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Can an old Terminal learn new tricks? Fig, a company out of Y Combinator’s S20 class, has raised a $2.2M seed round to prove that it can. Their goal: augment (but don’t try to replace) the command line terminal that so many people use every day and make it more powerful and easy to use — especially for teams.
The first of these augmentations is autocomplete. Start typing your command and it’ll respond with a narrowing drop down of things that might complete it, saving you the keystrokes, time and brain juice required to perfectly remember the myriad terminal commands you might use throughout your work day.
If you’re changing directories, for example, it can help finish paths as you type; with Git, it can keep track of your most recently tapped branches. If you find yourself punching in the same Google Cloud or AWS commands 10 times a day, it’ll put them a tap away. The autocomplete functionality tied to each command line tool can be tweaked to your liking and shared with the wider community. Everything can be done without taking your hands off the keyboard, for those who tend to avoid reaching for a mouse.
Autocomplete is a great feature, though perhaps not enough to fuel an entire company — but it’s just step one, says the team. Fig founder Brendan Falk tells me the goal is to build out an “app ecosystem” for companies that use the terminal as a key part of their daily workflow, charging teams a monthly subscription fee. They’ve built a platform for shareable Markdown-based apps that can a user can launch from the terminal, giving them a visual interface that can be filled out and adjusted before piping output back into the terminal. Autocomplete, as they see it, is just the foot in the door.
“Suddenly I’ve written a little script, but it’s visual, it’s discoverable, I can share that with my team,” says Falk. “Building these internal tools for your development team is really where we want to go here … things like sharing scripts, sharing deployment workflows, sharing monitoring commands. All of this boilerplate stuff that is spread throughout your system, that really is focused within your terminal and should be contained within the terminal.”
Here’s a tweet from Fig showing that visual interface in motion:
The team didn’t initially set out with their sights set on the terminal. Falk tells me that he and co-founder Matt Schrage had pivoted from idea to idea for months, building out things like a personal CRM, prediction markets and a stock exchange for creators. “We had all of the bad college kid ideas,” Falk says, “but they were just not problems we had. They were ideas, as opposed to problems people had.”
A bunch of pivots later, says Falk, they realized that each pivot had them back in the terminal typing the same commands, following the same complicated workflows to spin up a new project. “The last major changes to the terminal were in 1978, and it hasn’t really changed much since.” notes Falk. “Yet literally every hardware engineer, software engineer, data scientist is using it.” Could that be the problem they went after?
It seems there’s an audience for it; while Fig is still in private beta, Falk tells me they currently have tens of thousands of users on the waitlist to get access.
This round was led by General Catalyst, and backed by YC, SV Angel, Kleiner Perkins and a bevy of current/former tech execs including Adobe CPO Scott Belsky, Stripe CPO Will Gaybrick, Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, former Github CTO Jason Warner, former Heroku CEO Adam Gross, Segment co-founder Calvin French-Owen and Eventbrite founder Kevin Hartz.
Fig works with macOS’ built-in terminal app out of the box, but they’ve also got add-on integrations to make it work within things like VSCode, Hyper and iTerm. It won’t work on Windows or Linux just yet, but the team says support for them is on the roadmap.
Canalys released its quarterly U.S. PC sales today, and while the news was quite good with sales overall up 17% YoY, the growth slowed significantly from the prior quarter when sales soared to 74% pushed by the pandemic. Perhaps that is also due the widely reported worldwide chip shortage.
HP retained top spot for the second straight quarter with 21.9% of the market, up over 20% from the previous year. Apple remained in the second spot with a 20.6% share. It’s worth noting, however, that Apple’s growth fell -2.8% for the year.
Dell was in third place with 15.6%, followed by Lenovo with 12.4%. If you’re looking at yearly growth rate, Samsung had the highest with over 50%, but that translated into just over 6% market share.
Image Credits: Canalys
Brian Lynch, research analyst at Canalys, is optimistic that the pandemic-fueled growth we have been seeing in this market throughout 2020 and 2021 will continue and that consumer refreshes could be on the horizon as the economy continues to rebound.
“The commercial and education segments have exploded, triggering tremendous refresh potential. The U.S. economy has bounced back well from its pandemic woes and small businesses are recovering, which will lead to a wave of purchasing from the segment,” Lynch said in a statement.
Overall there were 36.8 million units sold and that includes notebooks, which were up 27%; desktops, which were up 23%; and tablets, which were basically stagnant with growth actually down 1%. Canalys attributed this drop to the education market moving away from tablets and the fact that many people bought tablets when they were stuck at home, but won’t be refreshing quickly.
In spite of this, Apple remains firmly in charge in the tablet market with a 45% share, while Amazon is well back in second place with 22% followed by Samsung with 18%.
It seems clear that even though more people may be returning to in-person learning and in-office work at some point, many schools and businesses will continue to take a hybrid or even fully remote approach and that should bode well for the PC industry, especially whenever the chip shortage finally abates.
Mindset, a platform featuring personal story collections from recording artists, announced today that it raised $8.7 million in seed funding.
As co-founders of the K-pop focused podcast production company DIVE Studios, brothers Brian Nam, Eric Nam and Eddie Nam noticed that the studio’s best performing content came from podcast episodes where stars discussed how they handle struggles in their personal lives. So, the Nam brothers came up with the idea for Mindset, an off-shoot of DIVE Studios.
“We found that this was a unique selling point people really wanted more of — so we started to think about ways to really double-down on that aspect,” said CEO Brian Nam. “How do we provide more of this valuable content to Gen Z and young millennial audiences? We decided that there wasn’t really the right kind of platform out there for this type of storytelling, so we decided to develop our own mobile platform to uniquely share these stories in an audio format.”
In its current format, Mindset features four audio collections from artists like Jae, Tablo, BM, and Mindset co-founder Eric Nam, who happens to be a K-pop star himself. Each collection has ten episodes of around ten to twenty minutes long — the introductory episode is free, but to gain access to the rest of an individual artist’s collection, users need to pay $24.99. The app also has free Boosters, which are Calm-like, five-minute clips of bedtime stories and motivational mantras.
“Up until now, the primary source of income, especially for musicians, has been touring, music streams, and then maybe some endorsement deals, but we’re able to unlock this fourth one, which is monetizing your stories,” Nam said. “The pricing is similar to how they might price a ticket, or how they would sell merchandise.”
Mindset isn’t meant to be a therapy app. “We’re not licensed therapists, we don’t try to act like we are,” Nam said. Rather, it’s a way for artists to share more intimate experiences with their fans to show that behind they music, they’re people too.
Mindset launched in an MVP (minimum viable product) version in February. Nam declined to share active user or revenue numbers, but said that the app gained enough traction that by May, it raised venture funding. The $8.7 million round is led by Union Square Ventures with strategic participants like record executive Scooter Braun (of TQ Ventures), who has more recently made headlines over the Taylor Swift masters controversy. Other backers include Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Opendoor Co-Founder Eric Wu, and more.
“Scooter Braun was a strategic investor,” Nam told TechCrunch.
Braun has also worked with artists like Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, and Demi Lovato.
“He’s really opened a lot of doors for us to branch out into the Hollywood and Western space, where we traditionally came from the K-pop space,” Nam added.
Mindset is putting its seed funding toward content creation, hiring, and product development. The app is currently available on iOS and Android, but it will officially launch on September 14. After that, Mindset will release another audio collection from an artist or actor every two weeks. Nam declined to share who these artists will be.
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Spotify is today opening up access to Podcast Subscriptions to all podcast creators in the U.S., after first launching the service for testing with a smaller number of creators back in April. Through Spotify’s podcast creation tool Anchor, podcasters of all sizes will now able to mark select episodes as subscriber-only content, then publish them to Spotify and other platforms. Since launch, over 100 podcasts have adopted subscriptions, Spotify says. Based on the early feedback from these creators, the company is now making a couple of key changes to both pricing and functionality as the service becomes more broadly available.
Before, creators could choose between one of three price points: either $2.99, $4.99, or $7.99 per month. Creators were able to choose which price point made the most sense for their audience.
But the company learned that creators wanted even more flexibility in pricing, which is why it’s now expanding the number of price points to 20 options, starting as low as $0.49 and then increasing all the way up to $150.
Image Credits: Spotify
Spotify explained that its research found that creators wanted some sense of where to start with pricing, rather than offering a completely open-ended system. That’s why the pricing isn’t something creators today manually enter. Going forward, Spotify will show the three price points that tested well — $0.99, $4.99 and $9.99 — before listing the other 17 options. Of those three, the company told us $4.99 was the best performing.
In addition to the ability to set pricing and gain access to a private RSS feed that can be used by listeners who prefer using a different podcast app, Spotify will now offer podcast creators the ability to download a list of contact addresses for their subscribers. This allows them to further engage with their subscriber base to offer them more benefits, the company notes. It could also be a selling point for creators who would otherwise not want to get on board with a paid subscription offering like this, if it meant losing out on a more direct relationship with their customer.
Image Credits: Spotify
Spotify is not the only service offering paid podcasts. Apple recently announced its own podcast subscription platform. But Spotify’s is currently the more affordable of the two. Apple will take a 30% cut from podcast revenue in year one, dropping to 15% in year two — similar to other subscription apps. Spotify, meanwhile, is keeping its program free for the next two years, meaning that creators keep 100% of revenues until 2023. After that, Spotify plans to take just a 5% cut of subscription revenues.
With this first step into a marketplace model, it’s notable to see Spotify — a staunch Apple critic in the antitrust fight — taking such a small percentage of creator revenues. Spotify has argued for years that Apple’s cut of Spotify’s own subscription business is an anticompetitive practice, especially since Apple is a business rival via its subscription-based Apple Music service, and now, its podcast subscriptions, too.
Today, Spotify hosts a number of subscription-based podcasts, including bigger names like NPR (which is on Apple’s paid podcasts service, too), as well as independent creators like Betches U Up?, Cultivating H.E.R. Space, and Mindful in Minutes. Creators who choose to work with Spotify aren’t locked in — they can share private RSS fees with their customers and publish to other platforms, like Apple Podcasts.
The news of Spotify’s broader launch follows a growing chorus of complaints from podcasters that Apple’s own subscriptions service is off to a rough start. A report from The Verge documented creators’ complaints about bugs, confusing user interfaces, interoperability issues, and more. In the meantime, Spotify claims its waitlist for creators interested in its podcast subscriptions had “thousands” of sign-ups.
The company says it will expand access to international customers soon. Starting on September 15, international listeners will gain access to subscriber-only content. And shortly after, creators will gain access to Podcast Subscriptions, too.
A Bahraini human rights activist’s iPhone was silently hacked earlier this year by a powerful spyware sold to nation-states, defeating new security protections that Apple designed to withstand covert compromises, say researchers at Citizen Lab.
The activist, who remains in Bahrain and asked not to be named, is a member of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, an award-winning nonprofit organization that promotes human rights in the Gulf state. The group continues to operate despite a ban imposed by the kingdom in 2004 following the arrest of its director for criticizing the country’s then-prime minister.
Citizen Lab, the internet watchdog based at the University of Toronto, analyzed the activist’s iPhone 12 Pro and found evidence that it was hacked starting in February using a so-called “zero-click” attack, since it does not require any user interaction to infect a victim’s device. The zero-click attack took advantage of a previously unknown security vulnerability in Apple’s iMessage, which was exploited to push the Pegasus spyware, developed by Israeli firm NSO Group, to the activist’s phone.
The hack is significant, not least because Citizen Lab researchers said it found evidence that the zero-click attack successfully exploited the latest iPhone software at the time, both iOS 14.4 and later iOS 14.6, which Apple released in May. But the hacks also circumvent a new software security feature built into all versions of iOS 14, dubbed BlastDoor, which is supposed to prevent these kinds of device hacks by filtering malicious data sent over iMessage.
Because of its ability to circumvent BlastDoor, the researchers called this latest exploit ForcedEntry.
Citizen Lab’s Bill Marczak told TechCrunch that the researchers made Apple aware of the efforts to target and exploit up-to-date iPhones. When reached by TechCrunch, Apple would not explicitly say if it had found and fixed the vulnerability that NSO is exploiting.
In a boilerplate statement re-released Tuesday, Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstic said: “Apple unequivocally condemns cyberattacks against journalists, human rights activists, and others seeking to make the world a better place … Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals. While that means they are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our customers, and we are constantly adding new protections for their devices and data.”
A spokesperson for Apple said BlastDoor was not the end of its efforts to secure iMessage and that it has strengthened its defenses in iOS 15, which is slated for release in the next month or so.
Citizen Lab said the Bahraini government was likely behind the targeting of the Bahraini human rights activist, as well as eight other Bahraini activists between June 2020 and February 2021.
Bahrain is one of several authoritarian states known to be government customers of Pegasus, including Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico; though, NSO has repeatedly declined to name or confirm its dozens of customers, citing nondisclosure agreements.
Five of the targeted Bahrainis’ phone numbers were found on the Pegasus Project list of 50,000 phone numbers of potential surveillance targets of the Pegasus spyware, which gives its government customers near-complete access to a target’s device, including their personal data, photos, messages and location.
One of those listed phone numbers belongs to another member of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, which Citizen Lab said was targeted months earlier and with a different zero-click exploit, called Kismet, which predates ForcedEntry. Citizen Lab says Kismet no longer works on iOS 14 and later since BlastDoor was introduced, but still poses a risk to devices running older iPhone versions.
Two other Bahrainis, who now live in exile in London and consented to be named, also had their iPhones hacked.
Moosa Abd-Ali, a photojournalist who was previously targeted by FinFisher spyware sold to the Bahraini government, had his iPhone hacked while living in London. Citizen Lab said it has only seen the Bahraini government spy in Bahrain and in neighboring Qatar, and said it suspects that another foreign government with access to Pegasus may have been responsible for the hack. Recent reporting found the United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Bahrain, is the “principal government” for selecting phone numbers in the U.K. Abd-Ali’s phone number was also on the list of 50,000 phone numbers.
Bahraini activist Yusuf Al-Jamri also had his iPhone hacked, believed by the Bahraini government, some time before September 2019, though it is not known if Al-Jamri’s iPhone was hacked while in Bahrain or the UAE, before he was granted asylum in the U.K. in 2017.
The seven unnamed Bahrainis continue to work in the kingdom despite a long history of human rights violations, internet censorship and widespread oppression. Reporters Without Borders ranks Bahrain’s human rights record as one of the most restrictive in the world, ranked only behind Iran, China and North Korea. A 2020 report by the U.S. State Department on Bahrain’s human rights said the country cited considerable violations and abuses, and noted that the government “used computer programs to surveil political activists and members of the opposition inside and outside the country.”
When reached, NSO Group did not answer specific questions nor would it say if the Bahraini government was a customer. In a statement attributed only as an NSO spokesperson sent via its external public relations firm Mercury, NSO said that it had not seen Citizen Lab’s findings and that it would “vigorously investigate the claims and act accordingly based on the findings.”
NSO recently claimed it cut off five government customers’ access to Pegasus for human rights abuses.
Zainab Al-Nasheet, a spokesperson for the Bahraini government, told TechCrunch in a statement: “These claims are based on unfounded allegations and misguided conclusions. The government of Bahrain is committed to safeguarding the individuals’ rights and freedoms.”
Abd-Ali, who said he was arrested and tortured in Bahrain, said that he thought he would find safety in the U.K. but that he still encounters digital surveillance but also physical attacks, as many victims of spyware experience.
“Instead of protecting me, the U.K. government has stayed silent while three of their close allies — Israel, Bahrain and the UAE — conspired to invade the privacy of myself and dozens of other activists,” he said.
A Bahraini human rights activist’s iPhone was silently hacked earlier this year by a powerful spyware sold to nation-states, defeating new security protections that Apple designed to withstand covert compromises, say researchers at Citizen Lab.
The activist, who remains in Bahrain and asked not to be named, is a member of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, an award-winning nonprofit organization that promotes human rights in the Gulf state. The group continues to operate despite a ban imposed by the kingdom in 2004 following the arrest of its director for criticizing the country’s then-prime minister.
Citizen Lab, the internet watchdog based at the University of Toronto, analyzed the activist’s iPhone 12 Pro and found evidence that it was hacked starting in February using a so-called “zero-click” attack, since it does not require any user interaction to infect a victim’s device. The zero-click attack took advantage of a previously unknown security vulnerability in Apple’s iMessage, which was exploited to push the Pegasus spyware, developed by Israeli firm NSO Group, to the activist’s phone.
The hack is significant, not least because Citizen Lab researchers said it found evidence that the zero-click attack successfully exploited the latest iPhone software at the time, both iOS 14.4 and later iOS 14.6, which Apple released in May. But the hacks also circumvent a new software security feature built into all versions of iOS 14, dubbed BlastDoor, which is supposed to prevent these kinds of device hacks by filtering malicious data sent over iMessage.
Because of its ability to circumvent BlastDoor, the researchers called this latest exploit ForcedEntry.
Citizen Lab’s Bill Marczak told TechCrunch that the researchers made Apple aware of the efforts to target and exploit up-to-date iPhones. When reached by TechCrunch, Apple would not explicitly say if it had found and fixed the vulnerability that NSO is exploiting.
In a boilerplate statement re-released Tuesday, Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstic said: “Apple unequivocally condemns cyberattacks against journalists, human rights activists, and others seeking to make the world a better place … Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals. While that means they are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our customers, and we are constantly adding new protections for their devices and data.”
A spokesperson for Apple said BlastDoor was not the end of its efforts to secure iMessage and that it has strengthened its defenses in iOS 15, which is slated for release in the next month or so.
Citizen Lab said the Bahraini government was likely behind the targeting of the Bahraini human rights activist, as well as eight other Bahraini activists between June 2020 and February 2021.
Bahrain is one of several authoritarian states known to be government customers of Pegasus, including Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico; though, NSO has repeatedly declined to name or confirm its dozens of customers, citing nondisclosure agreements.
Five of the targeted Bahrainis’ phone numbers were found on the Pegasus Project list of 50,000 phone numbers of potential surveillance targets of the Pegasus spyware, which gives its government customers near-complete access to a target’s device, including their personal data, photos, messages and location.
One of those listed phone numbers belongs to another member of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, which Citizen Lab said was targeted months earlier and with a different zero-click exploit, called Kismet, which predates ForcedEntry. Citizen Lab says Kismet no longer works on iOS 14 and later since BlastDoor was introduced, but still poses a risk to devices running older iPhone versions.
Two other Bahrainis, who now live in exile in London and consented to be named, also had their iPhones hacked.
Moosa Abd-Ali, a photojournalist who was previously targeted by FinFisher spyware sold to the Bahraini government, had his iPhone hacked while living in London. Citizen Lab said it has only seen the Bahraini government spy in Bahrain and in neighboring Qatar, and said it suspects that another foreign government with access to Pegasus may have been responsible for the hack. Recent reporting found the United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Bahrain, is the “principal government” for selecting phone numbers in the U.K. Abd-Ali’s phone number was also on the list of 50,000 phone numbers.
Bahraini activist Yusuf Al-Jamri also had his iPhone hacked, believed by the Bahraini government, some time before September 2019, though it is not known if Al-Jamri’s iPhone was hacked while in Bahrain or the UAE, before he was granted asylum in the U.K. in 2017.
The seven unnamed Bahrainis continue to work in the kingdom despite a long history of human rights violations, internet censorship and widespread oppression. Reporters Without Borders ranks Bahrain’s human rights record as one of the most restrictive in the world, ranked only behind Iran, China and North Korea. A 2020 report by the U.S. State Department on Bahrain’s human rights said the country cited considerable violations and abuses, and noted that the government “used computer programs to surveil political activists and members of the opposition inside and outside the country.”
When reached, NSO Group did not answer specific questions nor would it say if the Bahraini government was a customer. In a statement attributed only as an NSO spokesperson sent via its external public relations firm Mercury, NSO said that it had not seen Citizen Lab’s findings and that it would “vigorously investigate the claims and act accordingly based on the findings.”
NSO recently claimed it cut off five government customers’ access to Pegasus for human rights abuses.
Zainab Al-Nasheet, a spokesperson for the Bahraini government, told TechCrunch in a statement: “These claims are based on unfounded allegations and misguided conclusions. The government of Bahrain is committed to safeguarding the individuals’ rights and freedoms.”
Abd-Ali, who said he was arrested and tortured in Bahrain, said that he thought he would find safety in the U.K. but that he still encounters digital surveillance but also physical attacks, as many victims of spyware experience.
“Instead of protecting me, the U.K. government has stayed silent while three of their close allies — Israel, Bahrain and the UAE — conspired to invade the privacy of myself and dozens of other activists,” he said.
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.
Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.
This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps and games to try, too.
(Photo Illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Creator platform OnlyFans is getting out of the porn business. The company announced this week it will begin to prohibit any “sexually explicit” content starting on October 1, 2021 — a decision it claimed would ensure the long-term sustainability of the platform. The news angered a number of impacted creators who weren’t notified ahead of time and who’ve come to rely on OnlyFans as their main source of income.
However, word is that OnlyFans was struggling to find outside investors, despite its sizable user base, due to the adult content it hosts. Some VC firms are prohibited from investing in adult content businesses, while others may be concerned over other matters — like how NSFW content could have limited interest from advertisers and brand partners. They may have also worried about OnlyFans’ ability to successfully restrict minors from using the app, in light of what appears to be soon-to-comeincreasedregulations for online businesses. Plus, porn companies face a number of other issues, too. They have to continually ensure they’re not hosting illegal content like child sex abuse material, revenge porn or content from sex trafficking victims — the latter which has led to lawsuits at other large porn companies.
The news followed a big marketing push for OnlyFans’ porn-free (SFW) app, OFTV, which circulated alongside reports that the company was looking to raise funds at a $1 billion+ valuation. OnlyFans may not have technically needed the funding to operate its current business — it handled more than $2 billion in sales in 2020 and keeps 20%. Rather, the company may have seen there’s more opportunity to cater to the “SFW” creator community, now that it has big names like Bella Thorne, Cardi B, Tyga, Tyler Posey, Blac Chyna, Bhad Bhabie and others on board.
U.S. lawmakers demand info on TikTok’s plans for biometric data collection
The TikTok logo is seen on an iPhone 11 Pro max. Image Credits: Nur Photo/Getty Images
U.S. lawmakers are challenging TikTok on its plans to collect biometric data from its users. TechCrunch first reported on TikTok’s updated privacy policy in June, where the company gave itself permission to collect biometric data in the U.S., including users’ “faceprints and voiceprints.” When reached for comment, TikTok could not confirm what product developments necessitated the addition of biometric data to its list of disclosures about the information it automatically collects from users, but said it would ask for consent in the case such data collection practices began.
Earlier this month, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Thune (R-SD) sent a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, which said they were “alarmed” by the change, and demanded to know what information TikTok will be collecting and what it plans to do with the data. This wouldn’t be the first time TikTok got in trouble for excessive data collection. Earlier this year, the company paid out $92 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that claimed TikTok had unlawfully collected users’ biometric data and shared it with third parties.
Weekly News
Platforms: Apple
Image Credits: Apple
Apple told developers that some of the features it announced as coming in iOS 15 won’t be available at launch. This includes one of the highlights of the new OS, SharePlay, a feature that lets people share music, videos and their screen over FaceTime calls. Other features that will come in later releases include Wallet’s support for ID cards, the App Privacy report and others that have yet to make it to beta releases.
Apple walked back its controversial Safari changeswith the iOS 15 beta 6 update. Apple’s original redesign had shown the address bar at the bottom of the screen, floating atop the page’s content. Now the tab bar will appear below the page’s content, offering access to its usual set of buttons as when it was at the top. Users can also turn off the bottom tab bar now and revert to the old, Single Tab option that puts the address bar back at the top as before.
In response to criticism over its new CSAM detection technology, Apple said the version of NeuralHashthat was reverse-engineered by a developer, Asuhariet Ygvar, was a generic version, and not the complete version that will roll out later this year.
The Verge dug through over 800 documents from the Apple-Epic trial to find the best emails, which included dirt on a number of other companies like Netflix, Hulu, Sony, Google, Nintendo, Valve, Microsoft, Amazon and more. These offered details on things like Netflix’s secret arrangement to pay only 15% of revenue, how Microsoft also quietly offers a way for some companies to bypass its full cut, how Apple initially saw the Amazon Appstore as a threat and more.
Platforms: Google
A beta version of the Android Accessibility Suite app (12.0.0) which rolled out with the fourth Android beta release added something called “Camera Switches” to Switch Access, a toolset that lets you interact with your device without using the touchscreen. Camera Switches allows users to navigate their phone and use its features by making face gestures, like a smile, open mouth, raised eyebrows and more.
Google announcedits Pixel 5a with 5G, the latest A-series Pixel phone, will arrive on August 27, offering IP67 water resistance, long-lasting Adaptive Battery, Pixel’s dual-camera system and more, for $449. The phone makes Google’s default Android experience available at a lower price point than the soon to arrivePixel 6.
An unredacted complaint from the Apple-Epic trial revealed that Google had quietly paid developers hundreds of millions of dollars via a program known as “Project Hug,” (later “Apps and Games Velocity Program”) to keep their games on the Play Store. Epic alleges Google launched the program to keep developers from following its lead by moving their games outside the store.
Augmented Reality
Snap on Thursday announced it hired its first VP of Platform Partnerships to lead AR, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis (“KP”). The new exec will lead Snap’s efforts to onboard partners, including individual AR creators building via Lens Studio as well as large companies that incorporate Snapchat’s camera and AR technology (Camera Kit) into their apps. KP will join in September, and report to Ben Schwerin, SVP of Content and Partnerships.
Fintech
Crypto exchange Coinbase will enter the Japanese market through a new partnership with Japanese financial giant Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG). The company said it plans to launch other localized versions of its existing global services in the future.
Social
Image Credits: Facebook
Facebook launched a “test” of Facebook Reels in the U.S. on iOS and Android. The new feature brings the Reels experience to Facebook, allowing users to create and share short-form video content directly within the News Feed or within Facebook Groups. Instagram Reels creators can also now opt in to have their Reels featured on users’ News Feed. The company is heavily investing its its battle with TikTok, even pledging that some portion of its $1 billion creator fund will go toward Facebook Reels.
Twitter’s redesign of its website and appwas met with a lot of backlash from usersand accessibility experts alike. The company choices add more visual contrast between various elements and may have helped those with low vision. But for others, the contrast is causing strain and headaches. Experts believe accessibility isn’t a one-size fits all situation, and Twitter should have introduced tools that allowed people to adjust their settings to their own needs.
Twitter also tapped crypto developer Jay Graberto head the company’s “bluesky” project, which aims to create a decentralized social media protocol on which a number of networks, including Twitter, will eventually operate. The project will operate independently from Twitter, but is funded by Twitter and run by Twitter employees. Elsewhere, Twitter rolled out a new option that would allow users toreport misinformation.
Twitter added Spaces support to its API, allowing developers to buildSpaces discovery tools, and later, tools for hosts.
The pro-Trump Twitter alternative Gettr’s lack of moderation has allowed usersto share child exploitation images, according to research from the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Cyber Policy Center.
Pinterest rolled out a new set of more inclusive search filtersthat allow people to find styles for different types of hair textures — like coily, curly, wavy, straight, as well as shaved or bald and protective styles.
Photos
Photoshop for iPad gained new image correction tools, including the Healing Brush and Magic Wand, and added support for connecting an iPad to external monitors via HDMI or USB-C. The company also launched a Photoshop Beta program on the desktop.
Messaging
WhatsApp is being adopted by the Taliban to spread its message across Afghanistan, despite being on Facebook’s list of banned organizations. The company says it’s proactively removing Taliban content — but that may be difficult to do since WhatsApp’s E2E encryption means it can’t read people’s texts. This week, Facebook shut down a Taliban helpline in Kabul, which allowed civilians to report violence and looting, but some critics said this wasn’t actually helping local Afghans, as the group was now in effect governing the region.
WhatsApp is also testing a new featurethat will show a large preview when sharing links, which some suspect may launch around the time when the app adds the ability to have the same account running on multiple devices.
Streaming & Entertainment
Netflix announced it’s adding spatial audio support on iPhone and iPad on iOS 14, joining other streamers like HBO Max, Disney+ and Peacock that have already pledged to support the new technology. The feature will be available to toggle on and off in the Control Center, when it arrives.
Blockchain-powered streaming music service Audius partnered with TikTokto allow artists to upload their songs using TikTok’s new SoundKit in just one click.
YouTube’s mobile app added new functionalitythat allows users to browse a video’s chapters, and jump into the chapter they want directly from the search page.
Spotify’s Anchor app now allows users in global markets to record “Music + Talk” podcasts, where users can combine spoken word recordings with any track from Spotify’s library of 70 million songs for a radio DJ-like experience.
Podcasters are complaining that Apple’s revamped Podcasts platform is not working well,reports The Verge. Podcasts Connect has been buggy, and sports a confusing interface that has led to serious user errors (like entire shows being archived). And listeners have complained about syncing problems and podcasts they already heard flooding their libraries.
Dating
Tinder announced a new feature that will allow users to voluntarily verify their identity on the platform, which will allow the company to cross-reference sex offender registry data. Previously, Tinder would only check this database when a user signed up for a paid subscription with a credit card.
Developer Konami announced a new game, Castlevania: Grimoire of Souls, which will come exclusively to Apple Arcade. The game is described as a “full-fledged side-scrolling action game,” featuring a roster of iconic characters from the classic game series. The company last year releasedanother version of Castelvaniaon the App Store and Google Play.
Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle has now surpassed $3 billion in player spending since its 2015 debut,reported Sensor Tower. The game from Bandai Namco took 20 months to reach the figure after hitting the $2 billion milestone in 2019. The new landmark sees the game joining other top-grossers, including Clash Royale, Lineage M and others.
Sensor Tower’s mobile gaming advertising reportrevealed data on top ad networks in the mobile gaming market, and their market share. It also found puzzle games were among the top advertisers on gaming-focused networks likeChartboost, Unity, IronSource and Vungle. On less game-focused networks, mid-core games were top titles, like Call of Duty: Mobile and Top War.
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
Health & Fitness
Apple is reportedly scaling back HealthHabit, an internal app for Apple employees that allowed them to track fitness goals, talk to clinicians and coaches at AC Wellness (a doctors’ group Apple works with) and manage hypertension. According to Insider, 50 employees had been tasked to work on the project.
Samsung launched a new product for Galaxy smartphones in partnership with healthcare nonprofit The Commons Project, that allows U.S. users to save a verifiable copy of their vaccination card in the Samsung Pay digital wallet.
Image Credits: Samsung
Adtech
Samsung said it’s removing ads shown in its default apps, Samsung Pay, Samsung Weather and Samsung Theme, to address widespread criticism that a flagship phone’s core apps shouldn’t be ruined with ads.
Government & Policy
China cited 43 apps, including Tencent’s WeChat and an e-reader from Alibaba, for illegally transferring user data. The regulator said the apps had transferred users location data and contact list and harassed them with pop-up windows. The apps have until August 25 to make changes before being punished.
Security & Privacy
A VICE report reveals a fascinating story about a jailbreaking community member who had served as a double agent by spying for Apple’s security team. Andrey Shumeyko, whose online handles included JVHResearch and YRH04E, would advertise leaked apps, manuals and stolen devices on Twitter and Discord. He would then tell Apple things like which Apple employees were leaking confidential info, which reporters would talk to leakers, who sold stolen iPhone prototypes and more. Shumeyko decided to share his story because he felt Apple took advantage of him and didn’t compensate him for the work.
Funding and M&A
South Korea’s GS Retail Co. Ltd will buy Delivery Hero’s food delivery app Yogiyoin a deal valued at 800 billion won ($685 million USD). Yogiyo is the second-largest food delivery app in South Korea, with a 25% market share.
Gaming platform Roblox acquired a Discord rival, Guilded, which allows users to have text and voice conversations, organize communities around events and calendars and more. Deal terms were not disclosed. Guilded raised $10.2 million in venture funding. Roblox’s stock fell by 7% after the company reported earnings this week, after failing to meet Wall Street expectations.
Travel app Hopper raised $175 million in a Series G round of funding led by GPI Capital, valuing the business at over $3.5 billion. The company raised a similar amount just last year, but is now benefiting from renewed growth in travel following COVID-19 vaccinations and lifting restrictions.
Indian quiz app maker Zupee raised $30 million in a Series B round of funding led by Silicon Valley-based WestCap Group and Tomales Bay Capital. The round values the company at $500 million, up 5x from last year.
Danggeun Market, the publisher of South Korea’s hyperlocal community app Karrot, raised $162 million in a Series D round of funding led by DST Global. The round values the business at $2.7 billion and will be used to help the company launch its own payments platform, Karrot Pay.
Bangalore-based fintech app Smallcase raised $40 million in Series C funding round led by Faering Capital and Premji Invest, with participation from existing investors, as well as Amazon. The Robinhood-like app has over 3 million users who are transacting about $2.5 billion per year.
Social listening app Earbuds raised $3 million in Series A funding led by Ecliptic Capital. Founded by NFL star Jason Fox, the app lets anyone share their favorite playlists, livestream music like a DJ or comment on others’ music picks.
U.S. neobank app One raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Progressive Investment Company (the insurance giant’s investment arm), bringing its total raise to date to $66 million. The app offers all-in-one banking services and budgeting tools aimed at middle-income households who manage their finances on a weekly basis.
Public Markets
Indian travel booking app ixigo is looking to raise Rs 1,600 crore in its initial public offering, The Economic Times reported this week.
Trading app Robinhood disappointed in its first quarterly earnings as a publicly traded company, when it posted a net loss of $502 million, or $2.16 per share, larger than Wall Street forecasts. This overshadowed its beat on revenue ($565 million versus $521.8 million expected) and its more than doubling of MAUs to 21.3 million in Q2. Also of note, the company said dogecoin made up 62% of its crypto revenue in Q2.
Downloads
Polycam (update)
Image Credits: Polycam
3D scanning software maker Polycam launched a new 3D capture tool, Photo Mode, that allows iPhone and iPad users to capture professional-quality 3D models with just an iPhone. While the app’s scanner before had required the use of the lidar sensor built into newer devices like the iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro models, the new Photo Mode feature uses just an iPhone’s camera. The resulting 3D assets are ready to use in a variety of applications, including 3D art, gaming, AR/VR and e-commerce. Data export is available in over a dozen file formats, including .obj, .gtlf, .usdz and others. The app is a free download on the App Store, with in-app purchases available.
Jiobit (update)
Jiobit, the tracking dongle acquired by family safety and communication app Life360, this week partnered with emergency response service Noonlight to offer Jiobit Protect, a premium add-on that offers Jiobit users access to an SOS Mode and Alert Button that work with the Jiobit mobile app. SOS Mode can be triggered by a child’s caregiver when they detect — through notifications from the Jiobit app — that a loved one may be in danger. They can then reach Noonlight’s dispatcher who can facilitate a call to 911 and provide the exact location of the person wearing the Jiobit device, as well as share other details, like allergies or special needs, for example.
Tweets
When your app redesign goes wrong…
Image Credits: Twitter.com
Prominent App Store critic Kosta Eleftheriou shut down his FlickType iOS app this week after too many frustrations with App Review. He cited rejections that incorrectly argued that his app required more access than it did — something he had successfully appealed and overturned years ago. Attempted follow-ups with Apple were ignored, he said.
https://t.co/ZXvsalEeuj pic.twitter.com/KJ5uFXQ0rZ
Apple 
South Korea’s GS Retail Co. Ltd will buy Delivery Hero’s food delivery app Yogiyo 
Indian travel booking app ixigo is looking to 
Trading app Robinhood 
