iOS 12.2 beta includes new Animojis and fake 5G logo

Apple has released a new beta version of iOS 12.2 yesterday. While the final version isn’t available just yet, here’s what you should expect: new Animojis and a fake 5G logo if you’re an AT&T customer.

If you have an iPhone X, XS, XS Max or XR, you’ll see new animals in the Animoji collection. As 9to5mac spotted, you will be able to record video message and replace your head with a giraffe, an owl, a shark or a warthog. These Animojis will also work during FaceTime calls.

Here’s a picture from 9to5mac with the new lineup:

More interestingly, Apple succumbed to AT&T’s marketing plot to rename 4G into 5G. MacRumors noticed that some AT&T users now have a ‘5G E’ icon in the top right corner when they upgrade to the beta version of iOS 12.2. Some Android phones already show a 5G E icon after an AT&T update.

But don’t get fooled, this isn’t 5G — this icon replaces the LTE icon. AT&T has basically rebranded LTE with carrier aggregation as 5G Evolution. But it still runs on the same network.

Here’s a picture from the MacRumors forums:

The same thing happened in the U.S. during the transition from 3G to 4G. AT&T decided to rebrand its 3G HSPA+ network to 4G. It’s the reason why many carriers talk about LTE instead of 4G.

AT&T confused everyone back then, and the company is about to do the same again. It’s too bad Apple is helping AT&T with this iOS update.

Disclosure: TechCrunch is a Verizon Media company.

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Report: Smart speaker adoption in U.S. reaches 66M units, with Amazon leading

Smart speakers had a good holiday. Amazon already said its Echo Dot outsold all other items on its site this holiday season, which hinted toward the sizable growth for the voice-powered speaker market. Today, research firm CIRP is reporting the U.S. installed base for speakers grew to 66 million units in December 2018, up from 53 million in the September 2018 quarter and just 37 million in December 2017.

However, holiday sales didn’t have much impact on the market shares for the various speaker brands, the firm found.

Amazon Echo devices still lead the U.S. market with a 70 percent share of the installed base, followed by Google Home at 24 percent, then Apple HomePod at 6 percent, the report said.

“Holiday shoppers helped the smart speaker market take off again,” said Josh Lowitz, Partner and Co-Founder of CIRP, in a statement. “Relative market shares have remained fairly stable, with Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod accounting for consistent shares over the past few quarters. Amazon and Google both have broad model lineups, ranging from basic to high-end, with even more variants from Amazon. Apple, of course, has only its premium-priced HomePod, and likely won’t gain significant share until it offers an entry-level product closer to Echo Dot and Home mini,” Lowitz added.

Also of interest is that some portion of those buying a smart speaker for their home already own one. According to CIRP, 35 percent of smart speaker owners now have multiple devices, as of December 2018. That’s up from 18 percent in December 2017.

This figure is key to the device markers’ larger strategies, because it means that once a company is able to get that first sale, the consumer may return to buy more devices from the same vendor.

Amazon had gained an early advantage here, initially convincing more users to buy another speaker compared with Google Home users. A year ago, almost double the number of Echo users had multiple devices, versus Google Home owners. But Google is catching up, and now about a third of Echo and Google Home users have multiple devices.

It’s worth noting that CIRP data – like much that’s produced by market research firms – isn’t always going to match up exactly with other firms’ estimates and forecasts.

For example, Strategy Analytics this fall said that Amazon’s Echo market share in the U.S. was 63 percent, to Google’s 17 percent and Apple HomePod’s 4 percent. Meanwhile, eMarketer’s 2019 U.S. forecast predicts Amazon Echo will end up with around a 63.3 percent market share this year, versus Google Home’s 31 percent, with all others like HomePod and Sonos, reaching 12 percent.

That said, the broad strokes across all reports point to the same general findings – that Amazon is leading the U.S. market by a wide margin, and while that margin may be shrinking, it’s not going away soon.

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Apple pays millions in backdated taxes to French authorities

Apple has agreed to pay back a large sum in backdated taxes. The company has confirmed the information to the AFP and Reuters. According to L’Express, Apple could have paid as much as €500 million ($572 million) — the AFP also confirmed that sum.

“The French tax administration recently concluded a multi-year audit on the company’s French accounts, and those details will be published in our public accounts,” the company told Reuters. French authorities can’t confirm the transaction due to tax secrecy.

This isn’t the first time French tax authorities investigate on tech companies. Amazon also settled a dispute with French authorities back in February 2018.

In August 2016, the European Commission ruled that Apple had benefited from illegal tax benefits from 2003 to 2014. Like many global companies, Apple has been accused of optimizing its corporate structure to lower the effective corporate tax rate in Europe.

While Apple appealed the decision back in 2016 saying that everything was legal, the company finished paying back the fine in September 2018. There are now $16.4 billion (€14.3 billion) sitting in an escrow account, waiting for the appeal.

And it sounds like Apple should have paid more taxes in France in particular. French tax authorities focused on profits generated in France over the past ten years.

Last month, the French government announced that it would start taxing big tech companies in France even if they report profits in another country. This tax will be based on revenue generated in France. Other European countries could follow the same model.

127 member countries of the OECD are also discussing new taxation rules for big tech companies. This time, the OECD wants to force companies to report profits in all countries where they operate.

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Google brings Chrome OS Instant Tethering to more Chromebooks and phones

Tethering your laptop and phone can be a bit of a hassle. Google’s Chrome OS has long offered a solution called Instant Tethering that makes the process automatic, but so far, this only worked for a small set of Google’s own Chromebooks and phones, starting with the Nexus 6. Now Google is officially bringing this feature to a wider range of devices after testing it behind a Chrome OS flag for a few weeks. With this, Instant Tethering is now available on an additional 15 Chromebooks and over 30 phones.

The promise of Instant Tether is pretty straightforward. Instead of having to turn on the hotspot feature on your phone and then manually connecting to the hotspot from your device (and hopefully remembering to turn it off when you are done), this feature lets you do this once during the setup process and then, when the Chromebook doesn’t have access to a WiFi network, it’ll simply create a connection to your phone with a single click. If you’re not using the connection for more than 10 minutes, it’ll also automatically turn off the hotspot feature on the phone, too.

Tethering, of course, counts against your cell plan’s monthly data allotment (and even most “unlimited” plans only feature a limited number of GB for tethering), so keep that in mind if you decide to turn this feature on.

You can find the full list of newly supported devices, which include many of today’s most popular Android phones and Chromebooks, below.

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Daily Crunch: Google launches Live Transcribe

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:

1. Google intros a pair of Android accessibility features for people with hearing loss

Live Transcribe is, perhaps, the more compelling of the two offerings. As its name implies, the feature transcribes audio in real time, so users with hearing loss can read text, in order to enable a live, two-way conversation.

Meanwhile, Sound Amplifier is designed to filter out ambient and unwanted noise, without boosting the volume on already loud sounds.

2. Amazon’s Audible brings Choose Your Own Adventure stories to Alexa devices

These are professionally performed, voice-controlled narratives from the publisher of the original Choose Your Own Adventure book series, ChooseCo.

3. Bird CEO on scooter startup copycats, unit economics, safety and seasonality

“2018 was about scaling,” he said. “2019 is about really focusing on the unit economics of the business.”

4. Crypto exchange Kraken acquires Crypto Facilities

This nine-figure deal is Kraken’s biggest acquisition to date. Following the deal, some Kraken users can now access both spot and futures trading.

5. Why no one really quits Google or Facebook

Danny Crichton weighs in on the latest Facebook and Google scandals. Rather depressingly, he argues that nothing will change.

6. Watch the tech-centric Super Bowl ads from Amazon, Microsoft and others

This year’s theme: Sad robots.

7. Your Monday podcast roundup

This week, Equity looks at $100 million funding rounds for everyone, Mixtape discusses allegations that Oracle underpaid minority employees and Original Content reviews the creepy Netflix series “You.”

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Google intros a pair of Android accessibility features for people with hearing loss

Google this morning unveiled a pair of new Android features for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. As the company notes in a blog post this morning, the WHO estimates that 900 million people will be living with heading loss by 2055. The ubiquity of mobile devices — Android in particular — offers a promising potential to help open the lines of communication.

Live Transcribe is, perhaps, the more compelling of the two offerings. As its name implies, the feature transcribes audio in real-time, so users with hearing loss can read text, in order to enable a live, two-way conversation. It defaults to white text on a black background, making it easier to read and can also connect to external microphones for better results.

The feature leverages much of the company’s work in speech to text and translation. It starts rolling out today in limited beta for Pixel 3 users. It will be available in more than 70 languages and dialects.

Announced back at last year’s Google I/O, Sound Amplifier is designed to filter out ambient and unwanted noises, without boosting the volume on already loud sounds. The feature works with headphones, letting users manually adjust the settings for the right fit. That one is available now via the Play Store.

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Warby Parker dips into AR with the launch of virtual try-on

Warby Parker is today introducing virtual try-on to let shoppers select a pair of frames and instantly see how they look.

The tech was built on Apple’s ARKit, and the feature is only available to users on the Warby Parker iOS app on an iPhone X or later.

Warby Parker, which launched in 2010, attempted to implement a virtual try-on feature on its website, but pulled the feature shortly after it debuted. The issue?

With something like glasses, virtual try-on needs to be as close to reality as possible. Virtual objects can’t be overlaid ‘close to’ the user’s face, but rather match up with all their facial curves, and the placement of the ears, eyes and nose.

“It was really our first time building out a full AR feature as a company, and there were two things that were really important,” said Sr. Director of E-Commerce and Consumer Insights Erin Collins. “The first was getting fit right, which was a technical challenge that required a bunch of revisions. And the second thing was making sure the frame images looked as photorealistic as possible, which meant getting 3D artists to digital render them and lots of revisions to get it pixel perfect on each pair of frames.”

The technology Warby Parker built uses a proprietary algorithm to perfectly place virtual frames on the user’s face. The feature also allows users to quickly snap a screenshot and share with others to get feedback on the frames.

Since inception, Warby Parker developed its ecommerce brand on the back of a relatively low-tech feature: in-home try-on. The company simply sent users five frames of their choice to try on at home and send back later, once they’d made their purchasing decision.

Collins sees the new virtual try-on as a great compliment to that program, while offering a quick and convenient experience for repeat buyers.

“This will make it easier for returning customers to buy glasses without trying them on, but we’re really excited about it as a tool for people to narrow down their home try-on choices,” said Collins.

Warby Parker has raised a total of nearly $300 million in funding from investors such as T.Rowe Price, Tiger Global Management and General Catalyst.

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