Архив метки: App Store

Spotify says support for external payments on iOS has already boosted subscriptions

Spotify says its ability to direct its customers to external payment links in its iOS app has already had a positive impact on sales. In a newly filed amicus brief in support of Epic Games in its ongoing legal battle with Apple over external payments on the App Store, Spotify claims its internal data indicates […]
Spotify says support for external payments on iOS has already boosted subscriptions

Netflix is bringing back Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales with new gameplay

Netflix is bringing the Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales game to its platform with new gameplay based on the content from Season 4 of the show. Users will be able to play as new characters features in Season 4 in this no-ads game as the company continues its push toward gaming.
Users have to solve puzzles in this game to beat enemies like Demogorgons and other supernatural monsters. In the process, they can collect up to 50 versions of characters from the show. The company describes the game’s graphics as “nostalgic 1980s Saturday morning cartoon art style.”

Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales was first released in 2021 and it was removed from the App Store and Play Store in August after Netflix acquired the game’s publisher for $72 million. At that time, the streaming service announced that it is working on revamping the game and moving it to Netflix exclusively.
Users can download the updated game starting today using this link. This release of the title joins other Stranger Things games like Stranger Things: 1984 and Stranger Things 3: The Game.
The game also builds on Netflix’s efforts to let fans engage with the show in various ways. Earlier this year, the streaming company partnered with Reddit for Stranger Things-based customized avatars and teamed up with Spotify for personalized playlists.
At TechCrunch Disrupt, the company’s VP for gaming Mike Verdu said that Netflix is exploring avenues to get into cloud gaming. He added that the streaming giant is also opening its second gaming studio in California after establishing its first studio in Helsinki in August. The company also launched game handles that can be used across exclusive titles in September.
While the company is putting a lot of effort into making gaming a success, it hasn’t seen stellar results. According to a report from Apptopia published in August, Netflix games were only averaging 1.7 million daily users. During its Q3 2022 earnings, the company announced that it now has 223 million subscribers.
Netflix is bringing back Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales with new gameplay by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Netflix is bringing back Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales with new gameplay

Meme-based dating app Schmooze allows matches to share memes with each other

Sharing a meme with someone you just met can be tricky, especially if you’re trying to flirt with them. Are they into wholesome puppy memes? Or maybe they like dark Homelander memes? Whatever the case may be, Schmooze, the meme-based dating app, is designed to match users with like-minded people who want to make each other laugh.
To use the app, a person swipes right to like, left to dislike, and up to love memes from a selection curated via artificial intelligence. Match suggestions will pop on the screen based on meme choices, and the person can select either “Snooze” or “Schmooze.” The algorithm takes into consideration what types of humor both you and the potential match enjoy or reject.
Today, Schmooze launched a new feature called “Schmooze Flirts” for users to share memes with their matches. “Schmooze Flirts” handpicks memes from the app’s algorithm that a match would likely laugh at and encourages a user to send meme to their match to spark a conversation. The user has 48 hours to message the other person or the chat will automatically disappear. The app also provides icebreakers to help you out before a match gets removed.
Users can now set a limit on the distance for the matches as well.
Image Credits: Schmooze
Additional features are coming to Schmooze next week, including meme pick-up lines and “Schmooze Ayooo,” a place on the app for people to post funny pictures from their own camera roll. Currently, the app doesn’t allow memes from users to enter its algorithm due to quality and appropriateness control concerns. Over the next two months, Schmooze plans to create a user-content platform and let users upload their own memes.
Schmooze is available on the App Store and Google Play Store, however, “Schmooze Flirts” and the upcoming features are only available for iOS users. There will be a delay of two to three weeks until the features are available on Android devices.
When setting up a profile, the user must answer what their “#MemeVibe” is by selecting options such as dark humor, puns, wholesome, relatable, NSFW, gaming, anime, among other topics and categories. They then add profile photos, a bio, their four favorite music artists, memes they like and their TV show binge list.
Note that while there are systems in place to catch fake profiles, extensive background checks aren’t done to eliminate people with a history of crime or violence. The target audience for Schmooze is Gen Z (17+), so users should always prioritize safety, especially when it comes to dating online.

Meme-based dating is here: Meet Schmooze

Vidya Madhavan and Abhinav Anurag founded the startup and beta-tested the Schmooze app at Stanford University. In March 2021, Schmooze came out of beta. The dating app has grown to over 50,000 users with more than 15 million memes swiped and 750,000+ matches made.
A few months ago, the company raised $3.2 million in seed funding, led by Inventus Capital and Silicon Valley Quad, with participation from Lightspeed and Graph Ventures.
Meme-based dating app Schmooze allows matches to share memes with each other

Consumers swap period tracking apps in search of increased privacy following Roe v. Wade ruling

Consumers are ditching their current period tracking apps in favor of what they perceive to be safer options in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that allows individual U.S. states to criminalize abortion. The app switching trend is impacting all manner of period tracking apps, including leading app Flo, which owns a 47% share of the period tracking app market in the U.S., according to data provided by Apptopia. The app may have both lost customers to rival apps while gaining new users from others over the weekend. Other apps are seeing similar trends.
The patterns of app switching indicate consumers are seeking increased privacy, as many of those gaining from this trend are companies that have made public statements in support of strengthened data security and privacy practices. But it’s also clear that consumers don’t necessarily have a good understanding of which apps to trust given that the current beneficiary of this increased switching activity is a potentially problematic app called Stardust, which had yet to implement its new privacy protections at the time it was making promises to users.
As a result of its claims, Stardust saw its daily average downloads increase by as much as 6,000% over the past weekend, Apptopia said. The relative newcomer to the period tracking market drew attention by promoting itself as a small, women-led team that wanted to provide users with a more secure app. Those claims resonated with consumers, driving the app to No. 1 on the App Store on Saturday. But in terms of data security, being a small team is not necessarily an advantage. TechCrunch found various data privacy issues with the version of the app that users downloaded over the weekend, including its sharing of users’ phone numbers with a third party.

Period tracker Stardust surges following Roe reversal, but its privacy claims aren’t airtight

Despite these issues, app intelligence firm Sensor Tower said the app gained 82% of its total 400,000+ lifetime installs this past Saturday through Sunday.
Another top app, Clue, also benefited from consumers seeking alternatives. Apptopia found Clue’s app saw a 2,200% increase in installs over the weekend after it made comments in the press that it won’t divulge sensitive information to states. Sensor Tower reported Clue had also reached its highest-ever rank on Saturday as the No. 15 overall free app on the App Store. It has since dropped to No. 93, which suggests the rank change had been the result of a surge of app switchers.
Image Credits: Clue
Several other apps saw increased installs on Saturday, June 25, too. Compared with the month of June, Glow’s ovulation app saw its average daily downloads jump 21% and its period tracker Eve saw average daily installs increase 83%, Apptopia said. An app called Natural Cycles – Birth Control saw average daily installs rise 53%; another called Period Tracker by GP Apps saw a 17% increase; and the app Femometer saw a 10% increase. Single-digit increases were also seen in apps, including My Calendar – Period Tracker and Ovia Fertility & Cycle Tracker, the firm found.
Finally, leading app Flo moved up slightly on Saturday as a result of the app switching activity. Flo jumped from No. 197 on June 23 before the ruling to No. 187 on Saturday, June 25, Sensor Tower said. It’s now moved up more to No. 180 as of the time of writing. It’s worth noting that Flo’s average daily installs had been on the decline for several months, Apptopia had reported — in part, likely due to news of its 2021 settlement with the FTC over earlier privacy violations. That indicates consumers had been thinking about data privacy well before the Supreme Court ruling.
Image Credits: Flo (opens in a new window)
After the court’s decision on Friday, Flo issued a statement in hopes of stemming the tide of app switchers or those inclined to delete their accounts. It said:
Flo will always stand up for the health of women, and will do everything in its power to protect the data and privacy of our users. To add to our security measures already in place (read more about that here), we will soon be launching a new feature called “Anonymous Mode” – an option that allows users to remove their personal identity from their Flo account. Lastly, Flo will never require a user to log an abortion or offer details that they feel should be kept private, and users can delete their data at any time. We firmly believe that our users deserve complete control over their data and we are here to support our users every step of the way.
Clue also issued a lengthy response to Roe v. Wade on its website, which stressed its adherence to strict European data privacy laws and use of encryption. GP Apps, the maker of Period Tracker, published a strong statement, as well, though its privacy policy indicates that it would comply with legal requests and subpoenas. (However, it noted that consumers can opt to use its account without an online account, which would then only store data locally on the user’s device.) Other companies have published statements on their websites and social media accounts, as well.
But without a deeper analysis of each company’s privacy policy and more sophisticated testing of each app’s privacy and security protections, it’s hard to recommend that the use of any third-party period tracking app is a 100% safe decision at this time, regardless of their statements and claims.
One possible solution to this problem is to simply use Apple’s Health app alone for the time being, where end-to-end encryption of users’ Health records is available through iCloud. Unfortunately, data on Apple’s first-party apps isn’t available, so we’ll never know how many consumers made this choice.

Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade: Should you delete your period-tracking app?

Consumers swap period tracking apps in search of increased privacy following Roe v. Wade ruling

Poparazzi hits 5M+ downloads a year after launch, confirms its $15M Series A

Poparazzi, the anti-Instagram social app that hit the top of the App Store last year, is today, for the first time, detailing the growth stats for its business, its future plans and its previously unconfirmed Benchmark-led Series A round. The L.A.-area startup now reports its iOS-only has seen over 5 million installs in its first year, with users primarily in the Gen Z demographic.
The startup says that 75% of its users are between the ages of 14 and 18 and 95% of users are between 14 and 21. Most of its users are U.S. based, and to date, they’ve shared over 100 million photos and videos on the app.
While the startup positioned itself as an Instagram alternative where friends create your profile, the app’s competition today is not really the established tech giants. Instead, it’s the newer set of “alternative” social media apps that are targeting a younger crowd, like Yubo, Locket, LiveIn, HalloApp, BeReal and others. In general, this group of apps shares a thesis around how big tech is no longer the best place to connect with your real-life friends. With differentiated angles, they all claim to offer that opportunity.
Some of these are already outpacing Poparazzi. Yubo says it’s seen 60 million sign-ups to date. BeReal, which has declined press, has an estimated 12.3 million global downloads, according to app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The firm also reports that Locket has seen about 18.7 million worldwide installs to date, while LiveIn has hit a little more than 8 million installs. (Sensor Tower also sees 4.6 million downloads for Poparazzi, which is largely in line with the startup’s claims, as these estimates aren’t an exact science.)
This heated competition among alternative social apps could explain why Poparazzi is taking to its blog today to share its metrics and confirm its financing after a year of silence. (Or it could be that it’s hiring.)
Image Credits: Poparazzi
Though Poparazzi appears to be an overnight viral sensation, it’s actually taken 3 years to get to this point, explains co-founder and CEO Alex Ma. He, along with his brother, co-founder Austen Ma, went through several pivots to get to Poparazzi, he told TechCrunch.
“Poparazzi was maybe the 11th or 12th app that we built,” Alex says. Among those was the audio social network TTYL, a sort of “Clubhouse for friends.” But, says Alex, 9 months into TTYL the team realized that things weren’t working and they made the decision to wind it down.
The co-founders understood that most social apps fail and had decided the best thing to do was to keep building and experimenting until one hit. At other points, they tested a live texting app called Typo and many other social experiences. But when they built Poparazzi, they knew from day one it was something special. The app blew up, primarily among high schoolers, who were testing the app via TestFlight.
The app’s idea was, effectively, to turn one of Instagram’s core features — photo tagging — into a stand-alone experience. But in its case, photo tagging wasn’t an afterthought; it was the full focus.
Image Credits: Poparazzi
On Poparazzi, users can create social profiles for photo-sharing purposes, but only your friends are allowed to post photos to them. That makes your friends your own “paparazzi,” of sorts — which is how the app got its name.
“It started off almost like a novel, dumb idea — like, what if you could build Instagram but didn’t let people post photos of themselves?” Alex says. “But the more we thought about it, the more we realized we were actually fundamentally changing the engine of what drives social today. And that was the big bet.”
To its credit, Poparazzi perfectly executed a series of growth hacks to generate buzz for its app that drove downloads at launch. The app launched on May 24, 2021, and quickly shot to the No. 1 position on the App Store.

Poparazzi hypes itself to the top of the App Store

Like many apps now, it smartly leveraged the TikTok hype cycle to drive App Store preorders. This helped to ensure the app would hit the Top Charts as soon as it became publicly available, given how the App Store ranks apps based on a combination of downloads and velocity, among other factors. Poparazzi also implemented a clever onboarding screen that used haptics to buzz and vibrate your phone as its intro video played — something that helped generate word-of-mouth growth as users took to Twitter to post about the unique experience.
But the app also bypassed some best practices around user privacy by requesting full access to users’ address books to get started. This allowed it to instantly match users to their friends based on stored phone numbers and quickly build a social graph.
However, it overlooked the fact that many people, particularly women, store the phone numbers of abusers, stalkers and exes in their phone’s contacts, so they can use the phone’s built-in tools to block the person’s calls and texts. Because Poparazzi automatically matched people by phone number, abusers could gain immediate access to the user profiles of the people they were trying to harass or hurt.
Alex says Poparazzi has since taken steps to address this, but explains the thinking around the original decision.
“It’s really hard to compete with Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram for the social graph,” he says. “So the starting point for building a social app typically is the address book because that’s the place where we can get information.” Plus, he adds, “I think the value of the app is close to zero without that initial friend graph.”
Image Credits: Poparazzi
The app also rolled out other new features over the past year, including the ability to block and report users, and it’s invested in machine learning–powered content moderation for detecting things like nudity or hate speech. It’s added the ability to upload from the camera roll; provided support for video, messaging, comments and captions; and introduced in-app challenges that encourage participation — like “pop a friend eating ice cream,” “pop a friend at a mall,” or “pop a road trip.”
It’s now working to allow users to set their profiles to private and is planning an Android version. Longer term, it may monetize via events or merchandise, not ads — but this is still largely to be determined.
Prior to today’s update, the broad strokes of Poparazzi’s A round were already known.
In May 2021, Newcomer scooped the news that Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel had led Poparazzi’s “approximately $20 million” Series A, beating out Andreessen Horowitz for the deal. Alex says the round was actually a $15 million Series A, and confirmed Tavel joined its board.
This is on top of the company’s $2 million seed round closed in late 2018, before Poparazzi was developed. That round was led by Floodgate and included other investors like SV Angel, Shrug Capital and various angels. (Disclosure: unbeknownst to us until now, former TechCrunch co-editor Alexia Bonatsos was among them.) Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko joined the board with that fundraiser.
The funding gives Poparazzi, now a team of 15, a runway of over 2 years, Alex says.
And although some of the competition may be ahead of it for now, the startup believes in its potential largely because its premise is unique. Unlike every other social app on the market, it’s not for performative social media.
“We’re very different in the sense that it’s not about yourself,” Alex points out. “We’re putting the attention on the people you’re physically with, and the people that are in your life, rather than on yourself.”
Poparazzi hits 5M+ downloads a year after launch, confirms its $15M Series A