TikTok announced its midterms Elections Center will go live in the app in the U.S. starting today, August 17, 2022, where it will be available to users in more than 40 languages, including English and Spanish.

The new feature will allow users to access state-by-state election information, including details on how to register to vote, how to vote by mail, how to find your polling place and more, provided by TikTok partner NASS (the National Association of Secretaries of State). TikTok also newly partnered with Ballotpedia to allow users to see who’s on their ballot, and is working with various voting assistance programs — including the Center for Democracy in Deaf America (for deaf voters), the Federal Voting Assistance Program (overseas voting), the Campus Vote Project (students) and Restore Your Vote (people with past convictions) — to provide content for specific groups. The AP will continue to provide the latest election results in the Elections Center.

The center can be accessed through a number of places inside the TikTok app, including by clicking on content labels found on video, via a banner in the app’s Friends tab, as well as through hashtag and search pages.

Image Credits: TikTok

The company also detailed its broader plan to combat election misinformation on its platform, building on lessons it learned from the 2020 election cycle. For starters, it launched this in-app Election Center six weeks earlier than in 2020. It’s ramping up its efforts to educate the creator community about its rules related to election content, as well. This will include the launch of an educational series on the Creator Portal and TikTok, and briefings with both creators and agencies to further clarify its rules.

Much of how TikTok will address election misinformation has not changed, however.

On the policy side, TikTok says it will monitor for content that violates its guidelines. This includes misinformation about how to vote, harassment of election workers, harmful deep fakes of candidates and incitement to violence. Depending on the violation, TikTok may remove the content or the user’s account, or ban the device. In addition, TikTok may choose to redirect search terms or hashtags to its community guidelines, as it did during the prior election cycle for the hashtags associated with terms like “stop the steal” or “sharpiegate,” among others.

Image Credits: TikTok

The company reiterated its decision to ban political advertising on the platform, which extends not only to ads paid for through its ads platform but also to branded content posted by creators themselves. That means a political action committee could not work around TikTok policies to instead pay a creator to make a TikTok video advocating for their political position, the company claims.

Of course, just important as the policies themselves are TikTok’s ability to enforce them.

The company says it will use a combination of automated technology and Trust and Safety team people to help drive moderation decisions. The former, TikTok admits, can only go so far. Technology can be trained to identify keywords associated with conspiracy theories, that is, but only a human would be able to understand if a video is promoting that conspiracy theory or working to debunk it. (The latter is permitted by TikTok guidelines.)

Image Credits: TikTok

TikTok declined to share how many staffers are dedicated to the job of moderating election misinformation, but noted the larger Trust and Safety team has grown over the past several years. This election, however, will be of increased importance as it follows shortly after TikTok shifted its U.S. user data to Oracle’s cloud and has now tasked the company with auditing its moderation policies and algorithmic recommendation systems.

“As part of Oracle’s work, they will be regularly vetting and validating both our recommendation and our moderation models,” confirmed TikTok’s head of U.S. Safety, Eric Han. “What that means is there’ll be regular audits of our content moderation processes, both from automated systems…technology — and how do we detect and triage certain things — as well as the content that is moderated and reviewed by humans,” he explained.

“This will help us have an extra layer and check to make sure that our decisions highlight what our community guidelines are enforcing and what we want our committee guidelines to do. And obviously, that builds on previous announcements that we’ve talked about in the past in our relationship and partnership with Oracle on data storage for U.S. users,” Han said.

Election content can be triggered for moderation in a number of ways. If the community flags a video in the app, it would be reviewed by TikTok’s teams, who may also work with third-party threat intelligence firms to detect things like coordinated activities and covert operations, like those from foreign powers looking to influence U.S. elections. But a video may also be reviewed if it rises in popularity in order to keep TikTok’s main feed — its For You feed — from spreading false or misleading information. While videos are being evaluated by a fact checker, they are not eligible for recommendation to the For You feed, TikTok notes.

The company says it’s now working with a dozen fact-checking partners worldwide, supporting over 30 languages. Its U.S.-based partners include PolitiFact, Science Feedback and Lead Stories. When these firms determine a video to be false, TikTok says the video will be taken down. If it’s returned as “unverified” — meaning the fact checker can’t make a determination — TikTok will reduce its visibility. Unverified content can’t be promoted to the For You feed and will receive a label that indicates the content could not be verified. If a user tries to share the video, they’ll be shown a pop-up asking them if they’re sure they want to post the video. These sorts of tools have been shown to impact user behavior. TikTok said during tests of its unverified labels in the U.S. that videos saw a 24% decline in sharing rates, for instance.

In addition, all videos related to the elections — including those from politicians, candidates, political parties or government accounts — will be labeled with a link that redirects to the in-app election center. TikTok will also host PSAs on election-related hashtags like #midterms and #elections2022.

Image Credits: TikTok

TikTok symbolizes a new era of social media compared to longtime stalwarts like Facebook and YouTube, but it’s already repeating some of the same mistakes. The short-form social platform wasn’t around during Facebook’s Russian election inference scandal back in 2016, but it isn’t immune from the same concerns about misinformation and disinformation that have plagued more traditional social platforms.

Like other social networks, TikTok relies on a blend of human and automated moderation to detect harmful content at scale — and like its peers it leans too heavily on the latter. TikTok also outlines its content moderation policies in lengthy blog posts, but at times fails to live up to its own lofty promises.

In 2020, a report from watchdog group Media Matters for America found that 11 popular videos promoting false pro-Trump election conspiracies attracted more than 200,000 combined views within a day of the U.S. presidential election. The group noted that the selection of misleading posts was only a “small sample” of election misinformation in wide circulation on the app at the time.

With TikTok gaining popularity and mainstream adoption outside of viral dance videos and the Gen Z early adopters it’s known for, the misinformation problem only stands to worsen. The app has grown at a rapid clip in the last couple of years, hitting three billion downloads by the middle of 2021 with projections that it would pass the 750 million user mark in 2022.

This year, TikTok has emerged as an unlikely but vital source of real-time updates and open source intelligence about the war in Ukraine, taking such a prominent position in the information ecosystem that the White House decided to brief a handful of star creators about the conflict.

But because TikTok is a wholly video-focused app that lacks the searchable text of a Facebook or Twitter post, tracing how misinformation travels on the app is challenging. And like the secretive algorithms that propel hit content on other social networks, TikTok’s ranking system is sealed away in a black box, obscuring the forces that propel some videos to viral heights while others languish.

A researcher studying the Kenyan information ecosystem with the Mozilla Foundation found that TikTok is emerging as an alarming vector of political disinformation in the country. “While more mature platforms like Facebook and Twitter receive the most scrutiny in this regard, TikTok has largely gone under-scrutinized — despite hosting some of the most dramatic disinformation campaigns,” Mozilla Fellow Odanga Madung wrote. He describes a platform “teeming” with misleading claims about Kenya’s general election that could inspire political violence there.

Mozilla researchers had similar concerns in the run-up to 2021’s German federal election, finding that the company dragged its feet to implement fact-checking and failed to detect a number of popular accounts impersonating German politicians.

TikTok may have also played an instrumental role in elevating the son of a dictator to the presidency in the Philippines. Earlier this year, the campaign of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. flooded the social network with flattering posts and bought influencers to rewrite a brutal family legacy.

Though TikTok and Oracle are now engaged in some sort of auditing agreement, the details of how this will take place are undisclosed, nor to what extent Oracle’s findings will be made public. That means we may not know for some time to what extent TikTok will be able to keep election misinformation under control.

Streaming media platform Plex, already an expansive service for personal media, free streaming TV, and new content discovery, is venturing into a new area with today’s launch of a new feature, Discover Together. The friends-focused feature is laying the groundwork to develop Plex as not just a streaming hub, but a streaming community. Initially, this includes the ability to add friends and see what they’re watching, bookmarking and how they’re rating shows and movies.

Over time, Plex plans to leverage community engagement to help power its recommendations and, potentially, allow for streamers to engage in discussions around favorite content. This could help the service better compete with online TV communities like TV Time, which combines a TV show tracker with active discussions around shows, movies, and individual episodes.

At launch, however, the Discover Together feature will remain fairly private. Plex users can fill out their profile on the app with information about their Plex Pass status, location, and more, then add friends individually using their Plex email or username. There is no address book upload or contact matching feature built-in at this time. Users can also choose which parts of their in-app activity they want to make visible to friends. Items including their Watchlist, Watch History and Ratings can each be set to either Private or Friends Only depending on what parts of your Plex usage you want to share.

Even if you set all items to be visible to friends, you can still hide select activities on an individual basis from the Discover section’s Activity feed. Here, you’ll tap on the three-dot menu next to items you’ve watched, watchlisted, or rated to hide them, if you choose. (So, for instance, if you don’t want your friends to know you’ve been binging your way through cheesy reality TV shows, you can remove those from being seen in their feeds, while keeping track of your episode viewing privately.)

Image Credits: Plex

After adding friends on the service, you’ll be able to scroll through the Activity feed to see what shows and movies they’ve been watching, saving and rating. Plex is considering a feature that would display your friends’ ratings on a show or movie’s title page, as well, alongside the Rotton Tomatoes ratings. But for the time being, the app will simply highlight if a friend has engaged with a title in an area below the “Add to Watchlist” button. You can click on that banner to see a curated stream of your friends’ activities with the show or movie in question.

Image Credits: Plex

From the Activity feed, you can communicate privately with friends through an in-app messaging feature available from a chat icon below their posts. This isn’t meant to be a fully-featured messaging client, but rather a way to send a quick text about the movie or show, which they can reply to. You can also share a title and a message directly with a friend or even a group of friends by clicking the Share icon on the title’s page in the app.

Image Credits: Plex

While in the past, Plex has launched its new features to all users in a more public format, it’s rolling out the beta test of Discover Together by announcing it in its forums and allowing users to opt-in. This way, Plex can ramp up the number of users for the feature more slowly, as each new user will need to invite their friends to the service to get started.

The feature is being beta tested on the web, iOS, and Android. It follows a major update to the streaming media platform this April which delivered a number of new additions including a universal watchlist, cross-service search and new discovery features — including the new Discover section where the Discover Together feature is now housed.

Plex believes the long-term potential for its community features will allow it to turn its app into a more social experience and a second-screen companion for TV viewing.

“One of the early goals…is to start sharing and getting recommendations from friends,” explains Plex co-founder and Chief Product Officer Scott Olechowski. “That’s how so many recommendations are made and shared in the real world and there’s just no concrete platform for doing that today. Our belief is that it should be integrated into the experience,” he continued.”It should just feel part of the fabric of the ecosystem.”

Snapchat today is rolling out its first set of parental controls, after announcing last October it was developing tools that would allow parents to gain better visibility into how their teens used the social networking app. The update follows the launches of similar parental control features across other apps favored by teens, including Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

To use the new feature, known as Family Center, parents or guardians will need to install the Snapchat app on their own device in order to link their account to their teens through an opt-in invite process.

Once configured, parents will be able to see which accounts the teen is having conversations with on the app over the past seven days, without being able to view the content of those messages. They’ll also be able to view the teen’s friend list and report potential abuse to Snap’s Trust & Safety team for review. These are essentially the same features TechCrunch reported earlier this year were in development.

Parents can access the new controls either from the app’s Profile Settings or by searching for “family center” or related terms from the app’s Search feature.

Snap notes the feature is only available to parents and teens aged 13 through 18 as the app is not meant to be used by younger users. The launch comes on the heels of increased pressure on social networks to better protect their minor users from harm both in the U.S. and abroad. This has led big tech companies to introduce parental controls and other safety features to comply with E.U. laws and expected U.S. regulations.

Other social networks have introduced more expansive parental controls compared with what’s available at launch from Snapchat’s Family Center. For example, TikTok allows parents to set screen time controls, enable a more “restricted mode” for younger users, turn off search, set accounts to private, restrict messaging as well as who can view the teen’s likes and who can comment on their posts, among other things. Instagram also includes support for time limits set by parents alongside its parental controls.

Snap, however, points out that it doesn’t require as many parental controls because of how its app was designed in the first place.

Image Credits: Snap

By default, teens have to be mutual friends to begin communicating — so there’s a reduced risk of them receiving unwanted messages from potential predators. Friend lists are private and teens aren’t allowed to have public profiles. In addition, teenage users only show up as “Suggested Friends” or in search results when they have mutual friends in common with the user on the app, which also limits their exposure.

That said, parents’ concern over Snapchat isn’t limited to fears of unwanted contact between teens and potentially dangerous adults.

At its core, Snapchat’s disappearing messages feature makes it easier for teens to engage in bullying, abuse and other inappropriate behavior, like sexting. As a result, Snap has been the subject of multiple lawsuits from grieving parents whose teens committed suicide. They claim that Snap’s platform helped facilitate online bullying, which has since led the company to revamp its policies and limit access to its developer tools. It also cut off friend-finding apps which had encouraged users to share their personal information with strangers — a common avenue for child predators to reach younger, vulnerable Snapchat users.

Sexting has also been an issue of multiple lawsuits. Most recently, a teenage girl initiated a class-action lawsuit against Snapchat which alleges its designers have done nothing to protect against the sexual exploitation of girls using its service.

Image Credits: Snap

With Snapchat’s new Family Center, the company is giving parents some insight into teens’ use of the app — but not enough to fully prevent abuse or exploitation, as it favors maintaining the teen’s privacy.

For parents, the ability to view a teen’s friends’ list doesn’t necessarily help them understand if those contacts are safe. And parents don’t always know the names of all their teens’ classmates and acquaintances, only those of their closer friends. Snap also doesn’t allow parents to block their teens from sending photos to friends privately, nor has it implemented a feature similar to Apple’s iMessage technology which automatically intervenes to warn parents when sexually explicit images are being sent in chats. (Though it does now tap into CSAI Matching technology to remove known abuse material.)

The Family Center also offers no controls over if and how their teen can engage with the app’s Spotlight feature, a TikTok clone of short videos. Nor can parents control whether or not their teen’s live location can be shared on the in-app Snap Map. And parents can’t control who their teens can add as friends.

The company’s Discover section is ignored by the parental controls, as well.

In a Congressional hearing last year, Snap had been asked to defend why some content in its Discover section was clearly aimed at adults — like invites to sexualized video games, articles about going to bars or those about porn, and other items that seemed out of sync with the app’s age rating of 13+. The new Family Center offers no control over this part of the app, which includes a sizable amount of clickbait content.

We’ve found this section consistently features intentionally shocking photos and medical images  — similar to the low-value clickbait articles and ads you’ll see smattered across the web.

At the time of writing, a quick scroll through Discover uncovered various articles designed to frighten or alarm — at least three articles featured photos of giant spiders. Another was about a parent who murdered her children. One story focused on Japan’s suicide forest and another was about people who died at theme parks. There was also a story of a teacher caught “cheating with” (its words) a 12-year-old student — a truly disgusting way to title a story about child sexual abuse. And there were multiple photos of rare medical conditions that should probably be left to a doctor’s viewing, not shown to younger teens.

Snap says a future update will introduce “content controls” for parents and the ability for teens to notify their parents when they report an account or a piece of content to Snap’s safety team.

“While we closely moderate and curate both our content and entertainment platforms, and don’t allow unvetted content to reach a large audience on Snapchat, we know each family has different views on what content is appropriate for their teens and want to give them the option to make those personal decisions,” a Snap spokesperson said of the upcoming parental control features.

The company added it would continue to add other controls after gaining more feedback from parents and teens.

A popular anonymous social app that was misleading its users with fake messages has been forced to change. The top-ranked app NGL, which became the No. 1 app on the U.S. App Store in June, quietly rolled out an update yesterday that sees it now informing users when they receive messages that aren’t from their friends — as users had been previously led to believe. Before, NGL sent these fake messages as a means of creating engagement, then charged for “hints” about the message’s sender.

The app has also now lowered its subscription pricing, which promises to reveal details about who is behind the anonymous messages.

NGL is one of a handful of anonymous social apps that had recently shifted their attention to Instagram after Snapchat cracked down on apps of this nature using its developer tools, as part of Snap’s broader efforts to reduce harm to minors.

To use NGL, users would tap a button in the app to copy a unique URL they could share with friends and followers across the web.

Image Credits: NGL App Store listing

While Snap could prevent direct integrations with its own developer tools, NGL users could still copy and paste the special link into their Snapchat Stories or wherever they chose — like Twitter or any other app. However, a “Share” button in the app made it easy to post directly to Instagram Stories. Then, when others saw the link on their friend’s Story or post, they could click it to anonymously ask that person a question. These questions would appear as messages in NGL’s in-app “Inbox” for users to read and respond to.

However, NGL had a trick up its sleeves. If users didn’t get any engagement on their shared link, the app itself would generate messages automatically. Users had no real way of knowing that these messages were actually fake questions the app was sending them. But many suspected that was the case as the questions sounded like things their friends wouldn’t ask. (We confirmed the messages were fake by generating an NGL link but not sharing it. We then received messages).

NGL’s app reviews have been filled with complaints that its questions seemed to be coming from bots. What’s worse, the app developer was charging users for “hints” to learn more about who was asking the question. This means users were paying, in some cases, for hints about bots!  This could be considered fraud. (We’d advise impacted users to request refunds from Apple.)

The NGL app got its ideas from rival Sendit, a similar social app that also offers a variety of Snapchat games. In fact, Sendit’s maker is now suing NGL for stealing its ideas — the NGL developer previously worked on Sendit before realizing the potential in simply cloning the idea and raking in the money himself. As it turns out, there is some business to be had here. By July, NGL had topped 15 million downloads and had pulled in  $2.4 million in revenue by selling its subscriptions.

TechCrunch had called out NGL for its misleading tactics and, apparently, someone was listening. (Actually, we do understand there was a discussion between the developer and Apple about this). NGL has not commented.

Yesterday, NGL issued an update that now sees it labeling its fake messages with a tag that reads “sent with from the NGL team.” This is meant to indicate the message is not from a friend but from the app itself. (Arguably, the wording could be clearer. Some users — particularly among its target market of young adults —  could interpret this tag to mean the message is simply being delivered by the app.)

These messages also don’t show a subscription prompt. In addition, the subscription cost was lowered a bit, from $9.99/week to $6.99/week and now includes other features beyond “hints.” For instance, it touts users will get “early access” to exclusive games besides the anonymous Q&A. One of the paid games is already included — an anonymous confessions game.

The app’s rival Sendit’s Q&A feature had worked in much of the same way and it, too, just updated its subscription. Now, instead of just charging for hints, Sendit “Diamond members” can reveal the name and Bitmoji of the sender (in some cases), access exclusive games, unlock a custom icon and remove ads from the experience, the app claims. However, its pricing still remains $9.99 per week.

Though the viral buzz around these apps has since died down a bit, they still remain highly ranked. NGL is the No. 9 app on the U.S. App Store’s Lifestyle charts and Sendit is No. 12 among Social Networking apps.

Although the mobile app boom driven by pandemic lockdowns has long since passed, consumers’ mobile usage is still growing. According to new data released today by app intelligence firm data.ai (previously App Annie), consumers in over a dozen worldwide markets are now spending four to five hours per day in apps.

While the daily time spent in apps varies by country, there are now 13 markets where users are spending more than 4 hours per day using apps. These include Indonesia, Singapore, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Russia, Turkey, the U.S. and the U.K. And, in three of those markets — Indonesia, Singapore, Brazil — mobile users are spending more than 5 hours per day in apps.

Image Credits: data.ai

While the growth in app usage has slowed a bit from the second quarter in 2020, it’s worth noting that two years ago was the height of Covid lockdowns which drove app usage to spike across all categories as users worked, shopped, banked, gamed, as well as studied and attended meetings, school and events from home.

Still, the data suggests the pandemic may have led to longer-lasting impacts on app usage. It seems mobile consumers who adopted new apps and behaviors during the pandemic may have kept at it, despite the so-called “return to normal” in 2022.

Illustrating this point, some markets saw significant gains in app usage over the past two years. In the second quarter of 2020, Singapore users were spending 4.1 hours in apps. Now that’s grown to 5.7 hours, the report says. In Australia, users went from 3.6 hours to 4.9 hours from Q2 2020 to Q2 2022.  Both represent a 40% rise in time spent.

Other markets saw slower growth including Indonesia (+10%), India (+5%), Japan (+5%), Canada (+20%), Russia (+10%), the U.S. (+5%), U.K. (+5%), China (+5%), and Germany (+10%). A few markets saw no growth or a bit of a slowdown, such as Mexico (0%), Turkey and Argentina (both at -5%) — but again, comparisons to peak Covid timeframes indicate that trends are simply normalizing to pre-Covid levels.

The firm’s report also included the top ranked apps and games for the second quarter, which saw Instagram in the top spot worldwide by downloads and TikTok at No. 1 by consumer spend, in terms of non-gaming apps. Facebook was still No. 1 by monthly active users, ahead of WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, TikTok, Telegram, Amazon, Twitter, Spotify and Netflix.

Image Credits: data.ai

Notable movers in the quarter included Indian e-commerce app Meesho, which jumped to No. 8 by downloads; the multiplayer party knockout game Stumble Guys, which rose 23 places; and hyper casual game Fill The Fridge, which moved up 84 places. Meanwhile, Pokemon Go saw a boost in usage thanks to the new season that launched on June 1 ahead of the Pokemon Go Fest  in early June.

Spotify is updating its app to address a long-standing user complaint with music playback — but it’s asking customers to pay for the fix. The company announced today it will introduce, at last, a separate Play Button and a Shuffle Button at the top of albums playlists to make it easier to play the music the way you like. This will replace the combined button available before, which had been inconsistent across platforms and frustrating to use. However, streamers may be disappointed to find out that what should be an app update in favor of better usability is oddly being sold to them as a reason to upgrade to Spotify’s paid tier — the company says the new button is only being offered to Spotify Premium subscribers.

This seems a bizarre choice given that customer complaints had correctly identified an issue with the overall design of the Spotify app’s interface and its user experience. As one review posted last year to Spotify’s Community forums had noted, the button offered was even different across Spotify’s apps. On mobile, playlists had the combined Shuffle/Play button, but on the desktop, the button was just a regular Play Button. This was confusing for users who switched between platforms, the post pointed out. The user suggested Spotify simply offer two separate buttons so people could choose how they wanted to stream music, instead of having to tap into Now Playing screen to enable or disable Shuffle mode.

The post received 647 upvotes and pages of comments from others who agreed. It was not the only complaint of this nature on the forum site. Others posted similar requests for separate Play and Shuffle buttons or even different solutions to the same problem. For example, one person asked Spotify to allow users to configure which button appeared in the app to make it a user’s choice.

Spotify has been working on this problem for awhile. It first introduced the Shuffle/Play icon in 2020 to reduce streaming to just a click, it said, and last year made Play Button the default button on all albums for Spotify Premium users (at Adele’s request, as you may recall). With this upgrade, the Play Button will remain the default, and Shuffle will be a separate option across the mobile Spotify experience.

While arguably a minor change to the app — it’s literally just a button — it’s clearly a feature that was in need of a fix in users’ minds not a premium offering. Other major music streaming apps, like Apple Music and Amazon Music, already include separate Play and Shuffle buttons, for instance.

It’s uncommon for app makers to charge for something like a different button, especially when the reason for the change is because users were unhappy with the app’s functionality and design. One somewhat related example could be Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, which allows users to customize the bottom bar of the app with buttons of their choosing. But in that case, the option is more about personal preference and quick access to favorite features — not usability. Even without paying, Twitter’s features are still easy to get to in the main navigation on the left side of the app.

Spotify tells us the idea to charge for the button has to do with how it perceives the benefits associated with a Premium Subscription. At its core, Premium users are paying for the option to listen to any song they want, on-demand. The button is somewhat of an extension of that, as it’s allowing users to choose to listen on-demand in any way they want.

Google today announced that it is adding a new movie editor and a few new video editing features to Google Photos, but for now these new features will only be available in the Android app running on Chromebooks. No word on when these features are coming to other platforms or why Google decided to go this way.

It’s worth noting that you could obviously already manipulate single videos in Google Photos before, using what is essentially the same set of editing tools as for photos. More recently, Google also added an AI-based movie creation tool that mostly focused on automatically creating themed movies for you, with a very basic set of features to manually edit them.

Now, however, with the new movie editor, you’ll be able to combine multiple videos on a single-track timeline, add title cards and musing and create basic movies within just a few minutes. Like with similar tools, you’ll be able to easily trim your clips and adjust their brightness and contrast (no LUTs here, though, of course). And while Google will continue to offer its own themes, you will be able to build movies from scratch as well (and, of course, add photos to them, too).

Image Credits: Google

As Google notes, for users who need more power, LumaFusion is bringing its far more powerful video editor, which is currently only available on iOS, to Chromebooks as well.

There seems to be a trend here, with Adobe’s venerable Lightroom photo tool also adding video features recently. Maybe that’s no surprise, though. A lot of people now record far more videos than ever before and the popularity of platforms like TikTok and Instagram’s pivot to video is surely only accelerating this trend. Meanwhile, editing video remains far harder than just posting a photo and slapping a filter on it, so there’s plenty of room for a consumer platform like Google Photos to make things easier.

Image Credits: Google

In addition to the new movie editor, Google is also bringing a few other updates to Chromebooks in the new few weeks. Chrome OS will now feature light and dark themes, for example, with transitions between them timed for when the sun sets or rises. There’s also a new version of the Gallery app, which will now feature PDF editing, and a deeper integration between the Chromebook shelf and your Google calendar (Google somehow only refers to these features as coming to Chromebooks and doesn’t mention Chrome OS anywhere in its announcement). For those of you who use virtual desks (I’m not organized enough to think about even one desk, let alone multiple ones), you’ll now be able to save and close an entire desk and then reopen it when you’re ready to resume your work there.

It’s been a long time coming, but Google Cloud today announced its first Arm-based VMs, following AWS, with its Graviton instances, and Azure, which also recently launched Arm VMs. But while AWS built its own custom chips, Google Cloud is following Azure’s lead here by using chips from Ampere. These new VMs, which are now in preview, will join Google Cloud’s line of Tau VMs under the ‘Tau T2A’ moniker. This line launched almost exactly a year ago, using AMD Milan processors, to offer a better price/performance ratio.

“We are excited to extend the rich choices we already offer with Intel and AMD and enter the Arm ecosystem to provide our customers with even more choice and flexibility. We have support for a broad ecosystem of operating systems, databases, programming languages and other tools,” Sachin Gupta, Google Cloud’s VP and GM for infrastructure, said in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement.

The new chips will come in pre-defined SKUs with up to 48 vCPUs, each with up to 4GB of memory. The VMs will offer up to 32 Gbps of networking bandwidth and support the usual range of storage options available in the Google Cloud ecosystem. Google says these CPU specs will make these machines useable for a wide range of workloads, including as web servers and for running containerized microservices, data-logging applications and more.

Like the AMD-powered Tau chips, Google sees these as its price-performance optimized solutions. A 32-core Tau T2A VM in Google Cloud’s us-central1 region will cost $1.232 per hour, for example. 

Users will be able to use the likes of RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu and Rocky Linux on these machines, in addition to Google’s own Container-Optimized OS for running containerized applications. At this point, Arm support has become table stakes for most OS and software vendors, which in turn also greatly enhances the usefulness of these VMs (and those of Google’s competitors).

The new VMs are now available in a small number of regions, including us-central (Iowa – Zone A, B, F), europe-west4 (Netherlands – Zone A, B, C) and asia-southeast1 (Singapore – Zone B, C), but will come to other data centers over time.

“Ampere Altra Cloud Native Processors were designed from the ground up to meet the demands of modern cloud applications,” said Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer, Ampere Computing. “Our close collaboration with Google Cloud has resulted in the launch of the new price-performance optimized Tau T2A instances, which enable demanding scale-out applications to be deployed rapidly and efficiently.”

In addition to using these VMs as part of Google Cloud’s Compute Engine, Google also now supports them as part of its Kubernetes Engine, the Dataflow stream and batch processing service and Batch, a new fully managed job scheduler for batch job Google is also launching today. “This new capability will benefit major use cases for throughput-oriented computing such as weather forecasting and electronic design automation,” said Gupta. “The primary purpose of this new service is to offer unprecedented flexibility in time, location and cost of cloud capacity for batch jobs.”

TechCrunch is more than just a site with words. We’re also building a growing stable of podcasts focused on the most critical topics relating to the startup and venture capital worlds. To help you find the right show for your interests, we’ve compiled our audio output from the week.

Embedded below is the latest from Chain Reaction, our stellar crypto-focused podcast hosted by Lucas and Anita. You will also find Found, a long-form bit of work that goes deep on the real saga of company formation, from Jordan and Darrell. There’s an audio-only version of TechCrunch Live hosted by Matt that features founders and investors discussing successful pitch decks. Finally, there’s Equity, TechCrunch’s long-running, Webby-award-winning podcast focused on venture capital and the latest startup news, hosted by Natasha, Mary Ann and Alex.

And if you are more into the written over the spoken word, well we have newsletters on the above topics as well.

The TechCrunch Podcast

Episode 7: Crypto community or crumbling cult? And other TC news

This week on the TechCrunch Podcast our host, Managing Editor Darrell Etherington talks with Jacquelyn Melinek about the power and pitfalls of crypto communities and Devin Coldewey about why Pornhub’s COO and CEO have unceremoniously stepped down. And as always, you’ll get a rundown of the week’s top news on TechCrunch.

Articles from the episode:

• Crypto’s emphasis on community could lead followers off a cliff
• CEO and COO of Pornhub parent company MindGeek abruptly resign

Other news from the week:

• Twitter to expand into long-form content with upcoming Twitter Notes feature 
• FDA orders Juul to stop selling its vaping products in the US
• Meta to roll out new monetization tools on Instagram and Facebook, including a creator marketplace

Chain Reaction

Episode 12: Doodles CEO on expanding their cartoon NFT empire (w/ Julian Holguin)

The TechCrunch Live Podcast

Episode 9: Forethought AI’s CEO explains the pitch deck that won Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2018

Found

Episode 64: Christine Tao, Sounding Board

Christine Tao knows good leaders have good executive coaches. She founded Sounding Board to make it easier for companies to manage, scale, and measure leadership coaching on one unified platform. This week, she talks to Darrell and Jordan about difficulties she and her co-founder faced while fundraising and how they established the customer type that made scaling possible.

Take our listener survey and let us know a bit about yourself and what you think of FOUND.

Connect with us:

• On Twitter
• On Instagram
• Via email: found@techcrunch.com
• Call us and leave a voicemail at (510) 936-1618

Equity

Episode 526: Understanding the not-so-fine print of 2022 term sheets

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha asked: What’s in the fine print for term sheets these days, and what does that tell us about who is going to be in control during the downturn? 

The question was inspired by a recent story by Becca Szkutak – one of TC’s newest venture reporters – about how deal terms look different in a downturn. Of course that means we had to bring on Szkutak to talk about her story and dig into a further analysis of how founder friendliness is being challenged right now. Expect a tactical episode all about different terms that may start sneaking into term sheets, the cost benefit analysis of each, and why down rounds aren’t the end of the world.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/21/deal-terms-look-different-in-a-downturn-heres-what-to-watch-out-for/

Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PDT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

Episode 533: Leverage, red flags, and a changing venture landscape

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest, boldest and baddest technology news. This week we are not recording on a Tuesday as it’s a regular week. Though we would add that Equity will be live on Thursday, when we record our Friday episode. So if you wanted to come hang, make sure that you are following the show on Twitter.

Right, so what did we get into this morning?

• Stocks are generally up, major cryptos are not doing too much this morning, and a Coinbase downgrade caught our eye.
• Backstage Capital is laying off staff as it focuses on only investing into existing portfolio companies. With less capital than before going to Black founders, seeing a fund that focused on investing into underrepresented founders struggle is a bummer.
• The Strapi startup round was a fun one to look at, fusing open-source tech and CMSs, a tool that we use here at TechCrunch rather often.
• And then there is the mess at Digital World Acquisition Corp., the SPAC that wants to merge with former American President Trump’s digital media company. It’s in trouble with regulators.
• The chaos did not start there, however. 3AC is in default (like Russia!), the BlockFi rescue deal had internal pushback, Klarna may only be worth $10 billion, MilkRun loses lots of money, and we’re learning more about how India’s government is going after Twitter.

So, a great way to start the week. We kid. Chat soon!

Episode 532: All this startup news, and we didn’t even talk about Juul

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Today Natasha and Alex were on the mics, kicking back and riffing through the biggest technology stories of the week. Our dear Mary Ann was off this week, but will be back in short order.

What did we get into? A bevy of blistering bromides, naturally:

• Accel has a new $4 billion fund, focused on the late-stage, which is at once a pile of duckets and a fascinating timing for such a large capital vehicle.
• FalconX doubled its valuation in a new round, which was also a huge pile of money at an odd moment in time.
• Oh, and Suze Orman was also on the show today, in spirit and story.
• From there we noodled on the big changes at Brex, the latest in executive turnover, and why the metaverse actually had some good news this week?

All in all it was a good time and we are back Monday!

Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PDT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts

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

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

Image Credits: Google

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

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

Image Credits: Google

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top Stories

Instagram to verify users’ ages in new test

Image Credits: Instagram

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

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

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

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

Twitter goes long form

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

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

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

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

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

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

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

E-commerce

Image Credits: Twitter/Shopify

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

Augmented Reality

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

Fintech

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

Social

Image Credits: Twitter

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

Messaging

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

Photos

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

Dating

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

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Spotify

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

Gaming

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

Health & Fitness

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

Travel & Transportation

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

Image Credits: Apptopia

Government & Policy

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

Reading & News

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

Security & Privacy

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

Funding and M&A

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

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

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

Downloads

WatchTube

Image Credits: WatchTube

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, it appears that Spotify may be changing course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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