Google announced this weekend that it was delaying its planned release of the public beta version of Android 11 and The Beta Launch Show, a live streamed event to present major Android updates and announcements. In a tweet announcing the news, Google said that “now is not the time to celebrate.”
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.
In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.
This week we’re continuing to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting the world of mobile applications, with fresh data from App Annie about trends playing out across app categories benefiting from the pandemic, lockdowns and societal changes. We’re also keeping up with the COVID-19 contact-tracing apps making headlines, and delving into the week’s other news.
We saw a few notable new apps launch this week, including HBO’s new streaming service HBO Max, plus three new app experiments from Facebook’s R&D group. Android Studio 4.0 also launched this week. Instagram is getting better AR tools and IGTV is getting ads. TikTok got spammed in India.
Meanwhile, what is going on with app review? A shady app rises to the top of the iPhone App Store. Google cracks down on conspiracy theory-spreading apps. And a TikTok clone uses a pyramid scheme-powered invite system to rise up the charts.
When Toyota unveiled the 2021 Toyota RAV4 Prime in November, the vehicle garnered a lot of attention because it achieved two seemingly conflicting goals. It was Toyota’s most fuel efficient and one of its most powerful vehicles.
Now, it’s getting praise for managing a base price under $40,000. Toyota said Friday that the standard trim of the plug-in vehicle, the RAV4 Prime SE, will start at $39,220, a price that includes the mandatory $1,120 destination charge.
This plug-in RAV4 will have an all-wheel drive, sport-tuned suspension. When in pure EV mode it has a manufacturer-estimated 42 miles of range — putting it ahead of other plug-in SUVs. Toyota said it has a also has up to a manufacturer-estimated 94 combined miles per gallon equivalent. We’re still waiting on official EPA estimates.
The vehicle has a tuned 2.5-liter, four-cylinder gasoline engine and when combined with the electric motors will deliver 302 horsepower and be able to travel from 0 to 60 miles per hour in a projected 5.8 seconds.
The plug-in RAV4 will be offered in two variants. Toyota equips all of its RAV4 models with its standard active safety systems that includes a pre-collision system with pedestrian detection, full-speed range dynamic radar cruise control, lane departure alert with steering assist, automatic high beams, lane tracing assist and road sign assist.
The cheaper SE comes standard with some notable features like 18-inch painted and machined alloy wheels, heated front seats, a power liftgate, a 3-kilowatt onboard charger and a 8-inch touchscreen along with Amazon Alexa integration and Android Auto and Apple CarPlay compatibility. Some advanced driver assistance features such as blind spot monitor with rear cross traffic alert also comes standard.
There is a weather and moonroof package for an additional $1,665 upgrade, that adds extras like a heated steering wheel, heated rear outboard seats and rain-sensing windshield wipers with de-icer function.
The pricier XSE trim starts at $42,545 (with the destination price included) and offers more luxury touches such as a two-tone exterior paint scheme pairing a black roof with select colors, 19-inch two-tone alloy wheels, paddle shifters, wireless phone charger and a 9-inch touchscreen. There are several other upgrades, of course, including one for the multimedia system that adds dynamic navigation and a JBL speaker system. The daddy of upgrades on the XSE costs $5,760 and covers weather, audio and premium features including a heads-up display, panoramic moonroof, digital rearview mirror, surround-view cameras and four-door keyless entry.
The vehicle is expected to show up at dealerships this summer.
Your phone’s camera is more powerful than ever, but it is far from foolproof. It’s always discouraging to think you’ve lined up the perfect shot, only to check your camera roll and discover you messed up something—your composition, your white balance, or who knows what—and you have captured a less-than-perfect…
Parts of the U.S. are starting to open up again, but with covid-19 continuing to plague communities throughout the country, it’s still important to maintain proper social distancing where needed when out in public. To help make staying six feet away from others easier to visualize, Google made a simple augmented…
Several months into this pandemic, you can no doubt already eyeball six feet/two meters with the best of them. But if you’re still having trouble — and happen to have an Android device handy — Google’s got you covered, I guess.
The latest project out of the company’s Experiments With Google collection, Sodar is a simple browser-based app that uses WebXR to offer a mobile augmented reality social distance. Visiting the site in Chrome on an Android handset will bring up the app. From there you’ll need to point your camera at the ground and move it around as the device recognizes the plane with a matrix of dots.
Move it up, and you’ll get a visual perimeter of two meters (that’s 6.6 feet for us imperial unit loving Americans) — the CDC-recommended length to help curb the spread of COVID-19. The organization also handily lists it as “about two arms’ length. The app is probably more clever than it is useful at this point. Perhaps some day in the future, if smart glasses ever really take off. A big if, of course.
Meantime, holding a phone up to make sure you’re a proper distance away from your fellow human/disease vector is a bit less practical than good old fashioned common sense.
Not every app on your phone has to be a jack-of-all-trades hub that covers everything from smart home devices to text messaging. Sometimes apps can just do one simple job and do it very well to earn a place on your home screen. These are some of our current favorites.
Facebook’s R&D group, NPE Team, is launching a new app for engaging fellow fans around live events, Venue. This is the third new app to launch just this week from Facebook’s internal team focused on experimenting with new concepts in social networking. With Venue, the company aims to offer a digital companion for live events, starting with this Sunday’s NASCAR race.
The new app appears to be a challenge to Twitter, which today serves as the de facto “second screen” for commenting on live events and engaging with fellow fans. On Twitter, fans often use hashtags to add their commentary to live events that can range from TV show premieres to sports competitions to major political happenings, like live-streamed congressional hearings or the “State of the Union” presidential address, for example.
Twitter’s in-house curation team also rounds up the highlights from major events (e.g.), which are quick summaries featuring notable tweets, video clips, photos, comments and more about an event or related news story.
While there are some similarities with Twitter, Facebook’s Venue takes a different approach to the second screen.
Instead of having everyone viewing the event constantly chiming in with their own thoughts and reactions, the commentators for a given event hosted in Venue will only include well-known personalities — like journalists, current or former athletes, or aspiring “fan-analysts.” The latter could include popular social media personalities, for example.
These commentators will provide their own takes on the event and pose interactive questions and polls for those watching. The event host may also open up short, constrained chats around specific moments during the event — but fan commentary isn’t the main focus of the app.
In addition, fans don’t stay glued to their phone during the entire event when using Venue. Instead, the app sends out a notification to users when there’s a new “moment” available in the app. These “moments” aren’t like Twitter’s summaries. They’re one of the short, digital opportunities where fans can participate.
Facebook will first test Venue with NASCAR’s Food City presents the Supermarket Heroes 500 race on Sunday, May 31, 2020. Social media personality, nascarcasm, will host the in-app “venue.”
Future NASCAR races will also be hosted in Venue, with commentators including nascarcasm, FOX Sports NASCAR reporter Alan Cavanna, and NASCAR driver Landon Cassill.
“As NASCAR makes its return to action over the coming weeks, Venue will provide users with a unique and exciting way to connect with fellow race fans from around the globe – all from the safety and comfort of their own homes,” said Tim Clark, NASCAR SVP and Chief Digital Officer, in a statement. “NASCAR was built on innovation, and we couldn’t be more excited to help a great partner like Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team innovate around new platforms,” he added.
Facebook believes the new app will give viewers the chance to better engage with live events and fellow fans.
“Live broadcasts still offer the rare opportunity for millions of people to consume content simultaneously,” Facebook explained in its announcement. “Despite drawing large concurrent viewership, live broadcasts are still a mostly solo viewing experience,” it noted.
That’s a bit of stretch. Fans certainly engage with one another when chatting about live events on Twitter. And when Twitter streams the video from a live event — something Venue doesn’t do, by the way — Twitter will offer a dedicated space where users can easily see the tweets from fellow viewers. Other live video platforms, including Facebook’s own Facebook Live and Instagram Live, also include chat experiences as do YouTube Live and Twitch.
The real difference between Venue and Twitter is that it shifts the balance of power. On Twitter, everyone’s comments are given equal footing. In Venue, it’s the expert hosts leading and curating the conversation.
Facebook hasn’t announced what future events Venue may host beyond NASCAR but it sounds like it has plans to expand Venue further down the road as it refers to NASCAR as its “first” sports partner.
The Venue app is live today on iOS and Android.
Let’s be honest: There’s nothing exciting about basic tablets anymore. I don’t mean those fancy (and pricey!) convertible tablets like the iPad Pro, which can double as a slate and a laptop. I’m talking about the kind of tablet that lives in your living room (probably on a coffee table) that you use to surf the web…
Two years ago, Google unveiled Plus Codes, a digital addressing system to help billions of people navigate to places that don’t have clear addresses. The company said today it is making it easier for anyone with an Android device to share its rendition of an address — a six-digit alphanumeric code.
Google Maps users on Android can now tap the blue dot that represents their current location to generate and share their unique six-digit coordinate with friends. Anyone with the code can look it up on Google Maps or Google Search to get the precise location of the destination.
The codes look like this: G6G4+CJ Delhi, India. Google says it divides the geographical surface of the world into tiled areas and attributes a unique six-letter code and the name of the city and country to each of them.
More than 2 billion people on the planet either don’t have an address or have an address that isn’t easy to locate. This challenge is more prevalent in developed markets such as India where a street address could often be as long as a paragraph, and where people often rely on nearby landmarks to navigate their way.
Google is not the only firm that is attempting to simply the addressing system. London-based what3words has broken the world in 57 trillion squares and assigned each of those blocks with three randomly combined words such as toddler.geologist.animated that are easier to remember and share. The company told TechCrunch earlier that it had partnered with a number of firms including several carmakers to expand its reach.
But what3words and Plus Codes have both struggled to gain wider traction. When Google announced this project in India, its executives told this correspondent that they were exploring ways to work with logistics firms and government agencies such as postal department to get wider adoption — though none of it has materialized yet. At the time, the company had also tested Plus Codes at some concerts in India, they said.
To get wider adoption, Google also made Plus Codes open source so that people and businesses could find their own use cases. “If you’ve ever been in an emergency, you know that being able to share your location for help to easily find you is critical. Yet in many places in the world, organizations struggle with this challenge on a daily basis,” the company said today.
If you’ve ever found yourself scrubbing your way through a long YouTube video to get to the “good” part, you’ll appreciate the new feature YouTube is launching today: Video Chapters. The feature uses timestamps that creators apply to their videos, allowing viewers to easily jump forward to a specific section of the video or rewatch a portion of the video.
YouTube was spotted testing Video Chapters back in April, but today the feature is going live for all users across iOS, Android, and desktop.
Video Chapters will be automatically enabled when creators add chapter information to their video’s description as a line of timestamps and titles. The first timestamp has to be marked 0:00, followed by a space, then the chapter’s title. On the next line, you’ll type the timestamp where the next chapter starts (e.g. “2:31”), then a space and that chapter’s title. When you’re finished adding in the chapters, you save the changes and the Video Chapters will be listed as you scrub through the video.
Videos will need to have at least 3 timestamps that are 10 seconds or more in length in order to use the feature.
To make it easier for viewers to navigate Video Chapters, YouTube built in haptic feedback on mobile so users will feel a slight “thump” that informs them they’re moving into a new chapter, the company explains. On platforms where haptic feedback is not available, YouTube instead uses a “snapping” behavior that will snap you to the start of the chapter. That way, viewers who want to land on a precise spot near the chapter start can wait for a moment before releasing so they aren’t snapped to the start of the chapter.
In addition, users on mobile and tablet devices can also slide their finger up and down while scrubbing — without releasing — to reveal the scrubber bar and see exactly where they’re placing the playhead.
YouTube said the feature gained a lot of positive feedback during testing, but it has tweaked the product a bit based on its earlier experimentation.
For example, YouTube has since increased the number of supported chapters across devices after realizing that it was helpful to allow the devices to determine how many chapters can be shown, based on the available screen space. That means in a video with a lot of chapters, you may see more on desktop than on mobile devices, and more appear when you’re full screen on your phone than when you’re viewing the video in the smaller, portrait player.
Because the feature requires the creator to input the timestamps, you may not see it on all videos just yet. But there are a few you can visit now if you want to see Video Chapters in action, including this Flaming Lips concert, this Radiohead concert, this Spotlight channel interview with creators, this guitar tutorial, this cooking video, this recipe video, and this lecture on machine learning.
The new feature positions YouTube to be a better resource for long-form content as it becomes less cumbersome to navigate videos. The feature could even increase user engagement with some videos as viewers won’t get frustrated by having to scroll through parts they don’t want to watch, give up, then exit the video in search of a different one that’s easier to navigate. On the flip side, it could decrease total watch times, as viewers only watch particular sections of videos instead of the video’s full content.
YouTube says the new feature will not impact recommendations.
