS — like see camera previews in notifications and make adjustments. A new home panel on Android devices is also available, offering quicker access to Google Home directly from the lock screen or quick settings.

Image Credits: Google/Google Home app

MusicLM

Plus, the company launched an experimental tool “MusicLM” for turning text prompts into music via its AI Test Kitchen app for web, Android and iOS. Users can ask for instruments like “electronic” or “classical,” as well as the “vibe, mood, or emotion” as they refine their creations.

Find My Device

Google introduced a series of improvements coming to its own Find My Device network as well as proactive alerts about unknown trackers traveling with you with support for Apple’s AirTag and others. The news follows Apple and Google’s recently announced plan to lead an industry-wide initiative to draft a specification that would alert users in the case of unwanted tracking from Bluetooth devices.

Find My Device will now make it easier to locate devices by ringing them or viewing their location on a map, even if offline.

WWDC worries

The flurry of AI updates from Google comes at a worrying time for Apple, whose own AI assistant’s progress is reportedly in disarray along with Apple’s other AI efforts. A recent report by The Information detailed organizational dysfunction around Siri as the voice assistant has failed to improve over time. It’s so bad that Apple’s Siri is supposedly mocked internally at Apple, the report said. The company also lost in-house AI expertise to Google, where there was more ground-breaking AI work on things like LLMs.

With WWDC only weeks away, we’ve only heard about the usual slate of coming updates to Apple’s platforms, while the big news is meant to be the long-rumored AR/VR headset for gaming. It’s unclear if there’s even significant consumer demand for such a device, given the declining VR headset sales in 2022.

Apple’s iOS 17 is said to be a quieter update focused on smaller quality-of-life improvements, not a breakthrough AI upgrade where Apple has figured out how to make Siri a better AI helper or has integrated AI improvements across its apps and OS, for instance.

None of Apple’s heel-dragging has hurt the company before, but if AI is the movement the industry claims it will be, this could be a weak spot for competitors to capitalize upon.

Twitter Gets a New CEO

Image Credits: Collage by TechCrunch / Getty Images

Now that Elon Musk has run Twitter’s advertising business into the ground, the Twitter owner is bringing in new leadership — and not a moment too soon. Following rumors of the hire, Musk confirmed via tweet on Friday he has chosen NBCU chairman of its advertising and partnerships group, Linda Yaccarino, as Twitter’s new CEO, replacing himself. Musk will stay on to focus on product design and new technology, he said.

While Musk said Yaccarino will help transform Twitter into the “everything app,” the reality is that this hire is meant to telegraph to advertisers that an adult is once again back in the room as the company tries to recoup its lost advertising revenue and woo back its client base.

That’s a tall order for the new CEO, who will have to contend with Musk’s continual attempts to wreak havoc at Twitter by changing company policies and features with little or no warning, then sometimes reverting them, given enough backlash. That was the case, for instance, with some of the API changes and the labeling of respected U.S. news organizations as if they were on par with the state media and propaganda efforts in communist China. Twitter’s massive layoffs also mean there are fewer engineers to fix problems when Twitter breaks, leading to outages and security incidents, like private tweets becoming public.

Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter lost its top 500 advertisers, including major brands like Mondelez International, Coca-Cola, Merck, Hilton and AT&T. Ad revenue in its mobile app dropped 89% from September-October 2022 to January-February 2023, Sensor Tower data indicated. Despite Musk’s more recent claims of an advertiser return and Twitter reaching a break-even point, several former top advertisers were not found in a list of Twitter’s top 10 or top 50 ad customers as of April.

Meanwhile, the Telsa exec’s plans to monetize Twitter’s verified service via a Blue subscription has not gone well, generating around $11 million on mobile in its first three months — not enough to replace Twitter’s lost ad revenue which is forecast to be down by $2 billion this year.

Installing an ad chief as CEO may not solve Twitter’s problems, however, as Musk himself contributes to advertiser fears that the platform is no longer “brand-safe” by his tweeting and boosting of conspiracy theories and disparaging the media while suspending journalists. Hate speech also has risen under his purview.

Weekly News

Apple

• Apple also rolled out RC builds of macOS Ventura 13.4, iOS 16.5, and iPadOS 16.5.
• Due next week, iOS 16.5 will bring small changes and tweaks like a Sports tab, schedules and scores in Apple News, Pride wallpaper and bug fixes for Spotlight, Podcasts in CarPlay, Screen Time and more. There’s also a reference to new Beats Studio Pro headphones.
• Amid Google’s flurry of I/O updates, Apple released new stats about small businesses on its App Store, noting App Store revenue of small developers grew by 71% in the last two years.
• Apple has now notified WWDC 2023 Swift Student Challenge winners if they have won their prize pack, which includes a WWDC ticket.

Streaming & Entertainment

• Disney+ and Hulu are going to be combined into a single app by year-end, Disney announced during earnings. The news came after Disney+ lost 4 million subscribers in Q2 2023 while Hulu gained 200,000 subs.
• TikTok added a search feature called “NewMusic” that lets users find new tracks and a way for artists to reach their fans. Twitch introduced a new tool that lets streamers create and share short vertical video clips which can be published directly to YouTube Shorts. TikTok and Reels aren’t yet supported, but you could share to those platforms manually.
• Shazam was updated with support for Apple’s new streaming music service, Apple Music Classical. 
• Recently fired Tucker Carlson says he’s going to do a show on Twitter. Musk clarified Twitter has no deal with the former Fox News commentator.
• Spotify removed around 7% of songs uploaded to its platform by AI music startup Boomy. The tens of thousands of tracks removed had been flagged by Universal Music as engaging in artificial streaming behavior — that is, bots pretending to be humans to inflate the streaming numbers.
• The new MAX app which will replace HBO Max for existing customers is live for preorder on the App Store. The new app will include Discovery+ content when it rolls out in the U.S. on May 23. TechCrunch talked to the company about how it reportedly fixed the bugs and improved performance in the upcoming app.

Fintech

• Robinhood announced 24-hour trading for select stocks and ETFs, starting with 43 securities. The feature will arrive for all users next month. It also reported crypto trading revenue was down 30% YoY in Q1 to $38 million.
• Banking and money management app Revolut is losing its CFO Mikko Salovaara shortly after CEO James Radford departed in March, which had not been announced publicly.
• A new banking app Charlie launched its services aimed at the 62+ community. The app promises faster access to their Social Security check, 3% earnings on balances and no monthly fees or minimums. The company is backed by $7.5 million in funding, led by Better Tomorrow Ventures.
• PayPal reported Q1 TPV up 10% YoY to $354.5 billion, above estimates, and net revenue up 9% to $7.04 billion. But shares dropped as the company lowered its forecast for full-year margins.

Social

• Twitter released the first version of encrypted DMs but the feature is limited to Blue subscribers and accounts from Verified Organizations. It doesn’t protect against man-in-the-middle attacks or support group chats at this time. Sure, we trust the company that couldn’t even keep Twitter Circle tweets private.
• Twitter is purging old accounts from its platform, which will free up desired usernames, said Elon Musk.

• Pinterest is combining its creation tools for Pins and its video-focused Idea Pins and rolling out more editing features as well as measurement and engagement tools to woo creators.
• Mastodon app Ivory, from the makers of Tweetbot (a Twitter client killed by Elon Musk) received an update (version 1.4) that brings a redesigned media viewer, new sounds for boosts, new icons and a Safari extension that let you open Mastodon links directly in Ivory.
• Bluesky is gaining traction as new data shows the app had 628,000 downloads in April 2023 alone, up 606% from March. Mastodon had 90,000 downloads at this time.
• Social news app Artifact now lets you follow your favorite writers, in another challenge to Twitter.
• LinkedIn is phasing out its China app, InCareer, due to competition and broader economic concerns. The company will cut 716 jobs as a result.
• Meta is shutting down its Messenger app for Apple Watch on May 31. The company, like others, decided the Watch doesn’t require a standalone app experience as users can still receive notifications on the Watch without a native app. Users, however, have not been happy about the move and are complaining on Twitter. Messenger is the latest in a long line of apps that have abandoned the Watch, including Uber, Target, Hulu, Evernote, Slack, Trello and more.

• Meta is testing paying Facebook creators based on Reels’ performance, instead of ad earnings, and will roll out payments to Instagram in the months ahead.
• Meta also announced an AI Sandbox with generative AI tools that will allow advertisers to create text variations, background images from text and cropped images for their ads on Facebook and Instagram.

Image Credits: Meta

Messaging

• WhatsApp rolled out back-end fixes to address problems with spam calls that were impacting Indian users, which had caught the attention of the Indian government. The fixes leverage AI and ML systems to lessen the problem.
• Stripe and WhatsApp partnered to allow Singapore-based users to pay some businesses within the app, following the launch of biz payments in India and Brazil.

Dating

• Tinder is removing social handles from users’ bios. The company said the change comes about because people were using their profiles on the app to promote their businesses, sell things, fundraise and campaign, which is not what Tinder is meant for.
• A new dating app called Teaser AI (preorder), built by the same team behind Dispo, promises to pair users with AI chatbots who can handle the initial “getting to know you” chats that become tedious.

Travel and Transportation

• Uber added flight bookings to its U.K. app in partnership with Hopper as it moves toward becoming a super app.
• Airbnb reported Q1 revenue up 20% YoY to $1.8 billion, above estimates, making for its first profitable Q1 with $117 million in net income. But a cautious outlook for Q2 sent the stock down by 10%+ after earnings.

Gaming

• Roblox’s Q1 revenue is up 22% YoY to $655.3 million, and bookings were up 23% to $773.8 million.
• Niantic’s new Peridot game is the first to use a new immersive shopping experience from Amazon called “Amazon Anywhere,” which brings Amazon’s marketplace to apps and games. For instance, in Peridot, players can now link their Amazon account to purchase Peridot merch, like t-shirts.

Etc.

• Eventbrite integrated GPT capabilities into the platform to aid in event planning. The tools will arrive later this month to help with time-consuming steps in event planning, like creating event pages, email campaigns and social media ads.
• ByteDance subsidiary Lemon Inc. filed a trademark for 8th NOTE PRESS, hinting toward book publishing plans. The company recently launched an Instagram and Pinterest competitor Lemon8 in the U.S., which it paid influencers to promote on TikTok.
• Apple is bringing Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to the iPad later this month. The apps will hit the App Store for $4.99/mo or $49/year.

Government & Policy

• Florida joins other states in banning TikTok on government devices. The app was already banned on university-owned devices.
• Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, which requires apps to get consent from users before tracking them for ad targeting purposes, is now facing a competition probe in Italy. The competition watchdog is concerned that Apple is creating an unfair advantage for its own personalized ads that aren’t subject to the same permission pop-ups.

Downloads

HiNOTE

Image Credits: HiNOTE

A new app called HiNOTE lets users create personalized messages for things like greetings, invites, thank-you’s and more, which are shared as images with your own text. Often, people send a text followed by a photo or GIF to add a more personal feel to their communications, but HiNOTE lets you create imagery with whatever it is you want to say. The app has sent over 1 million notes since its 2022 launch. Read the full review on TechCrunch.

This Week in Apps: Google I/O 2023 recap; Android, apps and AI; Twitter’s new CEO by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Alongside its work to integrate more AI features into Search, Google today also announced it’s introducing a new “Perspectives” filter will be coming to the top of some of its Search results when the results “would benefit from others’ experiences,” Google says — like posts on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms, including those with video.

That means it will be easier to access things like Reddit links and YouTube or TikTok videos in search results, among other things, without having to append the name of the platform to your search query.

The company had previously announced a Perspectives feature would launch under Top Stories in the U.S. in English across desktop and mobile. Now it will be available to use across general search results, where relevant.

In addition, Google says when people use the Perspectives filter, they’ll be shown more details about the content creators, including their name, profile pic, and information about the popularity of their content.

These personal stories, discussions, and creator content, will also become available through a dedicated “Perspectives” section that will appear in some search results pages. Here, a “see more” link will be available, taking users to a full page of content that matches their results from these user-generated sources.

Related to this, Google says it’s developing an improved system for understanding and ranking personal content and that written from an expert’s point of view — an acknowledgment, of sorts, that Google’s original system for ranking webpages has decreasing relevance in an era where so much information is being published by individuals on social platforms and other places beyond the traditional website.

Google alluded to this last year, in fact, when an exec speaking at conference noted that Instagram and TikTok were eating into Gogole’s marketshare as younger people often now start some of their queries directly on those platforms, not on Google Search. In other words, Google didn’t have much choice but to adjust to this new paradigm, of how people want to find information if it wants to maintain its relevance in this coming years.

The company says it’s also making improvements to how it ranks “review content” on Search by giving more weight to higher-quality sites that include original information. That could become increasingly necessary as well in the age of AI, where perhaps too much content won’t be original, but AI-created — and a search engine that knows the difference could be very useful.

Google ‘Perspectives’ integrates Reddit, YouTube, TikTok and more in search results by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

At its I/O developers conference, Google today announced its new ML Hub, a one-stop destination for developers who want to get more guidance on how to train and deploy their ML models, no matter whether they are in the early stages of their AI career or seasoned professionals.

“We talk about this concept of democratizing machine learning and really making it more accessible, so something that we’re pretty excited about is Google has a bit of a sprawling set of open-source technologies that cover many different assets […] We want to make it much, much easier to understand how they fit together and actually help folks get up and running,” said Alex Spinelli, Google’s VP  of product management for machine learning. The idea here, he said, is to give developers a landing page where they can basically look at what kind of model they want to generate, based on the data they have, and then get step-by-step directions for how to think about deploying those models.

The company is launching this platform with an initial set of toolkits that covers a set of common use cases, with plans to regularly update these and launch new ones in a steady cadence. Some of the early toolkits, for example, can help developers build text classifiers using Keras or take large language models and run them on Android with Keras and TensorFlow Lite.

As Spinelli rightly noted, generative AI may be getting all of the hype right now, but machine learning is a large space that covers a wide range of types of models and technology.

“There’s amazing things going on in computer vision and facial recognition and recommendation systems and relevance ranking of content and those kinds of things — clustering content — all this stuff. We really don’t want to leave anything behind and want to make sure we can actually help developers and researchers have the right set of tools and technologies for their particular use case,” Spinelli noted.

He noted that a lot of the focus here is on open source — and while developers can take these technologies and run them on-premises or in any cloud, these new toolkits will also provide what he called a “glide path into the Google cloud.” But as Spinelli stressed, there is no lock-in here. “There is a fundamental commitment that this is open source that you can use anywhere,” he said.

Google launches ML Hub to help AI developers train and deploy their models by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Google is bringing its AI technology to the Play Store. At this week’s developer event, Google I/O, the company announced several new ways for developers to use its AI to build and optimize their Android apps for the Play Store, alongside a host of other tools to grow their app’s audience through things like automated translations and other promotional efforts.

The AI updates present another way Google is aiming to infuse AI technology into all its products, from search to productivity apps to code writing tools and beyond. They also set the stage for how AI could be used in terms of app publishing and promotion, leaving many to wonder if Apple will introduce similar tools at its upcoming developer conference, WWDC, in June.

AI updates

One of the new AI features for app developers is a Generative AI tool that helps developers draft new Play Store listings, using Google’s PaLM 2 model. Initially available in English as an experimental feature, this AI helper will generate a draft copy after the developer enters a couple of prompts, explains Google. The tool could be used to generate listings or even uniquely categorized app descriptions for different types of users, which developers can then edit, discard or use. For example, they could ask for an app description based on the app’s key audience or the app’s theme.

On the plus side, such a capability could help developers craft descriptions if they have a hard time articulating their app’s feature set in an appealing way. But it could also encourage more app spam, as it simplifies the process of doing some of the manual labor with writing app listings.

Generative AI is being used to help users, too. Another AI feature called “User Review Summaries” will pull together and synthesizes users’ comments about the developer’s app from the comments left in the reviews on the Play Store. Also initially available in English, the tool will allow users to quickly see what people are saying about the app they’re considering. Google says other languages will be supported later this year.

In addition, developers will gain access to a machine translation tool that leverages AI to translate the developer’s app and their Play Store listings in minutes into another language. 10 languages from Google Translate will be available at launch in the Play Console, says Google, and will be able to translate the app and app store listing in a matter of minutes.

The new AI listings generator will become available to developers today.

Overall, this use of AI clearly fits into the overall theme of AI at Google I/O, with the company focusing on where it can find specific areas in existing services to plug in its AI models.

Play Store Updates

While the AI-powered features may get the most attention, Google is also rolling out a series of updates to the Play Store and other developer tools focused on helping developers grow their app businesses.

For starters, it’s building on the ability introduced last year that lets developers create at least 50 custom store listings, by country and pre-registration status. Now, they’ll also be able to customize listings to target their app’s inactive users in an effort to lure them back and give the app another shot. Later, developers will be able to use Google Ads App campaigns to serve these custom listings to users on AdMob and YouTube, directly segments of users to Google Play. To support this process, it’s adding Store Listing Groups that are created by customizing the base listing and overriding specific elements.

Image Credits: Google

The company also touched on new subscription options, like its recently launched multiple prices per billing period, which lets developers offer different auto-renewing and prepaid plan prices — like giving “VIP” users a recurring discount. And it mentioned its User Choice Billing Pilot program, which allows developers to offer third-party billing alongside Google Play Billing’s system in their apps for a small discount. Spotify and Bumble are early adopters.

Promotional Content

Taking a page from Apple’s App Store in-app events, Google Play earlier introduced Promotional Content that lets app developers promote important events taking place in their app, like new content or exciting offers. Almost 25,000 apps and games already have access to Promotional content, and this year, it will roll out to more titles, the company notes.

The Play Store will also now incorporate in-app events in new places, including through Play Store notifications, the For You section on the Apps and Games tabs on the Play Store app, within Play Store search results, beneath the search results for a specific app by its title, and even on the Search screen itself, before you type in a query, above other recommendations. Google was recently seen testing ads in this spot as well.

Image Credits: Google

Google’s Play Console will include an updated reporting section so developers can track how their Promotional content and in-app events are performing across Google Play.

The ability to promote events and other content through the Play Store or have an app featured by editors is limited to “high-quality” games and apps, Google notes. To help developers better understand what that means, it’s launching a unified framework for app and game quality that explains how apps and games are evaluated across a number of dimensions.

Image Credits: Google

Elsewhere in Google Play, developers later this month will be able to run price experiments for in-app products in order to test different price points across markets. They’ll also be able to sell their in-app items directly on Play through a new kind of promotional content called “Featured Products.” These items will appear in their own cards underneath the app listing and can be nominated for promotion across other areas of the Play Store, too.

Image Credits: Google

The ability to market more than just the app downloads themselves across the Play Store reflects the mature app store market where users are now not only looking for new apps to try but also to be updated as to what’s taking place or available for sale inside the apps they already own and use.

The changes are rolling out at different times, with some arriving in the coming days while others are expected throughout the course of the year.

Google brings AI and more to the Play Store by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Google today introduced a new feature that combines Android’s guided customization with its advances in generative AI to help people compose more personal messages. The feature, called Magic Compose, was demoed briefly on stage this afternoon at the company’s I/O developer conference, showing how the feature could be used within messages and conversations to rewrite texts in different styles.

To get started with Magic Compose, you’ll need to use Google Messages app and first type your message as your normally would. Then, you’ll select how you want the message to sound, and Magic Compose can adjust the text accordingly. For example, the feature could make the message sound more positive or more professional, or you could just have fun with it and make the message sound like it was “written by your favorite playwright,” aka Shakespeare.

Magic Compose could be handy for those who spent a lot of time communicating through text messages and often have to switch between personal messages and those for work, but doesn’t necessarily sound like a must-have feature from these first demos. Instead, it’s another example of how Google is working to embed AI into every aspect of its business — including its Android smartphone apps. Combined with other features, however, the use of AI throughout its operating system could give Android a bit of an edge in the competitive device market.

Of course, the company also took the time today to shout out again about its demand for the rest of the industry (Apple!) to embrace RCS — the rich messaging format for texts that upgraded SMS with more features, putting it on par with Apple’s iMessage. But Apple hasn’t shown interest in integrating with RCS — no matter how many cheers it got during a Google conference — because it would rather keep users locked into its own ecosystem.

Magic Compose will roll out later this summer in beta, Google says.

Google’s Magic Compose can rewrite your texts using AI by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Shortly after last week’s joint announcement which saw Apple and Google teaming up on Bluetooth tracker safety measures and a new specification, Google today introduced a series of improvements coming to its own Find My Device network, including proactive alerts about unknown trackers traveling with you with support for Apple’s AirTag and others.

The news, detailed today at Google’s I/O developer conference, follows Apple and Google’s recently announced plan to lead an industry-wide initiative to draft a specification that would alert users in the case of unwanted tracking from Bluetooth devices.

The companies’ larger goal is to offer increased safety and security for their own respective user bases by making these alerts work across platforms in the same way — meaning, for example, the work Apple did to make AirTags safer following reports they were being used for stalking would also make its way to Android devices.

Today, Google is building on that announcement by noting that its own Find My Device network will soon automatically notify users if their phone detects an unknown tracker moving with them. The feature, arriving later this summer, will work with Bluetooth trackers, including Apple AirTags, and all the other trackers that are already compatible with Google’s Find My Device network.

In addition, Google is updating its Find My Device experience to make it easier to locate devices by ringing them or viewing their location on a map — even if they’re offline, it says.

This, too, will arrive later this summer, along with new support for Bluetooth trackers from Tile, Chipolo, and Pebblebee, as well as audio devices like Pixel Buds and headphones from Sony and JBL.

It seems the technology in the draft specification around trackers proposed by Apple and Google will be making its way to Android devices ahead of the production release — which is expected to arrive by year-end, the companies previously noted.

Their draft had been submitted as an Internet-Draft via a standards development organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Other interested parties were invited to review and comment over the next few months.

Apple and Google said other tracker makers like Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy Security and Pebblebee had also expressed interest in their draft.

Google’s Find My Device network to warn about unknown AirTags with you by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

At Google I/O today, the company announced that it was removing most waitlist restrictions and making Bard, the company’s generative AI chatbot more widely available, starting today in English. The idea is to continue to work on the chatbot, but with a larger group of people

In a blog post announcing the change, Sissie Hsiao, vice president and GM for Assistant and Bard at Google, made the official announcement. “As we continue to make additional improvements and introduce new features, we want to get Bard into more people’s hands so they can try it out and share their feedback with us. So today we’re removing the waitlist and opening up Bard to over 180 countries and territories – with more coming soon,” she wrote.

John Krawczyk, senior product director at Google and one of the leads on Bard, also announced at a press event ahead of the conference, that they will be rolling out Korean and Japanese versions of the chatbot with adding additional languages coming soon. “We’re going to continue to expand to the top 40 languages very soon after IO,” he said.

He added that they are rolling out other languages separately as a safety measure. Being responsible about how they are developing the chatbot was a theme the company reiterated throughout the press event. It even refers to Bard an experiment, rather than a beta.

Finally, Google announced that it will soon be adding multimodal content to Bard, meaning that it can deliver answers in more than just text. “Coming soon, Bard will become more visual both in its responses and your prompts. You’ll be able to ask it things like, “What are some must-see sights in New Orleans?” — and in addition to text, you’ll get a helpful response along with rich visuals to give you a much better sense of what you’re exploring,” Hsiao wrote in the company blog post. Rich visuals mean pictures for now, but presumably at some point, they will include maps, charts and other items.

Google announced Bard in February in a blog post. It made its first public launch in March when it made Bard available by signing up for the now-defunct waitlist. Much like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bard is a chatbot that will answer questions in natural language.

Google ends Bard waitlist, making English version of chatbot widely available by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Google Photos is expanding its use of AI to help users edit and enhance their photos. While the company has already leveraged AI for its tools like the distraction-removing Magic Eraser and corrective Photo Unblur features in Photos, it’s now turning to AI for more complex edits with the introduction of Magic Editor. The new tool will combine AI techniques, including generative AI, for editing and reimaging photos, says Google.

The company offered a sneak peek at the new experimental feature at this week’s Google I/O developer conference to show off its capabilities.

With Magic Editor, users will be able to make edits to specific parts of the photos — like the foreground or background — as well as fill in gaps in the photo or even reposition the subject for a better-framed shot.

For example, Google showed off how Magic Editor could be used to improve a shot of a person standing in front of a waterfall.

In a demo of the technology, a user is able to first remove the other people from the background of the photo, then remove a bag strap from the subject’s shoulder for a cleaner look. While these types of edits were previously available in Google Photos via Magic Eraser, the ability to reposition the subject is new. Here, the AI “cuts out” the subject in the foreground of the photo, allowing the user to then reposition the person elsewhere in the photo by dragging and dropping.

Image Credits: Google

This is similar to the image cutout feature Apple introduced with iOS 16 last year, which also could isolate the subject from the rest of the photo in order to do things like copy and paste part of the image into another app, grab the subject from images found through Safari search, or position the subject of the photo in front of the clock on the iOS Lock Screen, among other things.

In Google Photos, however, the feature is meant to help users create better photos.

Another demo showed off how Magic Editor’s ability to reposition a subject could also be combined with its ability to fill in the gaps in an image using AI techniques.

In this example, a boy is sitting on a bench holding a bunch of balloons, but the bench is shifted off to the left side of the photo. Magic Editor allows you to pull the boy and bench closer to the photo’s center and, while doing so, it uses generative AI to create more of the bench and the balloons to fill in the rest of the photo. As a final touch, you can brighten the sky behind the photo so it’s a brighter blue with white fluffy clouds, rather than the gray, overcast sky of the original.

Image Credits: Google

The sky-filling feature is similar to what various other photo-editing apps can do, like Lensa or Lightricks’ Photoleap, to name a couple. But in this case, it’s included with users’ main photo organizing app, instead of requiring an additional download of a third-party tool.

The result of the edits, at least in the demos, is that of natural-looking, well-composed images, not those that look like they’ve been heavily edited or AI-created, necessarily.

Google says it will release Magic Editor as an experimental feature later this year, warning that there will be times when it doesn’t quite work correctly. The tests and user feedback will help the feature to improve over time, as users now edit 1.7 billion photos each month using Google Photos, the company said.

It’s unclear if Google will eventually charge for this feature, however, or perhaps make it a Pixel exclusive. Possibly, it will make Magic Editor a Google One subscription perk, as it did with Magic Eraser earlier this year.

The feature will initially become available to “select” Pixel devices, but Google declined to share which phones will receive it first.

The company said it also plans to share more about the AI tech under the hood when it gets closer to the early access release of the feature, but won’t go into detail now.

Google Photos to gain a new ‘Magic Editor’ feature powered by generative AI 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 data.ai’s “State of Mobile” report. However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time in mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion.

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

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

Top Stories

Dorsey criticizes Twitter, Musk on the alternative social networks he’s backing

Image Credits: Jose A. Bernat Bacete (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

As demand for Bluesky, the Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized Twitter rival grows, the former Twitter CEO took to the app to share his thoughts on Twitter’s future, Elon Musk and the decision to take the company private. As TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington reported, Dorsey responded to questions posed to him from other users and reporters on Bluesky, including one where he was asked if Musk has proven to be the best possible steward for the social network.

Dorsey said he had not:

No. Nor do I think he acted right after realizing his timing was bad. Nor do I think the board should have forced the sale. It all went south. But it happened and all we can do now is build something to avoid that ever happening again. So I’m happy Jay and team and nostr devs exist and building it.

However, the Twitter co-founder stressed that Twitter would have never survived as a public company and defended himself from an accusation that he was deflecting blame for Twitter’s current situation.

Though Bluesky is having a moment, particularly as a haven for marginalized groups, sex workers and trans users, it’s not the only Twitter alternative Dorsey is now backing. In fact, he’s been more active in recent days on the social network nostr (which he also financially backed), where he’s also been critical of some of Musk’s recent decisions. For example, as The NYT reported, Dorsey posted last month “This is weak,” in response to Musk’s move to stop Twitter users from linking to Substack after it launched a Twitter-like service for its own community of writers and readers.

Dorsey also touted his belief in these platforms during Block’s recent earnings call, suggesting on his nostr profile this may be the first time the network’s name had been mentioned during a public earnings event.

Image Credits: Jack Dorsey on nostr

“Open protocols represent another fork in the road moment for people and companies,” Dorsey told investors. “Bitcoin, nostr, Bluesky, web5 and others are all working to level the playing field for competition and give individuals and organizations entirely new capabilities,” he added.

Over the past few weeks, Bluesky has been gaining traction, but the network has been difficult to access due to its invite-only nature. That’s turned Bluesky invites into hot commodities, where they’re even selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay, as most users have to wait to receive only one invite every two weeks.

Bluesky leadership will also sometimes gift a user with a larger number of invites in order to have them invite members of a specific community. Developers who can demonstrate they’re building a Bluesky app may also request additional invites, we understand.

The network has received outsized press coverage relative to its size — just 50,000+ users — possibly because of the heavy infusion of tech journalists on there and Dorsey’s name attached. But the reality is that Bluesky’s future remains uncertain. The company, for now, is able to build and grow thanks to the $13 million in initial funds it received from Twitter, where it was incubated under Dorsey’s leadership. It has since spun out into its own, independent company (a public benefit LLC). It’s unclear how Bluesky intends to maintain its operations in the long term, not to mention its freewheeling culture and accepting community. Networks can often be pleasant and welcoming when small, like Bluesky — or early Twitter, for that matter — but face challenges once they scale to millions of users.

NewFronts round-up

This week was IAB’s NewFronts, where digital media companies and social networks pitched their platforms to advertisers looking to reach online audiences. The event saw major brands introducing a range of new offerings, including both ad products and formats, as well as touting their latest features, in some cases, as Snap did with its My AI integration.

Here’s what you may have missed from the app makers’ NewFronts this week:

Image Credits: Snap

• Snap said it’s beginning to test a feature that lets partners leverage its new My AI chatbot to place sponsored links in front of users. Snap also announced new ad slots, including the option to reserve the first video ad seen in Snapchat’s Friend Stories and the ability to advertise within its TikTok-like Spotlight feature.
• YouTube introduced new ad opportunities for Shorts, including the expansion of Shorts into Video reach campaigns that leverage Google AI to serve the best combination of ads and improve reach on YouTube. Plus, YouTube Select is now coming to Shorts, allowing advertisers to place their ads alongside the most popular YouTube Shorts’ content, similar to TikTok Pulse. Another option, First Position on Shorts, will let advertisers be the first ad Shorts users see in their viewing session.
• TikTok announced partnerships with big-name publishers, including NBCU, Condé Nast, DotDash Meredith, BuzzFeed and others, in an effort to pull in more premium ad dollars. The new premium ad product, Pulse Premiere, would allow marketers, for the first time, to position their brand ads directly after TikTok’s publisher and media partners’ content in over a dozen categories, including lifestyle, sports, entertainment, education and more. Publisher partners would receive a rev share as a result.
• Meta announced AR would become available to Reels Ads and Facebook Stories. They had previously been available only to the Facebook Feed, Instagram Feed and Instagram Stories. It also announced features to make Reels Ads more interactive, including a test of a larger “call to action” button with additional advertiser information on Facebook and Instagram Reels ads. Other updates included multi-destination product ads, the ability to pause a video ad to preview a link’s destination and support for Reels Ads campaigns with select third-party measurement firms.
• NBCU will let Peacock users shop products that appear in its content through “Must ShopTV,” which puts a QR code on the screen when a shoppable product appears.

Apple & Google team up on Bluetooth tracker safety

Image Credits: James D. Morgan / Contributor / Getty Images

After numerous cases of Bluetooth trackers like Apple’s AirTag being used for stalking or other criminal apps, Apple and Google this week released a joint announcement saying they will work together to lead an industry-wide initiative to draft a specification that would alert users in the case of unwanted tracking from Bluetooth devices. The companies said they’re seeking input from other industry participants and advocacy groups in the matter, and noted that other tracker makers like Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy Security and Pebblebee have also expressed interest in the draft.

The companies submitted a proposed specification as an Internet-Draft via a standards development organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Other interested parties are now being invited to review and comment over the next three months. After this time, Apple and Google will offer feedback and will release a production implementation of the specification by year’s end that will be supported in future versions of iOS and Android, they said.

The spec would build on the AirTag protections Apple had already released but also, critically, would ensure that users would be able to combat unwanted tracking by offering tools across both iOS and Android platforms.

Google’s participation could signal more than a desire to protect its users — it’s been rumored the company may also be developing an AirTag rival.

Platforms

Apple

• Apple released its first Rapid Security Response update to the public, which updated iOS 16.4.1, iPadOS 16.4.1 and macOS 13.3.1 with security fixes. Rapid security responses were introduced as a way to quickly update Apple devices to fix security vulnerabilities that are under active exploitation or pose significant risks to its customers.
• Bloomberg’s latest Apple Watch rumor says the updated version of watchOS will combine the old Glaces feature and the new iPhone-style widgets to make Watch widgets a big part of the new interface.
• Apple released iOS 16.5, iPadOS 16.5, watchOS 9.5 and tvOS 16.5 beta 4 to both developers and the public.
• Apple added 20 more games to its subscription-based Apple Arcade service, including a new exclusive Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles title along with classic games like Temple Run and Snake.io.
• Apple announced fiscal Q2 earnings, where its Services segment revenue grew 5.5% YoY to reach $20.9 billion. The segment includes Apple Music, Apple TV+ and other subscription services where Apple completes, in some cases, with third-party apps on its platform. Apple also sold $51.3 billion worth of iPhones in Q2, beating expectations of $48.8 billion. Mac, iPad, Wearables, Home and Accessories all saw declines. Overall Q2 revenue was down 3% YoY to $94.84 billion, but beat expectations.

Google — I/O Preview

• Google I/O kicks off next week and we already know at least one of the announcements — because Google leaked it. The company plans to introduce its first foldable smartphone with the Pixel Fold. The device shares Pixel’s familiar camera bar and features an interface that showcases Material UI design. We expect to learn more at the event.

• In addition, Google I/O 2023 should bring a Pixel 7a, a budget device that could also help address Pixel demand in emerging markets, plus possibly a Pixel tablet, an AirTag rival, a Wear OS update, and a lot of new developer tools and features. We also expect to hear quite a bit about Google’s AI plans, with generative AI (like Bard) appearing across Google’s line of products.
• To get ready for I/O, even if you’re attending virtually, Google offered a new planning guide and a playlist of developer content to help attendees prepare.
• Checks, Google’s AI-powered data protection project, exited to Google from its in-house incubator Area 120. The tool uses AI to check mobile apps for compliance with various privacy rules and regulations.

App Updates

Social

• Social networking app IRL’s CEO Abraham Shafi stepped down following allegations he used bots to inflate the number of users IRL reported publicly and to its investors, The Information reported. A former employee had alleged he was fired after expressing concern over the use of bots. The SEC is now investigating if the company violated securities laws. IRL raised around $200 million from SoftBank Vision Fund, Founders Fund and others.
• After laying off 50% of staff, declining audio social network Clubhouse says it’s building “Clubhouse 2.0,” but hasn’t shared exactly what that plan may involve. Last year, the company began shifting its focus away from public audio to private rooms but it’s not clear there’s much demand for audio social networking in the post-pandemic market.
• Once-hot viral app Poparazzi shuts down and returns remaining funds to investors. The app had let friends tag others to build out their social profiles of real moments, not polished images, but had been on the decline, with only a few thousand MAUs down from a height of 4 million MAUs previously.

• A Twitter bug saw users able to regain their blue Verification checks just by editing their bio. Shortly afterward, the Twitter desktop website began randomly logging out users. Later in the week, the mobile website was also down.
• As Bluesky gains attention, rival decentralized social platform Mastodon announced a new, simpler onboarding experience that provides new users with an account on mastodon.social by default, instead of requiring them to pick a server. This doesn’t eliminate server choice, it simply means that joining another server requires a few extra clicks.
• Neighborhood social network Nextdoor added new features powered by generative AI, including an Assistant feature aimed at helping users write posts that are more likely to drive positive community engagement. The Assistant will offer writing suggestions that users can review and optionally adopt. The company says it will also use AI to better match content to users when providing recommendations.
• BeReal is testing another new feature in the U.K., “RealPeople,” that shows users a timeline of the “world’s most interesting people” — that is, athletes, artists, activists and other public figures. The company also recently began testing the option to post more often as usage has declined.
• Meta introduced new discovery and personalization options for Facebook Reels. Users can now choose “Show More” or “Show Less” options to control what sort of Reels they want to see. Facebook will also explain why it’s showing you a Reel, like if a friend viewed it, and is adding Reels to the main navigation at the top of Facebook Watch.

Image Credits: Facebook

• WordPress drops Twitter integration, says sharing to Instagram and Mastodon is coming instead. The Automattic-owned publishing platform said the Twitter connection on Jetpack and WordPress.com will cease to work, meaning users’ blog posts will no longer be auto-shared to Twitter as before. The company said Elon Musk’s decision to “dramatically change the terms and pricing” for Twitter’s API was to blame for this decision. The API now starts at $42,000/month for 50 million tweets. The move will likely hurt Twitter more than WordPress, as the latter powers over 40% of the global internet, including WordPress.com blogs.
• Mozilla announced it’s opening up its own Mastodon server — or “instance,” in Mastodon lingo — into private beta testing. The company had said last year it planned to create and begin testing a publicly accessible instance at mozilla.social. It explains its approach to Mastodon will involve high levels of moderation.
• Twitter announced it would make its API free for public service announcements after New York’s Metro Transit Service (MTS) abandoned the service and the National Weather Services (NWS) said it would no longer auto-post warnings.
• TikTok’s U.S. head of trust and safety Eric Han is leaving the company on May 12 as lawmakers weigh a TikTok ban. Han had played a key role in TikTok’s strategy to avoid a U.S. ban.
• Discord is making all users change their usernames, the company announced this week. Originally, Discord users had been identified by a name and random number separated by a hash sign, but now it wants to adopt a simpler format so people can more easily share their usernames with others. The new plan will include a unique alphanumeric username with the @ symbol in front of it, plus a freely assignable display name that can be changed at any time.

AI

• Slack introduced SlackGPT, its own generative AI built on Slack’s platform which developers can use to create AI-driven experiences.
• Microsoft launched its Bing chatbot to all users globally, meaning there’s no more waitlist to get started. It’s also adding more image- and graphic-centric answers in Bing Chat, including by creating graphs and charts and generating images from text prompts. It will also allow users to export their Bing Chat histories. And it will embrace multimodality, meaning it can understand queries with images and text combined. Bing now sees more than 100 million daily active users and says visitors have engaged in over half a billion chats.
• Plexamp, the music player originally incubated by the Labs division of media company Plex, is tapping into ChatGPT with its latest update. The new feature called “Sonic Sage,” powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, will build unique music playlists by scanning users’ libraries and leveraging their TIDAL subscription.

Media & Entertainment

• Spotify is looking to seed its platform with more audiobook titles. This week, Spotify and digital audiobook distributor Findaway, which Spotify acquired in 2021, announced that its service for indie authors, Findaway Voices, will eliminate the 20% distribution fee for audiobooks purchased on Spotify.
• Spotify also announced the addition of Thorn to its Safety Advisory Council. The international anti-human trafficking organization was already a longtime safety partner to Spotify.
• Pandora lost more users. Parent company SiriusXM reported Pandora’s monthly active user base fell below 47 million in the first quarter, down 8% from a year earlier (3.9 million MAUs), from 50.6 million. Overall, SiriusXM reported a 2% YoY drop in revenue, in the face of steep competition from Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Google and others.
• ByteDance’s music app and Spotify rival, Resso, is shutting down its free tier. The app will require a premium subscription as of May 11, 2023, saying this provides better opportunities for rightsholders and artists. The service currently operates in India, Brazil and Indonesia, but had been rumored to be expanding as it was filing trademarks globally.
• HBO Max and discovery+ added 1.6 million subscribers in the first quarter, growing to 97.6 million global customers. The company said it expects its streaming biz to be profitable this year.
• Paramount+ grew to 60 million subscribers, meanwhile, ahead of its Showtime integration.

Fintech

The Fingo App. Image Credits: Fingo

• YC-backed Kenyan fintech Fingo launched its neobanking app, developed in collaboration with Pan-African financial institution Ecobank Kenya. The company raised $4 million in seed funding after its YC S21 participation. Fingo offers users a bank account, paired with free peer-to-peer transactions and access to savings, financial education and smart spending analytics.
• The FDIC is looking into Tellus, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed fintech company that claims it can offer people higher yields on their savings balances by using that money to fund certain U.S. single-family-home loans. U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, wrote a letter to FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg expressing concerns about Tellus, and asking the FDIC to review Tellus’s business practices which may put customers at risk.

Messaging

• WhatsApp now lets users create single-vote polls and forward media with captions, Meta announced this week. Single-vote polls let users run a poll where people are only allowed to vote once, including multiple choice, as has been the default.
• Reddit’s latest update provides link previews for messaging apps. Now, when you share a Reddit link via a messaging app, it will include a visual preview of the content, the subreddit name, the total upvotes tally and the number of comments. The update also includes the ability to share directly to IG Stories and other tools for publishers.

Image Credits: Reddit

Travel & Transportation

• Following its acquisition by Via, Citymapper said it’s lowering the paywall for its premium features while also introducing a new subscription plan ($1.49/mo) purely for removing ads.
• Uber reported a Q1 earnings beat with its revenue up 29% YoY to $8.82 billion, gross bookings up 19% YoY to $31.4 billion and adjusted EBITDA up 353% YoY to $761 million. It also reported a $157 million net loss.
• Uber Eats is also planning to offer support for Live Activities and Dynamic Island on iPhone and integrated with Alexa for order updates.
• Lyft shared worrisome Q2 guidance sending its stock down after Q1 earnings where it had reported a 14% YoY increase in revenue to $1 billion and a net loss drop of 5% to $187.6 million. Ridership was up 9.8% YoY to 19.5 million.

Gaming

• Snowman, the mobile game studio behind Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey, launched its newest title, Laya’s Horizon, exclusively with Netflix. The wingsuit game sees players mastering the art of flying, diving off mountains, weaving across forests and gliding over rivers to unlock new abilities as they explore a vast and peaceful world.

• Cross-platform game engine Unity announced layoffs of 8% of its workforce, or around 600 jobs, after laying off 500+ in January and last June.
• Amazon announced that customers in the United States, Canada, Germany and the United Kingdom can now play Fortnite on their Fire TVs via its Amazon Luna cloud gaming service.

Commerce & Food Delivery

Image Credits: Amazon

• Amazon Inspire, the e-commerce giant’s in-app TikTok-like shopping feed has rolled out to all customers in the United States. The company had been experimenting since last year with the new feed, which features content creators by influencers.
• DoorDash revenue was up 40% YoY in Q1, reaching $2.04 billion, beating estimates of $1.93 billion. Its net loss also declined 3% to $162 million and orders were up 27% to 512 million.

Etc.

• Amazon rolled out a Matter update for Alexa that includes support for Thread, setup on iOS, and a new version of its Works with Alexa program.
• Match Group posted a Q1 earnings miss with revenue down by 1% YoY to $787 million and paying users down 3% to 15.9 million. The company, however, said it’s “very possible” the recent Apple-Epic court decision could result in App Store fee relief.

• Medtech startup Healthy.io, which provides urine analysis through a mobile app, is laying off a third of its staff, or around 70 people. The company had just raised $50 million in Series D funding.
• Airbnb announced Rooms, a feature that focuses on the ability to book single rooms averaging $67 per night as users complain about excessive fees, onerous checkout procedures and rising Airbnb prices.
• Google’s smart home app, Google Home, added support for smart garage door openers.

Security

• Google announced that passkeys are now rolling out to Google Account users globally. Passkey let users sign in to websites and apps using the same biometrics or screen-lock PIN they use to unlock their devices.
• Google announced that in 2022, it prevented 1.43 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play “in part due to new and improved security features and policy enhancements.”

Government, Policy and Lawsuits

• The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) became applicable on May 2, but enforcement is not expected until spring 2024. The act focused on gatekeepers like Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft. It limits how they can use third-party data, bans self-preferencing, introduces interoperability requirements, bans tracking users for targeted ads without consent and more. It also says app stores can’t require the use of their own payment services and permits app sideloading.

• Bipartisan U.S. lawmakers reintroduced the Kids Online Safety Act with updates aimed at fixing earlier issues. The bill says platforms have to take reasonable steps to stop the spread of posts that promote eating disorders, suicide, substance abuse and more and undergo independent analysis about their safety for minors. It now also includes protections for support services, like the National Suicide Hotline, substance abuse groups and LGBTQ+ youth centers. However, critics, including the ACLU, say the changes are not enough and they remain opposed to the increased surveillance of kids this bill would require and other matters.
• France’s competition watchdog announced interim measures against Meta, saying it suspects Meta of abusing its dominant position in the French market for ads on social media and across the broader (non-search-related) online ads market.
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says Meta has “repeatedly violated” privacy rules and proposed to tighten its 2020 privacy order against the company, which would completely bar it from monetizing data from anyone under 18 in any way, among other new restrictions. The FTC also accused Meta of COPPA, a children’s privacy law, by misrepresenting its Messenger Kids parental controls, which allowed group chats and group calls with unapproved contacts.

Funding and M&A

• Amazon acquired a small audio-focused artificial intelligence firm called Snackable.AI in 2022, The Post reported. Deal terms weren’t disclosed but Mari Joller, the founder and CEO of Snackable, is now the artificial intelligence and machine learning product leader at Amazon.

Downloads

RTRO

Image Credits: RTRO

New social networking startup RTRO launched its app this week with the goal of connecting brands, creators and their fans and followers in a more positive environment focused on human connections and communities, not algorithm-driven content. To accomplish this, RTRO divides its social experience into two parts — on one side, you can keep up with friends or family in RTRO’s “circles.” On the other side, users can switch over to see content from creators and brands in their own space, dubbed RTRO TV.

DistroKid

Music distribution service DistroKid this week launched its first mobile app, initially only for iPhone. The new app lets artists upload new releases, receive instant payment alerts, access stats from Apple and Spotify, edit metadata and more from their phones. The company said the mobile app had been the number one request from DistroKid members.

This Week in Apps: Apple and Google team up on trackers, Google I/O preview, apps hit NewFronts by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

After Google cut all but three of the projects at its in-house incubator Area 120 and shifted it to work on AI projects across Google, one of the legacy efforts — coincidentally also an AI project — is now officially exiting to Google. Checks, an AI-powered tool to check mobile apps for compliance with various privacy rules and regulations, is moving into Google proper as a privacy product aimed at mobile developers.

Checks originally made its debut in February 2022, although it was in development for some time before that. In its time at Area 120, it became one of the largest projects in the group, co-founders Fergus Hurley and Nia Castelly told me, with 10 people fully dedicated to it and a number of others contributing less formally. The founders’ job titles under Google will now respectively be GM and Legal Lead for Checks.

The amount that Google invested in the project was never disclosed, nor was the “valuation” of the exit to the parent company from the incubator, if the project ever had a price put on it in the first place.

Checks is not disclosing how many customers it has in total but notes that they are in the sectors of gaming, health, nance, education and retail. A sampling includes Miniclip, Rovio, Kongregate, Crayola and Yousician and in total the number of customers represented by its customers is over 3 billion.

Checks is one of those ideas that feels incredibly timely in that it speaks to an issue that’s growing in importance for consumers — who will vote with their feet when they feel that their privacy is in jeopardy. That in turn also puts more pressure on developers to get things right on the privacy front. App publishers these days are faced with a growing array of rules and regulations around data protection and privacy, not just rules like GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California (and the U.S.) set across different countries and jurisdictions, but also by companies that operate platforms, in their own compliance efforts.

When translated into how those regulations impact apps, there are potential issues at the front end, but also the back end, with how apps are coded and information moves from one place to another to consider. It’s spaghetti bowll of issues, with fixes in one area potentially impacting another and making user experience less smooth to boot.

Checks leans on artificial intelligence and machine learning to scan apps and their code to identify areas where there might be violations of privacy and data protection rules, and provides remediation to suggest how to fix it — tasks that would be far more difficult for a team of humans to execute on their own. It’s already integrated with Google’s large language models and what it describes as “app understanding technologies” to power both what it identifies and suggestions for fixing issues.

A dashboard lets users monitor and triage issues in the areas of compliance monitoring, data monitoring and store disclosure support (which is focused specifically on Google Play data safety). With the service also aimed at iOS developers, it’s not clear if it will add Apple App Store data safety at any point into that mix. All of this can be monitored in real time on live apps, as well as when they are still in development.

We have reached out to Google to get an update on the status of the other two projects that were spared all-out closure after Area 120 changed focus. They include video dubbing solution Aloud and an as-yet unnamed consumer product from the team that had previously built a bookmarking app Liist (which got acquired by Google).

As of right now, Liist’s co-founder David Friedl still describes himself on LinkedIn as working on a stealth product at Area 120, and Aloud is still using an Area 120 URL, so it seems that they remain in a holding pattern. (We’ll update this if and when we hear more.)

In the meantime, Area 120 itself is also seeing some revolving doors. Clay Bavor, who was running Area 120 among other things and messaged the big changes to staff in January, was himself out the door just a month later. He has now teamed up with Bret Taylor — another ex-Googler who has an outsized track record that includes being the CTO of Facebook and the co-CEO of Salesforce — to work on a mystery startup.

Checks, the AI-powered data protection project incubated in Area 120, officially ‘exits’ to Google by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

After numerous cases of Bluetooth trackers like Apple’s AirTag being used for stalking or other criminal apps, Apple and Google today released a joint announcement saying they will work together to lead an industry-wide initiative to draft a specification that would alert users in the case of unwanted tracking from Bluetooth devices. The companies said they’re seeking input from other industry participants and advocacy groups in the matter, and noted that other tracker makers like Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy Security, and Pebblebee, have also expressed interest in the draft.

The companies submitted a proposed specification as an Internet-Draft via a standards development organization, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Other interested parties are now being invited to review and comment over the next three months. After this time, Apple and Google will offer feedback and will release a production implementation of the specification by year’s end that will be supported in future versions of iOS and Android, they said

While Apple’s AirTag wasn’t the first Bluetooth tracker on the market to present security concerns around misuse — Tile and others had existed for years — Apple’s ability to integrate AirTag with the 2 billion+ Apple devices globally, including its over 1 billion iPhones, as part of its “Find My” network, made it one of the largest players almost immediately. It also popularized the then-still niche technology of using Bluetooth trackers to find lost items, making the devices for doing so a household name.

Soon, stories began to emerge that AirTags were being used for stalking and other concerns, like car theft. Apple in February 2022 announced it would work to address some of the problems it had created with new features, including new privacy warnings, alerts, and expanded documentation. Hoping to deter misuse, it also said it was actively working with law enforcement on all AirTag-related requests it receives, and confirmed it was able to provide the account details in response to a subpoena or other valid law enforcement request.

Today, the company along with Google, wants to make these safety measures more of a standard, rather than just a feature set. This includes building on the AirTag protections Apple had already released but also, critically, ensuring that users would be able to combat unwanted tracking by offering tools across both iOS and Android platforms. Today, for instance, Apple offers a Tracker Detect app for Android users, but it doesn’t work as well as Apple’s own Find My app because it requires users to actively scan for tags, rather than receive proactive warnings and alerts. The new spec, meanwhile, wants to make unwanted tracking alerts work across any platform.

Various advocacy groups praised the effort in today’s announcement, including the National Network to End Domestic Violence and the Center for Democracy & Technology. The former had been advocating for a universal standard to protect survivors from the misuse of trackers and noted, in a statement, it was ‘encouraged by this progress.” The latter referred to the move as a “welcome step” to prevent the misuse of these devices.

Google and Apple have worked together before on products that benefit their respective customer bases, including with the development of the Covid-19 tracing tool for iOS And Android users in 2020.

“Apple launched AirTag to give users the peace of mind knowing where to find their most important items,” said Ron Huang, Apple’s vice president of Sensing and Connectivity, in a statement. “We built AirTag and the Find My network with a set of proactive features to discourage unwanted tracking — a first in the industry — and we continue to make improvements to help ensure the technology is being used as intended. This new industry specification builds upon the AirTag protections, and through collaboration with Google results in a critical step forward to help combat unwanted tracking across iOS and Android.”

“Bluetooth trackers have created tremendous user benefits, but they also bring the potential of unwanted tracking, which requires industrywide action to solve,” added Dave Burke, Google’s vice president of Engineering for Android. “Android has an unwavering commitment to protecting users, and will continue to develop strong safeguards and collaborate with the industry to help combat the misuse of Bluetooth tracking devices.”

Apple and Google team up on industry spec to make Bluetooth tracking devices, like AirTag, safer 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 data.ai’s “State of Mobile” report. However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time in mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion.

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

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

Top Stories

Bluesky is having a moment

Image Credits: Jose A. Bernat Bacete (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

If anyone was waiting for a winner to emerge among the many Twitter alternatives, current signs are pointing to Bluesky as a possible forerunner in the race. With its invite-only status, native mobile apps and ability to attract the always online, shitposting crowd, the app has been getting buzz this past week as users invited their friends, bringing the network to somewhere around 40,000+ users.

Bluesky today moves quickly, giving posters the dopamine rush of Twitter-level attention at times. People are vying to reach to its “What’s Hot” feed and are arguing about whether or not these pseudo-tweets should be called “posts” or “skeets” — the latter against the wishes of the CEO Jay Graber, who is begging for anything else, even “skoots.”

To what extent she’ll have any sway over the matter remains to be seen. In one viral post, Graber essentially admits the users are now running amok.

Image Credits: Bluesky screenshot

Blueskyers are also creating their own conventions for the site, dubbing the Bluesky “timeline” the “skyline,” for example, and are laughing about Elon Musk’s failures while posting their Bluesky memes.

Much of the crowd is young — ranging from Gen Z to millennial — and some have been known to joke about their plan to bully cringey Gen X’ers or any unwelcome bad actors off the app if they ever dare to join.

This experience, naturally, is not for everyone.

Despite there being a number of journalists on Bluesky, it’s so far not a place where people are sharing their work or having thoughtful discussions about the news of the day. There aren’t many (any?) right-wingers getting into arguments with leftists. There are few legit celebs or high-profile figures on board, beyond folks like Chrissy Teigen and AOC and a few others.

Instead, Bluesky feels like a weird afterparty where everyone is a little too drunk, a little too tired and has lost their filter.

This vibe may not last and neither may its appeal. It remains to be seen.

While “party Twitter” is a fun place to be for a time, it isn’t necessarily a fulfilling meal — just a sugary snack. That could leave some people returning to more robust networks, like Twitter or Mastodon to engage in more thoughtful discussions. And it may turn off some potential Bluesky users who aren’t a fan of the shitposting culture.

For others, however, a place that’s all brouhaha and no baggage may be just what they want.

There are also things the app needs to address before it opens more publicly. For now, it’s lacking many of the features people expect — like the ability to view your past likes, bookmark items, create lists, block users, use hashtags, DM others, perform advanced searches and more. This gives the network a bit of an ephemeral feeling, as posts — or skeets — quickly move down the feed, never to be seen again.

Despite its issues, Bluesky recalls the early days of the social web where trying new apps was actually fun. That’s the nature of its invite-only status, which is keeping the party small with a bouncer at the door.

In the meantime, if you want to join us on Bluesky, give us a follow.

TechCrunch team members on Bluesky include me — Sarah Perez (@sarahp), Amanda Silberling (@ralts), Brian Heater (@bheater), Frederic Lardinois (@fredericl), Romain Dillet (@romain), Matthew Panzarino (@panz), Darrell Etherington (@darrelletherington.com), Ron Miller (@ronmiller), Alex Wilhelm (@alexwilhem), Becca Szkutak (@becca), Ivan Mehta (@methology), Bryce Durbin (@dicebourbon), Henry Pickavet (@pickavet), Miranda Halpern (@mirandahalpern), Morgan Sung (@morgansung), Natasha Mascarenhas (@natashareporter) and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (@lorenzofb).

(Those links should work when logged into the web app at staging.bsky.app. We’re all mostly on bsky.social so I didn’t write out that part of these usernames! If you have any unwanted invites, email me the codes, haha, sarahp@techcrunch.com.)  

Currently, Bluesky has 245,000 downloads on iOS, more than half of which came in April, indicating there’s far more demand than there is access for the time being.

Snapchat’s My AI is getting panned

Image Credits: Snap (modified by TechCrunch)

The user reviews for Snapchat’s “My AI” feature are in — and they’re not good.

Launched last week to global users after initially being a subscriber-only addition, Snapchat’s new AI chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology is now pinned to the top of the app’s Chat tab where users can ask it questions and get instant responses. But following the chatbot’s rollout to Snapchat’s wider community, Snapchat’s app has seen a spike in negative reviews amid a growing number of complaints shared on social media.

Over the past week, Snapchat’s average U.S. App Store review was 1.67, with 75% of reviews being one-star, according to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. For comparison, across Q1 2023, the Snapchat average U.S. App Store review was 3.05, with only 35% of reviews being one-star.

The number of daily reviews has also increased by five times over the last week, the firm noted.

Another app data provider, Apptopia, reports a similar trend. Its analysis shows “AI” was the top keyword in Snapchat’s App Store reviews over the past seven days, where it was mentioned 2,973 times. The firm has given the term an “Impact Score” rating of -9.2. This Impact Score is a weighted index that measures the effect a term has on sentiment and ranges from -10 to +10.

Apptopia also said that Snapchat received around 3x more one-star ratings than usual on April 20, 2023. That’s the day after the My AI global release was announced.

Many Snapchat users aren’t thrilled with My AI, which appeared inside their app without warning or their consent. For some, it’s the chatbot’s placement that’s the cause of concern. My AI is pinned to the top of users’ Chat feed inside the app and can’t be unpinned, blocked or removed, as other conversations can be. Many are also pushing back at the fact that removing the My AI from their Chat feed requires a Snapchat+ subscription — effectively forcing them to pay to get their app back to normal.

Other users found the AI creepy, as it seemed to know their location even if they hadn’t explicitly shared it.

In response to the ongoing complaints, Snap published an explainer. It said the AI would have your location data if you were already using Snap Map and if you disabled location sharing, there could be a temporary delay (due to caching, we understand) before the AI would no longer have access to that data. Snap also said it made updates to My AI that clarify when it is aware of a Snapchatter’s location, and when it isn’t. Now, when users open My AI for the first time, they’ll receive a notice explaining that it may use the information they share with Snapchat to personalize its responses.

Apple and Meta beat antitrust lawsuits; Apple’s battle was with Epic Games, Meta with state AGs

Image Credits: Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images

Apple this week won its antitrust-focused appeals court battle with Fortnite maker Epic Games over its App Store policies, according to the opinion issued today by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The court largely upheld the district court’s earlier ruling related to Epic Games’ antitrust claims in favor of Apple, but it also upheld the lower court’s judgment in favor of Epic under California’s Unfair Competition Law.

The ruling is a major setback for Epic Games and other developers who hoped the ruling could set a precedent for further antitrust claims and require Apple to open iOS devices to third-party app stores and payment systems. However, the one bright spot for developers is that the ruling upheld the lower court’s prior decision on anti-steering changes.

Noted Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney: “Fortunately, the court’s positive decision rejecting Apple’s anti-steering provisions frees iOS developers to send consumers to the web to do business with them directly there. We’re working on next steps.”

In addition to Apple, Meta also won an antitrust lawsuit, under appeal, that had pitted the tech giant against dozens of state attorneys general, led by New York. The states alleged Meta had illegally maintained monopoly power in the social networking market through its acquisitions of photo-sharing app Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and that it gained further power through data policies that harmed app developers.

The U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg originally ruled that states had waited too long to challenge Meta’s acquisitions and that the policies they had cited were not illegal under antitrust law. The appeals court upheld this decision.

Platforms

Apple

• A rumor floating around says Apple’s iOS 17 may bring changes to the iPhone Lock Screen, new features for Apple Music including lyrics on the Lock Screen, Control Center UI changes, additional Lock Screen customizations and more. The source is the same one that correctly leaked the yellow iPhone 14, so people are giving it the benefit of the doubt.
• Apple released the third betas for iOS 16.5, iPadOS 16.5 and macOS Ventura 13.4.
• Apple’s Music and TV apps were updated for Windows 11 users and support for lyrics and improved playback for songs with “consecutive lossless tracks, among other bug fixes.
• Apple is reportedly testing a system in iOS 16 to restrict features based on the user’s location, 9to5Mac says.
• The EU confirmed that Apple is one of 19 tech giants that will be subject to the Digital Services Act. This online safety and transparency legislation will apply to Apple’s App Store, specifically, and will require changes to ads, recommendations and more.
• In compliance with the Act, Apple reported its European MAUs for its App Stores, noting iOS has 101 million users, iPadOS has 23 million, macOS has 6 million, tvOS has 1 million and watchOS, Books and Podcasts have less than 1 million each.

Google

Image Credits: Google

• Google wants developers to get ready for I/O. In a new blog post, it suggests how to get prepared by browsing the program, creating an agenda and creating your developer profile.
• Google has been testing a new Play Store ad slot ahead of its I/O developer conference in May. If rolled out publicly, the change could significantly expand the company’s Play Store search ads business by offering developers access to new prime real estate for their app marketing efforts directly on the Search tab alongside other personalized suggestions.
• In a new report, Google said it prevented 1.43 million policy-violating apps from being published on Google Play in 2022 in part due to new and improved security features and policy enhancements.
• As part of the ActivityX 1.7.0 release, Android’s Photo Picker support library will use a backported version provided by Google Play services on devices running Android KitKat (4.4) and later. The Photo Picker feature was launched last year to offer a browsable interface that presents the user with their media library, sorted by date from newest to oldest, that integrates nicely with an app’s experience without requiring media storage permissions.

Image Credits: Google

App Updates

Messaging

Image Credits: Microsoft

• iMessage is finally coming to Windows. Microsoft announced that Phone Link for iOS is rolling out to all Windows 11 customers, allowing iPhone users to make and receive phone calls, send and receive messages via iMessage, access their contacts, and see their phone’s notifications directly on their Windows PC. The feature had previously been available as an early preview to Windows Insiders.
• WhatsApp introduced “Keep in Chat,” a feature that lets recipients of disappearing messages save them with the sender’s consent. It also expanded its multi-device feature so users can access their same account across multiple phones.
• A federal court in Brazil ordered a temporary ban on Telegram after the company refused to share information about neo-Nazi groups with Brazil’s Federal Police.

Streaming & Entertainment

• Spotify announced its Q1 earnings, reporting it now has 515 million MAUs, representing a 5% increase on the previous quarter and a 22% increase on the corresponding period last year. The streamer’s Q1 revenue was up 14% YoY to €3B, ad revenue was up 17% YoY to €329M, and Premium Subscribers were also up 15% YoY to 210M.
• YouTube Music is adding support for podcasts on Android, iOS, and the web, plus support listening offline, in the background and casting for all U.S. users, with or without a Premium subscription.
• Alphabet reported during earnings that YouTube’s ad revenue fell 2.6% year over year as advertisers pulled back from the platform due to economic uncertainty. YouTube only generated $6.69 billion in advertising revenue for the first fiscal quarter of 2023 compared to $6.87 billion during the same period last year.
• Triller settled a lawsuit with Sony Music over its use of artists’ music on its platform by agreeing to pay $4.5 million.

E-commerce

Image Credits: Klarna

• Klarna’s payments and shopping app rolled out new features to give users a more personalized shopping experience. The app now has “Ask Klarna,” a personal shopping assistant where users can speak to real fashion experts; “Creator Shops,” a customized storefront for content creators; an AI-powered discovery shopping feed; and a resell functionality.
• TikTok Shop has reportedly caught fire in Indonesia, TikTok’s second largest market, where TikTok has an estimated 110 million users. The Shop Seller app in the country has seen around 5.5 million installs.
• Instacart added a few new ways for users to find deals on its app, including a “Your Items on Sale” section on a store’s page that uses an AI recommendation system to help users find personalized deals based on their past orders. There’s also a new “Stores to Help You Save” section and more.
• Meta said it’s phasing out the onboarding of new Shops that don’t offer checkout on Facebook and Instagram. Beginning April 24, 2024, Shops without checkout on Facebook and Instagram enabled will no longer be accessible. This means that shops that direct people to an e-commerce site to complete a purchase will no longer be accessible through Meta’s apps.
• Amid earnings, Pinterest announced a multiyear strategic ad partnership with Amazon aimed at bringing more brands and relevant products to its platform. The new deal will make the e-commerce giant Pinterest’s first partner on third-party ads, and will bring Pinterest users directly to Amazon when ads are clicked on.

Fintech

• U.K.-based stock-trading startup Lightyear expanded to the web, nearly two years after emerging from stealth. Though mobile is a popular way to interact with stock trading apps, the company said web was its mostly highly requested feature.
• China’s biggest messaging app WeChat said this week it extended the use of e-CNY payments to transactions happening through its short video and mini-app platforms.
• Robinhood launched “Connect,” a feature that lets users fund their Web3 wallets without having to leave a decentralized app or be in their Robinhood Crypto account. The feature is already live with MyDoge, Giddy, and Slingshot wallets, and will support Exodus and Phantom soon.

Gaming

• Snowman, the maker of hit mobile games like Alto’s Adventure and Alto’s Odyssey, has announced its new title, Laya’s Horizon, and its launch date. The company says it’s not quite ready to share details about the game yet, but notes it’s an “entirely new IP and something we’ve been working on for a long time.” The game is due out on iOS and Android for Netflix subscribers on May 2.

Social

• BeReal claims to have 20 million DAUs and is now letting users post up to three times per day in the U.K. as part of its pilot test of a “Bonus BeReal” feature. We reported the~20 million DAU last fall, citing multiple sources, indicating the network hasn’t grown much since. Third-party data from Apptopia says the October figure was around 15 million but was down to 6 million as of March.
• Reddit hired a former Meta exec, Jim Squires, for its newly created role of EVP of Business Marketing and Growth.
• During earnings, Mark Zuckerberg disputed that Meta is shifting away from its metaverse vision, saying he sees AI and the metaverse as part of its future. Reality Labs, Meta’s department for VR and AR, lost nearly $4 billion in the quarter. Last year, it lost $13.7 billion.
• Meta says time spent on Instagram grew 24% due to its TikTok-style AI Reel recommendations. The company reported an earnings beat with Q1 revenue up 3% YoY to $28.6B, its net income down 24% YoY to $5.7B, and the “family daily active people” figure up 5% YoY to 3.02 billion for March 2023.
• Meta’s avatars are gaining new body shapes, improved hair and new clothing textures. The company also announced that more than one billion avatars have been created across its platforms.

Image Credits: Meta

• Meta also lost its head of Development and Programming, Mina Lefevre, amid layoffs. The departure came as Meta scaled back its original programming, with cancelations of most of its FB Watch Originals, including Red Table Talk.
• U.S. senators introduced a bipartisan bill that would ban kids under 13 from joining social media sites and require that tech companies get parental consent for teens’ accounts.
• Snap had a bad quarter with revenue down 7% to $989 million when analysts were expecting $1.01 billion. However, global DAUs were up 15% YoY to 383 million, close to estimates of 384 million, and its $329 million net loss was lower than expected. The stock sank 24% on the weak results.
• Clubhouse, the audio app that’s been on the downswing following the pandemic, said it was laying off 50% of its employees and will need to reset the company.
• Reddit has begun testing Discord-like chat channels with 25 subreddits that have less than 100,000 members. The company is giving moderators tools like the ability to choose who can participate in the chat, manage the chat queue and moderate reported messages in a conversation. The channels will be persistent on the community navigation bar so members can visit them frequently.
• NYC’s MTA ends its Twitter service after the Musk-run social media company demanded $50,000 per month for API access. “We want to communicate with our customers through all platforms, but we need a platform that is reliant and consistent and up to date,” MTA’s acting chief customer officer Shanifah Rieara said. As a result, the following MTA accounts will no longer offer real-time updates: @NYCTSubway, @NYCTBus, @LIRR and @MetroNorth.
• A former IRL employee alleged in a legal filing over an alleged unfair dismissal that the company inflated its user count and then retailed against him and others who raised concerns, The Information reported.

Image Credits: T2

• While Bluesky has its moment, another Twitter alternative T2 is also hoping to gain traction. The company this week readied for expansion with the launch of its invites system, aiming to grow its much smaller network of around 1,000 to at least double that if everyone invites at least one person. All users were to receive five invites, the company said. For some, the descriptions of Bluesky floating around are pushing them to try something else — shitposting is not for everyone. That could help T2 grow.

(Psst…Want a T2 invite? We have eight here. Feel free to find me on T2 as @sarahp).

AI

Image Credits: Yelp

• Yelp rolled out an AI-powered search experience and the ability to add videos to reviews. Thanks to the changes, Yelp says it can better understand a user’s search intent and highlight relevant information from reviews in new snippets that will appear under each business listing in search results. For video, users can now post high-resolution videos up to 12 seconds alongside their text and photos in their reviews.
• Artifact, the personalized news aggregator from Instagram’s founders, is further embracing AI with the launch of a new feature that will now summarize news articles for you. The company announced today it’s introducing a tool that generates article summaries with a tap of a button, in order to give readers the ability to understand the “high-level points” of an article before they read. For a little extra fun, the feature can also be used to summarize news in a certain style — like “explain like I’m five,” in the style of Gen Z speech or using only emojis, for example.
• Apple is reportedly working on an AI-powered health coaching subscription code-named Quartz, Bloomberg says. The coaching service would help users stay motivated to exercise, improve their eating habits and sleep better.
• TikTok is testing a feature that lets users create AI-generated profile pictures similar to Lensa’s AI app. The tool asks users to select between three to 10 photos to create their avatars, according to screenshots posted by social media consultant Matt Navarra. TikTok confirmed the test was running in “a few select regions.”

• Tinder announced a new verification process that will now use AI and video selfies to make a determination that someone is real and looks like their photos.
• Spotify’s CEO discussed AI’s progress on the company’s earnings call, describing it as both “really cool and scary,” and acknowledging there’s risk to the creative industry. “I don’t think in my history with technology I’ve ever seen anything moving as fast as the development of AI currently is at the moment,” he said.

Etc.

• Taking cues from Apple and Google, Meta announced its Meta Quest Store would now include an App Privacy tab — a new tab for product description pages “that makes it easier to understand the types of data an app or game may access — before you download it.”
• Dropbox laid off 16% of its staff or around 500 people, blaming slowing growth and the “AI era of computing.”

Funding and M&A

• Yahoo (also TechCrunch’s parent co) acquired Wagr, a three-year-old social sports betting startup based out of Nashville. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Wagr had $16 million in outside funding, including from Greycroft, Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six and others. The deal will see Wagr integrated into Yahoo Sports and Wagr itself shutting down.
• Lookout sold its consumer mobile security business to Finland’s F-Secure in a deal valued at around $223 million, allowing it to fully embrace the enterprise business that have been its larger focus in recent years.
• Fireside, the Mark Cuban-backed interactive entertainment app, confirmed its $25 million Series A, valuing the business at $138 million, post-money. The company had been rumored to be raising at a $125 million valuation last year.
• Kakao Pay, the online payment service of South Korean tech and messaging giant Kakao, acquired a stake in Siebert Financial, a brokerage firm based in New York. Kakao spent $17 million on this transaction and the company now owns a 19.9% stake in Siebert.

Downloads

Runway

Image Credits: Runway

The AI startup Runway, which helped develop the AI image generator Stable Diffusion, launched its first mobile app this week, giving users access to Gen-1, its video-to-video generative AI model. The app allows users to be able to record a video from their phones and generate an AI video in minutes as well as transform any existing video in their library by using text prompts, images or style presets.

Plus, users can select from a list of presets like “Cloudscape,” or transform their video to look like it’s a claymation, charcoal sketch, watercolor art, paper origami and more, TechCrunch’s Lauren Forristal reported, or they can upload an image or type an idea into the text box.

The app is currently iOS-only and has paid subscriptions.

The Standard ($143.99/year) plan offers 625 credits/month and other premium features like 1080p video, unlimited projects and more. The Pro ($344.99/year) plan offers 2,250 credits/month and all of Runway’s 30+ AI tools.

Petey for iPhone

Image Credits: Petey

Petey, the mobile app that introduced ChatGPT to Apple Watch users, recently brought its feature set to the iPhone, allowing users to access its AI assistant more quickly and even swap out Siri with Petey using Apple’s Shortcuts. Now, Petey has a new trick up its sleeve. In its latest update, out today, the app can be connected to Apple Music, so it can make playlists for you or help you add individual songs to your Apple Music library.

The new feature arrives alongside several other updates, including the ability to access the latest AI model, GPT-4, through a paid “Petey Premium” subscription.

To get Petey’s music recommendations, you simply type your request for a playlist into the app’s interface.

The app then lines up short previews of each recommended song below the returned playlist allowing you to scroll through and sample each one. If you like the song, you can tap on the three-dot “more” menu next to the song to either listen to the full version in Apple Music or save the track to your Library. You can also tap the “Create Playlist” button, to give the AI-built playlist a name, then open it up in Apple Music’s app and begin listening.

This Week in Apps: Users pan Snapchat’s AI, Bluesky has a moment, Apple wins antitrust appeal by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch