Tag Archive for: sides

TikTok partners with Giphy, new rules for reader apps, Roblox sides with Apple – TechCrunch


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 number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China grew 19% in 2021 to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion.

Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games generated over $100 million in consumer spend, and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend, and just eight apps topped $1 billion.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place, with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps to try, too.

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Reader apps get new rules

Apple app store iOS

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Apple this week announced it will begin to allow a subset of applications sold on its App Store to link to an external website where users can create or manage their accounts with the app developer. The change to Apple’s App Store Review guidelines only applies to what Apple calls “reader” apps — meaning, apps designed primarily to provide access to some sort of digital content, like magazines, books, audio, music or video. Apple’s…

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Phishing, Malware and Hacker Groups Taking Sides


Russia-Ukraine War

Ukraine’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) has warned of Belarusian state-sponsored hackers targeting its military personnel and related individuals as part of a phishing campaign mounted amidst Russia’s military invasion of the country.

“Mass phishing emails have recently been observed targeting private ‘i.ua’ and ‘meta.ua’ accounts of Ukrainian military personnel and related individuals,” the CERT-UA said. “After the account is compromised, the attackers, by the IMAP protocol, get access to all the messages.”

Subsequently, the attacks leverage the contact information stored in the victim’s address book to propagate the phishing messages to other targets.

Automatic GitHub Backups

The Ukrainian government attributed the activities to a threat actor tracked as UNC1151, a Minsk-based group whose “members are officers of the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Belarus.” In a follow-up update, the agency said the nation-state group also targets its own citizens, while simultaneously setting its sights on Russian entities –

  • Association of Belarusians of the World (International Social Union)
  • Belarusian Music Festival
  • Samara Oblasna Public Organization “Russian-Belarusian Fraternity 2000”
  • Dzêâslov, a Belarusian literary magazine
  • Soviet Belarus (Sovetskaya Belorussiya), a daily newspaper in Belarus
  • Employees of the National Academy of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and
  • Voice of the Motherland, a local newspaper in Belarus

UNC1151 is the Mandiant-assigned moniker to an uncategorized threat cluster, which operates with objectives that are aligned with Belarusian government interests. The hacking group is believed to have been active since at least 2016.

“UNC1151 has targeted a wide variety of governmental and private sector entities, with a focus in Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Germany,” Mandiant researchers said in a November 2021 report. “The targeting also includes Belarusian dissidents, media entities, and journalists.”

The state-backed cyber espionage group has also been linked to the Ghostwriter disinformation campaign that promulgated anti-NATO and corruption-themed narratives aimed at Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland with the likely goal of undermining the governments and creating…

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Lockheed CEO Sides With Trump Tariffs on China Espionage Threat

  1. Lockheed CEO Sides With Trump Tariffs on China Espionage Threat  Bloomberg
  2. America’s most expensive weapons system, the F-35, is a key symbol of Trump’s trade gripe with China  CNBC
  3. Full coverage

china espionage – read more