Mobile

To celebrate the premiere of HBO’s highly anticipated “Game of Thrones” prequel, “House of the Dragon,” HBO Max is partnering with Snap to give users access to in-app AR experiences. For the show’s premiere on August 21, Snap and HBO Max are releasing a new selfie and worldview Lens, along with Landmarker Lenses, that let

The dream to find out what actually happened on your favorite show last week, spill the tea with the Real Housewives or learn about your favorite artists’ creative process is now underway as Cameo launches a new feature, Cameo Live. This new 10-minute video calling feature allows users and their friends to have a live

Facebook this year has been struggling to maintain its position among the Top 10 apps on the U.S. App Store, according to an analysis of iPhone App Store data. As younger consumers shift to newer social networking experiences like TikTok and now BeReal, the tech giant’s big blue app has lost traction in the App

Apple today is introducing two new subscription-focused podcast charts today to showcase popular paid shows. The two new charts — Top Subscriber Shows and Top Subscriber Channels — will be available to users in the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia on iPhone, iPad, and Mac using iOS 15.6, iPadOS 15.6, and macOS 12.5 or later.

Amazon is the next company in line to try to generate engagement from a TikTok-like social feed. The e-commerce giant joins the a laundry list of companies that have had the same idea: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Spotify, Netflix … what’s next, a vertical video feed on the IRS app that tracks

Netflix’s upcoming ad-supported tier could have a big drawback — besides the fact that your programming will be interrupted by commercials, that is. One of the streaming service’s more useful features, offline viewing, may not be available to members on this low-end tier of the service. This discovery came about when developer Steve Moser found

Highbeam, a New York-based neobank built for people building e-commerce brands on marketplaces like Shopify and Amazon, raised $7 million in seed funding to continue developing banking tools that cater to these entrepreneurs’ needs. The one-year-old fintech startup, started by Samir Shergill and Gautam Gupta, provides banking features, access to transparent credit and cash management

Analyzing data generated within the enterprise — for example, sales and purchasing data — can lead to insights that improve operations. But some organizations are struggling to process, store and use their vast amounts of data efficiently. According to an IDC survey commissioned by Seagate, organizations collect only 56% of the data available throughout their

Oracle has begun auditing TikTok’s algorithms and content moderation models, according to a new report from Axios out this morning. Those reviews began last week, and follow TikTok’s June announcement it had moved its U.S. traffic to Oracle servers amid claims its U.S. user data had been accessed by TikTok colleagues in China. The new

After testing new in-app podcast recording tools for users in New Zealand, Spotify is now trialing a new audio feature in Vietnam, one that’s designed to encourage users to record voice reactions to playlists. A Reddit user posted screenshots of the feature, showing how they received a prompt to react to a playlist with a

A new report from Bloomberg indicates Apple may be expanding its advertising business beyond the App Store and other first-party apps like News and Stocks. This plan could see Apple introducing ads into other pre-installed, first-party apps like Apple Maps, where ads have already been explored internally, the report claimed. And later, Apple may roll

Dating app maker Bumble revealed more of its plans to strengthen its social networking features during last week’s Q2 earnings, which saw the company’s shares slump over its lowered financial outlook despite delivering a revenue beat. Now, new images show what Bumble has been developing as part of the larger revamp of its “Bumble BFF” friend-finding

Mobile apps have to be bug-tested across countless devices to ensure they work as intended. Users don’t look kindly on poor experiences — 88% say they’ll abandon apps based on minor glitches, according to software testing vendor Qualitest (which admittedly has a horse in the race). Testing is a time-consuming and expensive process, with 31%

Over the past year, Samsung recognized something we’d known all along: The clamshell form factor makes sense. It’s something those of us who are old enough to remember a pre-smartphone era are wired to appreciate. It’s small, it fits in your pocket, it opens up and gets bigger. That’s not to take away from the

Google has been sanctioned A$60 million (around $40 million+) in Australia over Android settings it had applied, dating back around five years, which were found — in a 2021 court ruling — to have mislead consumers about its location data collection. Australia’s Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) instigated proceedings against Google and its Australia subsidiary

Amazon’s cash-cow cloud division AWS has launched a new service designed to help companies deploy their own private 5G networks — eventually, at least. AWS first announced AWS Private 5G in early preview late last year, but it’s now officially available to AWS customers starting in its U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. East (N. Virginia), and

As Google continues the great merger between its Duo and Meet video communications apps, the company today announced that it’s introducing new Apple SharePlay-like live-sharing features to Meet, making it easier for call-participants to engage with content together in real time. It’s worth noting that Google already introduced some live-sharing features (e.g. watching YouTube videos

Happy unofficial foldables week! An increasingly rare bright spot in the broadly struggling smartphone space, manufacturers are looking toward the emerging form factor to help kickstart them out of the doldrums. Following announcements by Xiaomi and category-leader Samsung, Motorola returned this week with the latest version of the revived Razr brand. The latest version of

Sharing a meme with someone you just met can be tricky, especially if you’re trying to flirt with them. Are they into wholesome puppy memes? Or maybe they like dark Homelander memes? Whatever the case may be, Schmooze, the meme-based dating app, is designed to match users with like-minded people who want to make each

Portal, the beleaguered brand of smart displays released in 2018 by Meta (then Facebook), is reportedly slated for a phase-out as the company refocuses the product line on the enterprise. Ahead of the transition, Meta is releasing new features — perhaps some of the last for current owners, as the case may be — that

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

FullStory, which sells analytics tools for apps and websites, secured $25 million in new equity financing, paperwork filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week shows. TechCrunch couldn’t independently confirm the investors and the company hadn’t responded to a request for comment as of press time. But according to Crunchbase, the infusion is

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

South Korea’s communication watchdog, the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), said Tuesday it will investigate Apple and Google over potential violations of the country’s in-app payment rule. Local media reports noted that the agency will start this investigation on August 16. Apart from Apple and Google, the KCC is also investigating SK Group’s homegrown app store

Stores face new challenges in a world forever changed by the pandemic. Amazon and other tech giants are encroaching on their business. But perhaps more urgently, supply chain snarls haven’t gone away, presenting retailers with a host of inventory issues. In a March Retail Insights survey, seven in 10 (71%) shoppers said they felt that

WhatsApp now allows you to delete a message for up to two days and 12 hours (60 hours in total), so you can remove an accidentally sent chat even after hours. Previously, this limit was 1 hour, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds — yep, there were seconds involved. The company’s tweet about this feature just

For years, HBO Max has been under fire for its buggy app. Today, the streaming service’s re-platformed app completed its global rollout on desktop, iOS, Android, and Amazon Fire tablets. New features include a shuffle button on mobile, SharePlay support for iPhone and iPad users in the U.S., a dedicated home for downloaded content, and

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by

India’s anti-smuggling agency said that phone-vendor Vivo’s local unit had evaded customs duty of over $280 million, roughly a month after the country’s anti-money laundering agency raided the domestic offices of the Chinese company. The finance ministry said on Wednesday that its Directorate of Revenue Intelligence recovered “incriminating evidence indicating wilful misdeclaration in the description

A year ago, Club Feast, a subscription-based service aiming to disrupt the food delivery industry, emerged from stealth with $3.5 million in seed funding and the backing of prominent investors, including General Catalyst and Pika Capital. Co-founders Atallah Atallah, Ghazi Atallah and Chris Miao claimed that, by working with hundreds of restaurants to create low-priced