This week’s news about Microsoft’s plan to add ChatGPT-like capabilities to its search engine Bing has sent its companion mobile app into the App Store’s Top Charts as of Wednesday. On the U.S. App Store, the Bing app has surged to the No. 12 spot among all free iPhone apps, while Microsoft’s Edge browser is now the No. 3 Utility app. Globally, the Bing app has seen a 10x increase in new downloads, according to preliminary estimates from app intelligence firm data.ai.

The movement indicates there’s sizable consumer demand for these new AI experiences, and users are even potentially willing to try new search engines and other browsers in order to gain access.

On Tuesday, Microsoft first showed off the new Bing.com which included the highly anticipated integration of a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model. The update adds a ChatGPT-like experience within the search engine itself, allowing users to converse with an AI chatbot for help with more complex queries and to aid in select content creation tasks — like writing a LinkedIn post. Microsoft also demonstrated a new version of its Edge web browser with the same AI features built into the sidebar for easy access.

But while the new version Bing has now technically launched, it’s still in a limited preview for the time being.

Users who want to try out the new AI features have to first join a waitlist. Microsoft said that “millions” of users will be invited from the waitlist over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, the company cleverly introduced a way to move up its waitlist. On a landing page, Microsoft suggests that users can gain quicker access to the new Bing if they complete a couple of additional steps. This includes setting Microsoft’s search as the default on their PC and scanning a QR code to install the Microsoft Bing App on their smartphone.

Image Credits: Bing waitlist website

The latter has clearly inspired the app’s rapid climb up the App Store’s charts — and it’s been a dramatic rise, at that.

Ahead of Microsoft’s AI news, Bing was not a popular app by any stretch. As of last week, for example, the app was ranked No. 160 on the U.S. App Store’s Productivity apps chart — in other words, practically invisible. It wasn’t ranked on the U.S. App Store’s Top Overall Charts at all. In less than a week’s time, it’s nearing the top 10 in the U.S. as is the No. 2 Productivity app, as of the time of writing.

Image Credits: data.ai chart of Bing’s app movement

If the consumer demand wasn’t there, Bing’s app wouldn’t have moved this significantly, despite Microsoft’s push to download it.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that the App Store’s charts are susceptible to being manipulated by a rush of new downloads in a compressed period of time — which is why TikTok marketing that makes apps “go viral” has become so effective. Still, the Bing app’s movement is an interesting signal that demonstrates the demand for AI as well as the potential threat to Google.

Google is already paying Apple billions per year to be the default search engine in Safari. But if a large number of consumers move to another web search app like Bing or Edge in order to try out the new AI capabilities, Google could lose market share on one of the largest platforms consumers use to browse the web.

It’s possible, too, that some portion of the Bing app’s new users believe they’ll have access to the AI features from the mobile app. To be clear, that’s not yet the case as of yet. And though the app was recently updated, Microsoft makes no promises about using AI from this native iOS experience in Bing’s App Store description.

In addition to downloading Bing, as prompted by Microsoft’s website, some users may have downloaded Microsoft’s Edge browser on their iPhone, as well. While the Edge app hasn’t moved up the charts as quickly as Bing, it’s now No. 3 on the U.S. App Store’s Top Charts for Utilities, a slight bump from the No. 7 position it held Monday.

More specific figures around the total new installs may become available in the weeks ahead. If that’s the case, we’ll update with those numbers.

Bing’s app sees a 10x jump in downloads after Microsoft’s AI news by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Last year, Snap shut down Zenly, a popular social mapping app it acquired for over $200 million in 2017, despite the fact that Zenly still had 40 million active users and growing. Users were understandably upset. But now, Zenly co-founder Antoine Martin says he’s returning to the social app market with the launch of a new company called Amo. The former Zenly CEO is working with ex-Zenly managing director Michael Goldenstein and others on Amo, whose goal is to fix the problems with today’s social networks by focusing on connecting real-world friends, not the whole world.  

Details about the new product remain shrouded for the time being, but both Martin and Goldenstein began teasing Amo through social media posts on Friday. 

In a LinkedIn post, Goldenstein described the problem Amo was looking to solve in more detail.

“Today’s social products have become overly complex and commoditized super apps that no longer serve the best interests of those who use them, but rather the advertisers that feed their top line” he explained. “TikTok is eating the world and only making things worse as companies focus their efforts on getting their screen time back instead of focusing on why people use their products in the first place. Meanwhile, doom scrolling TikTok and its equivalents isn’t making anyone feel good,” he wrote.

In addition, he said today’s social tech makers were bloated as their employees fought over “pixel and their own metrics in order to get their next promotion.”

This situation has led to the development of a new set of social apps that are generating traction, however. Goldenstein cited apps like BeReal, Locket Widget and Zenly as proof that people are seeking to try products that are focused on “real relationships.”

He’s not wrong with this analysis of the market. As TechCrunch also reported last year, homescreen social apps that put widgets on the smartphone’s home screen, like Locket and BeReal, were blowing up. Apple also anointed BeReal as its “App of the Year” in 2022 after its dramatic growth and investors jumped to back the company with a $60 million Series B.

While these apps were among the first to capture the consumer demand for new, more authentic social networking experiences, there have been signals pointing toward this shift for years. As younger users craved a way to keep up with their real-world friends, outside of their carefully manufactured Instagram presence, they began to create private Instagram accounts, or finstas, for more casual posting. BeReal essentially productized this experience but with the added gimmick of a notification that urges users to post at a certain time every day.

It’s not yet clear what exactly Amo has in store, but it seems to be along these same lines of real-world social networking as opposed to places where users have to “compete with brands and celebrities,” as Goldenstein describes it.

Martin, in an announcement on Twitter, expressed a combination of disappointment over Zenly’s fate and excitement for his new product. He even tagged Snap CEO Evan Spiegel in a remark about Zenly’s closure, saying “I’m sure you’ll come to regret that decision.” (The Zenly co-founder had left Snap last year, after launching Zenly’s redesign.)

While Martin didn’t describe exactly what Amo was up to either, he promised the company would be more experimental.

“We are finally free, excited and will try a lot of things. You can expect us to take risks, build even weirder features, generate emotions and stronger friendships and hopefully find some success along the way,” Martin tweeteed. “We’ll be doing our best to serve you above all else, and hope to be on your springboard in 2023.”

The comment about the springboard — a reference to the app that manages the iPhone’s Home Screen — could be a hint that Amo may also include a Home Screen widget of some kind, similar to BeReal or Locket.

A TestFlight version of the Amo app will arrive soon, Martin also noted, and interested users can follow the @amoamoamo Twitter account to stay tuned for future news. A waitlist for Amo is available on the company’s website as well, and requires a phone number and name to sign up.

Zenly co-founder returns with new social app company, Amo by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

The global app economy slowed for the first time last year, as consumer spending on apps dropped 2% to $167 billion, according to a recent annual report put out by data.ai. At the same time, downloads were up 11% year-over-year — a seemingly positive indication that app adoption was still taking place, driven in particular by emerging markets. But a deeper analysis of the fourth quarter points to more recently slowing download growth during a time of year that’s typically a boon for the app ecosystem. The holiday season tends to bring new phones and more free time for consumers to try new apps and games, which makes these new figures all the more surprising.

According to app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, mobile app adoption across the App Store and Google Play Store leveled off in Q4 2022, declining a slight 0.1% year-over-year to reach 35.5 billion new installs in the quarter.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Its analysis is on a per-user basis, meaning additional downloads of an app by the same person on different devices aren’t counted towards the total. It also doesn’t count app re-installs in order to show only new download growth. However, its figures are only estimates.

While the fourth-quarter trends weren’t enough to pull down the overall year-over-year download growth metrics, it seems, it’s another signal of a stagnating app economy — one, no doubt, still normalizing after outsized growth during Covid and one that remains impacted by the overall macroeconomic forces, which also play a key a role in app marketing spend.

But there’s another argument to be made here, as well, and that’s that the years of high-priced commissions on app sales and in-app purchases across the global app stores have finally begun to impact the innovation taking place in the wider app ecosystem. If companies have to share up to 30% of their revenues just to distribute their apps and games to a mobile audience, it’s more difficult for them to weather a storm like a down economy. And entrepreneurs may be less inclined to build for mobile, specifically, when other areas of the market are less restrictive. Look at the developments around crypto and Web3, for example — they couldn’t fully expand to mobile because of app store guidelines and the platforms’ need to profit from in-app purchases. With so much pressing down on app innovation, it’s not surprising to see downloads and spending suffer.

This trend isn’t only apparent in the metrics surrounding the stagnating app install rates and declining spending.

Another example of the ecosystem’s floundering is visible in Apple’s editorially selected top app of 2022. An accolade meant to reflect the opportunity to be had in building for mobile, the Cupertino company highlighted the Gen Z social networking app BeReal as its “App of the Year.” While arguably a breakout success with younger people, it’s also an app whose daily active users fell far behind its download figures and one that has no business model at present — the app doesn’t yet generate revenue. Its continued existence is being fueled by VC funding, not app stores’ ability to provide a platform where new ideas can easily monetize. And its developers are struggling to come up with what sort of subscription or in-app purchases they could convince their young users to pay for — the result of an app marketplace that sold consumers for years on the idea that mobile software should be free.

Then there are the apps that are at the top of Sensor Tower’s list of the most-downloads apps in Q4 2022 — they are the apps from tech giants like Meta and ByteDance, angling each other for the top spots. For years, it’s been rare to see any newcomers find a way onto this list, and that remains true in the fourth quarter.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Worldwide, Instagram edged out TikTok for the No. 1 spot, and Meta’s other apps found a place in the top 10 (Facebook at No. 3, WhatsApp at No. 5, Messenger at No. 8, and WhatsApp Business at No. 9.) ByteDance’s CapCut, an extension of TikTok’s workflow, is No. 4. Other top apps include the usual suspects, like Snapchat, Telegram, Spotify, Amazon, Flipkart, Twitter, and more big names.

In games, Subway Surfers was No. 1, followed by Garena Free Fire, Stumble Guys, Roblox, FIFA Mobile, Ludo King and Candy Crush Saga. Subway Surfers had ended the year with nearly 292 million installs, up 48% from 2021. Newcomer Stumble Guys gained the No. 3 spot with over 184 million downloads, which is notable given it was only launched in 2021 while the other top five apps were released in 2017 or earlier — a bright spot in what was otherwise a quarter-over-quarter decline for mobile game installs.

On the App Store, game downloads declined 6.9%, on Google Play, they gained a small 0.6%.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Still, the games category continues to drive app installs. On the App Store, it’s responsible for almost three times as many installs as the No. 2 Category, Utilities, the report noted. But worryingly, the App Store’s games category dipped below 2 billion for the first since Q1 2019.

On Google Play, the games category was responsible for more installs (11.7 billion) than all categories on the App Store combined (8.1 billion), but the Play Store’s non-game categories were down 1.5% year-over-year, to 15.8 billion installs.

It’s too soon to say whether or not current trends represent a final cooling off of the app store gold rush, given how wider economic forces are clearly playing a role here in app adoption and spending. Plus, new app markets are coming online which means there will be more people downloading apps for the first time. But for the time being, the trend is a signal that there’s some saturation in top app markets and suggests that further innovation and growth may need to be kickstarted by forcing the app stores to engage in increased competition.

App downloads were stagnant in the fourth quarter, new analysis finds by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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

The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to the latest “State of Mobile” report by data.ai (previously App Annie). However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time using mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion.

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

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

Top Stories

The end of the Twitter app era

It’s incredible how third-party Twitter clients had been able to survive Twitter’s ups and downs over the years, including its various API changes and constantly fluctuating business objectives and policies, only to be unceremoniously killed in 2023 by the whims of a billionaire. This week, in what has been one of the more depressing moments in tech history, longtime Twitter apps like IconFactory’s Twitterific, Tapbot’s Tweetbot and others like Birdie, Fenix, Echofon and many more were unceremoniously cut off from being able to access Twitter’s API and serve their customer base.

Instead of warning developers that Twitter’s policies were changing and giving them time to wind down their operations and communicate with their longtime users and subscribers, Twitter quietly, callously and deliberately revoked their API access. They “fixed the glitch,” so to speak.

Users and developers found out about the change as the apps stopped working, but not because of any official communication from Twitter itself. As backlash and outrage grew, Twitter then made matters worse by trying to gaslight its community about the situation. The company tweeted it was only enforcing its “long-standing” rules, then rushed to update its documentation to reflect what those rules actually were.

Of course, there was a time when Twitter tried to shut down the Twitter app ecosystem: you know, 12 years ago. Following its acquisition of Tweetie, which became Twitter’s own native app, the company in 2011 told developers they should stop trying to compete with Twitter on clients and instead focus on other API use cases, like data and verticals. It was the sort of classic, misguided move Twitter always seemed to make. The company never quite got a grip on the power Twitter had as a platform, and how an ecosystem of tools and apps that worked with Twitter was a better investment of its resources than spending eons trying to do things like tweak the structure of a thread or adding other bells and whistles that users didn’t really care about.

At the time of the proposed shutdown over a decade ago, those Twitter apps had been responsible for 42% of tweets on the platform. While slightly down from the 55% of tweets made in 2009 (or as high as 60% in 2010, another analysis found), the apps still served a large audience of power users that Twitter wanted to simply cut off and walk away from.

As entrepreneur Nova Spivack warned Twitter back then, its failure to incorporate its API into its future plans could ultimately hamper its potential as a company:

I think Twitter’s current strategy may take them in a direction where they end up missing out on their biggest potential win. If Twitter continues to go down the media company path, without incorporating their API into the plan, that could not only force a large part of their ecosystem to go elsewhere, but it could deprive them of a much larger potential infrastructure revenue opportunity, and could even end up costing them the company. After all, Silicon Valley is littered with the burned out wreckage of once-great media companies that failed create and keep third-party app ecosystems: AOL, Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo – to name a few. It’s very hard to maintain leadership as an online media company without an ecosystem of outside apps increasing reach, innovation, and stickiness.

He was right. Twitter over the years struggled to grow its daily active user base, even making up its own metrics, and trying to convince Wall Street that its business should be evaluated by something besides user growth. It didn’t work.

Twitter historically often ignored the innovation emerging from its ecosystem of apps, even as those apps contributed meaningfully to what Twitter would become. Twitterific coined the word “tweet,” was the first to use the bird icon and delivered the first native Mac and iOS apps, among other things. Tweetie introduced the pull-to-refresh gesture. Brizzly made it possible to tweet photos, long before Twitter did. And all, arguably, demonstrated the market for premium apps (Tweetbot for Mac was $20 in 2012!) and app subscriptions, despite arriving at a time when Twitter’s focus was on cramming ads into its timeline — something that was once dubbed its #dickbar feature.

The company could have found an altogether different trajectory if it had embraced the innovation taking place in the broader app ecosystem, instead of constantly trying to squash it. Twitter users for years had no choice but to sit back and watch as their favorite third-party apps were slowly pruned. Long before TikTok, an app that began as a “video Twitter,” Seesmic, had to exit back in 2012. Favstar, a popular app for tracking top tweets, closed up shop in 2018. Twitter acquired TweetDeck, then abandoned it, despite surveys that indicated users would be willing to pay for premium features and subscriptions. Twitter almost seemed to revel in destroying various parts of its ecosystem. It bought Vine (a TikTok precursor) and Periscope (an early livestreamer), and killed them. (And when Twitter managed to come up with creative ideas of its own — like a music discovery app called #Music — it would give up on them, too. Now music discovery takes place on TikTok.)

Despite its fumbling, third-party Twitter clients managed to survive and even thrive, thanks to dedicated user bases, all while the company kept tweaking its API to make them less useful. In 2018, for example, the app makers told their customers they would have to disable or degrade certain features. And yet, the apps’ customers remained.

Now, at a perilous time in Twitter’s history — when analysts are predicting it will lose some 32 million users by 2024 — Twitter is removing access to some of its most beloved entry points to its ecosystem. And while these clients may not be the powerhouses of a decade ago, they deserved the opportunity to close up shop in a dignified manner that reflected the impact they had on Twitter’s own history and community.

What’s ironic here is that Twitter in more recent years almost seemed as if it was trying to right the ship. It was revamping its API and bringing back its developer conference. Its head of product for the developer platform, Amir Shevat, understood the potential. The company was beginning to spin up in-Twitter apps users could interact with and was even toying with ideas around a Twitter app store. But his team was cut from 100 people to two amid the Twitter layoffs, signaling the end of Twitter’s platform ambitions. And, we should have realized then, the end of the Twitter ecosystem of apps, too.

As Shevat warned in December: “Let this be my personal notice to Twitter developers: The team is gone; the investment has been undone. Love does not live here anymore.”

Trial set in Epic & Match’s antitrust case against Google

A date has been set for a trial by jury in a significant antitrust case against Google involving its alleged abuses of power in the Android app market. Fortnite maker Epic Games and dating app giant Match Group, joined by more than three dozen state attorneys general, have accused Google of unfairly leveraging its market dominance and harming competition through its Google Play Store terms and practices. In particular, the plaintiffs take issue with the commissions Google requires on app sales and in-app purchases as well as the control Google has over Android app distribution in general. The case will now proceed to a jury trial on November 6, 2023, a judge in the Northern District of California has ruled.

Epic and Match filed to amend their complaint in October by adding new antitrust counts to their case. Google in October asked the court to disallow these requests, saying, among other things, the claims were filed too late. (The court granted the motion to amend the complaint in November.)

The Android ecosystem antitrust case is a bit different from the Epic-Apple battle because Google allows Android apps to be sideloaded. The app makers will instead aim to prove other ways the company leveraged its market power — like paying developers to not leave the Play Store, for instance.

In a more recent hearing related to this case, a California federal judge criticized Google for not preserving evidence from employee chats, after learning internal communications were taking place in Google Chat, where messages were automatically deleted after 24 hours. Though employees can change the auto-delete setting, Google apparently did not enforce this setting to be turned on. The U.S. District Judge James Donato asked the parties how many of the 260 Google employees who received a litigation hold notice had chosen not to preserve their chats, according to a report from Law360.

The judge also threatened Google with a “substantial, trial-related penalty” if the court found evidence related to the trial was destroyed. This should be an interesting trial to watch, it seems.

Instagram adds a “Quiet Mode”

Instagram announced this week it’s expanding its selection of time management tools with the launch of a new feature called “Quiet Mode.” The feature aims to reduce users’ anxiety about taking time off from the app by silencing incoming notifications, auto-replying to DMs and setting your status to “In Quiet Mode” to inform friends that you’re not active on the app at present. The company said it will prompt teen users to enable the feature if they’re using the app late at night.

With the new Quiet Mode feature, the app is aiming to address the real-world impacts that accompany trying to step away for a bit from an app that you regularly use — and one where others expect you to be available.

The launches come as Instagram works to make its app less of a target for regulators and lawmakers who have been concerned with social media’s potential harms, particularly for teenage users. To date, Instagram has added several teen safety features, including those to protect teens’ privacy and reduce unwanted adult contact, limit ad targeting, restrict teens’ access to mature content and others to help parents monitor and manage their teens’ Instagram use through parental controls.

The update is one of several changes that rolled out, which also included tweaking its parental control tools and adding other tools to manage recommendations. For example, you’ll now be able to remove things from your Explore page and block terms from influencing your recommended content, too.

Weekly News

Android Updates

• Google fixed the issue that led to missing app changelogs on the Play Store’s website.
• Google’s clock app for Android now lets you record your own alarm sound. That could be fun. (Also ripe for pranks).

Apple News

• Apple seeded the release candidates (RCs) for iOS 16.3, iPadOS 16.3, tvOS 16.3 and watchOS 9.3. The release signals the public version is now likely days away.
• The iOS 16.3 public release will bring the new iCloud Advanced Data Protection feature to users worldwide. The opt-in feature offers end-to-end encryption for nearly all iCloud data, including messages, photos, device backups and more.
• Apple commemorated Black History Month with exclusive content, including a special-edition Apple Watch Black Unity Sport Loop, a new matching watch face and iPhone wallpaper.
• Apple is reportedly working on an iPad-bases smart display with smart home controls, FaceTime and video support. It’s also developing a faster Apple TV, reported Bloomberg.

Gaming

• Roblox’s estimated bookings grew 17-20% year-over-year, to $430 million-$439 million and daily actives jumped 18% to 61.5 million, Roblox said in its December 2022 metrics report.
• Google officially shut down its cloud gaming service Stadia this week, only two months shy of its third birthday. Though Stadia users were disappointed, Google did do some things right by offering both hardware and software refunds, save game transfers and more.
• 45% of game developers said they don’t believe in the promise of the metaverse, a new industry survey shows.
• Nintendo is increasing production of its six-year-old Switch console starting in April 2023, as consumer demand remains strong.

Entertainment

• Netflix made waves with the news that its founder and co-CEO Reed Hastings would step down after two decades of running the company. The news came on the heels of solid earnings, where the company reported adding 7.66 million subscribers, jumping to 230.75 million globally, and revenue of $7.85 billion, in line with estimates.
• Netflix also gave its iPhone app a makeover. The revamp included a new billboard layout, new card transitions, new animation for both the launch and profile screens, updated haptics and more.
• Wattpad Webtoon Studios signed with talent agency UTA for worldwide representation. The deal aims to help the global entertainment and publishing arm of Webtoon and Wattpad as it further expands into TV, movies, animation and more.
• YouTube TV refreshed its Live Guide and Library with a new design and the addition of recommendations on what to watch.
• Audio chat room app Clubhouse brought its “House Lounges” to the web. The always-on feature allows users to catch up, message and hang out with friends in private rooms. The feature first launched on mobile.
• TikTok expanded the reach of its “state-controlled media” label to more than 40 additional countries, to alert users when videos they’re seeing on the app are being published by entities whose “editorial output or decision-making process” is subject to influence by a government.
• Spotify, Deezer, Proton, Basecamp and others wrote a letter to the EU’s antitrust regulator’s Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager, urging the Commission to take action against Apple over antitrust practices. The Commission has been investigating the claims for years, following Spotify’s filing of an antitrust complaint in 2019.
• Amazon is increasing its Amazon Music Unlimited’s monthly prices by $1 and £1 to $10.99 and £10.99 in the U.S. and U.K. on February 21. The new prices will match the increase Apple Music implemented last fall.

Security & Privacy

• Period tracker Flo added an “anonymous mode” that lets users track their period without providing their name, email or other identifiers. Period tracker privacy has become a hot-button topic following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, as app users are worried how their private data could be used against them.

Twitter Drama

• Twitter launched an annual subscription for Twitter Blue that costs $84 per year, but is only available on the web. The subscription saves users 12% over a monthly web subscription or 36% over an iOS subscription, where the price is jacked up to cover App Store fees.
• The next day, it launched Blue for Android users, at the same pricey $11 per month it charges iOS users. The subscription is $3 per month cheaper on the web.
• Twitter killed off third-party clients, claiming it was only enforcing its long-standing API rules. But internal messages showed Twitter targeted the clients specifically, impacting classic apps like Tweetbot, Twitterific and others.
• A reverse engineer claims Twitter could be working on a video chat feature, based on findings in the app’s code.
• An ad industry leak indicated that Twitter’s fourth-quarter revenue had fallen 35% year-over-year to $1.025 billion, or 72% of its Q4 goal. It expects to earn $732 million in the first quarter this year, which would be down by 39% year-over-year.
• Twitter’s referral traffic to 12 major news outlets fell 12%, on average, from November to December 2022, per Similarweb data. The only two outlets that gained during this time were Fox News and NY Post.

Etc.

• Fintech Robinhood tapped tech editor Josh Topolsky to run Sherwood Media, an independent brand that will serve as the home to Robinhood’s Snacks newsletter.
• Dating app Hinge is testing a $50-60 per month premium tier, its equivalent of Tinder Platinum.

Layoffs

• Music app SoundHound laid off around 200 people, or nearly 50% of staff, with two weeks of severance that will only be paid if the company raises more money.
• Fandom laid off staff across its properties, including GameSpot, Metacritic and Giant Bomb. Most of Fandom’s properties are websites, but it also runs a Fandom News app for mobile devices.
• In addition to the Big Tech layoffs this week impacting Google (12,000 people), Amazon (18,000 people) and Microsoft (10,000 people), Amazon-owned comics publisher and distributor ComiXology laid off around 50% of staff, as well. The company offers an app that allows users to experience 23,000 comics, manga and graphic novels on mobile devices.
• Indian food delivery service Swiggy is cutting 380 jobs after raising $700 million in January 2022. The company has around 6,000 people employed.

Government & Policy

• The U.K. Online Safety bill was amended to make senior execs criminally liable for their companies’ failure to protect minors from harmful content.
• India’s Supreme Court declined to block an antitrust order that would require Google to change its Android business model, in a major setback for the tech giant. The Competition Commission of India ruled in October that Google exploited its market power by forcing device makers to pre-install Google’s apps. It had also fined Google $161 million. Google said it will challenge the ruling but will cooperate with the authorities “on the way forward.”
• Meta’s WhatsApp has been fined €5.5 million (just under $6 million) for failing to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules around data processing.
• Brazil’s antitrust regulator, CADE, is now investigating a complaint against Apple over alleged App Store antitrust issues, similar to investigations by other antitrust authorities in other markets.
• More TikTok bans cropped up in the U.S. Following crackdowns by numerous state governments, the video app has been banned on some college campuses, including Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Arkansas State University, the University System of Georgia’s dozens of universities and colleges, the Montana University System and Boise State University, NBC reported. Some experts believe the bans, which now reach more than two dozen U.S. states, are an overreaction.
• China’s government gave Didi the right to republish its apps on app stores after more than a year in regulatory limbo.

Funding and M&A

• Discord bought teen compliments app Gas for an undisclosed sum. Gas is an anonymous app that sent teens compliments purportedly from their peers. Founder Nikita Bier previously sold his app tbh to Facebook.
• Another teen compliments app, Slay — this one based in Germany — raised a $2.63 million (€2.5 million) pre-seed funding round led by Accel. Other investors included 20VC, Supercell co-founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen, Behance founder Scott Belsky, football star Mario Götze, Kevin Weil (Scribble Ventures) and musician Alex Pall (The Chainsmokers).
• Chinese fast fashion shopping app Shein is said to be raising up to $3 billion from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala, Sequoia and PE firm General Atlantic, at a $64 billion valuation, the FT reported. That would be down from its $100 billion valuation as of its last funding round in April.
• Walmart-backed Indian payments app PhonePe raised $350 million from General Atlantic at a $12 billion+ valuation, and plans to raise as much as $1 billion in tranches.
• Zitti, an app offering food costs and other insights for restauranteurs, raised $3.5 million in a seed round from Oceans Ventures, Serena Ventures and Crossbeam. In total, the company has raised $7.5 million to date.
• Cloud services provider Shadow made its first acquisition with a deal for French Android emulation startup Genymobile, the company behind Genymotion. Deal terms weren’t disclosed.
• Share Creators, a platform that helps game developers store and manage large media assets, raised $5 million in funding, including $3 million from China’s 5Y Capital and $2 million from PDF reader Foxit.

Downloads

Smores

Image Credits: Smores

This week, TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta took a look at a new iOS app, Smores, that allows users to discover new music through a TikTok-like feed. The app lets you listen to a short clip of a song, recommended based on your own listening history. You can then swipe through the vertical feed to skip to the next song clip, or like the current song with the heart button, which saves the like to your Spotify account. The liked tracks will appear in a new playlist called “Smores Discovery,” or you can add the track to another pre-existing playlist if you choose. The team says they may later bring the app to Apple Music or Android users.

Ice Cubes

Image Credits: Ice Cubes

This new Mastodon client for iPad, iPhone and Mac was oddly rejected from the App Store numerous times on its path to launching, as Daring Fireball highlighted, but the SwiftUI app from developer Thomas Ricouard looks like a solid addition to the Mastodon app ecosystem, which includes several new apps built by former Twitter app makers, including apps like Ivory from Tapbots and Mammoth from Aviary’s app developer. (Both are still in TestFlight.)

Ice Cubes, however, promises to bring a fast and reliable Mastodon experience to the desktop, allowing users to browse their timelines, interact with posts (“toots”) and even quote toot — a feature Twitter expats have been missing. You can also access more advanced functions like lists, filters, an explore tab and more.

This Week in Apps: Twitter kills third-party apps, Instagram adds Quiet Mode, Google’s antitrust trial gets a date by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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

The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to the latest “State of Mobile” report by data.ai (previously App Annie). However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time using mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion.

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

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

Top Stories

State of Mobile 2023 arrives, consumer spending slows

Data.ai’s anticipated review of the app ecosystem, “State of Mobile 2023,” arrived this week, finding that consumer spending on apps has been hit by the same macroeconomic forces impacting the broader economy. That led to a first-time drop in consumer spending after years of record growth. However, there are some bright spots in the report’s findings. For starters, it seems that non-game apps are more resilient than games in a down economy. Though consumer spend on mobile games dropped 5% to $110 billion, spending on non-game apps increased 6% to $58 billion — driven by streaming subscriptions, dating apps and short-form video apps.

Image Credits: data.ai

The data also indicated that despite the tightening of wallets, consumer engagement on mobile continues to grow. Across top mobile markets, consumers were spending 5 hours, 2 minutes per day in 2022 using their apps, up 9% from 2020. That’s remarkable, given that 2020 was the onset of the COVID pandemic, which tied everyone to their phone and rapidly changed consumer behavior. However, there is a caveat to this news: Much of mobile users’ time is monopolized by three app categories, which accounted for half the time spent on mobile: Social Media/Communication (19.5% of total time); Entertainment/Short Video (17% of total time); and Entertainment/Video Sharing (12.7% of total time).

Image Credits: data.ai

In addition, while mobile ad spend growth will also slow alongside the economy, it will not decline. Data.ai is forecasting that mobile ad spend in 2023 will hit $262 billion, up from $336 billion this year as short video apps drive growth. TikTok, for example, became the second-ever non-game app to top $6 billion in all-time consumer spending, the report noted.

The first category — Social Media/Communication — includes WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, Telegram, LINE and Discord, while the Entertainment and Short Video category is where you’ll find TikTok as well as Kwai, Vido Video, Baidu Haokan and Snack Video. The last category of Entertainment and Video Sharing includes long-form video like YouTube, YouTube Kids and bilibili.

Image Credits: data.ai

One finding that jumped out at me is that TikTok this year lost its No. 1 position on the Top Charts by Downloads to Instagram, the Meta-owned social app that has been desperately trying to clone TikTok’s feature set with Reels. Data.ai’s report indicated that Meta had a bit of a comeback this year, with Instagram bumping TikTok on downloads, though TikTok remained No. 1 by consumer spending. However, in terms of real-world use, TikTok is much further down the charts.

In 2022, the top four non-game apps by monthly active users were all owned by Facebook. In order, they were Facebook, WhatsApp Messenger, Instagram, then Facebook Messenger. TikTok was No. 5. Amazon, which was No. 5 last year, slipped to No. 7 while Telegram moved up to No. 6 from No. 7 in 2021. Twitter, Spotify and Netflix rounded out the charts.

Image Credits: data.ai

The report delves into other interesting trends related to specific categories of apps (some of which we may get into later), but one particular area of interest to us involved the detailed habits of Gen Z consumers. Unlike the top apps used by older generations, which tend to be more utilitarian and practical (think Amazon, eBay, Walmart, The Weather Channel, Waze, Ring, PayPal and others), Gen Z is still devoted to video apps, user-generated content and mindfulness apps, data.ai said. (Ah, youth!) They also have a preference for Meta’s Instagram over Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Netflix and Spotify.

Another trend driven by younger users was the rise of BeReal, a more authentic photo-sharing app that prompts users once a day to take candid photos of themselves and what they’re doing. Data.ai found that no other social app added more new users in the U.S. over the past five years than the 5.3 million users BeReal gained in August 2022. But the firm suggested BeReal may struggle to grow engagement since the app only asks people to use it for brief periods. However, in speaking with those close to the company, we understand BeReal is purposefully trying to build a non-addictive social app — it just doesn’t know how to monetize that sort of creation.

Another app category driven by Gen Z trends is friend-finding, which includes apps like Yubo, Hoop, Bumble (for its BFF feature), Live Talk and others.

Image Credits: data.ai

Meanwhile, in terms of gaming, the Gen Z demographic showed a preference for party, simulation and shooters, and counted Roblox as their No. 1 app. If there’s any wonder why Meta is spending billions trying to develop a virtual gaming landscape with Horizon Worlds, just look at Roblox’s growth and traction among the younger demographic. “Creative Sandbox” games like Roblox as well as Minecraft saw a global increase in time spent last year, up 25% from 2021 to 2022.

Image Credits, above and below: data.ai

A few other interesting highlights:

• The most-searched iOS App Store keywords in the U.S. for entertainment apps were, in order: netflix, disney+, hulu, HBO max, paramount, paramount+, amazon prime, peacock tv, prime video and tubi. Maybe Netflix will be okay after all.
• Genshin Impact reached $3 billion in in-app purchases in Q2 2022.
• Game publishers in China drove a third of consumer game spending.
• Crypto apps’ downloads fell in 2022, even as other fintechs grew.
• Average MAUs among the top five neobanks in the U.S. climbed from 1.4 million in 2020 to 2.2 million in 2022. Chime is the market leader in both active users and user engagement.

Image Credits: data.ai

• Consumers spent nearly 110 billion hours in shopping apps in 2022, up 9% globally. Cost-conscious shoppers drove growth.
• Total time spent in social apps climbed 17% year-over-year to over 2 trillion hours on Android phones in 2022. The U.S. accounted for more than one-fourth of social app consumer spending.
• Sports betting app downloads hit 4.3 million at the start of the 2022-2023 NFL season, up 8% year-over-year from 2021.
• Language learning apps saw 31% year-over-year growth as travel returned post-pandemic.
• Consumer spend in dating apps grew 12% year-over-year in 2022, and 91% year-over-year compared to pre-pandemic spend.

Apple let scammy “ChatGPT” apps flood the App Store

What, no I mean, what is going on with App Review? For years, Apple has been caught off guard at times, allowing violative apps to slip through its review process to be published on the App Store until users or the media called out the mistake.

But in the case of the scam “ChatGPT” apps that flooded the App Store over the past couple of weeks, one has to wonder if Apple is even paying attention at all. ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI doesn’t offer a public API, so that should have been a red flag to reviewers about any app claiming a ChatGPT or OpenAI connection in its name or description, then charging money for access. One app, called “ChatGPT Chat GPT AI With GPT-3,” even managed to reach the Top Charts in the productivity category in multiple countries as a result of consumer demand for ChatGPT and Apple’s inattention. (The app was removed shortly after reporters, including ourselves, reached out to Apple for comment. Apple never answered our emails.)

Google Play had the same problem, but frankly, consumers expect more from Apple’s App Store. In fact, Apple’s argument against antitrust concerns, like its ban on sideloading and third-party app stores, has to do with the safety and security of its users. Apple says only it should be trusted to keep consumers safe. But surely that means Apple should also be protecting consumers from scam apps and subscription scams. But it is not.

And while no system is perfect, it seems like the apps that are at the top of the App Store’s charts — or those that quickly moved up the charts for unknown reasons — should go under an additional review by Apple, just to make sure they’re playing by the rules. Developers have long argued that Apple should be cracking down on apps with high-priced subscriptions or those that are charging users for basic utilities or otherwise free features — in other words, the apps that are profiting from scamming users. If it did so, a subscription-based app that appeared to be charging for access to a free service with a non-public API wouldn’t have made the cut.

These things aren’t hard to spot either — third-party app intelligence services can parse customer reviews for negative sentiments and keywords, so surely Apple could implement a system of its own, if it wanted to. In the case of the scammy ChatGPT apps, customer reviews called the apps fake and non-functional, warning others not to get scammed. Where was Apple on this issue? Until the media coverage, it was quietly collecting its cut of the scammers’ subscription revenues.

In other App Store news, activist investors have pressured Apple for more insight into app removals, the FT reported, but their interest lies in wanting a better understanding of when Apple acquiesces to foreign governments’ requests. The company will begin including additional information in its Transparency Report about whether removals are related to local laws and how many apps were pulled in each country.

Goodbye, Instagram Shop. Move over, Reels. 

Image Credits: Instagram

Instagram announced this week it will simplify its in-app navigation after years of confusing changes designed to push various products like Instagram Shop and Reels. The company said, starting in February, it will return the Compose button (the plus sign “+”) to the front and center of the navigation bar at the bottom of the app and it will remove the Shop tab entirely.

As a result, the Reels button will now move over to the right of Compose, losing its prime spot.

The earlier changes that had pushed Reels over Compose had been fairly controversial as Instagram users felt as if the company was forcing them to use the app’s new products at the expense of the overall user experience. Instagram defended the changes in prior years as a way to introduce users to its new products. But in more recent months, there’s been increased backlash over how far Instagram has deviated from its original mission. Even the Kardashians criticized the app for “trying to be TikTok.”

Instagram said shopping on Instagram will continue to be supported despite the removal of the tab. We’ll see.

Weekly News

Android Updates

• Google is working to fix a Google Play issue impacting missing app changelogs, according to an Android Police report.
• The latest stable release of the official IDE for building Android applications, Android Studio Electric Eel (2022.1.1), arrived. The release includes updates and new features that cover design, build & dependencies, emulators & devices, and IntelliJ, Google said.
• Google released the Extension SDK to developers, bringing features like the Android 13 Photo Picker API and AdServices APIs to Android 11 and up.

Apple News

• Second developer betas for iOS 16.3, iPadOS 16.3, watchOS 9.3, macOS Ventura 13.2 and tvOS 16.3 have arrived. One notable change impacts the new Emergency SOS feature. The “Call with Hold” option is renamed to “Call with Hold and Release,” as now the call to emergency services won’t go through until users let go of the buttons they press down to start the SOS call. More here. The change may be an attempt to address issues over mistakenly triggered calls.
• Seems like Apple pushed Flickr to update its SafeSearch filtering. The company said it updated the feature so it won’t return results for “bad words” when it’s enabled in order “to act in compliance with Apple’s policies.”
• Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that iOS 17 is going to be a smaller release with fewer changes as Apple focuses on its mixed-reality headset.
• Apple Maps now lets businesses update their listings and tout promotions via a new Apple Business Connect portal. No plans yet for any sort of Maps ads offering, however.
• In a year-end review, Apple announced it has now paid out a record $320 billion to app developers since 2008 — a number that reflects the revenue apps have generated, minus Apple’s commission. The company now has more than 900 million paid subscriptions across Apple services, with subscriptions on the App Store driving a “significant” part of that figure, it said.

Image Credits: Apple

Gaming

• Google and Nvidia shared concerns with the FTC as to how Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal would give it an unfair advantage in cloud, subscription and mobile gaming.
• JioGames, part of Reliance Industries’ telecom platform Jio, announced a 10-year strategic partnership with France’s Gamestream. The latter will assist JioGames in bringing cloud gaming to “1.4 billion” Indians by helping scale the JioGamesCloud platform. JioGames’ titles can be played on Android, web (PC, Mac and iPhone), and Jio’s set-top boxes.
• Roblox could be coming to a new platform: Meta Quest. Sources told The Verge that Roblox will be expanding its VR footprint — it already works on Rift and HTC’s Vive — by releasing to Meta’s Quest, which doesn’t require a PC to play.
• Stardew Valley’s big update, patch 1.5, finally reached iOS and Android users. The update, which arrived on consoles in 2021, includes a number of new features and changes, including a new beach farm layout, new NPCs and enemies, ostriches (!!) and a new location called Ginger Island.

Image Credits: Stardew Valley

Twitter Drama

• Twitter’s API began experiencing issues that are impacting third-party Twitter apps like Tweetbot, Echofon and Twitterrific. The app makers confirmed the problems have been causing log-in issues for users and their apps no longer work.
• Online publishing platform Medium, originally created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, announced that it’s embracing the open source Mastodon platform by creating its own instance to support its authors and their publications. Access to the instance will be offered through a Medium membership, which means in a way, it’s the first paid instance to come to Mastodon.
• Twitter’s Blue subscription, which is the new way to be verified and get your checkmark — degrading the value of checks in the process! — rolled out to Japan. Users can subscribe for ¥980 (around $7.40) per month on the web and ¥1,380 ($10.42) per month on iOS, a bit lower than U.S. prices of $8 per month on the web and $11 per month on iOS.
• Twitter made the algorithmic timeline the default and renamed it the “For You” feed. (Eye roll). You can now swipe between the For You feed and a chronological timeline, as well as lists.

Entertainment

• TikTok is alpha testing a Talent Manager Portal with select talent agencies. The service would allow creators’ agents and reps to oversee, execute and analyze brand deals their clients are being offered.
• Apple Music and the Apple TV apps quietly launched on the Microsoft Store — a few months after Microsoft said the apps would be coming to Windows 11.
• YouTube will begin sharing ad revenue with Shorts creators on February 1, and will update its YPP terms to reflect this. (Take that, TikTok!)

Etc.

• Failed discount movie tickets service MoviePass is trying for a comeback with funding from crypto backers, Animoca Brands.
• Google added emoji reactions to Meet video calls, starting on iOS and web, with Android to follow. The feature was announced last year.
• Not so super. Tata Group’s super app Tata Neu is expected to meet only half its sales target in its first year — $4 billion versus an $8 billion target. The app had been modeled on successful apps like Alipay and WeChat.
• Tinder and other Match dating apps will introduce tips on how to avoid romance scams. Someone watched “The Tinder Swindler,” apparently!

Government & Policy

• TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, met with senior European Union lawmakers to answer a number of questions including privacy, data protection, DSA compliance, child safety, Russian disinformation and the transparency of paid political content. The inquiry follows what’s expected to be increased regulatory scrutiny of the app, including possible oversight by the European Commission.
• After being fined $400 million by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission over how Instagram handled minors’ accounts and data, Meta announced it would remove the ability for advertisers to target teen users by gender. The company will also end personalized ad targeting to users under 18 based on in-app activity, like who they follow on Instagram and what Facebook pages they like.
• New Jersey and Ohio have now joined 20 other U.S. states in banning TikTok on government-owned devices over security concerns.
• The U.S. Supreme Court declined to block a lawsuit filed by WhatsApp that challenged the alleged mass phone hacking by Israeli spyware maker NSO Group. The spyware maker had argued the suit should be dropped because it was acting on behalf of a foreign government, but the Supreme Court rejected this claim.

Funding

• A Twitter rival called ‘T2’ raised its first outside funding, with $1.1 million from a group of high-profile angels including Bradley Horowitz, Rich Miner and the former CEO of Wikipedia, Katherine Maher. T2 founder Gabor Cselle has sold startups to Twitter and Google previously.
• Payments technology platform Butter Payments raised $21.5 million in Series A funding led by Norwest at a ~$100 million valuation. The company leverages AI to help end accidental churn.
• Kakao Entertainment, which publishes apps for popular animated shows and novels, raised $930 million from Saudi Arabia’s PIF and Singapore’s GIC.
• A company developing a cognitive behavioral therapy platform for ADHD, Inflow, raised $11 million in Series A funding. Inflow’s self-help app offers daily exercises and challenges focused on habit development, mindfulness techniques, community support and more.
• Social crypto wallet app The Easy Company raised $14.2 million in seed funding. The iOS and Android app offers an Instagram-like experience for showcasing NFTs.

Image Credits: The Easy Company

Layoffs

• Tokyo-based news aggregator SmartNews laid off 120 people in the U.S. and China, with plans to implement a voluntary workforce reduction in Japan.
• Fintech for kids Greenlight, which lets kids use a debit card and app with parental monitoring, laid off 104 employees — or more than 21% of its total headcount of 485 employees.
• Crime-reporting app Citizen laid off 33 employees, including at least 10 engineers. The app uses public police blotters to notify users about verified incidents in their area, but also allows users in select markets to upload their own reports and livestream.
• Right-leaning Twitter alternative Parler’s parent company laid off 75% of staff and chief execs, leaving Parler with just 20 employees. Kanye, as many expected, didn’t actually buy it.

This Week in Apps: ChatGPT app scammers, Instagram revamp and a consumer spending slowdown by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Open source Twitter alternative Mastodon has gained a bit of attention in the wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition. Now, it’s gaining interest from third-party Twitter app developers, as well. The makers of popular Twitter clients, including Aviary and Tweetbot, have recently set their sights on building similar clients for the growing Mastodon user base.

While the Twitter exodus has only impacted a sliver of the social network’s overall user base, the influx of newcomers to the much smaller Mastodon ecosystem has had a significant impact on its community. Today, Mastodon has grown its active user base to somewhere between 3.3 million and 3.6 million, according to independent estimates, up from 655,000 in the days just after Musk’s Twitter takeover.

New Mastodon users are learning the basics of how to choose a server and find their friends, as well as learning about other community values, like the use of “content warnings” for their posts, when appropriate. They’re also realizing that Mastodon is not a Twitter clone, despite some initial similarities. Universal search doesn’t exist, requiring heavier use of reposts and hashtags to increase a post’s visibility. Direct messages work differently than on Twitter. An equivalent to quote tweets isn’t available. And so on.

The new Mastodon clients now in the works, however, could help make Mastodon feel more familiar to former Twitter users who are looking to make the shift to the “fediverse” — as the interconnected collection of servers powering Mastodon and other apps is called.

To be fair, the Mastodon community was not hurting for mobile apps. There were already quite a few third-party clients available, in addition to the official app, including MetaText, Tootle, Toot!, Mast, Mastoot, Tusky, Mercury and others. Several of these have seen increased development activity over the past month or so, as their makers realized their app side projects had suddenly gained a new following.

But for longtime Twitter users, the addition of well-known app makers from the Twitter ecosystem is an exciting prospect.

Among these is Tapbots, known for its popular Twitter app Tweetbot for iOS and Mac. Hailed as one of the third-party Twitter clients that keeps improving with age, the company earlier this year had released Tweetbot 7, which added features like picture-in-picture, a stats tab and widgets. Now, Tweetbots’ developer Paul Haddad is working on a similar app for Mastodon.

Haddad said that while the company hasn’t experienced disruption to the Twitter API since Musk’s takeover (besides a small increase in bugs and other issues), they’ve lost their contacts at Twitter following the layoffs and subsequent employee departures.

To address the “large number of requests” from current users leaving Twitter, the company is now working on a subscription-based app for Mastodon users that is much like Tweetbot.

Image Credits: Tapbots

The app, called Ivory, is still in the initial stages of development, but will likely appeal to Tweetbot users who want an app that also offers quick access to key features — in this case, navigation buttons that take you to your home timeline, @ mentions, favorites, search and trends, and your own user profile. You can swap out some buttons for others if you prefer. For example, a long press on the search button lets you switch over to a statistics feature or another screen for configuring mute filters. In addition to helping users mute topics they don’t care about or find disturbing, the latter could also help older Mastodon users from having to constantly read about Twitter and Musk in their feeds — something that’s been a steady complaint since the Twitter exodus.

And for creating a new post, it adds a floating button with a little horn — a nod to Mastodon’s version of the tweet, which is sometimes called a “toot.”

“Our starting goal for the app is to replicate the Tweetbot experience for Mastodon,” said Haddad. “We want people who are familiar with Tweetbot on Twitter to feel like they are at home with Ivory. Once we have a solid 1.0 version we’ll start working on adding more Mastodon-specific features, as well as some features that we’ve wanted to add to Tweetbot but couldn’t because of technical limitations,” he noted.

One of Ivory’s differentiators is that, unlike Twitter, it won’t show metrics like the number of boosts (Mastodon’s retweets), or the number of favorites or comments a post received in timeline view — a design choice intended to reduce screen clutter (and perhaps, clout-chasing).

Image Credits: Tapbots/Ivory

Tapbots says Ivory will be developed alongside Tweetbot as they share a lot of code, and a Mac version of both Tweetbot and Ivory are in development, too.

The app is already proving popular, as the TestFlight version of the app blew up and quickly became full after its release.

Another third-party Twitter app maker, Shihab Mehboob who develops Aviary, has also begun work on a Mastodon client, called Mammoth. The new app will be a paid download with a yet-to-be-determined price, and will include the latest Mastodon API features when they’re released, as well as 4.0 features like editing posts and edit history. An iPad and Mac version will be released, as well.

Image Credits: Mammoth

“I was motivated by wanting a ‘good’ Mastodon app out there, as all the existing ones lacked features or design paradigms in one way or another. They all fell short, and didn’t feel native to the iOS and Apple platforms either. So I set out to make my own that achieves all this,” Mehboob explains. He says the app differentiates itself with an iOS-focused design “that feels at home on your device,” and a comprehensive feature set.

“It’s also a joy to use, and has some cool features like sharing posts as images, viewing them in AR, tweaking various parts via settings, and more,” Mehboob adds.

However, one notable third-party Twitter app developer, The Iconfactory, makers of the popular Twitterific apps for iOS and Mac, said they haven’t yet decided to enter the Mastodon app space. Co-founder Gedeon Maheux admits they, too, have lost their API contacts at Twitter in recent weeks. But for now, the company is just watching the development of this alternative ecosystem — and using Mastodon for themselves.

“It’s exciting to be a part of a service that’s growing and adapting to many new users, just as Twitter did back in the day,” said Maheux. “As for a Mastodon app from The Iconfactory, we don’t have anything to announce at this time,” he noted.

Of course, all these third-party apps will still have to compete with Mastodon’s own app, which has been seeing its own improvements since Musk’s Twitter acquisition, and gained another developer to help speed up app updates. But unlike Twitter, which actively worked to crush third-party clients in years past, Mastodon is open to new developments.

Third-party Twitter app makers turn their attention to Mastodon by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Snapchat is adding a new privacy setting that enables users based in California to better protect their sensitive personal information. The company confirmed it’s rolling out a feature designed to comply with the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which takes effect on Jan. 1, 2023, and applies to personal data collected on or after Jan. 1, 2022.

In November 2020, California residents voted to pass the CPRA, also known as Proposition 24, which builds on an earlier consumer privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018.

While the CCPA  gave residents the right to access and delete personal information held by businesses and opt out of the sale of that data, the new law puts into place further requirements for businesses around their data collection practices and data retention. It additionally introduces new notification requirements and clarifies that users have the right to opt out of both the sharing and the sale of their personal information, while also adding a new category of “sensitive data.”

The law created the California Privacy Protection Agency to enforce the state’s privacy laws, as well as investigate violations, and assess penalties if warranted.

Consumers based in California, meanwhile, are to gain the right to not only know who’s collecting their information, but also be able to access it, correct it, delete it and transfer it, and to stop its sale and sharing, without being penalized as a result. As part of this, they’re also to gain the ability to access their options through “easily accessible” self-serve tools.

Snapchat’s implementation would seemingly address the latter as it presents a simple toggle switch under its Privacy Controls section in the app’s Settings screen. Here, users will be presented with a new option at the bottom of the list that reads “California Privacy Choices.”

A tap into this screen, (as spotted by competitive intelligence provider Watchful — see below image) reveals a new option to “Limit the Use of Sensitive Personal Information.” This page explains that enabling the setting would require Snapchat to limit the use of users’ personal info, including things like precise geolocation.

Image Credits: Watchful

The setting, however, is appearing in the Snapchat app for all U.S. users — even those who don’t live in the state.

Snapchat confirmed the new privacy feature is rolling out in compliance with the CPRA, but notes it only functions for those users in California.

The addition is interesting as it demonstrates how a popular mobile app has chosen to comply with the new legislation. And unlike on Facebook — where settings are buried, difficult to find, and constantly being relocated — Snapchat’s new privacy feature is relatively easy to find. All of the app’s settings are available from one main screen, organized into sections. So the new CPRA-compliant setting isn’t something users have to dig around to find.

Snapchat complies with the California Privacy Rights Act with a new toggle switch for users by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced 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 and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

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

Musk buys Twitter

It’s official, Elon Musk now owns Twitter. In typical Musk fashion, the transition has been nothing but chaotic, with the deal closing just ahead of the deadline set by the Delaware Chancery Court — the court where Musk was planning to try to exit the deal by claiming Twitter had misled him about the number of bots on the platform. (He was really looking to get the price down, of course!) In any event, the Telsa and SpaceX exec now has a new toy and everyone is waiting to see what comes next. Earlier, Musk had hinted at layoffs, then later retracted his statements, saying he wouldn’t fire 75% after all. However, he did immediately clear out the C-suite, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Head of Legal, Trust and Safety Vijaya Gadde — a sign that he’s planning to fill out Twitter’s top ranks with execs who will do his own bidding and not fight for the Twitter of days past.

Still, Musk’s talk about a Twitter that’s more permissive of “free speech” doesn’t quite align with his message to advertisers posted shortly after the deal’s close: He promised marketers that Twitter can’t turn into a “free-for-all hellscape.” That’s clearly a tacit acknowledgment on Musk’s part that advertisers don’t want to post their content next to hate speech-filled tweets. And despite Musk’s plans to grow Twitter’s subscription business, around 90% of Twitter’s revenue today comes from advertising. Given what he had to pay to own Twitter, Musk probably doesn’t want to have to pay to keep it running, too.

App Store Review Guidelines now give Apple a cut of NFTs, in-app advertising

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Along with the launch of iOS 16.1, Apple also introduced new App Store Review Guidelines. Among the major changes were two new rules designed to give Apple a bigger slice of the NFT market and Meta’s core advertising business.

The company said apps will be allowed to list, mint, transfer and let users view their own NFTs, but clarified that owning an NFT could not be a shortcut to unlocking any more features in an app. In other words, the ownership of an NFT shouldn’t be a way to route around Apple’s in-app purchases. In addition, Apple said NFT apps can’t display external links or other calls-to-action to purchase NFTs — that can only take place through Apple’s own in-app purchases system, as well.

This change is not all that surprising. As the web3 market grows, Apple wanted to find a way to stake its claim on the revenue and transactions that are occuring inside these new apps. Plus, it’s a better consumer experience for NFT marketplace apps to not just function as a showcase for users’ purchases, but as a place where users can actually transact.

The other big rule adjustment, however, is a bit more startling. In a bold move, Apple essentially said it deserves a cut of Meta’s ads business as well as any other social app. The new rule around social media apps now states that purchases of “boosts” have to flow through Apple’s in-app purchase system.

This could impact any app that sells the ability to boost a post to a wider audience, like Meta (Facebook, Instagram), TikTok, Twitter, dating apps and others. Meta, of course, took significant issue with this change, saying that Apple’s policy undercuts others in the digital economy after Apple had previously said it wouldn’t take a share of developer ad revenue. While Meta isn’t exactly a sympathetic player here, it’s concerning that Apple has decided it can now tax advertising inside iOS apps at the same time it runs its own expanding ads business. That seems like a move regulators will need to look into asap.

App Store gambling ads backlash

Speaking of Apple’s ads business…The company’s App Store ads platform expanded this week to include new ad slots like the main Today tab and a “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of individual app listings. The slots are available in all countries as of October 25, except China. The ads have a blue background and an “Ad” label to differentiate them from other listings.

Developers, however, were immediately disturbed by the instant deluge of gambling ads that appeared marketed alongside their own, including against kids’ applications and, in at least one case, a gambling addiction recovery app. This was a poor look for Apple. After all, the gambling category itself is already controversial — many developers would rather not share an app marketplace with these often predatory apps in the first place, much less have them advertised alongside their own.

Apple at least moved quickly to respond to the backlash by “pausing” gambling ads and a few other categories on App Store product pages, but the company didn’t say how long this pause would last or what it planned to do about the situation in the long term.

Spotify accuses Apple of anti-competitive behavior, this time around audiobooks

Just ahead of its Q3 earnings, Spotify published a blog post that again accused Apple of anti-competitive behavior with regard to its launch of audiobooks in the U.S. On an accompanying website, Spotify noted that its app update to include the audiobook expansion was rejected three times without “clear direction” as to what needed to be changed to come into compliance. The site details Spotify’s criticisms of Apple’s platform, explaining how Apple requires audiobook purchases to use Apple’s own in-app purchases — or, if selling elsewhere, prevents Spotify from telling users why, where or how to make those purchases outside of iOS.

Because Spotify wants to avoid the 30% IAP commission, it doesn’t let users buy audiobooks in its app. Instead, users select the book they want to purchase and are emailed a link that points to a website where they can complete the transaction.

“The Audiobooks purchase flow that Apple’s rules force us to provide consumers today is far too complicated and confusing — confusing because they change the rules arbitrarily, making them impossible to interpret,” Spotify’s blog post stated.

The company has regularly battled with Apple over its App Store policies but is sometimes seen as an unsympathetic victim due to its size, revenues and its role in moving the music industry to streaming, which artists say doesn’t pay.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

Image Credits: TechCrunch

• Apple released iOS 16.1, iPadOS 16.1, macOS Ventura and watchOS 9.1. The updated software delivers new features like iCloud Shared Photo Library, Continuity Camera, Stage Manager for the Mac and iPad, Live Activities, Apple Fitness+ for iPhone and more.
• Apple expanded its App Store ads platform to include the main Today tab and a “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of individual app listings in all countries on October 25, except China. The ads have a blue background and an “Ad” label to differentiate them from other listings.
• SKAdNetwork 4.0, which lets advertisers measure ads’ success, became available in iOS 16.1 and iPadOS 16.1 this week.
• Apple also released the first betas of macOS Ventura 13.1, iOS 16.2, and iPadOS 16.2 which included the new Freeform app, announced at WWDC. The app is a whiteboard app that lets you create sketches notes, files, documents and more, which can be accessed across devices.
• Apple reported its Q4 earnings with iPhone revenue up 9.67% YoY to $42.63 billion, Mac up 25.4% to $11.51 billion, but iPad revenue down 13.06% to $7.17 billion. Wall Street was expecting iPhone revenue of $43.21 billion, sending the stock down in late trading. Other products were $9.65 billion (up 9.95%) and the Services division, which includes the App Store, was up 4.98%.

Platforms: Google

• Google filed a brief opposing Epic and Match’s recent motion to amend and expand their antitrust claims in the ongoing antitrust lawsuit against the Android maker. In it, Google disputes that its incentive program for developers to publish to the Play Store would prohibit developers from creating competing app stores, as alleged. It also noted the motion from Epic and Match comes too late, after the December 3, 2021 amendment deadline.
• Google hosted its Android Developer Summit where it announced the first stable release of Compose Material 3, the library that allows developers to build Jetpack Compose UIs with Material Design 3.
• The company also announced updates across three main areas of Jetpack: architecture libraries and guidance, application performance and user interface libraries and guidance. It noted that 90% of the top 1,000 apps use Android Jetpack.
• Google introduced a Gradle Bill of Materials (BOM) specifying the stable version of each Compose library. The first BOM release, Compose October 22, contains Material Design 3 components, lazy staggered grids, variable fonts, pull to refresh, snapping in lazy lists, draw text in canvas, URL annotations in text, hyphenation and LookAheadLayout. And it launched the first alpha of Compose for Android TV.
• Android Studio got updates, too, including updated templates for Wear OS. And Google launched a stable Android R emulator system image for Wear OS.

E-commerce & Food Delivery

• The FTC sanctioned Uber-owned Drizly, an alcohol delivery service, and its CEO Jason Rellas for data security abuses that saw the personal information of the company’s 2.5 million customers exposed. Drizly will have to implement a security program, destroy unnecessary data, implement new security controls and train employees and cybersecurity.
• Amazon began letting select U.S. customers pay with Venmo on its website and in its mobile app, with plans to roll out the support to all U.S. customers by Black Friday.

Blockchain

• Twitter began testing a blockchain-agnostic tool that allows users to display their NFTs in tweets in partnership with Dapper Labs, Magic Eden, Rarible and Jump.trade. The feature is only available to select users at this time.

Fintech

• PayPal added support for Apple Passkeys on iOS, iPadOS and macOS, with more platforms to come. Passkeys are a new industry standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium — in partnership with Apple, Google and Microsoft — that are designed to replace passwords.

Social

• New analysis indicates India’s homegrown TikTok clones, like Moj and Josh, haven’t been able to replicate TikTok’s success in the country following its ban, leaving Instagram and YouTube to take over the short-form video market locally.
• Meta added Reels to Facebook Groups, noting that most Facebook users are members of at least 15 active groups and that there are 100 million-plus group joins every day.
• Snap reported its slowest quarterly revenue growth ever in the third quarter. The social app maker missed analyst expectations with $1.13 billion in revenue, versus $1.14 billion expected, leading the stock to drop from $11 to $8 in late trading on the day of the earnings announcement. DAUs, however, were up 19% YoY (up 53 million) to 363 million in Q3. The company said it also plans to close its San Francisco office, which was only lightly used due to remote work policies.
• The Snapchat app rolled out Director Mode, a feature offering TikTok-like tools including a green screen, quick edit and camera speed features, as well as a BeReal-like dual camera mode.
• Pinterest reported its Q3 revenue was up 8% YoY to $684.6 million, above estimates of $666.7 million. However, global MAUs remained flat YoY at 445 million, above estimates of 437.4 million. The stock jumped 11% on the news.
• Meta announced its Q3 earnings with revenue down 4% YoY to $27.7 billion, net income down 52% YoY to $4.4 billion, DAUs across its apps up 4% YoY to 2.93 billion. The stock dropped 25% on the revenue decline as investors voiced concerns about how much Meta is spending on its metaverse ambitions.

Dating

Image Credits: Bumble

• Bumble open sourced its AI, Private Detector, which the app uses to detect unsolicited nude images. (Get it?) The app gives the user the choice as to whether or not to open the image when a potentially lewd photo is detected. Now other apps can access the same technology.
• Match-owned dating app Hinge will add a profile verification feature in November that will ask users to take a video selfie in the app as part of a crackdown on scammers.

Messaging

• Telegram said it plans to auction usernames via the TON blockchain, a move inspired by an auction for wallet usernames that saw some selling for as high as $200,000. Founder Pavel Durov suggested other elements of the Telegram ecosystem could become a part of this marketplace in the future, including channels, stickers or emoji.
• Apple’s communication platforms, iMessage and FaceTime, went down on Tuesday afternoon, following an earlier more than two-hour outage from WhatsApp, making it a pretty bad day for trying to text and call.
• WhatsApp now has 2+ billion DAUs, Meta announced during its Q3 earnings.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Apple

• Apple raised prices for Apple Music, Apple TV+ and its Apple One bundle in the U.S. Apple TV+, which is getting its first price hike, will increase by $2 monthly and $10 annually. Subscribers will be charged $6.99 per month or $69 per year. Apple Music is getting a price increase of $1 for individual subscribers and $2 for families. The individual plan will now be $10.99 per month and the family plan will be $16.99 per month. And the Apple One bundle will cost $16.95/month, $22.95/month and $32.95/month, respectively, for the individual plan, family plan and Premier plan.
• YouTube is raising the rates for its Premium Subscription for families across several countries, including the U.S., U.K., Canada and Argentina, effective November 21. In the U.S., the price is going up from $17.99 to $22.99. The plan allows up to five family members to watch ad-free videos, download videos for offline access and play videos in the background.
• Deezer also bumped its monthly premium price to $10.99 in the U.S.
• Given the competitors’ increases, Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek noted on the earnings call that the company is considering a price hike as well. Spotify’s revenue in Q3 was up 21% YoY to €3.04 billion, MAUs were up 20% YoY to 456 million, and Premium subscriptions were up 13% YoY to 195 million. But Spotify’s stock dropped 6% after earnings due to a miss on advertising growth.
• YouTube’s mobile app on iOS and Android got a makeover that includes a new look, precise seeking, new buttons, ambient mode, darker dark mode and a “pinch to zoom” feature to see more details in a video. Later, the company rolled out an update across platforms that separated long-form, Shorts and Live videos into their own tabs on channel pages.

Gaming

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that more than 20 million people have now streamed games through Xbox Cloud Gaming, up from 10 million in April 2022. The gaming subscription service allows consumers to stream games to their phone via a web browser. This year, Microsoft brought the popular game Fortnite to the platform.
• TikTok is expanding further into games, according to the FT, which said the app would add a dedicated gaming tab by November 2, which would feature ad-supported mobile games and in-app purchases.

Government & Policy

• The U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority said it plans to investigate Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta’s moves into retail financial services over competition and consumer harm concerns, the FT reported.
• Turkey’s competition authority fined Meta 346.72 million lira ($18.6 million) for combining user data across Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
• India’s antitrust watchdog, the Competition Commission of India, fined Google $113 million for abusing the dominant position of its Google Play Store. It ordered the company to let app developers use third-party payments for in-app purchases or for purchasing apps and to drop any anti-steering guidelines. Google has three months to comply.

Security & Privacy

• Square parent company Block was reported to be selling access to customers’ email addresses used to receive receipts. While not illegal, privacy experts argue this means of selling marketing information is “walking a fine line,” per Protocol’s report.
• Apple patched a bug in iOS 16.1 and macOS Ventura that could have allowed apps with Bluetooth access to record users’ conversations with Siri without requiring microphone access.
• TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker offered an inside look into TheTruthSpy, the stalkerware operation that’s spying on thousands of people worldwide, including in the U.S., via Android apps planted by someone with physical access to a person’s device. Leaked data from the operation includes call logs, texts, location data and other personal info.

Funding and M&A

Free banking app Crowded raised $6 million in seed funding led by Garage, with participation from Deel co-founder Philippe Bouaziz, Innoventure Partners’ Michael Marks and a group of former bank executives. The app targets member-based nonprofits, like fraternities, sororities and booster clubs.

Onward, an app designed to help co-parents navigate and managed their shared expenses, raised $9.7 million in Series A funding led by Atlanta-based TTV Capital.

Joro, an app that helps people track and reduce their carbon footprints, raised a $10 million Series A led by existing investors Sequoia Capital and Amasia. Also participating were Norrsken, Nest co-founder Matt Rogers’ Incite, Jay-Z’s Arrive and Mike Einziger, the lead guitarist of Incubus.

Downloads

Duolingo Math

Image Credits: Duolingo

Language-learning company Duolingo officially launched its math app to the public this week, following beta trials. The app represents the first expansion beyond language learning and literacy for the company. The app allows users to choose between an elementary version that focuses on basic concepts like multiplication and division and an adult version that’s more optimized for “brain training” exercises that put skills into practice. A future version may even expand into higher-level math, like linear algebra or college-level math. The app is remaining free to use for the time being.

Pixel Pals

Apollo developer Christian Selig thought he’d have a little fun with the new iOS 16 feature, Dynamic Island, so he added a feature to his popular Reddit client called “Pixel Pals” that let users collect and care for small, animated pets that run atop the black bar at the top of the screen. The feature took off as people adopted their pixelated pets, fed them and played with them to earn their love.

Taking a cue from users’ interest, Selig launched a standalone app for Pixel Pals, which now allows pet owners to do more with their animated friends, including pinning them to the Home Screen as transparent widgets, adding them to the Lock Screen as animated widgets and enjoying them through iOS 16’s Live Activities, among other things. If anything, the app works to demonstrate iOS 16’s new features in a clever and entertaining way. Users seem to enjoy the new experience, too — as Selig noted this week, the app hit the top 3 in the Graphics & Design category on the App Store.

This Week in Apps: Elon buys Twitter, new App Store rules, gambling ads backlash by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced 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 and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

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

Kanye West to acquire Parler

Kanye West announced on October 17 that he has entered a deal to buy Parler, the “free speech” platform where the rapper, who also goes by Ye, believes he can’t be “canceled” as on other social apps — aka being held accountable for his antisemitic posts in violation of platform policies. West had accused Twitter and Meta of censoring his conservative opinions. Parler, meanwhile, is a known haven for conservatives to the point that it had been pulled down from the App Store and Google Play following the January 6 Capital riots for its role in inciting violence. Apple allowed the app back in earlier this year, but Google only recently did the same.

Assuming the deal goes through, it could be a good outcome for Parler. To date, the startup had raised $56 million — what West paid, however, is unknown.

TikTok to add “adult-only” livestreams

TikTok is venturing into new territory with the addition of adult-only livestreams. This change will allow creators to target only TikTok users ages 18 and up in order to broadcast about topics that aren’t appropriate for children or may just be uninteresting to them. The company is not going to compete with OnlyFans, however — these adult streams won’t be featuring actual adult content, as that’s still against TikTok’s policies.

In addition, TikTok will now require users to be at least 18 years old before they’re allowed to go live on the platform.

While the changes seem sound in theory, TikTok users — kids, often — do lie about their ages when joining the app. There’s no good solution for this problem, beyond the use of age-verification technologies like video selfies, which come with their own set of issues around privacy.

BeReal’s B round

TechCrunch learned that the startup closed a $60 million Series B round earlier this year. The round values Paris, France-based BeReal at a valuation north of €600 million — which at today’s exchange rates is just under $587 million. (BeReal’s valuation was previously reported by Insider and then The Information.)

A source told TechCrunch the company now has around 20 million DAUs. For comparison, The Information noted that the app had 7.9 million users as of July of this year. We also heard the app had around 2 million DAUs as of this April.

BeReal is facing competition now from social giants TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, which have all cloned its main feature of dual photos (photos taken at the same time using the front and back cameras). But the DAU growth indicates BeReal may still be the one to beat when it comes to capturing the attention of the younger Gen Z audience.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

Image Credits: Apple

• Apple is rolling out iOS 16.1 on Monday, October 24. The update, which comes alongside macOS Ventura, will include the launch of Apple Fitness+ for iPhone, which will allow subscribers to use the service for the first time without an Apple Watch. In addition, iOS 16.1 will include the multitasking feature Stage Manager, Live Activities for third-party apps, iCloud Shared Photo Library, Key Sharing in the Wallet app, Clean Energy Charging, support for Matter, the newly announced Apple Card savings account option and more.
• Apple announced a set of major hardware updates, including a new M2 iPad Pro (arriving October 26), new Apple TV 4K with a performance bump and lower price and the  new entry-level iPad.

Platforms: Google

Image Credits: Google

• Google announced Android 13 (Go edition) this week, which includes several premium features for affordable smartphone lineups, including the Material You design, Discover feed, Notficiations Permissions, per-app language settings and a way for users to receive essential updates to Android without having to wait for manufacturers to release them, along with other things. The update will now require at least 2GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage. Google said 250 million devices run the Android Go OS.
• Google introduced a refreshed Family Link parental controls app and a web version. The updated app includes a three-tabbed redesign showcasing highlights of the child’s device usage, an overview of their limits and a controls tab for setting the limits. There’s also a new feature, “Today’s Limit,” which lets parents adjust the day’s screen time without having to change their ongoing schedule. And the app can now track kids’ locations when they arrive at specific places, like school.

E-commerce

Image Credits: Klarna

• Klarna launched a new Klarna Creator app for retailers and influencers to collaborate on brand campaigns and to track earnings, performance and sales. Over 500,000 vetted creators have access to leading brands and retailers, the company said. On the app, retailers can direct-message a creator they want to partner with and send them products for content. The app also has a tracking feature for sales and commissions.
• A new app called Drivr introduces a crowdsourced tipping platform that uses data science to map last-mile delivery drivers to neighborhoods to allow shoppers to tip their regular delivery drivers.
• PayPal launched a revamped rewards program that combines Honey’s discounts with other ways to earn. Honey, acquired by PayPal for $4 billion in 2019, will continue to offer Honey Gold, but it’s being rebranded as PayPal Rewards. Consumers will be able to collect rewards via the Honey browser extension, the PayPal app and, in the future, various card products.
• Jane Technologies’ cannabis marketplace launched in a dedicated iOS app that lets consumers browse local cannabis dispensaries and make purchases.

Image Credits: Jane Technologies

Fintech

• TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield company Staax pitched its app that attempts to onboard a younger generation of stock investors using peer-to-peer payments of stock.

web3

• Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky detailed its plans for decentralized social networks that would limit governmental and corporate influence on the future of social media.
• Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, described the upcoming web3-focused smartphone Saga as a moonshot aimed at taking on Apple and Google by offering a distribution channel for mobile crypto developers. The phone will allow developers to maintain digital ownership rights instead of paying the Apple (and Google) tax of 30%.

Social

• Pinterest partnered with record labels to bring popular music to its TikTok rival, Idea Pins. The company is now working with Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin and BMG to offer users access to thousands of songs from top artists, accessible in the Pinterest app for iOS and Android.
• Instagram is expanding its “Hidden Words” feature, which lets you filter out abusive DMs using keywords and emoji, to also cover replies to Stories and catch intentional misspellings made to avoid filters. It also expanded its preventative blocking tool to proactively block more accounts from the abuser and added more nudges to remind users about to post a harmful comment to be kind.

Image Credits: Instagram

• Instagram is also now testing an in-app scheduling tool for posts and Reels, which would be helpful to creators and brands who want to queue up posts in advance.
• Over 3 million Reddit users created crypto wallets to buy NFT avatars, Reddit chief product officer Pali Bhat said this week at TechCrunch Disrupt. Reddit’s Vault blockchain wallet was used to create the crypto wallets. And most — 2.5 million — were created to purchase NFT avatars that can be used as their Reddit profile pics.
• Snapchat updated its Snapchat+ subscription with three new features, including those that allow subscribers to have their Snapchat Stories expire at different intervals instead of 24 hours, add new camera color borders that appear when taking photos with the in-app camera and use different custom notification sounds for when a friend Snaps them. Snapchat+ now has more than 1 million subscribers and over a dozen exclusive features.

Image Credits: Snap

Dating

• A new “relationship app” (as opposed to a dating app) called Sparks launched to help couples find things to do together, like choosing movies, restaurants, vacations, activities and more.

Messaging

• Google updated its RCS-powered Messages app with several new features, including the ability to react to texts sent from an iPhone, set reminders and have an in-app YouTube video player to watch videos without leaving the app.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Musixmatch

• Spotify’s lyrics provider, Musixmatch, launched a new platform for podcast transcriptions using AI models and NLP. The service is meant to help people search by topics to get accurate matches of related podcasts when using its app.
• Netflix reversed its downward trend with its Q3 earnings by adding 2.41 million subscribers in the quarter, higher than analyst estimates and its own forecast of just 1 million subs. It also pulled in $7.93 billion in revenue — more than analysts’ predictions of $7.85 billion.
• The company also announced at TechCrunch Disrupt this week that it’s “seriously exploring” a cloud gaming effort to complement its mobile gaming efforts, and is opening a fifth gaming studio in Southern California.

• Google introduced a set of parental controls and other features to its streaming platform Google TV, including the ability for parents to add titles to kids’ watchlists, AI-powered suggestions and a supervised experience that allows kids to access the YouTube app with the appropriate content restrictions in place.
• Apple is bringing its immersive surround sound, Spatial Audio, to cars, starting with Mercedes-Benz and Universal Music Group.

Gaming

• Microsoft revealed it’s building an Xbox mobile gaming store to challenge Apple and Google, according to filings made with the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority. The company said part of the motivation for its purchase of Activision Blizzard would be to establish an Xbox mobile gaming platform and store.
• Discord launched an app directory that will allow server admins to build out their server with useful or fun utilities. Some developers will also be able to sell premium app subscriptions within the platform.
• Roblox reported DAUs of 57.8 million in September, up 23% year-over-year. Hours engaged were 4 billion, up 16%, and estimated bookings came in between $212-219 million.

Health & Fitness

• Subscription-based mindfulness app Calm announced its first mental health offering, Calm Health, offered through payers, providers and self-insured employers. The service, built on its acquisition of Ripple Health Group, connects users with different healthcare options.

Productivity & Utilities

Image Credits: Google

• Google announced its new Lock Screen widgets for iOS 16 are officially available. These include widgets for Gmail, News, Search, Maps and Chrome. It also launched a YouTube Music Lock Screen widget for accessing recently played songs, and finally launched YouTube Home Screen widgets that let you watch Shorts and other videos, or access your subscriptions with a tap.
• Google also rolled out an update to Chrome that makes the browser better suited to Android tablets. The release includes new features like a side-by-side view for improved tab navigation and the ability to drag and drop information out of Chrome and into other apps like Gmail, Keep and Photos.

Travel & Transportation

• Uber officially launched its advertising division and a new in-app ad experience, Journey Ads, on Wednesday. The company will sell ad space inside its ride-hailing and Uber Eats apps, and elsewhere.

Government & Policy

• Wired reports on how China’s WeChat app has become a hotbed for misinformation ahead of the U.S. elections. Activists are concerned the falsehoods will distort the vote or surpass turnout, the media outlet said.
• India fined Google $162 million for anti-competitive practices on Android. The Competition Commission of India said that Google requiring device manufacturers to pre-install its entire Google Mobile Suite and mandating prominent placement of those apps was unfair competition.
• A server room fire shut down Korean tech giant Kakao’s apps, impacting Kakao Pay, Kakao T (ride-hailing) and messaging service Kakao Talk, leading to concerns about Kakao’s grip on the market. As the services were coming back online after the outages, President Yoon Suk-yeol said his administration would investigate whether Kakao was a monopolist.
• Apple restored Russian apps for VKontakte and Mail.ru to the App Store after removing them three weeks prior due to U.K. sanctions. Apple’s statement said the developer provided documentation to verify they were not in violation of the U.K. sanctions — that is, they are not majority owned or controlled by a sanctioned entity.
• Meta has been ordered by the U.K.’s competition authority to sell the animated GIF platform Giphy. The regulator believes Meta’s purchase of Giphy would limit choice for U.K. social media users and reduce innovation in U.K. display advertising.

Funding and M&A

Nexta, an Egyptian fintech that plans to launch its banking app in the coming months, raised $3 million from eFinance Group, a state-owned provider of digital payments solutions.

French app Revyze, a TikTok for educational videos, raised a $2 million pre-seed round (€2 million) from more than 100 business angels earlier this year. It’s aiming to reach 500,000 users by year-end and expand to the U.S.

Amsterdam-based Crisp, an app-only supermarket, raised €75 milliom in a round of funding from both new and existing investors.

This Week in Apps: Kanye to buy Parler, TikTok’s adult-only streams, BeReal’s B round by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced 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 and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

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

Epic Games and Match attempt to expand their antitrust lawsuits against Google

Image Credits: Alex Tai/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images

Epic Games and Match Group are looking to fortify their antitrust lawsuits against Google by adding new counts to their initial complaint, filed last year, which illustrate the lengths Google supposedly went to in order to dominate the Android app market. The companies, a week ago, filed a motion to amend their complaints in their cases against Google, which now allege that Google paid off business rivals not to start other app stores that would put them in competition with Google Play. This would be a direct violation of U.S. antitrust law known as the Sherman Act, the amended complaint states.

Epic Games and Match Group had originally detailed Google’s plans in a filing last year, where they detailed a Google program known as “Project Hug,” or later, the “Apps and Games Velocity Program.” This effort was focused on paying game developers hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives to keep their games on the Google Play Store, it had said.

Now, Epic Games and Match Group are looking to add to their complaint with two new allegations specifying how Google had either paid or otherwise induced its potential competitors to agree to not distribute apps on Android in competition with the Play Store, including through their own competing app stores. Google, it reads, had identified developers who were “most at risk … of attrition from Play” and then approached them with an offer of an agreement.

The complaint now deems this a “per se” violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations,” it says. (You can read the full story here on TechCrunch.)

Google Play revamp continues

Image Credits: Google

Google announced this week new features for its Play Store that are designed to put more of developers’ store listing assets “front and center.” The company says that on large-screened devices, like tablets, foldables and Chromebooks, the Play Store redesign will make better use of app screenshots, videos and descriptions directly in the Apps and Games Home. This will help Android users when they’re browsing for new apps and games to install, Google says.

It’s also adding the ability for developers to upload Chromebook-specific screenshots in the Play Console, to better portray the Chromebook experience. Developers can upload up to eight screenshots, in the recommended 16:9 screenshots for landscape, with dimensions of 1080-7690px. Google is updating its quality guidelines for tablets for consistency across large screens, as well, but notes that previous uploads won’t be impacted by the changes.

Google additionally published a set of content quality guidelines to help developers learn best practices about how to showcase apps on large screens.

The changes announced this week follow an earlier revamp of the Play Store that offered users the ability to filter search results by device, making it easier for them to discover and download apps for non-phone devices like smartwatches, TVs and cars, including through remote installs. The feature was timely, given Google’s recent debut of its first Pixel-branded smartwatch this month.

BeReal’s real traction

Gen Z social media app BeReal encourages its users to take a photo every day — a format designed to create a daily habit. But only a small number of the app’s users are currently doing so, new estimates from a third-party app intelligence firm indicate. According to research from Sensor Tower, BeReal is demonstrating significant traction across some metrics — it topped 53 million worldwide installs across the App Store and Google Play and has seen its monthly active users jump by 2,254% since January 2022, for example. But only 9% of its active Android installs are opening the app every day as of the third quarter of this year, the firm found.

Active users are a better indication of an app’s adoption than downloads, as many people will install an app out of curiosity to check it out, but then abandon the app if they don’t end up enjoying the experience.

On this front, BeReal is still trailing established social media giants, Sensor Tower says. Today, 9% of BeReal’s active installs on Android (users who downloaded the app and are actively using it) are now launching the app daily. That’s far behind Instagram and TikTok. Instagram leads this category with 39% of its active installs opening the app every day, while TikTok comes in second with 29%. This is followed by Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube and Twitter at 27%, 26%, 20% and 18%, respectively.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Of course, BeReal proponents point out that the app’s Android adoption is not at the same pace as iOS, as we said in our initial report. With many of its new installs being from young people in the U.S. — where iOS is preferred — this figure may not present a full picture of the app’s current usage. However, it’s a window into a company that’s media-averse, declining to speak to press on the record or share any of its metrics or growth, or even tout its funding. So for now, third-party data is what we have — and, if Android usage can be extrapolated to iOS, it shows that many of BeReal’s users aren’t necessarily everyday addicts. (Yet?)

Elsewhere, another mobile app data firm, 42matters, estimated BeReal’s MAUs on Android were only up by 633% this year, growing from 43,899 MAUs in January to 321,787 MAUs by August 2022. (You can read the full report here on TechCrunch.)

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

Image Credits: Apple

• Apple launched “Ask Apple,” a new series for app developers that allows them to connect directly with Apple experts for questions about integrating the latest technologies, design, testing and more. The sessions will run from October 17-21 and will include one-on-ones and group Q&As across multiple languages and time zones. To participate, developers will need to be members of either the Apple Developer Program or Apple Developer Enterprise Program.
• Apple Entrepreneur Camp applications are open and will close on December 5, 2022. The camp supports underrepresented founders and developers and will offer three online cohorts for female, Black or Hispanic/Latinx founders starting in January 2023.
• Apple will add 5G support to the iPhone 12, 13 and 14 models in India through an iOS update by December, The Economic Times reported. India’s government is pushing handset makers, like Apple and Samsung, to expedite software upgrades on their phones to make them compatible with local 5G airwaves.
• Apple is planning to launch iPadOS 16.1 alongside new hardware including MacBook Pros and new iPads in late October, Bloomberg reported. The iPad software update is expected the week of October 24, the report claims.
• As part of Microsoft’s announcements at its Ignite conference this week, Apple will be bringing more of its services, including Apple Music and iCloud storage with the Photos app in Windows 11, to Microsoft’s platforms.
• Apple rolled out iOS 16.1 beta 5 and watchOS 9.1 beta 5 to developers and as public betas. It also launched iOS 16.0.3 with fixes for the slow camera launch or slowness in changing camera modes, low microphone volume in CarPlay calls, delayed call and app notifications and more.
• Apple owners are reporting their iPhone 14 and Apple Watch’s crash detection features are being triggered by riding roller coasters.

Platforms: Google

• Google said its newly launched Pixel Watch will get at least three years of Wear OS updates, including security updates.
• Google approved the Truth Social app on the Play Store after the company updated its moderation policies. The app, which was denied entry in August 2022, said it would agree to enforce some policies around posts inciting violence, in order to gain approval.

E-commerce

• TikTok is planning to build its own fulfillment centers in the U.S., Axios reported, citing jobs posts in an effort to scale its e-commerce strategy. The company earlier this year was said to be dropping its live e-commerce “Shop” venture in the U.S., after it failed to gain traction abroad.
• Chinese fast fashion retailer Shein has seen its valuation decline from $100 billion+ to $65-85 billion in recent months, FT reports.
• Shein parent company, Zoetop, meanwhile has to pay $1.9 million in a fine to New York for a 2018 data breach that impacted 39 million Shein users and 7 million Romwe accounts.

Fintech & Crypto

Image Credits: Apple

• Apple is partnering with Goldman Sachs to introduce high-yield savings accounts in the Wallet app for Apple Card holders. The accounts can be funded with Daily Cash (cashback) from card purchases or through linked bank account transfers. Support for the accounts will arrive with an iOS update in the “coming months.”
• Crypto.com Capital is backing a new effort called Magic Square that’s aiming to build an app store for web3 developers.
• Children’s financial app Greenlight introduced a suite of new family safety features, putting the app in closer competition with services like Life360. A new subscription, Greenlight Infinity, will include family location sharing, SOS and emergency alerts, crash detection with automatic 911 dispatch and more.
• Fintech app Betterment launched a new crypto offering that allows customers to choose from four themed, customizable portfolios of crypto assets.
• Samsung announced its Samsung Wallet will roll out to 13 more markets this year, including Bahrain, Denmark, Finland, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Norway, Oman, Qatar, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, Vietnam and UAE. The wallet is already available in China, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.

Social

• TikTok is expanding its set of third-party integrations with the launch of Profile Kit, which offers a way to embed videos on other sites. The first partner to adopt the new integration is Linktree.
• It also announced updates to its TikTok Creator Marketplace, including improved search, new recommendation tech, invite links, improved reporting and tools to anchor app store links or clickable links in comments. TikTok introduced Showtimes on TikTok for movie studios looking to promote films and connect users with ticketing partners, and a new campaign offering called Focused View, where brands only pay when users watch their ad for at least six seconds.
• TikTok plans to take action against exploitive begging on its app after a BBC investigation found Syrian refugees pleading for digital gifts from TikTok users.
• A U.K. report found that one-third of children between 8 and 17 with social media profiles were using fake ages to make them “adults” on the apps by signing up with fake birth dates.

Image Credits: Meta

• Meta said videos from its VR space Horizon Worlds can now be shared to Instagram Reels. It also filed to dismiss the FTC complaint over its acquisition of VR fitness company, Within.
• Instagram expanded its AI-powered age verification program to India and Brazil, which, combined have around 400 million MAUs on the app. The verification program, which began testing in the U.S. earlier this year, runs video selfies through an AI system. Privacy advocates warn the California Age-Appropriate Design Code will lead to more invasive age verification practices like this.
• Twitter is now asking users to enter their birthdates to view sensitive content in its app, unless they have already done so and are over 18. The feature has no apparent built-in controls to prevent children lying about their age.
• Twitter is also developing a feature that would allow users to control who can @ mention them.
• Search-driven advertising has helped Pinterest stock rise 34% from its two-year low in mid-June, Bloomberg reported. This outpaces Meta and Snap, down 22% and 12%, respectively.
• Snapchat rolled out its parental controls to users in India through the new in-app Family Center. The launch follows the U.S. debut a couple of months ago, and allows parents to see who their teens are friends with and messaging on the app without being able to read the content of those messages.
• TechCrunch’s Rita Liao analyzes the potential challenges for Elon Musk’s super app plans: Elon Musk’s X app for ‘everything’ might be a non-starter in the U.S.

Messaging

• Signal announced it will soon be removing SMS support for Android users, explaining that it wants to simplify the experience for users instead of continuing to support two different messaging types in the app.
• A report by Rest of World looked into the issues around spam on WhatsApp in India, where users are complaining about receiving too much spam from brands, some of which are using WhatsApp’s own business tools.
• WhatsApp is beta testing a feature that allows users to put 1,024 friends into a single group chat.
• China’s internet censors have suspended thousands of WeChat accounts and removed posts following a protest in Beijing against “dictator and traitor Xi Jinping,” FT reported.

Streaming & Entertainment

• Netflix announced its ad-supported plan will go live next month. The $6.99 per month subscription will arrive in 12 markets to start, initially with Canada and Mexico on November 1 then the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Japan, Korea and Brazil on November 3, followed by Spain on November 10.

• ByteDance is reportedly planning to expand its Resso streaming music service in more than a dozen global markets outside the U.S. and integrate it into the TikTok mobile app.
• YouTube announced the launch of “YouTube handles,” a way for creators to identify their channel using the @username format across channel pages, video descriptions, comments and Shorts. The handles will be rolled out gradually, becoming available first to creators with larger subscriber bases, but will ultimately be offered to everyone on YouTube.

• NBCU and Meta are partnering to bring VR experiences, including those from the Peacock app and shows like The Office, to its Quest headsets.
• Streaming media company Roku launched a new Roku Smart Home mobile app to support its expanded product line that now includes smart home devices like security cameras, video doorbells, smart lights and voice-enabled smart plugs. The devices are available at Roku.com and Walmart.com. A camera subscription service is also offered.
• Apple-owned Shazam updated its iOS app to offer users new wallpapers for the iPhone and Apple Watch. The app now includes an “Exclusive Downloads” section where users can customize their iPhone or watch with wallpapers from favorite artists.

Gaming

• Harry Potter-themed mobile games have generated a combined $1 billion in player spending globally to date, a report from Sensor Tower indicates. The game with the highest revenue is “Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery” from Jam City, which has earned more than $400 million since its April 2018 launch.
• A Newzoo gaming report on the habits of Gen Z users found that 70% of Gen Z are interested in socializing in in-game worlds beyond gameplay and 1 in 2 Gen Alpha and Gen Z users are spending money on games, compared with 42% of the total online population.
• Apple’s Music app launched on Xbox One, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X. The app is a free download from the Microsoft Store.
• In the wake of Stadia’s demise, Google’s new gaming-focused Chromebooks from Acer, Asus and Lenovo will support cloud gaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now, Microsoft Xbox Cloud Gaming and Amazon Luna.
• Meta said its Quest Store has generated $1.5 billion in total revenue to date and that more than one-third of its 400 titles have grossed more than $1 million in sales; 33 titles surpassed $10 million in gross revenue. It also announced the game Among Us will head the Quest 2 platform on November 10.

Health & Fitness

• Diet and health coaching app Noom laid off 10% of its workforce, or around 500 people, mostly from its coaching team. The company was valued at $3.7 billion in May 2021.

Productivity

• Google Meet added automatic meeting transcriptions and said its companion mode will now work on mobile devices. Also, users with AI-powered cameras from Huddly and Logitech can now use adaptive framing.
• Google Docs to soon allow users to embed other apps into docs, including those from Asana, Miro, Figma and Tableau.
• Microsoft announced a number of new apps and features at its Ignite conference, including a Teams Premium subscription, which includes customized avatars and AI features like Intelligent Recap for meetings; a new app called Places aimed at helping companies address hybrid work challenges; and plans to integrate DALL-E 2 with its new Microsoft Designer app and Image Creator tool.

Utilities

• Google’s keyboard app Gboard updated with support for Android tablet layout, which includes easier-to-type on keys and an overall taller keyboard.
• Samsung and Google partnered to allow Samsung’s SmartThings app users to onboard Matter-enabled devices even if they’re set up in Google Home and vice versa.

Reading & News

• Instapaper rolled out an update, version 8.2 on iOS, that introduced in-article search, text justification and several other design updates. Among the changes, users can now manually add a link from the side menu by tapping on the + icon instead of worrying about clipboard detection prompts — useful, considering iOS has cracked down on apps reading users’ clipboards with an initially buggy security feature.

Security & Privacy

• Google rolled out support for signing in with passkeys — a new way to sign in on the web and in apps without using passwords — on Android and Chrome to beta testers. The feature is expected to launch more broadly later this year.
• Security researchers discovered that many apps associated with Apple services on iOS 16 send data that bypass users’ VPN connections.

Funding and M&A

Real estate investing app Fintor raised $6.2 million at an $80 million valuation in an extension round from existing investors including Public.com, Hustle Fund, 500 Global, VU Ventures, Graphene Ventures and angel investors such as Manny Khoshbin, Andy Madadian, Cindy Bi and Marcus Ridgway. The app allows non-accredited investors to invest in real estate.

Teen banking app Step borrowed $300 million in debt financing led by Triplepoint Capital and Evolve Bank & Trust. To date, the company has raised $500 million in equity and debt. Last year, Step raised a Series C equity round from investors including Coatue, Stripe and angels such as Charli D’Amelio and Jared Leto. The app will also now expand into crypto.

Paris-based Homa, which offers an SDK to indie mobile game studios, raised $100 million in Series B funding, led by Quadrille Capital and Headline. The SDK offers tools for tracking metrics in order to improve session and retention times, along with other A/B testing tools.

Cairo-based fintech app Telda raised $20 million in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital and Global Founders Capital, with Block also participating. The app offers money management, payments and offers a Mastercard-powered card. The company has onboarded 25,000 users and has a waitlist of 110,000.

London-based GoHenry, a digital banking app aimed at kids, raised £49 million+ ($55 million) in Series B funding. The company said 2021 revenue grew 55% year-over-year to £30.5 million, with losses up 20x year-over-year. The startup claims to have 2 million users.

Lego parent company Kirkbi is acquiring the U.S. edtech company Brainpop, which makes short educational videos for kids, for $875 million. Brainpop’s videos, available online and through its apps, reached around 25 million children per year across two-thirds of U.S. school districts.

Downloads

Yonder

Image Credits: Naver

Naver, the parent company behind Webtoon and Wattpad reading apps reaching a combined 200 million monthly users, has launched a new app called Yonder, a serialized fiction platform. The app aims to attract both those who are already avid consumers of serialized fiction as well as those new to the space but looking for a more premium experience without ads or distractions.

At launch, Yonder will include hundreds of titles and exclusives from authors like romance author Ivy Smoak (The Hunted Series), bestsellers P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast (House of Night) and fantasy author Ruby Dixon, along with titles from publishers including Blackstone Publishing, Aetheon, Sterling and Stone, Portal Books and Wraithmarked. Unlike Naver’s Wattpad and Webtoon app, where anyone can contribute, Yonder’s stories are curated.

To monetize, the app will offer users the ability to explore and read several chapters for free, then unlock the rest of the story using virtual coins purchased in-app. The app will be available on Android and soon, iOS.

This Week in Apps: Play Store revamp, Google antitrust suit updates, BeReal’s real traction by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced 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 and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

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.

Elon Musk is buying Twitter…again…maybe

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Elon Musk delivered another week of Twitter deal drama. After initially trying to worm out of the now-overpriced deal, the Tesla and SpaceX exec this week decided he would go through with the purchase after all. It was speculated that Musk may have seen the writing on the wall, and realized this legal battle was one he couldn’t win. (After all, he can’t simultaneously claim he wants to fix the Twitter bot problem by buying the network and then claim that there are just too darned many bots here — and that Twitter is lying about them, when in fact, its SEC filings indicate otherwise. Right?!)

But it had also come to light that Twitter had been given the go-ahead by the judge to proceed with a probe that would allow it to seek out information as to whether the Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko had contacted Musk’s lawyers before he tried to exit the deal.

It seems that Twitter’s discovery had uncovered an anonymous email claiming to be a former Twitter exec involved with Twitter’s Trust & Safety team that had been sent to Musk’s attorney on May 6. And Twitter wanted to find out if the legal team or Musk followed up to determine the sender’s identity. A judge agreed Twitter could dig in — and this was just before Musk changed his mind to move forward with the purchase. So perhaps it was this deep dive into more files and communications that Musk wanted to avoid? Maybe he didn’t want to be asked about this under oath?

In any event, Musk said the deal was on and Twitter’s stock jumped over 22% on the news. But the matter wasn’t immediately resolved.

As it turned out, Musk and Twitter hadn’t reached an agreement to end their litigation, and neither party had filed anything to stop the court case from proceeding. So the judge alerted them that the trial was still on and would start on October 17, 2022, as planned. But!… Twitter wasn’t ready to take Musk at his word about this sudden change of heart. The judge, however, agreed to give Musk’s team until October 28, 2022 — the date Musk’s team said they could close by — to see if the transaction goes through. If not, the parties will be given November 2022 trial dates, the judge said.

Now the deal is hinging on the “receipt of the proceeds of the debt financing,” Bloomberg reported. Morgan Stanley and half a dozen banks underwrote the debt financing for the deal, and given the market conditions, they may find it more difficult to find buyers for the bonds and loans — possibly taking a loss on portions of the package, the report said. But they’re not likely to back out or find a legal means of doing so. Which means…Elon is buying Twitter again. We think!

Go ahead, edit Your tweets

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

And if that wasn’t enough Twitter news for the week, then there’s this other small tidbit: Twitter’s Edit button has arrived.

The long-requested feature has now rolled out to Twitter Blue’s U.S. subscribers, in addition to subscribers in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The feature allows users to edit their tweets for up to 30 minutes after posting — something that could help users clarify or correct a mistake in their tweet, fix a small typo or add hashtags, among other things. The edits are logged and visible to the public to prevent abuse. Additionally, Twitter said users can only edit their tweets five times within the 30-minute period, which is also meant to cut down the feature’s abuse.

But many are still concerned that bad actors will find a way to take advantage of the addition to edit tweeting in misleading ways. Plus, it comes at a time when user demand for an edit button may have been quelled, given that Twitter last year introduced an “Undo Tweet” feature for its subscribers. This lets users quickly fix a typo after they post — likely cutting down on one of the major use cases for an Edit button. With “Undo Tweet,” users can delay their tweets for up to a minute, giving them time to re-read posts and fix errors, if needed.

The edit feature was also one of Musk’s big ideas for fixing Twitter, we should point out. Shortly after taking a board seat at Twitter (remember when that was the big Twitter news?!), he polled his 80.5 million followers to ask if they wanted an edit button — either a tease of the planned announcement or a desire to look like he was already taking action at Twitter. A day later, Twitter announced an edit button was actually in the works after years of saying the opposite. But Twitter denied it was Musk’s idea.

While the edit option is now live, its impact may be limited. The majority of Twitter’s users are not paying for a subscription to Twitter Blue at this time, and it’s unclear that this feature’s addition — however much they had clamored for it — will change that.

Google gets serious about wearables

Image Credits: Google

The other big news this week in the mobile realm took place at Google’s annual hardware event. While the event focused on Google’s new line of Pixel devices, including the Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel Watch, it’s the latter that may be of more interest to app developers as it signaled Google’s intention to get serious about its wearable strategy. While Google had competed in this space with Android Wear and Wear OS, the new Pixel Watch is the company’s first smartwatch.

The device differentiates itself from the Wear OS-powered watches from other brands, like Samsung, with a unique look and feel. It’s smaller, rounded and looks more like a premium device. This is an interesting entry point, given that Apple’s new high-end watch, the Apple Watch Ultra, has gone in the opposite direction — with a hefty, oversized version that can look ridiculous on smaller wrists. The Pixel Watch won’t have that problem.

Google had signaled its interest in wearables long before now, with its $2.1 billion Fitbit deal, $40 million acquisition of Fossil IP and Samsung partnership. Fitbit’s health-tracking features make the new Pixel Watch a more serious competitor to Apple, with additions like heart rate monitoring, ECG/AFib detection, sleep detection and more. But Google is also considering the wider app ecosystem alongside its hardware investment. The company also recently revamped Google Play to make it easier for users to search and filter for non-smartphone apps, including those for smartwatches and tablets — another area Google plans to take more seriously.

At the event, Google teased its upcoming Pixel tablet, to be released next year, which will continue the Pixel line to a bigger screen. It also plans to offer a clever charging speaker dock that will allow consumers to use their tablet as they would any other smart display or smart screen in their home.

Separately, Google also announced a series of updates to Google Assistant alongside the Pixel 7 launch, which will see the smart assistant improving its abilities in areas like voice typing, navigating businesses’ phone menus, voice message transcription and more. One of the better improvements here is the Google Duplex-powered “Direct My Call” service which will now display a business’s phone tree options on the smartphone’s screen when you call, so you can just tap the button you need instead of listening to all the choices.

Instagram’s ad load increase

Image Credits: LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP / Getty Images

Meanwhile, Meta this week began exploring a way to stem its advertising revenue losses.

Following another quarter that saw marketers pull back on their ad spending, Meta announced it’s increasing its ad load on Instagram with the launch of two new ad slots. The company said it will now allow advertisers to run ads on the Explore home page and in profile feeds and will debut a new ad format for Facebook Reels.

The Explore home refers to the page people land on when they first tap on Instagram’s Explore tab. Here, users can browse a page of suggested and trending content, or tap on buttons at the top of the screen to dive into various trends. Historically, Instagram had only placed ads on Explore within the Explore feed — that is, when a person taps on a post and scrolls. But now, it’s expanding to the Explore home page itself, as it says it sees users spending meaningful time there, Instagram told TechCrunch. This is already rolling out globally.

It will also insert ads in the profile feed which is the feed that appears when a user visits another person’s profile on the app and then taps on one of their posts and scrolls. And in Facebook Reels, it’s adding “post-loop” ads — four- to 10-second skippable ads and standalone video ads that play after a Reel has ended before the Reel resumes and loops again.

These additional ad units serve to boost the company’s ability to pull in revenue at a time when Meta has been seeing declining ad sales. It also follows Meta’s report of its first-ever quarterly revenue decline in Q2, which came shortly after its first decline in daily active users. While its revenue dropped only 1% in Q2, from $29.07 billion in the second quarter of 2021 to $28.82 billion in Q2 2022, Meta has worried investors with its troubling Q3 forecast. The company said it saw third-quarter revenue potentially declining between 2% and 11% year-over-year to somewhere in the range of $26 billion to $28.5 billion.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• iOS 16.1 beta testers were disappointed to find out that the “Adaptive Transparency” toggle that appeared in their AirPods settings was actually a bug, and not a promise of bringing the feature to older AirPods models. Apple confirmed this by removing the setting in the new beta release.
• Meanwhile, another feature in the latest iOS 16.1 beta shows Apple tweaking the design of the Dynamic Island to include a light gray border around the outside of the feature when it’s activated on a darker background or wallpaper.
• Apple seeded iOS 16.1, tvOS 16.1 beta 4 and iPadOS 16.1 beta 5 for developers, as well as the tenth developer beta of macOS Ventura.
• Apple named new vice presidents for its Maps, Services and Silicon teams, Bloomberg reported. Twenty-year Apple veteran Max Muller will become a VP overseeing Maps. Payam Mirrashidi is a new VP of engineering in Services. And Johny Srouji, Charlie Zhai and Fabian Klas are becoming VPs in the Silicon group. The appointments follow the firing of VP of Procurement Tony Blevins over sexist comments he made in a TikTok video.
• App developers who applied for a share of Apple’s $100 million App Store class action settlement, which saw the creation of the Small App Developer Assistance Fund, have been alerted that the distribution of their payments should occur before the end of October.

Platforms: Google

Image Credits: Google

• Google’s anticipated iOS 16 Lock Screen widgets have begun to arrive. The launches arrived starting last week with updates to the Chrome and Drive apps, and this week saw new widgets appear for its Gmail and Google News apps, as well. Still on its way are Search and Maps widgets. Google hasn’t explained why Calendar is not included, however.

E-commerce and Food Delivery

• DoorDash announced a new service, Drinks with DoorDash, that allows users to order food from one place and drinks from another — like a nearby liquor, convenience or grocery store. (Yep, dashers are going to love this.)
• In the same week, Grubhub and Gopuff partnered on grocery and alcohol delivery, allowing Grubhub customers to shop thousands of products from moe than 500 Gopuff locations via the membership program, Grubhub+.
• Recelery, a pantry tracker app and online marketplace for select food items, relaunched this past weekend to tweak a number of its features. It expanded the limit of pictures that users can post, introduced new markers to show the specific date when an item was added and now allows users to sell up to 25 items at a time.

Augmented Reality

Image Credits: Snap

• Snapchat is embracing Halloween via AR. Starting October 11, the app will roll out an AR shopping experience that allows users to virtually try on and buy costumes of some of their favorite TV and movie characters, including those from “Hocus Pocus,” “Squid Game,” “Stranger Things,” “Power Rangers,” “Transformers,” “The Office,” “Harry Potter” and others.
• Lucky Charms upgraded its cereal box with an AR game built using Niantic’s 8th Wall platform.

Fintech

• Sen. Warren’s office released a report that said fraud and scams are taking place on P2P payments app Zelle, but banks are refusing to refund customers for 53% of the defrauded funds.
• Venmo rolled out Charity Profiles in the app that allows charitable organizations to raise funds directly if they’ve already received confirmed charity status from Venmo parent PayPal.
• Investing app Stash, which raised $125 million from investors in a Series G round last year, announced it’s adding crypto to the set of products it offers its 2 million users.

Social

• TikTok added a handful of editing tools that will allow users to adjust clips, sounds, images and text in new ways. The additions include tools to stack, trim, split and speed up and slow down clips, plus others for cutting, trimming and setting the durations for sounds used in videos. Others focus on text placement and images, including a new Photo Mode feature for sharing a carousel of images that automatically display one after another.

Image Credits: TikTok

• ByteDance reported its revenue grew to $61.7 billion in 2021, but operating losses reached $7.15 billion due to investments in growth, a report to staff said, per The WSJ.
• Pinterest partnered with Headspace to offer creators a free six-month subscription in 20 countries worldwide, making it the first platform to provide such an offering, it said.
• A new lawsuit in California, filed by the Social Media Victims Law Center, targets companies Meta, Snap, Discord and Roblox for making platforms that contain features designed to encourage addiction to “the detriment of their minor users.” It brings up mental health issues, including suicide attempts, which it alleges are linked to use of these platforms.
• Twitter rolled out a new feature that lets users post images, videos and GIFs in a single tweet. It also expanded its experimental Status feature, for tagging tweets with moods and activities, to more of its users.
• Reddit began testing a new live chat feature in a chat tab in its app. Users who have access to the test will see three options to filter chats: live chats, Messages and requests — or they can view “All” chats.
• Facebook introduced new tools that allow users to customize their feeds by telling the app which posts they want to see more or less of, from across their friends, groups and other post recommendations. The feature will also be tested with Reels.
• Meta settled a lawsuit with BrandTotal and Unimania, companies engaging in scraping operations of Facebook and Instagram data. The settlements terms weren’t disclosed, but in addition to agreeing to stop the practice, Meta said the companies agreed to pay a “significant sum.”

Messaging

• WhatsApp for iOS expanded its feature called “View Once,” which lets users send photos and videos that disappear after they’re opened for the first time, similar to Snapchat. The feature first launched last year and will now work with screenshots and screen recordings, too.
• Even Signal is copying Stories now. The feature is now in beta and the Stories will disappear after 24 hours.

Dating

Image Credits: Tinder

• Tinder rolled out a new feature to help its users get ready to vote in the U.S. midterms. The dating app maker partnered with BallotReady to launch an Election Center within the app’s Explore section where users can register to vote, find their polling stations and access breakdowns of their local ballot measures.
• Bumble is testing a speed-dating feature that allows users to chat before matching, similar to Tinder’s own Fast Chats feature. The feature is live in the U.K. already.
• A Wired investigation found there were an increasing number of fake profiles of men on the Match-owned Hinge dating app. The profiles appear to be using AI-generated images and oddly written profile text that indicates English isn’t their first language. In chatting with the profiles, the reporter discovered they weren’t bots, but rather scammers hiding behind the fake accounts.

Streaming & Entertainment

• Apple Music announced a new milestone of reaching 100 million songs — a 100,000x increase since the debut of the original iPod some 21 years ago. To celebrate, Apple launched a new Apple Music Today series that will pick a new song every day and dive into its history.
• YouTube has been experimenting with asking some users to purchase a Premium subscription in order to watch videos in 4K resolution, currently a free feature.

Reading & News

• Facebook killed its Substack competitor, Bulletin, the newsletter service launched last year. Bulletin writers will earn subscription revenue until the platform’s closure in 2023, but will then need to migrate subscribers to another sevice.
• Substack launched its Reader app on Android, which allows users to access all their Substack subscriptions in one place alongside their RSS feeds.

Image Credits: Substack

Productivity

• Readdle launched a new version of its email app Spark, for desktop and mobile devices, which now offers subscription-based email management. The app, reviewed here by The Verge, organizes emails into bundles like newsletters and notifications, and elevates emails from real people. The app includes a bevy of other features, like focus schedules, thread muting, a gatekeeper function (to permit or deny access to your inbox) and more.

Utilities

• Alongside its new Nest Doorbell and faster Wi-Fi router, Google launched a redesigned version of its Home app for Android. The redesigned app arrived in parallel with the release of the Matter 1.0 standard, and includes faster Matter pairing and other new customization options to personalize the app to end users.

Government & Policy

• Russia fined TikTok 3 million rubles (around $51,000) for violating its anti-LGBTQ laws. Russia claims TikTok failed to delete content it called propaganda. It also fined Twitch for hosting an interview with a Ukrainian political figure, which it said contained fake information.

Security & Privacy

• Meta’s security team disclosed it had identified more than 400 malicious apps posing as photo editing tools, games, utilities, lifestyle apps, VPNs and more that were actually malware. The apps would prompt users to enter their Facebook login credentials to use the app, but this information was then stolen, allowing scammers to gain access to the user’s Facebook account and any other account that used the same username/password combo. Meta said it’s not able to determine how many people fell for this scam, but identified at least 1 million potentially impacted users.

Funding and M&A

Montana-based onX, the maker of navigation apps for hunting, hiking, off-roading and other outdoor activities, raised an $87.4 million Series B led by Summit Partners.

Spotify said it’s acquiring Dublin, Ireland-based content moderation tech company Kinzen, to aid with its global content moderation efforts. Deal terms were undisclosed. Kinzen, a Spotify partner since 2020, uses a combination of ML and human expertise to alert and flag dangerous misinformation and harmful content — something the streamer is facing more issues with as it invests heavily into podcasting and other forms of audio. Joe Rogan, for example, created a headache for Spotify when he spread COVID-19 vaccine-related misinfo on his show.

Duolingo acquired its first startup, a Detroit-based animation studio, Gunner, that created art for the company and others, including Amazon, Dropbox, Spotify and Google. Deal terms weren’t disclosed.

An anonymous social app for college kids, Fizz, announced its raise of $4.5 million in seed funding, led by entrepreneur and investor Rakesh Mathur, who also joined the Stanford student-founded startup as its CEO. Lightspeed, Octane and other angels also invested in the app that claims to have deep penetration on college campuses.

South Korean search giant Naver announced plans to acquire the secondhand apparel marketplace Poshmark for $1.2 billion in cash. The deal values publicly traded Poshmark at $17.90, or a 15% premium over the closing price at the time of the announcement.

Mobile banking app Jiko raised $40 million in Series B funding in a round led by Red River West, bringing the company’s total raise to date to $87.7 million. The app has evolved from a consumer-focused model to B2B, and now gives companies low-cost access to short-term treasury bills.

Singapore-online shopping rewards app ShopBack raised $80 million more to extend its Series F round to more than $310 million. The new investor is the state investment giant’s late-stage fund, Temasek Holdings Pte. The company is now valued at nearly $1 billion.

Downloads

Neeva (European launch)

Image Credits: Neeva

An ad-free search engine, Neeva, launched to the U.S. last year is now heading to Europe — specifically, the U.K., France and Germany. The service promises a way to both search the web and private, personal accounts like Gmail or Dropbox from any device, without having to view ads or have user data compromised. It does this by offering a premium membership, which provides additional privacy tools and other benefits to paid subscribers.

The service is available on desktop via a Chrome extension and on iOS and Android via native mobile apps.

This week, TechCrunch’s Paul Sawers sat down with Neeva co-founder and CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy in London to get an update on the three-year-old company as it expands to new markets. (You can read that interview here and learn more about Neeva’s business.)

This Week in Apps: Twitter gets an Edit button, Instagram increases ads, Google gets serious about wearables by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has diminished. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced 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 and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

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.

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Top Stories

So we’re just TikTok-ing all the things now

The TikTok-ification of today’s web is nearly overwhelming. Already we’ve seen top social apps like Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube clone the vertical feed format in their own apps. And it seems not a day goes by when some other app announces its own TikTok-like feed has arrived. This week, it was the NBA app that added a vertical video feed of sports content, for some reason, while Twitter announced the introduction of a TikTok-inspired feed for watching videos on its app.

It’s all starting to get a little ridiculous, isn’t it?

Image Credits: Twitter

Still, there’s something more going on here, it seems.

This isn’t just about adopting a new format — as apps did when Stories became popular, for example. What’s really happening is that there’s a broader shift in how younger people are using the web, and apps are rushing to adapt. Younger users are looking for more immersive content, visual experiences and easy access to information through intuitive user interfaces that allow for fast scrolling or simple navigation.

Throwing a TikTok feed into an app is a quick way to address these users’ unique interests, but they’re certainly not the only way.

Google Goes Visual

Image Credits: Google

Google, to its credit, has identified this shift as a threat to its core business. It understands that the days when people taught themselves how to use Boolean operators to narrow search results, then clicked back and forth through dozens of blue links, are now behind us.

At an event this week, Google introduced how it’s revamping its products as a result of these behavioral changes, starting with Google Search and Maps.

One of the most notable updates is how Google now plans to redesign Google Search for the TikTok generation.

Instead of starting with a list of links, some Google searches will return highly visual results, where pieces of information are presented in colorful cards alongside other imagery and videos — including both YouTube content and TikToks. For instance, if you search for a place, you might see maps and directions, weather, photos and snippets from Wikipedia all placed in boxes at the top of the search results. And all this could be interspersed with creator-based content that shows off famous landmarks, sights, tourist attractions, places to dine and other ideas.

The changes follow Google’s recent acknowledgment that it had been losing younger users to apps like Instagram and TikTok for some types of searches. This is its attempt to bring those users back to its search engine instead.

The idea now is that you wouldn’t just come to Google to be informed, but to also discover and be inspired — much like you do on social video apps.

The company will cater to users’ interest in visual content in other ways as well, including with shopping searches, where it will integrate more 3D imagery, allow users to browse through “shoppable looks” where they can buy outfits, not locate individual pieces, and have their experiences customized to their own interests in terms of product categories and favorite brands.

Meanwhile, in Google Maps the company is allowing users to explore cities in an “Immersive View” that leverages a combination of computer vision and AI technology to fuse Street View and aerial imagery together. This gives users a way to more visually explore an area, like a bird in flight, then glide down to the street level. Here, users can even go inside places, like restaurants, to get a sense of what they look like inside, layered with “busy-ness” data — so you know if the restaurant would be likely to have a table for you at that time.

Google Maps is also updating its new Live View feature — the AR experience that overlays information atop the real world in Maps just by holding up your phone’s camera. With Live View, you can find places like shops, restaurants or ATMs highlighted over the view of the street your camera displays. And now, you can search within Live View, too.

Another interesting feature is Neighborhood Vibe — a way for Google Maps users to get a sense of the most popular and trendy places in a given neighborhood by adding reviews, photos and videos directly atop Google Maps. (Why turn to TikTok, after all, if you can open a real maps app and watch videos there, attached to exact locations?)

Then there’s the feature that seemingly sets the stage for an AR future — multisearch near me.

This allows you to view items in the real world and find out where to find them nearby. For instance, you could point your phone’s camera (and maybe one day, your AR glasses) toward a dress, then find out which shops in your town carry it. This is a step beyond video-based e-commerce experiences, as seen on TikTok or YouTube, because you’re instead shopping from the real world — not a recorded version of it.

Now, whether Google’s investments will pay off in the long term remain to be seen, of course. These are broader bets on the future of search and discovery. But at least we can say this for it — it’s not ignoring the market shifts or thinking that simply cramming a TikTok-like feed into its apps will keep it relevant.

OG Drama

Image Credits: Un1feed

Hoping to cater to user demand for a more classic version of Instagram without the clutter from ads and suggested posts, a pair of developers built a customized app for viewing Instagram content, called OG App. While users may have briefly appreciated the experience of what felt like the old Instagram experience, the app’s existence was short-lived and filled with drama.

Apparently, the company didn’t exactly have permission to use Instagram’s API the way it was doing. Because soon after the app launched, Meta took enforcement actions against the app, confirming it was in violation of its policies. Apple also then removed the app from its App Store as a result of its behavior, noting that its rules state that apps displaying content from third-party services must do so in accordance with the service’s own terms of use.

OG App had already racked up nearly 10,000 downloads by the time of its removal, after just a couple of days of availability.

While this particular app is no more, it does serve as a test case for consumer interest in an algorithm-free photo-sharing experience that looks and feels more like Instagram once did.

Of course, a number of apps have entered the market hoping to capture users’ interest on that front, but have failed to gain significant traction. Among those were apps like Poparazzi, Later Cam and the ill-fated Dispo, which offer some sort of spin on analog photo-sharing — like replicating the disposable camera experience or only allowing friends to post pics of you. Then there were the apps that try to elevate photo-sharing, like Glass.

But many users either churned out of these experiences or never joined to begin with. Instead, users found a variation on casual, social photo-sharing with the app BeReal. But its notification-based “time to post” trick still needs to prove it can be a successful draw in the long term — and that’s not a given.

That’s why, as we said last week, now is a great time for developers to test the waters by building other privacy-focused social networking experiences — including those centered around photos.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• Apple’s latest iOS 16 developer beta allows Stage Manager to work with older iPad Pro models, but that support doesn’t allow extending the display to an external monitor. The feature was previously only compatible with the M1-powered iPad Air and the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models released last year.
• Apple pulled from its App Store apps owned by the Russian tech giant VK, including the music service VK Music. Apple said the apps have been removed due to new U.K. sanctions on Russian-owned companies. Apple also terminated the developer accounts associated with these apps.
• References to Apple Music Classical, a new Apple Music service, were spotted in the latest iOS beta.
• Apple rolled out iOS 16.1 beta 3, iPadOS 16.1 beta 4, watchOS 9.1 beta 3, tvOS 16.1 and macOS Ventura beta 9. It appears that iOS 16.1 could bring Adaptive Transparency to the original AirPods Pro, reports said.
• Apple launched a new App Store Foundations Program in the U.K., with a focus on supporting women developers. The program will feature both one-on-one and group sessions with App Store leaders across the U.K. and Europe.
• Apple News partner Fast Company’s account was hacked, leading the Apple News app to send offensive news notifications to users.

Platforms: Google

Image Credits: Google

• Google officially announced the Play Store reorg that has been rolling out for some days. The changes make it easier to filter for and remotely install non-phone apps, including those for watches, tablets, cars and smart TVs.
• Google upgraded its Speech Services by Google speech engine to provide “more natural voices.” The company says all 421 voices in 67 languages have been updated with a new voice model and synthesizer.

E-commerce and Food Delivery

Image Credits: Walmart

• Walmart updated its AR feature, View in Your Home, to all users to view TV models to see if the set they liked looks good in their space.
• Instagram began a new test in its app that ditches the Shopping tab. In one version, Messages takes the place of Shopping on the app’s home screen, while others saw the Notifications tab in its place.
• iFood in Brazil controls more than 80% of the delivery market. A new report by Rest of World analyzes the impact of the government’s own delivery app Valeu on the market.
• Shopify announced new mobile hardware, POS Go, that allows merchants to take payments anywhere via their phone, including through tapping, swiping or an integrated reader for chip cards.

Fintech

• Robinhood debuted a new non-custodial crypto wallet with Polygon, Robinhood Wallet. The crypto wallet, the company’s first international app, was initially rolled out to 10,000 beta testers on its waitlist. It expects to reach over a million users at the beta test’s end before the end of 2022.
• Public.com added support for alternative asset investing, which includes contemporary art, high-end trading cards, luxury items, vintage comics and more. Users can manage these new investments alongside their portfolio of stocks, crypto and ETFs.
• Square added support for Tap to Pay on iPhone, which allows users to accept contactless payments directly in the Square Point of Sale app for iOS.

Social

• TikTok is said to be bleeding U.S. executives, Forbes reported, because China is still calling the shots. Ex-employees said their ability to lead departments was minimized in the U.S. because of corporate reorgs that had them reporting to ByteDance leadership in Beijing, rather than TikTok leadership.
• TikTok said it removed 33.6 million fake accounts in the past quarter, a 61% increase from the 20.8 million accounts it removed in the prior quarter. TikTok’s fake account removal rate has grown by more than 2,000% over 12 months.
• Meta is testing a new interface that allows users to more easily create, manage and switch between multiple Facebook and Instagram accounts. When logged into either Facebook or Instagram’s app, users will be able to toggle between the two apps now through the profile menu.
• Meta said all Facebook and Instagram users in the U.S. can now share NFTs and cross-post between both apps, after announcing the start of the rollout last month.

Image Credits: Meta

• Snapchat is going to pay out $100,000 to creators across 12 Spotlight Challenges from October 3 through the end of the month. Most will focus on Halloween or fall themes and will be used to help promote Snapchat features.
• Twitter said Elon Musk has failed to provide Signal messages, with Marc Andreessen, relevant to the case involving Musk’s attempt to exit the $44 billion acquisition. It also said Musk’s own data scientists had estimated Twitter spam at 5-11% of users. Meanwhile, other court filings provided insight into Musk’s conversations ahead of the deal, including exchanges with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, revealing that Dorsey had wanted to give Musk a board seat.
• Twitter rolled out a redesigned DM experience on Android, catching up to iOS with an improved composer, better forwarding, clearer read receipts and more.

Photos

• Adobe says the company will integrate its new acquisition Figma into other Adobe tools, but will not change its UI and will keep its freemium model.

Messaging

Image Credits: WhatsApp

• WhatsApp rolled out a way to share links for video calls, similar to apps like FaceTime or Zoom. The new link is found under the calls tab and can be sent to family and friends so they can tap to join the call. The company additionally confirmed it’s now testing 32-person encrypted video calls as well.
• Intel announced the Unison app that allows Intel PC users to text, take calls and send files to their iOS and Android devices. The app will launch with 12th-gen PCs this fall.
• The U.S. SEC and CFTC fined 16 financial firms $1.1 billion and $710 million in penalties, respectively, for employees’ use of unauthorized messaging apps. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America were among those fined.

Dating

• The NYT examined the dating market in China, where the number of apps with over 1,000 downloads grew to 275 in 2022, up from 81 in 2017 and have received $5.3 billion in funding in 2021, up from $300 million in 2019. Despite a nationwide crackdown on tech, the dating app market has been allowed to flourish, the report found.
• Dating app Inner Circle launched a new group of anti-ghosting features called “The Date Conscious Suite.” The toolset includes things like anti-ghosting reminders, end conversation options, closure messages, pinned conversations and decision prompts.

Streaming & Entertainment

• An iOS 16 bug appears to be impacting videos recorded in Cinematic Mode, which are no longer recognized by iMovie and Final Cut Pro, users are reporting.
• YouTube added support for narration voiceovers for Shorts on iOS, copying another popular feature from TikTok’s app.
• Even the NBA app is copying TikTok. The updated app includes a “For You” vertical video feed that offers highlights from NBA games and behind-the-scenes footage, content from influencers, NBA clips and more.
• Deezer launched a new technology called SongCatcher music ID, which can search for songs based on humming, whistling and singing.
• Twitter rolled out podcasts to its Twitter Blue subscribers on Android after first launching the feature on iOS a few weeks ago.

Gaming

• Google is shutting down its cloud-based game streaming service Stadia. The service allowed users to stream games across platforms, including Chromecast Ultra, Android TV, computers, Google Chrome’s browser, Chromebook and Chrome OS tablets, the Stadia app for Android phones and on iOS via a progressive web app. Subscribers will have access to their games library through January 18 and refunds will be issued. The company says it will apply Stadia’s technology to other areas, including Google Play, YouTube and AR in the future.
• Netflix is establishing an internal games studio based in Helsinki, Finland, led by the former co-founder and general manager of the Zygna Helsinki game development studio, Marko Lastikka. The studio will be the fourth for Netflix, joining others including Next Games, Night School Studio and Boss Fight Entertainment, each designed to develop games catering to different tastes.
• India’s financial crimes agency searched the premises of Coda Payments India, the distributor of Sea’s Free Fire — a game banned by the government earlier this year over its China ties. The Enforcement Directorate said it searched three premises as part of an “ongoing investigation” into the distributor.
• Android’s share of hypercasual game advertising spending reached a record high of 57%, according to a report from Tenjin.
• Walmart launched metaverse experiences in Roblox, including Walmart Land and Walmart’s Universe of Play, designed to reach younger shoppers. The virtual worlds let Roblox players collect new virtual merchandise, play games featuring toys and characters, earn toys from a blimp, attend live concerts, win fashion competitions and more.

Image Credits: Walmart

Health & Fitness

• YouTube announced a new feature called “Personal Stories” that will appear in search results when users enter health-related queries. When people now search for certain health conditions on the app, YouTube will display a panel featuring videos from people who are diagnosed with those disorders.

Utilities

• Microsoft says it will end support for the predictive keyboard app SwiftKey on iOS and remove it from the App Store on October 5 but will continue to support the app on Android.
• Apple’s Dark Sky weather app has been removed from the App Store. The app was supposed to be available through January 1, 2023, according to a prior notification display in the app, making its removal ahead of schedule. The app’s technology had been merged into Apple’s own Weather app following the acquisition.

Government & Policy

• South Korean antitrust officials raided Apple’s offices in the country to investigate allegations raised by mobile game developers that Apple is actually taking a 33% cut of their business, due to the way it handles the local sales tax — or VAT (value added tax).
• TikTok is facing a $29 million fine in the U.K. for “failing to protect children’s privacy.” The U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) provisionally said the company breached child data protection laws for a two-year period by processing data for kids under 13 without parental consent, among other things.
• The North London Coroner’s Court has concluded that social media, including content on Instagram and Pinterest, played a role in the death of a 14-year-old British girl, who died by suicide in November 2017. The coroner will now compile a report laying out the concerns, which will be shared with the government and Ofcom, which will be responsible for regulating content under the Online Safety Bill.

Security & Privacy

• Researchers found 75 apps on Google Play and 10 on the App Store that were engaging in ad fraud. The apps collectively had 13 million installs before their removal by the app stores.
• WhatsApp warned users of a critical vulnerability, now patched, that could impact users on older versions of the app that haven’t been updated. The bug could allow an attacker to execute their own code on a victim’s phone.

Funding and M&A

Milan-based developer Bending Spoons, makers of apps like Splice and Remini, raised $340 million from Italian banks Intesa Sanpaolo and Banco BPM, plus Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort Holdings, the former CEO of Vimeo Kerry Trainor, and others.

Scout, a mobile app that helps Gen Z invest in cars, food, games and other “themes,” raised $2.6 million in seed funding led by Chingona Ventures. The app is iOS only for now. It doesn’t charge transaction fees, but rather a subscription of $1/mo. for users with less than $1,000 AUM or 1% of AUM for larger accounts.

Solvo, a new fintech app allowing users to invest in cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency-related financial products, raised $3.5 million in seed funding from Index Ventures and others. The app, launching in October, was founded by two former Revolut employees and will feature 10 cryptocurriences to start.

A new group camcorder app, Studio, raised $3.3 million in seed funding led by GV for an app that allows groups of friends to privately share everyday videos in albums.

Triller said it raised $310 million from Luxembourg-based investment group Global Emerging Markets ahead of its IPO. The company, however, is not obligated to draw the entire amount — it can issue stock to investors on each draw, as needed.

This Week in Apps: Google goes visual, Twitter copies TikTok, OG app drama by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch