Month: March 2021
This Week in Apps: Parler denied App Store re-entry, Walmart doubles down on TikTok live shopping, Instagram Lite rolls out worldwide
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 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes…
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Some research has gotten a huge boost during the pandemic
Billions of dollars have been spent fighting the pandemic, with a huge proportion of that money going towards vaccine development. Other areas of research have also gotten a big boost during the pandemic — and the results could make a huge difference to public health in the future. Here are…
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Google will now let third party developers create custom Tiles for Wear OS
Google says in a new blog post that it will now allow third-party developers to create custom Tiles for Wear OS. It first introduced Tiles in 2019, widgets that users could glance at and swipe among to get information about weather, calendar notifications, or stats like heart rate. All of…
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Nvidia brings its latency-reducing tech Reflex to Overwatch
An update to Overwatch’s Public Test Region (PTR) is bringing Nvida’s latency-reduction tech, called Reflex, to the popular esports title (via Engadget). The tech aims to help reduce the amount of time between when you click your mouse, and when you see the resulting action on screen, making the game…
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Amazon ordered to temporarily close facility near Toronto due to increase in COVID-19 cases
A public health authority has ordered Amazon to close one of its fulfillment centers in Canada for two weeks because of an uptick in the rate of COVID-19 infections at the facility. A public health investigation found that while the rate of COVID-19 infections has been decreasing in the area,…
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Why ‘blaming the intern’ won’t save startups from cybersecurity liability
SolarWinds is back in hot water after a shareholder lawsuit accused the company of poor security practices, which they say allowed hackers to break into at least nine U.S. government agencies and hundreds of companies. The lawsuit said SolarWinds used an easily guessable password “solarwinds123” on an update server, which…
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