Mobile

Losing access to Google software and services understandably threw Huawei for a loop. The Chinese hardware giant has clearly been working on a contingency plan to deal with the loss of access to things like Android and the Play Store, but Google’s offering formed so much of the devices’ software core — as they do

Phones were not the centerpiece at the recently wrapped Consumer Electronics Show; I’ll probably repeat this point a few more times over the course of this piece, just so we’re clear. This is due, in no small part, to the fact that Mobile World Congress has mostly usurped that role. There are always a smattering

If I watch a Story cross-posted from Instagram to Facebook on either of the apps, it should appear as “watched” at the back of the Stories row on the other app. Why waste my time showing me Stories I already saw? It’s been over two years since Instagram Stories launched cross-posting to Stories. Countless hours

Octi has created a new social network that uses augmented reality to connect the act of seeing your friends in real life with viewing digital content like their favorite YouTube videos and Spotify songs. When I wrote about the startup in 2018, it was building AR technology that could do a better job of recognizing

Samsung this morning announced that it has completed the acquisition of TeleWorld Solutions. The Virginia-based telecommunications company provides wireless networking and consulting services. It’s TWS’s 5G solutions that Samsung is clearly the most interested in as part of this deal. The electronics giant says it plans to leverage TWS’s services to help U.S.-based networks build

TCL is hardly a household name in the smartphone space. That’s hardly surprising, however, as the Chinese electronics company is better known for sub-brands like Alcatel and BlackBerry (hardware, not software — long story). Late last year, the company began really pushing its branded devices in Europe, a strategy it’s set to expand upon with

The Saturday night before CES seems like a less than ideal time to drop some big smartphone news — but it appears Samsung’s hand was forced on this one. Granted, the smartphone giant has never been great about keeping big news under wraps, but this morning’s early release of a promo video through its official

Some devices need no explanation. The Galaxy S10 and Note 10 Line are not such devices. They’re more nebulous, walking an interesting line, between premium and mid-range. They’re a clear attempt by Samsung to change with a smartphone buying public that have balked at the idea of $1,000+ device. On that front, they make plenty

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Popsockets is launching a new must-have item to its lineup of smartphone accessories — and one that solves a significant problem for PopGrip users. The company today is unveiling the PopPower Home wireless charger that allows you to wirelessly charge your supported Apple or Android smartphone by

If nothing else, Royole grabbed our attention a couple of years back by bringing the first foldable smartphone to market. There’s something to be said for being first, I suppose. It raised the profile of a largely unknown name in amongst the tech press, even if it didn’t exactly kickstart a form-factor revolution. Among other

At last year’s CES, Twitter introduced its first public prototype app, twttr — dubbed “little T” internally at Twitter. The app allows Twitter to develop and experiment with new features in the public, to see what works and what does not. The app’s main focus, to date, has been on making threaded conversations easier to

What if politicians could only display Twitter replies from their supporters while stopping everyone else from adding their analysis to the conversation? That’s the risk of Twitter’s upcoming Conversation Participants tool it’s about to start testing that lets you choose if you want replies from everyone, only those your follow or mention, or no one.

Two of the top three telecom operators in India are beginning to address one of the biggest challenges hundreds of millions of their subscribers face in the country each day: poor call quality and abrupt voice drops. Reliance Jio, India’s second largest telecom operator, announced today that it now supports voice and video calling functionality

Mark Zuckerberg won’t be spending 2020 focused on wearing ties, learning Mandarin, or just fixing Facebook. “Rather than having year-to-year challenges, I’ve tried to think about what I hope the world and my life will look in 2030” he wrote today on Facebook. As you might have guessed, though, Zuckerberg’s vision for an improved planet

Nearly five years after launching, Instagram’s back-and-forth video loop maker Boomerang is finally getting a big update. Users around the globe can now  add SlowMo, “Echo” blurring, and “Duo” rapid rewind special effects to their Boomerangs, as well as trim their length. This is the biggest creative upgrade yet for one of mobile’s most popular

The second season of the Penn Badgley romantic murder drama “You” launches on Netflix today — and along with it, a new project called Cosmopolitan Watch Party. You can hit play on the Watch Party website at the same time as you hit play on each episode, kicking off an experience that runs alongside the show.

For those following Huawei’s substantial rise over the past several years, it’ll come as no surprise that the Chinese government played an important role in fostering the hardware maker. Even so, the actual numbers behind the ascent are still a bit jaw dropping. Huawei reportedly had “access to as much as $75 billion in state

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Uber founder Travis Kalanick is leaving the company’s board of directors Uber founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick will officially resign

A year from now, this is likely to have all blown over. A year from now, the Samsung Galaxy Fold’s turbulent takeoff may well be a footnote in the largest story of foldables. For now, however, it’s an important caveat that will come up in every conversation about the nascent product category. How history remembers

“We were in the back washing blenders so they could keep taking Snackpass orders” recalls co-founder and CEO Kevin Tan. The team from order-ahead food startup Snackpass was willing to get their hands dirty to keep up with demand at one of their first restaurant partners, Tropical Smoothie Cafe on the Yale college campus. Why were

When we met up with Huawei at their Shenzhen headquarters earlier this year, details on the Mate X were hazy, at best. We did have the opportunity to play around with the forthcoming handset a bit over lunch, but the unit looked largely unchanged from what we’d seen at MWC earlier in the year. Release

Extra Crunch community perks have a new offer from voice meeting notes service, Otter.ai. Starting today, annual and two-year Extra Crunch members can receive 25% off an annual plan for Otter Premium or Otter for Teams. Otter.ai is an AI-powered assistant that generates rich notes from meetings, interviews, lectures and other voice conversations. You can

Somehow during all the partisan furor of the last few days, the Senate found a moment to vote some bipartisan legislation into law — presuming of course it survives the President’s desk. The TRACED act pushes carriers to kill robocalls before they ring, and gives the FCC some extra juice to pursue the wicked ones

Facebook doesn’t want its hardware like Oculus and Portal to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That’s why Facebook has tasked a co-author of Microsoft’s Windows NT named Mark Lucovsky with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according the The Information’s Alex Heath. “We

Spotify is prototyping a new way to see what friends have been listening to, called “Tastebuds”. Despite how discovering music is inherently social, Spotify has no features for directly interacting with friends within its mobile app after axing its own inbox in 2017 and keeping its Friend Activity ticker restricted to desktop. It seemed like

Mobile consumers worldwide will have downloaded a record 120 billion apps from Apple’s App Store and Google Play by the end of 2019, according to App Annie’s year-end report on app trends. This represents a 5% increase from 2018 — a notable achievement given that the number doesn’t include re-installations or app updates. Consumer spending

Instagram is giving politicians the same free rein to spread misinformation as its parent company Facebook. Instagram is expanding its limited fact checking test in the US from May and will now work with 45 third-party organizations to assess the truthfulness of photo and video content on its app. Material rated as false will be

The clock is ticking on Verizon’s plans to bring 5G to 30 cities. Short of an actual Christmas miracle, things are looking rough. On the upside, the carrier (and, disclosure, parent of TechCrunch) just brought the next-gen technology to a 19th city. And it’s a doozy. Verizon announced this morning that it’s flipped the switch

Here’s a nice little surprise for Android users this weekend. It seems that Google’s pans to roll out Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging is slightly ahead of schedule. The company announced in November that it would be making the feature available for all Android users in the country by year-end. A tweet from Android Messages

We’ve officially entered the mid-December hardware doldrums. Obviously no major hardware maker in its right mind is going to be announcing anything major in the next few weeks, for fear of preemptively cannibalizing holiday sales. Things will, however, heat up immediately after the new year with the kick off of CES. Then, a little over