Media

"">Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the technewss 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

A New York Post story forces social platforms to make (and in Twitter’s case, reverse) some difficult choices, Sony announces a new 3D display and fitness startup Future raises $24 million. This is your Daily Crunch for October 16, 2020. The big story: Twitter walks back New York Post decisio

Twitter has taken another step back from its initial decision to block users from sharing links to or images of a New York Post story reporting on emails and other data supposedly originating on a laptop belonging to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. The story, which al

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Dorsey, Mr. Pichai and Mr. Spiegel: We need universal digital ad transparency now! The negative social impacts of discriminatory ad targeting and delivery are well-known, as are the social costs of disinformation and exploitative ad content. The prevalence of these harms ha

Twitter has announced an update to its hacked materials policy — saying it will no longer remove hacked content unless it’s directly shared by hackers or those “acting in concert with them”. Instead of blocking such content/links from being shared on its service it says it w

If you’re reading this, you probably didn’t get here from Twitter. The service has been experiencing widespread reports of outages for at least an hour. The issue has impacted a range of different activities on the site, ranging from newsfeeds to the ability to tweet. The company has ac

YouTube today joined social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter in taking more direct action to prohibit the distribution of conspiracy theories like QAnon. The company announced that it is expanding its hate and harassment policies to ban videos “that [target] an individual or group

A new study from Pew Research Center, released today, digs into the different ways that U.S. Democrats and Republicans use Twitter. Based on data collected between November 11, 2019 and September 14, 2020, the study finds that members of both parties tweet fairly infrequently, but a majority of Twi

The AirBuddy app is celebrating another successful Apple week by opening up pre-orders on v2.0. The original, which arrived in early 2019, brought a pop-up to the Mac when a pair of AirPods were brought near — bringing simple ecosystem integration to the desktop before Apple did. Here’s eve

Snapchat this summer announced it would soon release a new music-powered feature that would allow users to set their Snaps to music. Today, the company made good on that promise with the launch of “Sounds on Snapchat” on iOS, a feature that lets users enhance their Snaps with music from

The French and Dutch governments have signalled support for EU rules that can proactively intervene against so-called gatekeepers, aka “structuring platforms” or “large digital platforms with significant network effects acting as gatekeepers” — or, more colloquially, &

WarnerMedia will discontinue HBO and WB TV channels in India, Pakistan, Maldives and Bangladesh later this year as the entertainment conglomerate struggles to find a sustainable business model in South Asia despite operating in the region for more than a decade. The company said it will end HBO and

A new app called Mycons launched today and is tapping into the iOS 14 home screen customization trend by making it easier for anyone, including non-designers, to quickly create their own custom icons, as well as shop premade icon-and-wallpaper packs from designers. With the release of iOS 14 in mid

If you ever doubted the hunger brands have for more and better information about consumers, you only need to look at Twilio buying customer data startup Segment this week for $3.2 billion. Google sees this the same as everyone else, and today it introduced updates to Google Analytics to help compan