Chinese app developers have invaded India

If you’ve conquered China, then India — the world’s second-largest country based on population — is the obvious next port of call, and that’s exactly what has happened in the world of consumer apps.

Following the lead of Chinese smartphone makers like Xiaomi and Oppo, who have dominated mobile sales in India for some time, the content behind the touchscreen glass in India is increasingly now from China, too. That’s according to a report from FactorDaily which found that 44 of the top 100 Android apps in India were developed by Chinese companies up from just 18 one year prior. (The focus is on Android because it is the overwhelming choice of operating system among India’s estimated 500 million internet users.)

The list of top Chinese apps includes major names like ByteDance, the world’s highest-valued startup which offers TikTok and local language news app Helo in India, and Alibaba’s UCbrowser as well as lesser-known quantities like Tencent-backed NewsDog and quiet-yet-prolific streaming app maker Bigo.

Citing data from Sensor Tower, the report found that five of the top ten Android apps in India are from China, up from just two at the end of 2017.

For anyone who has been watching the Indian technology scene in recent years, this ‘Chinese app store invasion’ will be of little surprise, although the speed of change has been unexpected.

China’s two biggest companies, Alibaba and Tencent, have poured significant amounts into promising Indian startups in recent years setting the stage for others to follow suit and move into India in search of growth.

Alibaba bought into Snapdeal and Paytm via multi-hundred million dollar invests in 2015, and the pace has only quickened since then. In 2017, Tencent invested in Gaana (music streaming) and Swiggy (food delivery) in major deals having backed Byju’s (education) and Ola (ride-hailing) the year prior. The pair also launched local cloud computing services inside India last year.

Beyond those two, Xiaomi has gone beyond selling phones to back local companies and develop local services for its customers.

That local approach appears to have been the key for those app makers who have found success in India. Rather than taking a very rigid approach like Chinese messaging app WeChat — owned by Tencent which failed in India — the likes of ByteDance have developed local teams and, in some cases, entirely local apps dedicated to India. With the next hundreds of millions of internet users in India tipped to come from more rural parts of the country, vernacular languages, local content and voice-enabled tech are some of the key strategies that, like their phone-making cousins, Chinese app developers will need to focus on to ensure that they aren’t just a flash in the pan in India.

You can read more at FactorDaily.

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Netflix stops paying the ‘Apple tax’ on its $853M in annual iOS revenue

Earlier this year, Netflix was seen testing a bypass of iTunes billing across dozens of markets worldwide. As 2018 draws to a close, Netflix – the App Store’s top grossing app – has ditched the ability for new users to sign up and subscribe to the streaming service within its iOS app across all global markets. The change means Apple will miss out on hundreds of millions in App Store revenue per year – money it would have otherwise received by way of its standard cut of in-app transactions.

According to new data compiled by Sensor Tower, Netflix grossed $853 million in 2018 on the iOS App Store. Based on that figure, Apple’s take would have been around $256 million, the firm said.

To date, the Netflix iOS app has generated over $1.5 billion through its in-app subscriptions, with Apple’s cut coming in around $450 million-plus, Sensor Tower estimated.

Before the change, Netflix on iOS was grossing an average of $2.4 million per day in 2018 – meaning Apple was making around $700,000 by doing nothing other than allowing Netflix to offer subscriptions in its app.

(Note, however, that Sensor Tower’s figures are based on the App Store’s 30 percent cut of transactions. After the first year, Apple’s cut on subscription renewals is lowered to 15 percent. That’s not being factored in. But it gives you a rough idea of Apple’s losses here.)

Netflix’s iOS revenue has been climbing steadily over the years.

In 2017 its gross subscriber revenue was $510 million – up from $215 million users spent in the app in 2016 – which earned it the No. 1 spot on the Top Grossing Chart for non-game apps. It snagged that position again this year, trailed by Tinder and Tencent Video.

In fact, Netflix has earned the bragging rights for being the top grossing iOS App of all time, App Annie reported this summer.

The streaming service’s decision to bypass the App Store isn’t a first. Many companies today direct their users to the web or other platforms, in order to avoid marketplace fees.

For example, Amazon has historically restricted movie and TV rentals and purchases to its own website or other “compatible” apps, instead of allowing them to take place through its Prime Video app. The same goes for Kindle e-books, which also aren’t offered in the Kindle mobile app. Spotify also discontinued the option to pay for its Premium service using Apple’s in-app payment system.

And Epic Games this year bypassed Google’s Play Store altogether – as well as its 30 percent cut – when it launched Fortnite for Android as a sideloaded app. That decision resulted in Google’s loss of $50 million+ in marketplaces fees.

Netflix earlier this year had dropped in-app subscription sign-ups in its Android app on Google Play. That signaled its intentions to later take back the so-called “Apple tax” for itself, too.

However, Netflix still earns money on Google Play through existing subscribers. That totalled around $105 million in 2018, with Google earning close to $32 million of that. But the number has been declining consistently, Sensor Tower said. Apple could soon be in the same boat.

VentureBeat was the first to notice the change to the Netflix iOS app. It would be surprising if Apple took action against Netflix, given it has not done so with other major tech companies that made similar moves.

 

 

 

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2GN3lB3

Citi slashes sales outlook for iPhone XS Max by nearly half

Citi Research has joined a growing list of analysts to lower first-quarter production estimates for Apple’s iPhones amid weakening demand for the smartphones.

Citi Research analyst William Yang cut the overall iPhone shipment forecast by 5 million to 45 million for the quarter, reported Reuters. That’s a sting that falls in line with others such as influential TF International Securities Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who delivered a less than stellar iPhone forecast earlier this month.

It’s Yang’s outlook for the 6.5-inch iPhone XS Max that is particularly gloomy. In a research note to clients, Yang slashed the shipment forecast for the iPhone XS Max by 48 percent for the first quarter of 2019.

The cut in Citi’s forecasts is driven by the firm’s view that ” 2018 iPhone is entering a destocking phase, which does not bode well for the supply chain,” Yang wrote.

Two weeks ago, Kuo predicted that 2019 iPhone shipments will likely between 5 to 10 percent lower than 2018. He also lowered first quarter shipment forecasts by 20 percent.

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Alpfpm

Smart speakers hit critical mass in 2018

We already know Alexa had a good Christmas – the app shot to the top of the App Store over the holidays, and the Alexa service even briefly crashed from all the new users. But Alexa, along with other smart speaker devices like Google Home, didn’t just have a good holiday — they had a great year, too. The smart speaker market reached critical mass in 2018, with around 41 percent of U.S. consumers now owning a voice-activated speaker, up from 21.5 percent in 2017.

According to a series of reports from RBC Capital Markets analysts released in December, the near doubling of the adoption rate for smart speakers in the U.S. was driven by growth in both Alexa and Google Home devices, while Apple’s HomePod played only a small role.

The firm found that U.S. penetration of Alexa-enabled devices reached 31 percent this year, compared with 41 percent overall for smart speakers.

It also forecast that Alexa would generate $18 billion to $19 billion in total revenue by 2021 – or ~5 percent of Amazon’s revenue –  through a combination of device sales, incremental voice shopping sales, and other platform revenues. In the U.S., there are now over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices installed – a key milestone for Alexa to become a “critical mass platform,” the report noted.

RBC additionally called out Amazon’s progress with Alexa’s development, with launches like Alexa Guard, which listens for break-ins and smoke detector alarms; plus new features like local voice control for when the internet is down; location-based reminders; advanced routines; email integrations; expanded calling options; and many others.

Alexa’s third-party app ecosystem also grew in 2018, with 150 percent year-over-year growth in skills to reach over 60,000 total Alexa skills by year-end. That’s up from 40,000 skills in May; 25,000 in Q3 2017; and just 5,000 two years ago.

Google Home also gained traction in 2018, with U.S. penetration for Google devices growing to 23 percent, up from 8 percent in 2017. Each household owns around 1.7 devices, which leads a Google Home install base of around 43 million in the U.S., and around 9 million in other Google Home markets, the forecast said.

However, the report doesn’t see as much revenue coming in from Google Home over the next few years, compared with Alexa. Instead, it estimates that Google Home generated $3.4 billion in revenue this year, and will grow that to $8.2 billion by 2021.

But combined with Google’s other hardware products like Pixel, Nest, and Chromecast, the hardware suite will have generated approximately $8.8 billion in 2018, and will grow to $19.6 billion in 2021.

This is the first year the analysts asked about Apple’s HomePod in the consumer survey, and they found its share of the U.S. smart speaker market remains small. Amazon has a 66 percent share to Google’s 29 percent. HomePod had 5 percent, it said.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Srbexp

Put down your phone if you want to innovate

We are living in an interstitial period. In the early 1980s we entered an era of desktop computing that culminated in the dot-com crash – a financial bubble that we bolstered with Y2K consulting fees and hardware expenditures alongside irrational exuberance over Pets.com. That last interstitial era, an era during which computers got smaller, weirder, thinner, and more powerful, ushered us, after a long period of boredom, into the mobile era in which we now exist. If you want to help innovate in the next decade, it’s time to admit that phones, like desktop PCs before them, are a dead end.

We create and then brush up against the edges of our creation every decade. The speed at which we improve – but not innovate – is increasing and so the difference between a 2007 iPhone and a modern Pixel 3 is incredible. But what can the Pixel do that the original iPhone or Android phones can’t? Not much.

We are limited by the use cases afforded by our current technology. In 1903, a bike was a bike and could not fly. Until the Wright Brothers and others turned forward mechanical motion into lift were we able to lift off. In 2019 a phone is a phone and cannot truly interact with us as long as it remains a separate part of our bodies. Until someone looks beyond these limitations will we be able to take flight.

While I won’t posit on the future of mobile tech I will note that until we put our phones away and look at the world anew we will do nothing of note. We can take better photos and FaceTime each other but until we see the limitations of these technologies we will be unable to see a world outside of them.

We’re heading into a new year (and a new CES) and we can expect more of the same. It is safe and comfortable to remain in the screen-hand-eye nexus, creating VR devices that are essentially phones slapped to our faces and big computers that now masquerade as TVs. What, however, is the next step? Where do these devices go? How do they change? How to user interfaces compress and morph? Until we actively think about this we will remain stuck.

Perhaps you are. You’d better hurry. If this period ends as swiftly and decisively as the other ones before it, the opportunity available will be limited at best. Why hasn’t VR taken off? Because it is still on the fringes, being explored by people stuck in mobile thinking. Why is machine learning and AI so slow? Because the use cases are aimed at chatbots and better customer interaction. Until we start looking beyond the black mirror (see what I did?) of our phones innovation will fail.

Every app launched, every pictured scrolled, every tap, every hunched-over moment davening to some dumb Facebook improvement, is a brick in bulwark against an unexpected and better future. So put your phone down this year and build something. Soon it might be too late.

from Android – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2GJX0GI
via IFTTT

Put down your phone if you want to innovate

We are living in an interstitial period. In the early 1980s we entered an era of desktop computing that culminated in the dot-com crash – a financial bubble that we bolstered with Y2K consulting fees and hardware expenditures alongside irrational exuberance over Pets.com. That last interstitial era, an era during which computers got smaller, weirder, thinner, and more powerful, ushered us, after a long period of boredom, into the mobile era in which we now exist. If you want to help innovate in the next decade, it’s time to admit that phones, like desktop PCs before them, are a dead end.

We create and then brush up against the edges of our creation every decade. The speed at which we improve – but not innovate – is increasing and so the difference between a 2007 iPhone and a modern Pixel 3 is incredible. But what can the Pixel do that the original iPhone or Android phones can’t? Not much.

We are limited by the use cases afforded by our current technology. In 1903, a bike was a bike and could not fly. Until the Wright Brothers and others turned forward mechanical motion into lift were we able to lift off. In 2019 a phone is a phone and cannot truly interact with us as long as it remains a separate part of our bodies. Until someone looks beyond these limitations will we be able to take flight.

While I won’t posit on the future of mobile tech I will note that until we put our phones away and look at the world anew we will do nothing of note. We can take better photos and FaceTime each other but until we see the limitations of these technologies we will be unable to see a world outside of them.

We’re heading into a new year (and a new CES) and we can expect more of the same. It is safe and comfortable to remain in the screen-hand-eye nexus, creating VR devices that are essentially phones slapped to our faces and big computers that now masquerade as TVs. What, however, is the next step? Where do these devices go? How do they change? How to user interfaces compress and morph? Until we actively think about this we will remain stuck.

Perhaps you are. You’d better hurry. If this period ends as swiftly and decisively as the other ones before it, the opportunity available will be limited at best. Why hasn’t VR taken off? Because it is still on the fringes, being explored by people stuck in mobile thinking. Why is machine learning and AI so slow? Because the use cases are aimed at chatbots and better customer interaction. Until we start looking beyond the black mirror (see what I did?) of our phones innovation will fail.

Every app launched, every pictured scrolled, every tap, every hunched-over moment davening to some dumb Facebook improvement, is a brick in bulwark against an unexpected and better future. So put your phone down this year and build something. Soon it might be too late.

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2GJX0GI

Indonesia unblocks Tumblr following its ban on adult content

Indonesia, the world’s fourth largest country by population, has unblocked Tumblr nine months after it blocked the social networking site over pornographic content.

Tumblr — which, disclaimer, is owned by Oath Verizon Media Group just like TechCrunch — announced earlier this month that it would remove all “adult content” from its platform. That decision, which angered many in the adult entertainment industry who valued the platform as an increasingly rare outlet that supported erotica, was a response to Apple removing Tumblr’s app from the iOS Store after child pornography was found within the service.

This impact of this new policy has made its way to Indonesia where KrAsia reports that the service was unblocked earlier this week. The service had been blocked in March after falling foul of the country’s anti-pornography laws.

“Tumblr sent an official statement regarding the commitment to clean the platform from pornographic content,” Ferdinandus Setu, Acting Head of the Ministry of Communication and Informatics Bureau, is reported to have said in a press statement.

Messaging apps WhatsApp and Line are among the other services that have been forced to comply with the government’s ban on ‘unsuitable’ content in order to keep their services open in the country. Telegram, meanwhile, removed suspected terrorist content last year after its service was partially blocked.

While perhaps not widely acknowledged in the West, Indonesia is a huge market with a population of over 260 million people. The world’s largest Muslim country, it is the largest economy in Southeast Asia and its growth is tipped to help tripled the region’s digital economy to $240 billion by 2025.

In other words, Indonesia is a huge market for internet companies.

The country’s anti-porn laws have been used to block as many as 800,000 websites as of 2017 — so potentially over a million by now — but they have also been used to take aim at gay dating apps, some of which have been removed from the Google Play Store. As Vice notes, “while homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia, it’s no secret that the country has become a hostile place for the LGBTQ community.”

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2SnihqX