Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly ZebethMedia series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by […]
A quick caveat up top. This isn’t a review. ZebethMedia does reviews. This isn’t one. There are several reasons for this. First, last week was Disrupt — I was busy on the other side of the country. Second, this week is my COVID week (third round, otherwise self-explanatory w/r/t a limited output). Third, we very […]
With the big three — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — reporting earnings this week, we learned that the cloud infrastructure market topped $57 billion for the quarter, up $11 billion over the same period last year. That adds up to 24% growth, according to data from Synergy Research. It might not be the growth we […]
India will set up grievance committees with the veto power to reverse content moderation decisions of social media firms, it said today, moving ahead with a proposal that has rattled Meta, Google and Twitter. The panels, called Grievance Appellate Committee, will be created within three months, it said. In an amendment to the nation’s new […]
A Google regulatory filing appears to have confirmed rumors in recent months that the European Union’s competition division is looking into how it operates its smartphone app store, the Play Store. However ZebethMedia understands that no formal EU investigation into the Play Store has been opened at this stage. The SEC Form 10-Q, filed by […]
The social platforms that power the creator economy might seem like they’re starting to slip. YouTube’s quarterly ad revenue declined 1.9% year over year, per Google parent company Alphabet’s quarterly earnings report this week. Overall, Alphabet missed analyst estimates, earning $69.1 billion in revenue, about a billion dollars less than expected. For many YouTubers, ad […]
Google has acquired Alter, an artificial intelligence (AR) avatar startup that helps creators and brands express their virtual identity, for about $100 million, a source familiar with the matter told ZebethMedia, in a push to boost its content game and better compete with TikTok. The acquisition was completed about two months ago, the source said, […]
India’s antitrust watchdog has hit Google with $113 million fine for abusing the dominant position of its app store, the second such penalty on the Android-maker in just as many weeks in the key overseas market. The Competition Commission of India, which opened the investigation in late 2020, said mandating developers to use Google’s own […]
A lot has been written about how incredible Google Pixel 7 Pro’s camera is. The camera itself gets no beef from me. Last week at ZebethMedia Disrupt, Brian and I were gawking in amazement at how well the 5x optical zoom lens does, for example. We had plenty of opportunities to contrast and compare. During […]
Devin Abbott was founder of Deco (acquired by Airbnb) and specializes in design and development tools, React and web3 applications, most recently with The Graph. It’s too early to predict all the implications of the recent Ethereum blockchain Merge, but it definitely addresses the most frequent (and valid) criticism of web3 regarding excessive energy consumption. […]
