Mobile

The Note is dead. After more than a decade, Samsung has officially closed the book on the transformative phablet. The brand will still exist, but only in a kind of liminal marketing capacity. “We’re thinking more and more of the Note as the experience,” a rep told me on a recent briefing call. As the

Dating app company Bumble, Inc. is making its first acquisition with today’s news that it’s adding the fast-growing French dating app Fruitz to its family of applications. Though Bumble, Inc. already has an international footprint as the parent company to Badoo, which is particularly popular in Europe, it sees the addition of Fruitz as a

Following a court order, developers working on dating apps don’t have to use Apple’s in-app purchase system in the Netherlands. And because those purchases aren’t handled by Apple, the company doesn’t take its usual 30% cut on digital purchases. But developers who use a third-party payment system still have to pay a commission. And Apple

A true “metaverse” may not yet exist, but that hasn’t stopped marketers from adopting the buzzword to promote their apps and games on mobile app stores. According to new data shared today by Sensor Tower, there are now 552 mobile apps that include the term “metaverse” in their apps’ titles or descriptions, in hopes of

Though the Covid-19 pandemic almost immediately devasted the business of travel booking startup Headout, the company has been able to return to growth as domestic travel rebounded in recent months. The service, which helps consumers book tours, events, and other experiences and activities in cities around the world, delivered 800% growth since January 2021 by

The Joe Rogan controversy has been a PR headache for Spotify in recent days, but it doesn’t seem to have yet prompted a sizable exit to rival streaming apps, according to new app store data. Over the past several days, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and other musicians have pulled their music from Spotify to protest

The use of tracking cookies is winding down, and Apple’s anti-tracking privacy update has impacted mobile apps’ advertising revenues. But these changes have only prompted the adtech industry to get more creative with its solutions. The latest example comes from Pandora parent company, SiriusXM, which this week rolled out a new way to identify and

A new Pinterest feature will allow consumers to see what furniture or other home décor items will look like in their own home, using augmented reality (AR). Similar technology has already been put into place by major retailers, like Amazon, IKEA or Wayfair, as well as others in the home design space, like Houzz. In

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

Global smartphone shipments had already begun to shrink ahead of 2020, though two years of a pandemic and the resulting supply chain and chip constraints certainly didn’t help the overall figures. According to a pair of reports from Counterpoint Research and IDC, however, the market finally experienced growth last year for first time since 2017.

Bolt, the Estonian mobility tech company that recently closed a huge round, is planning to onboard an additional 200,000 drivers in Africa this year, as it kicks-off expansion to more cities within its existing markets while keeping up with the growing demand for e-hailing services across the continent. Bolt’s Africa regional director, Paddy Partridge, told

Gaming has been one of the most popular entertainment categories in the last two years of pandemic living. Now, a gaming startup that’s building a new kind of platform that it thinks will be a — wait for it — game changer in the category is announcing some funding as to ride that wave of

Snapchat is upgrading its AR shopping experience today with updates to both to the Shopping Lenses inside its social app as well as to the analytics shared with Snap’s brand and retail partners. For consumers, the AR shopping features become more practical to use, as they’ll now display key product information, updated in real-time, like

A newly launched recipe app called Pestle aims to do more than provide a place to save and organize your favorite recipes. The app, from indie developer Will Bishop, also helps you plan meals, create shopping lists, keep up with new recipes from creators, and even cook hands-free or with friends and family remotely over

Partech Shaker, the innovation division of the Paris-based VC firm Partech, has launched an accelerator program christened Chapter54 to help European startups launch in African markets. The accelerator will take in 10 technology startups annually over the next four years for the Chapter54 program, which will last up to eight months. Application for the inaugural

Last summer, Samsung announced that – for the first time in a decade – it wouldn’t be releasing a new Note. The future of the well-loved phablet was a big, open question, as the hardware giant acknowledged a shift in focus to foldables, a form factor it felt was finally ready for a truly mainstream

Carry1st, a South African publisher of social games and interactive content across Africa, has raised a $20 million Series A extension led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). This is a16z’s first investment in an Africa-headquartered company (the firm has previously invested in Branch and Zipline, companies with some operations in Africa but headquartered in the U.S).

Fintech startup Revolut is rolling out stock trading in its app in the U.S. The company already lets you buy and sell shares if you’re a British user. And now, Revolut has received approval to become a licensed U.S. broker-dealer in the U.S. Revolut users will be able to trade 1,100 securities, such as shares

Late last year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down from his position in order to give his full attention to his other company Square, now called Block, which had become increasingly invested in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency — just like Dorsey himself. Now we’re starting to see the results of Block’s embrace of crypto, as

Supply chain issues continue to have a major impact on smartphone manufacturers per newly released figures from analyst firm Canalys — global shipments grew only 1% year over year in the final quarter of 2021. The numbers come on the tail of Q3 reports, which saw an overall drop of 6%, citing similar issues over

In 2020, Africa50, an infrastructure financier backed by the Africa Development Bank (AfDB) Group and a good number of African governments, hosted an innovation challenge that sought affordable and reliable solutions for last-mile internet connectivity across the continent. A proposal by Poa Internet, a Kenyan startup beat 673 others from across the world as a

nCore Games has raised $10 million in a new financing round as the top Indian gaming firm gears up to launch web3 offerings, its top executives said Monday. Animoca Brands and Galaxy Interactive, two high-profile investors in the crypto space, led the funding. Polygon, a popular layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution, and Hyperedge Capital also

As competition amid digital banks heats up, U.S. fintech Current is rolling out a new product designed to make its banking service more appealing. The company announced this morning it’s launching a new high-yield offering called “Interest” that allows any Current account holder to earn a 4.00% Annual Percentage Yield (APY) — a rate that’s

Krafton, the developer behind PlayUnknown’s Battlegrounds,” and the maker of PUBG MOBILE, last year’s No. 6 top-grossing mobile game on a global basis, is suing the app stores and a rival game maker, Garena, over copyright infringement involving Garena Online’s Free Fire games. The lawsuit alleges Garena’s games copy numerous aspects of its own, including

Around the same time Apple was touting its sizable App Store revenue growth this week, developer and noted App Store critic Kosta Eleftheriou brought to light what appeared to be yet another App Store scammer hiding in plain sight. On Twitter, Eleftheriou documented the earnings for a music syncing app called AmpMe, which claims to

Consumer spending on mobile apps reached $170 billion in 2021, according to App Annie’s newly released “State of Mobile 2022″ report, out today, which offers a comprehensive look at the app economy across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China. That figure is up 19% year-over-year, which is down just one percentage

Apple has submitted its compliance plans to allow developers to use third-party payment options in South Korea at a reduced service fee, the Korea Communication Commission (KCC) said on Tuesday. KCC also said it would discuss with Apple to iron out further details, including service fee structures and the exact date when the payment option

A new social app, Locket, popped to the top of the App Store charts in recent days thanks to its clever premise to put live photos from friends in a widget on your iOS homescreen. In other words, it turns Apple’s widget system — typically used to showcase information like news, weather, inspirational quotes or

Foxtrot is changing the way we think about convenience stores, and just picked up $100 million in new Series C funding to expand its brick-and-mortar footprint to 50 new retail locations in the next two years. We last looked in on Chicago-based Foxtrot in early 2020, just before the world was shook by the global

Despite facing numerous antitrust lawsuits and tighter regulations in certain markets, Apple today reported new figures indicating record App Store growth in 2021. The company in a press release said it has now paid out more than $260 billion to app developers since the App Store first launched in 2008, a number that’s up from