Mobile News - Week of July 19, 2021

Facebook is expanding its payments and revenue schemes for UGC, with a rather vague announcement about $1 billion of payments. (Meanwhile Youtube pays close to $10 billion a year in ‘content acquisition costs’ though much of that is for professional content and half was for music.) 

The Chinese brand loved by Gen Z and rumored to be exploring an IPO — Shein– is now the largest Fast Fashion retailer in the US by sales, only two months after displacing Amazon as the top e-commerce app downloaded in the US.

Market share data from Earnest shows that Shein began 2021 with 13% of total Fast Fashion sales, trailing traditional leader H&M. Since January, Shein continued to gain share and now leads with 28% of the Fast Fashion market, with Zara the only other brand growing share during that period. 

The total US Fast Fashion market grew 15% between January and mid-June, while Shein grew nearly 160% in the same period, suggesting that the brand’s mobile-first strategy resonated with the post-covid consumer.

Zoom Apps, launched under the name Zapps, at Zoom’s 2020 Zoomtopia conference, are different from the more than 1,500 apps offered in Zoom’s Marketplace. Zoom’s existing marketplace revolves around integrating Zoom with other applications, whereas Zoom Apps are meant to bring apps into the Zoom experience with a click. 

There are 50 Zoom Apps available at launch, including Asana, Dropbox Spaces, and SurveyMonkey Enterprise by Momentive. 

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has called out apps made by Amazon, NetEase and Tiktok-owner ByteDance, as well as 142 other apps, for violating users’ rights.

Amazon’s China app and NetEase’s Dashen, an online community for gamers, have illegally collected user information, the ministry said in its latest list of problematic apps released on Monday.

In addition, Douyin Lite, a version of TikTok’s Chinese app made for lower-end phones, did not clearly display app information on the app store while Huya, a major live-streaming platform backed by Tencent Holdings, was found to have deceived, misled or forced users to turn on certain permissions, according to the ministry.

Activations of iOS and Android devices are now evenly split in the United States, with little sign of movement toward either platform dominating over…

Both Android and iOS users have had a high level of loyalty historically. Android loyalty has varied very slightly, in a narrow range of 90 to 93% in the past four years. iOS loyalty, on the other hand, has gradually increased over the past four years, from a low of 86% in early 2018 to 93% in the most recent quarter ending in June 2021.

The Russian state hackers who orchestrated the SolarWinds supply chain attack last year exploited an iOS zero-day as part of a separate malicious email campaign aimed at stealing Web authentication credentials from Western European governments, according to Google and Microsoft.

Microsoft said that Nobelium—the name the company uses to identify the hackers behind the SolarWinds supply chain attack—first managed to compromise an account belonging to USAID, a US government agency that administers civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With control of the agency’s account for online marketing company Constant Contact, the hackers could send emails that appeared to use addresses known to belong to the US agency.