Amazon buys MX Player

Manish Singh, reporting for Techcrunch:

The two firms reached a definitive agreement for the deal on Wednesday evening, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The deal values MX Player at less than $100 million, far short of the $500 million valuation at which the streamer raised its last capital, the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the companies are yet to publicly comment on the deal, told TechCrunch.

Amazon is acquiring some assets of MX Player, but not the entire firm, which also counts Tencent among its backers.

MX Player has some of the most obscure web-series content that I’ve seen, but also has some good hits like Ek thi Begum, Aani Kay Hava, Pandu, Indori Ishq, etc. From what I’ve seen, MX Player is much more popular in the semi-urban and rural towns than in the metros, so I can see why Amazon was interested in the deal.

June 6, 2024 ✚ Permalink

Facebook's Banned App Snooped on 156,000 Indian Users

Zack Whittaker, reports for TechCrunch how Facebook, through its banned Research app, was able to obtain the personal and sensitive device data of about 187,000 users.

He writes:

The social media giant said in a letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s office — which TechCrunch obtained — that it collected data on 31,000 users in the U.S., including 4,300 teenagers. The rest of the collected data came from users in India.

Read that carefully. Of the 187,000 users that Facebook snooped data from, (only) 31,000 were from the U.S. The rest of the users were from India, which makes it about 156,000 users. According to the letter obtained by TechCrunch, a whopping 34,000 users were between the ages of 13 and 17, of which 4,300 were from the US, which means close to a whopping 30,000 users from India whose data Facebook was snoop ing on were underage.

These “research” apps relied on willing participants to download the app from outside the app store and use the Apple-issued developer certificates to install the apps. Then, the apps would install a root network certificate, allowing the app to collect all the data out of the device — like web browsing histories, encrypted messages and mobile app activity — potentially also including data from their friends — for competitive analysis.

The fact that Facebook collected data from over 1.5 Lakh Indian users, of which close to 30,000 users were between 13 and 17 years of age, is truly mind-boggling.

June 13, 2019 ✚ Permalink

'Sign In with Apple' FAQ Published by TechCrunch

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch, has published a detailed set of answers about Apple’s upcoming ‘Sign In with Apple’ feature on iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS and to an extent, Android and the web.

The ‘Sign In with Apple’ feature is one of the most exciting announcements to come out of WWDC ’19 for me, and I’m really looking forward to its release. However, I do have a few concerns, all of which still remain unanswered.

  • What happens to your account when you sign out of iCloud and Sign In with another Apple ID?
  • What happens when you want to use a developer’s app on multiple devices that don’t use the same Apple ID?
  • Will Apple allow you to choose/specify a custom email address that is separate from the Apple ID to receive marketing emails from the developers?

I believe that SIWA is a phenomenal new feature and I see a majority of developers adopt this feature for their apps. I just hope that SIWA doesn’t end up being the only Sign In option in apps going forward.

June 12, 2019 ✚ Permalink