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Under pressure, Deliveroo, Uber, and others in Europe are looking to reach labor agreements that offer some benefits without making workers full employees — Food-delivery platforms in Europe are offering couriers extra benefits in the hope of averting costly legislation on employment rights
Parks Associates: 20% of US broadband households currently use ad-supported streaming services and 15% use a freemium service, like Peacock — Twenty percent of U.S. broadband households currently use an ad-supported OTT service, and 15% use a “freemium” service, according to Parks Associates research.
An overview of tech to expect in 2021: better webcams, portable UV sanitizers, “assisted reality” glasses, more subscription services attached to hardware — New ways to work, exercise, see the doctor, watch movies and sanitize every surface in sight will continue to proliferate.
Facebook says there were 1.4B+ voice and video calls on WhatsApp on NYE 2020 globally, up 50%+ YoY, and 55M+ live streams across Facebook and Instagram — Like all of 2020, last night's New Year's Eve was different. There were fewer crowds celebrating in the streets around the world.
Researchers: more than 100K Zyxel firewalls and VPN gateways have a hardcoded admin-level backdoor that can grant attackers root access to devices — The username and password (zyfwp/PrOw!aN_fXp) were visible in one of the Zyxel firmware binaries. — More than 100,000 Zyxel firewalls …
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 is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion total downloads and $120 billion in global consumer spend in 2019. Not including Chinese third-party app stores, iOS and Android users in 2020 downloaded 130 billion apps and spent a record $112 billion. In 2019, people spent three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV.
Due to COVID-19, time spent in apps jumped 25% year-over-year on Android. 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.
This week (after a week off for the holidays), we’re taking a look at holiday app store spending, how the Chinese gaming licensing rules have impacted the App Store, Apple’s move to ban a party app that could have helped spread COVID, and the collaborative musical created by TikTok users, among other things.
Global app spending didn’t seem to be impacted by the pandemic in 2020, according to data from Sensor Tower. The firm reports that consumers spent $407.6 million in apps from the iOS App Store and Google Play on Christmas Day, 34.5% from the $303 million spent in 2019. The majority of the spending was on mobile games, up 27% year-over-year to $295.6 million. Tencent’s Honor of Kings led the games category, while TikTok led non-game apps with $4.7 million in spending on Christmas Day.
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
As in prior years, Apple accounted for the majority of the spending, or 68.4% ($278.6M) vs Google Play’s $129M. The spending was led by the U.S., who accounted for ~$130 million of the total
Apple’s App Store Review guidelines don’t specifically detail how the company will handle apps that could contribute to the spread of COVID-19, but Apple found a way to draw the line when it came to a social app that encouraged unsafe gatherings. This past week, Apple banned the app Vybe Together, which had allowed people to locate “secret” indoor house parties in their area, sometimes including those held in violation of state guidelines.
NYT reporter Taylor Lorenz first called attention to the problem with a tweet. The app had been posting to TikTok to gain attention, but its account has since been removed. Following its removal, the company defended itself by saying that it was only meant for small get-togethers and the founder lamented being “canceled by the liberal media.”
There’s no good defense, really, for the unnecessary and ill-timed promotion of an app that encouraged people from different households to gather, which spreads COVID. And what the founder seemed to not understand, by nature of his recent tweets and statements on the app’s website, is that many cities and states also already prohibit small private gatherings of varying degrees, including those he believes are fine, like small parties in folks’ “own apartments with people in your area.”
The U.S. is coping with 346,000 COVID deaths, and in New York, where the app was promoting NYE parties, 74% of all COVID-19 cases from Sept.-Nov. 2020 have been linked to private gatherings.
The media may have reported on what the app was doing, but ultimately the decision to “cancel” it was Apple’s. And it was the correct one.
Apple on Thursday, Dec. 31, 2020 removed 39,000+ games from China App Store. This was the biggest removal of games in a single day, Reuters reported, citing data from Qimai.
iOS games have long been required to obtain a Chinese gaming license in order to operate in the country, but Apple skirted this rule for years by hosting unlicensed titles even as Android app stores complied. Apple began to enforce the rule in 2020 and gave publishers a Dec. 31, 2020 deadline to obtain the license — a process that can be tedious and time-consuming.
Clearly, a large number of publishers were not able to meet the deadline. Included in the new sweep were Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Identity and NBA 2K20. Qimai says only only 74 of the top 1,500 paid games remained following the removals. To date, Apple purged more than 46,000 titles from the China App Store, the report said.
The TikTok musical version of Ratatouille has become a real thing. The pandemic forced a lot of creative types out of work in 2020, leading them to find new ways to express themselves online. On TikTok, this collective pent-up energy turned into a large-scale collaborative event: a musical version of Disney’s Ratatouille. (Or Ratatousical, as it was nicknamed.) TikTokers composed music, wrote lyrics and dialogue, choreographed dances, designed costumes, sets and more, as they worked together through the app.
Surprisingly, Disney is allowing a charity version of this collaboration to become a real event without any interference or lawsuits. The Ratatouille musical live-streamed on Jan. 1 at 7 p.m. Eastern, and will be available via video-on-demand through Jan. 4, for a minimum $5 donation to The Actors Fund.
The musical itself was lighthearted fun for a younger, Gen Z crowd. It also cleverly incorporated actual TikTok videos that featured the app’s well-known visual effects — like cloning yourself or the flashing colored lights typically associated with TikTok’s “you think you can hurt me” meme, for example. That made it more accessible and familiar to kids who had spent the past year being entertained via the internet.
TikTok users, of course, aren’t the only ones designing, creating and editing productions through remote and collaborative processes in 2020 — Hollywood itself has had to reorient itself for remote work at a much larger scale. TikTok was simply the platform of choice for theater kids looking for something to do.
It will be interesting to see if the TikTok-based collaborative process that birthed this musical ultimately becomes a one-off event that arose from the pandemic’s impacts — including the ability for many creative people to devote time and energy on side projects, for example, due to shuttered productions and stay-at-home orders. Or perhaps in-app collaborations have a real future? Time will tell.
TikTok has already proven it can drive the music charts, fashion trends, and app downloads, so it can probably generate an audience for this production, as well. But the cynic may wonder if such an event would have been as popular and buzzworthy had it been some entirely original production, rather than one based on already popular and beloved Disney IP. But you may as well watch — it’s not like you have any other plans these days.
Image Credits: The New York Times
Telegram photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Image Credits: Tappity
Image Credits: Yayzy
This U.K. startup’s new app will calculate the environmental impact of what you buy using payment data via Open Banking standards. You you can use this information to adjust your spending or buy offsets in-app in order to become carbon neutral. iOS only.
Image Credits: Iconfactory
The popular app maker Iconfactory released a new app, Waterscope, that is a weather app more specifically designed to provide users with information on water conditions. Creator Craig Hockenberry explains the app is something he largely built for himself, an ocean swimmer often in need of information about the tides, wave heights, water temperature, wind speed, air temperature, forecasts and more. The app could be useful to those who live around the water, whether they’re swimming, fishing, boating or anything else. iOS only.
Image Credits: BuzzFeed
This endless runner is BuzzFeed’s first mobile game, which makes it worth noting if not exactly recommending. The mental health-themed game, inspired by BuzzFeed’s animated series The Land of Boggs, was created by BuzzFeed Animation Studios. In the game, characters try to avoid things like stress monsters and gremlins, which is a humorous take on the anxieties of 2020. However, early user reviews indicate the game’s controls are too difficult and complain the game is too hard to be fun. How stressful! $0.99 on iOS and Android.
A new meditation game Enso promises to help users relax, meditate or fall asleep faster using gameplay that involves soothing visuals and sounds, composed by A.I. The app consists of 5-minute journeys where users concentrate on a task while guiding their movements and breath to achieve their goals. iOS and Android.
Image Credits: Portal
Not Facebook’s Portal! This sleep and relaxation-focused app, also called Portal, has been updated with Apple’s new privacy measures in mind. The company announced in December it will not collect user data from its app, and will now no longer use any in-app analytics tracking. The app also never required a login or collected personal information, and didn’t include third-party ads and ad trackers.
That’s resulted in an App Store rare find:
How refreshing.
The Portal app is a free download and offers a $35 per year membership for those who want access to the full content library.
Sources: investigators are checking if SolarWinds was hacked via its offices in Czechia, Poland, and Belarus, where the company moved much of its engineering — Those behind the widespread intrusion into government and corporate networks exploited seams in U.S. defenses and gave away nothing to American monitoring of their systems.
Tesla delivered 499,550 vehicles in 2020, a 36% increase over the previous year and just a few dozen short of hitting an an historic and long-awaited milestone that CEO Elon Musk has been aiming for more than five years.
Tesla reported Saturday that it produced 509,737 electric vehicles in 2020.
Tesla was able to reach the 500,000-vehicle target by ticking up production and sales in the fourth quarter — a final push that has mirrored numerous other end-of-the-quarter efforts by the company. Tesla delivered 180,570 in the fourth quarter, setting a new quarterly record and 30% higher than the previous quarter.
The company’s production and sales figures were also driven by the launch of the Model Y, its mid-sized SUV, and a new factory coming online in China.
The fourth quarter and annual figures show the rise in demand for its more affordable and newer models and waning interest in its flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV.
The company delivered 18,920 Model S and Model X vehicles in the fourth quarter and 57,039 for the year. Sales of the Model 3 and Model Y, the new mid-sized SUV, hit nearly 162,000 in the fourth quarter and 442,511 for the year.
Producing and selling more than 500,000 vehicles a year seemed unreachable for Tesla just a handful of years ago. But Musk has taken a bullish view of the company, noting in 2015 that he remained confident that Tesla would be producing half a million cars in 2020.
“That’s five years from now,” Musk said at the time. “If you go five years in the past for Tesla, we were producing 600 cars per year—now we can produce 600 cars in three days. So I think going from here to 500,000 cars a year is a much smaller leap.”
Musk has reiterated that target periodically, including in January of last year when he noted that deliveries should comfortably exceed 500,000 units. Tesla didn’t adjust that forecast even as the COVID-19 pandemic upended the economy and forced the company, along with every other automaker, to temporarily pause production for several weeks last spring.
Image Credits: Screenshot/Tesla
“Wonder Woman 1984” was released on HBO Max on Christmas Day, where it quickly divided the hosts of the Original Content podcast.
Perhaps it was predictable that Anthony — a fan of clunky-but-ambitious superhero sequels like “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron” — enjoyed the film. Darrell, meanwhile, took the side of most critics, who found the movie exasperating and even, at times, mystifyingly bad.
The biggest surprise was Jordan, who disliked the first “Wonder Woman” and actually preferred the sequel, thanks in large part to Kristen Wiig’s portrayal of the villainous Cheetah.
Everyone agreed that there were plenty of problems, including some slipshod and confusing plotting, as well as a portrayal of Wonder Woman that’s defined entirely by her longing for Steve Trevor, the Chris Pine character who died at the end of the first film but returns here under mysterious circumstances.
But where Anthony found the overall arc of the film — rewriting the melancholy love story of “Superman II” as a parable about capitalism and climate change — and its big emotional moments to be surprisingly affecting, Darrell thought the entire final act was ludicrous, with some of the worst CGI ever seen in a big-budget film.
In addition to debating the merits of “Wonder Woman 1984,” we also discuss our top streaming picks from the past year.
You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Introduction
0:35 Best of the year discussion
16:23 “Wonder Woman 1984” review
30:05 “Wonder Woman 1984” spoiler discussion
