Last week, Artifact, a buzzy news app from Instagram’s co-founders, announced it was shutting down after failing to gain critical mass.
New data indicates that Artifact couldn’t catch up to the competition and struggled to grow its user base outside the U.S.
According to data from app intelligence provider Appfigures, Artifact saw an estimated 444,000 downloads since its February 2023 launch.
Artifact also struggled to gain an international following, which could have helped it thrive even if U.S. downloads stalled.
By adding more functionality, Artifact may have potentially confused users as to when or why they should use it.
Apple’s response to being required to allow developers to lever payment options apart from its in-house system is drawing a bevy of negative commentary from tech folks.
And with good reason: Apple is offering little and demanding much, ensuring that it can continue to demand a massive cut of developer revenue.
The reduction in demands constitutes a full 3% reduction from its existing 30% fee charged to payments that occur inside of its App Store system.
Simply put, Apple is trying to offer developers what it has to, but with enough costs attached to make it economically unpalatable.
Eric Seufert of Heracles Capital, described Apple’s posture as “heads I win, tails you lose,” which feels pretty accurate.
But Apple’s compliance doesn’t give app makers the victory they had hoped, as the tech giant aims to still charge commissions on purchases made outside of apps — a decision Epic aims to challenge in court.
The decision meant Apple had to remove the “anti-steering” clause from its agreement with App Store developers.
Apple updated its App Store Guidelines following the Supreme Court’s decision but with a lot of caveats.
For instance, users won’t be able to cancel their subscriptions within Apple’s App Store or request refunds — they’ll have to do this through the developer’s website.
The developer lobbying group, Coalition for App Fairness, which also includes Epic, issued its own statement on Apple’s new App Store rules.
On Friday, the startup announced via a blog post it had made the decision to “wind down operations” of the app launched over a year ago, saying that the market opportunity wasn’t big enough to warrant continued investment.
It also employed several AI tools to summarize news, rewrite clickbait headlines, and surface the best content.
Existing posts will remain visible for the time being, and Artifact will continue to operate its “core news capability” through the end of February.
In part, the way users are finding news and information is changing with the arrival of AI.
The co-founder had spoken about AI’s role at Artifact at this past fall’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
Threads’ roadmap for integrations with the fediverse, aka the network of decentralized apps that includes Twitter/X rival Mastodon and others, has been revealed.
In the meeting, which Coates characterized as a “good faith” effort by the Instagram team, the roadmap for Threads’ fediverse integration was laid out, starting with a December launch of a feature within the Threads app that would allow their posts to become visible to Mastodon clients.
Meta did, in fact, start testing ActivityPub integration in December, allowing Threads posts to appear on Mastodon.
In addition, this rule would potentially come into play when a user banned from Meta’s platform moved their content to another Mastodon server.
Other questions remained unresolved at this time — like whether Threads would surface third-party Mastodon content in its algorithmic feed, whether it would ultimately allow for algorithmic choice, whether Mastodon content would be made to appear visually differentiated from Threads’ content in some way, and more.
And major features like multi-admin, which in theory allows Matter devices to work with every smart home platform simultaneously, remain broken pending future standards patches.
Lockly also announced at CES that its $80 Matter Link Hub, which allows users to manage older Lockly devices from Matter-supporting apps and devices, will become available later this year.
Aqara Hub M3Aqara, the smart home upstart, brought its long-teased Matter-compatible hub — the Hub M3 — to CES 2024.
Roborock S8 MaxV UltraRoborock, a longtime fixture of the robot vacuum cleaner market, launched its first Matter-compatible vacuum at CES: the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra.
But Amazon became the first to support Matter Casting, the video- and audio-beaming feature of the Matter smart home standard, on its smart displays and smart TVs this week.
Low-code dev platforms have gained momentum in recent years, in large part because they promise to shorten what’s otherwise typically a lengthy app development cycle.
According to data from analytics firm GlobalData, there was a fivefold increase in VC funding into low-code dev platforms from 2021 to 2022.
But low-code isn’t going anywhere, as evidenced most recently by low-code dev startup FlutterFlow’s financing round.
Leveraging Flutter, Google’s open source UI creation toolkit, FlutterFlow generates what Abel describes as “clean” and “maintainable” app source code.
There’s no shortage of competition in the market for low-code app dev platforms.
ChefPaw is an machine designed to prepare homemade dog food.
The appliance aims to provide an alternative to store-bought dog food, focusing on fresh ingredients tailored to individual pet dietary needs – and saving a ton of money along the way.
It turns out that fresh-ingredient food for your four-legged furbaby is hella expensive, and ChefPaw wants to make it easier to make your own.
ChefPaw operates by adding fresh ingredients into the machine, which then mixes and cooks the food at lower temperatures, a process taking approximately 40 minutes.
The machine can roughly chop the food to take the shape of usual dog food, or blend it more smoothly for pets that have difficulties eating after surgery, for example.
Whispp is working to change the game for individuals with speech disorders and voice disabilities, bringing voice boxes into the current millennium with its groundbreaking AI-powered assistive speech and phone-calling app.
“Voice disabilities and speech disorders like stuttering significantly impact a person’s life and happiness,” said Whispp co-founder and CEO Joris Castermans.
Whispp is a game changer, accommodating a broad spectrum of voice types — from whispers to rough speech resulting from total laryngectomy after throat cancer.
Now, with its new product features, Whispp can accommodate an even more diverse range of voice types and conditions.
It is truly a beacon of hope for individuals with speech disorders and voice disabilities and a testament to the transformative power of technology.
PhotoRoom — a startup out of Paris, France — has built a popular AI-based image editing app and API targeting e-commerce vendors, media specialists, and others.
Multiple sources say that the startup is raising between $50 million and $60 million on a pre-money valuation of between $500 million and $600 million.
PhotoRoom, and Matthieu Rouif, the CEO who co-founded PhotoRoom with CTO Eliot Andres, declined to comment on any funding-related questions.
Adding all this together, since its last round in 2022, when it raised $19 million, PhotoRoom has been blowing up.
Most categories of apps, she wrote, are still up for grabs; and within the popular area of AI image-based tools, apps like PhotoRoom, in her opinion, have a shot at success.
