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Apple says it’s going fully carbon neutral by 2030, Spotify adds video to its podcast strategy and the U.S. charges two alleged Chinese spies in what it describes as a global hacking campaign. Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 21, 2020.
The big story: Apple commits to carbon neutrality
Apple announced today that it plans to make its entire business — including its supply chain and resulting products — carbon neutral by 2030. This strategy includes reducing emissions from the production process, removing carbon from the atmosphere and working with renewable energy suppliers.
In addition to its climate change-focused announcement, Apple said it’s launching an Impact Accelerator that invests in minority-owned businesses.
“Systemic racism and climate change are not separate issues, and they will not abide separate solutions,” VP Lisa Jackson said in a statement. “We have a generational opportunity to help build a greener and more just economy, one where we develop whole new industries in the pursuit of giving the next generation a planet worth calling home.”
The future of work is human — Human Ventures CEO (and former TechCrunch CEO) Heather Hartnett says her firm is calling for entrepreneurs who are building companies that reimagine the way we work.
NBCU’s Peacock streaming service hits 1.5M app downloads in first 6 days — That’s 25% more than the 1.2 million installs Quibi saw during the same period post-launch in the U.S., but only 12% of the 13 million downloads Disney+ generated within its first six days, according to Sensor Tower.
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 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Apple this morning announced plans to make its entire business carbon neutral within the next 10 years. The news follows the company’s push toward a fully carbon neutral corporate structure, adding its manufacturing supply chain and resulting products into the mix.
The roadmap to sustainability as released today, as part of the company’s annual Environmental Progress Report. Reducing every device it sells to zero climate impact means a couple of things. The primary concern is finding ways to reduce emissions from productions by 75%. The remainder will be focused on efforts to help remove carbon from the atmosphere.
The company has already begun pushing to make a larger percentage of its products from recycled materials, thanks in part to its own in house robots Dave and Daisy (serious 2001 vibes), which recover key rare earth magnets and tungsten, along with some steel recovery. The company also runs its own Material Recovery Lab in Austin, with help from engineers at Carnegie Mellon.
Apple says it’s working with more than 70 energy suppliers to go 100% renewable for its production centers, partnership it believes will reduce roughly the same amount of carbon emissions annually as three million cars. The company is also working to launch one of the world’s biggest solar arrays in Europe. As far as the remaining 25% of carbon reduction, there are number of initiatives outlined in the report, including efforts to resort forests in Africa and South America.
There are also plans to launch an “Impact Accelerator,” aimed at investing in minority-owned businesses launched as part of the company’s Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. As for how that relates to the topic of sustainability, VP Lisa Jackson says in a press release, “Systemic racism and climate change are not separate issues, and they will not abide separate solutions. We have a generational opportunity to help build a greener and more just economy, one where we develop whole new industries in the pursuit of giving the next generation a planet worth calling home.”
Apple has generally received high marks from Greenpeace in recent years, for its aggressive efforts to limit the impact of its massive global operations.
Founded by former Apple engineers, a new app called Struck wants to be the Tinder for the Co-Star crowd. In other words, it’s an astrology-based matchmaker. But it took close to 10 attempts over several months for the startup to get its app approved by Apple for inclusion in the App Store. In nearly every rejection, app reviewers flagged the app as “spam” either due to its use of astrology or, once, simply because it was designed for online dating.
Apple continually cited section 4.3 of its App Store Review Guidelines in the majority of Struck’s rejections, with the exception of two that were unrelated to the app’s purpose. (Once, it was rejected for use of a broken API. Another rejection was over text that needed correction. It had still called itself a “beta.”)
The 4.3 guideline is something Apple wields to keep the App Store free from what it considers to be clutter and spam. In spirit, the guideline makes sense, as it gives Apple permission to make more subjective calls over low-quality apps.
Today, the guideline states that developers should “avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated,” and reminds developers that the App Store has “enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already.”
In the document, Apple promises to reject anything that “doesn’t offer a high-quality experience.”
Struck, unfortunately, found itself in the crosshairs of this new enforcement. But while its app may use astrology in a matchmaking process, its overall design and business model is nowhere close to resembling that of a shady “fortune-telling” app.
In fact, Struck hasn’t even implemented its monetization model, which may involve subscriptions and à la carte features at a later date.
Rather, Struck has been carefully and thoughtfully designed to provide an alternative to market leaders like Tinder. Built by a team of mostly women, including two people of color and one LGBTQ+ team member, the app is everything mainstream dating apps are not.
Image Credits: Struck
Struck doesn’t, for example, turn online dating into a Hot-or-Not style game. It works by first recommending matches by way of its understanding of users’ detailed birth charts and aspects. But you don’t have to be a true believer in astrology to enjoy the experience. You can use the app just for fun if you’re open-minded, the company website says. “Skeptics welcome,” the website advertises.
And while Tinder and others tend to leverage psychological tricks to make their apps more addictive, Struck aims to slow things down in order to allow users to once again focus on romance and conversations. There are no endless catalogs of head shots to swipe upon in Struck. Instead, it sends you no more than four matches per day and you can message only one of the four.
Image Credits: Struck
The app’s overall goal is to give users time to analyze their matches’ priorities and values, not just how they appear in photos.
If anything, this is precisely the kind of unique, thoughtfully crafted app the App Store should cater to, not the kind it should ban.
“We come from an Apple background. We come from a tech background. We were very insistent on having a good, quality user interface and user experience,” explains Struck co-founder and CEO Rachel Lo. “That was a big focus for us in our beta testing. We honestly didn’t expect any pushback when we submitted to the App Store,” she says.
Image Credits: Struck
But Apple did push back. After first submitting the app in May, Struck went through around nine rounds of rejections where reviewers continued to claim it was spam simply for being an astrology-based dating application. The team would then pull out astrology features hoping to get the app approved… with no luck. Finally, one reviewer told them Struck was being rejected for being a dating app.
“I remember thinking, we’re going to have to shut down this project. There’s not really a way through,” recounts Lo. The Struck team, in a last resort, posted to their Instagram page about their struggles and how they felt Apple’s rejections were unfair given the app’s quality. Plus, as Lo points out, the rejection had a tinge of sexism associated with it.
“Obviously, astrology is a heavily female-dominated category,” she says. “I took issue with the guideline that says ‘burps, farts and fortune-telling apps.’ I made a fuss about that verbiage and how offensive it is for people in most of the world who actually observe astrology.”
Finally, after several supporters left comments on Lisa Jackson’s Instagram where she had posted about WWDC, the app was — for unknown reasons — suddenly given the green light. It’s unclear if the Instagram posts made a difference. Even the app reviewer couldn’t explain why the app was now approved, when asked.
The whole debacle has soured the founders on the way Apple today runs its App Store, and sees them supportive of the government’s antitrust investigations into Apple’s business, which could result in new regulations.
“We had no course of action. And it felt really, really wrong for this giant company to basically be squashing small developers, says Lo. “I don’t know what’s going to become of our app — we hope it’s successful and we hope we can build a good, diverse business from it,” she continues. “But the point was that we weren’t even being given the opportunity to distribute our app that we had spent nine months building.”
Image Credits: Struck
Though Apple is turning its nose up at astrology apps, apparently, you don’t have to take astrology to heart to have fun with apps like Struck or those that inspired it, such as Co-Star. These newer Zodiac apps aren’t as obsessed with predicting your future as they are with offering a framework to examine your emotions, your place in the world and your interpersonal relationships. That led Co-Star to snag a $5 million seed round in 2019, one of many astrology apps investors were chasing last year as consumer spend among the top 10 in this space jumped 65% over 2018.
Struck, ultimately, wants to give the market something different from Tinder, and that has value.
“We want to challenge straight men since it is — quote unquote — a traditionally feminine-looking app,” says Lo. “For us, it’s 2020. It’s shocking to us that every dating app looks like a slot machine. We want to make something that has a voice and makes women feel comfortable. And I think our usership split between the genders kind of proved that.”
Struck is live today on the App Store — well, for who knows how long.
It initially caters to users in the Bay Area and LA and will arrive in New York on Friday. Based on user feedback, it will slowly roll out to more markets where it sees demand.
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch 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 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.
In this series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.
This week, we’re looking at the political intersections between the app stores and international relations, with news of app censorship in Hong Kong and the potential for a TikTok ban in the U.S. and how rivals are preparing their alternatives. There’s other big news around regulations and lawsuits hitting this week, including one over Firebase-powered app tracking and another that changes how app marketplaces have to operate in the EU. For a bit of fun, we’re also taking a look at some of the new emoji shipping in iOS and Android later this year.
* This Week in Apps was previously available only to Extra Crunch subscribers. Starting this week, we’re making these reports available to all TechCrunch readers.
Headlines
Over 2,500 games removed from China’s App Store in early July
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
More than 2,500 mobile games have been removed from China’s App Store during the first week of July, according to a new report from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The removals were expected due to a planned crackdown on unlicensed games, but this data is the first to demonstrate the impact on the app economy. For comparison, the July figure is four times the number of games that were delisted during the first week of April, five times higher than the first week of May and more than four times higher than the first week of June. Combined, the removed games generated $34.7 million in lifetime gross revenue, with one game accounting for more than $10 million and six that earned more than $1 million. More details are on TechCrunch here.
Longer-term, the fallout from the crackdown may show up in Apple’s bottom line as China has been the most lucrative mobile games market in the world. In 2019, games on China’s App Store generated an estimated $12.6 billion, or 33.2% of all global games spending on the Apple App Store.
Snap launches a developer program for app makers
Snap this week debuted a 13-week remote program, Yellow Collabs, focused on helping developers create deeper Snap Kit integrations. The company wants more developers to integrate its technology into their own apps. Through the new program, companies can choose to work with Snap to integrate the full Snap Kit platform, or they can narrow in on verticals like Snap Minis, Dynamic Lenses, Scan or Snap ML features. The program will run September 21-December 18 this year. Snap had earlier tried to get its technology in front of smaller startups by way of its Yellow accelerator. But this program hadn’t required integrations. The new effort puts a more direct focus on finding developers who want to build in partnership with Snap.
Microsoft xCloud to launch in September with 100+ titles
Image Credits: Microsoft
Microsoft’s xCloud — a cross-platform game streaming service and a competitor to Google’s Stadia — is arriving in September. The company this week announced a round of updates for the new service, which allows Xbox users to play their games on mobile devices or even move between consoles and mobile as they continue a game. The blog post says xCloud will first be offered to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, a $15/mo service, and will include more than 100 Game Pass titles at launch. Over time, the service will become more broadly available.
The growing trend of moving between devices to play favorite games has already led to mobile hits like Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox and others. For game developers, this trend matters to the bottom line, as mobile gaming’s lead over consoles and PC has been growing in recent years.
Data from App Annie and IDC indicates that mobile gaming first overtook both home game consoles and PC and Mac gaming for consumer spend in 2014. But in 2020, mobile is extending its lead to more than 2.8x over desktop gaming and 3.1x more than home game consoles. In other words, console makers have to figure out how to bring the mobile market into the fold because that’s where consumers are spending the majority of their money.
Image Credits: App Annie/IDCApple updates coding technology to replace non-inclusive language
Apple on Thursday announced it’s now working to remove and replace non-inclusive language across their developer ecosystem, including within Xcode, platform APIs, documentation and open source projects. The changes began on June 22 with its beta software, including iOS 14, and related developer documentation. For example, it will now replace words like “whitelist” and “blacklist” with “allow list” and “deny list.” The word “main” will take the place of “master” in the default SCM branch in Xcode 12. The word “Black,” when referring to ethnicity or cultural identity, will now be capitalized. These and other changes are available in Apple’s updated Style Guide.
New regulations in EU limit Apple’s and Google’s power over apps
On July 12, a new EU regulation came into effect that creates more rules around why and when apps are removed from their marketplaces, and more. The platforms will now have to provide 30 days notice to publishers before removing apps and terminating services, allowing developers the time to appeal or make changes to their software to come into compliance with the violation or violations in question. That means the platforms won’t be able to just ban apps and pull them down with no warning or explanation — unless the app involves illicit or inappropriate content, safety concerns, counterfeiting, fraud, malware, spam or it has suffered a data breach, MacRumors reported.
Highlights:
• Mandatory 30 days notice before app can be removed from the App Store by Apple
• Apple needs to disclose any preferential treatment it gives to big developers & publishers
• Apple must have an external mediator for disputes that can't be resolved by App Review https://t.co/vC2aCyCPzu
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) July 14, 2020
The platforms also have to provide more insight into rankings and explain how “trending” apps are chosen, disclose any differentiated treatment between sellers (like better deals that large publishers receive) and share information about their rules and terms in “plain and intelligible language.” Platforms will also have to offer third-party mediation for disputes that can’t be resolved through an app review process.
The regulations apply to platform owners who cater to businesses that sell products through their marketplaces. Apple and Google are large examples of this, but the rules could also apply to Amazon and Valve, notes Macworld.
The regulation goes into effect as both Apple and Google are under scrutiny in the U.S. for anti-competitive behavior. Apple, in particular, has been increasingly held accountable for the way it wields power over its App Store where it takes commissions on businesses — including those it competes with — and forces developers to offer Apple’s own in-app purchase system, when the developers have something to sell.
Microsoft and Google team up on PWAs
Image Credits: PWABuilder
Microsoft’s PWABuilder, an open-source developer tool for building PWAs and Google’s Bubblewrap, a command line and utility for generating Play Store packages from PWAs announced this week they’re working together to help developers publish PWAs in the Google Play Store. Now, PWAs packaged for Google Play via PWABuilder will support the new web shortcuts standard. In addition, PWABuilder now supports the full range of trusted web activity options to make apps better on Android devices. From the PWABuilder, developers can customize the appearance of the Android status bar and nav bar in a PWA, customize the Android splash screen, change their launcher name, use an existing signing key, utilize deeper push notification support, configure their package’s ID and versioning, fallback behavior and more.
Google launches new Kotlin Basics course
Apple isn’t the only one rolling out free educational training for would-be mobile developers. This week, Google announced the launch of Android Basics in Kotlin, a new online course for people without programming experience to learn how to build Android apps. Today, 60% of professional Android developers use Kotlin, and Kotlin powers 70% of Google Play’s top 1,000 apps. The course complements Google’s existing Android Basics curriculum, launched in 2016, which aims to teach programming to non-developers.
U.S. beat China on App Store downloads for first time since 2014, due to coronavirus impacts
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
The U.S. App Store’s downloads surpassed China’s downloads for the first time since 2014. According to data from Sensor Tower’s Q2 2020 report, the U.S. App Store saw 27.4% year-over-year growth in the quarter, compared to the 2.1% growth for the China App Store. During the quarter, the U.S. App Store generated 2.22 billion new installs compared with China’s 2.06 billion downloads, to regain the top position. This then translated to the U.S. beating China on App Store consumer spend, as well.
The shift was attributed to the surge in downloads for mobile apps that came as U.S. consumers were forced to stay home under shelter-in-place orders. Leading the downloads were education and business apps, as mobile users and their families had to shift to remote work and online learning. More details are here on TechCrunch.
U.S. Federal court rules Facebook can sue mobile surveillance software makers
A federal court ruled this week that WhatsApp and its parent, Facebook, could proceed with a lawsuit against Israeli mobile surveillance software company NSO Group. Facebook last October had filed a complaint alleging that NSO Group exploited an audio-calling vulnerability in WhatsApp to send malware to about 1,400 mobile devices, which then extracted messages, browser history and contacts from phones. NSO Group argues it has previously been granted immunity from U.S. lawsuits about its dealings with foreign governments, which uses its technology to fight terrorism, under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act (FSIA).
Messenger adds Screen-Sharing feature
Image Credits: Facebook
Facebook Messenger may be better known for casual conversations among friends and family, but its latest feature borrows from more professional business communication apps. The mobile messenger this week introduced screen-sharing on iOS and Android — meaning you no longer need a desktop or web app to share your screen. Instead, in a video call, you can use screen-sharing to do things like scroll through your photos, use social media apps together (like Instagram, of course) or go online shopping (which you can also do in Instagram — see below). Screen-sharing will also now support up to 16 users in Messenger Rooms on web and desktop, as well.
Instagram launches new Shop, nears U.S. launch of Reels
Image Credits: Instagram
Instagram is making some changes. The company had already begun testing swapping the Activity tab for a Shopping icon. Now, it’s rolling out its newly redesigned Instagram Shop, too. The Instagram Shop is described as a place to browse products from favorite brands and creators, as well as curated collections published by the Instagram-run @shop account. Users can also now check out directly with Facebook Pay on their purchases.
In addition, Instagram confirmed on Thursday it will bring its TikTok rival, Reels, to the U.S. next month.
The company expects to bring the new video feature — which is designed specifically for short-form, creative content — to its platform in early August, a spokesperson said. The U.S. launch comes shortly after Reels’ arrival in India this month, following a ban of TikTok in that market. Reels has also been tested in Brazil, France and Germany. The U.S. won’t be the only country to see Reels’ arrival, but Instagram didn’t say which other markets are on the list.
Image Credits: Instagram
The move to more quickly roll out Reels to more markets comes as TikTok has come under intense scrutiny for its ties to China. India banned the app, along with 58 other mobile applications designed by Chinese firms, in June. The Trump administration more recently said it was considering a similar ban on TikTok, for reasons related to national security. This week, it said such a decision could be just weeks away.
Meanwhile, Rep. Stephen Lynch, chairman of the subcommittee on national security, sought assurances from both Apple and Google this week that they would warn users about applications that are developed, operated or owned by foreign entities and could pose privacy risks to Americans.
Instagram has a real chance at scooping up millions of users around the world if TikTok is removed in more markets outside of India. Already, India’s Roposo, a TikTok rival, says it has seen as many as 500,000 new users joining its app every hour since the ban, and expects to have 100 million by month’s end. Meanwhile in the U.S., Snapchat is testing out a more TikTok-like way to scroll videos.
Apple accused of censorship over Hong Kong pro-democracy app
Apple is accused of denying an App Store release to a pro-democracy app PopVote, a voting platform designed by protest organizers, which also works on Android. While Google Play quickly approved the release, Apple rejected the app for issues with the code. The issues were fixed and the app was resubmitted, but never approved. Developers were unable to reach anyone at Apple about the delay, either.
Hong Kong is still fighting back against the draconian national security law imposed last month by Beijing. Over the past weekend, more than 600,000 voted in the opposition’s primaries, according to Quartz, which broke news of the censored app. The unofficial election had served as a protest against the new law. Local officials had warned that the democratic polls could be illegal, which is why PopVote believes it has been censored and not merely delayed.
Google sued for tracking users in apps via Firebase
Google is being sued for tracking user activity through hundreds of thousands of apps, even after users opted out of information sharing. The suit specifically complains that Google tracks users’ app activity through the Firebase SDK, which can log “the user’s interactions with the app, including viewing content, creating new content, or sharing content.”
App Annie launches ad analytics
Image Credits: App Annie
App Annie is building on last year’s acquisition of analytics company Libring with this week’s launch of a new version of Libring, TechCrunch reported this week. The new product is rebranded as App Annie Ascend and aims to reach a different market, including game publishers and others on the supply side of the ad industry, for example. The launch arrives just as Apple introduced a new way for users to limit ad tracking, which opens up a market for third-party providers of this data. Ascend uses hundreds of connectors to pull data from platforms like AdColony, Unity and Chartboost, allowing customers to see these data sets “side by side.” Reddit and Jam City are among Ascend’s early adopters.
Nextdoor makes it easier to donate to local nonprofits
Neighborhood social networking app Nextdoor has made it easier to donate to local nonprofits with the launch of its new “Sell for Good” feature. The option allows users to sell items on the platform, for example on the For Sale and Free section, then donate the proceeds. The option gives community members other ways to raise funds and saves them a trip to Goodwill, too.
New emoji are on the way
Image Credits: Google
New emoji are arriving on iOS and Android in 2020. For World Emoji Day on Friday, Apple and Google showed off how their respective platforms have designed the new characters. Emojipedia has a first look at Apple’s new emoji, like the ninja, boomerang, piñata and bubble tea, among others. Tim Cook also tweeted a video of the new Memoji. Google shared its plan to bring 117 new emoji to Android 11 this fall, as well as an update to its Gboard app that makes it easier to pick an emoji.
Istanbul and Berlin-based startup Meditopia, which has become a top meditation app in non-English speaking markets, raised$15 million in Series A funding co-led by Creandum and Highland Europe.
Lo-fi, text-based social app for queer women, Lex, raised $1.5 million from in seed funding from Corigin Ventures, X-Factor Ventures, Tusk Ventures and various angels. The app offers text-based personal ads as an alternative to mainstream dating apps.
Google invests $4.5 billion in India’s Reliance Jio Platforms, India’s largest telco, in order to develop a low-cost smartphone to bring new mobile users online. The phone will run a modified version of Android OS and the Play Store. The deal is unusual for the fact that Google and Facebook have invested in the same business. Facebook is the largest minority stakeholder, with a 9.99% share.
Robinhood raised $320 million more for its stock trading app, bringing its latest round to $600 million. The app is now valued at $8.6 billion.
SiriusXM bought podcast app Stitcher from E.W. Scripps in a deal worth up to $325 million. SiriusXM previously acquired Pandora for $3 billion.
Downloads
Mozilla’s VPN for Android
Image Credits: Mozilla
Mozilla’s new VPN app has launched on both Windows and Android this week, after having previously run a pilot program to test the software. The cross-platform app has since been rebranded as Mozilla VPN and is available for $4.99/mo in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Singapore, Malaysia and New Zealand, to start. iOS, Mac and Linux aren’t yet available, but the latter two are in development. The iOS app was included in the pilot but didn’t launch. Unlike many VPN apps, Mozilla’s generates revenue only through its subscriptions — not selling user data, it claims. However, because of its requirement to signup with a Firefox account, users will have to share their email, location and IP address with the service.
Brief
Image Credits: Brief
Founded by former Google engineers, Brief is a newly launched news app that aggregates and summarizes the news in hopes of tackling a number of problems with today’s news cycle, including information overload, burnout, media bias and algorithms that prioritize engagement over news accuracy. The app uses a format that involves short summaries, timelines and key quotes to balance reporting from both sides, while keeping the information flow minimal and the data un-personalized so as not to cater to the reader’s bias.
Even the world’s second largest smartphone market isn’t immune to Covid-19.
Smartphone shipments in India fell 48% in the second quarter compared with the same period a year ago, the most drastic drop one of the rare growing markets has seen in a decade, research firm Canalys reported Friday evening.
About 17.3 million smartphone units shipped in Q2 2020, down from 33 million in Q2 2019, and 33.5 million in Q1 2020, the research firm said.
You can blame coronavirus for it.
New Delhi ordered a nationwide lockdown in late March to contain the spread of the virus that saw all shops across the country — save for some of those that sell grocery items and pharmacies — temporarily cease operation. Even e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Flipkart were prohibited from selling smartphones and other items classified as “non-essential” by the government.
The protracted lockdown lasted until mid-May after which the Indian government deemed that other stores and e-commerce deliveries could resume their services in much of country. New Delhi’s stringent measure explains why India’s smartphone market dipped so heavily.
“It’s been a rocky road to recovery for the smartphone market in India,” said Madhumita Chaudhary, an analyst at Canalys. “While vendors witnessed a crest in sales as soon as markets opened, production facilities struggled with staffing shortages on top of new regulations around manufacturing, resulting in lower production output.”
Smartphone shipment estimates for the Indian market through Q1 2019 to Q1 2020 (Canalys)
Despite the lockdown, Xiaomi maintained its dominance in India. The Chinese smartphone vendor, which has been the top smartphone vendor in India since late 2018, shipped 5.3 million smartphone units in the quarter that ended in June this year and commanded 30.9% of the local market, Canalys estimated.
With 3.7 million units shipment and 21.3% market share in India, Vivo retained the second spot. Samsung, which once ruled the Indian smartphone market and has made major investments in the country in recent months, settled for the third spot with 16.8% share.
Nearly every smartphone vendor has launched new handsets in India in recent weeks as they look to recover from the downtime and several more new smartphone launches are planned in the next one month.
But for some of these players the virus is not the only obstacle.
Anti-China sentiment has been gaining mindshare in India in recent months ever since more than 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a military clash in the Himalayas in June. “Boycott China” — and variations of it — has been trending on Twitter in India as a number of people posted videos destroying Chinese-made smartphones, TVs and other products. Late last month, India also banned 59 apps and services developed by Chinese firms.
Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, which now assumes the fourth spot in India, and other Chinese smartphone vendors command nearly 80% of the smartphone market in India.
Canalys’ Chaudhary, however, believes that these smartphone firms will be able to largely avoid the backlash as “alternatives by Samsung, Nokia, or even Apple are hardly price-competitive.”
Apple, which commands only 1% of the Indian smartphone market, was the least impacted among the top 10 vendors as iPhone shipments fell just 20% year-on-year to over 250,000 in Q2 2020, Canalys said.
Apple flexes its muscles in China with another megastore that unveiled on Friday. Located in Beijing’s upscale shopping district Sanlitun, the outlet replaces and more than doubles the size of Apple’s first store in China in the same location, which instantly caused a sensation back in 2008.
The landmark building reopened in the heat of U.S. scrutiny over the hardware behemoth’s ties with China. In a speech delivered on Thursday, Attorney General William Barr attacked a raft of American tech companies, including Apple, for playing by China’s rules. He singled out Apple for being “acquiescence to the Chinese Communists.”
Apple has long relied on China not just for manufacturing partners but also generating revenues from App Store (especially games) and iPhone sales. Nonetheless, local smartphone makers such as Huawei — which opened its largest store to date in June — have been chipping away at Apple’s Chinese market share in recent quarters, leaving the American giant in the fifth place with about 10% of total shipment, according to Counterpoint research.
The new premise features Apple’s first integrated solar array in a retail store in China, allowing it to provide power to the store below like all Apple facilities worldwide running exclusively on renewable energy. The company claims it’s supporting enough clean energy in China to power more than 450,000 homes each year.
Over the last 12 years, the Sanlitun store has grown from 52 staff to 185 and has attracted more than 22 million visitors.
Apple News is getting a significant upgrade. The news aggregation app, which ships preinstalled on Apple devices, is introducing several new features for readers and premium subscribers, including audio stories, a daily audio briefing called “Apple News Today” and expanded local coverage.
The audio briefing is somewhat of a competitor to Alexa’s Flash Briefing, which has become a popular way to catch up on the top news headlines. But in Apple’s case, the briefing is hosted by people, not a virtual assistant. Apple News editors and co-hosts, Shumita Basu and Duarte Geraldino, will guide listeners through the day’s headlines. They will then spend the remainder of the briefing discussing around three or four articles in a more in-depth fashion.
Image Credits: Apple
In total, the briefing will run for roughly seven to eight minutes in length and will be accessible to all Apple News readers in the U.S.
A new briefing will arrive every Monday through Friday, and can be played in the Apple News app in the U.S., in Apple Podcasts, or it can be launched using Siri voice commands across Apple devices, including Mac and HomePod.
Another new audio feature, audio stories, is only being made available to Apple News+ subscribers, however.
Starting today, Apple News will produce around 20 new audio stories per week across a range of topics, which are narrated by voice actors. These stories aren’t original content, but will instead be professionally narrated versions of feature reporting and other long-form pieces published by Essence, Esquire, Fast Company, GQ, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, TIME, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired and others, as well as newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.
Image Credits: Apple
Apple several years ago had partnered with SpokenLayer to bring audio narration to the news, but that effort was focused on enhancing the Apple Podcasts experience. The company says it’s not partnered with SpokenLayer on the new feature for Apple News, but is instead working with voice talent itself and recording these audio stories in its own studios. Apple declined to say how many have been hired to work on audio programming for Apple News, but did confirm it expanded headcount specifically for audio.
The audio stories will be made available to subscribers in the U.S. only. Apple didn’t say if it’s planning to expand the offering to international markets.
To make room for the new audio features, the Apple News app navigation experience has been redesigned. There’s now an “Audio” tab directing users to the new content at the bottom of the news application, in between the “News+” and “Following” tabs at the bottom of the screen. When tapped, users will first see the latest episode of Apple News Today at the top of the screen, followed by the new Audio Stories that you’ve added to your Up Next queue. Below that will be a set of personalized recommendations of what to listen to next.
While the tab organizes the new audio programming, users will also be introduced to audio as they’re browsing elsewhere in the app. For example, as you’re scrolling through news stories in the Today tab or reading News+ feeds, a new audio News+ badge will appear next to stories that have narration. You can then click that story to begin the narration without having to change screens. The feature will also allow you to transition back and forth between reading and listening as it will remember where you left off in a longer piece, and begin there when you return.
Related to these efforts, CarPlay will support the News app so users can listen to these audio stories and the Apple News Today briefing while driving. Listening progress will also sync between devices, as you move from iPhone to car and back again.
Image Credits: Apple
While the big news today is the audio programming coming to Apple News, the app is also today introducing expanded local coverage.
In select markets — San Francisco and the wider Bay Area, New York, LA and Houston — Apple News will feature a curated local news experience headed by a local editor. These sections will include a wider range of stories across areas like local weather, politics, sports, dining and restaurants, and other news, and will be personalized to each reader. Apple News rival Flipboard recently launched a similar feature to capitalize on the growing demand for local news, particularly amid the coronavirus pandemic where readers need access to their city and state’s reports of the impact of COVID-19 on their daily lives.
Image Credits: Apple
Apple News+ also today expanded its selection of local and regional newspapers to now offer access to The Charlotte Observer, The Idaho Statesman, The Kansas City Star, the Miami Herald, The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) and The State (Columbia, SC) in the U.S. In Canada it added French-language newspaper Le Devoir and will bring on The Globe and Mail later this summer.
While the Apple News platform currently reaches over 125 million monthly active users in the U.S., U.K. Australia and Canada, the uptake on the News+ subscription has reportedly seen struggles in terms of growing its paid subscriber base. Earlier this year, Apple’s News service business chief, Liz Schimel, who managed relationship with publishers and advertisers, stepped down after the subscription service’s slow start, Bloomberg reported.
Publishers participating in Apple News+ keep 100% of the revenue from ads they sell and can participate in backfill ads that Apple sells, keeping 70% of the revenue. They can also sell their own subscriptions and receive a cut of Apple News+ revenue, based on engagement.
But not all publishers believe Apple News+ is the best way to grow their business. The New York Times, for example, announced in June it will no longer distribute articles in the Apple News app.
Despite the reports, Apple says it’s pleased with Apple News+ traction. But today’s new features are clearly designed to spark growth for the $9.99 per month paid subscription.
The new Apple News features will come by way of software updates ( iOS 13.6, iPadOS 13.6, or macOS 10.15.6), arriving today.
