Mobile

Netflix announced this week that it has started to stream titles in AV1 on Android in what could significantly help the two-year-old media codec gain wider adoption. The world’s biggest streaming giant said on Wednesday that by switching from Google’s VP9 — which it previously used on Android — to AV1, its compression efficiency has

Next Tuesday, Samsung kicks off smartphone season with its Unpacked event in San Francisco. One of two tentpole events for the company, the big show brings with it the latest edition of the company’s primary flagship line, the Galaxy S. Samsung played a fun little trick, holding the event on February 11th at 11AM PT,

Huawei has filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Verizon Communications in U.S. District Court. The Chinese telecommunications equipment giant wants Verizon to compensate it for the use of technology it says are covered by 12 Huawei patents, including ones related to networking, security and video communications. Before the lawsuits were filed, Huawei claims it negotiated

Snapchat’s developer platform is blowing up as a gateway to teen social app users. Hoop is the latest Snap Kit blockbuster, rocketing to #2 on the overall App Store charts this month with its Tinder -esque swiping interface for discovering people and asking to message with them over Snapchat. Within a week of going viral,

LG Electronics and ZTE said they have cancelled plans to participate in MWC later this month in Barcelona, Spain, because of coronavirus-related concerns. In a statement on its site, LG said it will skip MWC, the world’s largest mobile trade show, and launch this year’s releases at separate events “in the near future” instead. “With

Snapchat still isn’t profitable nearly two years after its IPO. In Q4 2019, Snap lost $241 million on 560.8 million in revenue that’s up 44% year-over-year and an EPS of $0.03. That comes from adding 8 million daily users to reach a total of 218, up 3.8% this quarter from 210 million and 17% year-over-year.

Facebook’s messaging app for families with children, Messenger Kids, is being updated today with new tools and features to give parents more oversight and control over their kids’ chats. Now, parents will be able to see who a child is chatting with and how often, view recent photos and videos sent through chat, access the

RFocus asks a simple question: What if instead of just antennas and transmitters on access points and mobile devices, we put the things just about everywhere? You know, just totally slather the walls with the stuff? The new “smart surface” from MIT’s CSAIL uses in excess of 3,000 antennas to boost signal strength by nearly

As it has done in previous election years, Apple today has added special coverage of the 2020 US presidential election to its Apple News app. The coverage includes curated news, information, and data related to the election from ABC News, CBS News, CNN, FiveThirtyEight, Fox News, NBC News, ProPublica, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times, The

More than a year and a half after wireless carriers were caught red-handed selling the real-time location data of their customers to anyone willing to pay for it, the FCC has determined that they committed a crime. An official documentation of exactly how these companies violated the law is forthcoming. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai shared

GoDaddy has reached an agreement to acquire Over, the startup behind an app that helps businesses create the photos and videos they need for social media. Justin Tsai, GoDaddy’s vice president of growth and product, said this acquisition is about acknowledging “a world of entrepreneurs who may never have a website.” He told me, “Over’s

Flexibits, the company behind popular calendar app Fantastical, is releasing Fantastical 3.0 on all platforms today — macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS. New features include event proposals, interesting calendars, new calendar views and weather forecasts. I’ve been using the app on my Mac, iPhone and iPad for a week. The main difference with Fantastical 2

The European parliament has voted overwhelmingly for tougher action to reduce e-waste, calling for the Commission to come up with beefed up rules by July 2020. Specifically, the parliament wants the Commission to adopt the delegated act foreseen in the 2014 Radio Equipment Directive by that deadline — or else table a legislative measure by the

If you were the star of every show, would you watch more mobile television? Snapchat is betting that narcissism drives resonance for its new weekly videos that put you and your friends’ customizable Bitmoji avatars into a flurry of silly animated situations. Bitmoji TV premieres on Saturday morning, and it’s remarkably funny, exciting, and addictive.

“We’re trying to shift cryptocurrency from this speculative asset class to driving real-world utility,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tells me. How? Through commerce and micropayments. But now Coinbase has the who to build it. Today the startup announced it has hired away former head of Product for Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart and Google Shopping VP

Facebook beat Wall Street estimates in Q4 but slowing profit growth beat up the share price. Facebook reached 2.5 billion monthly users, up 2%, from 2.45 billion in Q3 2019 when it grew 1.65%, and it now has 1.66 billion daily active users, up 2.4% from 1.62 billion last quarter when it grew 2%. Facebook

Less than six months after it announced $40 million in funding, Attentive has raised another $70 million, this time in Series C funding. The new round was led by Sequoia and IVP, two firms that were already part of the Series B. Previous investors Eniac Ventures and NextView Ventures also participated. CEO Brian Long (who, along with

Flipboard, the personalized news aggregation app used by 145 million users per month, is today launching a new feature aimed at bringing local news coverage to 23 cities across the U.S. and Canada, including major metros like New York, L.A, San Francisco, Seattle, D.C., Boston, Dallas, Chicago, and many others. The goal with the new

Last year saw global smartphone sales decline for the first time since analysts started tracking such things. In Gartner’s case, that comprises a full 11 years, as figures dropped 2% for 2019. Following on last week’s global device forecast, the firm is drilling down on smartphone figures with some slightly rosier results. According to the

Welcome back to ThisWeek 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 Annie’s recently released

Huawei may have just found itself an ally in the most unexpected of places. According to a new report out of The Wall Street Journal, both the Defense and Treasury Departments are pushing back on a Commerce Department-led ban on sales from the embattled Chinese hardware giant. That move, in turn, has reportedly led Commerce

Two years after Vine’s co-founder Dom Hofmann announced he was building a successor to the short-form video app, today Byte makes its debut on iOS and Android. Byte lets you shoot or upload and then share six-second videos. The tiny time limit necessitates no-filler content that’s denser than the maximum 1-minute clips on TikTok. Byte

At most, 7 million of Instagram’s 1 billion-plus users have downloaded its standalone IGTV app in the 18 months since launch. And now, Instagram’s main app is removing the annoying orange IGTV button from its home page in what feels like an admission of lackluster results. For reference, TikTok received 1.15 billion downloads in the

AppsFlyer has raised a massive Series D of $210 million, led by General Atlantic. Founded in 2011, the company is best known for mobile ad attribution — allowing advertisers to see which campaigns are driving results. At the same time, AppsFlyer has expanded into other areas, like fraud prevention. And in the funding announcement, General

Video advertising company Eyeview shut down in December, but its technology will live on thanks to an acquisition by Aki Technologies. Aki CEO Scott Swanson told me that he’s anticipating serious growth in the demand for ad personalization, particularly as consumers see personalization everywhere else online. Swanson argued that Eyeview’s technology is particularly strong thanks

Snapchat and NBC Olympics are again teaming up to produce customized Olympics content for users in the U.S. — this time, for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics this summer. The companies had previously worked together during the Rio 2016 and PyeongChang 2018 Olympics. The PyeongChang Olympic Winter Games in 2018 reached over 40 million U.S. users,

Losing access to Google software and services understandably threw Huawei for a loop. The Chinese hardware giant has clearly been working on a contingency plan to deal with the loss of access to things like Android and the Play Store, but Google’s offering formed so much of the devices’ software core — as they do

If I watch a Story cross-posted from Instagram to Facebook on either of the apps, it should appear as “watched” at the back of the Stories row on the other app. Why waste my time showing me Stories I already saw? It’s been over two years since Instagram Stories launched cross-posting to Stories. Countless hours

Octi has created a new social network that uses augmented reality to connect the act of seeing your friends in real life with viewing digital content like their favorite YouTube videos and Spotify songs. When I wrote about the startup in 2018, it was building AR technology that could do a better job of recognizing

Phones were not the centerpiece at the recently wrapped Consumer Electronics Show; I’ll probably repeat this point a few more times over the course of this piece, just so we’re clear. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that Mobile World Congress has mostly usurped that role. There are always a smattering