Mobile

Musical.ly has begun redirecting users of its Live.ly app, which it decided to kill off last month, to a competing app called LiveMe. Existing Live.ly users are being pointed to LiveMe through an in-app message, it says. While it’s a fairly common industry practice for companies to direct users to similar apps or services when

Let’s be real — the latest batch of Samsung ads are more about the company’s perception of Apple than its own devices. But hey, that tact has worked for the company in the past, so who can blame ‘em? They do, however, offer at least one key bit of insight into the company’s on-going plans.

Snapcash ended up as a way to pay adult performers for private content over Snapchat, not just a way to split bills with friends. But Snapchat will abandon the peer-to-peer payment space on August 30th. Code buried in Snapchat’s Android app includes a “Snapcash deprecation message” that displays “Snapcash will no longer be available after

Over the course of a weekend we got a glimpse at some of the coming seasons and movies for various sci-fi, superhero, and other types of highly-anticipated fan-favorite franchises from the San Diego Comic-Con this year. Here’s a quick selection of some of the ones shown over the weekend: [embedded content] [embedded content] [embedded content]

Meet Wilson, a new iPhone app that plans to change the way you discover and listen to podcasts. The company describes the app as a podcast magazine. It has the same vibe as Longreads, the curated selection of longform articles. With its minimalistic design and opinionated typography, Wilson looks like no other podcasting app. On

The second quarter of 2018 was another record-breaker for mobile app downloads and revenue. According to a new report this week from App Annie, there were over 28.4 billion app downloads worldwide across both iOS and Google Play in the quarter, up 15 percent year-over-year. That number is even more remarkable because it doesn’t include

Dish today announced it’s becoming the first TV provider to offer customer support over Apple’s Business Chat. Launched earlier this year, Business Chat allows companies to communicate with their customers over iMessage in order to answer questions, provide customer service, or even enable purchases. In Dish’s case, the TV provider says its customers can use

In a bid to cut down on the spread of false information and spam, WhatsApp recently added labels that indicate when a message has been forwarded. Now the company is sharpening that strategy by imposing limits on how many groups a message can be sent on to. Originally, users could forward messages on to multiple

India has quickly become ground zero for the smartphone wars. Last year, the country surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s No. 1 smartphone market, and manufacturers are falling over themselves to plant a flag. Samsung and Xiaomi have been the two biggest winners in recent quarters, battling it out for the top spot. Earlier

Anyone who follows George Takei on Twitter can tell you that Star Trek‘s original Sulu is not a fan of President Donald Trump. But he’s found a new way to express that criticism — not just in tweets, interviews and op-eds, but also in an augmented reality app called House of Cats. The app was

Apple just released the third version of the iOS 12 beta as part of the public beta program. It means that everyone can now install a development build of iOS 12, the next major version of the operating system for iPhone and iPad. Don’t forget this is still a beta version. Things will crash, things

Hackers can steal your phone number by reassigning it to a different SIM card, use it to reset your passwords, steal your Instagram and other accounts and sell them for bitcoin. As detailed in a harrowing Motherboard article today, Instagram accounts are especially vulnerable because the app only offers two-factor authentication through SMS that delivers

With the upcoming release of iOS 12, Apple is introducing a new app called Shortcuts that will allow users to build custom voice commands for Siri that can be used to kick off a variety of actions in apps. While some apps will directly prompt users to add a Shortcut to Siri, the new Shortcuts

Netflix didn’t add as many subscribers as expected by a bunch of people on Wall Street who, on a quarterly basis, govern whether or not it’ll be more valuable than Comcast — and that is probably a bad thing, as it’s one of the primary indicators of its future potential for said finance folk. While

Apple’s App Store continues to outpace Google Play on revenue. In the first half of the year, the App Store generated nearly double the revenue of Google Play on half the downloads, according to a new report from Sensor Tower out today. In terms of dollars and cents, that’s $22.6 billion in worldwide gross app

In honor of World Emoji Day (yes, that’s a thing), Apple is previewing some of its upcoming emoji. Later this year, Apple’s emoji set will feature people with a variety of hairstyles and colors, including curly hair, red hair and white hair. What you’re about to see are simply Apple’s take on emoji that were

The company that brought you the best glass for your mobile device now gives you DSLR-like controls with their Pro Camera app. Features include full manual adjustment over ISO, shutter speed, white balance, image format and more. It should be noted that if you don’t have a shiny new device you won’t be able to

Adobe currently has three dozens apps in the App Store. But one app is still missing. According to a report from Bloomberg, the company could be working on a full-fledged version of Photoshop for the iPad. And it makes sense for a ton of reasons. First, it’s clear that the iPad has become powerful enough

The Opera Android browser will soon be able to hold your cryptocurrencies. The system, now in beta, lets you store crypto and ERC20 tokens in your browser, send and receive crypto on the fly, and secures your wallet with your phone’s biometric security or passcode. You can sign up to try the beta here. The

Pinterest is trying to further tap its popularity as a place to plan events, this time adding ways for users to collaborate across boards that are baked directly into the app. Group boards will have their own designated feed, where users will be able to communicate with others collaborating on that board and also get

HTC isn’t gone just yet. Granted, it’s closer than it’s ever been before, with a headcount of fewer than 5,000 employees worldwide — that’s down from 19,000 in 2013. But in spite of those “market competition, product mix, pricing, and recognized inventory write-downs,” the company’s still trucking on. And while its claim to being “the

Mobile games publisher and marketer Tilting Point is dramatically increasing its commitment to its user acquisition fund. The company announced a $12 million fund at the end of 2016, which it said would help developers grow their games while remaining independent. Today it revealed that it’s committing $132 million in annual spending to the fund.

Slack’s search functions are getting another little quality-of-life update today with the introduction of filters, which aims to make search a little more granular to find the right answers. The company also says searches are going to be more personalized. All of this is an attempt to get to the right files or conversations quickly

iOS users have been reporting problems with excessive battery drain after updating to iOS 11.4. On Sunday, 9to5Mac reported on a raft of posts on Apple forums complaining about excessive battery drain since updating. ZDNet also flagged complaints around the issue early last month. The update to Apple’s mobile operating system was released at the

Yesterday, we learned that 18-month-old, Bay Area-based electric scooter rental company Lime is joining forces with the ride-hailing giant Uber, which is both investing in the company as part of a $335 million round and planning promote Lime in its mobile app. According to Bloomberg, Uber also plans to plaster its logo on Lime’s scooters.

Before Snapchat made social media about just today, Facebook made it about forever. The 2011 “Timeline” redesign of the profile and keyword search unlocked your past, encouraging you to curate colorful posts about your life’s top moments. That was actually an inspiration for Snapchat, as its CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in its IPO announcement that

A differentiator, a utility and maybe a money-maker Josh Constine @ / 11 hours Snapchat is building a visual product search feature, codenamed “Eagle,” that delivers users to Amazon’s listings. Buried inside the code of Snapchat’s Android app is an unreleased “Visual Search” feature where you “Press and hold to identify an object, song, barcode,

Samsung has put out earnings guidance for its Q2 which indicate quarterly growth at its slowest for more than a year — as a lack of new ideas to sell high end smartphones drags on the company’s bottom line. The electronics maker is reporting estimated profit of 14.8 trillion Korean won (USD$13.2BN) on revenue of

A number of top executives are out at ZTE as the phone maker works to fulfill the requirements of U.S.-imposed restrictions. Among the big changes up top is new CEO Xu Ziyang, who formerly headed up the company’s operations in Germany. A new CFO, CTO and head of HR have been named, as well, according

Facebook is becoming a marketplace for enterprise apps that help Group admins manage their communities. To protect itself and its users in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook locked down the Groups API for building apps for Groups. These apps had to go through a human-reviewed approval process, and lost access to Group