Tag Archives: TechCrunch

Google and top Indian telecom network Jio Platforms said on Friday that their much-anticipated budget smartphone, JioPhone Next, will go on sale in the world’s second largest smartphone market on November 4 (coinciding with the big Indian festival of Diwali.) The firms said the JioPhone Next will cost 6,499 Indian rupees ($87), and can also be purchased in multiple instalments with an entry price as low as $27. The smartphone runs Pragati OS, which is powered by… Source link

Australia could be next to mandate a choice screen in a bid to break Google’s dominance of the search market. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is recommending it is given the power to “mandate, develop and implement a mandatory choice screen to improve competition and consumer choice in the supply of search engine services in Australia”. A new report by the country’s competition watchdog concludes that interventions are needed to boost competition in the… Source link

Google today announced a preview of Android 12L, which sounds like a new version of Android, but Google calls it “a special feature drop that makes Android 12 even better on large screens.” The idea here is to provide users on tablets, foldables and Chrome OS laptops — anything with a screen above 600 dp — with an improved user interface. The developer preview of Android 12L is now available for developers who want to give it a try, as well as a new Android 12L emulator and… Source link

Google is rolling out the ability for kids, teens and their parents to request to have pictures deleted from the company’s image search results. The new privacy option was one of many changes the company announced in August in an effort to preemptively build in additional protections for users under the age of 18. Google’s other planned safeguards included making video uploads private by default, disabling and weed out some “overly commercial” YouTube kids content, including… Source link

You only get so many Hail Mary passes in consumer electronics. Even among the biggest companies. Take a look a Microsoft’s long-standing mobile phone ambitions. Even a $7.2 billion acquisition of the once-dominant Nokia couldn’t buy the company a place at the table with Apple and Samsung. Some earlier false starts aside, Google’s mobile hardware ambitions have been — on the whole — more successful. But the Pixel line has never had the major hit the company needs to justify the… Source link

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American 

Google Meet is getting new audio and video locks to let hosts turn off the microphones and cameras of other participants. The new feature essentially lets you mute a user and prevent them from unmuting themselves until you unlock them. Earlier this year, Google rolled out the ability for hosts to mute everyone all at once in a group call. This latest feature takes the move a step further by preventing participants from unmuting themselves at any point during the… Source link

Google is lowering commissions on all subscription-based businesses on the Google Play Store, the company announced today. Previously, the company had followed Apple’s move by reducing commissions from 30% to 15% on the first $1 million of developer earnings. Now, it will lower the fees specifically for app makers who generate revenue through recurring subscriptions. Instead of charging them 30% in the first year, which lowers to 15% in year two and beyond, Google says developers will… Source link

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 19, 2021! We are just over a week away from our SaaS event, which means that we’re deep into prep territory. I just got off a call for this panel that I am particularly excited about, for example. The trick will be cutting down my question list until it fits into the 30 minutes… Source link

Alongside the launch of the new Google Pixel 6 smartphones, the company also introduced a new way to purchase them: Pixel Pass. This all-in-one subscription service allows consumers to purchase a Pixel phone for a low monthly price, rather than paying for it all upfront. The service is available $45 per month for the Pixel 6 and $55 per month for the Pixel 6 Pro  — but it doesn’t just provide access to the phones themselves. Also included with the subscription are Google’s… Source link