Apple is opening up web distribution for iOS apps targeting users in the European Union from today.
Apple’s walled garden stance has enabled it to funnel essentially all iOS developer revenue through its own App Store in the past.
An Apple rep described this as a baseline safety and security standard which they said iOS users expect to help ensure their device is protected from external risks.
Given Apple has only just started implementing web distribution for iOS apps it remains to be seen whether the EU will step in for a closer look at this aspect of its DMA compliance too.
It’s also unclear how much demand there will be among iOS developers for direct web distribution.
On Thursday, the company announced it’s expanding its fediverse integrations to 400 more Flipboard creators and introducing fediverse notifications in the Flipboard app itself.
In total, Flipboard says there are now over 11,000 curated Flipboard magazines available to federated social networking users.
In addition to the newly federated magazines, Flipboard is also bringing a more integrated fediverse experience to its own app.
4.3.25), Flipboard users will be able to see their new followers from the fediverse in their Flipboard Following tab, while their Flipboard notifications will now include fediverse reactions and conversations.
The company had already begun curating content for fediverse users across a handful of “news desks” (dedicated fediverse accounts) that directed users to interesting articles and links across topics.
Initially, the web version, called Truecaller for Web, will only be made available to Android users in India, the company said, but it plans to roll out the support in other territories in the future.
All Truecaller for Android users in India can now link their devices to the web client on a PC or a Mac through a QR code.
This is akin to linking the web version of a messenger like WhatsApp or Telegram.
Now users will be able to look up numbers without any such limitations on the web client, the company said.
Last month, it launched a “Max” feature update for Android users to block all calls from unapproved contacts or spam detected by AI.
Paddy Cosgrave, the co-founder of the Web Summit tech conference, is returning to his role as CEO after resigning in October over controversial statements he made about the Israel/Gaza war last year on social media.
“As Web Summit becomes bigger, our aim should be to make it smaller for our attendees.
More opportunistically, as with Facebook, the emphasis on community is a counterweight to Web Summit’s bigger business aim: scale, in Web Summit’s case growing its conference empire by getting as many people and companies as possible paying to attend its events.
Web Summit runs a number of global tech conferences, the best known and biggest of which is in Lisbon, which in recent years attracted upwards of 70,000 attendees.
Scrambling in the lead-up to the Lisbon event, Web Summit quickly appointed Wikimedia CEO Catherine Maher as Cosgrave’s CEO replacement, even as Cosgrave retained an 80% ownership of the business.
StealthMole, an AI-powered dark web intelligence startup that specializes in monitoring cyber threats and detecting cybercrime, announced Thursday that it has raised a $7 million Series A funding round.
The startup serves over 50 clients across 17 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
One differentiator from its competitors in the cybersecurity industry is its unique expertise in Asia-related threats, Kevin Yoo, chief operating officer (COO) at StealthMole, told TechCrunch.
“The high demand for Asia-oriented threat information underscores the uniqueness and value of our dataset for customers worldwide, within and beyond Asia,” Yoo said.
Korea Investment Partners led the Series A round with participation from Hibiscus Fund (a joint venture between RHL Ventures, Penjana Kapital and KB Investment) and Smilegate Investment.
Some of these features sound and work like rival browser Arc’s recent releases.
But SigmaOS claims that its feature returns better-quality results, which is a hard metric to quantify.
Going all out on AILast year, SigmaOS released some AI-powered features such as a contextual assistant called Airis, which can answer your questions about a web page or the broader web.
Now, the company is looking to monetize its AI features.
It said that all users would get access to AI-powered features but for $20 per month users would get better rate limits for AI features.
The Browser Company, which makes the Arc browser, has raised $50 million in a round led by Pace Capital at a $550 million valuation, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
However, in January, the company released the Arc Search app on iOS, focusing on putting AI-powered search at its center.
This is ingrained in the DNA of The Browser Company.
Paul Frazee, who built a decentralized browser called Beaker, said that scaling a browser product is hard as people are set in their way and making them switch is tough.
The Browser Company has a big ambition to build an “internet computer” for users.
Apple will allow iOS developers located in the European Union to distribute apps from the web, rather then via its App Store.
“Web Distribution, available in a software update later this spring, will let authorized developers distribute their iOS apps to EU users directly from a website the developer owns and operates,” it writes.
iOS users will also need to approve the developer installing apps from their site via their iPhone Settings.
Apple’s initial proposal for DMA compliance did not allow web based distribution for apps.
While its current attempt to force EU users to consent to tracking is being challenged via GDPR and consumer protection complaints.
Apple has reversed its decision about blocking web apps, also known as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), on iPhones in the EU.
Last month, Apple reduced the functionality of PWAs as mere website shortcuts with the release of the second beta of iOS 17.4, as security researcher Tommy Mysk and Open Web Advocacy had first pointed out.
The company then updated its developer page saying that because of security risks like malicious web apps reading data from other web apps and accessing cameras, it decided to end support for home screen apps.
Apple also said that PWAs had “very low user adoption” so there might not be a lot of impact on users.
Separately, the Open Web Advocacy group published an open letter addressed to Tim Cook to lift the ban on web apps, which was signed by hundreds of organizations and individuals including Mastodon, internet advocate Cory Doctorowand Vercel CTO Malte Ubl.
Meta has dropped its lawsuit against an Israeli web scraping company Bright Data, after losing a key claim in its case a few weeks ago.
Beyond being just another case of web scraping, what made this case particularly interesting was that Meta was a Bright Data customer at one time.
However, when Bright Data scraped Meta’s own data, the company sued.
“This concession by Meta is a pivotal moment for Bright Data and the web scraping community.
“Bright Data remains committed to keeping public web data freely accessible to everyone.
