Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. … Read more
It is difficult to write our way out of the place where we are. The words come easily enough, each measured by its emotional weight in the stream of problems we face. It is possible that this paragraph will go away when I find my bottom. Mandates, Cuomo, Olympic head gymnastics, where we were two … Read more
SpaceX has reached another major milestone in its fully reusable Starship launch system: it has stacked the Starship spacecraft itself on a prototype of its Super Heavy Booster, which itself is loaded with a full complement of 29 Raptor rocket engines, and which Starship has on top six itself. The stacked spacecraft now represents the … Read more
In May, Yahoo! Answers was discontinued after helping the internet answer its most burning questions since 2005. But now Quora, which started as a question-and-answer site but expanded to include blogging, is making its platform more appealing to YouTubers. Quora says it is “on track to make cash flow positive through ads alone,” which means … Read more
Facebook has always been considerate of its users and has found that its privacy settings need to be messed up a bit to make things clear and easy to find. To do this, they took the “privacy settings” and mischievously scattered them among the other categories. “We have redesigned our entire settings menu on mobile … Read more
Karan Bajaj, the founder and CEO of WhiteHat Jr, is leaving the company a year after selling the startup to Indian edtech giant Byju’s for $ 300 million. In an email to staff on Wednesday, Bajaj and Byjus Founder and CEO Byju Raveendran said the departure follows a “mutually agreed” decision made at the time … Read more
After months of testing with more than 100,000 beta testers, Citizen is introducing its Premium Protect offer for all users today. The subscription service costs $ 20 per month and opens up a number of features in the app. The most important of the new paid features is the Get Agent button, which provides access … Read more
The Swiss alternative protein company Planted has its second round of the year worth 17 million CHF (currently around 18.5 million CHF Try the schnitzel. Planted appeared in 2019 as a spin-off from the Swiss research university ETH Zurich, where the founders developed the original technique of extruding vegetable proteins and water into fibrous structures … Read more
Unacademy has raised $ 440 million in a new round of funding as the Indian online learning startup seeks to expand into several additional categories. Temasek led the new funding round for the Bangalore-based startup, while Mirae Asset and existing investors such as SoftBank Vision Fund 2, General Atlantic, Tiger Global, as well as Zomato … Read more
Digitizing your haircut might not be on your 2020 bucket list, but 2021 has an even more surprising item: Tech-powered barbershops are now close to a billion dollars worth of business proposition. Squire is a back-end barbershop management tool for independent businesses. I first treated it in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. … Read more