If you’re reading this the year it was written, you’re almost certainly not getting it over 5G. If you’re reading this in the future, congrats, you made it. And hey, remember polar bears? 5G is the latest buzzword to send the mobile industry into a tizzy. This one’s got a particular weight to it, too,

Bumble has come up with a new way for its dating app and related businesses to generate revenue. The company this week launched filters — a way to sift through potential matches by a set of specific criteria. For example, Bumble Date users can now filter matches by astrological sign or relationship type, among other

A little taste of 5G is coming early, courtesy of AT&T’s new mobile hotspot. The carrier announced this morning that it will be firing up limited 5G service in a dozen cities across the U.S. this Friday, currently only accessible via the Netgear Nighthawk 5G Mobile Hotspot. Those who pick the router up will be

The Google Play Store is receiving an update today that will allow customers to make charitable donations to nonprofits from their Android device. While it may seem odd to be rallying for support for charities within the same marketplace where users download apps and games, it’s not uncommon — Apple for years has collected donations

Bloomberg today updated its earlier reporting on Apple’s plans for a news and magazine subscription service. Earlier this year, the outlet said Apple would relaunch the digital newsstand business Texture, which it acquired this spring, as part of the Apple News app. Now, Bloomberg confirms the launch time frame could be “as soon as this

Americans are regularly checking a second screen while watching TV, according to a new report from Nielsen that examined the media consumption habits of U.S. adults in the second quarter of 2018. Today, 28 percent of adults say they “sometimes” use a digital device, like a phone or tablet, while watching TV. A much larger

Internet users are already being tracked to death, with ads that follow us around, search histories that are collected and stored, emails that report back to senders when they’ve been read, websites that know where you scrolled and what you clicked and much more. So naturally, the growing podcast industry wanted to find a way

It’s an ad duopoly battle. Facebook is starting to test search ads in its search results and Marketplace, directly competing with Google’s AdWords. Facebook first tried Sponsored Results back in 2012 but eventually shut down the product in 2013. Now it’s going to let a small set of automotive, retail and e-commerce industry advertisers show

Apple’s mobile payment technology has finally launched in Germany, some four years after it debuted in the U.S. On its newly launched Apple Pay website for Germany, Apple lists partner banks and credit card companies at launch, with customers from the likes of Deutsche Bank, O2 Banking, N26, Comdirect, HypoVerensbank, Bunq and Boon able to tap

Apple has filed an appeal to overturn a court decision that could ban iPhone sales in China, the company said on Monday, adding that all of its models remain available in its third-largest market. The American giant is locked in a legal battle in the world’s biggest smartphone market. On Monday, Qualcomm announced that a

Google Fit, Google’ s activity-tracking app for Android, is getting a small but meaningful update today that adds a few new features that’ll likely make its regular users quite happy. Some are pretty basic, like the launch of a Fit widget for your Android home screen, while others introduce new features like a breathing exercise

Where there is discovery in an app, there is paid discovery. Google helped you choose between links, then sold ads that promote a few. Facebook helped you choose between pieces of content, then sold ads that promote a few. And eventually, as Uber helps you choose between restaurants, it will sell ads that promote a

It appears that most mobile carriers, including O2 and SoftBank, have recovered from yesterday’s cell phone network outage that was triggered by a shutdown of Ericsson equipment running on their networks. That shutdown appears to have been triggered by expired software certificates on the equipment itself. While Ericsson acknowledged in their press release yesterday that expired

Netflix just broke new records on consumer spending in its mobile apps, according to new data app intelligence firm Sensor Tower has shared with TechCrunch. In November, Netflix pulled in an estimated $86.6 million in worldwide consumer spending across its iOS and Android apps combined — a figure that’s 77 percent higher than the $49

It’s been a rocky year for MoviePass, something that CEO Mitch Lowe acknowledged in an interview this week with Variety. “We have a lot to prove to all our constituents,” Lowe said. “We don’t just have to prove ourselves to our members, we also have to prove ourselves to the investment community, our employees, and

A problem with the software in Ericsson equipment is causing outages across the world, including O2 users in Great Britain and SoftBank users in Japan, according to a report in the Financial Times earlier today. Ericsson took blame for the outage in a press release. It apparently involves faulty software on certain Ericsson equipment used

Last month, Pandora announced it would soon be bringing its “Genome” technology to a new space outside of music: it would leverage a similar classification system to make podcast recommendations, too. Initially, the feature was only available to select users on mobile devices, ahead of a broader public launch. Today, Pandora says its Podcast Genome

After going public in the U.K. last year, Boku has made an acquisition to expand its carrier billing services, which let users bill to their mobile bills mobile content purchases from companies like Apple, Microsoft, Spotify and 152 other app and other content purveyors. Today, Boku announced the acquisition of Danal, Inc., a specialist in mobile identity and authentication

A string of Chinese stocks fell hard on Thursday after the arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver deepened concerns over US-China trade tensions. The Hang Seng China Enterprises Index of Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong was off 2.76 percent as of 12:40 p.m. On the Mainland side, the CSI 300

With the release of iOS 12, Apple hid the button that lets you jump from front camera to rear camera (or vice versa) during a FaceTime call. Previously a one-click thing, it was suddenly shoved away into a menu as if it wasn’t something you might use a half dozen times per call. Don’t like

Apple’s new iPhone XR comes in a half dozen colors, including blue, yellow, red and coral. In fact, the colors are sufficiently fresh that it’d be kind of silly to buy a traditional phone case that would protect it but also hide if from plain view. It’s for this reason that Apple just began selling

Mobile intelligence and data firm App Annie is today releasing its 2019 predictions for the worldwide app economy, including its forecast around consumer spending, gaming, the subscription market and other highlights. Most notably, it expects the worldwide gross consumer spend in apps — meaning before the app stores take their own cut — to surpass

“The Google of Russia” is a fairly apt description, as far as those things go. Yandex has its hand in just about everything internet in its native Russia. Recent additions include a Prime-style service, a smart speaker and, yes, self-driving cars. So it was really only a matter of time before the company unleashed a

Leave it to Samsung to talk up its second 5G smartphone before most companies have tipped their first. A few days after announcing its first 5G handset via Verizon, the company is already on to number two. This one comes via an AT&T press release that qualifies the handset a bit more, calling it “another

This week, Qualcomm is hosting press and analysts on Maui for its annual Snapdragon Summit. Sadly, we’re not there, but a couple of weeks ago, Qualcomm gave us a preview of the news. There’ll be three days of news and the company decided to start with a focus on 5G, as well as a preview

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has approved new rules designed to provide a minimum hourly wage of $17.22 (after expenses) for drivers who work with app-based services like Uber, Lyft, Via and Juno. Fast Company reports that the rules try to deliver that wage by requiring drivers be paid according to a

Uber Eats has effectively invented its own native ad unit. Uber confirmed to TechCrunch that a test quietly running in markets around India allows restaurants to bundle several food items together and sell them at a discounted price in exchange for promoted placement by Uber Eats in a featured section of local “Specials.” In some

Samsung announced yesterday that it’s set to bring a 5G phone to market in the first half of next year, name-checking Verizon in the promise. This morning, however, AT&T was quick to note that it will also be getting its hand on the still-unnamed handset in the first half of 2019. The carrier issued a

YouTube on Monday announced a significant change to its mobile app — it will now autoplay videos by default when users are browsing the app’s home page, aka the “Home” tab. Fortunately, the videos will not autoplay with the sound enabled, the company says. Instead, the feature is meant to give users a preview of

Black Friday wasn’t just a boon for e-commerce retailers, it helped the mobile app stores break new records, too. According to a new report from Sensor Tower, the combined consumer spending across the U.S. Apple App Store and Google Play on Black Friday 2018 reached $75.9 million — a record for the most ever spent in