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21 hours agoThe App Store is booming again, and AI may be why | TechCrunch
New app launches are increasing significantly, contradicting predictions that AI would diminish the app market.
All empires eventually fall, and it seems the creative software industry has collectively decided that Adobe's time has come. The Creative Cloud provider's suite of design tools have been considered the industry standard for decades.
Apple privately threatened to remove Elon Musk's artificial intelligence app, Grok, from its App Store in January after Musk's xAI failed to do enough to stop it from creating nude or sexualized deepfakes.
Over the past decade, there have been a handful of occasions when an Android update wreaked havoc on my phone. Once, it was so bad that I had to do a factory reset and start over.
TikTok's newly formed US entity is off to a very bumpy start. As the app continues to face technical issues affecting the recommendation algorithm, view counts and other features, TikTok is also seeing a wave of frustrated users uninstalling it, according to new data. Analytics firm Sensor Tower, which tracks downloads and other app store-related metrics, told CNBC that there has been a 150 percent rise in uninstalls of the TikTok app in the United States compared with the last three months.
When someone taps your link in a social app or email, it often opens in an in-app browser (embedded browser), a contained environment inside that app. Those in-app browsers don't share cookies, logins, or referral data with Safari or Chrome. They sever the continuity that website-centric analytics depend on. So these sessions look like anonymous visits.
Only about a year old at that point, the App Store was changing people's relationship with software. Users were growing accustomed to the idea that the smartphone was a digital Swiss Army Knife, its glossy touchscreen waiting to be fitted with the right tool for any job. But what the public had not anticipated as we swiped and scrolled was that our phones might begin to watch us back.
During my week-long binge, I played games that paused their own tutorials to run ads. I saw endless fake X icons and banners that hid the close button under the iPhone's Dynamic Island. Now, I'm not against ads, but I hate it when they feel like a penalty. I'm a gamer, and from what I've seen, PC and console games integrate ads much better. If mobile devs followed suit, mobile games might finally climb out of the mess they're in.
In the fintech vertical, where growth depends on trust, the decision to monetise through in-app advertising is a bold bet, one that could backfire if a bad ad experience undermines user confidence. But Toss, South Korea's leading fintech super app with over 25 million users, turned that risk into a major revenue win by implementing filters based on user-level relevance and using behavioural signals and first-party data to block disruptive or inappropriate ad categories.