<p>Google announced on Tuesday that digital IDs are coming to more states and services in Google Wallet. The company also shared that Wallet is getting a way to privately verify age and that the app is expanding to 50 more countries. Residents in Arkansas, Montana, Puerto Rico, and West Virginia will soon be able to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Spotify reported on Tuesday that its premium subscriber base grew by 5 million in the first quarter, representing a 12% increase year-over-year. This brings the total to 268 million, marking the second-highest total ever and the highest net addition of paid subs for a first quarter since 2020.  Spotify also reported a record-high quarterly operating [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Veterans of the European startup scene, who’ve launched multiple consumer apps in the past, are partly coming out of stealth Tuesday with a new app. On the face of it, Grouphug will simply generate memes from the archive of a group WhatsApp chat. However, that masks a wider play.  Grouphug is led by Felix Petersen, [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Temu is adding &#8220;import charges&#8221; of around 145% in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs on goods shipped from China, CNBC reports. The fees cost more than the products that U.S. consumers are buying, and in some cases are more than doubling the price of a standard order. For example, CNBC found that a summer [&hellip;]</p>

<p>News about Android is being relegated to a side show at Google&#8217;s annual developer conference, Google I/O, next month. On Monday, the company announced it would share information about the latest updates coming to the Android ecosystem at an upcoming virtual event called &#8220;The Android Show: I/O Edition,&#8221; airing on May 13. The decision to [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Creating animation is a time-consuming process, requiring multiple steps, including storyboarding, rendering, composition, and lighting to craft a single scene. If a director wants to experiment with a different take for a scene, an animation team has to go back and tweak things before the scene can be finalized. Cheehoo, a startup founded by a [&hellip;]</p>

<p>If you’re someone who likes to bookmark a bunch of things that you find interesting or want to come back to later, it can be hard to manage everything you have saved. There are a number of great bookmark apps on the market that can help you organize all these sorts of links, articles, and [&hellip;]</p>

<p>A new app called Lately launched on the App Store a few weeks ago, targeting people with ADHD to help them arrive on time and rewarding them for doing so. The service is designed to help users manage their travel plans by notifying them when it&#8217;s time to leave for a trip, sending reminders 30 [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Instagram Edits, Meta&#8217;s newly released video creation app, had a bigger debut than its direct competitor, ByteDance&#8217;s CapCut, once did. The new app, which today helps users craft videos for Instagram Reels, stories, and other social posts, was downloaded an estimated 702,900 times on iOS devices during its first two days on the market. That&#8217;s [&hellip;]</p>

<p>It turns out that decentralized social networks can go down, too. On Thursday evening, the decentralized social network Bluesky experienced a significant outage, leaving users unable to load the app on both the web and mobile devices for roughly an hour. According to a message on Bluesky&#8217;s status page, the company was aware of the [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Instagram Threads, Meta&#8217;s newest social network and X competitor, is officially relocating from the website Threads.net to Threads.com. The transition will coincide with a handful of quality-of-life improvements for the Threads web app, including features to more easily access custom feeds, saved posts, and likes, as well as other tools for creating new columns, copying [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Chess.com reaches a new membership milestone as it nears its 20th birthday. Chess.com, the online chess platform that was founded in 2005 and launched in 2007, has surpassed 200 million members. Of those 200 million members, 1.5 million are paying users. More than 20 million games of chess are played every day on the platform. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Facebook will begin lowering the reach of accounts sharing spammy content and making them ineligible for monetization, Meta announced on Thursday. The company is also increasing efforts to remove Facebook accounts that coordinate fake engagement and impersonate others, it says. The move comes as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised a return to &#8220;OG Facebook.&#8221; [&hellip;]</p>

<p>TikTok is rolling out support for ALT text for photo posts to make content more accessible for users with visual and cognitive impairments. The company says creators can now provide descriptive text for photos to help users with screen readers understand the visual content through spoken descriptions. TikTok told TechCrunch in an email that creators [&hellip;]</p>

<p>For years, websites included information about what kind of crawlers were not allowed on their site with a robots.txt file. Adobe, which wants to create a similar standard for images, has added a tool to content credentials with an intention to give them a bit more control over what is used to train AI models. [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Government censorship has found its way to Bluesky, but there&#8217;s&nbsp;currently&nbsp;a loophole thanks to how the social network is structured. Earlier this month, Bluesky restricted access to 72 accounts in Turkey at the request of Turkish governmental authorities, according to a recent report by the Freedom of Expression Association. As a result, people in Turkey can [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Months after first testing ads in select markets, including the U.S., Meta on Wednesday announced that its Instagram Threads app would now expand ads to all advertisers worldwide. The expansion will allow eligible advertisers to reach Threads&#8217; over 320 million monthly active users, and it will include access to an inventory filter to control the sensitivity level [&hellip;]</p>

<p>WhatsApp announced on Wednesday it&#8217;s launching a new feature that will allow users to add an extra layer of privacy to chats. The new &#8220;Advanced Chat Privacy&#8221; setting prevents you and the people you&#8217;re chatting with from exporting chats and auto-downloading media to their phone. The setting also prevents users from mentioning Meta AI in [&hellip;]</p>

<p>Khosla Ventures-backed Fireflies.ai, an AI-powered note-taking app, on Wednesday released a set of domain-specific &#8220;mini apps&#8221; to extract insights from meeting transcripts automatically. With the widespread availability of automatic speech recognition models and generative AI, meeting intelligence startups like Otter, Read AI, Circleback, Krisp, and Granola have registered impressive growth. Fireflies, similarly, has seen 8x [&hellip;]</p>

<p>The European Union has fined Apple €500 million (about $568 million) and Meta €200 million (about $227 million) for allegedly breaching the bloc&#8217;s Digital Markets Act, according to The Wall Street Journal. The EU has accused Apple of failing to comply with an obligation to allow app developers to inform customers of alternative ways to [&hellip;]</p>