Mobile News - Week of June 21, 2021

After launching five years ago in the United States, Apple’s search advertising service finally arrived in mainland China this week.

The feature, called Apple Search Ads, lets developers bid on an advertising slot based on users’ keyword search in the App Store, similar to how Google search ads work.

China has historically been a strong market for Apple, but iPhones are increasingly losing their luster as a status symbol in the country with the rise of local offerings like Huawei. In the first quarter, however, Apple’s smartphone shipment saw a rebound thanks to Huawei’s slipping sales and the launch of the iPhone 12 family. The Chinese App Store is another important source of income for Apple.

The delay comes amid intensifying pressure on Silicon Valley giants to fix the internet’s privacy problem. Laws like Europe’s GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) target the data collection that Google and other companies want for fine tuning the advertisements they deliver. The ad tech industry doesn’t have forever to change course because anyone dissatisfied with Chrome’s pace has abundant alternatives.

All Chrome’s top rivals, including Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft’s Edge and Brave Software’s Brave, take more aggressive measures at stopping tracking than Google. If you want to stick with Chrome, browser extensions like Ghostery, DuckDuckGo, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin, are designed to block trackers.

Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms and Google on Thursday unveiled the JioPhone Next.

Google, too, has previously made several efforts — $100 Android One smartphones program in 2014 and low-resource intensive Android Go operating system in 2017 — to expand the reach of Android. The company has also backed KaiOS, which powers popular feature phones.

Windows 11 is real, and Microsoft has just revealed the brand-new app store that will go along with it — which could be a big deal, seeing how previous versions of the idea never really caught on.

In a major move, Microsoft’s Panos Panay says developers will now be able to keep 100 percent of their revenue “if you do bring your own commerce engine” — unlike app stores from Apple and Google that generally take 30 percent of developer revenue and insist on their own payment platforms and in-app purchases. 

Microsoft is bringing Android apps to Windows 11. Android apps will be available in the Windows store, allowing Windows 11 users to run mobile apps natively.

Apps will be listed in the new Windows store, and can be pinned to the taskbar or snapped alongside traditional Windows apps. Microsoft is also partnering with Intel to use its Intel Bridge technology to make this a reality, although the Android apps will still work with both AMD and Arm-based systems.

Most of Amazon’s properties including Amazon.com, WholeFoods.com and Zappos.com are preventing Google’s tracking system FLoC.

Amazon Marketplace (60% of sales) has become a platform to build $100m or $1bn companies, and there’s been a wave of roll-up plays. One of the biggest, Thrasio, is in talks to float at $10bn.

Amazon probably sold $15 billion of advertising space last year, and a lot of other online retailers are getting into ‘merchant media’.