{"id":4539,"date":"2023-02-04T19:00:43","date_gmt":"2023-02-04T19:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/04\/this-week-in-apps-instagrams-founders-new-app-another-twitter-rival-biden-admin-criticizes-app-stores\/"},"modified":"2023-02-04T19:00:43","modified_gmt":"2023-02-04T19:00:43","slug":"this-week-in-apps-instagrams-founders-new-app-another-twitter-rival-biden-admin-criticizes-app-stores","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/02\/04\/this-week-in-apps-instagrams-founders-new-app-another-twitter-rival-biden-admin-criticizes-app-stores\/","title":{"rendered":"This Week in Apps: Instagram’s founders’ new app, another Twitter rival, Biden admin criticizes app stores"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series<\/a> that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.<\/p>\n

The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to the latest \u201cState of Mobile\u201d report by data.ai (previously App Annie). However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time in mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone, hours spent in 2022 grew 9%, reaching 4.1 trillion.<\/p>\n

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.<\/p>\n

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com\/newsletters<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Instagram\u2019s co-founders launch a Toutiao-like news app<\/h3>\n
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Image Credits: <\/strong>Artifact(opens in a new window)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Surprising news this week saw Instagram\u2019s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger return to the mobile app market with the launch of a news reading app called Artifact<\/a>. The app is part of a new venture aimed at exploring social apps, a report in The Verge<\/a> noted.<\/p>\n

Artifact itself is not yet publicly available but offers a waitlist where interested users can sign up. As described, it sounds like a modern-day twist on Google Reader, a long-ago RSS newsreader app that Google shut down back in 2013. Except in this case, Artifact is described as a newsreader that uses machine learning to personalize the experience for the end user, while also adding social elements that allow users to discuss articles they come across with friends. (To be fair, Google Reader had a similar feature, but the app itself had to be programmed by the user who would add RSS feeds directly.)<\/p>\n

The app presents a curated selection of news stories, which become more attuned to the user\u2019s interests over time. According to a demo version of the app, you\u2019ll need to read at last 25 articles for the app to personalize your feed. (You can track your progress in the app.)<\/p>\n

During onboarding, you\u2019ll tap on news interests you want to track to initially customize the experience. Users can also add their own paid news subscriptions for top publishers, like The New York Times and Bloomberg, if they choose. This will then prioritize those outlets in the app\u2019s interface but links open in a web view. There\u2019s no publisher integration or exclusive deals here, it seems.<\/p>\n

Future app features will include comment controls, separate feeds for articles posted by people you follow alongside their commentary, and a direct message inbox for discussing posts more privately. But for now, you can thumbs down articles or hide the publisher, save articles to read later, share articles through iOS or Android\u2019s built-in sharing features, report content, view your reading history and read articles in a cleaned-up reader mode.<\/p>\n

There are some odd design choices, like the slightly too-small font for a text-heavy app and the italicized font styling on the sign-up page, but the latter isn\u2019t present in the app itself. The app had two news reading tabs, which is strange, as one is a scrollable list of headlines, similar to an RSS reader like Feedly, while the other is a browsable page, similar to Apple News\u2019 Today tab, but with categories at the top.<\/p>\n

The app doesn\u2019t immediately feel original, as it overlaps with other news readers and read-it-later apps, like Flipboard<\/a>, SmartNews, Newsbreak, Pocket<\/a>\u00a0and Matter,<\/a> plus other RSS readers and the default news apps from Apple and Google. It seems as if the company is hoping to reproduce the success of something like ByteDance\u2019s Toutiao, but in the U.S. that\u2019s difficult to do. The new market is more competitive here, where consumers also rely heavily on getting news from Google Search and Facebook \u2014 a platform not available in China. Plus, as TechCrunch\u2019s Catherine Shu previously reported,<\/a> many people in the country skipped the PC and first went online with their phones, paving the way for a mobile news app to eat up market share.<\/p>\n

It will be interesting to track how well Artifact fares in this environment.<\/p>\n

The Biden administration calls out app stores as anticompetitive<\/h3>\n
\"Capitol<\/p>\n

Capitol building. Image Credits:<\/strong> Bryce Durbin\/TechCrunch<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The Biden administration called out Apple and Google\u2019s app stores for stifling competition.<\/a> A new report, issued on Wednesday by the Commerce Department\u2019s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), said it had investigated the competitive conditions in the mobile app ecosystem and found that it\u2019s \u201cnot a level playing field, which is harmful to developers and consumers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report also made several policy suggestions that could improve the ecosystem and open up competition. These included pushes for more transparent app review process; limits on pre-installed apps and self-preferencing; bans on rules that restrict other means of installing apps, like sideloading; support for third-party payments; support for links to developers\u2019 websites from apps; and more.<\/p>\n

The recommendations, however, are just that \u2014 ideas, not policy. The report only helps to solidify and clarify the Biden administration\u2019s position on app store competition. As the report points out, \u201cCongress should enact laws\u201d and \u201crelevant agencies should consider measures\u201d to limit anticompetitive conduct.<\/p>\n

The Biden administration, so far, has seen mixed success in actually holding tech giants accountable. On the one hand, the\u00a0Department of Justice is now suing Google over its digital ad monopoly,<\/a>\u00a0while on the other,\u00a0Meta is winning against the FTC<\/a>\u00a0to move forward with its latest acquisition. The DoJ has yet to sue Apple,\u00a0though it has been building a case<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0weighing in<\/a>\u00a0on Epic Games\u2019 antitrust\u00a0lawsuit<\/a>. In the meantime,\u00a0record lobbying spending from tech giants<\/a>, including Apple and Google,\u00a0has helped to block bipartisan bills\u00a0<\/a>that would curb anti-competitive behavior from advancing in Congress.<\/p>\n

Another decentralized social app launches to take on Twitter, then gets kicked out of the China App Store<\/h3>\n
\"Damus<\/p>\n

Image Credits:<\/strong> Damus<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Twitter has another competitor<\/a>, with this week\u2019s arrival of Damus<\/a>, a decentralized social networking application<\/a> that\u2019s powered by an open and decentralized social networking protocol known as\u00a0Nostr<\/a>, which is based on cryptographic key pairs.<\/p>\n

Last year, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey donated around $245,000 in bitcoin<\/a> (then roughly 14 BTC) to fund the development of Nostr even though he\u2019s already investing in a different decentralized protocol with his Bluesky project.<\/p>\n

Though there are some venture-backed Twitter rivals coming onto the scene, like Spill, T2 and Post, Damus is not one of them. It\u2019s an experiment in decentralized social networking. The app\u2019s promise is a social network without a central authority that makes decisions about the network\u2019s content or who\u2019s allowed to participate, as Facebook or Twitter do. Explains the app\u2019s homepage, \u201cyou are in control\u2026there is no platform that can ban or censor you. You are in control of your data,\u201d<\/em>\u00a0it reads.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no requirement to sign up with a phone number, email or name because of how the Nostr works. That\u2019s a big point of differentiation with the federated platform, Mastodon, where a user\u2019s account is attached to a particular server and admins have some control over their server\u2019s registered users. That means issues with the Mastodon server you\u2019re using \u2014 like an outage \u2014 could impact your ability to use the network. And you could risk losing data if that shutdown was sudden or permanent.<\/p>\n

The new app also includes end-to-end encrypted messaging \u2014 something Twitter does not have, and which has concerned users in the wake of the Musk takeover. Messages are distributed through decentralized relays \u2014 in fact, the name Nostr is an acronym for \u201cNotes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays.\u201d And users can tip one another thanks to Bitcoin Lightning Network integrations.<\/p>\n

The decentralization and promise of anonymity brought a flood of Chinese users to the app at launch, as typical social networks in China have censorship tools to eliminate content that\u2019s illegal or banned in the country. Plus, anonymity is not allowed. Not surprisingly, China\u2019s government soon took action on Damus and the iOS app was pulled from the App Store in China<\/a> just two days after its launch.<\/p>\n

Apple News<\/h3>\n
\"Apple<\/p>\n

Image Credits:<\/strong> Emmanuel Dunand \/ AFP \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/div>\n