Twitter didn’t have as many users as it thought — a predicament that may have encouraged the company to more seriously consider its acceptance of Elon Musk’s proposal to take the company private in a $44 billion deal. According to Twitter’s Q1 2022 earnings out this morning, the company admits it had been overcounting the number of users on its service for at least 3 years due to a technical error involving linked accounts.

In its earnings release, Twitter explains that it launched an account linking feature in March 2019 which allowed users with more than one Twitter account to link them together in its user interface, allowing them to more easily switch between their different identities. Those multiple accounts belonged to a single person, clearly, but continued to be counted as separate mDAUs — or “monetizable daily active users.”

The mDAU metric was already a self-invented, non-standard way of measuring users on the service. Twitter came up with the idea after struggling to show growth through measurements of monthly active users on a quarterly basis. Instead, it said the mDAU metric would represent users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through its website and applications, and who were able to view its ads. It noted, however, that the metric would not be comparable to similar daily active user disclosures from other companies, as they would often use a more expansive metric that included users who were not seeing ads.

This metric was meant to give advertisers a better idea of how many people on Twitter were eligible to be targeted with their marketing messages within a given time frame. And since advertising continues to fuel Twitter’s business, accounting for the majority of its revenue, it was an important metric in terms of Twitter’s health.

Unfortunately, it was wrong.

Twitter says it re-ran the numbers for the mDAU metric for the past quarters where it had found it had been overcounting, and adjusted the totals. Its findings indicated it was overstating mDAUs by anywhere from 1.4 million to as much as 1.9 million, depending on the quarter. (The company noted the recast data was not available prior to Q4 2020 due to its data retention policies, but said its estimates suggested the prior period adjustments would not be greater than those seen in Q4 2020.)

Image Credits: Twitter

As you can tell by the chart, as Twitter’s overall user base slowly grew, so did the overcounting — ending with an overstatement of nearly 2 million more mDAUs than the company actually had.

Such an adjustment would barely be a blip to a rival social network like Facebook — Meta just reported its family of applications saw 2.87 billion users in Q1 2022, for example, and Facebook alone saw 1.96 billion. But it does matter more on a service as small as Twitter which has historically struggled with flat user growth. In fact, user growth had been such a thorn in its side that it had invented that new metric to better hide its issues in the first place.

Despite the adjustment, Twitter ended the quarter with a presumably now accurate 229 million mDAUs, up 15.9% from the same time last year, and topping analyst estimates of 226.9 million.

However, the company had set a lofty goal of reaching 315 million mDAUs by 2023 alongside a doubling of revenue. That mDAU goal would have represented a roughly 20% compound annual growth rate from its base of 152 million mDAUs reported in Q4 2019. Twitter believed it could get there by way of its new product developments, many of which were monetizable — like Super Follow subscriptions, ticketed Twitter Spaces, and the premium subscription service Twitter Blue. But it’s clear Twitter still had far to go to make those investments pay off, not only in dollars and cents, but also in attracting newcomers to the network.

This is not the first time Twitter reported erroneous metrics around users, but it is the first time it’s impacted Twitter since the switch to mDAUs. The company in Q3 2017 admitted it had overcounted its MAUs by 1 to 2 million, at a time when its MAU base was over 300 million.

The error could put Twitter in even a more precarious situation with regard to its advertisers. Elon Musk has been preaching a plan to embrace a “free speech” policy on Twitter, which often means a more permissive attitude towards abuse, bullying and hate speech. That’s not something brands want to market themselves against.

There are signs that advertisers are nervous, too.

AdAge reported the immediate reaction from advertisers was one of anxiety and confusion. Brands were reaching out to agencies to help them understand and prepare for what comes next at Twitter. One agency exec said there were also signals that advertisers are prepared to stop spending after Musk’s takeover, if need be.

Twitter, in response, emailed advertisers insisting that it will remain a safe place for brands after the Musk takeover, the FT reported. It had heard similar concerns from advertisers who are taking a “wait and see” approach for now, before adjusting their budgets. One group of advertisers is more worried, however: automakers. They fear their marketing campaigns will now leak to their rival, Tesla, which Musk also heads. CEO of EV maker Fisker, Henrik Fisker, already deleted his Twitter account, for instance.

Despite Twitter’s assurances, it’s a promise advertisers know it can’t really keep if Musk decides to make more radical changes. For a company as dependent on advertising revenues as Twitter currently is, it’s a wonder why they would agree to a deal that puts a free speech absolutionist in charge. Twitter’s miscounting of users helps, in part, to explain why it took the deal — because the growth it believed it had achieved was smaller than it thought.

We already suspected that the controversy surrounding the Joe Rogan podcast on Spotify was doing little to actually prompt users to leave the streaming service, based on app store data. Now, Spotify’s first-quarter earnings have confirmed it. Despite losing 1.5 million users in Russia, Spotify’s premium subscribers grew 15% year-over-year in the first quarter to reach 182 million, largely in line with analyst estimates. Ad-supported users, meanwhile, grew 21% to reach 252 million.

Earlier this year, several prominent musicians including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and others pulled their music from the streamer to protest its relationship with the controversial podcaster Joe Rogan, who was accused of using his platform to spread Covid-19 misinformation. But app store data at the time indicated rival streaming apps were not getting a boost from this latest PR headache, as Spotify’s app had continued to see millions of weekly downloads — a significantly larger figure than its nearest rivals — even amid the #deletespotify campaign on social media.

Spotify’s earnings indicate the news headlines around Rogan that dominated in the first quarter didn’t drag its business down.

The streamer beat on nearly every metric, with total monthly active users up 19% year-over-year to a record 422 million in the quarter ending March 31, above estimates of 417.1 million. Revenue rose 24% to reach 2.66 billion euros ($2.82 billion), above estimates of 2.61 billion euros. Meanwhile, average revenue per user (ARPU) was €4.38, above the expected €4.26, but down from last quarter’s €4.40. Earnings per share were €0.21, compared to the loss per share of €0.25 in the year-ago period.

Spotify cited Latin America and Europe as contributing to the user growth during the first quarter and helping to offset the loss resulting from its exit from Russia.

The stock, however, fell on weaker projections of 187 million premium subscribers in Q2, versus estimates of 189.4 million, and a lower gross margin of 25.2% versus the expected 27%. The company also said it’s expecting a loss of another 600,000 subscribers related to the closure of its service in Russia.

In its shareholder letter, Spotify touted its plans to launch “User Choice Billing” in partnership with Google, which later this year will allow Android users to pay through Spotify’s own payment system for the first time, instead of using Google Play Billing. It also noted the launch of call-to-action cards — an interactive ad format that prompts podcast listeners to take some sort of action — like clicking a button to “shop now,” for instance — while streaming. And it referenced its Q1 acquisitions of podcast advertising service Podsights and analytics platform Chartable in the quarter, which Spotify said was its largest-ever Q1 for ad-supported revenue (11% of total revenue).

Spotify’s podcast footprint also grew in the first quarter, from 3.6 million total podcasts in Q4 to now 4.0 million on its platform. The growth in monthly active users who engaged with podcast content also outstripped total monthly active user growth, it said, and podcast consumption rates grew in the double-digits year-over-year.

The company didn’t bother to reference the Rogan drama in its letter, saying only that it’s pleased with its performance and encouraged by the traction it’s seeing.

Google Play is today officially launching its own version of privacy-related “nutrition labels” for apps. The company says 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.

The company’s plan to introduce app privacy labels on Google Play was first announced last spring, months after Apple’s App Store introduced privacy labels on its own app marketplace.

While both sets of labels focus on informing users about how apps collect and manage data and user privacy, there are some key differences. Apple’s labels largely focus on what data is being collected, including data used for tracking purposes, and on informing the user what’s linked to them. Google’s labels, meanwhile, put a bigger focus on whether or not 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 labels also give Android developers a way to make their case as to why they collect the data directly on the label, so users can understand how the data is used — for app functionality, personalization, etc. — to help inform the user’s decision to download the app. They can also see if the data collection is required or optional.

Google says that it heard from app developers that simply displaying the data an app collects without additional context was not enough, which is what prompted the label’s design.

At launch, the Google Play Data safety section will specifically detail the following, says Google:

• Whether the developer is collecting data and for what purpose.
• Whether the developer is sharing data with third parties.
• The app’s security practices, like encryption of data in transit and whether users can ask for data to be deleted.
• Whether a qualifying app has committed to following Google Play’s Families Policy designed to better protect children in the Play Store.
• Whether the developer has validated their security practices against a global security standard (more specifically, the MASVS).

Alongside the launch, Google will also now finally introduce permission requests — a feature iOS has had for years. These prompts will appear when an app needs access to a sensitive permission, like your location, the camera, or the microphone. The user will see the prompt on the screen, then make a decision as to whether to grant the app access. They can also review existing data access by apps on the Android Privacy dashboard.

Image Credits: Google

Since introducing its plan for the labels, Google says it’s only made minor tweaks to the developer guidance and the store’s user interface and experience. This includes updates like encouraging developers to refer to their SDK providers’ data safety information and a new question about System services, among other clarifications and rewordings.

While the addition of the labels could, in theory, help Android users make better decisions about which apps they want to use, it’s not clear there’s an effort to actually check the data for accuracy at the time of submission. Asked how the data would be vetted, Google told us that developers are responsible for the information they provide. Google also said that if it finds a developer has misrepresented the data they’ve provided in violation of the policy, it won’t immediately remove the app — it will just ask the developer to fix it. Only if the app doesn’t comply would an action later be taken.

App privacy labels have already been accused of being an unreliable source of information following their launch on the App Store. According to a report by The Washington Post last year, many of the labels they reviewed in a spot-check provided false information. For instance, apps claiming they collected no data were actually found to be doing the opposite — collecting it and sharing it.

Image Credits: Google

In other words, the labels functioned to give users a false sense of security about how their data was accessed and used, rather than a real way to take action. Apple, however, had told The Washington Post it would routinely audit labels for accuracy. Google makes no such claims today.

Google has given developers until July 20 to complete their Data Safety section, but the Data safety section is already rolling out. That means many users will see apps without labels even as the product launches. That staggered release could also be by design, as it dissuades users from immediately going to check their favorite apps’ privacy and security practices; and by the time those labels arrive, users may have forgotten they had wanted to do this.

Users will begin to see the labels appear on their Android phones at some point over the next few weeks as the labels reach global users.

The founders of OwnID, Dor Shany and Rooly Eliezerov, previously founded Gigya, a startup that wanted to make it easier to help identify customers. They sold that startup to SAP for $350 million in 2017, but the idea of making it easy to log into websites without friction was always in the back of their minds, and they launched OwnID last year to help solve that particular problem.

Shany explained that the founding team understood identity from their time at Gigya, and they wanted to create a company to make it as simple as possible to authenticate from a user perspective. Anyone who has forgotten a password knows how maddening this process can be.

Their idea was to move the process to your phone and take advantage of the phone’s built-in authentication system. “The phone is actually a two-factor authentication on its own because it’s something you have and biometric authentication. The essence is that you go to a website, you enter your email address, you click “skip password” and log into your phone with your biometric (face or finger) ID.” That’s it.

If you have ever tried to log into a streaming service like Netflix on your television, you know it can be a frustrating experience, and in cases like this, OwnID presents you with a QR code on screen, and you use your phone to scan the code, then log into your phone.

Another annoyance that OwnID takes care of is when you move between devices and you need to remember your password  (unless you have a password manager of some sort). With OwnID, you are always authenticating with the phone, so that problem should just go away.

Shany said that it’s difficult to spoof because you register through your phone when you first come to the website and the cryptographic key is stored on your phone from that point forward. Whenever the website or app sees your phone has the key, it knows it’s you.

From the website or app owner perspective, they are connecting to OwnID via an API, and once the developer adds the code, users are presented with an option to log in without a password using the phone.

The company is making OwnID publicly available today for the first time, but it is already working with large customers like Nestle and DeLonghi. It currently has about 20 employees with plans to double that in the coming year. He says that the pandemic has actually made it easier to find diverse employees because they can hire people from anywhere, and that gives them much more flexibility.

OwnID announced a $6.2 million seed round today led by Mayfield. The founder’s previous company Gigya raised over $100 million, according to Crunchbase, before being acquired by SAP. It’s worth noting that Mayfield was an early investor in that company as well.

An app called BeReal, founded by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat along with Kévin Perreau, launched in December 2019 with its idea of asking users to post an unedited photo once per day after receiving a push notification. Upon receiving the alert, the user has up to 2 minutes to share what they’re up to and can see the photos their friends also posted.

The app is simple to use, capturing a selfie and front-facing photo simultaneously — an experience that recalls our fond memories of the long-lost photo app Frontback. (RIP).

The company explains this experience offers users a chance to show off who they really are.

The concept itself is not entirely novel. Besides Frontback’s use of dual cameras, a similar idea involving push notifications emerged amid a wave of apps trying to siphon users away from Instagram a few years ago.

Image Credits: BeReal

An app called Minutiae, launched in 2017, helped pioneer the same concept BeReal is now capitalizing upon: alerts that instruct users to snap whatever it is they’re doing now. Minutiae co-founder Martin Adolfsson recently lamented to TechCrunch that BeReal “borrowed pretty heavily” from his idea while touting its authenticity, much to his distress.

Unfortunately, though, ideas aren’t patents. And we’ve seen many apps and products over the years offering similar social experiences where only one actually becomes the breakout success for its time. Look at Qik vs. Ustream.tv; Gowalla vs. Foursquare; Phhhoto vs. Boomerang; We Heart It vs. Pinterest; or, more recently, TikTok vs. everyone else trying to clone it.

Plus, while Minutiae would allow users to browse strangers’ photos from around the world BeReal more squarely aims itself at groups of real-life friends.

There is some demand for new photo-sharing apps among younger users who are getting fed up with Instagram’s constant changes, its cramming in of new features like Reels and Shopping, and its overly-polished creator content. Other apps, like Minutiae and BeReal, have also experimented with unique photo-sharing experiences in an attempt to lure users away from Instagram with varying degrees of success.

Poparazzi — an app that turned Instagram’s tagging feature into its entire premise — hyped itself to the top of the App Store using a series of growth hacks not too long ago. It has since seen its popularity fade and is now No. 87 in the Photo & Video category on the U.S. App Store.

Another app, Dispo, delayed the release of your digital snaps to give itself a nostalgic feel, but aimed itself at a generation that has never known what it’s like to wait for prints. It also didn’t become the next new Instagram and is now No. 143 in Photo & Video on the App Store.

Image Credits: Apptopia

BeReal, meanwhile, has been around for a couple of years. But app intelligence firm Apptopia noted earlier this month that 65% of its lifetime downloads occurred in 2022 and its monthly active users had grown 315% year-to-date. Today, the firm offered TechCrunch updated figures. It found that BeReal has seen 7.67 million downloads year-to-date, representing 74.5% of its lifetime installs. France (where the app is based) and the U.S. lead, with a 20.5% and 19.7% share of installs, respectively.

The firm attributes the growth to a combination of word-of-mouth, BeReal’s college ambassador program, and newer features like Widgetmoji and RealMoji — the former which puts your friends into a Home Screen widget, and the latter which lets you react with stickers in iMessage conversations. However, this level of rapid growth typically implies marketing or ad spend, not just organic adoption which would be a slower rise and less sharp of a jump.

Image Credits: Apptopia

BeReal would have the funds. The a16z and Accel-backed app raised $30 million in a Series A last year. It sure seems like it’s put some of that money to use.

And as it turns out, at least some of BeReal’s growth had been manufactured to make the app look as if it were a viral hit. College students at Brown’s student paper reported BeReal was paying them $30 per referral and $50 for an app download with a review. The students would receive the money via PayPal or Venmo, they said. Other student ambassadors organized events and doled out perks, like free boba, to recruit new users, said a report from Rice University’s student paper.

The current ambassador program is running from January through June 2022, per BeReal’s website. (BeReal declined to talk to TechCrunch, saying they “are not ready for medias [sic].”)

There is nothing really wrong with paid user acquisition — this is how the app ecosystem works, after all. Besides, some paid users become engaged and loyal. That’s the goal!

BeReal is so far finding success with this model: Apptopia says daily active users have reached 2.93 million as of the time of writing.

It also has a 4.8 rating across nearly 22,000 user reviews on the App Store and a 4.5 rating across nearly 15,000 reviews on Google Play. It’s the No. 4 Overall app in the U.S. App Store right now.

That said, it’s a bit frustrating to see apps engaged in buying installs and five-star reviews get written up so definitively as Gen Z’s new favorite toy, in articles describing the app’s growth as organic. There may very well be some word-of-mouth interest here, but that interest has been combined with good ol’ paid app installs.

In the early days of the App Store, there were more direct channels for this sort of cash-to-downloads funnel, until Apple cracked down on companies “buying” their growth. But that only led to more behind-the-scenes paid user acquisition efforts. Today, in addition to traditional channels — like online ads/social ads, billboards, TV, etc. — we see things like “viral” TikToks that were actually undisclosed influencer marketing deals. Or, as with BeReal, college ambassadors getting compensated to hype an app to a target demographic.

The latter may actually work if the hype puts the app in front of users who end up charmed by the experience and stay with it.

BeReal likely has a good bit of user acquisition fuel ahead of it. And since its gimmick involves turning on push notifications, it could retain loyal users over time. But it has a long way to go to prove that it can become a part of users’ everyday rotation — something that we won’t know until the paid acquisition efforts slow and the app is left to fend for itself in the competitive landscape.

Still, we gotta love BeReal’s download URL: it’s bere.al/downloadthedamnthing.

Okay, why not!

Zenly has always felt like the small social app that could become the next big thing. But it turns it Zenly is quietly becoming a social giant without anyone paying much attention — at least until now.

Originally designed in Paris, the app was acquired by Snap back in 2017. But that acquisition was just the beginning of Zenly’s insane growth story. According to the company’s internal data, the app has now reached 35 million monthly active users.

And today, the Zenly team is releasing its biggest redesign ever. As the update is rolling out in the App Store and Play Store, Zenly co-founder and CEO Antoine Martin is using this milestone to leave the company in just a few weeks.

Before I unpack all this, let’s look back at Zenly’s original vision. I first covered Zenly back in 2016. When you opened the app, you were presented with a map that showed your location and your friends’ location.

“This isn’t another messaging app. This isn’t a social network. This isn’t a utility. It’s something that sits between all of these areas. And I keep opening the app,” I wrote at the time.

That vision hasn’t changed much. Zenly still wants to make the definitive social maps app. It’s an unconventional bet that has been years in the making. And the all-new Zenly could bring a new wave of users.

People and places

When you look at metrics, Zenly has been doing better than ever. In March 2022, according to data.ai (formerly App Annie), Zenly was the 10th most-downloaded social app globally. There are still nine apps that are in front of Zenly. But popular social apps like Discord and Twitter aren’t growing as rapidly as Zenly.

There’s a reason why Zenly is doing so well right now. “When lockdown rules are lifted, when people go out again, they need Zenly,” Antoine Martin told me.

But the company doesn’t want to stand still. I’ve been using the updated app for a week. The redesign is disorienting at first but a promising foundation for the future. It doesn’t look like Zenly as the design language is completely different. There are some new features while some existing features have been refined.

The old Zenly featured a lot of rainbow colors, animated emojis and playful design elements. It was both polished and fun, but it also felt like looking at the candy aisle in the super market.

Here’s what Zenly looked like when Snap acquired it back in 2017:

Image Credits: Zenly

When you open the redesigned Zenly app, it feels a lot more serious. Profile screens and conversations now feature a black background. The main buttons at the bottom of the screen look like neon signs in a trendy restaurant.

With this new look and feel, Zenly wants to appeal to a wider user base. “What is appealing to college students worldwide today?” Antoine Martin summed up.

Instead of bold and rounded fonts, Zenly now relies on thin, elegant fonts. You’ll also instantly notice the permanent overlay on the map in various tints of yellow and orange. Like in strategy video games, it displays your footprints — it shows where you’ve been and where you haven’t been yet.

Here it is once again:

Image Credits: Zenly

“Since the end of last year, we’ve been working on a global redesign of the entire app. It’s the biggest redesign we’ve ever done with multiple goals in mind. First, we are transforming Zenly into a maps app,” Martin said.

There are now three buttons at the bottom of the screen. The messaging feature is front and center. When you tap on it, the list of recent conversations slides from the bottom of the screen.

In the bottom right corner, the button lets you either recenter the map or view recent highlights. This way, you can see where you’ve been over the last few days, share a highlight with friends and more.

“It is still a product that is very personal, very contextual and very social,” Martin said.

And finally, in the bottom left corner, there’s a magnifying glass icon. That button alone hides a lot of potential.

“The big addition is places. We think we can build something better than anyone else,” Martin said. “Zenly has this unique ability to permanently run in the background. We remove the friction involved with checkins.”

“Places and movements are the best ways to make a map more personal,” he added.

On the search screen, you can look up a friend to see what they’re up to. When you tap on a profile, you see where they are, how long they’ve been here and who they are with. You can also see recent highlights, start a conversation and tap the ‘What’s Up’ button.

That feature has been around for a while and has become quite popular. It sends a request to a friend, asking them to record and share what’s happening right now.

From the search screen, you can now also search for places, such as bars and restaurants. The search experience by itself is pretty great as the list refreshes in a fraction of a second with every new keystroke.

Each place card has basic information, such as the address and phone number. But Zenly also adds contextual information to give you hints about this specific place. For instance, you can see if it’s a convenient place for big crew, if best friends tend to hang out there or if there are a lot of loyal visitors.

Unlock my world

With today’s update, Zenly wants to passively build a place graph. Users shouldn’t have to open up the app and check in when they go to their favorite bar. Instead, the company wants to learn from your habits and highlights that information to you and your friends.

On each profile page, there’s a new section called ‘My world’. You can tap on it to see someone’s top city and top place. You can also see some recent places to get a better sense of their lifestyle.

But you can also use that feature to navigate around the map and look at places. It’s a nice way to discover new places or revisit old favorites.

‘My world’ is locked by default due to privacy concerns. After installing the update, users can choose to enable the feature in the profile, which means that you’ll share some information publicly. For instance, each place features a leaderboard with people who often go there.

Interestingly, Zenly is creating a global rollout event around this feature. When you choose to participate in ‘My world’, your map isn’t unlocked instantly as Zenly wants to prepopulate the map with some of your favorite places.

Instead, people who enable the feature today will get a countdown. Three days later, you’ll be able to browse your world and let other people browse your world. The feature is a bit frustrating right now as there aren’t a lot of users on the beta version. I can’t wait to see data from the company’s millions of users.

100 million

When I installed the beta version of Zenly on my phone, I had to type “100 million” to unlock it. At Zenly, everything has a meaning. And that figure is the company’s milestone for monthly active users.

Zenly was a radically different app when Snap acquired it. The company only had 120,000 daily active users. “Zenly is now the biggest European social app ever,” Martin said.

And yet, if you live in the U.S., chances are you haven’t necessarily heard about Zenly. “Today in the U.S., we are really small but we have never tried to grow there since we joined Snap,” Martin said.

The app is particularly popular in Japan, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. There are also a lot of people signing up in Brazil and India. It’s clear that there’s still a lot of untapped potential. But that won’t be Antoine Martin’s job.

“We joined Snap five years ago and we started working on Zenly eleven years ago. I want to move on. And I haven’t had the opportunity to take a long paternity leave,” Martin said.

He didn’t tell me what he plans to do next. First, he’ll take a few months off. He may start a new company after that.

Going forward, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is taking over at the helm of Zenly (in addition to the rest of Snap). It could hint at synergies between the Zenly and Snap teams as the Zenly team has remained independent since the acquisition.

“I want to thank Antoine for his leadership of Zenly over the years, and for his friendship. I remain inspired by his vision and I wish him all the best in the future,” Evan Spiegel said in a statement. “We will continue to support Zenly and ensure its success, and I am confident that we will make Antoine proud with our stewardship of Zenly’s product and vision.”

During my meeting with Antoine Martin, he kept saying that Zenly has come full circle — “la boucle est bouclée” as he would say in French. I asked him why he kept using that phrase.

“We have come full circle because we have reached the original vision,” he said.

Are you looking to buy a folding smart phone? Do you want it to be Pokémon-themed? And do you live in South Korea?

If all those stars are aligned just right, do we have some good news for you: Samsung is making a Pokémon Edition of the Galaxy Z Flip 3.

They somehow decided to not make this folding phone look like a Pokédex… a device that is wildly important within the Pokémon universe and, which, you know, folds. They did include a Pokédex-themed necklace pouch, which honestly just makes me a little more annoyed because it means they know the Pokédex is a thing.

Instead they’re shipping it with swappable back cases covered in plenty of Pikachus, plus some other accessories including a Popsocket-style Pokéball stand, a Pikachu tail keychain, and Pokémon-themed ringtones and wallpapers pre-loaded on the device. If you’re thinking it kinda seems like they just stuck a nearly year-old phone in a box with some Pokémon stuff and called it a day… based on what they’ve shown so far, I’d be inclined to agree.

As spotted by Engadget, it looks like Samsung will unveil more details on April 25th once the timer on this page expires.

One of those as-of-yet undisclosed details is the price… but considering that the standard Galaxy Z Flip 3 still goes for $1000 unlocked, I wouldn’t expect a limited edition run to go for less than that.

As part of its continued investment into expanding its mobile gaming business, Netflix today announced it will, for the first time, launch a mobile game alongside a TV series from the same franchise. The game and show will be based on the popular Exploding Kittens card game. The mobile game will launch in May exclusively for Netflix members, along with two new cards for players. The TV series, which is produced by Greg Daniels and Mike Judge, will arrive in 2023.

Although Netflix today offers multiple “Stranger Things” mobile games for members which are tied to its original series, it clarifies these games were adapted from the TV series — they were not games that were adapted into a TV series, as Exploding Kittens will be. The service also launched a “Trivia Quest” interactive show (which is more like a streaming game for TV viewers), but Netflix doesn’t publish the “Trivia Crack” mobile game that the show is based on — that’s still published by Etermax.

Netflix says “Exploding Kittens — The Game” will retain the classic gameplay from the original card game, where players draw cards aiming to avoid the Exploding Kitten. Both single-player and multiplayer modes will be available. The mobile version is also adding two new, exclusive cards: one called Radar, which reveals to players the position of the Exploding Kitten closest to the top of the card deck; and Flip Flop, which reverses the order of the cards in the deck. Future cards and game mechanics added to the game will be themed around the animated series, Netflix notes.

This is a completely separate game from the original Exploding Kittens mobile game, the company tells TechCrunch. The existing game will continue to be sold, but will not share any progress, expansion packs, or saves with Netflix’s version.

Image Credits: Netflix

Like all of Netflix’s mobile games, the Exploding Kittens game will be free with a Netflix membership, will be ad-free, and won’t include in-app purchases.

With the launch, Netflix is interested in testing the market to see if it’s possible to promote a new TV series with a mobile game offering, and whether the TV series can drive new players to the game.

“The co-development of a game and animated series breaks new ground for Netflix,” said Mike Moon, Netflix Head of Adult Animation, in a statement. “And we couldn’t think of a better game to build a universe around than Exploding Kittens, one of the most inventive, iconic and original games of this century,” he added. “Netflix is the perfect place to explore this growing franchise and we are so fortunate to be working with this incredible team,” said Moon.

The series will co-star the voice talent of Tom Ellis (“Rush,” “Lucifer”), Abraham Lim (“Clickbait,” “The Boys”), Lucy Liu (“Shazam,” “Elementary”), Ally Maki (“Wrecked,” “Toy Story 4”), Mark Proksch (“What We Do In The Shadows,” “Better Call Saul”) and Sasheer Zamata (“Woke,” “Home Economics”). The story will involve God and the Devil being sent to Earth in the bodies of house cats.

Showrunners Shane Kosakowski and Matthew Inman will lead the series, which is exec produced by Mike Judge, Greg Daniels, and Dustin Davis of Bandera Entertainment; Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping for the Chernin Entertainment Group; and the creators of the Exploding Kittens franchise, Elan Lee and The Oatmeal’s Inman.

“Our goal is to offer our members great entertainment they’ll love in whatever format they may enjoy – whether it be a game or an animated series,” said Leanne Loombe, Head of External Games, Netflix. “As we expand our mobile games catalog, we’re excited to partner with the Exploding Kittens digital team to bring this enjoyable game to all age groups, including a few exciting updates exclusively for our members.”

The Exploding Kittens game will be the third card game Netflix offers members, alongside “Card Blast” and “Arcanium: Rise of Akhan.” The game is being produced by Dire Wolf, which has worked on a number of other games tied to entertainment properties, including digital adaptions involving Pokémon, “Game of Thrones,” and others.

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

Elon Musk tries to take over Twitter. Maybe.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Last week, Elon Musk bought a huge stake in Twitter (~$3B worth) and was joining Twitter’s board. And then he wasn’t. Now he wants to buy the entire company. Or maybe not.

In his offer letter, he said Twitter has to be “transformed as a private company.” If Twitter refuses his bid — which Twitter is trying to do — Musk warned he would “need to reconsider” his position as a Twitter shareholder. Who knows, maybe that was the plan all along?! He then went onstage at a TED event to tell the audience that, well: “I am not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it.”

No, way, really? Musk’s $54.20 per share offer — get it? 420? WEED! — was a joke? Who could have guessed it?

Ugh, billionaires.

Musk is playing with Twitter as if it’s a toy, either as a pump and dump for a little needed cash (the dump part’s pending…as of the time of writing on Friday), or to give himself a few minutes of attention where he can loudly proclaim things like: “Twitter has become kind of a de facto town square, so it’s really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” Or because he liked to briefly envision himself as Twitter’s new king. Or because he got bored. Or all of the above.

Okay, sure, whatever. It’s all been a ridiculous circus and one that’s not helping a company that’s finally getting on the right track in terms of product development efforts, amid a transitional period where it was going to be able to redefine itself under a new CEO following Jack Dorsey’s departure.

Musk wouldn’t have much time to devote to actually running Twitter, if he bought it, given his leadership positions as the chief exec at both SpaceX and Telsa. Mostly, he seems to want to throw his money around so that Twitter has to listen to his ideas: how about ad-free Twitter Blue?, instant verification for Blue subscribers? and, of course, how about turning down those pesky content moderation dials? Like way, way down? If successful on the latter point, Twitter wouldn’t be improved — it would be chaos. Or worse, Parler.

But in the wake of Musk’s lowball offer, Twitter’s future — regardless of whether he himself buys it — is no longer certain.

Tim Cook speaks out against sideloading…again

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks at IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals) Global Summit 2022 in Washington, DC. Image Credits: Apple

Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage this week at IAPP’s Global Privacy Summit to once again call out companies whose business model is built on mining users’ data — a not-so-subtle reference to Facebook, whose ability to serve personalized ads was impacted by Apple’s App Store privacy changes to the tune of $10 billion. The exec also reiterated Apple’s position against sideloading — the practice of loading apps onto mobile devices from outside the App Store.

Although Google has long allowed its users to install Android apps outside the Play Store, Apple has staunchly resisted the idea, saying it puts users’ privacy and security at risk from bad actors.

The company last year published a 31-page document explaining why it believes sideloading apps could lead to an increase in malware and scams, which would outweigh the consumer benefits of alternative app stores where fees may be reduced as developers could avoid paying Apple’s commissions. Apple critics, of course, believe the company’s position is more about its desire to maintain its tight grip on the mobile app ecosystem and its accompanying App Store revenues. Fortnite maker Epic Games, for instance, is appealing a lower court’s ruling over the App Store business model’s anti-competitive nature. The gaming company wants to serve its mobile games to users outside the App Store to avoid paying Apple commissions, but Apple insists that opening up the iPhone to third-party stores or web downloads is a slippery slope.

Apple proponents often agree that there are risks involved with sideloading, as Apple states. For instance, Apple’s documentation pointed out that Android devices were found to have 15-47x more malware infections than iPhones over the past four years, citing data from Nokia’s prior Threat Intelligence Reports.

But bills that would permit sideloading are gaining bipartisan support in the U.S., which Cook specifically spoke about today, saying they “could put our privacy and security at risk,” and were of deep concern to Apple. Notably, he didn’t only focus on how sideloading could increase the risks of malware, but also on how companies could use the feature to route around Apple’s existing privacy protection to once again track users’ data.

“To be clear, Apple is in favor of privacy regulation. We have long been supporters of the GDPR and we applaud the many countries that have enacted privacy laws of their own. We also continue to call for a strong comprehensive privacy law in the United States. And we are grateful to all the global leaders who are working to advance privacy rights, including the rights of children in particular,” Cook said.

“But we are deeply concerned about regulations that would undermine privacy and security in service of some other aim. Here in Washington and elsewhere, policymakers are taking steps, in the name of competition, that would force Apple to let apps onto iPhone that circumvent the App Store through a process called sideloading. That means data-hungry companies would be able to avoid our privacy rules, and once again track our users against their will,” he added.

Cook also pointed to how sideloading enabled users to be infected with ransomware during the pandemic after being tricked into installing illegitimate COVID-tracing apps. The scheme, he said, “directly targeted those who could install apps from websites that lack the App Store’s defenses.”

Given how many scammy apps slip through the cracks of the “App Store’s defenses” these days, a world where there’s no moderation at all could, in fact, be worse. The real question is whether or not individuals should have the right to take on that risk for themselves.

Elsewhere in the speech, Cook raised concerns about companies that data-mine users for profit. Though tech rivals like Google and Facebook were not mentioned by name in the speech, they were clearly the intended targets of some of Cook’s remarks. At one point, he alluded to companies tracking user data as an “emergency.”

“At this very moment, companies are mining data about the details of our lives. The shops and restaurants we frequent. The causes we support. The websites we choose to read. These companies defend their actions as pure of intention, as the work of better serving us with more targeted experiences,” said Cook. “But they don’t believe we should have a real choice in the matter. They don’t believe that they should need our permission to peer so deeply into our personal lives.”

To illustrate the problem, Cook painted a dramatic picture of what this would look like if it took place in the physical world, calling it an “emergency.”

“Imagine a stranger following you as you take your child to school, holding a camera outside the driver’s side window, recording everything you do. Imagine you open your computer and the stranger is suddenly watching your every keystroke. You wouldn’t call that a service. You would call it an emergency. In the digital world, it is one too,” he said.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• Apple updated its iMovie app with new features, Storyboards and Magic Movie. Storyboards offer users pre-made templates for popular types of videos shared on social, with colleagues or with classmates, while Magic Movie instantly creates a video from the clips and photos a user selects, automatically adding transitions, effects and music to the edit.
• Apple’s iOS 16 beta included references in the code that seem to point to the long-rumored Mixed Reality (AR/VR) headset Apple has under development. The beta also points to possible notifications changes, health-tracking features and possibly a new multitasking interface for iPad.
• Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) may have led to $16 billion in revenue losses among big tech companies like Meta, Twitter, Snap and YouTube, a report by Lotame said.

Platforms: Google

• Google quietly launched its awaited “Switch to Android” mobile app for iOS that helps users transfer their contacts, calendar, photos and videos from their iPhone to a new Android device. The app is not yet discoverable in the App Store.
• Android Auto 7.5 arrived on the Play Store, but the changes this time around appear to be under the hood.

E-commerce & Food Delivery

• Pinterest partnered with the e-commerce platform WooCommerce, allowing its merchants to turn their product catalogs into shoppable Pins.
• Wegmans began offering support for SNAP purchasing through the Instacart grocery app.

Augmented Reality

Image Credits: TikTok

• TikTok launched Effect House into open beta. The new AR development platform allows creators to make AR effects that others can use in TikTok videos. The platform offers creation tools, documentation, templates, and the occasional live demo from TikTok engineers.
• Walmart introduced “shoppable” AR content on Snapchat with a new AR lens to inspire users to make recipes with ingredients from home or those they can order from Walmart.
• A portion of Etsy’s sellers went on strike for a week over a 1.5% increase in the site’s transaction fees.

Fintech

• Investing app Public launched a new “Learn and Earn” hub where users can complete courses related to investing and earn rewards, like a free slice of stock or ETF as a reward for leveling up.
• India’s payments body, the National Payments Corporation of India, approved WhatsApp’s plan to extend its payments service to 60 million additional users in India, to allow WhatsApp Pay to reach up to 100 million in total.
• Robinhood’s trading app added SHIB, SOL, COMP and MATIC to its service, leading Shiba Inu to rally by 35% on the move.
• Coinbase suspended support for UPI payments on its app in India, less than four days after launching the trading service. The National Payments Corporation of India, which oversees UPI, had said that it was not aware of any crypto exchange using UPI payments.
• Coinbase shareholders have filed a class-action lawsuitagainst the company for deceptively positive statements, noting the company had failed to disclose things like the amount of cash it would need to scale and how susceptible to outages it would be.
• TikTok star and musician Bella Poarch’s latest brand deal has her becoming the face of Cash App. The deal has the star modeling Cash App’s clothing line (?!!) and giving away $100,000 in bitcoin.

Social

Image Credits: Snap

• Snapchat’s latest feature is able to automatically create Stories for publishers based on the news stories they post online. The feature leverages RSS feeds, and the generated Stories will appear in the app’s Discover section.
• Snapchat also debuted its fifth cohort of Yellow accelerator startups. The eight startups will take up a 13-week residency at Snap’s HQ, and include companies focused on finance, e-commerce, dating, social, AR and more.
• TikTok is testing a private dislike button for comments. The dislike won’t be public and commenters won’t know they’ve been downvoted in this way. But TikTok could use the feature to inform a comment-ranking algorithm in the future.
• Fox News said an account on Trump-backed Truth Social using its name was unauthorized after the site’s CEO had welcomed the news outlet to the social app.
• India’s ban on Chinese apps in the country has allowed TikTok rival Josh to thrive after TikTok itself was blocked. Josh now has more than 150 million MAUs and a $5 billion valuation as of April.
• TikTok is found to be dominated by pro-war content in Russia after its ban on new uploads, per a study examining the impacts of the Russian “fake news” law. TechCrunch also found that Russian state media was continuing to post to TikTok a month after the app blocked new content originating in Russia.
• TikTok users spent a record $874 million on in-app payments from January-March 2022, up 184% year-over-year, per data.ai data (previously App Annie.) The app reached 1.6 billion MAUs by the end of March.
• Pinterest launched its latest version of its API (v5), saying it’s the first time in the company’s history it’s offering a developer-centric open API that any developer can apply to.

Photos

• Meta subpoenaed “competitor” Dispo, a social photo-sharing startup, in an attempt to prove it wasn’t a monopoly. Dispo fought the summons, which had seen the tech giant send 36 requests for its internal documents, including metrics, calling Meta’s requests “unduly burdensome, overbroad, vexatious and harassing.”

Messaging

Image Credits: WhatsApp

• WhatsApp introduced Communities — a new, organized group chat feature that includes admin tools, file sharing, emoji reactions, 32-person calls and more, allowing clubs, schools and other private groups to host chats with thousands of users. Only admins can announce to the entire group, but members can chat more freely in sub-group chats. The update could allow the app to compete with other group chat products or even Facebook’s own Groups, to some extent. But WhatsApp clarifies its difference is that chats are more personal — users would see each other’s phone numbers, for example. They may also be networked in the real world, unlike Facebook’s larger interest-based Groups. Communities will initially launch with select testers for feedback, but some of the other features designed for Communities will arrive on WhatsApp for general access sooner.

Dating

Image Credits: Tinder

• Tinder added a “Festival Mode” to its mobile app that allows members to make connections before heading out to a concert or music festival. The feature was launched in partnership with Live Nation and event producers AEG Presents and Superstruct Entertainment.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Spotify

• Spotify rebranded its companion app Spotify Greenroom as Spotify Live and integrated its live audio capabilities directly into its main streaming app, minus the interactive features. Only select creators from Spotify’s originals will be able to go live in the main app. Independent creators will still be able to stream in Spotify Live, however.
• YouTube said it will now make all public videos on its platform eligible to be remixed into YouTube Shorts (short-form video) content unless creators opt out. The one exception to this will be music videos, where licensing issues prevent re-use.
• Clubhouse added a dark mode for your nighttime streaming.
• Artists are criticizing TikTok’s new music distribution service SoundOn, claiming issues with delays and audience reach.
• Plex drops its plan to be a podcast streaming app. The company said it was ending support for streaming podcasts along with web shows to instead focus on its ad-supported video streaming efforts.
• Spotify-owned podcast creation app Anchor rolled out support for 35 more languages.

Gaming

• Would-be Roblox rival Rec Room, a cross-platform app including VR, reached 3 million monthly active users specifically in VR.
• Amazon launched its first original mobile games since 2015 with the debut of Amazon Kids+ original games, “Super Spy Ryan” and “Do, Re & Mi” based on its popular shows.
• Niantic launched its first original AR game in nearly a decade not tied to another company’s existing intellectual property with the debut of Peridot.
• Mobile game app spending was down 6.3% year-over-year in March 2022, per Sensor Tower data, to reach $7 billion in player spending. The U.S. was the top market with $1.9 billion or 27.4% of spend, followed by China (19.2%), then Japan (19%). The top game was Tencent’s Honor of Kinds, with $272.4 million in spending.
• Square Enix unveiled Kingdom Hearts 4 and a new Kingdom Hearts mobile game, Missing-Link, for iOS and Android, as part of its 20th Anniversary Event.
• Zynga launched FarmVille 3 in Japan, after having first debuted in November 2021 for most other countries.

Health & Fitness

• A free iPad app called Staybl launched to help people with involuntary hand tremors due to conditions like Parkinson’s be able to use the tablet computer.
• Apple is planning to add new features to its Health app this year that will include things like medication reminders, additional sleep tracking and possibly body temperature sensing. Plans to add a blood pressure monitor to Apple Watch were scaled back, however.

Government & Policy

• Apple will face another antitrust charge in the EU related to its music streaming efforts, Reuters reported. Last year, the European Commission accused Apple of anticompetitive behavior by restricting developers to its own in-app payment system and preventing them from informing users of other purchasing options.

Funding and M&A

Welcome Tech, a startup building a “Super App” aimed at immigrants, raised $30 million in funding led by TTV Capital, bringing its total raise to date to $70 million. The funding will bridge the gap between the B and C rounds for the company. The app offers a banking service, including a debit card and a bilingual mobile app.

Fortnite-maker Epic Games raised $2 billion in funding from Sony and Kirkbi, the parent company of the Lego Group, with both companies investing $1 billion each. The deal values the company at $31.5 billion. Epic said the funding will go toward its plans to build out a kid-friendly metaverse in addition to supporting its further growth.

Nigeria-based digital banking app Umba raised $15 million in Series A funding, two years after raising its $2 million seed. The app offers free bank accounts, interbank transfers, peer-to-peer transfers and bill payments.

U.K.-based Wagestream, a startup offering salary advances to employees through an app, raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Smash Capital, along with $115 million in debt. The app targets front-line workers and others paid in hourly wages.

Twitter acquired the mobile engagement platform OpenBack for an undisclosed sum. The deal will help Twitter to enhance its push notifications via on-device data processing, unlike conventional push notification SDKs.

China-based game engine developers, Cocos Technologies, raised $50 million in Series B funding from CCB Trust, a subsidiary of China Construction Bank, GGV Capital and real-time communication solution provider Agora. Cocos is best known for its cross-platform, open source engine for 2D mobile games.

Voyager Innovations, the owner of Philippines’ payment and financial services app PayMaya and neobank Maya Bank, raised $210 million in new funding. The round was led by SIG Venture Capital, bringing its valuation to $1.4 billion.

Berlin-based Choco, a startup that makes ordering tools for restaurants and suppliers, raised $111M in Series B2 funding at a $1.2B valuation, bringing its funding to $282.5 million. The company offers apps for iOS and Android focused on streamlining ordering for the food industry.

Mental health app Real raised $37 million in Series B funding led by Owl Ventures, bringing its total funding to $53 million. The app offers subscriptions from $13 per month, allowing users to access therapists, therapist-created mental health programs and resources, events and more.

Dating app SwoonMe raised a second round of seed funding in the amount of $1 million from Foxhog Ventures. The company had previously raised $200,000 in its first seed round from angel investors last year after its July launch. The startup claims nearly ~50,000 downloads after launching in India.

Downloads

Pokémon GO maker Niantic announced the upcoming launch of its latest augmented reality mobile game Peridot. Unlike prior efforts, this game is not based on other companies’ intellectual property, but will instead allow users to care for virtual, magical animals called Peridots. The Dots, as they’re called for short, will be able to distinguish between different types of terrain when viewed in AR and will acquire different types of items based on their surroundings, as well. Players will also be able to breed Dots when they reach adulthood to unlock new types of virtual pets. The new game will soft-launch this month in select test markets on iOS and Android.

You can read more about what the game will bring here on TechCrunch.

Tweets

Meta is throwing billions of dollars into building out the metaverse as the future of social networking but in the near term, the tech giant is looking toward the power of messaging to connect users in a more personal way. On that front, the company today introduced its plans for a significant update to its WhatsApp messaging app that will allow users to now not only connect privately with friends and family, as before, but also participate in larger discussion groups, called Communities. These groups aim to serve as a more feature-rich replacement for people’s larger group chats with added support for tools like file-sharing, 32-person group calls, emoji reactions, as well as admin tools and moderation controls, among other things.

The feature has been under development for some time as the next big iteration for the WhatsApp platform, meant to capitalize on the app’s existing end-to-end encryption as well as users’ growing desire to join private communities outside of larger social platforms, like Facebook.

In particular, Communities could present a challenge to other messaging apps like Telegram — which has recently become a prominent player in communications related to the Russia-Ukraine war — in addition to other private messaging platforms, like iMessage or Signal, as well as apps like GroupMe, Band, Remind and others used to communicate with groups.

“It’s been clear for a while that the way we communicate online is changing,” wrote Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, announcing the news in a post on his public Facebook profile. “Most of us use social networks and feeds to discover interesting content and stay updated. But for a deeper level of interaction, messaging has become the center of our digital lives. It’s more intimate and private, and with encryption it’s more secure too,” he added.

Image Credits: WhatsApp Communities features

The feature may initially lead to some comparisons with Facebook Groups, a more private networking tool on Facebook that now reaches 1.8 billion users on a monthly basis, per Facebook’s most recent public data. Similar to Groups, WhatsApp Communities would allow organizations, clubs, or schools to create networks for their members to interact and share news and updates. And like Facebook Groups recently added, Communities also support the ability to host sub-groups.

For example, a volunteer organization could create a sub-group discussion for those involved with a particular project, like a food drive. A parents group could host sub-groups based on their kids’ ages. A school could include sub-groups for different grades or extracurricular activities. A club could host sub-groups dedicated to planning their various events and activities. And so on.

But while Facebook Groups may see some overlap with WhatsApp Communities, the two are not designed for the same purpose. Facebook’s product is often used by larger, otherwise disconnected strangers who share a common interest. WhatsApp Communities, meanwhile, focus on more private and personal groups — including those where members may already be connected in other ways, including in the real world.

Explains Head of WhatsApp Will Cathcart of the difference, “we’re phone number-based.”

“When you’re interacting with people on WhatsApp, there’s a necessary comfort with exchanging your phone number with them. So that points towards communities where you know these people in real life,” he says. “Maybe you don’t have every phone number of every parent in your kid’s class, but you’re comfortable interacting with them in that way.”

Image Credits: WhatsApp Communities’ reactions feature

In Communities, users will also be able to see the phone numbers of the others who participate in the sub-groups with them, or when they engage with each other one-on-one. This makes the product feel more personal than something like Facebook Groups.

Another key differentiator between Communities and Facebook Groups is that the latter includes groups that are public or discoverable on the platform. WhatsApp Communities are neither. The company says it will not allow users to search for or discover Communities on its service. You have to be invited to the groups to join them.

To get started with Communities, admins will be able to link a pre-existing group chat to the new feature or create a new group from scratch. WhatsApp believes there are already a large number of group chats that will easily make the transition to the more structured Communities when the feature launches.

“We don’t have a precise number, but when you talk to people in a lot of the countries where WhatsApp is popular, it is really prevalent that people are not, at this point, just using WhatsApp to talk to their family or their friends,” says Cathcart. “They’re using it to talk to their boss and co-workers. They’re using it if they have kids in schools.”

“What we’re doing now is starting to build for organizational use cases with intention,” he says.

Admin tools come to messaging

To grow their groups, admins can add members to Communities individually or they can share an invite link. Helpfully, for clubs and other groups where members come and go, admins have the power to remove individual members from a Community as needed.

Plus, only admins will have the power to share announcements to all Community members through the main announcement group (as it’s called), which will initially support “several thousands” of users. Community members are only able to chat in the smaller groups the admins have created or approved.

WhatsApp will also limit forwards — a way to send messages that often leads to the spread of misinformation and spam. In Communities, messages that have already been forwarded will only be able to be forwarded to one group at a time, rather the current forward limit of five.

This, along with subgroups, could address the problem of overload that happens today in many group chats where important information gets missed amid the chatter and irrelevant content.

Image Credits: WhatsApp Communities’ voice calls

Communities additionally bring other group management tools to messaging, including the ability for group admins to moderate the content. Admins will be able to remove errant or problematic messages or media from everyone’s chat. They’ll also be able to share files up to 2 GB to help groups collaborate and share information. And Communities will be able to host voice calls with up to 32 people for those times when it’s easier to talk live rather than text, the company says.

Users, too, will have control over being added to Communities. In WhatsApp’s settings, users can already decide who can add them to a group chat; now those same settings will apply to Communities, too. Users can report abuse, block accounts, and leave Communities when they no longer wish to participate. In Communities, users can silently leave a group, which doesn’t notify the other users as in traditional WhatsApp chats.

While WhatsApp promotes its end-to-end encryption as another reason to use the new discussions feature, the company still has to overcome user hesitancy due to issues regarding its latest attempt at updating its privacy policies. The company faced backlash over its hard-to-understand policy update last year, which is still being examined by some markets’ anti-competition authorities and regulatory bodies, including in the EU and India.

Cathcart says after WhatsApp added more clarity to its policy, a “large, overwhelming percentage of the user base” accepted the update. Anyone who refused just isn’t able to use the new functionality related to businesses. Communities, he notes, won’t require another policy update at this time. 

“This fits very closely with what we’ve been doing before. And from a data perspective, this is all end-to-encrypted on the communications — [it] works very similar to how groups have worked,” he says.

The new feature is not live today. It’s initially being launched into a limited test with select communities to gain further feedback ahead of a public rollout. WhatsApp has not said when the feature will reach the wider public, but notes some of Communities’ new functionality –like reactions, file-sharing, and 32-person calls — will roll out sooner.

Last year, reports began circulating that Google was developing a “Switch to Android” app for iOS users looking to make the jump from iPhone to a smartphone running Google’s Android OS. Now that app has arrived. On Monday, Google quietly launched the Switch to Android app on the App Store in a number of global markets, including the U.S. As expected, the app promises to make the transition between mobile platforms easier to manage by helping users import their contacts, calendar, photos, and videos to their new Android phone.

The app also instructs users how to turn off Apple’s iMessage in order to get text messages on their new device and has them connect with iCloud to migrate their photo and video library to Android.

Image Credits: Google

Google’s Switch to Android website has not yet been updated to indicate the new app is available and the company hasn’t officially announced its launch. The app is also not appearing on Google’s developer page on the App Store or in App Store search results. It can only be found when clicking the direct link.

Currently, the Switch to Android website guides users through the standard process for moving to Android which involves users backing up their contacts, calendar, photos, and videos via the Google Drive iOS app before changing devices.

The company’s plan to develop a standalone app for iPhone-to-Android switchers was first uncovered last year, when the website 9to5Google dug into the code within Android’s official Data Restore Tool and spotted a reference to a Google-developed Switch to Android app for iOS. The site just last month noted the app appeared to have gained the ability automatically migrate a users’ photos and videos from iCloud to Google Photos, also based on mentions in another Android app’s code.

There have been other hints that Google has been working to make it easier for users to shift their media content to its own platform and services through backend developments. Recently, Google announced an update to the Google Photos app that offered a way for mobile device owners to copy over photos from rival cloud storage services, including iCloud, Facebook and others. Before, transfers had to originate from Facebook or iCloud, not from Google’s app itself.

Unfortunately, one thing Google’s new Switch to Android iOS app doesn’t help with is migrating a users’ applications. This is likely due to limitations as to what third-party apps can access on the user’s device. Apps aren’t supposed to scan the user’s iPhone to extract a list of all the other apps a user has installed, that is.

In its App Store description, the new app promotes its ability to handle moving users’ content between devices without the use of “fussy cables,” meaning the two phones don’t have to be physically linked together to complete the process, as an added perk.

Google’s app is arriving many years after Apple’s app that helped switch Android users to iPhone. Back in September 2015, Apple launched its Move to iOS app for Android users which, notably, was its first app on Google Play (besides those from its acquisition Beats.). Similarly, its app helped to migrate users’ data including their Camera Roll, Messages, Google Account, Contacts, and Bookmarks.

Google has not yet responded to requests for comment. But the app is publicly available from the URL here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1581816143.

Apple is releasing an iMovie update today for iOS and iPadOS. iMovie 3.0 introduces two new major features — storyboards and Magic Movie. It is available as a free download on the App Store for anyone running at least iOS 15.2 or iPadOS 15.2.

With the previous version of iMovie, most people started with a blank project on which you could add your own video footage and photos. But if you’ve never used a video editing app before, starting with a blank canvas can be intimidating.

Apple is adding the ability to create Magic Movies to get started with a new project. When you create a Magic Movie, it opens up the Photos library. You can open an album, select some videos and hit next. iMovie then automatically identifies dialogs, people’s faces, actions and more.

Your video footage is automatically stitched together with transitions, music and titles. This is just a starting point as you can still rearrange your movie however you want. For instance, you can move or delete clips, trim some parts and split a clip into two clips.

Apple has designed 20 different styles so that your Magic Movies don’t all look and sound the same. Each style is a package with animations, a soundtrack and transitions. When you switch from one style to another, your video is automatically regenerated.

Users can also pick their own soundtrack from purchased music, GarageBand or any audio file in the Files app. iMovie lets you add a voice over your video as well.

With Magic Movies, Apple is essentially giving you more flexibility to create a movie based on your media library. If you often watch Memories in the Photos app and keep thinking “I wish I could edit that auto-generated video”, iMovie doesn’t let you edit those Memories. But it helps you create a Memories-like video and start editing from there.

Image Credits: Apple

Today’s other new feature is storyboards. iMovie already helped you create a Hollywood-style movie trailer. Apple is expanding on that idea and moving beyond movie trailers.

With storyboards, iMovie users can select a template and get a guided way to make videos. Templates include social videos, education videos, trailers and product reviews.

Once you select a storyboard, you get a list of shots. You can fill out each shot by grabbing a video from your library or by shooting new footage. Once again, everything is customizable. You can trim a clip, add titles, change the style for titles, etc.

When you’re done with your video, you can save the video to your library, share it as a video file in other apps, or share the iMovie project with another Apple device. For instance, you can share a project with a Mac and continue tweaking your video on your Mac.

With this update, Apple isn’t adding more professional video editing features. Instead, it should be a little easier to open iMovie and get started.

Image Credits: Apple