Apps

Aiming to bring the “social” back to “social media,” a new app called noplace has surged to the top of the App Store as it launched out of invite-only mode Wednesday. Designed to appeal to a younger crowd — or anyone who wants to connect with friends or around shared inter

As more music streaming apps and creation tools emerge to compete for users' attention, social music-sharing app Popster is getting two new features to grow its user base: an AI image generator for cover art and a collaboration capability where artists can remix another user's song. 

Meta’s Threads now has more than 175 million monthly active users, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Wednesday. The announcement comes two days away from Threads’ first anniversary. Zuckerberg revealed back in April that Threads had more than 150 million monthly active users, up from th

Telegram launched a digital currency called Stars for in-app use last month. Now, the company is expanding its use cases to paid content. The chat app is also allowing channels to convert the stars they have to Toncoin — the cryptocurrency Telegram uses over The Open Network (TON) blockchain. Alt

Mastodon, the open source, decentralized alternative to X (formerly Twitter), is rolling out a new feature that’s meant to make the app more appealing for those who use it to keep up with news and information from writers and journalists. Starting Tuesday, the company is adding clickable auth

Apple unveiled iOS 18 last month at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Since then, the company has released two developer betas in the last few weeks with extended support for multiple new languages across the lock screen, Siri, the keyboard, and search on iOS 18. With the new update, you

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that the company will begin to surface AI characters made by creators through Meta AI studio on Instagram. The tests will begin in the U.S. The social media company’s announcement comes on the same day as a16z-backed chatbot company Character.AI

Meta has fixed the bug that caused people to believe the company had adjusted their selections in a political content settings tool without their consent. The issue had impacted users on both Instagram and Threads, seemingly resetting users’ content settings back to the default, which limits

YouTube is adding several new features for Premium users, including smart downloads and support for picture-in-picture mode for Shorts, as well as a wider rollout of its “Jump Ahead” feature for navigating through videos. The Google-owned video streaming platform already allows backgro

TikTok is gearing up to challenge Amazon’s Prime Day event in July. The social network announced on Thursday that TikTok Shop is holding a “Deals For You Days” sales event in the U.S. starting on July 9. The announcement comes a few days after Amazon revealed that its annual Prim

Google said today that it is adding support for 110 languages to its translation service. The company has used its PaLM 2 AI model to power translations.  These languages include Afar, Cantonese, Manx, Nko, Punjabi (Shahmukhi), Tamazight (Amazigh) and Tok Pisin. The company said the newly add

Facing new competition from startups like Arc, Google announced on Wednesday that it's bringing five new features to the Chrome browser on mobile devices, each designed to enhance the search experience. These include new shortcuts for local search results, a refreshed address bar for easier nav

TikTok earlier this month launched a new social app called Whee, an Instagram-like service for taking photos to share with friends. Like Instagram, Whee also supports the use of photo filters and includes messaging. However, the company’s plans for Whee aren’t clear, as the app has rela

Activity tracking platform and community Strava is shutting down Fatmap, the Europe-based 3D mapping platform it acquired last January. In an email sent to users this week, accompanied by an online support page, Fatmap said that its website and app will be retired from October 1, 2024, and users w