Category: apps

This Week in Apps: Elections’ impact on the app store, new app privacy requirements, iOS 14.2 arrives

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch 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 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours…

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PUBG Mobile plots return to India following ban

PUBG Mobile, the sleeper hit title that was banned in India two months ago over cybersecurity concerns, is plotting to make a return in the world’s second largest internet market, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The South Korean firm has engaged with global cloud service providers in…

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WhatsApp receives approval to expand its payments service in India

WhatsApp, which began testing its payments service in India with 1 million users in early 2018, can finally start to expand the feature to more users in the world’s second largest internet market. National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that operates the widely popular UPI payments infrastructure, said…

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WhatsApp now lets you post ephemeral messages, which disappear after 7 days

Facebook recently announced that WhatsApp passed the whopping milestone of 100 billion messages sent per day, but not everyone wants those chats to stick around forever. Now, Facebook’s wildly popular messaging app with 2 billion users is adding a feature to give people more control on how their words and…

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YouTube removes ads from, but won’t pull, ‘Trump Won’ video following backlash

This year’s presidential election has already proven to be a considerable test of the U.S. democratic system. It’s also been doing a fine job testing the systems behind leading social networks four years after a rather disinformation-ridden election. Twitter today has proven to be reasonably swift — if not entirely…

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Spotify adds standalone streaming support to its Apple Watch app

Spotify confirmed today it has begun to roll out support for standalone streaming on its Apple Watch app. The feature had been spotted in testing back in September, and arrives roughly two years after Spotify first debuted its dedicated Apple Watch app. With support for standalone streaming, users can listen…

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