Mobile News - Week of October 26, 2020

Since the Coronavirus pandemic began, a host of Covid-19 applications have emerged. 493 of them!

Covid-19 marks a global shift in the way local, regional, and national authorities distribute and collect data about their citizens during large-scale crises.

When Apple’s 2018 iPad Pro was undergoing production trials at the company’s largest outside manufacturer, Foxconn Technology, the Taiwanese firm gave Apple a list of how many workers it needed to develop the new product. That was standard procedure for Foxconn, whose factories across China have …

Apple hired John Giannandrea, Google’s head of search, more than two years ago.

The iPhone’s latest operating system version, iOS 14, has started to show its own search results and to link directly to websites when users type in search queries directly from the home screen, according to industry sources cited in the report.

Microsoft Teams is the company’s Office 365 chat-based collaboration tool that competes with Slack, Facebook’s Workplace, Google Chat/Meet, and even Zoom. Indeed, Microsoft is in a virtual meeting war with Google and Zoom. Google Meet has seen 100 million meeting participants in a single day, Teams has seen more than 200 million meeting participants, and Zoom has seen 300 million daily meeting participants.

Airbnb is not the largest player by a landslide. Booking.com is the top dog here, but not by too much. Airbnb’s slice of the pie here is actually even smaller as there are plenty more OTAs in operation such as TripAdvisor, VRBO, etc.

The VPN is first rolling out to Android over the “coming weeks” in the United States and can be enabled/disabled from the mobile app.

It’s interesting to see Google is doing this. Having VPN essentially may hurt its advertising business.