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This Week in Apps: Another App Store settlement, Apple asks to personalize ads, Twitter launches Super Follows

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!

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Top Story

Apple settles another App Store antitrust case…but it’s still winning the war with developers

Photo: TechCrunch

Another day, another App Store settlement announced late at night in the hopes that reporters will miss it. (Apparently, publishing press releases after 8 PM ET is a good time to try to hide the news, huh?)

PR theatrics aside, this week’s settlement is only a minor concession on Apple’s part that its aggressive anti-steering guidelines could be considered anticompetitive. The company said it reached a settlement with Japanese regulator, the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), to change its policies for “reader apps” that would allow them to point users to their own website. Yes, Apple literally had to be drug through an antitrust investigation to agree to allow a subgroup of developers the ability to add a link to a website inside their app.

Anyone celebrating this as a major win for developers needs to think again. Apple is still winning this war.

The rule change, which kicks in globally in early 2022, will only apply to “reader” apps, Apple says. Reader apps provide access to purchased content, like books or audiobooks, or content subscriptions, like streaming music and video. The rule could also apply to apps that provide access to digital magazines or newspapers. Think: Spotify, Netflix, Kindle and others. Of course, “reader apps” is a sort of made-up category Apple invented years ago in hopes of forcing a revenue share, but instead forced some smaller apps out of business. But now, having this category allows Apple to make up rules that only apply to a subgroup of apps. That is some forward thinking.

Historically, reader apps that have not wanted to share subscription revenue with Apple (or that got big enough to no longer need the in-app purchase option) have offered only a sign-in form for existing subscribers on the home screen that appears at first launch. Some also don’t offer any way to buy their content through the app itself, forcing users to figure out how to purchase the content they want through the company’s website. Now they can finally say, “here is our website.” Big whoop, we knew where Netflix.com was.

Overall, the iOS reader app experience from a consumer perspective has been a crappy one. It doesn’t “just work,” it’s a hassle. It’s an annoyance.

Now, Apple says these apps will be able to offer users a link to a website that launches inside their app so users can “set up and manage their account.” Presumably, that could include entering in payment information — after all, once the website is open, it would seem users could navigate it freely, right? But Apple hints that it will have specific rules about these links to come, saying the company “will also help developers of reader apps protect users when they link them to an external website to make purchases.” (Hopefully, Apple just means something like https is required, not that it’s planning to tell developers how to design their own websites and payment processing.)

Apple critics largely panned the settlement, saying they want better rules for everyone.

“This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t solve the problem,” said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek. “App developers want clear, fair rules that apply to all apps. Our goal is to restore competition once and for all, not one arbitrary, self-serving step at a time. We will continue to push for a real solution.”

For whatever reason, Apple appears to want to battle App Store antitrust complaints on a case-by-case basis, instead of just rewriting its rules to even the playing field. That decision seems pretty obstinate, not to mention expensive. But, so far, it’s working. The changes emerging from these settlements so far (including last week’s) are the very smallest of updates to App Store guidelines. Apple is ceding very little ground here.

But the fight is far from over. As soon as the JFTC ruling hit, news broke that Apple is facing another antitrust challenge in India over in-app payments. There are similar cases underway in the EU, too, and U.S. lawmakers have been pursuing their own legislation, as well. Time will tell.

Apple asks users to opt-in to its personalized ads

Does this seem fair?

Today, developers have to show their users a pop-up box that asks if they can track their users, with options like “Ask App not to Track” or “Allow.” Most users decline tracking. After Apple introduced this new policy, aka App Tracking Transparency (ATT), there was some pushback around the fact that Apple didn’t have to follow its own rules — even though it had an ads business of its own where personalized ads were switched on by default.

While Apple, to be clear, is only sharing its data in-house — and not, say, with a third-party data broker — it also was doing so without any sort of opt-out screen presented to users who would prefer that data wasn’t gathered by anyone, you know, at all. 

Image Credits: iOS 15 screenshot

Now, things are changing. In iOS 15, Apple has begun popping up a message that allows users to turn off personalized ads in the App Store and other Apple apps. But wow, does it have a lot of screen space to make its case. Not only does Apple explain the many ways its personalized ads are beneficial to users, it also says its ad platform “does not track you” because it doesn’t link the data it collects with other data, nor does it share any personally identifiable information with third parties.

But there is an argument to be made here that Apple’s distinction between data-gathering across a set of first-party apps (Apple News, App Store and Stocks) and what it calls “tracking” — where app data is shared externally, or combined with others — is a line in the sand that is not only about Apple’s user privacy mission, but also about harming other ad-dependent businesses (like Facebook’s, naturally) in order to boost its own.

Weekly News

Apple updates

Android updates

E-commerce

Image Credits: Instagram

Fintech

Social

Image Credits: Instagram

Messaging

Streaming & Entertainment

Dating

Health & Fitness

News/Reading

Image Credits: Flipboard

Government & Policy

Security & Privacy

Funding and M&A

Neobank Point raised $46.5 million in Series B funding, led by existing investor Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures. Point offers an online account, debit card and banking app for $49 per year.

Callin, a new “social podcasting” app from former PayPal COO and Yammer CEO David Sacks, raised $12 million in Series A funding, co-led by Sequoia, Goldcrest and Craft Ventures, where Sacks is a founder and partner. The app competes with Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, but allows users to download a recording that can be edited into a podcast.

French grocery delivery service Cajoo raised $40 million in a Series A round led by supermarket giant Carrefour. The deal allows Cajoo to take advantage of Carrefour’s purchasing organization, making more products available to Cajoo customers. Cajoo currently has more than 100,000 customers across 10 cities in France and operates 20 dark stores.

Social commerce app Flip raised $28 million in Series A funding led by Streamlined Ventures for its app that combines live commerce and real customer reviews. The company claims 1 million downloads and shipped out 30,000 orders in the last quarter.

  Playtika Holding Corp., the maker of games like Bingo Blitz and Slotomania, is buying 80% of Finland’s Reworks Oy, the maker of a home-decorating game, Redecor. The $400 million deal allows Playtika to acquire the balance for as much as $200 million more in 2023, if earnings meet an agreed-on target. If not, Playtika can buy the remaining portion for $1. This is Playtika’s first acquisition as a public company and eighth overall, and will bring ~$30 million in sales to Playtika this year.

U.K. diet and lifestyle coaching app Oviva raised $80 million in Series C funding, co-led by Sofina and Temasek, for its service that aims to empower users to change their diet habits and improve their health, with a particular focus on treating obesity and health conditions like Type 2 diabetes. The company sells to health insurance companies or publicly funded health services, which then refer or provide Oviva to their own customers.

Amsterdam-based delivery startup Borzo (previously Dostavista), which focuses on emerging markets, has raised $35 million in Series C funding in a round led by UAE-based investor, Mubadala. The service, accessible via a mobile app, has 2 million users, 2.5 million couriers and operates in 10 countries, including Brazil, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey and Vietnam.

No-code tool Anima raised $10 million in Series A funding. The service lets designers upload from Figma to have their work turned into code, including support for React, Vue.js, HTML, CSS and Sass. The platform now has 600,000 users, up from 300,000 last October.

Family safety and communication app Life360 completed its acquisition of wearable maker Jiobit on September 1. The company plans to integrate Jiobit into its offerings, and allow family members to track Jiobit users (or pets), through the mobile app.

Downloads

Clay

Image Credits: Clay

Clay is a new cross-platform app (web, mobile and desktop) that allows you to better manage your relationships, both business and personal. The service is something of a consumer-grade CRM. That is, it’s not about a sales pipeline, it’s about better recalling who you met, how and when, and other important details. This information can be useful to you ahead of meetings and other networking events, business appointments or many other situations. The system is designed to be flexible enough that it can work for a variety of use cases — so far, it’s been used by teachers, veterinarians, political candidates and others. The company, backed by $8 million in seed funding, is encrypting data, but ultimately plans to allow the data to be housed locally on users’ machines, more like the Apple model. The app, however, is pricey — it’s $20/month for the time being, but the company hopes to bring that down to a freemium model over time.

Read the full review here on TechCrunch.

Playbyte

Image Credits: Playbyte

A startup called Playbyte wants to become the TikTok for games. The company’s newly launched iOS app offers tools that allow users to make and share simple games on their phone, as well as a vertically scrollable, full-screen feed where you can play the games created by others. Also like TikTok, the feed becomes more personalized over time to serve up more of the kinds of games you like to play. At its core, Playbyte’s game creation is powered by its lightweight 2D game engine built on web frameworks, which lets users create games that can be quickly loaded and played even on slow connections and older devices. After you play a game, you can like and comment using buttons on the right side of the screen, which also greatly resembles the TikTok look-and-feel.

At launch, users have already made a variety of games using Playbyte’s tools — including simulators, tower defense games, combat challenges, obbys, murder mystery games and more. The app is a free download on iOS.

Read full review here on TechCrunch.

Source Link This Week in Apps: Another App Store settlement, Apple asks to personalize ads, Twitter launches Super Follows

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