Android development these days runs on a monthly cadence, so it’s no surprise that about a month after Google announced the first developer preview of Android 13 (codenamed ‘Tiramisu,’ as Google occasionally calls it in its developer documentation) it has now launched the second developer preview.

These previews typically still have a lot of rough edges and are meant for developers, so like with the first preview, there is no over-the-air installation option (though if you installed the first preview, you will get the second as an over-the-air update). Google has made system images available for the Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 4a, Pixel 4 XL, and Pixel 4, as well as the Android Emulator.

While the first preview gave us a bit of a glimpse of the user experience in Android 13, today’s update mostly focuses on developer features.

Image Credits: Google

The one exception here is that users will definitely notice that apps will now have to ask for permission to send you notifications (though while Google highlights this today, this has been a known feature of Android 13 for a while). Just like with other permissions, apps now have to ask you if they can send notifications and this is an opt-in process. If you’ve ever installed an app which then immediately sends you a plethora of notifications, you’ll love this. Developers, on the other hand, will have to make sure they give plenty of control and context for users to get them to opt in.

Talking about permissions, developers can now also downgrade their apps’ permissions when they don’t need them anymore. Android 13 will feature a new API that lets them easily do this.

The new version of the operating system will also introduce a new feature that ensures that apps won’t be able to receive messages from other apps unless that’s something the developer explicitly wants.

Also new in this preview is support for the MIDI 2.0 standard (musicians rejoice), which will now allow you to connect MIDI 2.0 hardware to Android devices over USB, as well as support for Bluetooth LE Audio, which will bring features like the ability to share and broadcast audio to others, as well as subscriptions to public broadcasts for information and accessibility — and, as the name implies — it’ll use less power.

Android 13 will also support vector fonts that adhere to the COLRv1 format and Google is moving its system emoji to this format as well. Since these are vectors, their file sizes are smaller and can be rendered at any size without getting pixelated.

COLRv1 vector emoji (left) and bitmap emoji

For those using non-Latin scripts, Android 13 now improves the display of languages like Tamil, Burmese, Telugu, and Tibetan by adapting the line height for each language to prevent clipping. And for those who use phonetic lettering input methods for languages like Japanese and Chinese, Android 13 now introduces a new text conversion API so a Japanese user could type in Hiragana and immediately see Kanji search results live, skipping over today’s more convoluted four-step process.

Google is giving its default messaging app a big upgrade, the company announced today. The Messages app, which comes pre-installed on most Android phones, will gain a number of new features with the update. Most notably, it will address the long-standing issue where iMessage’s “Tapbacks” weren’t delivered as emoji reactions, but were rather sent as a separate message. It’s an annoyance that’s made chats between Android and iPhone users confusing, cluttered and far too noisy.

Other coming updates include nudges to remind you to reply to messages you missed, separate tabs for business and personal messages, reminders about birthdays you may want to celebrate, support for sharper videos via a Google Photos integration, and an expanded set of emoji mashups, among other things.

After the update, reactions from iPhone users will be sent as an emoji on text messages on Android. As on iMessage, the emoji reaction — like love, laughter, confusion, or excitement — will appear on the right side of the message. (On Android, it’s the bottom right.) This feature is first rolling out to Android devices set to English, but additional languages will follow.

Image Credits: Google

These improved reactions were already available to beta users of the Messages app, but Google had not yet said when they will become available to the public. Testers had noted that Android’s interpretation of which emoji to use varies slightly from iPhone, however. For instance, the “heart” reaction on Android becomes the “face with the heart eyes” emoji. And the iMessage’s exclamation mark reaction becomes the “face with the open mouth” emoji.

Google is also integrating Google Photos into the Message app to improve the video sharing experience. While the modern RCS standard allows people with Android devices to share high-quality videos with each other, those same videos appear blurry when shared with those on iPhone, as iMessage doesn’t support RCS. By sending the link to the video through Google Photos, iPhone users will be able to watch the video in the same high resolution. This feature will later include support for photos, too.

This addition aims to push Apple to adopt the industry standard by shaming the company over video quality.

Google thus far has been very vocal about Apple’s decision to avoid supporting RCS — largely because RCS adoption would allow Google to better compete with Apple’s iMessage. But Google is not wrong when it points out that Apple is not serving its own customers very well by having iMessage fall back to the older standard of SMS, which is less secure. (An odd choice for a privacy-focused company like Apple claims to be.)

The lack of support also leads to all sorts of inconsistencies when messaging. For instance, when texting another iPhone user, iMessage users can see typing indicators, use read receipts and view high-resolution media. Those features would work when communicating with Android users if iMessage supported RCS, but Apple has chosen not to, which leads to a poor experience for its own customers.

Apple, to some extent, benefits by making SMS the “worse” experience, as this can help with ecosystem lock-in. But critics argue that decisions like this have led to iMessage failing as a global messaging champion; users worldwide have turned instead to third-party messaging apps — like WeChat, Messenger, Telegram, and WhatsApp — in part because Apple chose not to compete on Android, or even keep up with the baseline features for modern-day messaging.

Meanwhile, Google Messages’ upgrade is raising the bar when it comes to how a default messaging app could work, at least in terms of consumer convenience — though in Google’s case, more efforts need to be made to protect user privacy. Still, it’s good to see steady improvements to just one app, instead of the rollout of yet another — as had been the case with the company’s scatterbrained messaging strategy in previous years.

Image Credits: Google

In addition to the above fixes, which are focused on solving problems related to Apple’s continued use of SMS, Messages will also now automatically sort messages into Personal and Business tabs in the app, so you can more easily find the messages you need. Plus, to reduce the clutter, you can set it so one-time password messages will automatically disappear after 24 hours. This feature was available already in India and is now coming to the U.S.

The app will also help you maintain your relationships better, by nudging you if you forgot to respond to a text or reminding you if it’s your friend’s birthday. (It will only know this if you’ve saved their birthday info in your contacts app.) The nudges will first roll out to English users worldwide.

YouTube links sent through Messages will now include a preview of the video right in the conversation.

Finally, Google updated its Emoji Kitchen feature in its Gboard keyboard, which allows you to mashup two different emoji to make your own. Now, this selection is bigger with over 2,000 new mashups available as stickers. Gboard’s on-device Grammar Correction feature is also arriving for all of Android, after having first launched on Pixel devices.

Image Credits: Google

The new Messages app features are one of the highlights across a number of other Google product updates rolling out today, including include improvements to Android widgets, Google TV, Google Photos, Nearby Share, Android Auto, Accessibility features, and more.

Google in October announced a preview of Android 12L, a version of the Android operating system designed specifically for large-screened devices. Today, Android 12L is officially becoming available, offering features that will make it easier to use Android on tablet devices. The software will begin to roll out to supported devices from Samsung, Lenovo and Microsoft starting later this year, Google said.

The idea with Android 12L was to tailor Android for users on tablets and foldable devices larger than 600sp with an updated user interface, multitasking enhancements and improved compatibility support so apps would offer a better experience by default when run on bigger-screened devices.

With Android 12L, for example, the notification shade takes advantage of the expanded space by showing Quick Settings and your Notifications in a two-column layout. The lock screen also uses a two-column layout to show your notifications and clock. Other built-in system apps, like Settings, are also optimized for the bigger screen, so you can make changes without having to go in and out of each section. Some key interactions have changed, too — like putting the PIN controls and lock screen pattern off to the side of the screen for easier reach.

Image Credits: Google

Android 12L addresses foldables with an optimized home screen grid and a polished fold-unfold transition, Google notes.

12L also adds a new taskbar for launching and switching between apps, while gesture navigation helps users do things like flip through recent apps, reveal or hide the taskbar, enter split-screen mode and swipe up to go home. Users on Android 12L can now drag and drop apps directly into split-screen from the taskbar or use a new “Split” action in the overview to start split-screen mode. That means you can watch a YouTube video while you read the news, search the web in the Chrome browser or use Google Maps, for instance. (Split-screen mode wasn’t new, to be clear, but now it’s easier to access in Android 12L and doesn’t require the developer to opt in to support the mode.)

And 12L offers visual and stability improvements to Android’s compatibility mode for apps that are not yet optimized for large-screen devices.

Image Credits: Google

The updated version of Android follows other improvements Google has made to Android tablets in recent years, which included the launch of a Kids Space in 2020, which is essentially a “kids mode” on tablets; and an Entertainment Space, launched last year, which offers a one-stop shop for all your content, including movies, shows, books, games and video — all in one destination.

While Android 12L is similar to its Apple counterpart, iPadOS, in that it also aims to address the needs of tablet owners, Google stopped short of actually forking Android into a separate operating system as Apple did with iOS and iPadOS.

The official launch of Android 12L arrived alongside the latest Pixel Feature Drop, the update that brings Google’s Pixel devices the latest set of new features. In this tenth feature drop, Google has added Night Sight support Snapchat, Live Captions for phone calls, language expansions for Live Translate, and other additions.

Facebook attempted a return to its roots as a college-focused social network with the fall 2020 launch of Campus, a private section within Facebook that was only open to those with an @.edu email address. However, the initiative didn’t succeed, as Facebook is now alerting users that Campus will fully shut down on March 10.

Through an in-app message, Facebook is informing users that its Campus pilot will close down and that Campus profiles, groups, posts and other data will be deleted. Ahead of its shutdown, users will be able to view their data and download it using an export tool, the message noted.

“Since we launched the Campus pilot, it’s been our mission to help bring college communities closer together. But we’ve learned that the best way to support students is through Facebook Groups,” the message explains.

Social media consultant Matt Navarra told TechCrunch he had been alerted to the closure by several Campus users and posted a screenshot of the message to Twitter. Other Campus users had also noted the planned shutdown and the accompanying plans to delete the data. But very few had commented on the loss — an indication, perhaps, of Campus’ lack of traction.

Originally, Facebook had presented Campus as a way to appeal to make the social network appealing to younger people by offering college students a private place where they could connect with classmates, join groups, learn about upcoming campus events, get updates from their school’s administration, and chat with others.

With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was also a sense that Facebook could potentially capitalize on the fact that many students had shifted to virtual learning to drive adoption of its online college network.

However, Campus was not offered as a fully separate app — it was accessible from the “More” section alongside other Facebook verticals, like Watch, Dating, Gaming, News, and others. This may have made it feel more like a part of Facebook itself, rather than a truly private network.

Image Credits: Facebook

Facebook had marketed the feature on its platform — sometimes too aggressively, users complained. One Twitter user in 2021 had remarked how they were being pushed to join Campus, even though they were faculty, not a student, for instance. As of mid-2021, the feature had become available to 60 total U.S. colleges and universities, after 30 more schools were added to the service. And even as early as this January, Facebook Campus expansions were underway as local outlets were reporting school additions, as with UNC Charlotte, for example.

Currently, the pilot program has 204 schools on board, Facebook told TechCrunch.

A company spokesperson noted the original idea for Campus came about because students were already using Facebook Groups for their college, and Facebook wanted to explore if a dedicated product could better serve this use case. But ultimately, Facebook realized Groups worked better.

The spokesperson also confirmed the decision to shut down Campus, noting:

“We’ve decided to end our pilot of Facebook Campus. We learned a lot about the best ways to support college students, and one of the most effective tools to help bring them together is Facebook Groups. We’ve notified students in the test schools that Campus will no longer be available, and have suggested relevant college Facebook groups for them to join.”

As Finland mulls joining Nato in the wake of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, another bit of M&A is going down in the country. Today Netflix announced that it would be acquiring Next Games, a developer of mobile games in the country for a total value of €65 million ($72 million). Next Games is listed on the public markets in Helsinki, and the deal is being done as an all-cash share purchase at €2.10 in case per share. The board of the gaming company has already approved the deal and is recommending it to shareholders although it has yet to be completed but is expected to close in Q2 2022.

The deal is part of Neflix’s bigger strategy to build out its gaming content as a complement to its video catalogue and Next Games is a perfect fit. THE free-to-play mobile games publisher already has developed titles related to some of Netflix’s biggest draws, such as Stranger Things and The Walking Dead — meaning the two companies already had a strong relationship. This deal will cement that, and improve Netflix’s margins beyond simply licensing the brands, by bringing Next Games’ IP, talent, and existing business selling in-app purchases, in house.

“Next Games has a seasoned management team, strong track record with mobile games based on entertainment franchises, and solid operational capabilities,” said Michael Verdu, VP of games at Netflix, in a statement. “We are excited for Next Games to join Netflix as a core studio in a strategic region and key talent market, expanding our internal game studio capabilities. While we’re just getting started in games, I am confident that together with Next Games we will be able to build a portfolio of world class games that will delight our members around the world.”

Next Games had 120 employees at the end of 2021 and its last annual results showed €27.2 million in revenues 2020. Some 95% of its sales came from in-game (in-app) purchases that year. Now it will have more investment to double down on existing titles and build out more on Netflix’s catalogue.

Teemu Huuhtanen, who founded Next Games in 2013 and is its CEO, is an alum of Finland’s extensive gaming ecosystem, which has played a big role in breaking new ground in gaming over the years. Right before Next Games, he was an exec at Rovio, the Angry Birds publisher (this was at a time when it was still a formidable presence on app stores). Before that he was at Sulake for about a decade. spent almost a decade at Sulake, a trailblazer in the online virtual worlds category with the creation of Habbo Hotel (now called Habbo, having weathered many a controversy in intervening years).

“We have had an unwavering focus to execute on our vision: to become the partner of choice for global entertainment businesses and craft authentic and long-lasting interactive entertainment based on the world’s most beloved franchises,” said Huuhtanen in a statement. “Joining forces with the world’s largest streaming service, Netflix, presents an opportunity for a logical and exciting continuation of our strategy to craft interactive experiences for the world to enjoy. Our close collaboration with Netflix on Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales has already proven that together we create a strong partnership. This is a unique opportunity to level-up the studio on all fronts and continue on our mission together.”

For all its size, Netflix has only made a handful of acquisitions over the years — five in all according to CrunchBase data. Next Games is its first specifically in gaming, although the others include a visual effects studio, two interactive content makers for younger audiences, an anime comics publisher and the Roald Dahl estate, so arguably, there’s been a gaming angle in its M&A strategy all along.

And at a time when companies like Disney can continue to pull the rug from under Netflix’s by yanking away key video content to improve the selection on their own streaming video platforms, this is also one way for Netflix to fertilize its own walled garden. Buying something like Next Games underscores a strategy to produce or buy in its own exclusive work, and now build out bigger franchises based on it across multiple screens and experiences.

Jolla, a Finnish startup that develops a mobile Linux-based alternative to Google’s Android which has had some take-up by the Russian government in the past, is looking to restructure its business to jettison links to the Russian state.

We reached out to the startup earlier this week to ask if it was concerned about the impact of looming EU sanctions on Russia — given how, since 2018, it has counted Russian telecom company, Rostelecom, as a strategic investor.

“We have actually ramped down business and exports to Russia already in 2021,” CEO and co-founder Sami Pienimäki told TechCrunch. “Thus, the potential tech sanctions would not impact Jolla’s business anymore. In parallel, Jolla is growing in particular rapidly in the automotive sector, and it formed already significant part of our 2021 revenues.”

“In regards the ownership, that is correct, and something we’re looking to re-structure during this year,” he also confirmed.

Sailfish has been certified in Russia for government and corporate use since 2016.

The following year its local licensee in the market, a company called Open Mobile Platform, could be heard gleefully touting a “totally Google-free” debut Sailfish device for the Russian market at the annual Mobile World Congress conference.

Then in 2018, Russian press reported that Rostelecom was seeking regulatory clearance for the acquisition of a 75% stake in Open Mobile Platform and an entity called Votron, which was reported to own a majority stake in Jolla. And that transaction appears to be how the Russian telco — which is partially state-owned — came to be the largest holder of Jolla shares.

But it’s an ownership structure that Jolla has now decided is no longer viable — creating a “difficult situation” which it implies has impeded its ability to grow in Europe.

That said, back in 2019 Jolla said it was concentrating the bulk of its energy on the Russia market — most likely as a result of its ownership ties to Russia. So it’s a huge reversal for the company to be pulling everything out just a few years later.

Although last summer Jolla announced it had finally hit profitability (in 2020). And, according to Pienimäki, it was growing significant revenue last year outside the Russian market.

In a statement posted to LinkedIn today (in Finnish), Samuli Simojoki the chairman of Jolla’s board, put more meat on the bones of its new goal of distancing itself from Russia — hinting that it’s hoping to find a buyer for the Rostelecom stake, potentially from the automotive sector, or perhaps by taking support from the Finnish government (if offered).

“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine forces each of us to evaluate our own actions in relation to Russia,” Simojoki writes [translated from Finnish using machine translation].

“It would be easy to say that you do not want to work for a company with such a significant indirect ownership by the Russian State. Jolla has for some time been looking for a shareholding structure that would provide a balanced ownership structure and significantly reduce Russian ownership… In the new situation, it is clear that the company has no future without a complete divestment of Russian ownership.”

Simojoki goes on to say that Jolla has already actively run down its Russian business during the past year — and “will not generate any revenue from Russia”.

“The only tie is therefore ownership,” he goes on, adding: “The company has some really interesting business openings in both the automotive and operating system sectors. Several European countries have long indicated that they would enter into cooperation without delay once the ownership structure is rectified.

“The company has an ongoing and positive dialogue with Finnish government representatives on these issues. One of Jolla Oy’s important partners is Daimler, and Jolla’s board of directors includes a Daimler representative. We have had an ongoing dialogue with Daimler in recent days about the situation, and Daimler’s representation on the board will be maintained.

“The aim is therefore to save the company through the ownership structure described above.”

One reason why Jolla may attract interest from the automotive sector is a new product it launched last year targeted at industries using embedded Linux-compatible platforms (such as car makers). This AppSupport for Linux Platforms product allows such systems to run Android apps without needing to license Google’s own automotive offerings.

Netflix helped change the game for microservices when it developed and the outsourced a tool called Conductor, initially built to handle its own extensive, multi-channel on-demand video traffic (and correspondingly complex codebase) globally, and later adopted by companies like Tesla, American Express, Github, Deutsche Telekom, VMware and some 150 other large organizations and others to manage their own services. Now the team behind creating Conductor are launching Orkes, a cloud-hosted version of the tool based on Conductor; and along with this, they’re announcing $9.3 million in funding to fuel the mission, as well as to support the continued growth of the open-source Conductor community.

Battery Ventures and Vertex Ventures are co-leading the funding, with angel investors in the round including Mahendra Ramsinghani and Gokul Rajaram and unnamed executives from different tech companies, including Amazon and Facebook.

Orkes (pronounced “or-kes”, a shorted form of “orchestration”) was co-founded by CEO Jeu George, co-CTOs Viren Baraiya and Boney Sekhbut, and CPO Dilip Lukose. The first three all worked together to build Conductor at Netflix, but then went their separate ways: George worked as a senior engineer at Uber; Baraiya led engineering for Firebase at Google; and Sekh headed up the payments for Robinhood. In 2021, the three reunited and were joined by Lukose (an alum of Microsoft Azure, where he’d worked with George), to start Orkes.

The reason for returning to Conductor and building a set of tools to sit on top of it was down to what George said were very clear market signals.

“We built Conductor as a general purpose engine and we could see many companies starting to use it. The space is now at an inflection point and organizations are moving to a microservices architecture,” George said in an interview. “But the wider idea now is to help operationalize that, and help with the management of the scale on top of this.” Since organizations often work in hybrid cloud environments, and across multiple coding languages, the idea with Orkes is to provide a set of tools to help manage that “out of the box,” he added.

Indeed, a discussion on the pro’s and con’s of Conductor on Hacker News, before Orkes came into being, highlighted some of the difficulties in implementing it in some environments, also pointing to the opportunity to fix that.

“When companies build microservices, they build them in their languages of choice, and typically might use multiple languages,” George said, typically with at least three languages in use, but sometimes more. “What is unique about Conductor and Orkes is that it’s fully language agnostic.”

The closed alpha, which has focused on cloud services, has been seeing positive responses, so the investment now will be used to continue building out Orkes’ engineering and go-to-market teams.

The rise of Orkes underscores a very common route these days for open source tools. Developers and engineers put a substantial amount of effort into building groundbreaking tools either inside existing organizations or as projects to solve very direct needs based on their own first-hand experiences, and in keeping with the ethos of how developers operate, and to build wider communities to support those tools in the longer term, they make them open source.

Those same developers often eventually return to those to build some of the most obvious and useful customizations to make them easier to use by a wider set of organizations that might not have the resources or people to implement the open source versions in such a user-friendly way. Of course, anyone can come along and create commercialized versions of open source tools (and for very mature tech it does happen that you might have competing commercial products built on top of them) but typically the founders of these startups are often the same people who helped build the open source tools in the first place: they’ve put more time and focus than anyone else and know the tool’s potential and pitfalls better than anyone else.

And investors like to back them for the same reason. (Another recent example following that same theme: Superconductive, from the creators of Great Expectations, recently raised $40 million.)

In the case of Conductor, the open source tool has a ripe body of existing users who are natural customers for Orkes, but the rise of the startup will open the door to a potential new set of users, too, or so the thinking goes.

A team at Google is today launching a new product for mobile app developers called Checks which leverages A.I. technology to identify possible privacy and compliance issues within apps, amid a rapidly changing regulatory and policy landscape. The freemium solution will be offered to both Android and iOS app developers of all sizes, who will be able to have their apps analyzed then receive a report with actionable insights about how to address the problems that are found.

Checks was co-founded by Fergus Hurley (GM) and Nia Castelly (Legal Lead), who developed the project over the past two years as a part of Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120. The Checks team had previously built tools like Android Vitals to address developers’ technical challenges, and had the idea to use A.I. to now address privacy compliance challenges, as well.

Today’s app developers have to keep up with a number of newer regulations and policies, from Europe’s GDPR requirements to new rules implemented by the app stores themselves. Meanwhile, consumers have become savvier about the trade-offs involved in using free software — they now often want to know to what extent an app respects their privacy, how their data is accessed, stored, or shared, and more. And even if a developer’s app plays by all the rules, an SDK the developer uses may not — or the SDK’s data-sharing behavior may change over time — presenting another compliance challenge.

Image Credits: Google

With Checks, the idea is to make achieving compliance an easier process than it is today. To use Checks, developers submit their app for a privacy compliance analysis, which involves both an automated review, and, on some tiers of service, a human review, as well.

To get started, Android app developers can log in using their Google account, then provide their Google Play app ID. They’ll then answer a few questions and verify their access. Checks will scan across multiple sources of information, including the app’s privacy policy, SDK information, and network traffic, to generate its report. The solution also takes advantage of advances the team made with using Natural Language Processing to scan an app’s privacy disclosures. After the scan completes, developers are presented with a report that provides clear, actionable insights about the problems found and lists of resources.

The free tier can be used for completing Google Play’s new Data safety section, while paid tiers — Core, Premium, and Enterprise — are designed to meet the needs of professional developers and larger businesses, including those who develop on iOS.

There are no technical requirements or prerequisites for using Checks, which runs its analysis on both physical and virtual devices.

The $249/month Core offering adds compliance monitoring for regulations like GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and proactive notifications about upcoming compliance requirements. Premium users ($499/month) can automate the monitoring of their app’s data-sharing practices and gain an understanding of SDKs, permissions, and where app data-sharing is taking place, among other things. Enterprise users (5+ apps and custom pricing) receive more frequent, advanced, and in-depth privacy checks, which include access to a compliance review team, plus custom analysis and testing flows, and more.

Checks says the data and reports it generates are not shared with the Google Play team.

The team gathered feedback from hundreds of app developers to build Checks then worked with 40 early adopters to test the product ahead of its launch. Testers included Headspace, Sesame Workshop, StoryToys, Carb Manager, Homer, and Lose It, among others.

Now, Checks is opening to a wider audience — interested developers can fill out the online form to register their interest on the Checks website.

Online language learning continues to be a huge opportunity for startups, with the most engaging experiences meeting a surge of interest from consumers looking for more productivity out of the hours that they spend on their smartphones. In one of the more recent developments, a language learning app called EWA — which has built a media-based approach to language acquisition, with excerpts from films and TV, and books, to familiarize learners with vocabulary and speaking — has passed 51 million downloads and picked up 3.5 million monthly active users, and now it has raised $2.7 million in its first outside funding.

EWA — pronounced “E-vah”, says co-founder and CEO Max Korneev — has been bootstrapped since being founded in 2018, and it’s been doing well on its own steam, with a current annual revenue run rate of $32.4 million, based on charging people along three tiers of usage. (The “freemium” part of the app is a three-day trial, but it also has an extensive presence on other social media channels like TikTok and Instagram, where it is essentially a content creator, with collectively millions of users learning languages informally from its posts. EWA English alone has more than 5 million followers.)

Korneev said the startup is now turning to outside funding now both to meet the growth demands it’s now facing as it scales, and also to hire more engineers to build out features that it has long wanted to have in the app, including more social elements, gamification hooks, and a wider set of languages, with the current list spanning English, Spanish, French, German and Italian.

The seed round includes participation from Day One Ventures, Elysium and angels, founders and executives from Semrush, Zynga, Niantic and Zynga. And from what we understand, EWA is already working on its Series A, a $30 million round that it will be raising at a $150 million valuation, with Softbank among the VCs talking to the startup. (I’ve reached out to Softbank for comment; Korneev declined to comment.)

Duolingo, which is now publicly traded with a market cap today of about $3.4 billion, has stolen a march on the online language learning market in part by making its app very sticky: users log in daily to keep learning streaks going and to stay at the top of their leagues, and they link up with people on the app that they might also know in the real world, tapping into natural competitiveness and turning that into habitual behavior. 

EWA’s unique selling point up to now has been how it has harnessed the vast world of online media in aid of its purpose. Users of the app have options to learn by reading well-known books, or excerpts from popular films and TV — the idea being that their familiarity with plot lines will give them a head start in making out what people are saying. It then bolsters that knowledge with word games.

The approach appealed to me personally because it reminded me of how my family and I learned English when we first came to the U.S. from Russia. (And no, the coincidence that Korneev is also Russian was not lost on me.) Korneev said that this was an intentional choice the company made to try something different and more attuned to our modern times to bring in a different kind of language learner.

“If you look at the self-education apps space, a lot of them copy the dynamics of a classroom, and more specifically old methologies, but these are just not effective anymore,” he said, pointing out that Duolingo’s own research has found that on average less than 1% of people ever finish an online language course. “People want to be entertained. So when we ask our users, why do you use EWA, they answer, because it’s entertaining. We combine that entertainment with education.”

It seems that my family is not the only one that took the “native media” approach to learning languages: this was also how Korneev learned different languages while working in IT.

“A lot of startups are born out of pain, and this is how EWA started, too,” he said. “I ended up watching films with subtitles and reading books with vocabulary on the side,” he said. “I saw that others were doing this, too, and it was helping them move forward with a language.” He was taken enough with the idea that he quit his job in IT to see if he could turn his own language learning approach into a business. He teamed up with other co-founders Stepan Nikitin, Anton Aleshkevich, and Stas Morozov, and thus EWA was born.

The startup has a mass of developers based out of Russia but EWA itself is officially based in Singapore — something that Korneev said was very much intentional because it’s hard at the moment (understandably) for Russian startups to raise money from western investors. Korneev, in keeping with this moment in time and the Covid pandemic that has changed how many of us work, describes the team as a remote workforce, with he himself splitting time between Singapore, Budapest and Barcelona.

RIP Mark Zuckerberg’s “time well spent“? In a move that appears to coincide with Facebook/Meta reporting slowing growth, photo-sharing app Instagram appears to have quietly removed the ability for mobile users to set a lower daily time limit reminder than 30 minutes.

Indeed, the app’s UX design nudges people to choose a three hour ‘limit’ (see screengrab below).

This daily time limit setting pops up a notification to the user once their app activity hits their preferred limit, reminding them to be conscious of how much time they are spending on the app — and maybe making it easier for them to choose to quit out of the app voluntarily.

Instagram’s daily time limit setting puts “3 hours” in the top slot — burying lower available limits (Screengrab: TechCrunch)

Previously the company supported a user-defined limit for Instagram that could be as low as 15 minutes — or even 10 minutes — per day, when it was making a big PR push to suggest that more ‘mindful’ usage of its services was possible, as concern over social media addiction surged.

But it seems the attention-loving adtech giant now wants Instagram users to spend longer eyeballing content feeds on the photo- and video-sharing platform where it can cash in by targeting them with ads. Which could be a result of pressure from the business side to eke out growth…

In its earnings earlier this month, Meta reported flat quarter-over-quarter usage for its eponymous app (Facebook) — and near flat growth for its other apps, which it wraps into a “family of apps” moniker, rather than breaking out Instagram, WhatsApp etc usage individually. (Daily active users of this ‘other apps’ category rose from 2.81BN in Q3 to 2.82BN in Q4; while monthly active users rose from 3.58BN in Q3 to 23.59BN in Q4; but usage of Facebook itself stayed entirely flat, quarter-over-quarter, at 1.93BN DAUs and 2.91BN MAUs.)

The disappointing Q4 results wiped 20% off the company’s value when they hit — which could be one reason why Meta’s growth teams may be seeing what levers they can tweak to drive engagement from existing users.

TechCrunch was alerted to the Instagram settings change by an tipster who shared screenshots of their account (see pics below) which show the company nudging them to “set a new value for your daily limit” — because, as it puts it, “the available daily limits are changing as part of an app update”. (Full marks to Meta for penning a sentence that fails to contain any meaningful explanation of why it’s making arbitrary changes to limit users’ control.)

This user had previously specified a 10 minute daily limit. However they’re now suddenly being informed this option is no longer available — and, presumably, any users who had not yet specified a daily limit or had picked a different (higher) limit would be unlikely to even realize that the 10 minute option had been deprecated.

And while Instagram’s notification to the user of this change to daily limits does state that they can retain their current 10 minute limit, the app uses blatant dark patterns to nag them into changing it — including by popping up a notification right above the 10 minute limit that’s indicated on their “time on Instagram” settings page, which further instructs: “This value is no longer supported. Please edit” — all of which is clearly designed to make them think they do actually have to switch to a higher limit.

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“My choice has gone away, and if I try and change it, my old minimum of 10 minutes triples to 30 minutes as the new minimum,” the tipster told TechCrunch.

The source, who preferred to remain anonymous, likened this silent switch to “a tobacco company saying you can limit your packs a day, as it takes away smaller packs”.

“They don’t force the change but if go into the edit screen as it tells you to, then you have to force quit the app to get out without changing it,” they added.

We’ve recently seen Facebook/Meta using a similarly manipulative persistent notification tactic when trying to push a policy update on WhatsApp users in the face of a major T&Cs backlash — which has led to an (ongoing) consumer protection probe in the EU. But the company has a long, ignoble history of this sort of stuff. So none of this is surprising. But ofc that doesn’t make it okay.

It’s getting harder for companies like Meta to pull the wool, though. Oversight bodies are wising up to dark patterns. See for example — again in European Union — lawmakers in the parliament who recently overwhelmingly backed putting explicit restrictions on such manipulative tactics into upcoming rules set to apply widely to digital platforms.

So the scope for platforms to profit off of cynically self-serving defaults (or “available” settings) looks to be shrinking.

Our tipster wasn’t sure exactly when the 10 minute option they had been able to select previously was discontinued — but they told us the app had been “nagging for a couple of weeks” to press them to “edit” the setting.

We also checked what we could see ourselves to confirm this change applied more widely than to a single Instagram user — and found that 30 minutes seems to be the new ‘norm’ for app users.

A US-based TechCrunch reporter found the app also only offers them 30 minutes as the lowest available daily limit.

As with the tipster, the top option this user was presented with in the list of available times — and thus the option they’re most likely to notice, from a UX design point of view — was “3 hours” (aka 6x 30 minutes).

Another UK-based TCer who checked their app could also only select 30 minutes as the lowest daily limit for the notification on their Instagram.

Interestingly, the picture looked different on the Facebook mobile app. There the options offered to a TechCrunch reporter based in France technically included “0 hours, 0 minutes” — although that did not work when selected. However they were able to select a 5 minute limit (rising in 5 minute increments thereafter) so it looks as if the 30 minute minimum may not have been applied to the Facebook mobile app by Meta (yet).

We were also able to confirm that another UK-based Facebook mobile app user could select a 5 minute minimum on that app.

We asked Meta to confirm any changes it has made to the Instagram daily limits setting — as well as putting a number of other related questions to it — but at the time of writing the company had not responded.

Facebook garnered a lot of press back in 2018 when, with concern surging over the impact of social media platforms on teenagers’ mental health — it announced it was giving Instagram and Facebook users new “time management tools” — which included the ability to set a (soft) daily time on usage.

Users would also be able to view a daily average of time spent on the mobile app, based on a week’s usage.

“We want the time people spend on Instagram and Facebook to be intentional, positive and inspiring,” Ameet Ranadive, product management director at Instagram and David Ginsberg, director of research at Facebook, wrote as they introduced the bundle of time management features.

“Our hope is that these tools give people more control over the time they spend on our platforms and also foster conversations between parents and teens about the online habits that are right for them.”

The feature launch was linked to a wider company push — starting around 2017 — when it appeared to engage publicly with concerns about the negative impacts of social media. However Facebook did so by seeking to reframe the narrative by suggesting any problems with usage are incremental and manageable (i.e. rather than existential for its attention-dependent business) — just so long as the user has “tools” to support what it dubbed “meaningful social interactions”.

Hence the flotilla of tweaks and “controls” Facebook/Meta went on to announce — offering self-serving ‘fixes’ to address concerns about social media with the aim of preventing users actually stopping the habit entirely.

Of course these controls rarely — if ever — actually put users in control.

Moreover the underlying content ranking algorithms actively undermine user autonomy by optimizing for profit-maximizing ‘engagement’ — as Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, went on to detail in hours of detailed testimony to lawmakers last year.

The Instagram daily time limit feature, for example, was a lot more mindfulness theatre than meaningful control right from the get go — since users just got a notification if/when they reached their desired daily time, rather than the app taking firmer action like actually locking them out until the next day.

As Haugen has testified, Facebook has demonstrated a systematic unwillingness to give up little slivers of profitability in service of a greater good (aka the welfare of its users/society) — up to and including, it now seems, letting Instagram users select a 10 minute soft limit on their usage. Which would allow for fewer ads to be served vs a 30 minute minimum — which means less profit for Meta…

So the company’s claim of trying to deliver ‘time well spent’ on its platforms looks to have past its sell by date: Another hollow publicity stunt to buy Fb time while its growth teams drum up new UX hacks to keep the eyeballs busy.

(On the flip side, it’s interesting to consider the recent popularity of viral word game, Wordle, whose creator suggested it should only be played for three minutes a day when he spoke to the BBC last month — while the app itself hard-limits the game to one puzzle per day.)

In any case, the debate about regulating powerful tech platforms has moved on considerably since 2017 — with tech giants like Meta now facing the prospect of hard limits on how they can operate, via incoming regulation such as the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Or the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code which seeks to safeguard the welfare of children by enforcing strict privacy defaults and standards, and imposing other restrictions such as time limits on when platforms can message child users. 

So if the secret of your ad-platform’s growth is dark pattern design and manipulative messaging — not to mention anti-competitive surveillance — then your investors do, certainly, have reasons for concern.

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

The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. App Annie says global spending across iOS, 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.

In addition, consumers are spending 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, App Annie noted. 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 and games to try, too.

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

Top Stories

Google introduced a “Privacy Sandbox” for Android

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Google this week introduced its take on Apple’s App Tracking Transparency system with the reveal of the Privacy Sandbox for Android. The system is based on the Privacy Sandbox initiative for Chrome, but isn’t going live anytime soon. Instead, Google says its current system will remain active for at least two more years while it runs tests.

Google — which makes a majority of its revenue from advertising let’s not forget — is going in a different direction than Apple did. Google even took a bit of a swipe at Apple when announcing the news, noting that “other platforms have taken a different approach to ads privacy, bluntly restricting existing technologies used by developers and advertisers.” It says this sort of approach is “ineffective” and leads to “worse outcomes” for user privacy and developers. Google then touted its system as one where it will work with the industry and developer community to balance the need for user privacy with businesses’ needs. (Not to mention Google’s own.)

The system, broadly, will involve phasing out the Advertising ID tracking feature, while still allowing advertisers to show personalized ads to groups of users with similar interests. This is based on Google’s work developing “Topics,” which offers users more control and transparency over the ads they see. It will also offer some level of attribution reporting to advertisers and a developer SDK. (A technical run-through is here.) Already, the system has support from Snap, Rovio, Activision Blizzard, Duolingo and others.

Google’s decision to engage in dialogue, rather than rolling out a policy change that disrupts the existing ecosystem, makes sense for the company because so many Android apps are free and ad-supported, compared with apps on iOS. Plus, Android serves as a gateway to serve ads, which benefits Google’s bottom line. In addition, Google pointed out that Apple’s approach can lead advertisers to turn to other, less visible means of tracking users which is bad for users, too. In fact, it says this is already happening, pointing to a study by ex-Apple engineers that backed up this opinion. The study showed how trackers built features to circumvent Apple’s ATT rules, making ATT something that only gives the illusion of privacy in the long run.

But critics have slammed Google’s plans as “toothless,” as an optional system for advertisers, and others noted that Google can’t even really do anything to prevent its competitors from running “effective ads on Android” since it’s already facing antitrust accusations of being an ad monopolist — which limits its ability to change things in this space. Then there’s the fact that Google’s announcement was more of a plan to create a plan (after much discussion) than it was any sort of definitive step forward. In the end, there isn’t much detail as to how all this works because there just aren’t details yet — they’re TBD. Meanwhile, Android user privacy remains unimpacted.

Crypto apps’ Super Bowl ads paid off

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

The Super Bowl ad spots paid off for a number of tech companies, not just in terms of exposure, but also app installs, a new report indicates. But Coinbase’s viral ad — which just bounced a QR code around on a black screen like the old DVD screensaver — outperformed the group, with installs jumping 309% week-over-week after the ad’s airing Super Bowl Sunday, February 13, and it continued to climb by another 286% the following day, according to Sensor Tower data.

Among the top five apps whose ads delivered strong download growth, three were crypto apps. In addition to Coinbase, crypto trading platform eToro grew app installs by 132% week-over-week on February 13, and by 82% on February 14. Meanwhile, Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, whose ad featured “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David, saw a 130% boost in downloads week-over-week on February 13, followed by 81% growth the next day. Collectively, Coinbase, eToro and FTX saw their U.S. installs grow by a collective 279% on February 13 compared to the week prior. This continued into the following day, when week-over-week download growth reached 252%.

Other apps that did well during the big game were sportsbook apps — but they may have seen downloads pop anyway!

App Annie rebrands to data.ai…for reasons

The company announced this week the new name will reflect its “vision to drive comprehensive digital performance with products and partnerships.” Arguably, it will also unlink the old brand name from the embarrassing news last fall which saw both the firm and its co-founder charged with securities fraud. App Annie and former CEO Bertrand Schmitt had to pay more than $10 million to settle the fraud charges related to its deceptive practices and making material misrepresentations about how its data was derived. The firm had used non-anonymized data to alter its estimates, and even directed engineers in China to manually update its estimates at times, before automating those adjustments to better match up with the actual — and confidential — revenue and download figures it had from clients. Oops! 

The new company name implies those days are behind it, as it references how it will fuel its digital insights using the power of artificial intelligence (AI). Related to this news, data.ai also announced a new reseller agreement with Similarweb that will allow the firm to offer a unified mobile and web market data set.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple/iOS

• Apple’s iOS 15.4 beta 3 and iPadOS 15.4 rolled out to developers and public testers ahead of the rumored March release. The beta is now prompting users to add an emergency contact in their Emergency SOS setting, if they don’t have one set up already, testers found. The beta also offers 37 new emoji symbols, and an update to Face ID that allows it to work when a face mask is worn.

Platforms: Google/Android

• Google is testing iOS-like app update progress indicators, XDA Developers reported. App icons in the launcher that are being updated or installed for the first time will appear greyed out with a progress bar around the app to indicate their install or update progress.
• Spotify released an internal tool called Ruler, which can be used to measure Android app size, to the broader community. To use Ruler, developers can apply the plugin to their project then run a single Gradle task.
• Google has been working on a way to stream apps and notifications from a Pixel phone to a Chromebook or PC, according to a report by 9to5Google, which tested it.
• Microsoft rolled out access to the Amazon Appstore Preview in Windows 11. The app store was previously available only to beta testers with a limited number of apps. It’s now more broadly accessible and offers access to over 1,000 apps and games, including Amazon’s Kindle, Clash of Kings, Coin Master, Lego Duplo World, The Washington Post and others. Now to see if there’s any demand…

Image Credits: Microsoft

Augmented Reality

• A new AR software platform called Perceptus from Singulos Research, profiled by Wired, acts as a layer above existing AR technologies like Apple’s ARKit or Google’s ARCore. App developers provide the 3D models it wants Perceptus to detect, and the platform uses ML to determine all the different ways these objects could be seen in the real world, to make identification easier and more accurate. It also runs locally on the device, which makes it suited for AR glasses down the road.

Crypto

• A recent blog post by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is making the rounds after The Verge called further attention to the issues it raised about the power the app stores have over its business. Among the key points are the fact that if having a mobile app presence is required, essentially, then the tech giants have the power to not just dictate the terms (like commissions paid), but also can moderate and deplatform businesses by making calls that go beyond the letter of the law. This is in conflict with Coinbase’s goal to offer a decentralized product, it indicates.

Social

• Instagram introduced private Story “likes,” which appear as hearts next to people’s handles in the Stories view sheet, instead of cluttering up the recipient’s DM inbox.
• Twitter launched Safety Mode into beta. The feature, which lets you automatically block trolls for a period of time while under attack, will now proactively suggest when it’s time to enable it.
• Snapchat will finally let users change their username starting on February 23. You’ll only be able to update your name once per year, however. Other social platforms have had this sort of feature for a long time.
• Snapchat also rolled out a live location-sharing feature for friends, and partnered with Ticketmaster to match users with live events nearby. And it introduced revenue sharing on ads placed inside Snap Stars creators’ Stories. 
• TikTok has been scooping up content moderators from companies used by rivals like Facebook, including Accenture, Covalen and Cpl, FT found. The company is luring them with better pay and corporate benefits packages. (The job itself still sucks, though.)
• Trump’s new Twitter-like social media platform, “Truth Social,” opened up to about 500 beta testers, according to Reuters. As of late Wednesday, Trump’s account had 317 followers.
• Glass, the Instagram alternative for photographers, launched Glass 2.0 with iPad support, six months after its public launch. The company said membership has been going well so far, but didn’t offer further details.

Messaging

• WhatsApp for iOS adds the ability to listen to your audio messages while you multitask by reading or replying to different chats. The update is available in version 22.4.75, shortly after the launch of the feature that lets you pause and resume while recording voice messages.
• Google Messages is now Samsung’s default messaging app in the U.S., starting with the Galaxy S22 series. Though the app had always been available, Samsung previously supported its own messaging app. The change will give RCS-powered messaging an expanded reach.

Dating

• Global spend on dating apps topped $4.2 billion in 2021, said App Annie, which has now rebranded as data.ai. That figure is up 95% from 2018 and represents a 30% increase over 2020.

Gaming

• India’s latest ban of Chinese apps included Garena Free Fire, backed by Tencent. The game had been downloaded more than 238 million times in the country, according to Sensor Tower data. However, the Free Fire Max, which launched in September 2021, was still available.

Health & Fitness

• The FDA cleared the first smartphone app for delivering insulin. The system comes from Tandem Diabetes Care and works with the company’s t:slim X2 insulin pump. Users will be able to program their doses via the app instead of the pump itself when the app arrives later this year.

Government & Policy

• Alan Davidson, the newly confirmed head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), told Axios his agency will be launching a review of competition in the mobile app ecosystem. The agency plans to release a report this summer to inform the Biden administration policy. Davidson said he’s interested in learning the challenges app developers are facing in the ecosystem, but the review also takes into account the privacy and security arguments made by app store operators like Apple and Google.
• Apple was fined again by the Dutch antitrust regulator for applying unreasonable conditions to the dating apps after its order that instructed Apple to allow support for third-party payments. Specifically, the regulator took issue with Apple’s condition that the companies would have to submit a separate app if they wanted to use an alternative payment system, which it said was “unreasonable.” This additional €5 million fine brings the total fines to date to €20 million.
• India banned more than 50 China-linked apps, including big names like Tencent’s Xriver, Garena’s Free Fire, NetEase’s Onmyoji Arena and Astracraft, in addition to Sweet Selfie HD, Beauty Camera, Viva Video Editor, AppLock and Dual Space Lite, which were clones or rebrands of the many of the more than 300 apps that had already been banned in the country due to escalating geopolitical tensions.
• Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) introduced the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require online platforms to give parents more tools to control their kids’ time online, including screen time tools, and those to protect their data, opt them out of autoplay, and control what sort of content they could see.
• California lawmakers also introduced a bill similar to the U.K.’s age-appropriate design code that would limit data collection from younger users, restrict targeted ads, and require age-appropriate design policies, among other things.

Security & Privacy

• Many in the security community aren’t buying the reports about TikTok bypassing iOS and Android device security to access “full user data.” Critics say the app’s use of dynamic code isn’t that scary or weird — it just means it’s partly a web app, which is standard on mobile platforms. The app’s access to user data is still limited by its permissions, and its ability to access clipboard data is now exposed thanks to an iOS update.
• A spyware dealer who sold WhatsApp-hacking technology has pled guilty, the Justice Dept. said. Mexican businessman Carlos Guerrero, who owns businesses in the U.S. and Mexico, sold signal jammers, Wi-Fi interception tools, IMSI catchers (aka “stingrays” which track a person’s phone) and tools that could hack WhatsApp messages.

Funding and M&A

Image Credits: Rainbow

Ethereum wallet app Rainbow raised an $18 million Series A led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six. The app offers a pleasant and colorful interface that’s helping it take on the top wallet app MetaMask with its broader consumer appeal.

Beem, an app that lets you livestream yourself in AR, raised a $4 million seed round. The company has been around since 2017 but originally did work for clients, like businesses and brands. It’s now more directly targeting consumers and developing a prototype for AR glasses.

Fitness app FitOn raised $40 million in Series C funding led by Delta-v Capital, and announced its plans to acquire Tampa-based corporate wellness platform Peerfit for an undisclosed sum. The LA-based company FitOn hit 10 million users in 2021 and offers workouts from a range of partners, including OrangeTherapy, Zumba, Kingry and others.

Music therapy app Spoke raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by Ada Ventures. The company employs artists, trained by a team of clinical psychologists, therapists and neuroscientists to produce music to help users achieve a desired mental state, it says.

Appboxo raised $7 million in Series A funding led by RTP Global for its platform that lets developers turn their apps into “super apps” either by building their own mini-apps or by accessing them from its marketplace. The company’s clients include GCash, Paytm and VodaPay, among others.

A conservative dating app called The Right Stuff raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Peter Thiel, according to a report by Axios. The app is expected to launch this summer in D.C. to an invite-only crowd to start.

She Matters’ app for Black women dealing with postpartum depression raised $300Kin angel funding while participating in the Techstars program, and is working to raise a seed round of $2 million.

Downloads

Shortwave

Image Credits: Shortwave

TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois took a look at a new startup called Shortwave, which aims to pick up where Google Inbox (RIP) left off. The email app is available on desktop (as a PWA), iOS and Android (beta). It’s designed to function as a “smarter” Gmail client that offers tools for turning messages into to-dos, pinning emails to the top of the inbox, grouping and categorizing conversions, replying to emails with GIFs, reactions, emoji, snoozing messages and more. The app is available for free but will target business users. It offers a Slack-like monetization feature, where users who want access to more than 90 days of email history will have to pay.  

Obscura 3

Image Credits: Obscura

The popular Obscura camera app released its latest version this week, which includes a number of new camera features, a refreshed design, improved performance and other changes. The apps’ exposure and focus controls are now controlled entirely by gestures, while haptics provide feedback to let you feel the control without having to look. The app’s capture modes have been updated to reflect the iPhone’s improved camera system, and now offers five separate modes. These include Photo (for fast shooting), Pro Photo (where you can control every aspect like focus, white balance, shutter speed and more), Depth (Portrait effect), Live Photo and an all-new Video mode — the first time the app has supported video capture. The app also added support for alternative aspect ratios, more white balance controls, manual exposure controls and other features. The new app is double the price of the prior version at $9.99, but also ships with a Watch companion, support for connecting controllers and will soon offer Widgets and support for iPad.

Spotify this afternoon announced two more acquisitions in the podcasts market, this time on both the measurement and analytics side of the business. The company is acquiring the podcast measurement service Podsights and the analytics platform Chartable for undisclosed sums.

Measurement and attribution are still two of the biggest, unsolved challenges for podcast advertisers, Spotify explained, which is what it hopes to address with the Podsights acquisition. Initially, Podsights’ technology will be used to help Spotify’s advertisers more accurately measure the impact and actions driven by their podcast ads. Over time, however, Spotify aims to expand the measurement tools to be able to other ad formats, including audio ads within music, video ads, and display ads.

Podsights has 40 full-time employees and all will join Spotify as one integrated unit. Spotify says it has no plans to adjust that team at this time.

Chartable, meanwhile, will be another addition to Spotify’s Megaphone, which was recently beefed up with a deal for a comapny called Whooshkaa, which allows radio broadcasters to convert their programming into podcasts. Chartable will integrate its audience insights and its promotional tools, SmartLinks and SmartPromos, with Megaphone so podcasters can learn more about their listener base and grow their business.

After Chartable is fully integrated into Megaphone, Spotify will deprecate the standalone Chartable platform. Until then, however, it will remain available to both new and existing publisher and advertiser clients.

This team is smaller, having only 11 employees, but Spotify isn’t planning to make any immediate changes here, either, it says.

There may be some concern that these previously independent firms will now be in-house at Spotify. But Spotify notes the Podsights team will operate independently from other service functions within Spotify for the foreseeable future in order to maintain trust with its clients, which include podcast brands and agencies.

Spotify’s name has been in the headlines in recent weeks related to its exclusive hosting of Joe Rogan’s podcast, which critics said is helping to spread Covid-19 misinformation. This backlash led several artists, including Neil Young, to pull their music from Spotify’s catalog in protest. But so far, the criticism hasn’t impacted Spotify’s broader plan to invest in podcasts and podcast technology, as it believes the medium has the potential to drive revenue for its business in the longer term.

“We believe we’re still in the early chapters of digital audio and the opportunity for advertising in this space remains significant,” said Dawn Ostroff, Chief Content & Advertising Business Officer at Spotify, in a statement. “Our acquisitions of podcast technology players Podsights and Chartable are important steps in our pursuit of taking digital audio to the next level, underscoring the powerful impact it delivers for advertisers and publishers, respectively.”