Mobile News - Week of January 4, 2020

Snapchat is joining Facebook and Twitter in temporarily cutting off President Donald Trump’s ability to post after he incited violence at the U.S. Capitol.

Though Snapchat is primarily used as a private messaging app, public figures and media companies also post content to its Discover tab, which it claims 70% of the U.S. Gen Z population viewed last year, and the company recently rolled out a TikTok-like feed of user-submitted videos. Snap in June blocked Trump from being promoted in Discover after he said Black Lives Matter protesters would be met with violence if they stormed the White House.

Twitter removed several of Trump’s tweets on Wednesday and blocked his ability to post new tweets until he deletes others in violation of its policy, while Facebook for the first time put a temporary block on his ability to post. Trump regularly uses Snapchat, which has 249 million daily users, to share content he posts to other social networks, including campaign ads. 1.9 million Snapchat users have subscribed to his account, according to his profile.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order banning transactions with eight Chinese software applications, including Ant Group’s Alipay mobile payment app, CamScanner, SHAREit, Tencent QQ, VMate, etc

Apple customers spent $1.8 billion on digital goods and services in the App Store during the week between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, and then spent a new single-day record $540 million on New Year’s Day.

OpenAI, a startup working toward a long-term goal of artificial intelligence software that perceives the world as humans do, unveiled two new programs that bridge the gap between text and images.

The programs–one of which can create images based on text, and the other which generates text captions for images–illustrate the rapid pace with which OpenAI’s research is evolving. They also show how OpenAI’s focus with programs like GPT-3, which have focused on understanding patterns of text communication, is expanding to include images as well.

Honour of Kings was created after Chinese gaming giant Tencent failed to convince League of Legends’ creators to develop a mobile version of the PC game

It is now the world’s most popular game and the first on any platform to average more than 100 million users a day

Globally, consumer spending on the App Store reached $72.3 billion, up 30.3 percent Y/Y from $55.5 billion in 2019. As in previous years, this exceeded the amount users spent on Google Play, which grew 30 percent Y/Y from $29.7 billion in 2019 to $38.6 billion. The App Store generated 87.3 percent more in consumer spending than the Play store, and both platforms experienced roughly the same Y/Y growth. The spending gap between the platforms remained relatively flat compared to 2019.