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 industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China grew 19% in 2021 to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion.

Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games generated over $100 million in consumer spend, and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend, and just eight apps topped $1 billion.

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 suggestions about new apps to try, too.

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Top Stories

Consumers react to Roe v Wade by deleting period tracking apps

In the week after the controversial Supreme Court ruling on Roe v Wade, consumers began to lock down access to their non-protected health data in period tracking apps. There was enough app switching taking place to influence the App Store charts, in fact, as users moved both to and from leading app Flo, benefitting rivals like Clue and Eve, which saw installs increase by 2,200% and 83%, respectively.

There are differing opinions on how much concern there needs to be over this period tracking data. Some argue that period tracking app data would not be the primary evidence used if there were to be prosecutions over now criminalized abortions — an argument, however valid, essentially serves to chastise consumers for reacting in fear by switching to more private apps or deleting them altogether. The bigger picture here is that this data was never HIPPA protected in the first place. And if consumers are reacting with seemingly outsized concern, maybe it’s because the government’s ruling terrifies them about what the future for this country holds. Maybe it not so crazy to switch back to pen and paper at a time when a rogue court is throwing out half a century of established legal precedent in order to control bodies and invade citizens’ privacy.

In any event, many period tracking app providers have been making promises to secure data or introduce new anonymity features. But in an unfortunate twist, it was a newcomer to the market that became the No. 1 app after the ruling — largely based on promises of end-to-end encryption and not its existing protections. As it turned out, the app — Stardust, as it was known — was sharing users phone numbers with a third-party. And after it rolled out its expected encryption later in the week, Stardust was found to be sending the local encryption key back to its servers. In layman’s terms, that means whatever was encrypted could now be decrypted. Not a good look.

Now the House Democrats are considering legislation that could protect abortion rights and secure data in reproductive apps.

Snapchat thinks its users will pay for perks with Snapchat+

Image Credits: Snapchat

Like many tech companies, Snapchat has been struggling amid the tougher economic conditions and inflation. The company reported a challenging first quarter where it had additionally cited supply chain disruptions, the war in Ukraine, labor shortages and rising interest rates as contributing factors to its miss on both revenue and earnings in the quarter, and only a small uptick in daily active users. The company is also still dealing with the fallout from Apple’s 2021 privacy changes, or ATT (App Tracking Transparency), that impacted its advertising business and revenue.

In the midst of these macroeconomic factors, Snap is trying to navigate new regulations around minor safety, lock down its developer platform, roll out parental controls and remain competitive in a market where much of young people’s time spent in apps is now shifting to TikTok and other lightweight networking apps — or what TechCrunch recently dubbed “homescreen social” apps — like LiveIn, BeReal and others.

This has resulted in a search for alternative business models beyond advertising, it seems. This week, Snap introduced Snapchat+ — a $3.99/month subscription that provides access to premium features like being able to pin a friend as a “BFF,” see who rewatched a Story and the ability to change the app icon. The move, which was leaked in advance, follows the launches of similar subscription options aimed at power users, like Telegram Premium’s recent launch and Twitter Blue. It’s hard to say if these investments will pay off in the long run. For now, Twitter continues to make the majority of its revenue from ads and a small bit from data licensing. Telegram’s offering is too new to analyze at this time.

Snapchat+, meanwhile, is targeting an audience with perhaps even less to spend on subscription services. Will Snap’s high-schooler customers want to use their babysitting money, allowance or income from another minimum wage job or side hustle to gain a few extra features? Were these features actually in high demand, the way Twitter’s Edit button was? What’s the strategy for enhancing the offering over time? How will Snap evaluate which features to add — is it analyzing user data or behavior? Will it launch a feedback forum? Or will it just come up with ideas on its own? What percentage of revenue will Snapchat+ need to target to be considered a success? What are the ramifications to Snap if the product fails? Would Snap consider a bundle that combines hardware (like its new drone camera) and software?

For what it’s worth, Snap clearly didn’t want to invite much scrutiny of this major change to its business model. The company only offered one outlet, The Verge, an interview and said very little in it — beyond conveying to investors that this won’t be a “material new source of revenue.” Snap also tried to suggest to the outlet that it had been thinking about subscriptions for over five years, as if the new product was not reactive to the state of its business today.

Of course, tech companies weigh a variety of ideas all the time! But the timing of when they allocate real-world resources to build them is what actually matters. And Snap built a new way to make money at a time when the old way is suffering.

Oh, we’re thinking about banning TikTok again?

Image Credits: TechCrunch

The GOP wants to force you to use Reels. OK, that’s not quite the story — but that could be the result.

In actuality, Brendan Carr, the senior Republican on the Federal Communications Commission, wrote to Apple and Google to insist they pull TikTok from their app stores, calling it “a sophisticated surveillance tool” that’s harvesting “extensive amounts of personal and private data.”

Carr’s letter was prompted by the new report from BuzzFeed News which found that ByteDance staff in China had access to U.S. users’ TikTok data as recently as January 2022. (Beijing-based ByteDance owns TikTok and its Chinese sister app, Douyin).

Carr demanded the companies respond by July 8 if they didn’t comply and why. Specifically, he asked the app stores to explain why they would not penalize an app engaged in “the surreptitious access of private and sensitive U.S. user data by persons located in Beijing” coupled with “TikTok’s pattern of misleading representations and conduct.”

TikTok has long insisted it stores U.S. users’ data in the U.S. itself, with backups in Singapore, and said the data was outside the jurisdiction of China’s national security law which requires companies to turn over data to the Communist party if requested. But if TikTok data was being accessed in China, these prior statements seem to be misleading, at best.

The Trump administration had previously tried to ban TikTok by way of an executive order, but was held up in the courts. The Biden administration didn’t pursue the matter. But this latest incident now has the GOP interested in a ban once again. Fourteen GOP senators have also issued letters calling for answers from the video app, arguing it’s a national security threat.

Of course, it’s not that easy to ban TikTok. Last time around, TikTok creators successfully sued to stop the ban, which they said would prevent them from being able to earn a living. Another judge had also blocked Trump’s ban, saying the former president had overstepped his authority.

TikTok, meanwhile, has responded to BuzzFeed’s reporting by announcing it’s moving all U.S. user data to Oracle servers in the U.S., after which it will then delete U.S. users’ data from its own data centers, it says. Sure, Jan.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• Apple announced on Thursday developers in South Korea can now use third-party payments in their apps published to the South Korea App Store but will still pay a 26% commission. Plus, just as it tried before with Dutch dating apps, which had also won the right to use third-party payments, Apple said developers will need to submit their revised apps in a separate binary. Dutch regulators had pushed back against that provision, calling it an undue burden on developers, and Apple eventually dropped the requirement to come into compliance. It’s unclear how the Korea Communication Commission (KCC) will choose to respond, however.
• Apple CarPlay in iOS 16 will support a new feature that allows drivers to pay for gas through a screen in their car using the fuel company’s app, instead of having to pay at the pump itself. BP, Shell and Chevron have expressed interest.
• Apple clarified the iPad home hub support in iOS 16, after testers noted the iPad could no longer serve as a home hub — while Apple TV and HomePod devices could. The company explained that the Home app will introduce a new architecture in iPadOS 16 and iPad won’t be supported as a home hub with that upgrade. Impacted users can opt to not update their Home app to continue to use their iPad as a home hub.
• Apple released the fourth public beta of iOS 15.6 and iPadOS 15.6.

Platforms: Google

• Google’s Switch to Android app for iOS users is now compatible with all Android 12 phones, instead of just Pixel phones as before. The feature allows users to more easily make the move from iOS to Android by copying over contacts, calendars, photos and videos, and instructing on how to deregister iMessage.
• Google settled a lawsuit with Android app developers over fees. The company settled a lawsuit with U.S. app developers who made less than $2 million in Play Store revenue from 2016-2021 by setting aside $90 million in a fund to pay back money to developers. The suit had argued Google gained a monopoly in the Android app distribution space through anti-competitive practices. The law firm said 48,000 U.S. developers are eligible to receive payments from Google.

E-commerce & Food Delivery

• Food delivery biz Deliveroo will expand advertising on its app in July, including by adding ads to its order-tracking page as it chases profitability.
• Fast food and membership club apps are seeing increased demand amid inflation, Apptopia reports.
• TikTok is testing a dedicated “Shop” feed in Indonesia that lets users browse and purchase products from different categories, such as clothing and electronics. Of note, the feed sits on the app’s main page alongside its For You and Following feeds, which would be a major change to the product. The TikTok Shop service itself is currently available in select markets, including Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore and the U.K.

Augmented Reality

• Pokémon GO developer Niantic laid off 8% of its workforce, or around 85-90 people, amid the economic downturn. The company also canceled four upcoming projects, including Heavy Metal, a Transformers game that had already entered beta testing; Hamlet, a collaboration with the theater company behind “Sleep No More;” and two other projects known as Blue Sky and Snowball. Niantic has not been able to reproduce the success of its flagship game, having shut down a Harry Potter AR title and so far seen little adoption for its new AR game, Pikmin Bloom. The company is now working on a new AR game, NBA All-World.
• Niantic’s Lightship is also powering a new “Game of Thrones” app designed to promote HBO’s upcoming prequel series “House of the Dragon.” The AR app will allow users to hatch a personalized dragon egg and raise their dragon at home. The app, produced by The Mill, will arrive on July 20.
• Niantic launched Campfire, a new social app for its community that shows a map of your area with game experiences and activities from friends and other nearby players. The app helps users find local communities, add and manage friends, chat in one-on-one and group messages, join events and more.

Social

Image Credits: Facebook

• Facebook takes on Discord. The company this week rolled out new features for Facebook Groups including “Channels,” that allow users to connect with one another in smaller groups via chat or audio, similar to Discord, or in interest-based communities. The app will also test a new sidebar that will make it easier for users to find their groups more quickly, with the option to pin favorites to the top.
• Facebook also rolled out NFTs. U.S. NFT creators will now be able to display NFTs under a new tab on their profiles. Meta recently launched NFTs on Instagram in May 2022.
• Pinterest has a new CEO. The image pinboard and link-saving site’s co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann stepped down after a 12-year run, turning over the reins to Google commerce boss Bill Ready. Previously, Ready ran Google’s shopping and payments arm after joining Google from PayPal, which acquired its startup Braintree for $800 million in 2013. Last fall, PayPal had been reported to be considering a Pinterst acquisition.
• Instagram rolled out Reels APIs for developers. The new endpoints added to Instagram’s developer platform will allow developers to schedule Reels, publish to Instagram Business accounts, access social interaction metrics, reply to or delete comments, hide or unhide comments, disable or enable comments, find public Reels tagged with specific hashtags and identify Reels where an Instagram Business or Creator’s alias has been tagged or @mentioned.
• Instagram users can now delete their accounts from within the iOS app. The app has complied with Apple’s new policy that states any app offering account creation must also now offer deletion. Instagram, however, puts accounts on hold for a month instead of immediately deleting them. If you log back in at any time, the deletion process is canceled.
• Instagram is testing a change that turns all videos into Reels. The company said it’s trying to “simplify and improve” the video experience in the app. In reality, the move is yet another effort aimed at helping Instagram catch up with TikTok.
• Short-form video app Triller filed for an IPO. The company confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO after ending its $5 billion merger with video ad software provider SeaChange International on June 14.

Messaging

• WhatsApp is developing avatars. The Meta-owned company is working on an avatars feature similar to Apple’s Memoji or Snap’s Bitmoji, that could stand in for the user during video calls.

Streaming & Entertainment

• Spotify launched a new personalized playlist option called “Supergrouper” that lets you create your own supergroup consisting of up to five artists. After you create and name your group, Spotify will curate a playlist of songs from the artists you selected, which you can also share on social media.
• U.S. artists on Spotify can now use the app’s Marquee self-serve ad-buying option to promote releases across 14 markets via the Spotify for Artists dashboard. Marquee first launched in October 2019 but wasn’t able to target users outside the U.S. initially.
• Twitch added a new Guest Star feature that lets streaming hosts bring up to five guests into a stream and swap them in and out.

Gaming

• Meta VR developers call out the company for hypocrisy given its complaints over Apple’s App Store fees. The developers are frustrated with Meta’s 30% cut of their purchases and 15-30% cut of subscriptions, similar to Apple’s. They said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had called Apple’s fees “monopoly rents,” but his company is doing the same thing.
• The WSJ examined the growing complexity of hypercasual games which have begun adding leaderboards, multiplayer formats and in-app purchases to these previously simple games as they look to retain player retention amid market saturation. The games often also use rewarded ads or those that showcase someone playing poorly to encourage users’ sense of competition. Other ads will feature gameplay that doesn’t exist at all.

Travel & Transportation

• Car rental apps in the U.S. hit all-time highs for new installs and MAUs in May, Apptopia found, indicating pent-up travel demand and possibly a desire to avoid the chaotic airline issues. New installs are projected to increase 27% YoY in Q2 2022, and MAUs are expected to increase 19.4%. Enterprise (39.6%), Hertz (36.8%) and Turo (34.3%) are growing MAUs the fastest, the firm said.

Reading & News

• Storytelling community Wattpad launched a creator program that offers writers up to $25,000 in compensation. There’s also a new metric called “Engaged Readers” that helps track readers’ interest in stories and a creator portal where writers can get other tips about improving their content.
• Substack has begun to convert some writers’ text into audio automatically using text-to-speech technology. Readers using the Substack iOS app will have the ability to hear posts read aloud as a result.

Image Credits: Substack

Government & Policy

• Russia is issuing fines to companies that aren’t storing Russian citizens’ personal data in the country. Google, Twitch, Pinterest, Airbnb and UPS have already been fined, and the government has opened cases against LikeMe and Apple as well.

Security & Privacy

• Google notified Android users who were compromised by Hermit government-grade spyware which targeted victims in Kazakhstan and Italy. Google also examined the Hermit iOS app which is sideloaded onto devices and included six exploits, including two zero-days. Apple said it revoked all known accounts and certificates associated with the spyware campaign.
• T-Mobile launched a service called App Insights that allows marketers to target wireless customers based on the apps they have installed. Customer data is anonymized and pooled together with others with similar interests and behaviors. And users are opted in by default.
• Instagram is accused of continuing to allow a man accused of selling photos of children to pedophiles to maintain his account and share images for two months following his arrest, Forbes reports.
• Google updated its password manager for Chrome and Android, offering a way for users to manually enter new passwords across platforms, as well as a new unified user experience that automatically groups multiple passwords for the same sites or apps together, and a new shortcut on the Android home screen to get access to these passwords. The iOS Chrome app will also be able to generate strong passwords for you.

Funding and M&A

Data analysis startup Zing Data raised $2.4 million in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures for a mobile app that lets business users work with data wherever they are in an accessible way. The product can connect with a variety of popular data sources, including Snowflake, Trino, Google BigQuery and Google Sheets, as well as databases like Postgres and MySQL. Users then choose a dataset and some fields to display, then can manipulate the data to see different views and can share charts with others.

London-based Birdie, a provider of digital tools for in-home care, raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Sofina, which will be used to scale the business in Europe. The SaaS company works with 700 care businesses that deliver millions of visits per month to around 35,000 recipients and 8,000 family members. Its services are available through both an iOS and Android app.

London-based fintech Cleo, an AI-powered app for financial assistance, raised $80 million in Series C funding led by Sofina. The app targets the U.S. market’s Gen Z users with budgets and savings guidance and education.

New Delhi-based digital bank Progcap raised $40 million in a Series C extension, valuing the business at $600 million, up 3x since September 2021. Creation Investments and Tiger Global led the round. The app serves 700,000 small retailers across hundreds of Indian cities and towns.

Google today announced an update to its password manager that will finally introduce a consistent look-and-feel across the service’s Chrome and Android implementations. Users will soon see a new unified user experience that will automatically group multiple passwords for the same sites or apps together, as well as a new shortcut on the Android home screen to get access to these passwords.

In addition to this, Google is also now adding a new password-related feature to Chrome on iOS, which can now generate strong passwords for you (once you set Chrome as an autofill provider).

Image Credits: Google

Meanwhile, on Android, Google’s password check can now also flag weak and re-used passwords and help you to automatically change them, while Chrome users across platforms will now see compromised password warnings.

With this release today, Google will now also finally let you manually add passwords to its passwords manager (“due to popular demand,” Google says) and the company is bringing Touch-to-Login to Chrome on Android to log you in to supported sites with a single tap.

Image Credits: Google

Five years ago, the European Union passed rules which largely ended mobile roaming fees for citizens traveling with their devices across borders within the bloc. Today lawmakers are reupping the regulation that lets EU citizens “roam like at home” for a full decade, meaning European consumers can keep avoiding most extra fees when travelling within another of the 27 EU Member States (or the EEA) until at least 2032.

The updated regulation also brings some new additions — including a focus on quality of service, with a requirement that consumers have access to the same services abroad in the EU as at home when the same networks and technologies are available on the network in the visited Member State.

This means, for example, that a roaming customer who can use 5G services at home should also have 5G roaming services — where they are available — in the visited Member State.

The quality of service provision does not mean a guarantee of getting the same mobile network speed when roaming, since network speeds can vary, but the Commission says the new rules “aim to ensure that when similar quality or speeds are available in the visited network, the domestic operator should ensure the same quality of the roaming service”.

Operators are also required to inform their customers of the quality of services they can expect while roaming by stating this in the roaming contract and publishing information on their website.

The Commission argues that quality of service will be increasingly important as 5G rollouts expand and mobile network technology continues to evolve (its PR includes the phrase “future 6G” — alongside talk of the EU “investing in developing and using innovative digital solutions”).

“As concerns 5G services, it will become more and more important for consumers travelling abroad to know if they could be affected by limitations in available network quality when using certain applications and services,” it suggests. “The new roaming rules aim to enable innovation and business development, ensuring the widest use of innovative services and minimising the risk that citizens would not be able to use certain applications requiring the latest network technology, such as 5G, when crossing internal EU borders.”

The EU’s executive also frames the updated roaming regulation as a boon to digital innovation by reducing the risk of usage disruption since consumers can continuously use their apps and services as they travel across borders in the EU.

The Commission’s PR makes no mention of contrasting recent developments in the UK — which ceased to be an EU Member on January 31 2020, following the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum vote to leave the bloc — and where, since the EU roaming regulation ceased to apply, most of the big carriers have quietly announced they will be reintroducing roaming charges for their UK subscribers travelling in the EU.

But UK mobile users are unlikely to have missed the fact that Brexit has meant a return of roaming fees when they want to travel in Europe.

Some Brits may therefore detect a faint trace of trolling in this statement from Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, commenting on the extension of fee-free roaming inside the EU, who said: “Remember when we had to switch off mobile data when travelling in Europe — to avoid ending up with a massive roaming bill? Well this is history. And we intend to keep it this way for at least the next 10 years. Better speed, more transparency: We keep improving EU citizens’ lives.”

Transparency

Another focus for the EU’s updated regulation is around increasing transparency about the types of services that can still bring additional costs when roaming, such as calling customer service numbers, helpdesks or insurance companies — to help travellers in the bloc avoid related ‘bill shocks’.

The Commission says consumers who are roaming should receive an SMS about “potential increased charges” from using such services.

“The SMS should include a link to a dedicated webpage providing additional information on the types of services and, if available, about the relevant phone numbering ranges,” it notes, suggesting operators may also include information about the types of services that may be subject to higher charges in roaming in their contracts with the consumers.

The updated rules are also intended to improve information provision about and access to emergency communications across the EU — such as via the single European emergency number, 112.

“Dialing the emergency numbers and transmitting information on the location of the caller while roaming should be seamless and for free. Likewise, citizens who cannot place a call to 112 should be able to access emergency services free of charge through alternative means when roaming, for example through real time text or a smartphone application,” says the Commission.

“The new roaming rules also reinforce access to emergency services, through calls and alternative means of communications in case of cross border use. It will also ensure that the transmission of caller location will be seamless and free of charge while using roaming services.”

The EU is continuing to regulate wholesale caps — controlling the maximum prices a visited operator may charge for the use of its network by another operator in order to provide roaming services — with the Commission describing this as “an essential element for the sustainability of ‘roam like at home’ for operators”. Its review of the roaming market concluded that wholesale caps should be further reduced.

“The co-legislators agreed on a gradual reduction of the wholesale caps from 2022 onwards,” it notes. “These caps reflect decreasing operators’ wholesale costs of providing roaming services, provide sufficient investment incentives and maximise sustainability for EU operators.”

The Commission expects these wholesale cost reductions to lead to benefits for consumers — such as more generous data allowances while roaming and less likelihood of consumers having to pay surcharges for data usage that exceeds contract allowances.

Operators will still be able to apply a ‘fair use’ policy — meaning that if a person moves to live in another EU country it will be better for them to move to a local contract, as permanent roaming is no longer considered ‘fair use’.

Anonymous social apps targeting teens haven’t gone away in the wake of Snapchat’s new policy, which earlier this year banned these types of social experiences from integrating with its developer platform. Instead, the apps have simply found a new way to reach young people: via Instagram. In recent weeks, new apps like Sendit for Instagram and NGL have launched anonymous Q&A apps that allow users to post “ask me anything”-style questions to Instagram in order to receive anonymous responses from friends. Teens flocked to the apps, both of which surged to the top of the App Store after launching.

History has demonstrated these sorts of social experiences tend to be problematic. Online anonymity among teens often leads to bullying and abuse. Snapchat, for instance, ultimately chose to suspend anonymous apps on its platform after being sued multiple times by families whose teens died by suicide after being bullied on Snapchat-connected anonymous messaging apps. Lawmakers and regulators have also been pressuring social platforms to implement more safeguards for their youngest users.

But as attention today is mainly attuned to how Big Tech is tackling issues around online safety for younger users, indie apps like Sendit and NGL have been able to fly under the radar. And, like the anonymous apps that came before them, they’ve quickly taken off.

According to data from Sensor Tower, the anonymous Q&A app Sendit for Instagram launched on June 24, 2022 and immediately saw 117,000 installs within the first two days, driving it to No. 3 on the U.S. App Store. The app now has somewhere north of 150,000 installs, Sensor Tower says, but exact estimates are not available. Another firm, data.ai (formerly App Annie), sees the app with 266,000 iOS downloads but doesn’t have Google Play data.

It has since tweaked its name to Sendit – Q&A on Instagram. Data.ai also noted the app shot up to No. 1 at launch within the Social Networking category as well as overall in non-gaming apps in the U.S. App Store from June 23, 2022, through June 28, 2022.

Image Credits: data.ai (opens in a new window)

The same company behind Sendit for Instagram also operates a version of Sendit aimed at Snapchat which has over 18 million lifetime installs and has generated more than $11 million in consumer spending to date, Sensor Tower said.

Meanwhile, the anonymous Q&A app NGL launched on Dec. 10, 2021, and has seen more than 3.5 million installs to date, Sensor Tower data shows. It reached the No. 1 position on the U.S. App Store for the first time on June 16, 2022, and has now topped $1 million in consumer spending. Data.ai had estimated its downloads were even higher — around 5 million.

There are concerns these apps aren’t necessarily operating on the up-and-up, however.

For starters, Sendit for Instagram users have been complaining in reviews the app had originally marketed itself to them as “Sendit Reveal” during the pre-order phase. The company, the reviews allege, had promised a new Sendit app that would reveal which friends had sent the anonymous messages. Obviously, this was a big draw for the app’s young users, as everyone wanted to know who had said what.

Image Credits: Sendit (app data via Mobileaction)

App Store screenshots from the time confirmed this was the case, as well.

The marketing strategy worked. User demand for “Reveal” helped drive installs of the app, which then rebranded as Sendit – for Instagram after launch.

Reached for comment about what appeared to be a bait-and-switch technique to acquire users, Sendit’s founder Hunter Rice didn’t directly address the issue. He suggested that coverage of this amounted to “clickbait” on our part.

“There’s a lot of great things about what we’re doing that are newsworthy,” Rice told TechCrunch. “You’re welcome to have your fun with this topic, but I’m only interested in talking about real news,” he said.

But an analysis of App Store reviews at least indicates users felt they were misled by the earlier branding and had expected a much different experience.

Image Credits: Sendit for Instagram reviews, as analyzed via Sensor Tower

The company behind Sendit, Fullsenders (now also referring to itself as Icon Hearts on its website), had another viral hit last year with an app called Push It. The social app had also climbed to the top of the App Store. At the time, users complained the app was using bots to send them fake questions to answer — things they knew their friends would have never asked, they said. Rice had denied the use of bots at the time.

The flagship version of the company’s Sendit app saw similar complaints about bots, as does its new Instagram version. App Store reviews are again filled with users questioning the legitimacy of the questions’ origins.

Image Credits: Sendit for Instagram App Store reviews

Essentially a clone of Sendit, the new app NGL also allows users to post anonymous Q&As on Instagram. To differentiate itself, the app touts its “world class [sic] AI content moderation,” which claims to filter out bullying and harassment.

As it turns out, there are not many complaints about bullying among the app’s 68,000+ App Store reviews. But there are a number of people griping about bots asking them fake questions here, too. Similar to the concerns consumers had raised about Fullsenders’ apps, many NGL users insist they’re seeing questions they believe were not sent in by their friends. Notably, the app is charging users a subscription of $10 per week to “reveal” who sent the question. Users are also complaining this paid service only offers hints like what kind of phone the user has or what area they live in.

NGL did not respond to a request for comment.

TechCrunch tested both apps, NGL and Sendit for Instagram. We copied the personalized links and posted them to an Instagram Story that was only shown to “Close Friends,” then immediately took the post down so no one would see it. This tricked the apps into thinking we had published our link so friends could respond. Several hours later, both apps sent us a series of questions supposedly sent from “friends.” The questions were innocuous, like “the strangest dream you’ve ever had?” (Sendit) or “what was the best day so far this year?” (NGL), for example.

No one had access to the links we had created, so these were clearly automated messages.

We asked Instagram if either of these apps were integrated with its platform by way of Meta’s developer tools, which are governed by its platform policies. Meta, so far, has been unable to provide this information.

App intelligence firm Apptopia told us it only has visibility into NGL at present and found it uses the Facebook SDK in its Google Play version but not in the iOS app. Neither Sensor Tower nor data.ai had visibility into either app’s components, they said.

As the apps only offer the ability to post links to Stories, they aren’t necessarily reliant on technical integrations offered through Meta developer tools in order to function. That means they wouldn’t be held accountable by Meta’s developer policies related to anonymous messaging apps, either.

Meta’s policy seems more lenient than Snap’s as it allows anonymous messaging if apps offer a blocking function. (Section 8.8.2.a of the policy states: “Pages or Apps may not facilitate person-to-person messaging, relays, or interactions that mask user identities from each other without giving individual users the ability to block other users within the messaging experience.”) Meta’s policy also bans bots under its spam section (8.8.2.b).

Recently, it had seemed Meta was taking action against NGL as users began reporting Instagram was removing the links to the NGL app from their Instagram Stories. But Instagram told us NGL had access to the links feature revoked “by mistake” and that access has since been restored.

These Instagram-tied mobile apps arrive at a time when Snapchat is looking to tighten how third parties use its platform tools. That change could impact Sendit’s traction. The app had benefitted from Snapchat’s earlier ban on the anonymous apps YOLO and LMK, which had been cited in lawsuits. But now, Sendit is among those that are supposed to be banned from the platform under Snap’s new developer policies. (Snap told TechCrunch last month it had given Sendit more time to come into compliance with its policies after the developer requested an extension.)

Investing in the anonymous consumer social space almost never pays off in the long term. The web is littered with failed anonymous social apps that have had to wind down due to bullying and other issues, including Ask.fm, Yik Yak, After School, Secret, Yolo and Sarahah, among others.

In previous years, the app stores themselves had even taken action against apps that offered anonymous messaging experiences. Sarahah, for example, was banned from both Google Play and Apple’s App Store after accusations it was facilitating bullying. Today, Apple insists on a set of protections for any app that includes user-generated content, but it doesn’t ban the anonymous social category in general.

It’s not clear if the app stores will take any action on these new anonymous apps despite the way they’re misleading their young users about the nature of the inbound messages, which are bot-driven and not really from friends.

Without enforced policies, there will always be a new crop of developers willing to risk long-term success for short-term profits. In fact, the business models for this latest group of apps depend on the lack of policy and regulation in this market.

If data is at the heart of any modern business, it needs to be easier to access and manipulate it without expertise. While there are many data analysis tools available including the sophisticated data science variety, and more line of business-focused BI tools, it hasn’t been easy for a person with little experience to work with data without going to one of these experts for help.

The founders of Zing Data recognized this fundamental problem with data access, and they went to work building a mobile application that would let users get into the data themselves.

Today, the company announced a $2.4 million seed investment to help keep building on that elemental idea.

Co-founder and CEO Zack Hendlin says they used Figma, a collaborative design program as an inspiration when they created Zing Data. He says that collaboration is baked in because data analysis typically isn’t a solo effort. It involves many people who need to understand something about how you run your business. Further, the founders wanted to make it mobile, so people could work with data wherever they are. Another key premise was that it needed to be accessible to everyone.

“We said ‘well, what if we could just make that available to everybody directly without them needing to know SQL, without them having to pay a lot for a license, and without them even needing to know where to start’…So that was sort of the genesis, make data simple, accessible, and collaborative,” Hendlin explained.

He says that you want the data analysis experts in your company working on hard problems, but too often they are working on basic questions from business users. Zing Data is designed to let those users answer the basic questions themselves. The way the product works is you connect it to a variety of popular data sources including Snowflake, Trino, Google BigQuery and Google Sheets, as well as databases like Postgresand my MySQL. Once connected, you can choose a specific data set, choose some fields to display, then manipulate the data as you wish, changing different aspects to see different views, while sharing the chart with others.

It’s available for both iOS and Android users and there is a web app as well. You can then share a chart and get notifications in Slack or by email, as well as in the app when you get comments from your fellow employees. The product is free to use for up to 10 employees, but after that they start charging.

Image Credits: Zing Data

Hendlin launched the company last year with long time friend and co-founder Sabin Thomas, who heads up engineering. For a time they kept their day jobs, building the app nights and weekends, but by last June when they had a working product, they decided to go all in.

Thomas says he believes a product like Zing will thrive even if there is an economic downturn because it’s solving a big problem around data access. “The solution that we’re developing right now is actually geared for an environment like this. We feel there will be more adoption for tools like us. Companies that are penny pinching are going to rethink their BI vendor licenses, and we think a solution like ours really fits into that mold,” Thomas said.

It’s still early and the company has just three employees, but are actively looking to fill four roles right now. The founders believe that hiring a diverse workforce isn’t only the right thing to do, it’s also smart business strategy from a product perspective.

“The multitude of experiences you get, both within the US or outside of the US, I think all of that helps you build a better product, a mobile experience, chief among that as well. You know, the adoption globally has different acceleration rates and we feel that will empower how we build our product as well, if we can find the right kind of diverse set of employees,” Thomas said.

Today’s $2.4 million seed was led by Kindred Ventures with participation from Correlation Ventures and various industry angels.

Consumers are ditching their current period tracking apps in favor of what they perceive to be safer options in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that allows individual U.S. states to criminalize abortion. The app switching trend is impacting all manner of period tracking apps, including leading app Flo, which owns a 47% share of the period tracking app market in the U.S., according to data provided by Apptopia. The app may have both lost customers to rival apps while gaining new users from others over the weekend. Other apps are seeing similar trends.

The patterns of app switching indicate consumers are seeking out increased privacy, as many of those gaining from this trend are companies that have made public statements in support of strengthened data security and privacy practices. But it’s also clear that consumers don’t necessarily have a good understanding of which apps to trust given that the current beneficiary of this increased switching activity is a potentially problematic app called Stardust, which had yet to implement its new privacy protections at the time it was making promises to users.

As a result of its claims, Stardust saw its daily average downloads increase by as much as 6,000% over the past weekend, Apptopia said. The relative newcomer to the period tracking market drew attention by promoting itself as a small, women-led team who wanted to provide users with a more secure app. Those claims resonated with consumers, driving the app to No. 1 on the App Store on Saturday. But in terms of data security, being a small team is not necessarily an advantage. TechCrunch found various data privacy issues with the version of the app that users downloaded over the weekend, including its sharing of users’ phone numbers with a third party.

Despite these issues, app intelligence firm Sensor Tower said the app gained 82% of its total 400,000+ lifetime installs this past Saturday through Sunday.

Another top app, Clue, also benefitted from consumers seeking alternatives. Apptopia found Clue’s app saw a 2,200% increase in installs over the weekend after it made comments in the press that it won’t divulge sensitive information to states. Sensor Tower reported Clue had also reached its highest-ever rank on Saturday as the No. 15 overall free app on the App Store. It has since dropped to No. 93, which suggests the rank change had been the result of a surge of app switchers.

Several other apps saw increased installs on Saturday, June 25, too. Compared with the month of June, Glow’s ovulation app saw its average daily downloads jump 21% and its period tracker Eve saw average daily installs increase 83%, Apptopia said. An app called Natural Cycles – Birth Control saw average daily installs rise 53%; another called Period Tracker by GP Apps saw a 17% increase; and the app Femometer saw a 10% increase. Single-digit increases were also seen in apps including My Calendar – Period Tracker and Ovia Fertility & Cycle Tracker, the firm found.

Finally, leading app Flo moved up slightly on Saturday as a result of the app switching activity. Flo jumped from No. 197 on June 23 before the ruling to No. 187 on Saturday, June 25, Sensor Tower said. It’s now moved up more to No. 180 as of the time of writing. It’s worth noting that Flo’s average daily installs had been on the decline for several months, Apptopia had reported — in part, likely due to news of its 2021 settlement with the FTC over earlier privacy violations. That indicates consumers have been thinking about data privacy well before the Supreme Court ruling.

Image Credits: Flo (opens in a new window)

After the court’s decision on Friday, Flo issued a statement in hopes of stemming the tide of app switchers or those inclined to delete their accounts. It said:

“Flo will always stand up for the health of women, and will do everything in its power to protect the data and privacy of our users. To add to our security measures already in place (read more about that here), we will soon be launching a new feature called “Anonymous Mode” – an option that allows users to remove their personal identity from their Flo account. Lastly, Flo will never require a user to log an abortion or offer details that they feel should be kept private, and users can delete their data at any time. We firmly believe that our users deserve complete control over their data and we are here to support our users every step of the way.”

Clue also issued a lengthy response to Roe v. Wade on its website, which stressed its adherence to strict European data privacy laws and use of encryption. GP Apps, the maker of Period Tracker, published a strong statement, as well, though its privacy policy indicates that it would comply with legal requests and subpoenas. (However, it noted that consumers can opt to use its account without an online account, which would then only store data locally on the user’s device.) Other companies have published statements on their websites and social media accounts, as well.

But without a deeper analysis of each company’s privacy policy and more sophisticated testing of each app’s privacy and security protections, it’s hard to recommend that the use of any third-party period tracking app is a 100% safe decision at this time, regardless of their statements and claims.

One possible solution to this problem is to simply use Apple’s Health app alone for the time being, where end-to-end encryption of users’ Health records is available through iCloud. Unfortunately, data on Apple’s first-party apps isn’t available so we’ll never know how many consumers made this choice.

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 industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China grew 19% in 2021 to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion.

Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games generated over $100 million in consumer spend and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend and just eight apps topped $1 billion.

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 suggestions about new apps to try, too.

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

Top Stories

Instagram to verify users’ ages in new test

Image Credits: Instagram

Instagram announced this week it’s testing a new set of features for verifying users’ ages in the app, including things like video selfies, vouching from adult friends and providing an ID. The tests, which will begin in the U.S., will apply to users who try to change their age to 18 or over after being previously set to under 18. These users may be trying to correct an earlier mistake or they could be teens trying to circumvent the app’s newer age-appropriate restrictions.

If users are prompted to provide an ID card, like a passport or driver’s license, Meta will store it on its servers for 30 days before deletion. If users choose the social vouching option, they’ll need at least three other adult friends to vouch for their age — and Instagram will choose a list of six people randomly who meet the criteria. Those users can’t have a new account or be vouching for others at the same time.

The company also said it’s using AI that can estimate users’ ages in video selfies. The company is working with the London-based digital identify firm Yoti which will examine the file, make an estimate, then delete the file.

Age verification is an increasingly common feature in social apps used by younger users as a result of tighter regulations. Another company catering to Gen Z users, Yubo, recently rolled out its own age estimating tech as well.

Twitter goes long form

TechCrunch broke the news that Twitter was testing a long-form writing feature called Twitter Notes. The next day after our report went live, Twitter announced it officially.

The news is one of Twitter’s more significant changes since doubling the character count from 140 to 280 characters, as it will allow users to write on Twitter directly, as if it’s a blogging platform. With Twitter Notes, users are able to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media, which can then be tweeted and shared with followers upon publishing. The company also said it would merge its newsletter service, Revue, into Twitter Notes.

Users with access can create Twitter Notes from the “Write” link in Twitter’s navigation. For the time being, Twitter is testing Notes with a small group of writers in the United States, Canada, Ghana and the United Kingdom. The Notes can be up to 2,500 words in length.

The feature could encourage users to rely on Twitter Thread (tweetstorms) less in order to share their longer thoughts, ideas or stories with their Twitter followers, Community or Circle. It could also put an end to using a screenshot from the Notes app to tweet something longer than 280 characters. Meanwhile, Twitter Notes can tap into the potential for viral distribution that comes with posting to the platform. Like tweets, the Notes would have their own link and could be tweeted, retweeted, sent in DMs, liked and bookmarked. They can also be reported and must comply with Twitter’s rules.

It’s worth noting (ha!) that Twitter Notes also gives the company a new business and potential revenue stream as it further develops the product. The feature may allow the social platform to compete with established services, like Medium for blogging, or Substack’s newsletters.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• Apple released the second developer beta for iOS 16 and iPadOS 16, along with other betas for Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Among the changes is support for cellular iCloud backups over LTE; a new feature that shows a brand or company’s logo beside their email in the Mail app to cut down on phishing; tech that lets you skip CAPTCHAs; plus new SMS filters and the ability to tap to report a junk SMS sender in the U.S. But another thing to note if you’re testing iOS 16 — the current beta’s editable iMessage feature doesn’t work with older iPhones, meaning your edits are texted to the person after the original message.
• Apple also rolled out Xcode 14 beta 2 which now includes a Stage Manager simulator.
• The iPad will no longer work as a home hub in iOS 16 according to information discovered in the Home app.

E-commerce

Image Credits: Twitter/Shopify

• As part of its ongoing efforts to expand into e-commerce, Twitter announced a new partnership with Shopify. The deal will see Twitter launching a sales channel app that will be made available to all of Shopify’s U.S. merchants through its app store. The app allows merchants to onboard themselves to Twitter’s Shopping Manager, the dashboard offered by the social media company where sellers can access product catalog tools and enable other shopping features for their profiles. Merchants will be able to use the new sales channel app to connect their Twitter account to their Shopify admin then get set up with Twitter’s Shopping Manager and other free tools Twitter built for “Professionals.” This includes Twitter’s launch of a new feature called Location Spotlight, which allows local businesses in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia to display information like their street address, contact info and operating hours directly on their profile.

Augmented Reality

• Walmart gave its app an AR upgrade with the launch of View in Your Space, which allows customers to see home décor and furniture in their own homes. The feature will be rolled out to over 300 items on Walmart’s iOS app by early July.
• Tim Cook may have hinted at Apple’s AR headset plans when he told a Chinese state-run news outlet to “stay tuned” to see what Apple had in store next for AR in an interview. A later investor note by Ming-Chi Kuo also suggested the new hardware could arrive as soon as early 2023.
• IKEA launched a new in-app design experience, called IKEA Kreativ, that lets U.S. shoppers visualize furniture in their own spaces using AR and AI. The feature can also remove the existing furniture from your room so you can better imagine the changes.
• Snap shared some data about AR shopping trends, noting that there was a 32% increased use of shoppable AR during the pandemic and that 69% of consumers believed AR was a part of shopping’s future.

Fintech

• Coinbase is shutting down its standalone Pro service by year’s end and replacing it with Advanced Trade across its website and app. The latter offers comparable features to the Pro service, which had lowered fees to traders who interacted directly with the Coinbase Exchange order book.
• Facebook Pay formally rebranded to Meta Pay. The change had already been announced but is now rolling out in the U.S. before expanding globally.

Social

Image Credits: Twitter

• Snapchat announced its first accelerator program for emerging Black creators, which will see 25 selected participants receive $10,000 per month to launch their careers across a total $3 million investment.
• Instagram has been experimenting with a new feature that would allow users to leave notes for their friends at the top of the DM inbox. The feature could help users share urgent or more important messages that could be overlooked in Stories or in messages.
• Meta announced more ways for creators to make money on Facebook and Instagram and the expansion of other monetization tools to more creators. The company will keep paid online events, fan subscriptions, badges and its upcoming independent news products free for creators until 2024, instead of 2023, as it had said before. Meta is also testing a designated place on Instagram where creators can get discovered by brands for partnerships; will launch a way for users to subscribe to Facebook Groups even for those who have paid for access on another platform; and is expanding the Reels Play Bonus program to more creators and making Facebook Stars available to all.
• Twitter announced the return of its developer conference, Chirp. The event was first held in 2010 but was then canceled the next year. At the time, the event had been a reflection of Twitter’s attitude toward its developer community in general — disorganized and constantly in flux as the company’s business initiatives changed. Times have since changed and Twitter has been trying to woo back developers with its new API, even by promoting some apps on Twitter itself.

Messaging

• Telegram said it now has over 700 monthly active users and announced Telegram Premium, a subscription that gives users access to exclusive features like doubled limits, 4 GB file uploads, faster downloads, exclusive stickers and reactions, improved chat management and more.

Photos

• Camera+, an alternative to Apple’s built-in app, added a new “UltraRes upscaling” feature. With machine learning technology, the app can upscale images to up to four times what the native sensor can capture.

Dating

• Match-owned Hinge added a new feature that allows users to share their “Dating Intentions” — meaning whether they’re looking for long-term, short-term, open relationships and more. The update changes Hinge’s focus as the company has historically been the app designed to connect people looking for more serious relationships, while Match-owned Tinder was aimed at those seeking casual encounters.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Spotify

• Spotify revamped its concert discovery feature with the launch of a new Live Events Feed. The personalized feature will allow users to find favorite artists’ events in your area and will now include artist imagery and more tour details. Local events will also be highlighted while streaming and soon, in other places in the Spotify app.
• Clubhouse is testing a new feature called Houses, per Bloomberg, which are private rooms aimed at encouraging social interactions where anyone can unmute themselves and speak.
• Reddit Talk, the company’s live audio Clubhouse-like feature, announced its Host program would launch on July 11th. The program will promote hosts’ audio across the site. Reddit Talk also gained new features like a soundboard and topic selector for discovery purposes.
• Apple Music raised the price of its student plan in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. In the United States and Canada, the price for the plan has increased from $4.99 to $5.99. In the United Kingdom, the price has increased from £4.99 to £5.99.

Gaming

• Epic Games has come up with a new system for game ratings. While these changes apply to its own online games store, it’s an example of why alternative app stores could be useful to provide competition with Apple’s own — they can be a ground to test out new ideas. In Epic’s case, random players who have played a game for over two hours will be asked to rate the game on a five-point scale. Over time, these will create the game’s Overall Rating. The system, which relies on random sampling, could cut down on review bombing and reviews left by those who aren’t actual players, the company notes.
• China’s regulation of the mobile gaming market may be leading to declining use of the App Store in the country, according to Morgan Stanley. The firm’s latest analysis estimated that the App Store only saw 1% growth in June so far, compared with 6% growth in May.

Health & Fitness

• Fitbit added a new premium feature, “Sleep Profile,” which will allow users to track their sleep patterns across 10 key metrics, including new data points like bedtime consistency, the time before sound sleep and disrupted sleep. The feature is rolling out to the Fitbit app’s Premium users and supports devices including Sense, Versa 3, Versa 2, Charge 5, Luxe or Inspire 2.

Travel & Transportation

• Apple is planning to expand its CarPlay experience to China, according to a job posting.
• Polestar has now added Apple CarPlay to its all-electric Polestar 2 sedan via an over-the-air software update, after previously only supporting Android Auto.
• Car rental apps saw their MAUs grow 19% year-over-year in the U.S. in May, reported Apptopia, despite rising gas prices.

Image Credits: Apptopia

Government & Policy

• TikTok offered a series of commitments in the EU to improve user reporting and disclosure requirements around ads/sponsored content as well as an agreement to boost transparency around its digital coins and virtual gifts. The agreement follows a series of complaints over child safety and consumer protection complaints filed back in February 2021.
• The U.S. Department of Justice today entered into an agreement with Meta to resolve a lawsuit that alleged Meta engaged in discriminatory advertising in violation of the Fair Housing Act (FHA). As a result, Meta has agreed to develop a new system for housing ads and will pay a roughly $115,000 penalty, the maximum under the FHA.

Reading & News

• India-based VerSe Innovation rolled out its news aggregator Dailyhunt in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, with over 5,000 content partners in the region.

Security & Privacy

• Google Chrome for iOS gained a number of new features in a recent update, including access to Enhanced Safe Browsing to protect users from dangerous websites and malware, as well as the ability to make Google Password Manager your Autofill provider. Other additions include Chrome Actions (typed commands in the URL bar) and access to Google’s Discover feed on the main page.
• Daycare apps including those from Brightwheel, HiMama and others were found to lack 2FA and other privacy protections, in an analysis.
• Google threat researchers detailed a commercial spyware system called Hermit, used in Kazakhstan and Italy, which targeted both Android and iOS. The iOS version had six exploits, including two zero-days. Targeted victims are tricked into installing a malicious app — which masquerades as a legitimate branded telco or messaging app — from outside the app store.

Funding and M&A

Courier raised $35 million in a Series B funding round led by GV. The company provides an API for sending notifications across multiple channels, including email, text, web and mobile.

Ghana-based fintech Fido raised $30 million in equity investment and some undisclosed debt funding in a Series A round led by Israel-based private equity fund Fortissimo Capital. The round brings the total equity investment raised to date to $38 million. The startup says it’s adding savings and payment products to its portfolio later this year and will enter Uganda.

Twitter asked its shareholders to approve the $44 billion Elon Musk acquisition. At the time of its SEC filing, Twitter’s share price was around $38.12 — lower than Musk’s offer price of $54.20 a share. The company’s market cap had also dropped below $30 billion, making a $44 billion deal look very good.

Downloads

WatchTube

Image Credits: WatchTube

Well, here’s something kind of crazy: 9to5Mac this week highlighted the new app WatchTube, which lets you watch YouTube videos directly on your Apple Watch. Yes, really!

The app is not the best experience for watching videos, as you may have guessed, but it is pretty wild that it actually works. The app by default shows you top trending videos, but you can customize this so the videos that appear are selected from a particular genre, like Music, News, Gaming, Movies and more. While it would be enough to just accomplish bringing YouTube to the Watch, the developer also added other features like the ability to search for videos, save videos to the app’s local Library and subscribe to Channels. When you get back to your other devices, you can also scan a QR code to share the video back to your iPhone or iPad.

As Google works on reconfiguring its adtech stack to move away from cookie-based ad targeting to something else that’s not yet fixed but which it claims will be better for individual web users’ privacy — and after Apple’s move last year to lock down third-party tracking of app users on iOS, also on a claim its better for user privacy — a number of telcos in Europe are sniffing opportunity to press in the polar opposite direction.

In recent months it’s emerged that several telcos in the region are testing what they describe as a “cross-operator infrastructure for digital advertising and digital marketing” — aka TrustPid, as they’re branding the ad targeting initiative — although, as is customary with respawning adtech, they’re claiming their approach is “secure and privacy-friendly.”

Users of mobile networks — who pay their hard-earned money to get cellular connectivity, not to be clobbered with (yet) more consent pop-up spam and/or be ad-stalked around the internet — may well take a very different view, as they wonder how many times they’re going to have to keep slaying the tracking zombie.

EU privacy regulators are also on early alert, having fielded complaints and/or raised concerns over the telcos’ approach — which suggests regulatory intervention could follow if carriers decide to move ahead with a full launch.

The carriers are dubbing their plan a “counter-design to third-party cookies” — and say it involves the creation of “pseudo-anonymous tokens” that are linked to the mobile device user’s IP and mobile phone number (which is classified as personal data under EU law).

The ‘twist,’ if you can call it that, is that different tokens are generated for each ad partner — which they claim “limits” the merging of data from different ad partners to create profiles on customers. But individual level ad targeting is still individual level ad targeting. (And consent spam may still be unlawfully attention sapping.)

The telcos involved in TrustPid are proposing to manage — and presumably monetize — advertisers’ access to this network-based infrastructure.

Technical details of how the tracking-based targeting is intended to work in practice are not immediately clear — but here’s how Vodafone, which is leading the initiative — explains the approach online:

• Your mobile number and IP address will be used by your network provider, e.g. Vodafone or Deutsche Telekom, to generate a pseudonymous network identifier based on which we generate your pseudonymous unique token (“TrustPid”). The IP address is considered traffic data. Traffic data is personal data processed while delivering a telecommunications service.
• We use this TrustPid to create additional marketing tokens for the websites of advertisers and publishers you visit (“website specific tokens”). Advertisers and publishers aren’t able to identify you as a person via the website specific tokens. Where you have provided consent, advertisers and publishers will use the website specific tokens to provide you with personalised online marketing or conduct analytics.
• We will keep a list of advertisers and publishers that you have consented to provide you with personalised online marketing or conduct analytics based on your TrustPid in order to show you this list via our Privacy Portal so you can manage your consent for those parties at any time.

As noted above, the proposal by European telcos to embed themselves into the ad-tracking game has quickly attracted plenty of the wrong kinds of attention — with regulators and data protection experts querying the legal basis for the processing — as well as, more broadly — questioning the ethics of repurposing mobile network traffic for ad tracking.

News of the proposal to fire up individual-level ad-targeting at the carrier level in Europe made it into German press late last month where it was reported that Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom were testing TrustPid locally — with the German publisher Bild/Springer initially signed up (another local publisher, NTV/RTL Group, has since also been reported to have joined the tests).

A report in Spiegel called the TrustPid trial “the return of the supercookie” — a reference to a deeply unpopular tracking technique used by U.S. carrier Verizon about a decade ago (which also attracted FCC sanction).

“Cellular providers like Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom are in a unique position. Even if the browser routinely deletes cookies or even changes the IP address, the provider can still link the data traffic to the respective cell phone number,” Spiegel wrote in the report [translated from German with machine translation]. “Advertisers don’t want access to names or real mobile phone numbers, only to a pseudonymous identifier. However, this can quickly be reassigned to a specific user profile, for example when shopping in an online shop or logging in to an e-mail provider.”

The newspaper went on to quote a spokesperson for the data protection authority in North Rhine-Westphalia — raising questions about the appropriateness of TrustPid’s stated reliance on user consent for its legal basis. The DPA’s spokesperson added that the authority would be taking a closer look at the initiative’s compliance with EU data protection law.

Media attention to the TrustPid trial in Germany was quickly followed by an announcement by the country’s federal data protection authority, the BfDI — presumably getting a lot of alarmed inbound from citizens of the famously privacy-loving country at that point — admitting that the project was presented to it in 2021. But it emphasized it had not given any kind of sign-off on lawfulness of the approach.

Indeed, on the contrary, the federal authority said it had flagged a number of “data protection issues” vis-a-vis the proposal, including its focus on relying on consent for its legal basis.

“At that time, we pointed out various data protection problem areas, in particular the requirements for effective consent. However, we have NOT made any final project assessment or given any kind of approval. It was only agreed that there will be further consultations with the relevant telecommunications service providers in the future,” the authority wrote [in German; we’ve used machine translation] at the end of May.

Nonetheless, Vodafone et al. appear to have pressed on with their tests — which, earlier this month, were reported to have spread to Spain, via local carriers Movistar and Orange.

Asked about the legal basis being relied upon for the experimental tracking system, Simon Poulter, a senior spokesman for Vodafone, denied that TrustPid is akin to a ‘supercookie.’

“What we’re trialling in Germany is a system based on digital tokens which do not include any directly identifiable information. Participation in the trial is only possible after having previously given voluntary and explicit consent (so-called opt-in),” he told TechCrunch.

“For a single user, the token generated will be different for each different partner. This limits the merging of data from different parties to create extensive profiles on customers — one of the big drawbacks for consumers in the way digital advertising works today. The tokens are expired after 90 days providing consumers with further protection. The telecommunications providers do not enhance the tokens with any customer, traffic or location data nor is this provided by the service in any other way. Neither the partners, nor TrustPid itself, can identify an individual by means of the tokens created by TrustPid.”

In further remarks, Vodafone’s spokesman also claimed:

The service doesn’t intercept or alter the data flows between a user and a website in any way, contrary to how other technologies sometimes called supercookies work” — and went on to dub it a “win-win” for users who he also claimed can “take control over their online privacy and decide who can show them personalized content and advertising.”

While there are some technical differences between assigning a permanent, fixed ad identifier per mobile device and linking single-use pseudo-anonymous tokens to target ads per device, at bottom both are setting out to repurpose mobile network infrastructure for tracking. And many mobile users would say that sums to the same kind of creepy.

In TrustPid’s case, telcos banding together with select publishers to erect a whole new attention-sapping vector targeting mobile users — which requires them to keep denying consent to ad-tracking as they go about their business on the mobile web as they’re faced with yet another unfamiliar-sounding ‘partner’ in the laundry list of cookie pop-up consent demanding data processors — does not sound like the kind of ‘control’ most people would prize.

It also pays to remember that a large chunk of current online advertising was recently found in breach of EU data protection rules — after the IAB Europe and its TCF framework were deemed to be delivering compliance theatre (rather than lawful compliance), exactly because of bogus reliance on non-compliant consent spam.

The IAB was given a few months to come up with a reformed approach. So a bunch of European carriers proposing a new wave of consent-based tracking of regional mobile users looks ill-thought through, to put it mildly.

Genuine user control — if that’s what Vodafone et al. actually want to deliver — would require this tracking infrastructure to be always off at source. Unless or until a mobile user instructed their telco to turn it on. Aka, making it opt-in.

But — as far as we can gather — that’s not how TrustPid has been designed to work.

TrustPid’s website claims users can withdraw their consent at any time via its Privacy Portal (i.e., in addition to repeatedly denying consent at the publisher website level). However when TechCrunch attempted this process — by accessing TrustPid’s bespoke “manage your consent” process via a mobile device connected to a participating mobile network — we were unable to access any controls that allowed us to actually opt out. (It’s possible the test has only been rolled out to a portion of participating carrier network’s users; but if it’s not clear who can even opt out that is not exactly looking amazing on the transparency front, either.)

The convoluted process TrustPid has devised to ‘opt out’ also merits a mention — as it requires browsing to this brand name website (not your carrier’s own site) while connected to a participating mobile network (not Wi-Fi) and clicking on a “Verify me” button that’s accompanied by an off-putting chunk of text which states that you agree to the processing of your personal data “as detailed in the Privacy Notice [which is hyperlinked] in order to verify you and enable access to the “manage your consent” section of the Privacy Portal” (Actual quote; I kid ye not!).

When we tapped on this horrible-sounding “Verify me” button it disappeared and was replaced by the tedious-sounding word “Accessing…” which was accompanied by a looping status bar that just kept looping infinitely and never actually progressed to displaying anything — such as an ‘opt-out’ button.

So, in our experience, TrustPid’s claimed ‘opt out’ was indeed pure dark pattern theatre.

Moreover, since the TrustPid tokens are designed to re-spawn every 90 days, the opt-out-seeking user must — presumably — return afresh every three months to restate their desire not to be tracked.

If that’s control, it’s an exceptionally tedious flavor that makes a mockery of user agency by requiring exercising it a never-ending chore.

Failing TrustPid requiring affirmative user consent via an opt-in, the telcos could at least provide a persistent, centralized opt-out.

Instead they seem to have devised a ‘control’ that’s either decentralized/scattered (i.e., across an unknown number of various publisher consent flows); and/or complex and inherently ephemeral as it perpetually resets on TrustPid’s own multilayered “Privacy Portal” — and ofc they’ve branded all this as “privacy-friendly.”

Frankly it’s exhausting just describing it. (Let alone having to mark a calendar with a recurring event to refresh an opt-out of a thing we never asked to be included in in the first place.)

TechCrunch contacted Spain’s data protection watchdog about TrustPid’s tests in the country to ask if it has any concerns. The regulator confirmed it has received a complaint and the AEPD’s spokesperson told us it would process the complaint following standard procedures — so it remains to be seen whether it (or any German DPAs) progress to opening a formal investigation.

(The AEPD received a similar complaint against Apple’s IDFA — an ad-tracking ID (albeit a fixed one) the iPhone maker links to iOS devices — back in November 2020 and said at the time it would investigate that, though we’ve not seen any public outcome yet.)

Prior to a few DPAs expressing concerns, the TrustPid experiment landed on the radar of the Washington Post’s privacy engineering lead, Aram Zucker-Scharff — who tweeted this unreassuring assessment of what he’d spotted back in April, while pointing out that T-Mobile was already doing something similar in the U.S. on an opt-out basis.

Thing is, the U.S. does not have comprehensive data protection legislation to regulate how mobile users can be tracked. Whereas the European Union does — via the ePrivacy Directive, which regulates tracking technologies and mandates that users are asked for their consent to such tracking.

Europe’s top court has also weighed in in recent years — making it clear that consent for non-essential tracking must be obtained prior to storing or accessing the tracking tech.

There is also the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — and its requirement for privacy by design and default; for transparency — and for consent to be informed, specific/non-bundled and freely given.

All of which should count for something when it comes to protecting European mobile users from creepy, network-level tracking.

Asked about TrustPid’s approach to consent, Poulter claimed no processing of users’ personal data occurs within the TrustPid system prior to a user accepting a cookie pop-up on a participating publishers’ website. “Explicit consent is collected via participating partners before the point of data processing,” he told us. “This consent is then used to provide the service. No tokens are generated unless consent is obtained. Each participating partner requires their own consent.”

However, per his description of the system, none of the participating carriers themselves ever proactively ask for user consent at any point — which, if they did that, would at least surface the fact they are trying to repurpose subscribers’ mobile network traffic as ad-tracking infrastructure. So the source of the tracking looks obfuscated by design.

The average mobile user getting a pop-up on their device from their carrier — asking if they can use their IP and mobile number so websites can target them with “personalized” ads — would surely insta-hit the ‘no way José!’ button.

By outsourcing the gathering of consents to third party ad ‘partners,’ TrustPid’s approach looks intended to dodge denials — but by doing that it risks running counter to key principles baked into EU law.

There is also just the pure creepy optics. It looks hella baaaaaaad. Because this is mobile network traffic data. And can a telco really delegate consent collection of that to a random grab bag of other advertising ‘partners’?

“Companies that operate communication networks should neither track their customers nor should they help others to track them,” Wolfie Christl, a researcher at Cracked Labs in Austria — who raised early concerns about TrustPid’s approach — told TechCrunch.

“I consider the project an irresponsible abuse of their very specific trusted position as communication network operators. It is a dangerous attack on the rights of millions. It appears they want to legally justify it with the misleading and meaningless pseudo-consent banners we have to deal with on websites every day, which is irresponsible and outrageous.”

“The project undermines trust into communication technology and should be stopped immediately,” Christl added. “I hope that European data protection authorities quickly team up and stop the project.”

Dr. Lukasz Olejnik, a privacy researcher and consultant based in Europe — who was similarly quick to query whether the telcos’ experiment complies with the EU’s ‘privacy by design’ requirements — also highlights how unpopular this sort of tracking tends to be with users.

“While some U.S. carriers tried to field test such systems years ago, it never really caught on. The thing is, people rather disliked such systems and it’s no wonder why. Building it with privacy is hard. I am not aware of any privacy considerations or thinking put into this TrustPid endeavour,” he said.

“When people subscribe to telecom carrier services, what they expect is a telecom service. Such additions are unexpected,” he added.

Other carriers involved in the TrustPid project that we contacted for comment referred us back to Vodafone — whose spokesperson did finally confirm that carriers do not intend to gather any consents themselves.

“The participating website must obtain explicit consent from the user at the point before any data processing begins,” said Poulter.

“TrustPid makes use of Vodafone’s network connectivity to anonymously identify a user on a website — once their consent has been expressly given. Only once that unique digital token is issued can advertisers and publishers use them for targeted advertisements. The tokens do not include any personally identifiable information. The tokens have a reduced lifespan and are specific to individual advertisers and publishers. The consumer is free to opt out at any time via the privacy portal that provides a transparent view of what consent they have given (i.e., opt in).

“Every brand or publisher token holds a consent against it, which can be revoked by the user at any time through a privacy portal. Once revoked, that brand or publisher can no longer use it for advertising. Vodafone does not control that process.”

Vodafone’s spokesman added: “We believe it is relevant to offer advertisers and publishers … a level playing field for the digital advertising sector but, most importantly, to offer end users greater control, choice and transparency.”

If Vodafone believes the tracking system it wants to subject mobile users to is indeed fair and transparent — and compliant with EU data protection law — why are experts and regulators concerned?

Poulter did not offer a direct response to that question — merely confirming that the telco “engaged with the BfDI to get its view from a telco regulation perspective.”

“We will also engage with other regional or national regulators where they have any queries,” he also told us, adding: “Specifically, the BfDI gave guidance on how to ensure compliance, including transparency and ensuring users can ‘reject’ with a single click at the first layer of consent request in the interface.”

Of course Vodafone et al. won’t be in control of the look and feel of cookie compliance on participating publishers’ websites — so won’t be in a position to ensure a clear ‘reject’ option is offered at the first layer. And given we all know what a total compliance trash fire cookie consent pop-ups generally remain, as resource-strapped DPAs have largely looked the other way at such widespread privacy breaches, it looks safe to assume TrustPid’s partners will deliver more of the same.

There’s a further twist in the tale, too, as the BfDI told us TrustPid itself has been established as a U.K.-based company — meaning it won’t be regulated by EU-based regulators — at a time when the U.K. government is moving forward on a plan to diverge domestic legislation from the EU’s data protection framework, including by loosening the rules around consent for cookies … Fancy that!

The German federal data protection authority also confirmed it was “merely informed” by Vodafone about its trial of the TrustPid-technology together with Deutsche Telekom, as it regulates the two carriers.

“For TrustPID, the responsible data protection authority is not us but the British data protection authority ICO. The U.K.-based company TrustPid itself has not contacted the BfDI at any time,” it told us.

“The mobile network provider creates a unique, pseudonymous network identifier for TrustPid. Therefore TrustPid technology could be seen as a value-added service according to the ePrivacy Directive. But the BfDI emphasizes that only an informed and voluntary given consent is an acceptable foundation for the use of this technology,” the authority went on, expressing scepticism about the use of consent for this type of tracking.”

“High standards must be set here and we are sceptical that the current consent fulfils that aim,” it added. “The BfDI has not yet made a final decision regarding the data processing by Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom.”

Mobile well-being apps topped 1.2 billion downloads last year, while leading meditation app Calm alone pulled in $118.2 million in revenue, data from Sensor Tower indicates. That may leave some to believe the digital well-being market is essentially solved, but a new startup, Lumi Interactive, believes the opposite is true. The Melbourne-based, women-led company has identified a under-explored niche in the mobile market which involves translating offline, self-care activities into games as a means of reducing our collective stress and anxiety.

While most mobile games focus on having users compete against one another or achieve some sort of goal, the startup’s forthcoming title, Kinder World’s main aim is to help users relax. It accomplishes this through short, snack-sized sessions where it asks players to care for virtual houseplants by taking care of themselves in the real world.

In the game, players are encouraged to perform simple acts of kindness — like practicing daily gratitude, for example — in order to improve their own well-being and that of the game’s wider community. The game features a variety of non-stressful activities — like watering houseplants, interacting with animal neighbors, and decorating a cozy room with plants, among other things.

Image Credits: Lumi Interactive

In some ways, this recalls how many of us spent months in creative play during the height of the pandemic engaged with games like Animal Crossing, the popular Nintendo game whose pressure-free environment helped many relax and pass the time under Covid-19 lockdowns. In Animal Crossing, players designed indoor and outdoor spaces, shopped for outfits and home accessories, planted flowers, and chit-chatted with animal pals.

As it turns out, the pandemic played a big role in Lumi Interactive’s founding, too, the company told TechCrunch.

“In late 2020, we were a small team of three, exhausted by the pandemic and a hard year for the business,” explains Lumi Interactive co-founder and CEO Lauren Clinnick. “We decided to take two weeks to refresh ourselves with a game jam to make something totally new, and mental well-being was very much on our minds. We’d also all become closer to nature over the harsh Melbourne lockdowns, and wanted to examine why houseplants had become part of a self-care routine for so many people we knew,” she says.

That gave rise to a question as to whether houseplant care could be brought into the digital world, and the team prototyped Kinder World as a result.

“It had a spark of something special after just two weeks, and the concept tested very strongly with our target audience straight away,” Clinnick says.

Both Clinnick and Lumi Interactive co-founder Christina Chen had a background in gaming before founding their new company, and had known each other for nearly a decade. Clinnick first entered the games industry as a marketing consultant for games like Crossy Road, co-founded a boutique games marketing agency, then moved into direct games development. Chen, meanwhile, had a technical background that saw her working on payments at Xbox Live and later as a Senior Producer at PopCap in Shanghai, before co-founding games publisher Surprise Attack (now known as Fellow Traveller).

The duo had bonded over their mutual love for data, underserved player communities and the new opportunities they believed were still on the horizon for mobile gaming, Clinnick says.

Image Credits: Lumi Interactive

As the team investigated the idea for a more collaborative, self-care-focused title, they discovered that many of today’s consumers weren’t finding satisfaction with mainstream well-being apps.

“When we actually interviewed users — especially Gen Z and millennial women and nonbinary folks — we found that 97% had dropped out of apps like Headspace and Calm, citing they ‘felt like work’ or became another thing for them to fail at,” says Clinnick. “Instead they often have fragmented relaxation hobbies such as gaming, houseplants, Squishmallow collecting, crafting, and ASMR. These are mostly distraction activities that helped their short-term anxiety but didn’t help them build important resilience skills in the long-term,” she says.

Lumi Interactive responded to this feedback by making sure their game was designed in a way where you couldn’t fail, no matter how you played. For instance, all the activities in the game are optional and the virtual houseplants will never die.

“We’ve consciously made these choices to prevent a burdened feeling for players,” says Clinnick. 

In keeping with a strategy to co-develop the game along with their community, the startup turned to TikTok to test various elements, like game design, the art style, and to find out what interested their users.

Now a full-time team of 12 and growing, Lumi Interactive closed on $6.75 million in seed funding in March in a round led by a16z — which it’s officially announcing this week. Other investors include 1Up Ventures, Galileo Ventures, Eric Seufert’s Heracles Capital and Double Loop Games’ co-founder and CEO, Emily Greer.

The startup is using the funds to grow the team so it can further develop the larger concept it calls “crowd healing,” informed by Lumi Interactive’s full-time well-being researcher, Dr. Hannah Gunderman, Ph.D. The company believes the idea — which references sharing kindness with others through self-care style gameplay — could become a new gaming category.

Lumi Interactive, of course, is not the first to imagine games that aren’t goal-focused. There are games that are interactive stories or graphic novels or other indie projects, but they often still have the gamer play through the experience to come to a conclusion. Kinder World, meanwhile, would be something players come back to whenever they need to relax, which is why the company is considering a subscription offering, in addition to standard in-app purchases. It’s also exploring online-offline experiences with physical items that could unlock certain game benefits or activities. 

Kinder World is currently in alpha testing on iOS and Android and aims for a full release later in 2022.

Spotify is introducing a new feature that will allow users to better discover nearby events and concerts. The streaming service today announced it’s replacing its in-app Concert Hub with a new Live Events Feed that will allow you to find favorite artists’ events in your area in a way that’s personalized to your own interests.

The update is only the first step towards a reimagined strategy around live events, Spotify says. The company notes it’s aiming to further integrate event discovery into the app in the future, which could see in introducing new search tools, playlist formats, and other integrations into the app that will make event discovery an even larger part of the overall Spotify listening experience.

The company has been invested in concert discovery features for many years, as it first introduced a concert discovery feature back in 2015. Though Spotify doesn’t sell event tickets directly, it’s able to leverage its listening data and knowledge of a user’s location to suggest concerts to fans who may be interested in attending.

The new Live Events Feed continues to be powered by Spotify’s existing ticketing partnerships, which had earlier fed listings into the Concert Hub. The company works with Ticketmaster, AXS, DICE, Eventbrite, See Tickets, and others to help source the event listings and direct users to purchase their tickets.

Image Credits: Spotify

But this system wasn’t working as well as it should have been, it seems. In an interview published to the corporate blog, Spotify’s Product Manager for Live Events Discovery Sam Sheridan, admitted that music fans would engage with artists on its platform but would leave the Spotify app when they wanted to buy tickets or follow the artists on social media in order to get event updates. That indicates Spotify’s product wasn’t doing enough to retain the users interested in live events from using its own app to make their ticket purchases.

Though Spotify doesn’t disclose the details of its partnership agreements, this impacted its bottom line as Spotify earns affiliate commissions on the sale of tickets initiated in the app.

The updated Live Events Feed looks a bit different from the Concert Hub, the company notes. It now includes artist imagery, instead of just the calendar icon that showed the date and show information, as before. When you tap into a particular show, you can also see the concert lineup along with other event details, a link to purchase tickets, and other music recommendations. Spotify says it’s also introduced a new messaging tool, which will alert fans to personalized recommendations about live events based on their listening habits. Fans can control this experience by setting their notification preferences.

In addition, when users are streaming an artist in the Spotify app who has a show coming up, this information will now be displayed in the app while listening. This will help to surface live events even to those who don’t visit the Live Events Feed itself.

The company had to shift its live events strategy during the pandemic when it shifted focus to virtual events instead. But Spotify now believes the time is right to refocus on live concerts and events, as listeners are now excited to see their favorite artists perform live again.

“Ultimately, our goal is to ensure that fans are aware of all of the upcoming events by the creators they love and creators they may come to love,” said René Volker, Senior Director of Live Events, in the announcement. “We believe if we get that right, then we can get more fans to more shows and help artists and venues have better-filled rooms. We’d love to be a part of helping the live music industry recover and, even more importantly to us, helping to grow it in the years to come.”

Spotify is developing a new feature called Community that would allow mobile users to see what sort of music their friends are streaming in real-time as well as what playlists they’ve recently updated in a dedicated place in the app. The company today offers a similar “Friend Activity” feature on the desktop, but had limited users’ access to that same Friend Activity on mobile devices.

Reached for comment, Spotify confirmed the feature was in the early testing phases but declined to share more details.

The company’s roots as a social music streaming app had helped the company grow in earlier days by leveraging its Facebook integration to build out its friend graph. But, in later years, Spotify looked more toward personalization features to give it an advantage over streaming rivals. Playlists customized to the individual listener — like Spotify’s flagship Discover Weekly, for example — had been helping to attract and retain users more than seeing what friends streamed. As a result, the company’s focus on users’ personal friend networks was de-emphasized in the product.

Though some people still wanted access to their Friend Activity on mobile, the company in 2019 shot down plans to add this feature after a user request on its community forums received some 7,451 votes.

Now, it appears that Spotify may be changing course.

Image Credits: Chris Messina via Twitter (opens in a new window)

While not publicly surfaceable in the app at this time, mobile users can access this new Community feature by typing in “spotify:community” in the Safari browser on their iOS device. The addition was first spotted by Chris Messina, who shared a video of the feature on Twitter earlier this month amid a longer list of Spotify app updates.

In the Community hub that appears in the app, you’ll see a horizontal row of Playlist Updates at the top of the page, then a vertically scrollable list of friends and what they’re listening to now, along with timestamps as to when that listening took place.

For those who are actively listening, animated music equalizer bars appear next to their name and music selection. Otherwise, the screen will show you when your friend had listened to Spotify and what they had streamed. In an updated version of the Community tab, Spotify added timestamps to the playlist updates as well, so you can view the most recent additions.

The feature doesn’t appear to be fully functional in our tests. You can currently tap on the playlists to see the song list, but tapping on a friend’s music doesn’t let you play the song, too. That will likely change when or if the feature becomes publicly available.

Although Spotify hasn’t prioritized its Friend Activity features, it continues to have a close relationship with Meta (Facebook). Spotify users’ social graphs today still rely on a Facebook integration — despite the fact that younger generations are more often now discovering new music via TikTok and many Gen Z users don’t even have a Facebook account at all. Last year, for instance, Spotify and Facebook partnered on a mini-player that would stream Spotify from the Facebook app. Facebook, however, competed with Spotify on podcasts for a brief period before discontinuing a series of audio projects to focus instead on its metaverse efforts.

The addition of a social feature on mobile would be even more exciting if it was decoupled from Facebook in some way, but the current version of the feature doesn’t indicate that’s the case.

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 industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China grew 19% in 2021 to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion.

Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games generated more than $100 million in consumer spend, and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend, and just eight apps topped $1 billion.

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 suggestions about new apps to try, too.

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

Top Stories

Instagram to “nudge” teens away from some negative content

Image Credits: Meta

Social apps are taking a closer look at how they’re being used by teens and minors as regulatory pressure increases.

Last week, TikTok improved its protections for minor users when adding a new feature that allows users to remind themselves to “take a break” after watching videos for a certain amount of time on the app. As a part of this, the company also said it would notify younger teens on the app that the new tool was available if they had spent more than 100 minutes on TikTok the prior day.

This week, Instagram said it’s rolling out its own set of improvements to the teen experience. It’s expanding access to its existing parental control features outside the U.S. to users in the U.K., Japan, Australia, Ireland, Canada, France and Germany starting this month, and plans to make them globally available by year end.

In addition, Instagram will now allow parents and guardians to send invitations to teens to initiate the setup of supervision tools. Once enabled, they’ll be able to limit their teen’s usage of the app during specific times of day and days of the week. They’ll also be able to see more information when the teen reports an account or a post, including who they reported and the type of report. For parents who were already using parental controls in the U.S., the feature will be updated to include these new features.

Notably, Meta is also now taking a cue from last fall’s congressional line of inquiry into how Instagram’s algorithms could be leading teens to develop eating disorders as searches for healthy recipes push them down rabbit holes to content that encourages disordered eating, over-exercise and other things that could trigger negative body image issues. Instagram says it will roll out “nudges” in the app that encourage teens to switch to a different topic if it sees them repeatedly looking at the same type of content on the Explore page. This feature aims to help direct them away to content they may be obsessing over to discover something new. It also won’t nudge users toward content that’s associated with “appearance comparison,” the company said.

Of course, by limiting nudges to the Explore page, Instagram isn’t fully addressing the problem as users could still encounter this content while browsing their Feed, Stories or Reels. But in that case, the content is there because the user explicitly chose to follow someone — which is why parental monitoring of the time spent on the app remains important.

Sherlocks from Apple’s WWDC

Image Credits: Apple

Apple introduced a number of new features and services across its platforms at this month’s Worldwide Developers Conference, but in doing so, the company appears to have once again pulled inspiration from the wider developer community. TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta took a look at which apps got “sherlocked” during WWDC as a result. (The term refers to Apple’s old finder app called Sherlock which the company updated with features offered by a competitor, Watson. The move eventually put the latter out of business.)

This time around, Apple introduced a number of concepts popularized by other apps — like Continuity Camera, which seems to be inspired by companies like Camo, which had allowed users to use their iPhone as a computer webcam. This situation recalls how the makers of Duet Display and Luna had to refocus on serving a broader ecosystem after Apple introduced Sidecar in 2019 to offer a similar ability to use the iPad as a secondary display. Camo, too, will need to shift some of its focus to Windows and Android as Apple moves in on its market.

Other services that may see increased competition include: BNPL apps like Klarna and Afterpay, which will now go up against Apple Pay Later; apps for removing the background from photos, which is now a native iOS 16 feature; medication tracking apps, which will compete with a native Apple Health feature; Figjam and other collaboration tools, which will have a new first-party rival in the form of Apple’s Freeform; and sleep tracking apps, whose functionality has been added to Apple Health.

Image Credits: Apple (opens in a new window)

While this year was a particularly bad one for smaller startups that had seen an opportunity in the market, not everything Apple copies is a fully developed product. For instance, Camo saw the shift to online meetings in the wake of COVID was driving consumer demand for better webcams — and what better way to serve that market than to repurpose the excellent camera most people already carried as a smartphone? But, as Florian Mueller explained on the FOSS Patents blog this week, Camo was more of a feature than a product. And perhaps in those cases, developers should focus on patenting whatever feature it is they’ve come up with, rather than waiting for Apple to swoop in with an app or API that could significantly impact their business. At least then, some of their work could be compensated.

FOSS also noted, however, that there continues to be concern that apps delivering their software to users through Apple’s own App Store are inadvertently giving Apple access to valuable data about their customers and traction. Alternative app stores could help somewhat to alleviate this concern.

In fact, Apple’s “sherlocking” was a line of inquiry at last year’s antitrust hearing in the U.S. Senate, when a rep from Apple was asked whether there was a “strict firewall” or other internal policies in place that prevented them from leveraging the data from third-party businesses operating on their app stores to inform the development of their own competitive products. Apple had only offered vague responses as to whether or not it leveraged such App Store data for product development ideas.

“We don’t copy. We don’t kill. What we do is offer up a new choice and a new innovation,” Kyle Andeer, Apple’s chief compliance officer, had said at the time. He noted simply that Apple had “separate teams” and “controls in place” to avoid such issues.

TikTok relocates U.S. user data to Oracle

In a huge move, TikTok said it would move its U.S. users’ data to Oracle servers located in the U.S. at the same time BuzzFeed published a remarkable report indicating that TikTok’s U.S. data was regularly being shared with ByteDance colleagues in China. Concern over China’s access to TikTok had previously led the Trump administration to ban the app in the U.S. The ban was initially held up by the courts and the appeals were then put on pause when Biden came into office. All the while, TikTok had repeatedly said it would never hand over U.S. user data to anyone.

When the Trump ban was underway, TikTok had engaged in discussions with several tech companies to acquire its U.S. business if it was forced to spin it off. Oracle had been among the suitors, so it’s not surprising it was named in the new deal.

In recent days, TikTok had come under fire in media reports about its toxic workplace culture where employees were quitting because of being overworked — spending some 12 hours a day at their job due to requirements to align themselves with China’s business hours. The company was said to also reward the overworked and punish those who set more reasonable boundaries, as it seemed to enforce China’s 996 work schedule on non-Chinese employees. This dictates a schedule of working from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days per week. A WSJ report also noted some U.S. employees said they had worked 85 hours per week on average, resulting in health concerns, stress, anxiety and emotional lows so severe they sought therapy.

More Reading

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

The next big social platform is the smartphone’s homescreen

This week, we took a deep dive into a new app trend involving social apps that are leveraging homescreen widgets to connect and engage with younger users who are looking for simpler, more private social networking apps that let them stay in touch with friends through casual photo-sharing. Read more here:

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

Image Credits: Apple

• Apple announced new sessions of Apple Camp for children and families. The Apple Store program runs June 20-August 31 and will offer lessons about using Apple’s technology and apps to do things like make a digital comic book, take photos, use Apple Pencil to draw and more.
• With Apple’s upcoming release of iOS 16, users will now be able to remove 30 stock apps from their Apple devices, including Contacts, FaceTime, Clock, Camera, Find My, Health and others.
• Apple made a notable update to its Apple Developer Program that will now allow apps that use iCloud to be transferred to another developer without removing them from the App Store. This makes it easier for developers to sell apps or relocate them to another organization.
• The focus may be on iOS 16, but Apple is still working on the next version of iOS 15, as well. This week, the company rolled out iOS 15.6 beta 3 and iPadOS 15.6 beta 3 to developers.

Platforms: Google

• Google said it’s shutting down Google Assistant’s Conversational Actions in favor of App Actions for Android. Developers have 12 months to migrate to the Android-focused replacement for the older, voice-only features.

E-commerce

Image Credits: eBay

• eBay launched livestream shopping. The company announced the debut of eBay Live, a live shopping platform that allows users to interact with sellers in the chat and through reaction buttons, then purchase any items they like during the livestream. The service is currently in beta and available on the website and mobile app. The first event will see eBay taking on Whatnot with a curated selection of rare trading cards offered by eBay seller Bleecker Trading.
• Food delivery app JOKR is exiting the U.S. The company said it’s closing its New York and Boston locations by June 19 and leaving the U.S. market altogether in order to focus on Latin America.
• Grocery delivery app Instacart renamed its subscription service Instacart+. The service will continue as usual, with $9.99/mo or $99/yr tiers, but will also now gain Family Accounts that allow multiple members of a household to add items to a shared Family Cart.

Fintech

Image Credits: Samsung

• Samsung launched its new “Samsung Wallet.” The wallet app lets users store digital keys, boarding passes, identification cards and more, and combines Samsung Pay and Samsung Pass into one secure platform.
• A report suggests Apple’s new Apple Pay BNPL service — Apple Pay Later, available in Apple Wallet — may be related to its privacy push, as it would not involve sharing personal data with third parties.
• PayPal introduced another BNPL option called PayPal Pay Monthly, which lets shoppers split purchases of $199-$10,000 into monthly payments over a 6-24 month period, if they qualify. The company previously offered Pay in 4, which was for smaller purchases up to $1,500, split over four payments.

Social

Image Credits: Instagram

• Instagram said it’s begun testing a new version of its full-screen feed, similar to TikTok’s, which aims to improve upon the way photos appear in this new format. The company said it will also use this experiment to try out changes to the navigation bar at the bottom of the Instagram app, where it will soon add shortcuts for creating a post — a button removed from the nav bar in 2020 — and another for accessing messages. Instagram had been testing a different version of the full-screen feed before now, but had been met with negative feedback.
• An internal memo provided to The Verge said Meta is planning to make Facebook more like TikTok, including by bringing Messenger back into the app and recommending posts from unconnected sources.
• Snapchat is experimenting with a subscription service. The company is testing Snapchat+, which would give users early access to experimental features like pinning certain conversations and exclusive icons and badges.
• TikTok is testing a feature that lets you see which followers have viewed your posts. People you follow will be able to see that you viewed their posts, too. The company has made the test available to a limited audience, but it may not be welcomed by all users.
• Twitter is now allowing local businesses to display their location, operating hours and contact info on their Twitter Professional profiles.
• Pinterest is turning Idea Pins into ads. The feature has allowed Pinterest creators to tell their stories using a combination of video, images, music and other editing tools, resulting in something that’s a cross between TikTok’s short videos and a Stories product with multiple pages of content. Now, Pinterest is opening up this new format to its advertisers with the launch of its new “Idea Ads.”

Messaging

• Apple and WhatsApp announced that Apple’s Move to iOS app will now allow users to transfer their WhatsApp chat history, photos, and voice messages from Android to iPhone when switching between devices, while keeping e2ee. Before, users could only transfer chats from iPhone to Android. The feature is rolling out in beta and will take a week or so to reach all users.
• Messaging app Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov, writing on his Telegram channel, accused Apple of limiting competition by banning other browsers on iOS beyond those that are WebKit-based. The comments follow news that the U.K.’s CMA was looking into this area due to possible anti-competitive concerns. “I think it’s an accurate summary [by the CMA] and hope that regulatory action will follow soon,” Durov said. “It’s sad that, more than ten years after Steve Job’s death, a company that once revolutionized mobile web turned into its most significant roadblock.”

Dating

• A ban on dating apps in Pakistan has sent users flocking to Facebook Groups. The country banned apps like Tinder, Grindr and Skout in September 2020, leading to local Facebook matchmaking groups gaining tens of thousands of members.
• Dating app Bumble has been pushing for legislation across multiple U.S. states that would criminalize what it calls cyberflashing — the sending of unwanted sexual images to another person online. The company previously helped pass a bill in Texas that made sending lewd photos without the consent of the recipient a class-C misdemeanor, The NYT said.

Streaming & Entertainment

• YouTube Music takes on Spotify’s Wrapped with a new feature called seasonal recaps — a culmination of your top artists, songs, albums and playlists. A “Spring Recap” will be the first recap that users can try. The streaming service had first introduced a Wrapped-like feature called Recap as a year-end review.
• YouTube added a “corrections” feature that will allow creators to add a note to the video’s description or pin a comment with the correction after the video is uploaded.
• Pirate streaming apps were spotted beating out traditional streamers like Netflix and Disney+ on the Top Charts in the Play Store in Brazil. The apps have a lot of traction. One app, Cine Vision V5, has more than 5 million downloads and 82,000 reviews.
• Spotify said it would slow its hiring by 25% after adding 2,000+ staff from 2019-2021. The company’s total headcount is now 6,617.
• Spotify also announced the formation of a Safety Advisory Council to help it make better decisions about content moderation. The effort follows the controversies that arose over its hosting of the Joe Rogan podcast which helped spread medical information related to COVID-19 vaccines, prompting a backlash.
• Apple’s TV app will become the exclusive destination to watch every single live MLS match beginning in 2023 thanks to a new partnership with Major League Soccer (MLS).

Gaming

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

• Netflix’s venture into mobile gaming has generated 13 million downloads, according to a report from Sensor Tower. The company now has 24 mobile titles and is preparing to launch others, including The Queen’s Gambit Chess, Shadow and Bone: Destinies, and Too Hot To Handle, which tie into Netflix series. To date, the most popular game is Stranger Things 1984, which has close to 2 million downloads. Asphalt Xtreme ranks No. 2 with 1.8 million installs, and Stranger Things 3: The Game ranks No. 3 with 1.5 million. (These don’t include the games’ original release downloads before they were Netflix-owned.) Netflix games are now being downloaded at a rate of more than 1 million installs per month, the report found.

Health & Fitness

Image Credits: Sleep Reset

• Sleep Reset is a new app from meditation app Simple Habit’s founder, Yunha Kim, which helps users improve their sleep. The app aims to bring the same treatment you’d otherwise receive in sleep clinics — such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) — to mobile devices.

Travel & Transportation

• Google Maps introduced a new feature for Android users that now shows live traffic around you not just in the app but in a widget you can access on your lock screen. The feature follows Apple’s introduction of Live Activities on the iOS 16 Lock Screen. It also rolled out a new feature that shows the total toll prices for a trip.
• London-based Waymap is introducing an app to help visually impaired people to navigate their surroundings, starting with public transit. The company wrapped trials of its navigation app at three stops within Washington, D.C.’s Metro, and hopes to begin a public trial at 25 Metro stations and 1,000 bus stops by September.

Productivity

Image Credits: Readdle

• Readdle now offers its popular iOS Calendars app for the Mac. The app includes other useful features, like to-dos, weather, meeting integrations (e.g. Zoom, Meet, GoToMeeting), color-coding, natural language event creation and more. It works with calendar providers like Google, Outlook, iCloud and others. The Pro plan is $19.99/year and unlocks all the features across Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch.
• Google officially shuts down Google Talk. After June 16, anyone trying to use the app will get an error message. Users are being pushed to Google Chat instead, which is available on web and mobile.

Government & Policy

• Social app makers and big tech co’s, including Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Google and others, have agreed to new EU rules focused on fighting disinformation on their platforms. Among the 44 commitments they’ve agreed to are those focused on creating libraries for political ads, demonetizing fake news sites, reducing bots/fake accounts, offering more tools for flagging disinformation and accessing authoritative sources, giving researchers more access to platforms’ data, and more.
• Meta (then Facebook)’s acquisition of GIF startup Giphy may be revisited. The U.K.’s competition authority may have to look again at the decision to approve the merger after the country’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) endorsed the regulator’s finding that the deal could harm competition, Reuters said.
• Germany’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO), its antitrust watchdog, announced it’s investigating Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework over concerns that the company could be breaching competition rules by self-preferencing or creating unfair barriers for other companies.
• The Netherlands’ competition regulator said Apple’s latest changes to its App Store Rules, which now allow dating app makers to choose alternative payment methods, now meet local and EU competition requirements.

Funding and M&A

Indian esports fantasy app FanClash raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Alpha Wave Global, formerly known as Falcon Edge Capital. Users compete across several titles, including Counter Strike: Go, FreeFire and League of Legends. The company is now experimenting with expanding in the Philippines.

Mobile gaming platform VersusGame raised $25 million in a new funding round with a number of investors, including Apex Capital, Brightstone Capital Partners, Feld Ventures and others. The startup has content creators pose “prediction contests” to viewers, who can win cash and prizes. It has previously worked with BuzzFeed, Billboard, ESPN, UFC and others.

Reddit is acquiring machine learning startup Spell for an undisclosed sum. The startup was founded by former Facebook engineers to provide a cloud computing solution that allows anyone to run resource-intensive ML experiments without the high-end hardware that would normally be necessary. Reddit could use the ML to improve its personalized recommendations and its Discover tab.

Spotify closed its acquisition of audiobook company Findaway, announced last November. The company cited the potential for its expansion into audiobooks, noting the market is expected to grow from $3.3 billion to $15 billion by 2027.

Food delivery app Wonder, led by Marc Lore, raised $350 million in a new round led by Bain Capital Ventures at a $3.5 billion valuation, bringing its total raise in equity and debt to $900 million. Lore previously sold Quidsi (Diapers.com) to Amazon, then Jet.com to Walmart, where he stayed to lead its U.S. e-commerce business for years. Wonder is now looking to bring local restaurants and food truck deliveries to consumers’ homes.

Edtech company Pok Pok, which spun out of Snowman (Alto’s Adventure, Alto’s Odyssey) raised $3 million in seed funding led by Konvoy to expand its play-based learning experiences for kids. The company’s Pok Pok Playroom app is designed to help kids learn through digital play using open-ended toys which, unlike mobile games, don’t have a goal to achieve, points or other gaming elements.

Indonesian consumer payments app Flip raised $55 million in Series B funding in a round led by Tencent, with participation from Block (formerly Square) and existing investor Insight Partners. The company has helped more than 10 million people in Indonesia as of May this year, up from more than 7 million users in December 2021. Its app lets users perform interbank transfers to more than 100 domestic banks, use an e-wallet, and create international remittances.

Onymos, a “feature-as-a-service” platform for app development, raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Great Point Ventures. The startup offers off-the-shelf features that can be added to apps like login, biometrics, chat, data storage, location services, notification modules, underlying logic and server-side functions needed to process data in the cloud.

Downloads

Image Credits: Grace

A new startup called Grace launched an app to make it easier for parents to monitor and manage their kids’ screen time and app usage on iOS devices. Although Apple offers built-in parental controls, many parents would prefer an app-based solution as opposed to having to dig around in the settings for Apple’s tools. In addition, Grace offers more customization over kids’ screen time schedules. With Apple’s controls, parents can only configure start and stop times for “Downtime,” for instance, as opposed to being able to set other times when app usage should be limited, like school hours, family dinner time, homework time and more.

Grace is also notable for being one of the first to arrive that’s built with Apple’s Screen Time API, introduced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference last year. The new API allows developers to create an interface that works with Apple’s built-in tools in order to expand their functionality.

You can read more about Grace here: