Mobile

Companies send out conflicting messages about the TikTok deal, Microsoft acquires a gaming giant and the WeChat ban is temporarily blocked. This is your Daily Crunch for September 21, 2020. The big story: This TikTok deal is pretty confusing This keeps getting more confusing. Apparently TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has ...

Facebook today is rolling out a new feature that will allow friends and family to watch videos together over Messenger. The feature, called “Watch Together,” works with all Facebook Watch video content, including its original programs, user uploads, creator content, live streams and, soon, music videos. At launch, the co-watching ...

Improve your retention rates, but don’t do it for the 85/15 split Jacob Eiting is CEO of RevenueCat, a platform for managing cross-platform in-app purchases, products and subscribers and analyzing in-app-purchase data. Ever since Apple opened up subscription monetization to more apps in 2016 — and enticed developers with an 85/15 ...

The Trump administration moves forwards with plans to ban TikTok and WeChat (although TikTok gets a partial extension), Unity goes public and we announce the winner of this year’s Startup Battlefield. This is your Daily Crunch for September 18, 2020. The big story: US TikTok ban is imminent The U.S. ...

If this was a normal year, we would be settling in for an iPhone event right about now. This is, however, very much not a normal year. And while we are, in fact, getting an Apple hardware event tomorrow at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET, it’s looking entirely possible — ...

The European Union’s top court has handed down its first decision on the bloc’s net neutrality rules — interpreting the law as precluding the use of commercial ‘zero rating’ by Internet services providers. ‘Zero rating’ refers to the practice of ISPs offering certain apps/services ‘tariff free’ by excluding their data ...

Apple said its latest iOS 14 software will be released on September 16, ahead of the company’s release of the next-generation iPhones. We saw our first glimpse at iOS 14 earlier this year at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which included home screen widgets and reply threading in Messages. It also ...

Mendix CEO Derek Roos shares his insight with The Exchange Investor interest in no-code, low-code apps and services advanced another step this morning with Airtable raising an outsized round. The $185 million investment into the popular database-and-spreadsheet service comes as it adds “new low-code and automation features,” per our own ...

Things have gone from bad to worse for a stumbling smartphone market in 2020. Already plateauing and declining figures have taken a big hit from COVID-19. The pandemic has hampered sales of non-essential items, particularly those best enjoyed outside of the home. According to new figures from Canalys, smartphone shipments ...

In the early days, Microsoft had misgivings about calling the Surface Duo a phone. Asked to define it as such, the company has had the tendency to deflect with comments like, “Surface Duo does much more than make phone calls.” Which, to be fair, it does. And to also be ...