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Cannabis and gaming payments startup Aeropay is now offering an alternative to Mastercard and Visa | TechCrunch

May 16, 2024 4:31 PM0


The key to taking on legacy players in the financial technology industry may be to go where they have not gone before. That’s what Chicago-based Aeropay is doing. The provider of pay-by-bank solutions for businesses started out helping cannabis retailers and gaming companies with their payments and is now entering into Visa and Mastercard’s territory […]

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Robotic Automations

Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs | TechCrunch

May 14, 2024 8:44 PM0


The appetite for alternative clouds has never been bigger. Case in point: CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider that began life as a cryptocurrency mining operation, this week raised $1.1 billion in new funding from investors including Coatue, Fidelity and Altimeter Capital. The round brings its valuation to $19 billion post-money, and its total raised to […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.


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Xona Space Systems closes $19M Series A to build out ultra-accurate GPS alternative | TechCrunch

May 8, 2024 4:39 PM0


For decades, the Global Positioning System (GPS) has maintained a de facto monopoly on positioning, navigation and timing, because it’s cheap and already integrated into billions of devices around the world. But Xona Space Systems thinks a more accurate system will be necessary to scale autonomous vehicles (AVs), advanced robotics and other technologies for the twenty-first century.

The startup plans to launch a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit that would act as a commercial GPS alternative. Called Pulsar, the network could potentially cost less to operate while offering more accurate geolocation data.

Xona was founded in 2019 by seven Stanford graduate school alumni; most met during grad school. CTO Tyler Reid went on to get his PhD there and worked in the university’s GPS Research Lab, later joining Ford’s autonomous vehicles group in 2017. He worked on “localization requirements,” or the level of navigation performance an autonomous vehicle or Driver Assist function needs to operate safely, and trying to develop or procure that tech.

Many vehicles today that integrate autonomous features use a combination of technologies, like cameras, lidar sensors and radar sensors to navigate. But Xona’s CEO Brian Manning said that while these sensors work well in structured environments, like cities, their efficacy is degraded in unstructured environments, like the middle of a desert. Fortunately, being unimpeded by buildings and other features, GPS tends to work very well in those places.

“The problem, though, is that GPS just has nowhere near the level of accuracy or really availability or robustness to be a complimentary sensor,” Manning said.

“That’s when we really started to realize how big the gap is between your GPS is today, and where the needs of at least the automotive market are and where they’re very quickly going,” he continued. “What if we could build a new GPS using more of the SpaceX mentality instead of the government contracting mentality?”

Xona’s approach is certainly more SpaceX than Boeing. The 31 satellites that provide GPS are all exquisite, ultra-expensive, and synchronized with nanosecond precision using massive on-board atomic clocks. In contrast, Xona’s Pulsar service is built on a patented “cloud architecture for atomic clocks,” as Manning put it, which he claimed will dramatically drive down the cost of each satellite but still provide orders of magnitude higher levels of accuracy. Think an accuracy of several centimeters, rather than meters.

Xona launched its first demonstration satellite in 2022 to demonstrate the core patented IP, and that satellite has now reached the end of its life. The first production-class satellite will launch in June 2025, and will be built by Belgian satellite manufacturer Aerospacelab. Xona is eventually aiming to launch a constellation of 300 satellites. Different customer groups will be able to start benefitting from the service even before the full constellation is operational, Manning said.

The company has designed its signal to be backwards compatible with many existing GPS chipsets, though some are “forwards compatible,” Manning said. But in general, chipsets will only need a firmware update to access the encrypted Pulsar signal.

While it might be hard to compete with a free service like GPS, Xona is convinced that there will be a huge market for advanced positioning, navigation and timing services due to the rise of AVs and other tech. Investors are behind this goal: on Tuesday, Xona announced the close of an oversubscribed $19 million Series A round led by Future Ventures and Seraphim Space, with participation from new investors NGP Capital, Industrious Ventures, Murata Electronics, Space Capital, and Aloniq.

Rob Desborough, a GP at Seraphim Space, described our dependence on GPS as an “absolute” in a statement. “Outages could cause incalculable damage to the global economy, while enhancement opens up whole new industries,” he said. “Waiting for GPS to fail, or for hostile powers to spoof it, is not an option for our security or commercial industries.”

This new funding round will go toward getting the first production-class satellite up in orbit, as well as building out the ground segment to support Pulsar and growing the 25-person team.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs | TechCrunch

May 5, 2024 7:12 PM0


The appetite for alternative clouds has never been bigger.

Case in point: CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider that began life as a cryptocurrency mining operation, this week raised $1.1 billion in new funding from investors including Coatue, Fidelity and Altimeter Capital. The round brings its valuation to $19 billion post-money, and its total raised to $5 billion in debt and equity — a remarkable figure for a company that’s less than ten years old.

It’s not just CoreWeave.

Lambda Labs, which also offers an array of cloud-hosted GPU instances, in early April secured a “special purpose financing vehicle” of up to $500 million, months after closing a $320 million Series C round. The nonprofit Voltage Park, backed by crypto billionaire Jed McCaleb, last October announced that it’s investing $500 million in GPU-backed data centers. And Together AI, a cloud GPU host that also conducts generative AI research, in March landed $106 million in a Salesforce-led round.

So why all the enthusiasm for — and cash pouring into — the alternative cloud space?

The answer, as you might expect, is generative AI.

As the generative AI boom times continue, so does the demand for the hardware to run and train generative AI models at scale. GPUs, architecturally, are the logical choice for training, fine-tuning and running models because they contain thousands of cores that can work in parallel to perform the linear algebra equations that make up generative models.

But installing GPUs is expensive. So most devs and organizations turn to the cloud instead.

Incumbents in the cloud computing space — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure — offer no shortage of GPU and specialty hardware instances optimized for generative AI workloads. But for at least some models and projects, alternative clouds can end up being cheaper — and delivering better availability.

On CoreWeave, renting an Nvidia A100 40GB — one popular choice for model training and inferencing — costs $2.39 per hour, which works out to $1,200 per month. On Azure, the same GPU costs $3.40 per hour, or $2,482 per month; on Google Cloud, it’s $3.67 per hour, or $2,682 per month.

Given generative AI workloads are usually performed on clusters of GPUs, the cost deltas quickly grow.

“Companies like CoreWeave participate in a market we call specialty ‘GPU as a service’ cloud providers,” Sid Nag, VP of cloud services and technologies at Gartner, told TechCrunch. “Given the high demand for GPUs, they offers an alternate to the hyperscalers, where they’ve taken Nvidia GPUs and provided another route to market and access to those GPUs.”

Nag points out that even some big tech firms have begun to lean on alternative cloud providers as they run up against compute capacity challenges.

Last June, CNBC reported that Microsoft had signed a multi-billion-dollar deal with CoreWeave to ensure that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT and a close Microsoft partner, would have adequate compute power to train its generative AI models. Nvidia, the furnisher of the bulk of CoreWeave’s chips, sees this as a desirable trend, perhaps for leverage reasons; it’s said to have given some alternative cloud providers preferential access to its GPUs.

Lee Sustar, principal analyst at Forrester, sees cloud vendors like CoreWeave succeeding in part because they don’t have the infrastructure “baggage” that incumbent providers have to deal with.

“Given hyperscaler dominance of the overall public cloud market, which demands vast investments in infrastructure and range of services that make little or no revenue, challengers like CoreWeave have an opportunity to succeed with a focus on premium AI services without the burden of hypercaler-level investments overall,” he said.

But is this growth sustainable?

Sustar has his doubts. He believes that alternative cloud providers’ expansion will be conditioned by whether they can continue to bring GPUs online in high volume, and offer them at competitively low prices.

Competing on pricing might become challenging down the line as incumbents like Google, Microsoft and AWS ramp up investments in custom hardware to run and train models. Google offers its TPUs; Microsoft recently unveiled two custom chips, Azure Maia and Azure Cobalt; and AWS has Trainium, Inferentia and Graviton.

“Hypercalers will leverage their custom silicon to mitigate their dependencies on Nvidia, while Nvidia will look to CoreWeave and other GPU-centric AI clouds,” Sustar said.

Then there’s the fact that, while many generative AI workloads run best on GPUs, not all workloads need them — particularly if they’re aren’t time-sensitive. CPUs can run the necessary calculations, but typically slower than GPUs and custom hardware.

More existentially, there’s a threat that the generative AI bubble will burst, which would leave providers with mounds of GPUs and not nearly enough customers demanding them. But the future looks rosy in the short term, say Sustar and Nag, both of whom are expecting a steady stream of upstart clouds.

“GPU-oriented cloud startups will give [incumbents] plenty of competition, especially among customers who are already multi-cloud and can handle the complexity of management, security, risk and compliance across multiple clouds,” Sustar said. “Those sorts of cloud customers are comfortable trying out a new AI cloud if it has credible leadership, solid financial backing and GPUs with no wait times.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Edonia grabs €2M to turn microalgae into less bitter-tasting ground meat alternative | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 11:42 AM0


As the world’s population continues to grow, the need to be able to feed everyone is something a number of entities are working on. Paris-based Edonia, is one of the startups working on creating protein ingredients using microalgae.

Edonia joins companies like Bevel, AlgaeCore Technologies, Algenuity and NewFish that are all tapping into the global market for commercial algae expected to be valued at $25.4 billion by 2033.

Now armed with €2 million ($2.1 million), the company is moving forward with producing plant-based ingredients from microalgae biomass generated from spirulina or chlorella that Valentin claims is more nutritious than meat, Edonia CEO Hugo Valentin told TechCrunch.

Edonia is Valentin’s second company. He was also co-founder of Ammi, a company that was also working on spirulina consumption. Prior to that he was an account director for consulting firm Uzik. He said while at Ammi he was convinced that mycology (the study of fungi) would play an important role in the current protein transition.

Edonia makes the protein via a unique microalgae transformation process called “edonization.” This transforms the microalgae biomass into a textured super ingredient with numerous taste, odor, texture, nutritional and environmental qualities.

“We want to solve the organoleptic (sense organs) aspects of mycology,” Valentin said. “Today, it’s mainly known as a green powder with a bitter taste. The goal of the technologies is to solve this problem.”

Brevel sprouts $18.5M to develop microalgae-based alternative proteins

How edonization works

The edonization technique changes the color from green to a darker richer-looking brown. It converts the texture to “meaty-like tender grains” with aromatics similar to one that smoking or grilling would produce, Valentin said.

Edonia’s microalgae product replaces ground meat, like meatballs. (Image credit: Lilie Bedos + Edonia)

Edo-1 is the startup’s first product, which Valentin said offered an umami-like flavor and texture closer to ground meat than that of soy proteins. Therefore, it’s a good plant-based replacement for ground meat, he said.

In addition, the minimally processed Edo-1 is 30% protein, comprised of essential amino acids, and contains other minerals and vitamins. That’s a bit higher percentage of protein than, for instance, ground beef, which can be around 20% (a large percentage of beef is water).

At a time when 34% of greenhouse gas emissions are generated by our food, Valentin also wanted to show that microalgae could reduce emissions. Edonia worked with university institution AgroParisTech to develop a Life Cycle Assessment that shows Edonia’s product could emit 40 times less carbon dioxide than its ground meat equivalent, and three times less than its textured soy equivalent.

Scaling up

Edonia is already able to produce a few kilograms of Edo-1. Valentin’s next goal is to scale the technology so it can deliver thousands of tons of the product to the market. Valentin expects to have a full-scale factory in about two years.

The company is also working with food manufacturer beta testers to develope recipes and food products using Edonia’s ingredients.

“We plan to go to the market by the end of this year with commercial proofs of concepts,” he said.

Edonia isn’t subject to the “Novel Food” category regulations, so it does not need French or European Union authorization to go to market. This will enable it to commercialize its production more rapidly. The official launch will be European, and then the startup aims to quickly expand to other continents, like Asia and the United States, through strategic partnerships, Valentin said.

Getting Edo-1 on the plate

The €2 million investment was led by French venture capital firm Asterion Ventures, which recently invested in another “green” company Diamfab. BPI also participated. The capital will enable the company to finance a pilot plant and extend its R&D, Valentin said.

The quality of Edonia’s product has already been tested and approved by French R&D chef Laurent Sicre, whose culinary creation and development expertise is recognized by food industry professionals and restaurateurs.

In addition to meat alternatives, Valentin said Edo-1 can improve nutrition for other products, including bread, cakes, cream and cereal bars, without impairing the eating experience.

Edonia is now setting up its industrial demonstrator and Valentin expects to be able to execute at an industrial scale beginning this summer. The next step is to secure additional letters of intent for food makers to go to market with a product containing Edo-1.

Is ocean conservation the next climate tech? 7 investors explain why they’re all in


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Post News, the a16z-funded Twitter alternative, is shutting down | TechCrunch

April 20, 2024 12:57 AM0


Post News, a microblogging site that emerged in the days after Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition, is shutting down just a year and a half after launching in beta.

Founder Noam Bardin, previously CEO of Waze, broke the news in a post on Friday.

“At the end of the day, our service is not growing fast enough to become a real business or a significant platform,” Bardin said. “A consumer business, at its core, needs to show rapid consumer adoption and we have not managed to find the right product combination to make it happen.”

Post was backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and tech commentator, but the platform never disclosed how much it raised. Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher was an adviser to the company.

Post News, a Twitter alternative, gets funding from a16z

Post’s strategy was to harness Twitter’s reputation as a virtual watercooler for journalists, then build on that further by creating a new way for publishers and writers to monetize. Instead of subscribing to various different publications, Post users could purchase individual articles from certain partner outlets.

Despite Post’s closure, Bardin said he thinks that the company proved something about the different ways in which digital news outlets can monetize. He wrote that Post “validated many theories around Micropayments and consumers’ willingness to purchase individual articles.” The platform also allowed users to tip writers for their work.

Bardin is right that the media landscape is changing. There are more independent and worker-owned publications than ever, hosted on tech platforms like Substack, Beehiiv and Ghost. But perhaps it was too soon to try to capture this nascent movement in a social platform.

Around the same time that Post sprung up, a number of other Twitter alternatives threw their hat into the ring to capture the population of users who would be dissatisfied with Musk’s ownership decisions. Post managed to hang in there for more than a year after launch, but it’s not the only new microblogging site that’s folded. Pebble, also known as T2, shut down in October.

As we knew all along, social media is a tough business — and even if users flock to your site for a fleeting moment, that doesn’t mean they’ll stick around.

AirChat, the buzzy new social app, could be great — or, it could succumb to the same fate as Clubhouse


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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Alternative browsers report uplift after EU's DMA choice screen mandate | TechCrunch

April 19, 2024 9:33 PM0


A flagship European Union digital market regulation appears to be shaking up competition in the mobile browser market.

It’s been a little over a month since the Digital Markets Act (DMA) came into application and there are early signs it’s having an impact by forcing phone makers to show browser choice screens to users.

On Wednesday, Reuters reported growth data shared by Cyprus-based web browser Aloha and others that it said suggests the new law is stirring the competitive pot and helping smaller browser makers gain share or at least grab more attention than they were.

But it’s early days for DMA implementation, with choice screen rollouts still a work in progress, and many EU users haven’t even seen one yet. While Aloha is not the only other browser reporting a boost in interest since the DMA compliance deadline kicked in on March 7 — Brave, Opera and Vivaldi also shared positive stories of increased interest — several others, including DuckDuckGo and Firefox, told us it’s too soon for them to be able to assess the regulation’s effect.

TechCrunch reached out to 16 alternative browser makers with questions, as well as Apple and Google, to inform our reporting. We also contacted the European Commission to ask about its own tracking of the DMA’s impact in this area — but it declined to share any data.

Neither Apple nor Google responded to questions asking about any changes in regional usage of their own browsers since the choice screens began being shown to mobile users.

Opting for choice screens

The EU’s goal for the DMA is to boost competition against internet “gatekeepers” whose control of dominant platforms gives them many operational advantages over smaller rivals. The regulation does this through a list of “dos and don’ts” that tech giants must comply with. In the case of browsers, it obliges the likes of iOS maker Apple and Google’s Android to display browser choice screens — forcing them to point users to alternatives to Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome.

Choice screens are intended to work against platform dominance and self-serving defaults by alerting consumers there are other options. But users do still need to decide to switch to an alternative app in order for choice screens to boost competition. The design of screens is also important.

Some alternative browser makers remain concerned the design of choice screens isn’t where it needs to be. We suspect this is leading to reluctance by some underdogs to share data on early impact, especially as the EU is currently investigating Apple’s choice screen design for suspected noncompliance.

In other words, some browser makers may be playing a waiting game in the hopes of encouraging Commission enforcers to push for a stronger implementation. At the same time, some really small browser players may see more gains to be had from good old-fashioned publicity — for example, sending out a press release trumpeting early interest — as a tactic to raise their profile to try to drive more downloads through increased awareness.

Overall, it’s still very early. Many regional mobile users may not have even seen a choice screen appear on their handset yet. Google, for instance, says screens are being displayed on newly launched Android devices but for existing Android handsets it’s up to the makers of the devices to push out the choice screens to their users. So there isn’t a clear implementation timeline on Android.

While in the case of iOS, Apple says it’s been displaying choice screens to users of iOS since iOS 17.4. But users who haven’t updated to this version also won’t have seen any yet.

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, told us it estimates that less than a fifth of iOS users have been shown a choice screen so far. It reckons even fewer Android users have seen one in the wild as yet.

With this patchy Android rollout picture in mind, it seems likely that more iOS users will have seen choice screens than Android users so far — even though Google’s platform has a larger regional market share.

Measuring the impact of the DMA on alternative browsers’ market share is further complicated by variations in the apps that mobile users see in different EU countries. Some alternatives, such as Firefox, can appear on the iOS choice screen in every EU market. Whereas others are far more limited: Vivaldi, for example, can only appear in eight countries. So exposure to potential users can vary substantially depending on the browser. (Apple lists the options it’s currently showing in each market here.)

Alt browsers on the up?

Aloha, a browser that focuses on privacy and claims not to track users, told us it’s seen 250% growth in new users (i.e., app downloads) since the DMA came into effect last month. It reports having approximately 10 million active monthly users globally — and estimates that around 1 million of those are located in the EU. So it remains a very small player.

However, since Aloha says it does not collect any personal data, including location data, it told us it cannot be precise about where its users are located. Yet it told Reuters the EU had moved up from being its fourth largest market to its second largest since the DMA compliance deadline kicked in.

Aloha also claimed to have seen an uptick in users in the U.S. since the DMA came into effect — yet the regulation does not apply in the U.S. market so U.S. users aren’t encountering it via browser choice screens. Aloha told TechCrunch it believes privacy awareness is rising generally, but also suggested growth in new installs in the EU may be helping to raise its position in the U.S. App Store.

Norway-based Opera, meanwhile, is also claiming market share gains since the DMA started to bite on March 7. Per new metrics shared with TechCrunch Wednesday, Opera said new user growth from February to the end of March was 63% — so it’s reporting a substantial uptick in people downloading Opera and giving it a try.

It is also reporting a 39% growth in users on iOS selecting its browser as their default specifically, from March 3 until April 4.

Previously (as of March 18), Opera reported 164% growth in the inflow of new EU users on iOS after the deadline for Apple to implement the DMA-enforced choice screen. So there actually appears to have been a drop in the growth rate it’s seen over this period — that is, after a bigger initial spike of interest.

Regardless, Opera is sounding very happy with the extra level of interest it’s seeing. In a statement, Jørgen Arnesen, its EVP of mobile, said the DMA “is working to even the playing field,” adding: “We’re excited to see that it has become easier for users to express their browser choice and for that choice to be respected.”

Another browser maker with a positive experience since DMA compliance day is Vivaldi, which is also developed out of Norway.

It told TechCrunch it’s seen an increase of 36.7% in downloads in the EU (in total) since the iOS choice screen came into effect. But the boost in downloads is even bigger when you look at the eight markets where Vivaldi is actually being shown on iOS choice screens. In those markets it said downloads have increased 69.6% since the choice screen started being pushed at users.

Despite this uptick in downloads, Vivaldi is unhappy with the current design of Apple’s choice screen.

“There are significant flaws with its implementation, including when it is shown and what is shown,” a company spokesperson told us. “Users can only see the choice screen when they click Safari. The list of browsers does not show additional information and that does not help users to make a meaningful choice. If the user has already selected a browser of their own choice, the choice screen can actively try to push them away from it, and may not even include it in the list that it presents to the user.”

“We think the priority should be given to cross-platform browsers, so that the same browser can be used on all of the user’s devices,” she added. “Apple looks at it very narrowly, per platform and country. We believe the main browser choices should be visible and we are not. And we should be on the list for all countries.”

We also heard positive things from Brave. The U.S.-based privacy-focused browser said it’s seen “a significant uptick” in installs since the DMA came into effect. (Although it does not report users per region so declined to break out total usage figures for the EU.)

“The daily installs for Brave on iOS in the EU went from around 7,500 to 11,000 with the new browser panel this past March,” per a company spokesperson. “In the past few days, we have seen a new all time high spike of 14,000 daily installs, nearly doubling our pre-choice screen numbers.”

“Regarding retention, users who are choosing Brave from the DMA screen are being retained equally to or better than our average,” she added, arguing that, overall, the uptick in interest it’s seeing “confirms that users want choice.”

On the flip side, three other alternative browsers that we contacted — DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Firefox — suggested it’s too early to tell whether the DMA is helping them.

Veteran privacy-focused browser maker DuckDuckGo declined to share any data, saying it’s too soon to draw meaningful conclusions.

“While we’ve seen some positive signs, the choice screen rollout is ongoing and for a competitor like us that sees billions of searches and millions of downloads a month, we need more time to make an accurate impact assessment at scale,” it said in a statement.

DuckDuckGo also told us it lacks access to “key information” to be able to assess the DMA’s impact, saying, for example, that it has no way of knowing how many people have seen a search engine or browser choice screen.

“This is key because it would help us understand our selection rate on a choice screen and how widespread the rollout has been,” it noted, adding: “We’re at the beginning of this journey, not the end.”

Another alt player, the not-for-profit, tree-planting and eco-action focused Ecosia, also told us it doesn’t have enough data to make an accurate assessment of the regulation’s impact. “We have not received selection rates or any other meaningful datasets, so it is hard for us to solidly report on the effectiveness of the choice screen at this stage,” said Sophie Dembinski, its head of public policy and climate action.

She emphasized Ecosia isn’t happy with the current iOS choice screen, which it believes is hampering potential growth — also pointing to the Commission’s open case investigating Apple’s implementation.

“While Ecosia has jumped to second and third position in some European markets for utility apps in the Apple App Store, our search numbers have barely changed,” she said. “This is due to several design issues within Apple’s choice screen — such as showing the choice screen to users who have already selected an alternative choice to Safari; an overly complex installation process which loses a large number of users; and keeping the Safari browser app in the best position on the home screen.”

Another veteran browser player, Firefox, is also keeping its powder dry when it comes to assessing early impact.

“We are not currently sharing absolute numbers, both because we have some serious concerns about the current choice screens and because we estimate that less than 20% of users on iOS and likely less on Google have been exposed to them thus far,” said Mozilla’s Kush Amlani, global competition and regulatory counsel.

“The DMA represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create competition and choice for EU consumers. Whether that potential is realized depends on the gatekeepers’ compliance and the European Commission’s enforcement,” he emphasized, also referencing the Commission’s probes into suspected gatekeeper non-compliance.

“While we’re seeing many thousands of people select Firefox on the choice screens, we don’t think this should distract from the fact that the iOS choice screen has significant flaws that block people from making genuine choices,” Amlani added. “The critical challenge is that powerful and deep-pocketed gatekeepers are incentivized to protect their existing closed ecosystems and fight the implementation of the DMA, which will open them up to competition.”

TechCrunch’s outreach to browser makers that may benefit from the DMA choice screens also yielded one report of no meaningful impact since the requirement kicked in: Yandex, a Russia-based browser that can appear on the iOS choice screen anywhere in the EU, told us it hasn’t seen “any meaningful changes in the user metrics in the region so far.”

In Yandex’s case, its possible disinterest in switching could be linked to consumer concerns about using or supporting software that’s developed in Russia in light of the Ukraine war.

Apple, Google and Meta face first formal investigations under EU’s DMA

Europe’s DMA rules for Big Tech explained


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The AltStore, an alternative app store coming to the EU, will offer Patreon-backed apps | TechCrunch

April 12, 2024 3:45 PM0


Apple’s chokehold on the App Store ecosystem for iPhone apps stifles competition, according to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), so it’s now forcing the tech giant to open up to new rivals. As a result, we’re beginning to see what an app store ecosystem could look like when other developers are allowed to compete with the default iPhone App Store.

One notable case in point is the AltStore, an alternative app store that’s preparing to take advantage of the DMA to launch an updated version of its app marketplace in the EU, with plans to support Patreon-backed apps.

To comply with the new European law, Apple is introducing APIs and frameworks that allow developers to distribute apps independently of the App Store. The AltStore was quick to capitalize on this possibility, and last week, AltStore developer Riley Testut shared screenshots of the up-and-coming version of his app store that will be offered in the EU.

Instead of relying only on ads, paid downloads or in-app purchases to monetize, the AltStore will allow developers to use its custom Patreon integration to market their apps directly to consumers.

 

Post by @rileytestut
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The store — which has offered sideloading apps like the video game emulator Delta, also from Testut — will initially launch in the EU with just two apps, the developer says. Delta will be available for free and the AltStore’s own clipboard manager Clip will require a pledge of $1 or more on the crowdfunding platform Patreon. The AltStore plans to add the beta versions of both Delta and Clip soon after, which will require a $3 per month Patreon pledge to use.

This unique business model for monetizing apps is similar in some ways to Apple’s in-app subscriptions but comes without the traditional 15% to 30% commission on sales that the tech giant currently takes. With Apple’s DMA rules, alternative app stores can opt to pay €0.50 for each first annual install per year over a 1 million threshold — a new scheme to tap into the revenue of larger apps, which Apple calls its Core Technology Fee. (Whether Apple’s fee will remain is uncertain, as the EU is investigating the tech giant for non-compliance with its competition law.)

As Testut explains, after the AltStore launches and is working properly, the plan is to then allow other developers to also distribute their apps through the storefront by establishing their own sources.

“They’ll also be able to use the same Patreon integration we use to distribute ‘paid’ apps,” Testut told TechCrunch. This integration will create a new business model for apps that wouldn’t be permitted without the DMA coming into effect.

“One thing @altstore does that should really get you thinking about alternative payment systems that Apple never would have considered: it has Patreon integration, and can tie access to apps to your Patreon pledge — which gives you an entirely different, personal relationship with your users, and lets you use the same reward system you use for videos, blog posts, merch, etc,” wrote iOS developer Steve Troughton-Smith in a post on Mastodon. “Alternative app stores don’t just have to recreate Apple’s model,” he added.

Plus, he pointed out how the AltStore will provide users with a “granular view” of the entitlements — or extra permissions — that an app has, before you install it.

Beyond offering developers a new way to make money, Testus claims that the EU version of the AltStore will be “dramatically simpler” to use compared with the current version.

Today, users who want to sideload apps via the AltStore without jailbreaking their iPhone have to use a Mac or PC, provide the AltStore with their Apple ID and password, and then refresh the apps every seven days. That process not only raises security concerns, but is also complex. However, the EU version of AltStore won’t require these steps.

“It all works virtually the same as the App Store now,” Testut says.

In the screenshots he shared, the AltStore looks much like a modern-day app store, with categories like Games, Lifestyle and Utilities, as well as buttons to download its free apps, as on Apple’s App Store. However, the user interface will be slightly different, as Apple requires developers to insert an additional confirmation screen after the user clicks to install an app. This screen warns consumers that updates and purchases will be managed by the AltStore, as opposed to Apple.

Testut also notes that the AltStore apps have to be notarized by Apple in order to be installed, so it won’t be able to install just any sideloaded app available as an .ipa file.

The new AltStore is ready to launch now, but Testut says he’s waiting on final approval from Apple.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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