Mobile

It has the simplest name but the sort of shadowy overtones that national security writers lust after. Team Telecom, a mostly informal working committee of the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice (along with affiliated agencies) has for years been quietly tasked with evaluating and maintaining the security of America telecom infrastructure in concert

Looks like things haven’t gone completely smoothly with Quibi‘s launch. The issue appears to have been resolved, but the Quibi customer support account tweeted this afternoon that “some users may be experiencing problems with the Quibi app,” only to add an hour later that “Users should once again be able to use the Quibi app

Fintech startup Lydia is the dominating mobile payment app in France with most of its 3.3 million users in its home country. That’s why the startup has been working hard over the past ten days to ship a feature that was originally planned for this summer — donations to charities and hospitals. Starting today, Lydia users

Quibi, the much-hyped mobile app promising to deliver “quick bites” of video entertainment, is finally here. The company has been in the headlines for more than two years, thanks to the involvement of founder Jeffrey Katzenberg (who previously co-founded DreamWorks Animation) and CEO Meg Whitman (previously the CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard Enterprise). Plus,

Sick of sharing those generic Zoom video call invites that all look the same? Wish your Zoom link preview’s headline and image actually described your meeting? Want to protect your Zoom calls from trolls by making attendees RSVP to get your link? ZmURL.com has you covered. Launching today, ZmURL is a free tool that lets

Google is giving the world a clearer glimpse of exactly how much it knows about people everywhere — using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to repackage its persistent tracking of where users go and what they do as a public good in the midst of a pandemic. In a blog post today the tech

T-Mobile this morning officially announced its exclusive partnership with the new streaming service, Quibi, set to launch on April 6. The service will be made available for free for a year to T-Mobile customers on its unlimited wireless family plans. The streaming service, founded by Hollywood media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, has been specifically built for

Disney+ has arrived in the land of Bollywood. The company on Friday (local time) rolled out its eponymous streaming service in India through Hotstar, a popular on-demand video streamer it picked up as part of the Fox deal. To court users in India, the largest open entertainment market in Asia, Disney is charging users 1,499

After months of regulatory maneuverings, T-Mobile and Sprint officially completed their $26 billion merger today. The new combined parent company is called T-Mobile and will now trade on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol TMUS with Sprint no longer trading on the NYSE. For consumers, it will seemingly take a little time before the effects

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and chief executive of India’s most valuable startup, Paytm, posed an existential question in a recent press conference. “What do you think of the commercial model for digital mobile payments. How do we make money?” Sharma asked Nandan Nilekani, one of the key architects of the Universal Payments Infrastructure that created

Amazon has made it easier for Apple customers to buy or rent movies from its Prime Video app with a recent update. Before, customers using the Prime Video app from an iOS device or Apple TV would have to first purchase or rent the movie elsewhere — like through the Amazon website or a Prime

Disney said on Tuesday that it will launch its streaming service, Disney+, in India on April 3. The service, available globally in about a dozen markets, will launch in India on Hotstar, one of the most popular on-demand streaming services in the country that is also owned by Disney. The company said it is raising

The FCC unanimously passed a new set of rules today that will require wireless carriers to implement an tech framework to combat robocalls. Called STIR/SHAKEN, and dithered over for years by the carriers, the protocol will be required to be put in place by summer of 2021. Robocalls have grown from vexation to serious problem

Last fall, Spotify debuted a standalone Kids application, aimed at bringing kid-friendly music and stories to Spotify Premium Family subscribers, initially in Ireland. Today, that app is being made available broadly in the U.S. Canada and France, the company announced on Tuesday. The Kids app is still considered a “beta” as it arrives in these

Turbo Systems, a three-year old, no-code mobile app startup, announced today it has brought on industry veteran Jen Grant to be CEO. Grant, who was previously vice president of marketing at Box and chief marketing officer at Elastic and Looker, brings more than 15 years of tech company experience to the young startup. She says

Facebook Messenger could soon automatically tell your closest friends you’re at the gym, driving, or in Tokyo. Messenger has been spotted prototyping a ported version of the Instagram close friends-only Threads app’s Auto Status option that launched in October. The unreleased Messenger feature would use your location, accelerometer, and battery life to determine what you’re

As part of its response to the public health emergency triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Commission has been leaning on Europe’s telcos to share aggregate location data on their users. “The Commission kick-started a discussion with mobile phone operators about the provision of aggregated and anonymised mobile phone location data,” it said today.

We look at an in-depth screener app for COVID-19, U.S. stocks take another tumble and Apple extends its free trial for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 27, 2020. Stay safe and socially distanced this weekend! 1. Clearstep’s COVID-19 chat-based screener goes in-depth to preserve healthcare resources There are

Ranker, an online publisher that turns crowdsourced lists and fan-rankings into a data business, is now turning its attention to the world of streaming services. The company this week launched a new app, Watchworthy, that helps you find something new to watch across TV networks and over 200 streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video,

A new app called CatchUp might be useful for anyone who’s struggling to keep up with the latest headlines, podcasts and Netflix shows. CatchUp is the latest offering from Mammoth Media, the startup behind chat fiction app Yarn and social polling app Wishbone. Founder and CEO Benoit Vatere told me that the product started out

MX Player, the on-demand video streaming service owned by India’s conglomerate Times Internet, is expanding to more than half a dozen new international markets including the U.S. and the UK to supply more entertainment content to millions of people trapped in their homes. The Singapore-headquartered on-demand video streaming service, which raised $111 million in a

With limited prospects for growth, one of the iron laws of economic downturns is that advertising is among the first budgets to be cut. Advertising revenues have already cratered at many alt-weekly newspapers, which heavily rely on local events and restaurants that have been shuttered in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. BuzzFeed even went

Coinbase’s mobile wallet app Coinbase Wallet puts you in control of your crypto assets. The app already lets you access decentralized crypto apps (dapps) using a dapp browser. But Coinbase is going one step further with deep integrations with some of the most popular DeFi projects. DeFi means “decentralized finance,” and it has been a

Snapchat’s location sharing app acquisition Zenly has gamified shelter-in-place during the COVID-19 outbreak. Today the app launched its Stay At Home challenge that shows a leaderboard of which friends have spent the most percentage of the last three days in their homes. Users can see who’s social distancing the best and share stickers of the

It’s like Google Docs for everything. Screen is a free interactive multiplayer screensharing app that gives everyone a cursor so they can navigate, draw on, and even code within the apps of their co-workers while voice or video chatting. Screen makes it easy and fun to co-design content, pair program, code review or debug together,

Apple has released software updates for the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, the Apple TV and the Mac. The biggest changes are on the iPad. Starting today, you can pair a mouse or trackpad with your iPad and use it to move a cursor on the display. Apple unveiled trackpad support for iPadOS when

Earlier this month, the FCC issued a new measure aimed at easing some of the burdens on consumers as COVID-19 continues to have an increasingly profound impact on nearly every aspect of life. Most or all major internet and wireless providers in the U.S. signed up for the pledge, agreeing to take actions like waiving

Google says Coronavirus has become its biggest search topic by a country mile this year, and to continue its efforts to harness that attention in the best possible way, late on Friday the company launched a new information portal dedicated to the pandemic as well as an improved search experience for desktop and mobile. The

The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App