This Week in Apps is a weekly series from TechCrunch that recaps the latest news in the mobile OS, mobile applications, and the app economy. The app economy hit a snag in 2023, with consumer spending dropping for the first time by 2% to $167 billion. However, downloads are still growing, up 11% year-over-year in 2022 to 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time in mobile apps than ever before, with hours spent in 2022 growing 9% to 4.1 trillion on Android devices alone.
Meta announced a new feature to sell its blue verified badge to customers, taking a play from Elon Musk’s Twitter playbook. The badge comes with other features like improved impersonation protection and direct access to customer support, plus more visibility through upranked posts. It’s initially rolling out to Australia and New Zealand.
Instagram’s co-founders unveiled their news app, Artifact, to the public, no sign-up required. It now includes a social feature, allowing users to upload their contacts to see when articles are becoming popular with people in their network. It also has a stats feature that shows users their news reading habits, plus feedback controls to better personalize the news reading experience.
Spotify launched an AI DJ to personalize the music listening experience for its users. It will deliver a curated selection of music alongside AI-powered spoken commentary about the tracks and artists users like, using a “stunningly realistic voice” based on Spotify’s Head of Cultural Partnerships Xavier “X” Jernigan. The feature is leveraging Generative AI through the use of OpenAI technology to create the commentary.
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