apps News of 01/27/20

Vine Has A New Successor: The 6-Second Video App Byte

Dom Hofmann, the co-founder of the defunct six-second video platform Vine has announced the release of the app’s successor: Byte. The new app, which lets users shoot and upload six-second looping videos, launched on Android and iOS on ...

This Week In Apps: Apple Antitrust Issues Come To Congress, Subscription Apps Boom, Tencent Takes On TikTok

Welcome back to ThisWeek in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever with a  record 204 billion downloads in 2019  and ...

Kraftful Raises $1m To Help Smart Home Companies Make Better Apps

Kraftful raises $1M to help smart home companies make better apps image If a thousand companies make their own smart light bulb, do a thousand companies also have to design a light switch app to control them? Kraftful , a company out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 class, doesn’t think so. Kraftful builds ...

The App Store Is Down

Midday on Friday it appeared that Apple’s App Store, a critical piece of the digital and mobile economies, struggled with uptime issues. Apple’s own status page indicated that the application vendor was having an “ongoing” ...

Meet The b2b Videoconferencing Startup That’S Gone Crazy For Online Dating

Meet the b2b videoconferencing startup that’s gone crazy for online dating image Founder Andreas Kröpfl has spent almost a decade hard-grafting in the b2b unified communications space, building a videoconferencing business with a patented single-stream system and a claim of no ‘drop-offs’ thanks to “unique ...

Wikipedia Now Has More Than 6 Million Articles In English

Wikipedia has surpassed a notable milestone today: The English version of the world’s largest online encyclopedia now has over six million articles. The feat, which comes roughly 19 years after the website was founded, is a testament of “what ...

Match Group Invests In Noonlight To Power New Safety Features In Tinder And Other Dating Apps

Match Group invests in Noonlight to power new safety features in Tinder and other dating apps image Match Group, the dating app giant and parent company to Match, Tinder, OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, and several other dating apps, announced this morning it has invested in and partnered with connected safety platform Noonlight to roll out a series of ...

Twitter DMs Now Have Emoji Reactions

Twitter DMs now have emoji reactions image Twitter is pouring a little more fuel on the messaging fire. It’s added a heart+ button to its direct messaging interface which lets users shortcut to a pop-up menu of seven emoji reactions so they can quickly express how they’re ...

TikTok Inks Licensing Deal With Merlin To Use Music From Independent Labels In Videos And New Resso Streaming Service

TikTok , the fast-growing user-generated video app from China’s Bytedance, has been building a new music streaming service to compete against the likes of Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. And today it’s announcing a deal that ...

Google’S Latest User-Hostile Design Change Makes Ads And Search Results Look Identical

Google’s latest user-hostile design change makes ads and search results look identical image Did you notice a recent change to how Google search results are displayed on the desktop? I noticed something last week — thinking there must be some kind of weird bug messing up the browser’s page rendering because suddenly ...

Babylon Health Is Building An Integrated, AI-Based Health App To Serve A City Of 300k In England

After announcing a $550 million fundraise last August, U.K. AI-based health services startup Babylon Health  is putting some of that money to use with its widest-ranging project to date. The company has inked a 10-year deal with the city of ...

Yo Facebook & Instagram, Stop Showing Stories Reruns

Yo Facebook & Instagram, stop showing Stories reruns image If I watch a Story cross-posted from Instagram to Facebook on either of the apps, it should appear as “watched” at the back of the Stories row on the other app. Why waste my time showing me Stories I already saw? It’s been ...

Disney Sells Mobile Game Studio FoxNet Games To Scopely

Disney announced today it has sold the game studio FoxNet Games Los Angeles , the makers of “MARVEL Strike Force” and other titles, as well as Cold Iron Studios in San Jose, to the interactive entertainment and mobile game company, ...

Substack Builds Multi-Author Support Into Its Hybrid Publishing, Newsletter Service

Substack builds multi-author support into its hybrid publishing, newsletter service image Substack announced today that it has built support for multiple authors into its service. The company provides a publishing tool that blends blogs and email newsletters into a single entity, with a focus on subscription monetization. The ...

Google’S New Experimental Apps Focus On Reducing Screen Time — Including One That Uses A Paper Envelope

In October, Google debuted experimental apps focused on digital wellbeing , including one that offered a notification mailbox, another that tracked how long you went between phone unlocks, and even one that let you print out the information you ...

Octi Launches A Social Network Built Around Augmented Reality

Octi launches a social network built around augmented reality image Octi has created a new social network that uses augmented reality to connect the act of seeing your friends in real life with viewing digital content like their favorite YouTube videos and Spotify songs. When I wrote about the startup in 2018 , ...

Tencent To Grow Gaming Empire With $148m Acquisition Of Conan Publisher Funcom In Norway

Tencent , one of the world’s biggest videogaming companies by revenue, today made another move to help cement that position. The Chinese firm has made an offer to fully acquire Funcom , the games developer behind Conan Exiles (and others in ...

India Likely To Force Facebook, WhatsApp To Identify The Originator Of Messages

New Delhi is inching closer to recommend regulations that would require social media companies and instant messaging app providers operating in the nation to help law enforcement agencies identify users who have posted content — or sent messages ...

Spotify’S New Test Lets Influencers Post Stories To Introduce Their Own Playlists

Spotify’s new test lets influencers post Stories to introduce their own playlists image Spotify is testing a new Stories feature that will allow select influencers to incorporate video elements into their public playlists, TechCrunch has learned and Spotify confirmed. The first influencer to test the feature is makeup and fashion YouTube ...

Huawei’S Answer To Life After Google Maps? TomTom

Losing access to Google software and services understandably threw Huawei for a loop. The Chinese hardware giant has clearly been working on a contingency plan to deal with the loss of access to things like Android and the Play Store, but Google’s ...