Mobile

In recent years, YouTube has been working to transform its platform into more of a shopping destination with product launches like shoppable ads or more recently, the ability to shop directly from livestreams hosted by creators. Now, it’s furthering that investment with new features for live shopping experiences. At yesterday’s YouTube Brandcast event, where the

Zenly, the popular social app with 35 million monthly active users, released a complete redesign just last month. But it turns out that this was just the first part of a bigger change at the company owned by Snap. Zenly is going to compete with the likes of Google Maps and Apple Maps as it

Ming-Chi Kuo is one of a handful of Apple analysts whose reports always warrant a second look, regardless of how strange they might seem at first blush. We’ve heard plenty of reports that the company is testing its own version of a foldable device, in its customary style of being fashionably late to the party,

A small handful of Snap Kit platform developers have not yet complied with the new guidelines around anonymous messaging and friend-finding apps announced in March. The Snapchat maker revamped its developer platform policies on March 17, 2022, to ban anonymous apps and require developers to build friend-finding apps to limit access to users 18 or

Google today announced that its Chrome browser will now offer users the ability to use a virtual credit card number in online payment forms on the web. These virtual card numbers allow you to keep your ‘real’ credit card number safe when you buy something online since they can be easily revoked if a merchant’s

At its I/O developer conference, Google today launched Google Wallet, a new Android and Wear OS app that will allow users to store things like credit cards, loyalty cards, digital IDs, transit passes, concert tickets, vaccination cards and more. That’s pretty straightforward, but from here on out, it gets a bit confusing. Google, after all,

It’s neither surprising, nor necessarily new scuttlebutt, but one of the most reliable Apple news scoopers of all time has chimed in to say that Apple is indeed at least serious enough about a potential switch from Lightning to USB-C on future iPhones that it’s doing testing with models equipped with the latter connector. Bloomberg’s

Bubbles, a startup that pitches its platform as the “anti-Zoom” for video messaging, today announced that it closed a $8.5 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures, Craft Ventures, Streamlined Ventures, 468 Ventures, and Bain Capital. Co-founder and CEO Tom Medema said that the money will be used to further develop Bubbles’ platform while ramping

As Snapchat’s app continues to grow, the company is turning to the open source community to help further improve its technology infrastructure. This morning, Snap announced it’s acquiring the Toronto-based KeyDB, the developer of an open-source, high-performance database, for an undisclosed sum. The startup’s six-person team, including its co-founders John Sully and Ben Schermel, will

It’s been said that no one uses Alexa for voice-based shopping. But retail giant still sees the potential for Alexa as a shopping companion — just in a different way. That’s why this month the company quietly rolled out a new feature designed to boost consumers’ use of Alexa’s Shopping Lists: cashback offers. The company

Yes, the Pixel Watch is the thing. Google undoubtedly took some of the wind out of its own sails (and, perhaps, sales) by talking up a number of products we won’t be seeing for several months — and, in one case, a year — but let’s focus on the here and now for a moment.

Last August, Google tried something different. The company offered a sneak peek at the Pixel 6 several months ahead of its official announcement. The reasoning seemed sound. The company had spent several years working to reinvigorate the flagging smartphone line, and it was ready to show it off. Even more importantly, it wanted to build

YouTube is expanding on its latest feature that made any public YouTube video potential fodder for its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts. Today, the company is announcing the launch of “Green Screen,” a tool that will allow users to use up to a 60-second video segment from any eligible YouTube video or YouTube Short as the

Vladyslav Strykun Contributor Vladyslav Strykun is head of marketing at Headway, an edtech startup that provides bite-sized learning for fun and personal growth. Wondering how to improve the marketing performance of your mobile app in the spring without experimenting and extra costs? Take advantage of results from the high winter season, also known as Q5.

Investment in stocks or retirement accounts can seem like a complicated process if you are not sure where to begin. Mentum is out to change that in Latin America, and is working on customizable investment APIs and widgets so businesses in Latin America can build and offer fully digital investment products, like local mutual funds,

Moysle, a mobile device management platform for Apple devices, today announced that it raised $196 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners with participation from StepStone Group and previous investors including Elephant and Album VC. CEO Alcyr Araujo says that the round, which comes as Moysle introduces a new product, Apple

TikTok is introducing a new way to lure advertisers to its platform by giving them the ability to showcase their brands’ content next to the best videos on TikTok. Ahead of its NewFronts presentation to advertisers scheduled for this afternoon, TikTok announced the launch of TikTok Pulse, a new contextual advertising solution that ensures brands’

Dating app giant Match is getting a new CEO. Just over two years after assuming the top exec position, Match CEO and 16-year employee Shar Dubey is stepping down. The company announced today, alongside its first-quarter earnings, Shar Dubey will resign as an officer of Match Group but will remain on the company’s board and

Welcome back to Found where we get into the stories behind the startups. Thor Fridriksson is, as Jordan calls him, the Kind of Mobile Gaming. With mega-viral games like Trivia Royale and QuizUp, he knows the secret sauce to make a popular game, but the code he hasn’t cracked is how to make a super

People in the Global South are often subject to terrible fluctuations in their currencies, as well as hyperinflation. At the same time, many are unbanked, but still able to access a crypto wallet. A way for these populations to access more stable currencies would be by accessing Stable Coins which are pegged to the US

Twitter’s work on its forthcoming Edit button is continuing. While several people last month already spotted the in-development “Edit Tweet” menu option, what we didn’t yet know was how edited tweets would appear to users viewing them on Twitter, or how the edited tweet’s original text could be read. Now, we’re able to see what

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

Twitter didn’t have as many users as it thought — a predicament that may have encouraged the company to more seriously consider its acceptance of Elon Musk’s proposal to take the company private in a $44 billion deal. According to Twitter’s Q1 2022 earnings out this morning, the company admits it had been overcounting the

Airbnb today announced that it will soon no longer offer refunds for COVID-19-related circumstances, including cases where a guest or host becomes sick with COVID-19 — reflecting an update to the company’s extenuating circumstances policy. Beginning May 31, Airbnb hosts’ cancellation terms will apply “as usual,” Airbnb said, although certain reservations made before May 31

Yesterday, fintech startup Lydia unveiled a brand new design for its financial super app. And it’s an opinionated take on mobile payments — not just a fresh coat of paint. I sat down with the company’s founders to discuss the thinking and vision for the future of Lydia. In many ways, Lydia isn’t standing still

Snap isn’t just the company behind popular social app Snapchat. It has also built a powerful augmented reality developer platform called Snap AR — it spreads beyond Snapchat thanks to Camera Kit, an SDK solution that lets you integrate Snap’s camera capabilities in other apps. In Snap jargon, Lenses are essentially augmented reality apps that

Pinterest may have beat on revenue and earnings in the first quarter, but the company is not out of the woods yet when it comes to carving out a place for its service in today’s competitive landscape. In particular, Pinterest is up against a credible threat with the rise of TikTok when it comes to

Fleet, a startup offering a service that helps to track and manage enterprise devices like laptops, today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by CRV with participation from angel investors including GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij. Fleet CEO Mike McNeil says that the new capital — which values the company

TikTok is one of the world’s fastest-growing social media platforms. Sensor Tower recently released its “Q1 2022: Store Intelligence Data Digest” report in which TikTok was the top app by worldwide downloads in Q1 2022. The app surpassed 3.5 billion all-time downloads in the first quarter of 2021, becoming just the fifth app (and the

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