A new analysis indicates it’s gotten harder to get an app to the top of the App Store, in terms of downloads, over the past several years. According to new data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, the number of downloads needed for an app to break into the No. 1 position on Apple’s iPhone App Store in the U.S. has climbed by 37% since 2019. Specifically, it estimates an app now requires approximately 156,000 downloads on a given day to hit the top spot, up from 114,000 daily downloads back in 2019.

But to be clear, downloads alone don’t move an app up to the top of the charts. It’s only one of several factors that Apple’s ranking algorithm takes into account for managing its Top Charts.

In the early days of the App Store, Apple soon realized that downloads alone would give developers an easy way to buy their way to the No. 1 spot,

It then expanded its ranking algorithm to make it more complex — and more of a mystery. Another firm, Apptopia, believes it’s reverse-engineered the current version of this algorithm, which is said to consider numerous factors like velocity, app usage, quantity of new users, and more.

That said, downloads are still a part of the equation here and an interesting factor to examine given how little information there is about how Apple’s App Store ranks actually work.

Among the new findings, Sensor Tower noticed that Apple appeared to have adjusted the ranking algorithm to address the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

It reports that in 2020, the number of downloads it was taking an app to hit No. 1 on the U.S. App Store hit a record high of 185,000, up 62% year-over-year. That would be in line with the overall boost seen in app downloads and usage that was occurring as consumers stayed at home under government lockdowns, while schools, stores, and workplaces closed.

Getting to the same position on Google Play was easier at that time, however, as the number of daily downloads required grew just 5% year-over-year to reach 87,000 in 2020.

Since then, the number of daily downloads needed to reach No. 1 has declined on both marketplaces as post-Covid trends (or rather, post-lockdown trends) have normalized app usage.

This year, Sensor Tower estimates apps must reach a median of 156,000 daily installs to reach No. 1 on the App Store, as noted above, but Android apps now need just 56,000 installs, down 33% from the 83,000 required in 2019.

Breaking into the top 10 on the U.S. App Store also requires more effort than hitting that same position on Google Play.

Per the report’s findings, it now takes approximately 52,000 daily downloads to get into the Overall Top 10 on the App Store, up 2% from the 51,000 required to reach the Top 10 in 2019. But Android apps only need 29,000 daily downloads, which is down 9% from 2019 levels.

Still, these figures are approximations reached from trends across the respective app stores.

When looking at figures in more detail on a per-category basis, there are different trends to be found. For instance, on the App Store, it’s tougher to break into the Top 10 free iPhone apps for those ranked in the Entertainment category than others like Shopping, Social Networking, Travel or Finance. Android is similar in that it also sees Entertainment as needing more daily installs, but this is followed by the Shopping, Tools, Finance, then Communication categories.

It’s worth pointing out that these trends only hold true for mobile apps, not mobile games. That’s an entirely different matter.

When looking at mobile games, Sensor Tower found iPhone games now require a median of 93,000 downloads to hit No. 1 while Android games need 37,000 installs. These figures are down from 2019 levels, dropping by 46% and 68%, respectively.

The report also notes that, historically, it’s taken fewer installs for games to get into the Top 10. So far in 2022, iPhone games have needed 26,000 daily downloads to reach the Top 10, down 40% from 43,000 in 2019. And Android games needed just 16,000 daily installs, down 52% from 33,000 in 2019.

While much of the new report is focused on the U.S. market, Sensor Tower did examine how the U.S.’s Top 10 compared to other countries.

Here, it found that it’s much tougher for non-game apps in China to reach the Top 10 — requiring more than twice the number of daily downloads as in the U.S. at 108,000 (China) versus 52,000 (U.S.)

But on Android, it’s India that the most difficult market to top, requiring 292,000 daily downloads to reach the Top 10 in the free charts for non-game apps.

While the data here is worth investigating, this analysis doesn’t take into account the other factors apps and games require to climb the charts so it’s not a complete picture of how or why apps can climb to the top of the app stores.

In addition, there have been some hints that Apple may have been adjusting its algorithms even more in recent weeks, as bigger apps like Facebook, Netflix, Snapchat and others have taken ranking hits since around mid-April, Apptopia told us last month, when we inquired how relative unknown apps had been finding their way to the Top 10. This could be a test or a more permanent change meant to give smaller apps a chance to stand out and be discovered amid the tech giants, but more time will be needed to conduct that analysis.

Still, this sort of tweaking could help to highlight a variety of apps that are benefitting from marketing, promotions, and other trends. This might explain why Planet Fitness is No. 2 on the Top Free Charts in the U.S. today, for instance — the company gave teens free gym passes for the summer. Meanwhile, DIRECTV’s recent consolidation of its apps has driven it to No. 3, while the newcomer social networking app LiveIn, popular among teens, is now sitting higher than Facebook and Snapchat at No. 7.

As it continues to chase TikTok, Meta today announced a series of updates and new features for its Reels products across both Facebook and Instagram. Most notably, it’s offering a Sound Sync feature on Facebook Reels and adding support for longer Instagram Reels of up to 90 seconds, instead of 60 seconds, previously. The expansion follows TikTok’s move into YouTube territory with videos that can now be 10 minutes, instead of just 3 as before.

The company is also rolling out several more creative tools, audio tools, templates, and other options to make Reels more engaging, as TikTok’s influence — and money-making potential — continues to grow.

For starters, Meta is now leveraging existing features designed for Instagram Stories and bringing them to Reels. Among these are the Poll, Quiz, and Emoji slider stickers commonly found on Instagram Stories. These will become available as Reels features, as well.

While it may make sense to repurpose some of its most popular creative tools for Reels, in doing so, Meta runs the risk of blurring the line between its various products to the point where Reels doesn’t feel all that differentiated from Stories — instead, it could end up seeming more like an extension.

Another new Instagram Reels feature is the ability to import your own audio — an option that would allow users to add commentary or a background sound from any video at least 5 seconds long that’s stored on their Camera Roll.

Plus, Instagram is introducing templates, a new tool that will allow users to create new reels using the same structure as one they just watched. This was spotted in testing back in April and is somewhat similar to TikTok’s own templating option, which is a simpler way to get started with video creation. With Reels Templates, users are able to pull in both the audio and clip sequence, however. This helps users to recreate more complex formats just by adding their own content and trimming their clips.

Image Credits: Meta

Separately, Facebook Reels is gaining a number of new features, as well.

One key addition here is the launch of Sound Sync, a tool that will automatically sync users’ video clips to a favorite track. Syncing video to sounds has been a defining characteristic of TikTok’s short-form video platform, and a technology the company has expanded on over the years with further music-related creative effects, like those including visualizations, animations, and interactivity.

Facebook Reels users will also be able to add voiceovers to their videos, which is already common on TikTok.

A few other features are aimed at appealing to more professional creators, like desktop-based video clipping tools that will make it easier for creators who publish long-form, recorded, or live videos to test out other formats, like Reels. They’ll be able to turn their content into Facebook Reels using Creator Studio, for example. Meanwhile, gaming video creators will gain tools that will let them generate short-form, vertical Reels directly from their Live content, with dual views for both gameplay and the creator cam.

Creators will also now be able to create, edit and schedule their Facebook Reels from the desktop, in addition to iOS and Android.

Image Credits: Meta

Facebook will also push suggested reels in its Feed globally, as well as in Watch and Groups, in an effort to ramp up discovery and help creators obtain broader reach. It reminded creators, too, that Reels are prioritized and ranked based on whether or not they’re featuring original content.

While these changes may help to expand the variety of reels that are produced by creators, what Meta is arguably lacking when it comes to Reels is quality.

Feeds are often dominated by boring or dated trends — like recordings of people trying out AR or beauty filters, or videos synced audio clips that feature random or uninteresting videos uploaded from users’ phones. Pets and uninspired travel video clips are also common on Reels, as is engagement bait, where the sole purpose of the video is to drive users to the comments. Some Reels creators simply pose for the camera but have nothing to say — a tactic that may have helped them build a following when Instagram was a photo-centric app that rewarded the attractive, but is less of a draw in the TikTok era, where users are demanding authenticity, not perfection.

Despite these issues, creators can still — for now, at least — rely on Facebook and Instagram’s massive reach of billions to garner attention and engagement. But the overall feel of browsing Reels remains quite different from TikTok. On the latter, commentary, insights, vlogs, and serendipitous, but highly personalized discovery continues to reign.

To address this larger issue, Meta has been paying creators directly to make Reels through its creator fund and recently announced that it will pay out bonuses to creators for original content, too. But some are beginning to suspect TikTok’s rise combined with Meta’s hampered ability to acquire competitors under increased regulatory oversight will put an end to Meta’s time at the top as the leading social platform.

Poparazzi, the anti-Instagram social app that hit the top of the App Store last year, is today, for the first time, detailing the growth stats for its business, future plans, as well as its previously unconfirmed Benchmark-led Series A round. The L.A.-area startup now reports its iOS-only has seen over 5 million installs in its first year, with users primarily in the Gen Z demographic.

The startup says that 75% of its users are between the ages of 14 and 18 and 95% of users are between 14 and 21. Most of its users are U.S.-based and, to date, they’ve shared over 100 million photos and videos on the app.

While the startup positioned itself as an Instagram alternative where friends create your profile, the app’s competition today is not really the established tech giants. Instead, it’s the newer set of “alternative” social media apps that are targeting a younger crowd, like Yubo, Locket, LiveIn, HalloApp, and BeReal, among others. In general, this group of apps shares a thesis around how big tech is no longer the best place to connect with your real-life friends. With differentiated angles, they all claim to offer that opportunity.

Some of these are already outpacing Poparazzi. Yubo says it’s seen 60 million sign-ups to date. BeReal, which has declined press, has an estimated 12.3 million global downloads, according to app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The firm also reports that Locket has seen about 18.7 million worldwide installs to date, while LiveIn has hit a little more than 8 million installs. (Sensor Tower also sees 4.6 million downloads for Poparazzi, which is largely in line with the startup’s claims as these estimates aren’t an exact science.)

This heated competition among alternative social apps could explain why Poparazzi is taking to its blog today to share its metrics and confirm its financing after a year of silence. (Or it could be that it’s hiring.)

Image Credits: Poparazzi

Though Poparazzi appears to be an overnight viral sensation, it’s actually taken three years to get to this point, explains co-founder and CEO Alex Ma. He along with his brother, co-founder Austen Ma, went through several pivots to get to Poparazzi, he told TechCrunch.

“Poparazzi was maybe the 11th or 12th app that we built,” Alex says. Among those was the audio social network TTYL, a sort of “Clubhouse for friends.” But, says Alex, nine months into TTYL the team realized that things weren’t working and they made the decision to wind it down.

The co-founders understood that most social apps fail, and had decided the best thing to do was to keep building and experimenting until one hit. At other points, they tested a live texting app called Typo and many other social experiences. But when they built Poparazzi, they knew from day one it was something special. The app blew up, primarily among high schoolers, who were testing the app via TestFlight.

The app’s idea was, effectively, to turn one of Instagram’s core features — photo tagging — into a standalone experience. But in its case, photo tagging wasn’t an afterthought, it was the full focus.

Image Credits: Poparazzi

On Poparazzi, users can create social profiles for photo-sharing purposes, but only your friends are allowed to post photos to them. That makes your friends your own “paparazzi,” of sorts — which is how the app got its name.

“It started off almost like a novel, dumb idea — like, what if you could build Instagram but didn’t let people post photos of themselves?,” Alex says. “But the more we thought about it, the more we realized we were actually fundamentally changing the engine of what drives social today. And that was the big bet.”

To its credit, Poparazzi perfectly executed a series of growth hacks to generate buzz for its app that drove downloads at launch. The app launched on May 24, 2021 and quickly shot to the No. 1 position on the App Store.

Like many apps now, it smartly leveraged the TikTok hype cycle to drive App Store pre-orders. This helped to ensure the app would hit the Top Charts as soon as it became publicly available, given how the App Store ranks apps based on a combination of downloads and velocity, amid other factors. Poparazzi also implemented a clever onboarding screen that used haptics to buzz and vibrate your phone as its intro video played — something that helped generate word-of-mouth growth as users took to Twitter to post about the unique experience.

But the app also bypassed some best practices around user privacy by requesting full access to users’ address books to get started. This allowed it to instantly match users to their friends based on stored phone numbers and quickly build a social graph.

However, it overlooked the fact that many people, and particularly women, store the phone numbers of abusers, stalkers, and exes in their phone’s Contacts, so they can use the phone’s built-in tools to block the person’s calls and texts. Because Poparazzi automatically matched people by phone number, abusers could gain immediate access to the user profiles of the people they were trying to harass or hurt.

Alex says Poparazzi has since taken steps to address this, but explains the thinking around the original decision.

“It’s really hard to compete with Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram for the social graph,” he says. “So the starting point for building a social app typically is the address book because that’s the place where we can get information.” Plus, he adds, “I think the value of the app is close to zero without that initial friend graph.”

Image Credits: Poparazzi

The app also rolled out other new features over the past year, including the ability to block and report users, and it’s invested in machine learning-powered content moderation for detecting things like nudity or hate speech. It’s added the ability to upload from the Camera Roll, support for video, messaging, comments, and captions, and introduced in-app challenges that encourage participation — like “pop a friend eating ice cream,” “pop a friend at a mall,” or “pop a road trip,” for example.

It’s now working to allow users to set their profiles to private and is planning an Android version. Longer-term, it may monetize via events or merchandise, not ads — but this is still largely to be determined.

Prior to today’s update, the broad strokes of Poparazzi’s A round were already known.

In May 2021, Newcomer scooped the news that Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel had led Poparazzi’s “approximately $20 million” Series A, beating out Andreessen Horowitz for the deal. Alex says the round was actually a $15 million Series A, and confirmed Tavel joined its board.

This is on top of the company’s $2 million seed round closed in late 2018, before Poparazzi was developed. That round was led by Floodgate and included other investors like SV Angel, Shrug Capital, and various angels. (Disclosure: unbeknownst to us until now, former TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Bonatsos, was among them.) Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko joined the board with that fundraise.

The funding gives Poparazzi, now a team of 15 full-time, a runway of over two years, Alex says.

And although some of the competition may be ahead of it for now, the startup believes in its potential largely because its premise is unique. Unlike every other social app on the market, it’s not for performative social media.

“We’re very different in the sense that it’s not about yourself,” Alex points out. “We’re putting the attention on the people you’re physically with, and the people that are in your life, rather than on yourself.”

YouTube is improving its app’s experience for those who watch videos via their TVs, the company announced today. After observing that many YouTube users were already using the mobile app and engaging with videos as they watched on the big screen, the company is now introducing a new feature that allows users to connect their TV to their iOS or Android device in order to sync videos between devices. This makes it easier for users to engage with other YouTube features, like comments, the like button, or creator support, among other things, YouTube says.

The company pointed to research that found that over 80% of people claimed to use another digital device while watching TV as driving this product decision. It then looked at how people were using its own YouTube mobile app, and saw that many would open the video while watching YouTube on their TV and would engage with the content on their device by liking, subscribing, and more.

YouTube said it saw the opportunity to tap into this user behavior to address the challenges it has faced in designing a big-screen experience. Over the years, its designers have struggled with making the TV app easier to use, given that remote controls are difficult to navigate with, most TVs don’t have built-in web browsers, and there’s often less space to work with — especially when users are watching full-screen videos.

The new mobile feature helps to solve some of these challenges as it allows users to turn to their mobile app instead to synchronize their phone to the TV. After opening the YouTube app on the TV, they can then open the mobile app on their phone and click “Connect” on the prompt that appears to sync up their viewing.

This is sort of the reverse of the typical “casting” experience, where users would tap the Cast icon in the YouTube mobile app to connect their phone to the TV. YouTube confirmed the new feature doesn’t rely on casting protocols, like Google Cast or DIAL, in order to work. Instead, users just stay signed into their YouTube account on both devices — there’s no technical complexity to the experience for the end user, a spokesperson said.

Once synchronized via the new feature, users can then directly interact with the video from their phone while they watch, which YouTube says makes it easier to read video descriptions, leave comments, share a video with a friend, or use other features to support creators, like Super Chat or channel memberships, among other things.

But this feature also lays the groundwork for other experiences YouTube is building, including e-commerce. The company says it’s already testing new designs for its video watch page that would make it easier for users to browse and shop for products seen in videos directly from the big screen. These designs will help to guide users to their mobile device when they’re ready to buy.

In this case, a message may appear on the big screen that suggests users open the mobile app for a “second screen experience.” When they do so, they’ll see a list of products featured in the video which they can then view with a tap.

Image Credits: YouTube shopping experience

YouTube has signaled its interest in online shopping for some time, having launched livestream shopping last year, following other enhancements like merch shelves and shoppable ads, for example. At this year’s Brandcast event in May, YouTube also said it would soon roll out more livestream shopping features, including co-streams where creators could go live together, and redirects that send a creator’s audience to a brand’s channel.

According to a statement earlier this year from YouTube Chief Product Officer, Neal Mohan, e-commerce is a major area of focus for YouTube.

Left unsaid is the credible threat that TikTok is having on this market. TikTok has been sending users directly to other shopping platforms like Shopify or Amazon, driving millions in sales — with no Google sites being used along the way.

“One of the most anticipated opportunities we’ll bring to our brands this year is Shopping,” Mohan had written. “This new experience taps into the deep trust creators have built with their communities to help our partners expand into the booming world of e-commerce. We’re thinking about shoppable videos, Live Shopping, and, more broadly, how shopping appears across the app,” the post read.

Another benefit to syncing the app to the TV platform directly is that it could give YouTube more control over critical aspects of the user experience which it can’t always dictate on third-party TV platforms. The company, for instance, got into a dispute with Roku over the distribution of its YouTube and YouTube TV apps on the streaming media device maker’s platform, because YouTube wanted to control things like how search results appeared or how voice search functioned. In prior years, it had issues with Amazon as well, before finally coming to an agreement.

YouTube says the new feature will work on all smart and connected TVs that have the latest YouTube app. It will also require that users are signed into YouTube on both the TV app and in the mobile version, and both are connected to the internet.

The feature will roll out across all platforms with the latest YouTube app over the next few weeks, YouTube says.

Google Duo, the company’s video chat service for consumers, will soon merge with Google Meet, the company’s video chat service for business users.

The Duo app will soon get all of Meet’s features, including scheduled calls, and then, once the transition is complete, change its name to Google Meet. At that point, the current Meet app will simply launch the new Duo/Meet app. It’s a bit complicated, but to be fair, moving millions of users to the new platform was always going to be a heavy lift.

All of this isn’t a major surprise, given that Google has already sunset Allo, Duo’s chat-focused sibling. Both launched to a bit of confusion in 2016, as Google already offered a bunch of text and video chat options at the time. Now Google is finally consolidating most of these under the Chat and Meet brands.

Image Credits: Google

Javier Soltero, Google’s GM and VP, told me that this move has been in the making for quite a while. Back in 2020, the company brought the Duo and Meet teams together with the goal of collapsing these two products into one. “We think it’s incredibly important and strategically critical for Google to be able to serve the full breadth of the video market, from consumer use all the way to organizational and commercial use with a common service platform and a product whose user experience is guided by the same sense of simplicity and intuitiveness,” he explained.

Dave Citron, the director of product management for these products, also noted that as the pandemic hit, both Duo and Meet suddenly saw their usage increase rapidly and found a new kind of product-market fit. That led the teams to look for ways to iterate more quickly. “The great thing about bringing the teams together is that we’ve brought some of the best of both products to each other, strengthened the foundation and…it’s now fairly straightforward because of the work we’ve done over the last few years to take that final step and actually bring them fully together,” Citron explained.

Image Credits: Google

Over the course of the last few years, Google actually brought a number of Duo features to Meet, and now the Duo app will soon get all of Meet’s features, including scheduled meetings. This will happen over the next few weeks, though Soltero and Citron noted that Google will take a very measured approach here and monitor its metrics for potential issues and slow the process down to fix bugs, if necessary.

It’s no secret that, originally, Duo and Allo were meant to become the consumer-centric versions of the more business-focused Google Chat and Meet. But that’s clearly not what consumers wanted — especially in the case of Allo — and if anything, the pandemic helped collapse the difference between people’s work and private lives even faster than anybody could have anticipated. Google’s colleagues at Microsoft saw the writing on the wall when they launched a personal version of Teams.

Citron stressed that the overall idea here is to not leave any users behind. Duo’s users should be able to continue to use the app — even if the name changes — just like before. If they don’t want to schedule meetings, they won’t have to (but both Citron and Soltero noted that more consumers than ever are now also scheduling personal meetings). Likewise, Meet users will be able to continue to use the app for their scheduled meetings but they will now also gain the option to have ad hoc calls with their contacts without having to go through the process of setting up a call. And those of you who are using Duo on a Nest Hub Max or similar smart speaker (or even a TV) today will be able to continue doing so going forward, too.

In a way, it’s almost surprising that it took Google this long, especially given that at its core, both Duo and Meet use the same open WebRTC standard. If anything, the existence of Duo in parallel with Meet created a bit of confusion among consumers, especially as Google opened up Meet to everybody during the pandemic. Making users choose between two different tools for related use cases isn’t something that’s easy to explain and Soltero admitted as much.

“Part of this is also motivated by something that we’ve always known as true and that is: it doesn’t matter how many tools you have — and communication tools in particular — if you’re not great at allowing people to make the right choices for the right circumstance — then you’re not really making the world a better place, right?… People just still in this day and age — and certainly through the course of the pandemic — are not necessarily better at understanding intuitively what tool to use for what circumstance,” he said. Google, he argued, has the ability to approach this problem by giving users that choice based on how addressable somebody is at a given time and to look people up using phone numbers or email addresses, for example.

Some of this may feel like Google is looking for reasons for this move after the fact, but most importantly, this chapter of Google’s video chat confusion is finally coming to an end, and to me, a combined Meet/Duo app simply makes sense and may get me to use the platform more often for ad hoc meetings. Now for Google Hangouts…

A federal antitrust lawsuit over the long-shuttered alternative app store called Cydia has now been given the green light to proceed, after its initial complaint was dismissed. The Cydia app store, which once featured apps and other tweaks that weren’t permitted by Apple’s official App Store policies, is suing Apple over its alleged unlawful monopoly over iOS app distribution — a monopoly that contributed to the end of Cydia’s business, it says.

The plaintiff, SaurikIT LLC, maker of the rival app store, originally filed its legal challenge back in 2020, but U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers — the same judge who recently issued the Apple-Epic ruling now under appeal — granted Apple’s motion to dismiss the first complaint on the grounds that its claims were outside the statute of limitations. But the judge allowed Cydia to amend its complaint, which was filed in Jan. 2022.

That new complaint is now moving forward, as Judge Gonzalez Rogers has rejected Apple’s motion to dismiss it. Apple had again argued Cydia’s allegations fell outside the four-year window allowed under federal antitrust law, reported Reuters, which first noted the lawsuit’s update this past Friday.

In Cydia’s amended complaint, it says Apple more recently implemented design changes that prevented iOS app distributors from being able to provide apps that were usable on iOS devices. These changes were rolled out from 2018 to 2021, the complaint states, which brings the legal challenge into the permitted time frame for an antitrust argument.

More specifically, the complaint cites 2018 and 2019 technical restrictions like runtime code modification prevention, pointer authentication, physical map codesigning, memory tagging extensions, and other control mechanisms designed to target Cydia and other alternative app stores from delivering functional apps. It also references Apple’s contractual restrictions which prevent developers from using alternative payment mechanisms. And it points out that Apple’s numerous restrictions have impacts on other app stores besides itself, like the newer AltStore.

“…[the] plaintiff has plausibly alleged that Apple engaged in changes in its technological updates, which occurred within the four years preceding the filing of the lawsuit,” Gonzalez Rogers wrote in the new filing. “Accordingly, to the extent plaintiff’s claims rely on Apple’s technological updates to exclude Cydia from being able to operate altogether, those claims are timely,” the decision read.

Cydia is ultimately looking to recoup damages and injunctive relief and wants to move towards a trial by jury. Apple has been given 21 days to respond to the amended complaint.

While Apple continues to battle with iOS developers on other fronts, including with the ongoing Epic appeal, the Cydia lawsuit is particularly interesting because it’s focused on whether third-party app stores have a legal right to exist and do business. Cydia is arguing they do, pointing to the decisions made by the U.S. Copyright Office which declared iPhone jailbreaking legal in 2010. Because Apple lost the case to make jailbreaking illegal, it instead moved to make jailbreaking an impossibility through both technical and contractual means, Cydia is arguing.

It’s a creative tactic to reference the jailbreaking decision and one that allows Cydia to point to all sorts of other changes Apple has made in the years since that ruling. For example, the complaint contrasts how Apple has moved against some rival app stores like AltStore and Cydia as well as against cloud gaming services, but then permitted certain apps to distribute apps, as with WeChat and its distribution of “mini-programs.” Arguably, these are all very different types of experiences, but the case being made is that Apple is making choices designed to restrict certain rivals and not others.

While the complaint itself reads a bit like a grab-bag of antitrust concerns — some of which really have nothing to do with Cydia’s right to operate. At one point, Cydia complains about the $99 per year Apple developer fee; at another, it pleads Spotify’s case for pages — which almost makes you wonder who’s paying Cydia’s legal fees!

Still, it’s interesting to have Cydia in the fight, given the outsized role it’s played in iOS innovation over the years.

As longtime iPhone jailbreakers likely recall, Cydia was once a popular and sizable marketplace filled with apps and tweaks that skirted Apple’s official rules. To use Cydia, consumers would first have to jailbreak their iPhones to circumvent Apple’s security protections — a process that required jailbreaking teams to constantly search for new ways to unlock consumer devices to permit sideloading apps.

At one point in 2013, Cydia was used by some 23 million users, according to figures from its creator, Jay Freeman.

Though jailbreaking was sometimes associated with giving users a way to download pirated apps, Cydia also contributed to the development of iOS itself.

Dozens upon dozens of iOS features were seemingly inspired by tweaks being marketed on Cydia, in fact.

Long before users were customizing their iPhones with widgets and custom icons, for instance, Cydia users were downloading theme managers like Winterboard to overhaul their iOS look and feel with custom themes. A popular Cydia tweak SBSettings was iPhone’s first Control Center, before there was a Control Center. Cydia users were also first to have access to things like custom keyboards, private web browsing, dynamic wallpapers, native QR code scanning, screenshot previews, dark modes, auto-updating apps, a card-based app switcher, the ability to delete stock apps, screen recording tools, and so much more.

However, Cydia’s ability to actually win this case could be more of a longshot, given that Gonzalez Rogers already declared last year in the Epic ruling that Apple was not a monopolist.

Ahead of Apple’s big developer conference on June 6, WWDC, new information about what’s in store for iOS 16 has come to light. According to leaks reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, iOS users may expect to see new features like an upgraded lockscreen as well as updated first-party apps, including Messages and Health, updates to notifications, iPad multitasking features, and more.

The report described the software as a “fairly significant” upgrade —  which is notable given the last two updates had included sizable changes, as well. With iOS 14, for example, iPhone users gained support for home screen widgets, leading to a homescreen customization craze that still sees widget and themes apps like Brass, Themify, ScreenKit and others topping the Graphics & Design charts. Last year’s iOS 15 upgrade, meanwhile, delivered Focus Modes — a new way to control what and who is allowed to interrupt you and when.

This time around, Bloomberg says Apple will give particular attention to its lockscreen, a bit of under-utilized real estate currently which offers only the date, time, and buttons to launch the Flashlight or Camera apps.

In iOS 16, Apple aims to support wallpapers that have widget-like capabilities, the report claims. This could indicate that Apple is considering merging what’s today to the left of the homescreen — the “Today View” with its lineup of widgets — directly into the lockscreen itself. This would make sense as the Today View is meant to offer easy access to information you may need throughout the day, like upcoming calendar appointments, the weather, or widgets that can be tapped to open favorite apps. But the Today View isn’t within easy reach because you still have to swipe right to see it, and many users don’t bother to do so.

This change could be beneficial to app developers who support widgets, as it gives them another shot at grabbing users’ attention in a high-profile area. Plus, it would give the homescreen customization app developers a way to extend their offerings. That is, users could now download full theme sets with sets of widgets designed both for the lockscreen and homescreen, along with matching wallpapers and icon themes.

In addition, the updated lockscreen could be preparing for a future where the lockscreen has an always-on display, similar to Apple Watch, though this would likely be tied to updated hardware, the report said. This mode may be exclusive to high-end iPhones at launch, including the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max — if given the greenlight.

Other expected features with iOS 16 include an updated Messages app with more “social networking-like functionality,” which may include some sort of update around audio messages. (Please, Apple, allow us to play audio messages at faster speeds like on WhatsApp!)

The Health app will also be updated, but the report didn’t have further details as to what would be changed. In addition, watchOS will gain changes to watch faces and a low-power mode, while iPadOS will gain changes to windowing and multitasking.

One feature that wasn’t touched on, but is in need of improvement, is iPhone’s Focus Mode. While a solid concept in theory, in practice many who have tried to set up Focus Modes have ended up missing important calls and texts, as well as critical notifications, that had come in via numbers or apps that hadn’t been allowed to punch through “Do Not Disturb” settings for the given mode. Setting up Focus Modes takes a lot of work, too — what could be better, perhaps, would be a Siri-powered Focus Mode that asks users to train the setting over a period of time, allowing it to learn what you consider important versus a distraction for particular times of “focus,” like your workday or personal time. Siri could also suggest Focus Modes based on how you already use apps on your phone or how often and when you “mute” notifications from specific apps.

The Bloomberg report didn’t note any planned changes for Focus Mode, but it would be a big oversight on Apple’s part to not roll out some tweaks to this system with the software update.

Apple’s WWDC 2022 keynote will livestream on June 6.

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

Web3 apps are growing

Image Credits: Apptopia

A report from Apptopia has found the number of mobile applications describing themselves as “web3” apps has continued to grow from 2020 through 2022. So far this year, the number of web3 apps available for download is growing nearly 5x faster compared with 2021, and year-to-date, the number of apps available for download is up by 88%.

The firm analyzed data across the App Store and Google play, looking for any apps with “web3” in the title, subtitle or app description. Many of these apps — around 46% — were those in the finance space. This has to do with the large number of mobile wallets, NFT apps and the like now crowding the app stores. Much smaller percentages were found in apps in the social, tools/utilities, business and gaming categories.

However, despite the growth in the availability of web3 apps, the number of downloads the apps are seeing seems to ebb and flow, Apptopia noted. In addition, it found that NFT marketplace apps OpenSea and Veve were down 90%+ off their highs, and the top 50 crypto apps have seen downloads fall 64% since November. Meanwhile, web3 apps seeing growth currently include the circular economy app Twig and running app STEPN, which lets users collect NFTs by running outdoors.

Never-ending Twitter deal drama

In what’s becoming a regular occurrence, it was another tumultuous week for the deal that would see Elon Musk acquire Twitter.

This week, Musk decided to put up more of his own money for Twitter — just days after it looked like the tech exec was trying to get out of the deal by alleging Twitter lied about the percentage of bots on the platform. In a filing, Musk said his personal financial commitment was now $33.5 billion, up from $27.25 billion. The Telsa and SpaceX exec had previously said he would execute a margin loan of $12.5 billion against his other holdings, like his Tesla shares. But Tesla shares had seen a sharp decline after news of Musk’s acquisition plans for Twitter back in April, potentially prompting this move.

If you’re sick of all the deal shenanigans, you’re not alone. A group of Twitter shareholders has now sued Musk, alleging he manipulated Twitter stock for his own benefit throughout the course of buying the company.

The suit says Musk’s complaint about the percentage of bots on the platform was likely an attempt to drive down the price of the deal. It also cites issues with how he claimed the deal was “on hold,” when there was no such mechanism in place to stop the deal from proceeding; and it points out that Musk delayed filing a disclosure when his stake in the company exceeded 5%, allowing him to buy shares at a discount, in violation of securities law.

While a select group of Twitter investors is behind the lawsuit, it’s open to any shareholders who are looking to receive financial compensation from the Twitter chaos the deal has caused.

Musk’s move to buy Twitter is certainly shaking things up. This week former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey exited the board of directors. And, at Wednesday’s shareholder meeting, the board voted to oust board member — and Musk ally — Egon Durban, CEO of private equity firm Silver Lake. Durban has backed Musk’s companies, including SolarCity, before it was acquired by Tesla. The FT pointed out that the two biggest shareholder advisers, Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, cited concerns with Durban serving on too many other boards. (The FT said he was on seven this year, but a Twitter SEC filing said it was six.)

Twitter then rejected Durban’s resignation, two days after shareholders had blocked his re-election. The company said that Durban likely failed to receive shareholder support because of his director role on so many other boards (six), but Durban had agreed to reduce the number to five by May 25, 2023.

Also during the shareholder meeting, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal faced a number of questions about the deal, what it means for free speech on Twitter, content moderation and other issues. But Twitter declined to answer questions about the deal and said work at Twitter was continuing as usual. (Which hardly seems true, given the string of firings and exec departures following Dorsey’s exit and Musk’s takeover attempt!).

Twitter’s troubles also extended beyond the acquisition, as this week Twitter also agreed to pay a $150 million fine as part of its settlement with regulators over user data privacy. The FTC and Department of Justice said that between May 2013 and September 2019, Twitter asked users for personal information — including phone numbers and emails — to secure their accounts, but then used that information to target users with ads. More than 140 million Twitter users were impacted, the FTC said.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

Image Credits: Apple

• Apple’s latest research suggested the iOS app economy supports 2.2 million U.S. jobs. Apple shared two more new research reports this week, both of which were meant to demonstrate how successful the app economy has been under its reign. The company commissioned two outside firms to produce analysis related to job growth and earnings in the iOS developer community. Apple said revenue for small developers on the App Store in 2019 increased by 113% over the past two years, outpacing the earnings growth of larger developers by more than 2x. In the U.S., smaller developers saw a 118% increase in earnings since 2019. It defined small developers as having under $1 million in billions and fewer than 1 million downloads.
• Apple informed developers that starting on June 30, 2022, all App Store apps that offer account creation must also offer an in-app option to allow their users to delete their accounts. The deadline had been pushed a couple of times previously, and takes particular aim at many of Apple’s rivals, like Facebook or Match, which offer cumbersome and obfuscated processes for account deletions.
• Apple released iOS 15.5.1 with iPhone-to-iPhone contactless payments.

Platforms: Google

• Google’s automated enforcement of its Play Store policies has angered the developer of email app FairEmail, which has over 500,000 downloads. The app was flagged as spyware because it uploads user contacts, although the real issue could be something else and the wording in Google’s response wasn’t clear. Fed up, the developer said he was going to stop working on his apps altogether. After press coverage, however, he was able to talk to Google by phone and the app is being restored.

E-commerce

• EBay launched its first collection of NFTs in partnership with web3 platform OneOf. Its new “Genesis” NFT Collection features 3D and animated interpretations of athletes featured on Sports Illustrated covers over the years.
• Instacart revamped its ratings. The shopping app’s new customer ratings system aims to address shopper complaints about customers who continually abuse the system unfairly. Instacart says it will now remove ratings from customers who consistently rate their shoppers below five (5) stars. Instacart is also going to forgive ratings for reasons that may be outside of a shopper’s control and will allow shoppers to block rude customers so they won’t be paired with them again. And when customers remove tips without reporting problems, Instacart will pay out at least $10. The shoppers’ app will also now show a “Your Stats” screen with details like their average customer rating, customer feedback and statistics, like how many orders they’ve completed. Shoppers have to keep a 4.7 star rating to get prioritized for batches.

Augmented Reality

Image Credits: Niantic

• At its Lightship AR developer conference, Niantic unveiled Campfire, a social app for the “real-world metaverse” that helps Niantic gamers discover new people, places and experiences across the company’s apps.
• Niantic also introduced other AR developments at its event, most notably, its new Lightship Visual Positioning System (VPS) — a way for developers to determine the position and orientation of users and anchor AR content. The company has been quietly building out VPS, and there are now more than 30,000 VPS-activated public locations already available — most of which are in San Francisco, London, Tokyo, LA, New York and Seattle. Plus, its WebAR development platform 8th Wall added a new pricing tier for creators.
• Niantic also revealed its investment in Pixelynx, makers of a mobile game called Elynxir from musicians deadmau5 and Plastikman, which is like a music-filled take on AR games like Niantic’s own Pokémon GO. It also backed XR wellness app Tripp, a VPS partner.
• As part of Snap’s partnership with Live Nation, the Snapchat maker teamed up with Insomniac Events to bring Snap’s technology to Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas. The event brings festival-goers four new EDC Snapchat Lenses, including a Night Owl Lens; Daily Lens; AR Compass; and a Friend FindAR Lens (beta). The latter works to help users find their friends if everyone has location-sharing enabled.

Image Credits: Snap

Fintech

• PayPal laid off 83 employees from its San Jose headquarters around a week before the company said it was closing its San Francisco office. The company didn’t offer further details, but said it remains committed to the Bay Area and will continue to hire.
• Apple’s new “Tap to Pay” contactless payments feature rolled out to Apple Stores nationwide. The feature allows users to make a payment without any extra hardware involved.

Social

Image Credits: TikTok

• TikTok ramped up its competition with Twitch, YouTube and others with the launch of TikTok LIVE subscriptions, a new program that will allow creators to generate recurring revenue via payments from their top fans. Similar to the offerings from rival streaming sites, the new service will offer subscribers a range of perks, including subscriber-only chat, custom emotes, badges and more. Based on early reports, the subscriptions cost $5.99/mo and involves a 50/50 rev share, though that could still change.
• Snapchat’s Family Center parental controls were spotted under development. The feature will allow parents to see who their teen is friends with on the app as well as who they’ve been messaging with over the past seven days, and more. However, it won’t give parents insight into what teens are saying in messages or posting to their own accounts, or allow them to restrict access to various parts of the Snapchat experience.

Image Credits: Snapchat screenshot via Watchful

• Snap’s CEO Evan Spiegel warned employees this week that the company would miss its Q2 revenue and earnings targets as its growth had weakened. The company said it would slow hiring, as well. Snap cited the overall economic environment as contributing to the slowdown, including inflation and the Russia-Ukraine war. It also suggested the iOS privacy change continues to impact the company’s revenues. The stock tanked as a result.
• Twitter updated its API (v2) to give third-party app developers the ability to access the same reverse chronological timeline that’s available today in Twitter’s own app.
• Instagram gave its app a visual refresh with a brighter logo, typeface (“Instagram Sans,” inspired by its logo and its “squircles”) and full-screen marketing layouts. The new logo’s gradient, meanwhile, is meant to be more vibrant and features a touch of blueish-purple, likely meant to recall the app’s connection to Facebook.

Image Credits: Instagram

• A Rest of World case study of India’s Koo, a Twitter alternative, highlights the potential pitfalls with the introduction of a self-verification system (as Elon Musk wants for Twitter). In Koo’s case, the system is technically optional, but leverages Aadhaar — a verification system that’s supposed to be voluntary but had proved to be otherwise. Those without Aadhaar verification had not been able to access services like mobile connections, education, banking and pensions.
• YouTube Shorts began rolling out ads globally. The TikTok rival had been experimenting with ads since last year, and now offers both video action campaigns and app campaign ads.
• ByteDance rival Kuaishou, maker of China’s second-largest short video platform, reported Q1 revenue up 24% year-over-year to ~$3.2 billion, versus ~$3.1 billion estimated, and a ~$939 million net loss, down 89% year-over-year from ~$8.7 billion. The company now has 346 million DAUs, up 17%  from 295 million a year ago.
• TikTok extended its Marketing Partner Program to allow marketers to manage their TikTok accounts without leaving their third-party content marketing platforms. The short-form video app is partnering with Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Emplifi, Dash Hudson, Khoros, Brandwatch and Later for the initial launch.

Messaging

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

• New data indicates more than half (55%) of WhatsApp’s audience is using the app every day, up from 39% a year ago, per Sensor Tower. The firm found that both WhatsApp and Telegram saw a spike in engagement by MAUs in February due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In Q1 2022, Telegram saw 15.5% of its MAUs open the app each day, up from 9% in Q1 2021.
• WhatsApp said it will no longer work with iPhones running iOS 10 and iOS 11 starting later this year, as it aims to focus development only on newer versions of Apple’s mobile operating system.

Photos

• Google Photos began rolling out its new “Real Tone” filters on Android, iOS and the web this week. The filters are found in the Filters tab in Google Photos’ image editor and were designed by professional image-makers to work across skin tones.

Dating

• Bumble is preparing to expand further into social networking with a new communities feature inside its flagship dating app. The feature will be a part of its BFF offering and is already in alpha testing, the company said. Many of the communities are female-focused, with social groups that allow women to chat about topics like student life, mentoring, parenting, work and more.

Image Credits: Bumble screenshot via Watchful

Streaming & Entertainment

• Spotify is again hosting political ads on podcasts after pausing them in early 2020, as it says it has strengthened its advertiser verification system.
• Spotify also said its new “call-to-action” clickable ads were expanding to Australia, Canada and the U.K., after their U.S. launch in January. The ads display during a podcast’s ad break and can later be located on the podcast’s page.
• Apple Music became available in Google’s navigation app, Waze, which had already supported rival Spotify, Audible and other streaming services.

Gaming

Image Credits: data.ai

• Data.ai (formerly App Annie) released a new games report with IDC, which found that mobile gaming is poised to take over 60% of the market share in 2022 — 3.2x the size of the next largest form factor, console gaming. The mobile gaming market itself will top $136 billion in 2022. Mobile gaming reaches a wide demographic, it found, with 47% of the top 1,000 grossing mobile games skewing toward Gen Z in the U.S., while the Gen X and Baby Boomer generations, combined, was the fastest group for mobile game spending. U.S. mobile gamers also generally prefer to see ads in exchange for free content by a 3:1 margin.
• Roblox hired former Zynga CTO Nick Tornow as its new VP of Engineering. Tornow will help to shape the platform for its 50 million daily active users, including in areas like real-time translation, and other areas.
• Sony said it will shift more than half (55%) of its development budget to its live game service over the next three users, aided by Sony Interactive Entertainment’s acquisition of Destiny maker Bungie for $3.6 billion. The company will leverage Bungie’s expertise to build out a portfolio of 12 live game service franchises by its 2025 fiscal year, up from one in 2021, it told investors. It also forecast significant growth of PC and mobile games within its portfolio.

Image Credits: Sony (opens in a new window)

Utilities

• Google celebrated 15 years of Street View with a new camera and a time travel feature on Google Maps for iOS and Android that lets you view historical imagery going all the way back to 2007.
• Apple rolled out its immersive walking directions feature for Apple Maps in the city of Tokyo. The feature offers step-by-step walking guidance in augmented reality. Users simply raise their iPhone to scan buildings in the area, and Maps then generates a highly accurate position to deliver directions.
• Maryland residents are now able to store their driver license or state ID in the Apple Wallet app. The state is now the second in the U.S. to support the new feature, following the launch in Arizona in March.

Government, policy and… antitrust lawsuits

• Match Group and Google reached an interim compromise over app payments. Match agreed to withdraw its request for a temporary restraining order and put up to $40 million aside in escrow in lieu of making payments directly to Google while its antitrust lawsuit over app store fees is decided.
• Epic Games and Google also reached a similar agreement over Epic’s Bandcamp. The company had filed an injunction asking for the right to allow Bandcamp to continue operating as usual instead of being forced to adopt Google’s own payments system as is now required via a policy change, or risk expulsion from the Google Play Store. Bandcamp agreed to place 10% of its revenue into escrow until Epic Games’ larger antitrust lawsuit with Google is decided.
• In a new court filing, Epic Games challenged Apple’s position that third-party app stores would compromise the iPhone’s security. It points to Apple’s macOS as an example of how the process of “sideloading” apps — installing apps outside of Apple’s own App Store, that is — doesn’t have to be the threat Apple describes it to be. Apple’s Mac, explains Epic, doesn’t have the same constraints as found in the iPhone operating system, iOS, and yet Apple touts the operating system used in Mac computers, macOS, as secure.
• Apple again criticized the impact of allowing sideloading on iOS devices, following U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s introduction of an updated version of the American Choice and Innovation Act aimed to address lawmaker and tech industry concerns over the original. Said Apple, the changes weren’t enough and will “undermine the privacy and security protections” its users depend on.

Security & Privacy

Image Credits: Proton

• Encrypted email provider ProtonMail, makers of a popular iOS mail app, rebranded as just “Proton” as it works to combine services including Proton VPN, Proton Calendar and Proton Drive under one roof.
• DuckDuckGo confirmed a researcher’s findings which indicated its browser allows some Microsoft trackers on third-party sites. The company said this was due to a Microsoft search content agreement, which had been previously undisclosed. The company defended itself on Hacker News, saying that the deal was “just about non-DuckDuckGo and non-Microsoft sites in our browsers, where our search syndication agreement currently prevents us from stopping Microsoft-owned scripts from loading.” It noted DuckDuckGo can still apply its browser’s protections post-load — like third-party cookie blocking and others. The company operates browsing apps for Mac, iOS and Android.
• Brave Software, the company behind the cross-platform privacy-focused Brave browser, extended its partnership with Guardian, makers of Guardian Firewall + VPN. The deal will integrate Brave Firewall + VPN, powered by Guardian, into the Brave Android app. The move follows the Firewall + VPN for the Brave iPhone and iPad browser apps.
• A study by Human Rights Watch found that 89% of 164 remote learning apps and sites used during the pandemic across 49 countries had shared student data with marketers and data brokers.

Funding and M&A

Take-Two completed its $12.7 billion acquisition of mobile games giant Zynga. The deal saw Zynga shareholders receive $3.50 in cash and 0.0406 shares of Take-Two common stock per share of Zynga common stock.

AR mobile game maker Jadu raised $36 million in a Series A round led by Bain Capital Crypto to accelerate its work building out an AR game featuring 3D NFT avatars from Deadfellaz, CyberKongz, FLUFs, VOIDs, ChibiApes, Meebits and other collections. The company has raised $45 million+ to date.

Friendly Apps just closed on a $3 million seed round, pre-product, from BoxGroup, Weekend Fund, Shrug Capital, Day One Ventures, Betaworks Ventures, SRB Ventures, 305 Ventures, CoreVentures and other angels. The startup hails from longtime engineer and product designer Michael Sayman, who has been building apps since he was a kid, landing him roles at Facebook, Google, Roblox, and, most recently, Twitter. Having joined Facebook at just 17, he’s often been tasked with developing products aimed at a teenage audience. Now he’s planning to leverage his understanding of what users want from their apps with his own startup.

Circles, an app that offers online group therapy via video chat, raised $16.5 million in a Series A round led by Zeev Ventures. Also participating was Lior Ron, head of Uber Freight, along with existing investors NFX, Flint Capital and Sir Ronald Cohen.

Pokémon GO maker Niantic disclosed its first two investments. The company said it has backed TRIPP, an award-winning leader in XR wellness, and music metaverse startup Pixelynx, from musicians deadmau5 and Plastikman. The latter’s first mobile game is called Elynxir and is using Niantic’s new Lightship AR platform to combine musical experiences and AR. Deal terms weren’t disclosed.

Longtime engineer and product designer Michael Sayman has been building apps since he was a kid, landing him roles at Facebook, Google, Roblox, and most recently Twitter, where he’s often been tasked with developing products aimed at a teenage audience. Sayman was only 17 when he joined Facebook, but had already built several apps — an experience documented in his book “App Kid.” Over the years, Sayman contributed to high-profile products like Instagram Stories, WhatsApp Status, YouTube Shorts, and the Roblox Graph, among others. Now, Sayman is looking to leverage his understanding of what users want from their apps with the launch of his new startup, Friendly Apps.

The startup’s thesis is that his generation, Gen Z, understands that many of the social apps that have been built to date can be toxic to users’ health and can prevent people from accomplishing their true goals. Friendly Apps’ mission is to create a suite of apps with a different set of values that are targeted toward helping people with both their physical and mental health in new ways.

Prior to starting Friendly Apps, Sayman was working at Twitter. In fact, the founder had just joined Twitter in March, where he intended to aid the social network by building out new product experiences for teens via its 0–>1 team.

But after the Elon Musk acquisition deal was announced, internal product development efforts slowed down, he says. That situation gave him a push to finally break out of Big Tech to work on his own thing.

“It takes a billionaire trying to acquire a company that I worked at for me to finally go and do this,” Sayman says, with a laugh.

The idea for Friendly Apps is something he’s had in the back of his mind for years as he’s seen how tech companies developed their products.

“A lot of social media products use retention tactics that slowly deteriorate the well-being and mental health of their users because of the way they’re designed,” explains Sayman. The companies encouraged the wrong behaviors from their users, and have become popular because they’re addictive, he says.

“They have tactics to keep people coming in.”

He suggests the problem lies not only with the product design, but also with the internal goals and metrics companies pursue.

“The structures and the incentives within a lot of these social media companies are not set up in a way to encourage longer-term thinking around the well-being of the person that’s using the product,” Sayman notes. “If somebody is not doing well on the platform…if they’re feeling anxious, depressed, or insecure, over time, they’ll stop using the product. They’ll try to find other avenues or other ways of communicating or connecting with the people they care about through some other means,” he says.

Image Credits: Michael Sayman (opens in a new window)

Sayman wants Friendly Apps to be different. Although the startup will take the learnings from social apps and products he’s helped create for teens, its apps won’t be solely aimed at Gen Z users.

As for the apps themselves, they haven’t yet been created. Despite that fact, the startup raised a seed round of $3 million in about a week’s time. It seems a lot of people were willing to bet on Sayman, starting with Weekend Fund’s Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt.

“I’ve known Michael for eight years. It was clear that he would eventually start his own company. He has a very rare ability to deeply intuit human behavior, translate his ideas into clean design, and build quickly,” says Hoover. “We committed to invest pre-product, pre-deck.”

Sayman does have a few different product ideas, however. He envisions one app could be focused on helping people achieve their physical fitness goals — even if they’re not a regular gym-goer or runner, or some other kind of hardcore fitness advocate.

Another app could help people remember to prioritize their real-world relationships and encourage them to spend time with people they care about in the physical world.

“Everyone’s doing so many things that we don’t actually end up catching up in person for a while,” Sayman says.

As time goes by, friendships can deteriorate as people know less and less about each other, which can impact mental health. Today’s social apps don’t help — they only further isolate us, he explains. Instead, we end up experiencing relationships through “a little tiny window of filtered photos,” he notes.

“We didn’t evolve to live that way — like we all do right now,” says Sayman. “So I think a lot of the mental health issues that we start seeing, in particular with younger generations, come as a result of a lot of that isolation and that ‘tiny window’ view of the world.”

The founder also plans to bring his worldview as a second-generation Latino immigrant into Friendly Apps’ product experiences, seeing the potential to help address specific hurdles that new immigrants to the U.S. may need to overcome.

But these sorts of concepts may or may not be among the first apps to launch. Instead, the startup plans to test a suite of products, experiences, features, and even various design elements before bringing anything to the public.

Sayman can build apps quickly. But as a sole founder, he will still need some time to get the products off the ground and tested. He hopes to have something released to the public in around 6 months, he says.

Seed investors in Friendly Apps include BoxGroup, Weekend Fund, Shrug Capital, Day One Ventures, Betaworks Ventures, SRB Ventures, 305 Ventures, CoreVentures, plus founders and operators from Snap, TikTok, Instagram, Meta, Google, Tesla, Things, and others.

The company also wants to include the perspectives of those outside Silicon Valley, Sayman says.

One angel investor, Hayley Leibson, told TechCrunch she was “extremely happy that Michael prioritized bringing onboard womxn angel investors like myself, and others including teachers, mothers, students, and immigrants from diverse backgrounds.”

“The tech industry doesn’t really gather a lot of investors from places that aren’t the tech industry,” Sayman points out. “If we’re thinking about how to make products that help people’s mental health and help people’s like physical well-being…I think we can have opinions, feedback, and input directly from people who aren’t in the tech world.”

Yubo, a social livestreaming app popular with a Gen Z audience, announced today it’s becoming one of the first major social platforms to adopt a new age verification technique that uses live image capture technology to identify minors using its app, in order to keep them separated from adult users. While other companies serving a younger crowd typically rely on traditional age gating techniques, these are easily bypassed as all that’s generally required is for a user to enter a birthdate in an online form.

Many kids know they can lie about their age to gain access to platforms designed for older users, which is how they end up in online spaces that aren’t kid-friendly or that have greater risks associated with their use.

Yubo, on the other hand, has been thinking about what the future of social networking should look like for the next generation of users — and not just from a product standpoint, but also from a product safety perspective.

Founded in 2015, Yubo users hang out in live-streaming rooms where they can socialize, play games, and make new friends. There aren’t creators on the platform broadcasting to fans, and Yubo has no plans to move in that direction — the way that nearly all other major social platforms have today. Instead, its app’s focus is on helping users socialize naturally, the way they’re already comfortable with, after having grown up using services FaceTime and hanging out with friends in other live video apps.

According to Yubo co-founder and CEO, Sacha Lazimi, Generation Z sees “no difference between online and offline life,” he says.

“They have exactly the same needs of socializing offline as online, but there were no solutions [for this],” Lazimi explains. This led Yubo to launch a live video feature that launched to the app’s userbase in February 2018.

“We are taking the best of offline interaction and adding to that the power of technology to make sure that you will connect to the right group of people anywhere in the world, at any time, in a safe environment,” he adds.

The company today has seen 60 million sign-ups, which is up from the 40 million it reported in 2020 when it closed on its $47.5 million Series C funding round. 99% of them are Gen Z users, ages 13 to 25.

While Yubo doesn’t share its monthly active users, it notes that it’s seeing increasing revenue via its a la carte premium features and subscriptions, which grew from 7 million euros in 2019 to now 25 million euros as of last year. The app doesn’t run ads.

But with this younger audience and growth, comes the need for increased safety. Previously, Yubo had partnered with the digital identity provider Yoti to help it vet potentially suspicious users. If people were using different phone numbers or devices, for example, or if they had been reported by others, Yubo would ask them to verify themselves by submitting their IDs. The process of managing the ID verification was handled by Yoti.

On average, Yubo processed 6,500 verifications per day in 2021. Following this verification, 67,000 accounts per month were suspended due to discrepancies in age, the company says.

But there was one challenge with this system — minors often don’t have an ID.

“A lot of teenagers — especially under 18 years old — do not have any identity documents,” notes Lazimi. “So we could not ask everyone to verify their identity.”

Image Credits: Yubo

That led the company to now adopt another Yoti product for age estimations. This system will direct new and existing users to an age verification and agreement screen either during sign-up or as a pop-up for existing users upon launching the app. When they accept, their camera will activate and they’ll be prompted to place their face within an oval that appears on the screen. The “liveness algorithm” also takes a short video that analyses movement to confirm the image used is not fake or being pulled from a search engine.

When the face has been detected, the user will receive confirmation that they’ve been verified or they’ll be told if their age doesn’t match the age they entered upon sign-up, or that they’re not using a legitimate picture.

If the user’s age is confirmed, they’ll be directed to the homepage and can use Yubo as before. If verification fails, they’ll need to go through a full ID check instead.

Image Credits: Yubo

The new technology, as you may imagine, is not perfect.

Lazimi admits that it works better with younger people’s faces than with adults. Currently, the Yoti age estimation system can effectively identify the ages of 6 to 12-year-old users within 1.3 years, and those between 13 and 19 within 1.5 years, Yoti claims. After that, accuracy decreases. For 20 to 25-year-olds, it’s accurate within a range of 2.5 years. For 26 to 30-year-olds, it’s within an average of 3 years. But this accuracy could improve over time, as more analysis is performed.

“It’s actually very accurate for young users, and especially users under 15…I believe for 13 to 14-year-old users, it’s around 99%,” he says. (It’s 98.9% accurate across all ages, genders, and skin tones, says Yoti.). To date, Yoti has run the technology across some 500 million faces, and is certified by software testing service iBeta.

“It’s less accurate for older users — that’s why we’ve launched with the youngest users, because those are the ones we want to protect more and also because it’s more accurate and more precise,” Lazimi says.

The company will initially roll out the technology initially to 13 and 14-year-old users with the goal of age-verifying 100% of users by the end of 2022.

The age estimation tech is not the first tool that Yubo has adopted to keep younger users safe on live streams, the company points out.

It’s also using A.I. technology and human moderation to monitor livestreams by taking second-by-second screenshots, then flagging inappropriate content to human moderators in real-time, including nudity, partial nudity (including underwear), suggestive content, drug use, weapons, blood, and violence. (You can see some complaints about this in Yubo’s App Store reviews, where teens are complaining it flagged boys for streaming with their shirts off.)

Yubo also includes educational safety features. For example, the app pop-ups reminders about personalized modification options (like Muted Words), and sends alerts sent to users if they are participating in harmful and inappropriate behaviors or sharing sensitive personal information. The company has a Safety Advisory Board with international online safety experts, as well.

“We are also working closely with government and NGOs because we believe that social networks need to have stronger regulation from the top,” says Lazimi. But, he adds, “we are not waiting for regulation to do safety features. We are doing it proactively,” he says.

As app store legislation targeting tech giants Apple and Google moves forward in Congress, Apple today is out with two more new reports meant to demonstrate how successful the app economy has been under its reign. The company commissioned outside firms to produce analyses related to job growth and earnings in the iOS developer community. The studies found the iOS app economy now supports more than 2.2 million jobs in the U.S. and indicated a 118% increase in U.S. small developer earnings over the past two years.

Apple again tapped Analysis Group for one report — the same firm it’s used to produce reports to back up its position on its commission structure or to highlight the growing amount of commerce that takes place via apps. Last year, for example, that figure grew another 24% to $643 billion while Apple noted around 90% of those billings and sales were commission-free.

The larger point Apple is attempting to make with each new report is that Apple’s current system is working well — that it’s fair; that its commissions are comparable with rival app stores and other software marketplaces; and that ultimately, Apple’s app store business is good for the economy. But the underlying tone is also one of warning to potential regulators: beware what you’re messing with. Today’s reports are more of the same.

In the research backed by Analysis Group, Apple shared that revenue for small developers on the App Store in 2019 increased by 113% over the past two years, outpacing the earnings growth of larger developers by more than 2x. In the U.S., smaller developers saw a 118% increase in earnings since 2019. These small developers are those who earn up to $1 million per year and have fewer than 1 million annual downloads, said Apple.

Image Credits: Apple

It’s interesting that Apple broke out small developers by both revenue and downloads, given that its own App Store Small Business Program, launched on Jan. 1, 2021, only uses the $1 million threshold to drop commissions for small developers from 30% down to 15%. A certain number of downloads is not used as a threshold for that program. If Apple continues to chart this same growth metric over the years to come, then, it won’t be possible to make a direct comparison between these figures and its Small Business Program.

The report also examined the number of new developers joining the App Store ecosystem in 2021, noting that approximately 24% came from Europe, 23% from China, 14% from the US, 4.3% from Japan, and 34% from other regions including Korea, India, and Brazil. The number of smaller developers over the past two years has also grown, it said — in the U.K. by almost 40% since 2019, and in Germany, by over 25%.

While Apple believes this data can help make the case for its successful running of the App Store, if anything, these figures highlight how important the App Store is to a wide range of global developers. That, in turn, could also help demonstrate why a system this large and powerful could also be due for more regulation and competition.

That’s now underway. As Congress pushes forward its own app store bills in the U.S., Big Tech reform impacting Apple is coming into force in the E.U. by way of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), expected to roll out this Spring. The DMA will bring in a series of up-front obligations on so-called Internet gatekeepers which are likely to apply to the big app store operators. In the U.K., a provisional report by the competition regulator last December suggested Apple, as well as Google, are both likely to face intervention over the control of their app stores, once the government legislates to empower a planned ex ante regime for regulating tech giants to address entrenched market power. The European Union recently agreed to its own ex ante reboot to tackle Big Tech.

Apple recently has been fighting back particularly hard against one of the DMA requirements to give consumers the ability to install apps from outside the App Store, also known as sideloading. Apple has stringently argued that permitting sideloading will make the iPhone less safe and secure for end-users. Stateside, Apple has been embroiled in a lawsuit with Fortnite maker Epic Games over much of the same thing — the game maker wants to allow users to install its apps without paying Apple a commission, including by hosting them in its own App Store and processing its own payments. That lawsuit is under appeal.

Today’s reports even suggest that some large developers — perhaps those of Epic’s size, in fact — owe their mobile successes to Apple’s App Store.

The research plots the growth of developers that earned more than $1 million on the App Store in 2021, finding that 45% of today’s large developers were either not on the App Store, or had less than $10,000 in earnings, five years ago.

Image Credits: Apple

While it is always interesting to have access to new App Store data, Apple’s latest research only shows what a powerful force the App Store has become over the years. It’s an ecosystem that’s responsible for billions of dollars of commerce, that’s fueling job growth, and where Apple’s decisions around revenue share agreements and developer policies can impact businesses earning millions.

Apple concluded the reports by noting the size of the App Store itself has now grown to 1.8 million apps. The store is visited by over 600 million people weekly, it said, and Apple has more than 30 million registered developers.

The reports come ahead of Apple’s annual developer conference, WWDC, which runs June 6 through 10.

Dating platform Bumble is looking to enhance its non-dating social features with a further investment into its Bumble BFF feature, first launched in 2016. This friend-finding feature currently uses the same swiped-based mechanics to connect people looking for platonic relationships but will soon expand to include social networking groups where users can connect with one another based on topics and interests, not just via “matches.”

TechCrunch heard Bumble was venturing more into the social networking space, and Bumble recently hinted at this development during its first-quarter earnings, announced this month.

On the earnings call, the company referenced a Bumble BFF “alpha test” that had been performing well.

It described the test as offering new ways for “people to discover and get to know each other around shared joys and common struggles.” Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd added that, so far, over 40% of “active BFF users” were engaging with the new experiences being tested and the feature’s one-month retention was upward of 75%.

Bumble didn’t, however, describe the product in much detail, beyond noting it offered a “new group format” for networking.

Reached for further insights, product intelligence company Watchful had additional information. It had uncovered screenshots showing a women-focused “social groups” feature.

There were around 30 different topics available, including things like “Women in Business,” “Networking + mentoring,” “Finding fulfillment,” “Mental health,” “Working moms,” “Body positivity,” “Self care,” “Eating well,” “Grad students,” “Money management,” “Building a better world,” “Recent grads,” “Women’s empowerment,” “Mom life,” “Breakups suck,” “Single not alone,” “Workouts,” “Study hacks + motivation,” “Path to parenthood,” “Pet Parents,” “Wanderlust” and others.

Users could join the groups and create multimedia posts or reply to existing posts, similar to a threaded group chat or lightweight networking product. The topics, so far, seem to cater to a slightly broader crowd than just “young adults,” given there were groups for students as well as working moms.

Bumble confirmed to us this is the same feature that was being discussed during its earnings.

“We are currently testing new product features in our Bumble BFF community for a small number of people. We are assessing feedback from this test to help inform our final product decisions,” a Bumble spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Image Credits: Bumble screenshot via Watchful

On the call, Wolfe Herd had also suggested the new BFF feature could potentially help Bumble generate revenue further down the road.

“We are very focused on the product, building the ecosystem, the communities and really going into this new group format and testing the functionalities that we’ve been hard at work building,” Wolfe Herd said. “As we look to revenue in the future from BFF, there are really multiple pillars of opportunity — and one of them would be advertising,” she continued.

“We will be looking at baking in functionalities to be greater economy efficient or advertising ready for the future but not to expect any near-term revenue from that,” the exec had noted.

Image Credits: Bumble screenshot via Watchful

Originally, the Bumble BFF feature had been designed to help Bumble serve its growing audience of younger singles, who were often looking for new friends to hang out with, not just date. The company had explained at the time of its 2016 launch that it got the idea not only based on user feedback but also because it observed people using its dating app to make friends — particularly when they had just moved to a new city or were visiting a place for a limited time, like on vacation.

Bumble BFF also allowed the company to leverage some of the same technology it was using to create romantic matches — algorithms based on interests, for example — and put them to use for helping users forge platonic connections.

But in the years following its launch, friend-finding has spun out to become its own app category of sorts, particularly among the younger Gen Z demographic who’s more inclined to socially “hang out” online, including through live video, audio and chat-based groups. Snapchat’s platform apps are a good example of this trend in action, as is Gen Z livestreaming app Yubo. Then there was dating giant Match Group’s biggest-ever acquisition with last year’s $1.73 billion deal for Hyperconnect, a company that had been more focused on social networking than dating.

In addition, dedicated social experiences have sprung up to serve Bumble’s core demographic of young, professional women including the motherhood-focused Peanut app; leadership network for professional women, Chief; creator platform for women, Sunroom; female college influencer network 28 Row; community-focused Hey! Vina; and others.

Combined, these factors could create trouble for Bumble, particularly if younger Gen Z users are less inclined to adopt traditional swipe-based dating apps — or, when they do, it’s more to just meet new people, not partners.

Of these, Peanut seems to have more overlap with what Bumble is building — which is interesting, too, since Peanut was founded by former Badoo deputy CEO Michelle Kennedy who brought her understanding of dating app concepts to online socializing. (Today, Bumble, Inc. operates Bumble, Badoo and its latest acquisition Fruitz.) Now, Peanut’s concepts are making their way back to Bumble.

Asked for thoughts on this latest development, Kennedy said it “completely validates the market” that Peanut has been working in for many years — particularly as the current groups spotted had been women focused.

“It’s something that we’ve always believed in. We’ve always known that it’s a huge opportunity. We’ve always seen that. And for Bumble to say, ‘yeah, we agree.’ Huge! Couldn’t be happier,” she said.

Bumble has not said when it expects to launch the social features to the general public.

The company just posted a strong Q1 where it reported $211.2 million in revenue, higher than the consensus estimate of $208.3 million and a 7.2% increase in paying users in the quarter. Bumble’s forecast for its fiscal year 2022 revenue is expected to be in the range of $934-$944 million, higher than previously estimated.