Google’s developer conference Google I/O is back, which means that the company has a few things to announce. During the opening keynote, Google is expected to unveil new hardware products, new software updates and new features for Google’s ecosystem.

The conference starts at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. on the East Cost, 6 p.m. in London, 7 p.m. in Paris) and you can watch the livestream right here on this page.

Rumor has it that Google could unveil the Pixel Watch. This isn’t the company’s first experience in the smartwatch space, but it represents a fresh new start with Google’s own hardware division leveraging Wear OS. If you’re a Pixel person, you can also expect some smartphone news and maybe new accessories.

More importantly, Google will likely share some news about its flagship services, such as Google Maps, Google’s search engine, YouTube and Google Play. It’s going to be interesting to see if Google has anything to share about Chrome and Android as well.

Whether you’re a Google user who relies a lot on Google’s ecosystem or a tech enthusiast who wants to see what’s next for Google, make sure to watch today’s keynote and read our coverage on TechCrunch.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app 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. App Annie says global spending across iOS and Google Play is up to $135 billion in 2021, and that figure will likely be higher when its annual report, including third-party app stores in China, is released next year. Consumers also downloaded 10 billion more apps this year than in 2020, reaching nearly 140 billion in new installs, it found.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that was up 27% year-over-year.

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

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

Top Stories

Fortnite finds its way back to iOS

Epic Games’ battle with Apple has seen its mobile gaming title Fortnite banned from the App Store ever since Epic broke Apple’s rules around in-app purchases, then used its ban to wage a legal fight over antitrust issues. But this week, Epic Games found a way to return to the iPhone, and with the help of a notable partner, too. The company teamed up with Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming service which runs games on the iPhone and iPad within the browser. Now Fortnite has joined the Xbox Cloud Gaming lineup, meaning customers on iOS will once again be able to play the popular game. The move follows Nvidia’s announcement earlier this year that Fortnite would become playable through its own GeForce Now service.

Of note, Microsoft said Fortnite is the first free-to-play title to join its cloud gaming service, and says users won’t need a GamePass subscription in order to play it. All users need to do is go to Xbox.com/play on their device’s web browser, then sign-in with their Microsoft Account to get started.

“It’s an important step to add a Free-to-Play title to the cloud gaming catalog as we continue our cloud journey,” said Catherine Gluckstein, vice president and head of Product, Xbox Cloud Gaming, in a blog post. “We’re starting with Fortnite and will look to bring more Free-to-Play games people love in the future.”

Apps go to NewFronts!

This week, IAB’s NewFronts held its hybrid event where companies pitched their upcoming offerings to ad buyers. While a number of streamers were there to promote their lineups and new ad products, including an interesting set of new digital ad insertion features, several app makers, including Meta, Twitter, Snap and TikTok, were also in the mix, as they’re no longer just social networks but entertainment platforms in their own right. TechCrunch covered the event and the various announcements, which included the following:

• TikTok: The short-form video app introduced TikTok Pulse, a new contextual advertising solution that ensures brands’ ads are placed next to the top 4% of all videos on TikTok. Notably, the solution will also be the first ad product that involves a revenue share with creators, offering a 50/50 rev share. Ads can be targeted across 12 categories, like beauty, fashion, pets, gaming, TV & movies, auto, Spanish language, sports and recreation, and others, and can be purchased through the TikTok Ads Manager by selected buyers.
• Snap: The social app unveiled a Cameo partnership, a new ad format and more original programming during its presentation. The Snap x Cameo Advertiser Program lets Snapchat’s video advertisers partner with Cameo’s top talent to create custom short-form video ads for Snap. The new ad product, Snap Promote, offers content partners a way to expand beyond their organic reach with Snapchat’s For You feed on the Stories page. The company also expanded its slate of originals with programs from Simone Biles, La’Ron Hines, Marika Sila and Kairyn Potts and others, and renewed deals with “Charli Vs. Dixie,” featuring the TikTok stars, among others.
• Meta: The social network touted its creators and video usage at the event, with a highlight on Reels. Alongside the announcement, Meta informed creators it will now pay for original content in Facebook Reels. The company said it would pay specifically for original content and will roll out new “challenges” that allow creators to earn more as they complete different goals. Among some of the metrics it shared with advertisers: 50% of the time spent on Meta’s platforms now involves video; over 2 billion people watch videos with in-stream ads; and more than 700 million people are using AR effects each month.
• Twitter: The soon to be Elon-owned social network had to convince wary advertisers that its platform would still offer a brand-safe experience for their marketing messages after Elon Musk turns it into a “free speech” social network — a move that advertisers worry will mean hate speech and abusive content could become more prevalent. Twitter promoted its premium video and media partnerships to demonstrate that there would be higher-quality content they could position themselves against, including content from Condé Nast’s red carpet livestreams, live WBNA games, a show about what people are streaming from E! News and other content from Essence, Revolt and more.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• Apple released its fourth betas of iOS 15.5 and iPadOS 15.5 to developers just a week after beta 3. The coming update will allow developers of reader apps to add a link to an external website so users can sign up and manage accounts outside the App Store. Apple also released watchOS 8.6 and tvOS 15.5.

Platforms: Google

• Google’s developer conference I/O is coming up next week, and the news of its new Wear OS device has already leaked. We’re expecting a big event with a focus on more than just Android and wearables, however. In previous years, Google used the I/O keynote to announce all sorts of projects across its many platforms and services.

E-commerce

• DoorDash stock rose 10%+ after reporting 35% sales growth during earnings. The company brought in $1.46 billion in revenue, ahead of estimates of $1.38 billion. But it also lost $0.48 per share instead of the expected $0.41.
• Amazon no longer allows downloads of digital content using its Android shopping app following the changes to the Google Play Store policy that requires apps to use Google’s own payment systems.
• Starbucks will begin selling NFTs this year, offering access to “unique experiences and benefits.” Details about the company’s plans were sparse, but it has brought in Adam Brotman, the architect of its Mobile Order & Pay system and the Starbucks app, to advise on the project, hinting at a mobile component.
• Shein became the most-downloaded app in the U.S. on May 3, passing TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and Amazon to gain the No. 1 spot, noted Marketplace Pulse.

Fintech

• Fintech Block reported its revenue down 22% YoY to $3.96 billion in its Q1 earnings, when Wall Street was expecting $4.1 billion; but profit was up 34% to $1.29 billion. Cash App’s bitcoin revenue, however, fell 51% YoY to $1.73 billion. The stock climbed 5% on the results.
• European crypto app installs grew to nearly 100 million in 2021, Sensor Tower said, and reached 300 million MAUs.
• Following last week’s layoffs, Robinhood launched Stock Lending, a way that retail investors can lend out any fully paid stocks in their portfolio for extra income.
• Stripe announced a new product, Financial Connections, a Plaid competitor that lets Stripe’s customers connect directly to their customer’s bank accounts. A bit of drama ensued.

Social

• A group of nearly two dozen investors, including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, crypto exchange Binance and asset management firm Fidelity and others, have invested over $7.1 billion to back Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid to acquire Twitter, according to a new filing out this week. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is also an investor in Tesla, was the largest investor, offering a check of $1 billion. This was followed by Sequoia ($800 million), VyCapital ($700 million), Binance ($500 million), and a16z ($400 million). Musk said the margin loan of $12.5 billion he received from Morgan Stanley and other banks has been cut to $6.25 billion as result. He also increased his equity commitment to $27.25 billion.

• Instagram began testing a full-screen home feed where both images and videos take up more screen space, similar to TikTok’s full-screen video feed. The test is clearly meant to better emulate the TikTok experience, but feels off due to the mix of formats, which makes it more difficult to interact and comment.
• Twitter rolled out new Spaces features, including access to analytics for hosts and co-hosts on mobile. The company is also testing a feature that will tweet out a Space card once hosts start the Space. And it’s adding more information about the Space in the card that appears at the top of users’ timelines.
• CNBC reported Elon Musk may serve as temporary CEO after his takeover of Twitter.
• Celeb greetings app Cameo laid off 87 people, a quarter of its workforce, citing changing market conditions and the need to balance costs with cash reserves. Protocol reported CTO Rob Post, marketing exec Emily Boschwitz, CPO Nundu Janakiram and Chief People Officer Melanie Steinbach were among the departures.
• Twitter’s open source Bluesky unit released early code for developers to test. The Authenticated Data Experiment (or ADX) is available on GitHub, but is not complete. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber said this release is the start of a semi-public development process.
• Instagram began testing a “Get Quote” button with select businesses on its app, which allows businesses to set up custom questions to ask customers prior to starting a conversation.
• Twitter began testing Twitter Circle, a feature similar to Instagram’s“Close Friends,” which allows users to post only to select friends and followers more privately. For people with larger follower bases, it’s a struggle to set up. It also defies what many today use Twitter for: attention.
• More news about Twitter’s edit button emerged. According to reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, the Edit Tweet button will allow users to create a new tweet with different content. But to make sure Twitter users know the tweet has been changed from the original, a label (alongside an icon of a small pen or pencil) will appear at the bottom of the tweet. The label’s text will simply say “Edited.” And if you click on the word “Edited,” you’ll be taken to the tweet’s edit history. Users will have 30 minutes to make tweet edits.

Dating

• Match named Zynga President Bernard Kim as its new CEO, replacing Shar Dubey. Kim has been president of Zynga since 2016 and has overseen global marketing, user acquisition, revenue, consumer insights, data science, product management, mergers and acquisitions, and communications. The change comes as Match has been making plans to create a “dating metaverse.”
• The news was announced alongside Match earnings, where it reported Q1 revenue of $799 million, up 20% year over year, above Wall Street estimates of $794 million and operating income up 10% year over year of $208 million, representing a 26% operating margin. Tinder reached 10.7 million paid subscribers.
• Alex Hofmann, a former president at musical.ly (now known as TikTok), founded 9count, a parent company to various apps including the friendship-making app Wink. Now he’s launching 9count’s latest addition: a dating app called Spark which shows you everyone around you in a grid, instead of asking you to swipe. But you can only receive messages from people if you’ve both liked each other.

Messaging

• Telegram’s new iOS beta hints at the company’s monetization model expansion. The beta offers reaction emoji and stickers for Telegram Premium subscribers, which are marked as Premium exclusives.

Image Credits: Telegram

• WhatsApp announced emoji reactions are now available in the latest version of the app and users can now share files up to 2GB in size, protected by end-to-end encryption. It also said it’s slowly rolling out the ability to add up to 512 people to a group. The features follow the news that WhatsApp is expanding with the launch of Communities, a way for organizations and larger groups to communicate via its app in a more structured way.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Spotify

• Spotify became the first music streamer to launch on Roblox. The company debuted “Spotify Island,” a place where artists and fans will gather to play interactive quests, unlock exclusive content and buy artist merchandise. While it didn’t announce any plans for virtual concerts, the venue already includes a stage.
• Spotify is also shutting down its lightweight listening app, Spotify Stations, first launched in 2018. Unrelated to this, the company said it’s opening up editorial submissions for podcasters who want their podcast featured on its main app.
• iPhone users complain of a bug that’s causing the Apple Music app to install itself to the iPhone’s dock, booting out their other apps from their spots. Some said the bug also caused Apple Music to set itself as the default for Siri requests as well. Apple said it’s aware of the issue, but didn’t offer a comment.
• Google is shutting down the YouTube Go Android app for emerging markets, first launched in 2016. The app will close in August, with Google citing improvements to the main YouTube app as the reason.
• Facebook is killing its audio streaming projects. The company said it would shut down its podcasts service, will discontinue its short-form Soundbites feature, and will integrate Live Audio Room into Facebook Live. Bloomberg had earlier reported the changes were coming as the company wanted to focus more heavily on its short-form video efforts.
• Pinterest quietly launched a livestreaming app for video creators. The new Pinterest TV Studio app for iOS and Android will allow select creators to go live on Pinterest and use multiple devices in order to achieve different camera angles. The company didn’t announce the app’s debut — perhaps because it’s not broadly available to all creators at this time.

Gaming

Image Credits: Newzoo

• Games market revenues will surpass $200 billion for the first time in 2022 as the U.S. overtakes China, per a new report from Newzoo. Games in 2022 will reach $203.1 billion via consumer spending (+5.4% year on year) — a new record. Mobile game revenues will pass the $100 billion mark for the first time in 2022, growing +5.1% year over year to $103.5 billion.
• Netflix’s latest gaming addition is Relic Hunters: Rebels, a “looter shooter RPG,” and the first time the Relic Hunters series has appeared on mobile. The game, like Netflix’s others, has no ads or other monetization.
• miHoYo’s Genshin Impact has now reached $3 billion in global revenue on mobile since its September 2020 launch, according to Sensor Tower. Following its worldwide release, the title took 171 days to generate its first $1 billion on mobile, and has been averaging revenue of around $1 billion every six months, making it one of the most successful titles of all time.
• China’s gaming giant NetEase opened its first U.S.-based studio in Austin, Texas as China’s own gaming industry is slowing under new regulations. The game maker, whose portfolio includes mobile titles, is best known for the blockbuster Honor of Kings. The new Austin studio, Jackalope Games, is led by Jack Emmert, a veteran of massively multiplayer online role-playing games including City of Heroes, Neverwinter, Star Trek Online and DC Universe Online.
• The Xbox mobile app rolled out a new Stories feature allowing players to share their favorite gaming moments, including game clips, screenshots and achievements with their friends and the Xbox community.

Image Credits: Microsoft

Health & Fitness

• Dieting app Noom reportedly is cutting hundreds of its weight-loss coaches, after raising more than $500 million, per Axios.
• TechCrunch’s Carly Page takes a look at whether or not period tracking apps are now more of a privacy and security risk as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s plan to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Government & Policy

• Match Group’s latest Google Play Store complaint has triggered a Dutch antitrust probe by the Netherlands’ Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM). The probe will examine to see if Google is abusing a dominant position, with regard to forcing businesses to use its own payments service for in-app purchases.
• PayPal and others have made informal complaints about Apple’s NFC restrictions to the European Commission, spurring the EU’s recent antitrust complaint, Bloomberg reported. The new complaint focuses on the fact that Apple reserves the iPhone’s tap-to-pay NFC abilities for its own Apple Pay service.

• The Netherlands Authority for Consumers & Markets (ACM) has concluded that the changes Apple made on March 30 related to the conditions for dating apps are still insufficient and a new penalty will be enforced.
• Epic Games-owned app Bandcamp is fighting back against the Google Play policy changes that will require apps to use Google’s own payments systems — a change it says it will either have to pass on to customers or address by disabling sales of digital goods in-app.

Security & Privacy

• Apple, Google and Microsoft announced plans to adopt features from the FIDO (“fast identity online”) Alliance, which is working on passwordless technology designed for websites and apps. Instead of using logins and passwords, websites could identify you with a fingerprint reader, face scanner or your phone.
• Mozilla analyzed 32 mental health and prayer apps and found that 29 had poor privacy protections and security practices and were collecting large amounts of personal data. Those with the worst practices included Better Help, Youper, Woebot, Better Stop Suicide, Pray.com and Talkspace.
• The WSJ reported that millions of Grindr users’ location data had been collected by a digital ad network and resold since at least 2017. Grindr said it has cut the data flow.

Funding and M&A

Paris-based Alan, an app offering personalized mental health programs, raised €183 million in Series E funding led by Canadian Teachers Venture Growth. The round values the business at €2.7 billion.

Canadian neobank app Neo Financial raised $145 million in Series C funding led by Valar Ventures after surpassing 1 million customers. The company offers a variety of products to its customers, including cash-back rewards, savings and investing, and is planning a mortgage offering for later this year.

SoundCloud acquired an AI music company Musiio, whose tech aims to identify which songs could be hits. The company says it will use this to enhance SoundCloud’s own music discovery experience. Terms were not disclosed.

LottieFiles, a company that develops plugins for app developers to create, edit and test JSON-based Lottie animations, raised $37 million in Series B funding led by Square Peg Capital. LottieFiles is used by animation and motion designers at 150,000 companies, including Google, TikTok, Disney, Uber, Airbnb and Netflix.

Moysle, a company providing a mobile device management system for Apple devices, raised $196 million in Series B funding led by Insight Partners. The company now has 32,000 customers and says it’s seen “triple-digit” revenue growth since 2020.

A mobile game called Wordle!, which benefitted from the web-based game of the same name that went viral (and is now run by The NYT), has come into the hands of AppLovin. Neither AppLovin nor developer Steven Cravotta were able to comment on the acquisition, but the game is now run by AppLovin’s studio Lion Studios Plus per its App Store listing. An Android version has also become available.

South Korea’s RECON Labs raised $4.4 million to help shoppers visualize products when shopping by creating 3D models in AR, which can then be used within their own platforms. The company plans to launch a 3D creator’s app next year.

Iceland-based Sidekick Health raised a $55 million Series B led by Novator Ventures for its gamified digital care platform for healthcare apps and services. The company aims to have more than 40 medical-grade digital therapeutics by 2026.

India’s Zepto, a 10-minute grocery delivery app, raised $200 million in Series D funding, valuing the business at $900 million. Existing backer Y Combinator Continuity led the round. The app currently operates across 11 cities in India and sees hundreds of thousands of orders daily.

Pinterest on Monday launched a new app aimed at making it easier for creators to livestream to its platform. The new Pinterest TV Studio app for iOS and Android will allow select creators to go live on Pinterest as well as use multiple devices in order to achieve different camera angles, the app’s description states.

The company didn’t announce the app’s debut — perhaps because it’s not broadly available to all creators at this time. Instead, upon first launch, creators have to enter in a code or scan a barcode that Pinterest provides in order to gain access to the livestreaming tools the app provides.

Image Credits: Pinterest

However, the addition of a dedicated livestreaming app is another example of how Pinterest is rethinking its place in the broader social media landscape, where TikTok’s rise has pushed other platforms to adopt a video-first focus. Today, major social players including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube have a TikTok-like short video feature available, and most offer features for creating live video content.

Pinterest, meanwhile, has been working on its own video efforts with the launch of Idea Pins, a sort of video-first mashup of both TikTok-stye short-form video content and tappable Stories. The company during its earnings last week said it’s seen over 25% growth in the save rate of Idea Pins quarter over quarter. And Pinterest users who follow multiple video creators on the site tend to visit Pinterest more often than those who do not, the company shared.

Meanwhile, Pinterest last November also announced the launch of Pinterest TV — a series of live, shoppable videos from creators focused on food, home, fashion, beauty, DIY and more. The shows air live, then later become available for on-demand viewing. The platform was initially only available to select, hand-picked creators at the time of launch, including folks like Christian Siriano, Monica Suriyage, Tom Daley, Manny MUA, Robyn Schall and others. It had earlier in the year tested livestreamed events inside the Pinterest app with top creators.

According to data from Sensor Tower, the brand-new Pinterest TV Studio app has been live on the App Store and Google Play since May 2, 2022. It has not seen enough downloads to rank the app on any app store charts and the firm isn’t able to estimate the total downloads at this time.

However, the app is available in several markets outside the U.S., including Canada, Australia, the U.K. and Germany — signaling a potential global expansion of Pinterest TV efforts.

Pinterest confirmed the launch with a statement but said it didn’t have more to share about the app at this time.

“With more Creators developing innovative programming with Pinterest TV on the Platform, we’re continuously experimenting with new ways to help Creators bring their ideas to life,” a spokesperson said.

TikTok is introducing a new way to lure advertisers to its platform by giving them the ability to showcase their brands’ content next to the best videos on TikTok. Ahead of its NewFronts presentation to advertisers scheduled for this afternoon, TikTok announced the launch of TikTok Pulse, a new contextual advertising solution that ensures brands’ ads are placed next to the top 4% of all videos on TikTok. Notably, the solution will also be the first ad product that involves a revenue share with creators,

The company said creators and publishers with at least 100,000 followers on TikTok will be eligible for the revenue share program during the initial stage of the TikTok Pulse program.

TikTok told TechCrunch the Pulse program will launch to U.S. advertisers in June 2022 with additional markets to follow in the fall.

TikTok didn’t say how many creators it would actually approve for the program in the early phases. But longer-term, the move could help TikTok to attract more creators to its social video app, following its earlier investments in creator monetization. Last December, TikTok debuted an online “Creator Next” portal where it organized all the tools creators can use to make money on its app in one place. Here, creators can learn about how to accept virtual gifts and payments from fans viewing their videos and their TikTok LIVE content. They can also apply to the Creator Marketplace to be connected with brands for sponsored content if they have at least 10,000 followers.

Now, TikTok will be able to add advertising revenue share to that list of creator monetization opportunities.

Image Credits: TikTok

The new program isn’t just about helping creators, however. It’s also about ensuring advertisers a more “brand-safe” environment for their content, similar to something like YouTube’s Partner Program (YPP).

On YouTube, the YouTube Partner Program allows creators to earn ad revenue from display, overlay, and video ads on their channel, in addition to providing access to other features like channel memberships, Super Chat, a merch shelf, and more. For advertisers, meanwhile, YPP allows them to reach videos from creators with more traction and subscribers, whose channels have also been vetted by YouTube for adhering to its content policies. This helps brands control their ads’ placement, so they don’t accidentally end up posted alongside hate speech or misinformation, for example.

TikTok says its new TikTok Pulse program will also be focused on making sure the creator content is “suitable” for advertisements.

“Our proprietary inventory filter ensures that TikTok Pulse ads are running adjacent to verified content with our highest level of brand suitability applied on the platform,” an announcement from TikTok states. “Additional post-campaign measurement tools such as third-party brand suitability and viewability verification provide advertisers the opportunity and transparency to analyze and understand the impact of their campaigns,” it noted.

The company says the program will additionally offer brands a way to target their ads to particular areas of TikTok. Through Pulse, brands can place their ads alongside videos across 12 categories of content, including things like beauty, fashion, cooking, gaming, and more.

At launch, only advertisers TikTok invited to join the program will have access to TikTok Pulse. But a TikTok spokesperson said the plan is to roll out the solution to more brands in the months that follow.

TikTok declined to share other specific details about the new program, like the revenue share percentage for creators, ad pricing, or information about how soon someone browsing their For You page would see Pulse ads appear, among other things.

Later this afternoon, TikTok is scheduled to pitch its platform to advertisers at the NewFronts, where TikTok’s GM for its North America Global Business Solutions, Sandie Hawkins, and its Global Head of Business Marketing, Sofia Hernandez, will talk about TikTok Pulse as well as explain to advertisers why TikTok should be a part of their media buy considerations.

Dating app giant Match is getting a new CEO. Just over two years after assuming the top exec position, Match CEO and 16-year employee Shar Dubey is stepping down. The company announced today, alongside its first-quarter earnings, Shar Dubey will resign as an officer of Match Group but will remain on the company’s board and continue to serve as an adviser. Bernard Kim, the current president of Zynga, will become CEO effective May 31 and will join Match’s board of directors.

Kim has been president of Zynga since 2016 and has overseen a number of key functions, including global marketing, user acquisition, revenue, consumer insights, data science, product management, mergers and acquisitions, and communications, Match said, in announcing the news. Kim was also instrumental in the company’s expansion into new markets including blockchain and hypercasual gaming, as well as to new platforms like Nintendo Switch, Snapchat and smart home devices. He also helped quadruple Zynga’s market cap ahead of its $12.7 billion acquisition by Take-Two in January 2022. Before Zynga, Kim spent nearly 10 years at EA, as SVP of Mobile Publishing, and previously worked at The Walt Disney Company.

The move to bring in a mobile gaming exec to lead a dating app company is an interesting choice, particularly as Match is looking to grow its business beyond traditional, swipe-based matchmaking and into the so-called “metaverse.” Match has spoken previously about its plans for a dating metaverse, complete with a virtual goods-based economy, real-time audio and the ability for online daters to meet up in a virtual space to have conversations. In addition, Match’s flagship dating app Tinder began experimenting last fall with interactive, social experiences in a new Tinder Explore section, meant to help push the boundaries of where dating and in-app socializing overlap. And Match’s bigger-ever acquisition of HyperConnect, now powering various products across Match, Meetic, Pairs and POF, is pushing Match further into online social. Given Kim’s background with Zynga — a company that originally built its empire as a social gaming platform on top of Facebook’s platform — the new exec may be able to offer insights as to how to guide Match as it expands into new, interactive and social spaces.

“I’m honored to join Match Group’s talented team at such a pivotal time, as the company continues to see powerful momentum, strong user engagement and passionate employees who are driven to bring joy to millions of users from all walks of life,” said Bernard Kim, in a statement. “I have tremendous admiration for Shar Dubey’s leadership and for Match Group’s powerful mission to create meaningful connections for every single person worldwide today and in the future.”

“I feel privileged that I am able to step down from a day-to-day operating role and have the time and headspace to focus on what is hopefully the ‘give back’ chapter of my life,” stated Shar Dubey. “As a director and an adviser, I will have the flexibility to stay close to aspects of the business I love — product and strategy. I leave the company in great hands. With Bernard’s energy, fresh thinking and extensive mobile technology and consumer business experience, combined with the over 70 years of institutional knowledge and category experience of our brand CEOs and leaders at Match Group, I am ever so excited about this next phase of the company and the category.”

The company reported Q1 earnings of $799 million, up 20% year over year, above Wall St. estimates of $794 million and operating income up 10% year over year of $208 million, representing a 26% operating margin. Tinder’s direct revenue grew 18% over the prior year driven by 17% growth in paying subscribers to reach 10.7 million. Across all dating app brands, Match’s monthly active users approached 100 million by the end of the quarter. The company, however, warned that Google’s change to force payments through its own system would lead to an estimated $6 million of negative impact beginning June 1. Match’s stock dropped 6% after earnings were reported.

Bunq, a European challenger bank based in Amsterdam, has announced that it plans to acquire Tricount, a popular mobile app to manage group expenses. Bunq isn’t disclosing the terms of the transaction and the acquisition is pending regulatory approval.

Tricount is a simple yet effective way of tracking expenses as a group. For instance, if you are traveling with friends or if you live with roommates, the Belgian startup lets everyone add expenses, which can be useful when it’s not the same person buying things for the group.

At any point in time, group members can check who owes what so that they can settle up. Tricount offers additional options. For instance, you can add expenses in multiple currencies or split expenses unevenly.

Tricount has amassed quite a large user base with 5.4 million users. The app is free with ads. There’s also an optional subscription that unlocks pro features, such as CSV exports and statistics. It competes with other mobile apps, such as Splitwise.

“Tricount’s commitment to simplicity, transparency and community perfectly aligns with our own values. I’m very happy that we’re able to offer Tricount’s users many new ways to make life easy,” Bunq founder and CEO Ali Niknam said in a statement.

While Bunq lets you split a payment with friends, the feature is designed for a group of people who all use Bunq. Tricount is a bank agnostic solution.

This is an interesting move as these startups don’t offer the same thing at all. Bunq is a challenger bank with account numbers, debit cards and, yes, subscription fees. On the other hand, Tricount is a lightweight, mostly free utility app with some virality factor as it only works with groups.

Tricount has a large audience but doesn’t generate as much revenue per user as Bunq. It could act as the top of the funnel for Bunq products and services.

While Tricount’s app is available globally, the company focuses specifically on users living in France, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Italy. Bunq also operates in these markets.

“We fully subscribe to Bunq’s mission and are very proud to be a part of it. I’m excited for the many opportunities this gives our users,” Tricount co-founder and CEO Jonathan Fellon said in a statement.

In other news, Bunq is announcing a handful of new features today. With Jackpot, users can participate in a lottery by paying with their Bunq card, adding money to their account and inviting friends.

The app has been slightly rearranged. Users can now customize the home tab with accounts, cards and other features. In the community tab, users can now respond to posts from the app.

People in the Global South are often subject to terrible fluctuations in their currencies, as well as hyperinflation. At the same time, many are unbanked, but still able to access a crypto wallet. A way for these populations to access more stable currencies would be by accessing Stable Coins which are pegged to the US dollar – but most crypto platforms are less thank user-friendly.

This is the thinking behind Cheq, a fintech startup that enables cryptocurrency payments in a user-friendly app. It’s now raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by London’s Connect Ventures, alongside Semantic Ventures, firstminute Capital, and 30 angels including former leadership from Monzo, Revolut, and Tide.

Cheq hopes now to establish itself as a viable option for taking payment with stablecoins that are pegged to the US dollar. And because it uses stable coins it also avoids intermediary fees and many approval requirements.

Chris Butcher (no relation) was formerly co-founder and CTO of Portify, but also founded a side-project called Token Alerts in Latin America. From this experience, he learned that stablecoins were popular in the region as a way of staving off hyperinflation.

Cheq says users connect a crypto wallet to the platform and then use the app as they would a modern neobank. Cheq can create payment links so customers can pay with crypto via these links. Cheq then collects names and addresses from the buyer and perform follow-on actions with other services for merchants to fulfil orders.

Cheq is also aimed at SaaS companies wanting to add a crypto option alongside the existing fiat payment processor, such as events. It can be used with a wallet that supports payments on the Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain or Polygon chains. But does not offer Bitcoin as this is not pegged to the dollar, obviously.

In a statement, Butcher said: “While cryptocurrency has its diehard fans, many people still find them complex and lacking tangible value in a day-to-day setting. We believe a crypto wallet has the potential to be an amazing business bank account, and stablecoins provide the means to trade across borders without the costs typical of card payments.”

Rory Stirling, General Partner at Connect Ventures commented: “Chris and his team have a unique perspective on building a web3 company, insisting that the mass market wants a clean and easy product that removes the complexity and confusion typical of the sector. I’ve been blown away by how quickly they’ve executed. In December 2021 Chris was pitching me an idea. By March they had built a stunning product and were processing tens of thousands of dollars every week.”

Cheq has competitors. Platforms like Coinbase commerce or Binance pay are creating similar offerings, but still run a fairly crypto-savvy interface.

Twitter’s work on its forthcoming Edit button is continuing. While several people last month already spotted the in-development “Edit Tweet” menu option, what we didn’t yet know was how edited tweets would appear to users viewing them on Twitter, or how the edited tweet’s original text could be read. Now, we’re able to see what Twitter is building to highlight that tweets have had edits made to them.

According to reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong, the Edit Tweet button will allow users to create a new tweet with different content. But to make sure Twitter users know the tweet has been changed from the original, a label (alongside an icon of a small pen or pencil) will appear at the bottom of the tweet. The label’s text will simply say “Edited.” And if you click on the word “Edited,” you’ll be taken to the tweet’s edit history.

Wong notes that currently users will have 30 minutes to make tweet edits. That’s a bit longer than needed to quickly correct a spotted typo — something Twitter’s subscription service Twitter Blue already allows for. But it’s long enough to clarify or reword a tweet that could be beginning to blow up and go viral for the wrong reasons.

Above: Edited Tweet examples. Wong notes she wrote “edit: soup*” on her tweet example of this to be funny, as that’s how she indicates her edits on Reddit. That’s not part of the new Twitter experience, however. 

Wong had earlier discovered code references related to the work-in-progress Edit Tweet feature in the recent build of the Twitter web app had indicated the Edit button wasn’t actually correcting or changing the text in the original tweet — it was creating a new tweet with the updated content. She had said the new, edited tweet would include the list of old tweets prior to the edit, but we didn’t yet know how Twitter would address this critical context in its user interface.

Her latest findings, which Wong says she found in development within Twitter’s web app, give us a better idea.

Because the new, edited tweet and old tweet are actually different entities, it’s possible that someone could still link directly to the out-of-date version. In that case, the user would see the old tweet with a label that states “There’s a new version of this Tweet” directing them to the updated version with the new text.

The feature appears to be in the early stages of development, as Wong pointed out to TechCrunch that the “Edited” label itself looks small and inconsistent with the rest of Twitter’s user interface. But as the feature is not yet live, that’s something that will likely be corrected ahead of a more public launch.

Though a relatively minor detail, this does help give Twitter users an idea as to how Twitter is thinking about the Edit Tweet feature from the perspective of how the addition would impact the user experience on Twitter, as well as the company’s own backend systems.

As some people had previously noted, allowing people to actually edit the text in the original tweet would have meant both the old and new versions would point to the same tweet ID, which could complicate things from an engineering standpoint. It could have been a nightmare for caching systems based on the tweet ID, they said. Instead, Twitter is giving the edited tweet a new tweet ID, but linking to the older versions from the most recent one.

Reached for comment, Twitter confirmed Wong’s latest finding is a part of the same in-development “Edit Tweet” feature spotted earlier, but declined to share more about its plans.

Last month, Twitter first announced the ground-shaking news that it was actually going to offer users a way to edit tweets — a longtime user request and one that incoming Twitter owner Elon Musk has also been pushing for. The company has not said when the feature would go live to the public, but said Twitter Blue subscribers could expect to be able to try out the feature “in the coming months.”

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 Story

A billionaire buys himself a social network

Can you believe it’s only been a week since Elon Musk announced he was buying Twitter for around $44 billion? It’s felt like years!

A lot has happened since Elon Musk first signaled his interest in Twitter by snatching up Twitter shares, then later being offered a board seat, declining the seat, then deciding he’d rather just take the whole company. Initially, no one was quite sure how serious Musk’s offer was, but when he rounded up financing and detailed how he planned to pay for Twitter, the offer had to be given a lot more consideration. On April 25, Twitter accepted Musk’s offer, which includes a $1 billion termination fee on both sides. The deal is a go.

There’s a lot of curiosity over why Musk wanted Twitter in the first place. But it’s likely a combination of a power user thinking they can fix the service and a desire to use the network for the market-moving power it’s been shown to have.

Now everyone’s wondering what happens next. Twitter was never a great business in Wall Street’s eyes, so going private is not the worst choice for the company to make. But going private under a free speech absolutionist already has advertisers wary. If Twitter were to lighten its content moderation rules, it could allow more online abuse and hate speech to thrive. AdAge reported the immediate reaction from advertisers was one of anxiety and confusion. Brands began reaching out to agencies to help them understand and prepare, it said. One agency exec said advertisers are preparing to stop spending after Musk’s takeover if things go south. Looking to quell worries, Twitter emailed reassurances to advertisers, the FT reported. But brands know Twitter can’t make any promises about the nature of free speech on Twitter once Musk is in charge.

Advertisers can pull out of Twitter if need be — there are a number of other social networks hungry for their dollars beyond Meta. Snap and TikTok, for instance, could benefit from a potential ad budget shift, as they also reach a younger demographic and have growing user bases. While Musk has ideas about how to grow Twitter’s revenues in other ways in the future, Twitter’s business today is advertising-dependent. To what extent Musk understands the nuances of that complication is less clear. But unless the billionaire wants to self-fund Twitter, he should probably give it some thought.

Weekly News

Global app store revenues remained flat in Q1

Global consumer spending in apps saw relatively flat growth year-over-year, according to new data from Sensor Tower. The company found that worldwide app revenue growth from in-app purchases, premium apps and subscriptions grew just 0.6% from $32.3 billion in Q1 2021 to $32.5 billion in Q1 2022. However, when looked at individually, the App Store and Google Play saw different trends. Google’s Play Store lack of growth pulled the combined growth rate down, as it saw approximately $10.7 billion in consumer spending, down 8.5% year-over-year from $11.7 billion in Q1 2021. Meanwhile, Apple’s App Store revenue, which was double that of Google Play’s, grew 5.8% year-over-year from $20.6 billion to $21.8 billion.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Top grossing apps in the quarter included TikTok (iOS) and Google One (Android), as well as streamers like YouTube, Disney+, Tencent Video, HBO Max, and others. Dating app Tinder was also the No. 5 top grossing app overall.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Among app categories seeing increased usage in Q1, medical apps led the market with 102% year-over-year growth, followed by navigation (+24%), travel (+19%), business (+15%), shopping (+14%), finance (+13%) and education (+13%)

Snap Summit Recap

Snap held its Partner Summit this week, where the company announced a number of new features in areas like AR Shopping, 3D asset creation, AR development tools and more. It also announced a drone for taking photos, but that’s not really an app!

Among the highlights:

• Lens Cloud: Snap launched another component for its developer platform, Lens Cloud. This server-side component will help developers build dynamic, multiplayer experiences. Lens Cloud allows developers to take advantage of multiuser services so groups of friends can interact with the same Lens at the same time; location-based services allow developers to anchor their Lenses to places, starting in central London; and it will offer developers the ability to store assets on Snap’s servers and load them up on demand, allowing developers to expand beyond 8 megabytes of storage.
• AR Shopping: Snapchat added a new in-app destination within the app called “Dress Up” that will feature AR fashion and virtual try-on experiences and said it will now allow retailers to integrate with Snapchat’s AR shopping technology within their own websites and apps, via CameraKit. Retailers will also gain access to a new AR Image Processing technology in Snap’s 3D asset manager, which Snap says will make it easier and faster to build augmented reality shopping experiences. To use it, brands will be able to select their product SKUs and then turn them into Shopping Lenses by first uploading their existing product photography for the SKUs they sell. Snap’s tech will then process these using a deep-learning module that turns them into AR Image assets.

Image Credits: Snap

• Director Mode: Snapchat will add a new feature called Director Mode, aimed at providing easier access to Snapchat’s native creative tools for publishing video on its platform, including for its short-form video feature known as Spotlight. Director Mode will include access to tools like greenscreen tech, Quick Edit and a new Dual Camera feature that will allow users to record both the front-facing and back-facing cameras at the same time.
• Live Nation + Snap: Snap said it would partner with Live Nation to launch AR experiences at select concerts and festivals, including Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas, Lollapalooza in Chicago, Wireless Festival in London, Rolling Loud in Miami and The Governors Ball in New York.

Apps and earnings

It was a busy week for tech company earnings. Apple had a stellar quarter, with revenue increasing 9% to $97.3 billion, and quarterly profit growing 6% to $25 billion, but shares slipped on warnings of possible supply chain constraints impacting the business in the future. But the standout news for the app economy was the record revenue reported by Apple’s services division, which includes the App Store and other subscription-based business lines, like Apple TV+, Apple Music, cloud services and more. The company said services revenue grew 17% year over year to reach $19.8 billion and it now has 825 million paid subscriptions. That means services is now bigger than Apple’s Mac ($10.44 billion) and iPad ($7.65 billion) divisions combined.

Other tech earnings of note this week included:

• Twitter: In what could be one of its last earnings reports as a public company, Twitter reported revenue of $1.2 billion, slightly missing estimates of $1.23 billion, EPS of 4 cents, above the 3 cents expected, and mDAUs of 229 million, above the 226.9 million expected. But the company also admitted a major error, noting it had overcounted its users over the past three years. On a quarterly basis, the overcounting was as high as 1.9 million.

• YouTube (a part of Alphabet’s earnings): The video site was expected to bring in $7.51 billion, but made $6.87 billion, up 14.9% year-over-year. That’s slower growth than the prior quarter’s 25%, and even smaller than the year-ago quarter when growth was 48.71%. YouTube cited Apple’s privacy rules and others impacting web browsers for the slowing growth. In addition, YouTube’s TikTok rival, Shorts, saw 4x more views than last year, with 30 billion views per day; 2 billion logged-in users visit YouTube monthly.
• Meta: The company’s family of apps (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp) grew to 3.64 billion MAUs in the quarter, but ARPU declined from $9.39 to $7.72. Facebook once again grew its DAUs to 1.96 billion, after slipping last year for the first time, when it then dropped from 19.3 billion to 19.29 billion. But much of the money Meta’s making ($27.9 billion in Q1, up 6.6%) is being spent on its VR pivot, Reality Labs. The division lost nearly $3 billion in Q1 after losing some $10b in 2021.
• PayPal: The payments app and Venmo owner reported revenue of $6.48 billion in Q1, up 8% year-over-year, failing to meet the $6.6 billion analyst estimates. Net income of $1.03 billion, down from $1.46 billion and TPV of $323 billion, was up 15% year-over-year.
• Robinhood: The trading app reported Q1 revenue was down 43% year-over-year to $299 million, versus $355.8 million estimated, and a net loss of $392 million, down from $1.4 billion year-over-year. The app has 15.9 million MAUs, down from 17.7 million.
• Pinterest: The image pinboard now pivoting to video reported Q1 revenue of $575 million, up 18% year-over-year, versus $572.5 million expected, and 433 million MAUs, down 9% year-over-year, with a global ARPU of $1.33, up 28%. The company addressed the TikTok threat during earnings, saying it would focus on video content that inspired users to take action, not just be entertained.

Platforms: Apple

• An App Store cleanup caused controversy this week, as several iOS developers took to social media to report receiving notices from Apple that their older apps without updates will be removed from sale within 30 days if no updates were submitted. Sensor Tower’s analysis of apps that had at least 10,000 installs in 2022 found some 2,966 apps and games could face removal during Apple’s latest purge, as they were last updated before or during 2018. In looking at apps meeting the same level of installs that were last updated before September 2020, it found apps facing removal may number as many as 7,335. Apple then clarified its plan with a developer update, saying apps that have not been updated within the last three years would be the ones it removed. 

• Apple reminded developers they have until May 20, 2022 to submit a request to receive payment from Apple’s $100 million assistance fund, announced last year in response to a class-action lawsuit from U.S. developers. The fund would pay out between $250-$30,000 to developers making equal to or less than $1 million per year on the App Store between 2015 and 2021. To qualify, developers must have sold paid apps or in-app purchases (including subscriptions) through the App Store between June 4, 2015 and April 26, 2021.
• The App Store had an outage on Monday which made it appear as of privacy labels were missing from apps.
• Apple released the third public beta for iOS 15.5, iPadOS 15.5.
• Apple’s iOS 15.5 beta was found to be blocking sensitive locations for Memories in the Photos app, including places like Holocaust memorials, the Anne Frank house and others.
• Mobile attribution firm AppsFlyer released a study (via AdWeek) that showed user opt-out rates for ATT have stabilized, based on data from March 2022 across 4,600 apps on its network. Consent was highest when users launched the app for the first time, when 46% selected “Allow” on the pop-up, it found.

Platforms: Google

• Google launched the first beta of Android 13, also available as an over-the-air update. The beta was first made available to Pixel device owners. During the preview phase, Google had launched features like themed app icons, Bluetooth LE audio, MIDI 2.0 support over USB, per-app language support and opt-in push notifications, among other things. This new beta included more granular permissions for media file access, better error reporting, a new audio API and other smaller updates.
• Google’s Privacy Sandbox for Android launched in Developer Preview for Android 13. The privacy-focused ad-tracking overhaul provides an early look at the SDK Runtime and Topics API.
• Google Play officially launched its own version of privacy-related “nutrition labels” for apps. The company said it will begin to roll out the new Google Play Data safety section to users on a gradual basis, ahead of the July 20th deadline that requires developers to properly disclose the data their app collects, if and how it’s shared with third parties, the app’s security practices and more. Compared with Apple’s initiative, Google’s labels put a bigger focus on whether you can trust the data that’s collected is being handled responsibly by allowing developers to disclose if they follow best practices around data security. The company said it would check each Data safety section “using systems and processes that are continuously improving,” when asked how the information developers submit is vetted for accuracy.

Image Credits: Google

Augmented Reality

• Camera IQ launched support for AR effects within TikTok’s AR development platform Effect House, which allows creators to build AR effects for use in its app.

Fintech

• The Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Instagram was hacked this week, leading to the theft of millions of dollars of NFTs. The high-profile incident showed how social media apps run by crypto operations could be a source of vulnerability.
• Trading app Robinhood’s CEO Vlad Tenev announced this week that it was laying off 9% of its full-time employees, potentially impacting some 300 people. The company is coming off two years of hyper-growth, where it grew from 700 to nearly 3,800 employees between 2019-21, and now faces greater competition.
• WhatsApp is planning to launch cash-back rewards and merchant incentives to attract users in India to its P2P payments service.

Social

• Instagram began testing a Templates feature, which allows users to copy formats from other Reels. It also started testing a feature that would let users pin multiple Feed posts to their profile, similar to how TikTok lets users pin videos.
• Reddit officially launched its Community Funds program with a $1 million investment after previously experimenting with funding over a dozen projects nominated by users on the platform, ranging from community-designed billboards to digital conferences. The company will accept nominations for projects needing between $1,000 to $50,000 in funding.
• TikTok once again became the top app worldwide by downloads in the first quarter, per Sensor Tower. The app had previously surpassed 3.5 billion lifetime installs in Q1 2021, and in the first quarter of 2022 it saw more than 175 million installs. No app has had more downloads than TikTok since the beginning of 2018 when WhatsApp had 250 million worldwide downloads.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

• Reels, Instagram’s short-form video feature and TikTok rival, now makes up more than 20% of the time that people spend on Instagram, the company announced during earnings.
• An NYT review of the Trump-backed social app Truth Social found a number of phony accounts for big brands that were being used by imposters, as well as broken features (including search), and posts that were hidden for using curse words.
• China’s social app Weibo, similar to Twitter, told users it would now publish the locations of users based on IP address to their account pages in order to combat “bad behavior.” Users will not be able to opt out.
• TikTok rolls out a feature that lets users opt into seeing who viewed their profile and allowing others to see when they’ve visited their profiles, too.

Streaming & Entertainment

• YouTube rolled out Super Thanks, its in-app tipping feature that includes animated GIFs alongside the fan’s comments, to all eligible creators across 68 locations in the YouTube Partner Program.

Image Credits: YouTube

• The HBO Max mobile app just had one of its biggest quarters to date. The app made the top five in terms of most-download apps in the U.S., and also had the second-best month overall in the month of January.
• NBCU’s streaming app Peacock added 4 million paid subscribers in Q1, up 44% from last quarter. The streamer ended the first quarter of 2022 with 28 million monthly active accounts, up from the 24.5 million Comcast reported for the platform at the end of 2021. Of those, 13 million are paying customers, up from 9 million in the prior quarter.

Gaming

• Fortnite maker Epic Games filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to stop Google from removing the music storefront Bandcamp, which Epic acquired in March, from the Google Play Store. Google’s policy says Android apps need to move into compliance with the Google Play Billing policy by June 1, or face removal from the Play Store. The filing argues that having to pay Google’s fees would impact Bandcamp’s business model involving paying artists 82% of their Bandcamp revenues in a rev share. But paying Google’s fees could force that biz model to change or force Bandcamp to operate at a loss. Of particular interest: the filing notes Google offered Bandcamp a special deal involving a rev share of 10%, which Epic Games says is still too much.

Health & Fitness

• The Apple Watch app Gentler Streak, which takes a more compassionate approach to fitness tracking, was updated with improved heart monitoring during exercise, as well as widgets support for iPhone users. The app recently added other non-conventional exercises not tracked by Apple’s Workout app, like dog walking, shoveling and mountain biking.

Government & Policy

• Japan is now considering new regulations that would require tech giants like Apple and Google to allow for multiple app stores on their platforms. It also viewed the preinstallation of the companies’ own browsers as a potential anti-competitive issue. Apple protested the report saying it disagreed with a number of its conclusions. Google said it will further examine the report.
• The EU is preparing to lodge an antitrust complaint over Apple Pay on iPhone, as Apple restricts other payment services from having the same access to the iPhone’s NFC hardware.
• U.S. regulator National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is requesting comments on competition in the mobile app ecosystem, including around app store policies, mobile web development and more.

Security & Privacy

• Google announced it has blocked 1.2 million apps that violated its policies from being published on the Play Store in 2021, banned 190,000 developer accounts for malicious behavior and closed around 500,000 developer accounts that were inactive or abandoned.

Funding and M&A

Copper, a digital banking app aimed at teens, raised $29 million in Series A funding in a round led by Fiat Ventures. The app has grown to more than 800,000 users, up from 350,000 last October, and offers a combination of personalized debit cards, access to 50,000 ATMs, support for digital wallets, parental monitoring of teen spending, P2P, finance advice and more.

Mirai Flights, a London-based app for instant booking of charter flights, raised a $3 million investment round led by Xploration Capital. The Mirai Flights app is available in 63 countries and operates with eight private airlines. Mirai uses a last-mile model, matching supply and demand, utilizing empty flight legs to make it more efficient to return a jet to its base location.

Singapore-based BandLab, an app that lets users create and share music, raised $65 million in Series B funding, at a post-money valuation of $315 million. The round was led by Vulcan Capital. The company says its app is now used by over 40 million creators.

Berlin-based app Taxfix, which helps users with filing taxes, raised a $200 million Series D round led by Teachers’ Venture Growth, valuing the business at over $1 billion.

Yesterday, fintech startup Lydia unveiled a brand new design for its financial super app. And it’s an opinionated take on mobile payments — not just a fresh coat of paint. I sat down with the company’s founders to discuss the thinking and vision for the future of Lydia.

In many ways, Lydia isn’t standing still and keeps reinventing itself. The company originally started as a peer-to-peer payment app for the French market. For the first time, people could send and receive money instantly from their smartphones.

The app has evolved drastically over the past few years. The company recently reached unicorn status and the team has been iterating with more services and features.

In particular, you can now use your Lydia account as an alternative to a regular bank account. Users can order a debit card, send and receive money through a unique IBAN. Users can also trade cryptocurrencies, stocks, precious metals and ETFs.

With this new design, the company is streamlining its app with a clear separation between your activity, your accounts, your cards and your trading activity. More importantly, the company is positioning its mobile app as a social product — not a fintech product.

Image Credits: Lydia

Building the foundation for the next 10 years

When I met with Lydia’s co-founders Cyril Chiche and Antoine Porte, they both had read my recent article on Zenly, another popular social app designed in Paris. And they found some similarities between the new Lydia and the new Zenly.

“We just sent a newsletter to our user base that unveils a new chapter for Lydia, laying down the plan for the next 10 years — just like Zenly,” co-founder and Chief Product Officer Antoine Porte told me.

This isn’t a random milestone. Lydia launched the first version of its app nine years ago. “If you count the gestation period, it’s been 10 years,” Porte said.

The company has managed to attract 5.5 million users. And a fraction of them have now decided to use Lydia as their primary account.

“The more we progress in financial and banking services, the more we try to intellectualize the reason why people dislike their bank,” co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche told me.

“When digging further, you realize how banks have been using technology. They built a beautiful system for interbank activities. You can move money from one end of the globe to the other. It works but it has never been designed for humans,” he added.

This sums up Lydia’s design language pretty well. The team wants to build an app that is “designed for humans”. For instance, someone who has never used a bank app before shouldn’t have to learn about SEPA transfers and IBANs before sending money to a family member.

When you open the updated version of Lydia, the main tab has been drastically cleaned up. It is now an activity feed with your latest transactions. There are two buttons at the top of the screen — receive and pay.

At the bottom of the screen, there’s a new tab bar with buttons that are clearly labeled. You no longer have to guess which button does what.

The second tab shows your accounts — your main Lydia account, your sub-accounts and your bank accounts that you have aggregated in the app. Personal accounts and shared accounts are now separated into two sections.

The third tab lets you access your cards and control them from there. Trading now gets its own tab, separated from the rest of the app. If you rarely open Lydia, it is now much easier to understand where you should tap to access what you want to access.

What is money?

As French entrepreneurs who overthink everything a bit too much, Lydia’s founders keep going back to the definition of the terms they use. “We have forgotten the very reason why money exists because we view money as an accounting tool,” Porte said.

“Money has a meaning. It is either a project or a memory,” Chiche added later in the conversation.

And yet, when people open their bank app, it feels like opening up an Excel spreadsheet. Worse, it often fosters a lot of negative thoughts.

“Your account has only been credited once and everything else is negative operations. When you look at your account statement, you feel like you messed up,” Chiche said.

According to the founders, there’s too much guilt involved with banking. That’s why you no longer see your account balance when you open Lydia. You have to tap on the second tab to view it. That’s also why you don’t see the ‘€’ sign next to every transaction. The company doesn’t want to emphasize the accounting aspect of your transactions.

“The worst thing is neobanks that show you a chart of your balance over time,” Chiche said.

“We need a new definition for money. Money is no longer coins, bills or physical things. That could be the opportunity to go back to the origin — money is what you do with it,” Porte said.

A fintech app or a social app

Each transaction in Lydia could be considered as an event. You can open the transaction card, change the name and add emojis so that it means something to you. For instance, you may want to put your baby’s name on the nursery bill.

Today, the company is going one step further. Users can add a photo to each transaction. That seems a bit odd at first, but Lydia truly believes it has a shot at building the best social journaling app.

Image Credits: Lydia

You may think that journaling is a thing of the past. But a generation of smartphone users have been journaling every day without even realizing it.

The journal itself has evolved. Instead of buying a fancy notebook and spending 15 minutes every day writing about the current day, people take photos with their phones. The camera roll has become a sort of ubiquitous, effortless journal.

Lydia plans to take advantage of that by augmenting the camera roll. First, your past financial transactions represent a structure. Second, adding a photo makes a transaction much more personal. “If you don’t know what photo you should use, it probably means that it was an unnecessary expense,” Porte said.

Third, it turns each transaction into a potential social post. You can swipe through your transactions just like you would swipe through photos in a photo album. If it’s a shared expense, other users will see the photo. It also creates a virality factor as people could start asking why you’re taking a photo. You could imagine a feature that lets you share a transaction in other apps as well.

More importantly, it opens up a lot of possibilities. A card transaction also happens at a specific place and at a specific time. Lydia could populate the transaction screen with more data about the place you visited. As soon as Foursquare invented checkins, people started talking about checkin fatigue. Maybe the most powerful checkins are your card payments.

It brings us to the main question. Is Lydia a fintech app or a social app?

“Lydia is so simple and fast that it has always been considered as a utility app. But it has always been a social app,” Porte told me.

I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Some users will still use Lydia a few times a month to send and receive money. But a small, highly engaged portion of the user base might see the social potential of Lydia.

We don’t need to come up with a definitive answer right now as the redesign is a clear improvement over the previous version of the app. “People tell us our competitors are Revolut, but they are bankers,” Porte said.

“We want to create the WhatsApp of money instead,” he added.

Pinterest may have beat on revenue and earnings in the first quarter, but the company is not out of the woods yet when it comes to carving out a place for its service in today’s competitive landscape. In particular, Pinterest is up against a credible threat with the rise of TikTok when it comes to social commerce. The idea that you could be inspired to shop by browsing media shared by others is an experience that Pinterest, in a way, helped pioneer, with its pinboard-style website where users often saved ideas of things they were considering buying or trying.

But these days, the more common refrain among influenced and inspired shoppers is “TikTok made me buy it,” not “I found it on Pinterest.”

That’s a challenge the company understands it must overcome in order to establish its site as a destination for the next generation of online shoppers.

The company on Wednesday reported fairly solid earnings, pulling in $575 million in revenue versus $573 million expected, and delivering earnings per share of 10 cents instead of the 4 cents expected. But one troubling area was its decline in users. The company reported its global monthly active users decreased 9% from the same period last year to 433 million in the quarter, below expectations of 437.9 million.

Investors drilled into the user decline on the subsequent earnings call with a focus on better understanding how Pinterest was standing up to the TikTok threat.

Pinterest explained it’s been investing over the past year and a half in its new video-powered features, like Idea Pins — a sort of video-first mashup of both TikTok-stye short-form video content and tappable Stories.

These Pins are aimed at attracting creators to Pinterest’s site, allowing them to record and edit creative videos with common tools like voiceover recording, background music, transitions, and other interactive elements. But the Pins can also include pages of content where creators can add instructions, like the steps to perform a DIY project or the ingredient lists for a recipe. This makes the Pins more purpose-driven and actionable compared with some of the content on primarily entertainment-focused destinations, like TikTok or Instagram Reels.

Pinterest acknowledged it had to do a significant amount of work to catch up to where the market was headed with video, but believed it’s now starting to see some traction.

The company said its shift in focus to video had come at the expense of some monthly active users in the short term, but it’s taking the risk in order to get the new video-focused ecosystem off the ground. As a result, it’s seen the number of video Idea Pinners increase 15x year-over-year, and noted the feature was attracting a more engaged audience. Pinterest also said it’s seen over 25% growth in the save rate of Idea Pins quarter-over-quarter. And Pinterest users who follow multiple video creators on the site tend to visit Pinterest more often than those who do not, the company shared.

“This is also strategically important because we think video as a format is just fundamental to the way people get inspired and take action in the future,” noted Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann.

Pinterest is also planning to further develop new publishing features for video, including by leveraging its most recent acquisition Vochi, which will help creators make better videos that are more likely to inspire action. It’s said it’s planning to expand its creator rewards, had launched a Pinterest API for shopping, and began beta testing a new feature called Your Shop, which offers a personalized experience to users by connecting them with products they may like.

But Pinterest also said it felt the impacts from lower search traffic and from “time spent by people on competitive platforms.” While the former was attributed to a Google search algorithm adjustment in the quarter, the latter was more of a veiled reference to TikTok, in addition to other social apps.

The company pointed out that the U.S. is its most mature market and one where a number of social media, entertainment, and news apps are competing for users’ time spent on mobile devices.

“We called out [the] competition just because there is a tremendous amount of options for consumers on the phone at any given time,” said Silbermann, without specifically saying the word “TikTok.”

“That said…what we’ve heard from Pinners and what we see is that we have a pretty differentiated use case…that’s the use case of actually using Pinterest to plan, get ready for major events, and then, eventually, to make considered purchases. And that’s quite different from an entertainment and news use case,” he added.

But investors were clearly interested in understanding how TikTok, specifically, was impacting Pinterest’s business, prompting a direct question about the growing threat of the short-form video giant whose mobile app just saw the most downloads worldwide in the quarter.

“We don’t have exact fidelity into where people are spending their time,” Silbermann responded. “But obviously the story of the last couple of years in terms of time shift has been the rise of TikTok as a major place that people are spending their time,” he admitted, before reiterating that Pinterest’s focus is on content that inspires action — not just entertainment.

“That’s going to have to be reflected in the way that we provide incentives for creators, but also the way that we rank content on Pinterest,” he said, before laying out the vision for how Pinterest will compete with TikTok.

“The reason that a feed on Pinterest feels different than a feed on a social network, or a feed on a pure entertainment network, is that the content is ranked taking into account how useful that idea will be to getting something done in the future,” the CEO continued. “As we think about things like creator rewards and roll out new ad formats, like Idea Pins that are sponsored, that’s the sort of central thesis behind it. And it’s in line with the central thesis of Pinterest overall, where this isn’t a platform to talk to your friends. It’s not a platform to keep up with the news. It’s a platform for you to articulate things that you want to do in your life [and] for us to help you visualize what that end state looks like,” he said.

Pinterest also said it will work to improve its home fee recommendation and search result quality, while making Pinterest easier to access and use even for logged-out visitors.

But the company stopped short of admitting its monthly active user [MAU] loss was due to TikTok or other competitive threats.

Instead, it largely blamed the global decline in users on the Russia-Ukraine war and lower engagement from other regions across Europe — an impact of about 5 million MAUs. Excluding that situation, Pinterest believed its MAU count would have been modestly up from earlier estimates.

Snap isn’t just the company behind popular social app Snapchat. It has also built a powerful augmented reality developer platform called Snap AR — it spreads beyond Snapchat thanks to Camera Kit, an SDK solution that lets you integrate Snap’s camera capabilities in other apps.

In Snap jargon, Lenses are essentially augmented reality apps that you can access in Snapchat. And the company has been building a huge “app store” of Lenses over the past few years. Some of them are funny, some of them are useful, some of them help you communicate in a whole new way. It is becoming a rich augmented reality ecosystem.

“Already, more than 250,000 creators have built over 2.5 million Lenses that have been viewed over 5 trillion times,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said during the Snap Partner Summit keynote.

Today, the company is launching another component for its developer platform, Lens Cloud. As the name suggests, it’s a server-side component that will help developers build dynamic, multiplayer experiences.

There are three components to Lens Cloud. First, developers can take advantage of multi-user services. It lets you create an instance for a group of friends so that they can interact together at the same time within the same Lens.

Second, location-based services let developers anchor Lenses to places, starting with Central London. For instance, museums could leverage that to enable certain Lenses when you’re pointing your camera at a specific landmark.

Image Credits: Snap

And finally, there are storage services. Developers can store assets on Snap’s servers and load them up on demand. It can also act as a sort of memory card. Users can leave a Lens and pick up where they left off later.

“Storage services make it possible for developers to expand beyond 8 megabytes. They do so by storing the assets that they're going to load in the Lens in real time in our cloud,” Snap Head or AR Platform Partnerships Sophia Dominguez told TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez.

Storage services aren’t available just yet but the company expects to launch them in the coming months. This collection of backend services will be available for free for Snap AR developers.

Creators who want to start working on a Lens for Snapchat start by downloading Lens Studio. They can import 2D and 3D assets, use 3D Face Mesh, add custom shaders, write scripts and take advantage of Snap’s machine learning models with SnapML. Today, Snap is releasing a new version of Lens Studio with some new features as well.

Lens Studio already lets you dynamically adjust your Lenses by leveraging APIs. For instance, you can change the appearance of a Lens if it’s raining. The company is adding new API partners to open up more possibilities. Thanks to AstrologyAPI and Sportradar, you can create content that adjusts depending on astrological or sports data.

The company is also working on ray tracing support, which should greatly improve reflections and surface rendering in general. Analytics have been improved as well with event insights. It should help with debugging in particular.