Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 01/12 – About Those Apps Cloning Wordle…

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

The FTC gets a second shot at Meta, after a judge okays their lawsuit edit. Samsung ghost on its own event. The state of the mobile app economy. Is cloning Wordle to release an app ok or not? And the new app at the top of the App Store that definitely comes from the, why didn’t I think of that file. Sponsors: EditorX.com Links: ‘Second time lucky?’ FTC’s case against Facebook can move forward, federal judge rules. (Washington Post) Samsung no-showed on its major Exynos 2200 launch [Update: Samsung speaks] (Ars Technica) Samsung Electronics to Unveil Exynos 2200 AP on Launch Day of Galaxy 22 (BusinessKorea) App Annie: Global app stores’ consumer spend up 19% to $170B in 2021, downloads grew 5% to 230B (TechCrunch) The Wordle clones have disappeared from the App Store (The Verge) Locket, an app for sharing photos to friends’ homescreens, hits the top of the App Store (TechCrunch) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for January 12th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the FTC gets a second shot at Meta after a judge okays their lawsuit edits. Samsung ghosts on its own event. The state of the mobile app economy is cloning Wordle to release an app okay or not, and the new app at the top of the

app store that definitely comes from the why didn't I think of that file. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. A federal judge ruled that the the FTC's amended lawsuit, alleging META has a monopoly, can move forward after a ruling last year throughout the FTC's complaint over a lack of evidence. So maybe bullet not dodged here. I guess it depends on if you're the FTC or your meta, quoting the Washington Post. In a colorful order, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg wrote that an amended complaint, the agency filed in August offered, quote, more robust and detailed evidence to suggest Facebook has an alleged monopoly. In the filing, the FTC argued that Facebook is in a class of its own

and should not be compared to other social apps such as TikTok. Second time lucky, Bosberg wrote in the opening of the complaint, noting that the commission's first suit, quote, stumbled out of the starting blocks, end quote. First filed under a Republican-led FTC in 2020, the Facebook antitrust suit is widely viewed as a bellwether of Washington's ability to rain in Silicon Valley after years of a hands-off approach to tech regulations. While the judge's decision acknowledges the agency has overcome some of the shortcomings of the initial suit, Bosberg signaled it may be challenging for the FTC to ultimately prove Facebook as a monopoly. It's, quote, anyone's guess whether the agency will prevail, he wrote.

The revised complaint included enough facts to, quote, plausibly establish, end quote, that Facebook has a monopoly in personal social networking, referring to services that allow people to maintain relationships with family and friends online, Boasberg said. Bostberg said the Achilles' heel of the FTC's first complaint was that it was devoid of data supporting its claim that, quote, no other social network of comparable scale exists in the United States, end quote. The revised complaint included data from the analytics firm Comscore and argued that Facebook's share of daily active users of apps providing social, personal networking in the United States, has exceeded 70% since 2016, end quote. This is a weird one. Ghosted itself. The company which had announced a January 11th event for the Exenos 2,200 chip, didn't show up to its own product launch, quoting Ars Technica. Samsung pooled a no-call, no-show for a major product launch. It's the end of the day now, and the company has yet to respond

to what must be hundreds of press inquiries, including ours, that are no doubt flooding its email inbox. Samsung stood up the entire tech industry and now it won't say why. Nobody knows what is going on. The Exenos 2,200 was shaping up to be a major launch for Samsung. It is, after all, the first Samsung system on a chip with the headline grabbing feature of having an AMD GPU. The two companies announced this deal a year ago and we've been giddy about it ever since. The Exxinose 2200 is or was going to debut in the Galaxy S-22. That launch event is currently scheduled for February 8th, assuming Samsung doesn't ghost everyone again. Samsung announced the Exinos 2200 event just 12 days ago saying, quote, stay tuned for the next Exenos with the new GPU

born from RDNA2, January 11th, 2022. Our DNA2 is an AMD GPU architecture. In addition to a tweet from the official verified at Samsung Xenos account, the company also cut a promo video ending with the January 11th, 2022 date. You can still watch it at archive.org. The closest thing Samsung has done to communicate about the status of the Xenos 2,200, is to delete its tweets promoting the show, end quote. So that was obviously written yesterday, but this morning, Samsung said the Exenos 2200 will be unveiled alongside a new smartphone, likely in late January or February. Quoting business Korea. We are planning to unveil the new application processor at the time of launching a new Samsung smartphone, a Samsung Electronics official said, there are no problems with the AP's production and

performance, end quote. Accordingly, Samsung Electronics is expected to introduce the Exenose 2200 at the end of January or early February in time for the launch of the Galaxy S-22, end quote. So I'd say that's still mysterious, because if these chips are going into new phones as early as next month, those chips are already in mass production, right? So what's the issue? Only hint that I could find came from user Ravi underscore 711 on Twitter who said, quote, none of the leaks about Exenos 2200 have been positive and now the launch has been delayed. This should have been the year Exxinose was most competitive with Snapdragon. The gap will widen as Qualcomm moves to TSMC in 2022 and the Nuvia cores in 2023, end quote. From the interesting data points file, according to App Annie, consumers spent

$170 billion on mobile apps globally in 2021, which was up 19% year over year, with 230 billion app downloads, the average American now spends 4.1 hours on apps per day, quoting TechCrunch. That figure is up 19% year over year, which is down just one percentage point from the growth rate The firm reported in its prior annual report. Growth in app downloads, however, dipped a bit more. Though today's consumers are installing more apps than ever, 230 billion were downloaded in 2021, setting another record. The growth rate itself is slowing. In January 2021, App Annie reported year-over-year download growth of 7% during 2021, which has now dropped to just 5% at the end of the year. Download growth today is being driven largely by emerging markets like India, as well as Pakistan,

Peru, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Egypt. What's also clear is that consumers are spending more time in apps, even topping the time they spend watching TV in some cases. The report noted the average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but over the course of the past year, 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. Across the top 10 markets analyzed in the study, the average time spent in apps topped 4 hours, 48 minutes in 2021, up 30% from 2019. This included the averages from Brazil, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, India, Japan, Turkey, Singapore, Canada, the U.S., Russia,

the UK, Australia, Argentina, France, Germany, and China combined. Much of this time was spent in social, photo, and video apps, which accounted for seven out of every 10 minutes spent on mobile in the past year. These categories plus entertainment apps also appeal to Gen Z users, particularly in the U.S. Here in the U.S., Gen Z's most used apps include Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Netflix. Millennials, meanwhile, preferred Facebook, Messenger, Amazon, and WhatsApp. Gen X, which has now been lumped into the baby boomer demographic, use the weather channel, Amazon Alexa, newsbreak, and ring. This increased time spent in apps has had a direct impact on consumer spending. In the U.S., the COVID-19 pandemic's lingering effects have forced users to shop, work, learn, game, and

entertain themselves from home over the past year. This led to, quote, phenomenal growth in consumer spending, app Annie said, as the market added, $43 billion in 2021 or $10.4 billion more than 2020, equating to a 30% year-over-year growth rate higher than the global average. At the high end of consumer spending, there were 233 apps and games that pulled in more than $100 million in 2021, and 13. titles that generated over $1 billion. This is up 20% from 2020 when there were then 193 apps in games topping the $100 million mark and only eight titles making over $1 billion

annually, end quote. So I consider doing a story yesterday about Wordle and how a bunch of wordal clones were popping up on app stores, but now word comes that those clones are disappearing from at least Apple's App Store after reports surfaced that many were capitalizing on the guessing games popularity by cloning it in app form. Quoting the Verge. Has Apple taken action against apps that clone the popular web game Wordle? They have now disappeared from the App Store after several publications, including the Verge, called out a flood of copycats so blatant as to be named Wordle, and that featured

the same gameplay and UI, each taking advantage of the fact that developer Josh Wardle didn't create an Apple app of his own. While we're still seeing a few clones in the App Store, they don't use the Wordle name. The cloned apps had a spotlight shown on them today when one developer started bragging about how many downloads his version of Wordle was getting. Following some intense backlash from the community, he set his account to private, but people had already started finding many other apps like it on the App Store, end quote. So about that bragging dev, the person in question goes under the Twitter handle at Zach Schacht. He talked about how he made his own Wordle app named Wordle, but with the twist being that in his version there were not just five-letter words, but also four, six, and seven letter words, too. And if you paid up for a

pro version, you could play unlimited times. He shared screenshots of download stats, claiming thousands of downloads per hour and reaching higher levels of the App Store rankings. Now, others attacked him, saying this is why we can't have nice things. And I'm not saying that I agree with what he did or agree with those who attacked him, but here was his tweeted justification, which sort of holds water, quote, here were my calculations. A, wordal is a rip-off of another game. By the way, editors note there, this does seem to be the case, though I couldn't 100% confirm it. B, wordel, the word, isn't trademarked, and there's a bunch of other unrelated word apps name the same thing. C, wow, I'll just hack together something on the weekend and see if I

can make a buck. I used a similar UI because I made the app in a weekend, and I was already working on an update with a different UI. Twitter can be an effing hellscape. sometimes, and you all need to calm down because this happens thousands of times a week with other apps. Getting mad that I charged a $30 subscription that thousands of people were willing to pay is just bananas. This is how businesses work. You charge money. If it's too much, people won't pay. In this case, many people were willing to start a trial. If I launched with multiplayer, where you could real-time play against other people and friends, would you be as mad? This was a weekend side project I built that unexpectedly blew up, end quote. So, yeah, I mean,

I mean, if someone creates something of value but doesn't go through the steps to legally control the use of that thing, are you really in the wrong for stepping in and, I don't know, tweaking it or wringing money out of it? If the original developer wanted to make sure the thing was never exploited for monetary gain, again, there are steps to make that sure. But back to the original wordal developer's perspective, because there's another added wrinkle here. The great Owen Williams tweeted this, which I thought also held. water. Quote, Werdel is a fascinating example of how you can get punished by app stores for building web first instead of a native app. If someone like this decides to rip your idea and use the name in the store, you don't have any recourse except making your own app. If Apple and Google were actually allowing proper competition, you'd be able to register a PWA slash web app in their stores if you

choose that route instead of a native app. But that doesn't help build their walled garden. so we get this, end quote. Since we're talking about apps, app economics, and the like, let's end today with this. Lockett is an iOS app and widget for sharing photos to your friend's home screens. It just hit number one on the App Store after debuting just this past New Year's Day, and subsequently going viral on TikTok, quoting TechCrunch. A new social app locket popped to the top of the app store charts in recent days, thanks to its clever premise to put live photos from friends in a widget on your iOS home screen.

In other words, it turns Apple's widget system, typically used to showcase information like news, weather, inspirational quotes or photos from your own iPhone's gallery into a private social networking platform. The idea for the app was dreamed up by Matt Moss, a former Apple worldwide developer conference student scholarship winner, and recent UC Santa Barbara grad, who had been building a user research and testing platform called Hawkeye Labs. Lockett, he admits, was originally a person side project, not his main focus. I built it as a present for my girlfriend for her birthday last summer, Moss explains. She was going back to school in the fall, so we were about to start a long-distance relationship, he says. The process of getting a little photo from her on my home screen seemed

really appealing, just a nice way to stay in touch, end quote. The developer built the app over a week or two and ended up using it with his girlfriend fairly extensively over the past six months, sending each other an average of five photos per day. As Lockett also stores the photos sent and received in its history section, the app became a fun way to look back on their photos as well. Soon the couple's friends started taking notice and asked if they could use it with their own significant others, family or friends. So Moss decided to make Lockett publicly available to users on the App Store. The app launched on New Year's Day and has now seen more than two million users sign up as of this morning. On Sunday, Lockett became the number one app

overall on the U.S. Apptopia's App Store data and had become the number one social networking app the day prior. Apptopia reports only seeing around 1 million global installs so far with about 31% from the U.S., but its data is only through yesterday. Moss credits Lockett's rapid adoption to going viral on TikTok, where he published videos to an accompanying company account for Lockett where he could show off the app in action. His video received some 100,000 views over just a couple of days. other TikTok users then began making their own content featuring the app and the custom sound used on the original Lockett video. To get started using the app, download Lockett from the App Store and sign up by verifying your phone number. Lockett then requests access to your phone's contacts and camera in order to function,

and ideally Lockett would allow users to bypass full address book access to instead allow users to invite friends through standalone invitations, as that would be a more privacy-focused approach. Moss tells us he's considering changing this aspect of the app's behavior, which is meant to make the app easier to use. However, he says Lockett doesn't store your contact info nor send its invites automatically using its own phone number. It just pops up the iMessage window so you can customize the text sent to your friends.

However, if you choose to decline Apple's pop-up, which requests permission to pool your contacts, you aren't able to use the app at all, we found. After inviting and adding friends to join you on Lockett, you'll then add the app's widget to your iOS home screen. The widget will showcase your friend's photos as they add images throughout the day. You can also launch the app,

at any time to add photos of your own to be sent to your friends widgets, end quote. What's with everybody finding success recently by coding things that will just, you know, amuse their partners? The gold standard of this sort of story is, of course, the old saw that Pierre Omidyar, also over a weekend, coded up eBay for his partner, who was a rabid collector of Pez dispensers. Although if you read my book, you'll know the truth is that that was just a feel-good story, later dreamed up by eBay PR much after the fact. I've been to Hollywood, I've been to Redwood, I've crossed the ocean for a heart of gold.

Talk to you tomorrow.