Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. Last week, I wrote about Apple’s App Store controversy, which I’m kind of revisiting this week through the lens of how Apple’s WWDC announcements tease a change to what apps fundamentally look like in the future. If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get…
Chinese mobile developer NetEase is partnering with Warner Bros to produce a The Lord of the Rings mobile game. The game is going to be a strategy title that “will unlock new opportunities for players to explore the iconic settings and characters of Middle Earth”. Like all mobile games, this ‘strategy’ title is going to…
Mobile safety app Parachute is today rolling out a new feature that will prevent an unauthorized person who grabs your iPhone to stop it from recording live video, even if they attempt to turn off the phone entirely. The timely update arrives amid the nationwide George Floyd protests against police brutality and the systemic racism…
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and chief executive of India’s most valuable startup, Paytm, posed an existential question in a recent press conference. “What do you think of the commercial model for digital mobile payments. How do we make money?” Sharma asked Nandan Nilekani, one of the key architects of the Universal Payments Infrastructure that created…
As a cell phone plan, Yahoo Mobile seems pretty straightforward — there’s just one pricing tier, where you pay $39.99 per month for unlimited calls, data and mobile hotspot usage. But you may be wondering why Yahoo is getting into the phone business. It makes more sense when you recall that Yahoo is owned by Verizon,…
Another afternoon, another round of funding for a mobile banking app. This time, it’s Empower Finance, a San Francisco-based company that’s headed up by former Sequoia Capital partner Warren Hogarth and which just closed on $20 million in Series A funding from Icon Ventures and Defy Ventures. David Velez, who is the founder and CEO…
A new report has shown that mobile gaming has grown to become a huge industry. $41.5 billion was spent in gaming apps within a single year. This massive revenue surge isn’t necessarily a good thing for the games industry. It has been a long time since mobile gaming was considered the boogeyman of the gaming…
Call of Duty: Mobile racked up 148 million downloads in its launch month. That’s more than the combined total of PUBG Mobile and Fortnite. The game now boasts the 2nd most successful mobile game launch of all time. While Activision didn’t afford Call of Duty: Mobile the same marketing fanfare as its mainline titles, the…
According to data compiled by analyst outfit Sensor Tower, Activision’s latest foray into the mobile gaming space, Call of Duty Mobile, racked up no less than 100 million global downloads in its launch week. Source: Call of Duty Mobile/ActivisionBest First-Week Launch Ever These figures give Call of Duty Mobile the venerated accolade of the best…
Chinese mobile-phone and device maker Transsion has listed in an IPO on Shanghai’s STAR Market, a Transsion spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. Headquartered in Shenzhen, Transsion is a top-seller of smartphones in Africa under its Tecno brand. The company has also started to support venture funding of African startups. Transsion issued 80 million A-shares at an opening…
