Facebook shutdown and rebranding, Android 12, new Pixel and MacBooks
October has come to an end, and that can only mean one thing — we compiled a short informative news digest of the main news in the mobile industry. Let’s roll!
Thanks for the shutdown, Facebook. Some stats
Do you remember that Facebook was down for six hours in early October? It couldn’t help but affect other apps. For example, Telegram experienced a massive increase of 70 million users!
Android is the most popular mobile OS in the world, and its popularity is actively growing. Now, it has a market share of 72,44%.
According to App Annie, YouTube has surpassed $3 billion in consumer spending on iOS as of Oct 15, 2021. YouTube also ranked third among all non-gaming apps in worldwide consumer spending as of October 2021.
Facebook is dead, long live Meta
On October 28, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would change its name to Meta. New name is intended to show the company’s vector for creating a meta-universe in which communication will be inextricably linked to virtual reality technologies.
New Macbook Pro, Pixel 6 and Android 12
Another Apple Event was held on October 18. The new Macbook Pro with the blazing-fast M1 Pro or M1 Max chip was introduced, as well as the new sweat and water-resistant AirPods.
Google also has new products — Pixel 6 smartphones and Android 12.
Everyone has been waiting for an OS update for a long time. Mostly because of Material You, a new design language that allows you to customize the entire interface. In addition to appearance and convenience, Android has improved privacy settings, added new widgets and other tools.
Here’s some information for developers — check out Android 12 updates that may affect your app performance on Android 12. And here you can learn about Material You.
In addition to the Pixel 6, Google also announced a monthly subscription Pixel Pass, which allows you to change your Pixel phone for a new one every two years and use premium Google services like cloud storage and content without ads.
Some Android apps are available on Windows 11, though the launch has been problematic and users didn’t expect to see the update this year. However, active testing is already underway. So far, there are 50 apps for Windows 11 to test. You can already try it, but it requires an Amazon account to access the Amazon Appstore.
TikTok is expanding, Pinterest is copying it, Instagram is bringing back old features
TikTok Transparency Report states that from April-June 2021, 81,518,334 videos were removed for violating community principles. It is less than 1% of all videos uploaded. Do you know the total number of published videos in Q2 2021? Over 8.1 billion! Users post about 90 million videos every day.
Pinterest is copying TikTok and inviting creators to the platform, announcing $20 million in creator rewards. It looks like a repositioning: Pinterest wants to be not just a site for inspiration, but a full-fledged platform for creators. Thus, Pinterest has launched ‘Idea Pins’ — the vertical video stream.
After Facebook had a giant outage in years, the company announced that it would test a new Instagram feature that would notify users of crashes or other technical problems. The company won’t send a notification every time, but when they see that users are confused and looking for answers, they will.
Instagram has launched its own service for recruiting influencers. So far, only for selected brands. Instagram also has rolled out the feature for businesses accounts to create quick replies in DM. That’s the future 🙂 Instagram has announced that all users now are able to share link stickers in Stories — now you don’t have to wait until you have 10,000 followers!
Twitter is going to test a new ad format and placement on its platform. It will begin showing ads on mobile devices inside conversation threads after the first, third and eighth replies.
Starting November, the free version of YouTube Music will only include audio, so that’s the big update. The app will keep streaming music in the background when it’s no longer open or the screen is off.
ASO News — we have lots of them!
Developers and app owners can now publish in-app events and even schedule them on the App Store. Premieres, live streams, and announcements should all help improve your reach among your app users.
On Google Play, the subscription fee will now always be 15%. But this only applies to non-gaming apps. 10% will remain for music services and e-book apps, because this segment has high content costs. The new service fees kick in starting on January 1, 2022.
Google Play has an update on screenshots. Now Google will promote not only horizontal 16:9 screenshots, but also vertical 9:16 screenshots.
App Store Connect has more data in the ‘analytics’ section now.
Tech Talks will give an opportunity for developers to directly connect with Apple experts to learn more about new technologies, and most importantly, to ask questions, and receive one-on-one guidance.
Checkaso News
We’ve introduced the new version of Checkaso 2.5 on Product Hunt!
- Collecting the semantic core became much easier with Keywords Explorer.
- Ideas: Lots of new insights and keywords suggestions.
- Track and prioritize semantics with Keywords Tracking.
- Analyze keyword overlaps between your app and competitors’ apps with Intersection tool.
- In-Apps. One section with all the tools for competitive analysis and promotion of your IAP.
- Difficulty of ranking for a keyword. Unlike others, we calculate it individually for each app.
- Monitor any action your competitors take with Keywords Performance.
- Performance Index provides a geography of indexed keywords and detailed metrics.
