Mobile

In preparation for the holiday shopping season, Amazon today convenient a new way to send gifts through its mobile app. Instead of entering in the recipient’s mailing address — a piece of information people often don’t know in today’s age of digital communications — Prime members can now send a gift to a friend via their

Marc Lore, who earlier this year stepped down from his role as Walmart’s head of U.S. e-commerce, is now backing a new startup in the e-commerce space called Wizard. Lore has taken on the roles of co-founder, chairman of the board and investor in Wizard, a B2B startup in the “conversational commerce” space which believes

While working as a software engineer in Japan, Singapore and San Francisco for the past 10 years, Ryo Chikazawa, CEO and co-founder of Autify, came to realize that there’s one common problem in the software development industry; software testing takes excessive time. Chikazawa and co-founder Sam Yamashita started Autify in 2016 in San Francisco to

Amid a deluge of new creator platforms, a startup called Fireside is launching today with what it believes will be a compelling proposition for professional creators in need of a more robust set of tools for content creation, distribution, measurement, and monetization. The service, which offers a platform for live and interactive shows, had been

Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently said was “no longer a photo-sharing app,” noting the company was prioritizing a shift into video amid significant competition from TikTok and YouTube. Today, Instagram is taking another step towards its larger goal of making video a more central part of the Instagram experience with news that it will now

Netflix is today officially launching a new feature for its Android users that will make it easier to find something to watch when you can’t make a decision. The feature, called “Play Something,” is a shuffle mode option that will play another movie or show Netflix believes you may like, based on your interests and

Pioneered by Snapchat and cloned by Instagram, the “Stories” feature has become a staple for modern-day mobile apps from Google search to Pinterest to streaming apps and more. And while the addition doesn’t work for everyone — LinkedIn and Twitter recently shuttered their Stories features, for example — there’s enough demand for Stories out there

It’s said that you should measure what you value, and for founders, nothing is more valuable than growth. Growth provides revenues, venture capital, prestige and scale — ultimately driving the success of every business. Yet, measuring growth is complex and challenging — and it’s only getting tougher. Changes to attribution in iOS 14 and further

Twitter really can’t go a day without releasing new products. But if you’re running an account for a business or a public figure, its latest addition might capture your interest. Soon, businesses and creators will be able to opt into “professional accounts,” giving them additional tools to distinguish their profile, quickly promote content through ads,

French startup Voodoo has made a significant acquisition in the casual mobile gaming market. The company is acquiring Beach Bum, a game studio based in Israel and specialized in tabletop and card games. It’s hard to get a clear number for this acquisition as Voodoo is offering both cash and shares and there are some

Spotify earlier this year began beta testing new features to make podcasts more interactive through the use of listener polls and Q&As. Today, the company says these features will become publicly available to all creators through its podcast creation app, Anchor. To use the new options, creators who publish and distribute using Anchor will be

The days of “no signal” may be behind us with the advent of Lynk’s satellite network that lets any modern phone exchange data directly with a satellite overhead, no special antenna or chip required. The company just demonstrated a two-way data link this week and announced its first network partners in Africa and the Bahamas

Netflix is expanding its mobile gaming push with the launch of three more gaming titles which will become exclusively available to Netflix members in select European markets. The company today is introducing a trio of casual games — “Shooting Hoops,” “Teeter Up,” and “Card Blast” — to Netflix members in Spain and Italy, as well

Cryptocurrency company Coinbase is announcing a handful of new features. While the company is better known for its exchange that lets you convert USD into various cryptocurrencies, Coinbase wants to expand its consumer services so that you use the platform for different use cases with more financial services. First, the company will soon launch direct

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 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone.

A new forecast on the state of the app economy indicates the third quarter will see record-breaking revenues spent on apps and games. According to App Annie, consumers worldwide will spend $34 billion on apps and games in Q3, a 20% year-over-year increase on spending. The increase indicates that the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on consumer

Amazon has launched Prime Video Channels in India, allowing its customers to subscribe to eight streaming services including Discovery+ and Mubi from one hub, the latest in a series of efforts by the U.S. giant to win customers in the South Asian nation. The new offering makes it easier for users to login and pay

NTWRK, a video shopping app that has helped to popularize the idea of livestreamed commerce in the U.S., announced today it has closed on $50 million in new funding led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and global luxury group Kering, owners of luxury brands Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta and others. The company has

Making smartphones more accessible is always a good idea, and Google’s latest features bring quick actions and navigation to people whose expressions are their primary means of interacting with the world. Project Activate and Camera Switches let users perform tasks like speaking a custom phrase, or navigating using a switch interface, through facial gestures alone.

PayPal has been talking about its “super app” plans for some time, having recently told investors its upcoming digital wallet and payments app had been given a go for launch. Today, the first version of that app is officially being introduced, offering a combination of financial tools including direct deposit, bill pay, a digital wallet,

Netflix said on Monday it is launching a free mobile plan in Kenya as the global streaming giant looks to tap the East African nation that is home to over 20 million internet users. The free plan, which will be rolled out to all users in Kenya in the coming weeks, won’t require them to

The release of iOS 15 should be a major event for mobile operating systems. And yet, this year, there’s no breakthrough feature or overarching theme that makes this release stand out. Apple has focused on quality-of-life updates as well as new features for its own apps. The result is a solid update that is not

Facetune developer Lightricks, which operates over a dozen subscription-based photo and video editing apps across iOS and Android, now has $130 million in new funding to further grow its business. The company’s newly announced Series D round includes $100 million in primary and $30 million in secondary funding, and now values the company at $1.8

Taha Ahmed and Rooshan Aziz left their jobs in strategy consulting and investment banking in London earlier this year in order to found a mobile-only education platform startup, Maqsad, in Pakistan, with a goal “to make education more accessible to 100 million Pakistani students.” Having grown up in Karachi, childhood friends Ahmed and Aziz are

Tile, the maker of Bluetooth-powered lost item finder beacons and, more recently, a staunch Apple critic, announced today it has raised $40 million in non-dilutive debt financing from Capital IP. The funding will be put towards investment in Tile’s finding technologies, ahead of the company’s plan to unveil a new slate of products and features

SmartNews, a Tokyo-headquartered news aggregation website and app that’s grown in popularity despite hefty competition from built-in aggregators like Apple News, today announced it has closed on $230 million in Series F funding. The round brings SmartNews’ total raise to date to over $400 million and values the business at $2 billion — or as

The rumors were right. The centerpiece of today’s big Apple event is the latest iPhone. The latest device lands less than a year after its predecessor, now that things have settled down somewhat on the supply chain side for Apple. Last year’s iPhone 12 was a massive seller, bucking the trend of stagnating smartphones sales,

The TechCrunch crew is hard at work writing up the latest from Apple’s iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch event. They have good notes on the megacorp’s hardware updates. But what are the markets saying about the same array of products? For those of us more concerned with effective S&P dividend yields than screen nit levels,

The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said on Tuesday it fined Google $177 million for abusing its market dominance in its Android operating system (OS) market. The U.S. tech company has restricted market competition by prohibiting local smartphone makers like Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics from customizing their Android OS, through Google’s anti-fragmentation agreements (AFA),

This summer, Spotify launched its live audio app and Clubhouse rival, Spotify Greenroom, with the promises of more programming to come in the months ahead to augment its then primarily user-generated live content. Today, the company is making good on that earlier commitment, with the launch of six new shows on Spotify Greenroom focused on