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Strava raises $110 million, touts growth rate of 2 million new users per month in 2020
Activity and fitness tracking platform Strava has raised $110 million in new funding, in a Series F round led by TCV and Sequoia, and including participation by Dragoneer group, Madrone Capital Partners, Jackson Square Ventures and Go4it Capital. The funding will be used to propel the development of new features, and expand the company’s reach to cover even more users.
Already in 2020, Strava has seen significant growth. The company claims that it has added more than 2 million new “athletes” (how Strava refers to its users) per month in 2020. The company positions its activity tracking as focused on the community and networking aspects of the app and service, with features like virtual competitions and community goal-setting as representative of that approach.
Strava has 70 million members, according to the company, with presence in 195 countries globally. The company debuted a new Strava Metro service earlier this year, leveraging the data it collects from its users in an aggregated and anonymized way to provide city planners and transportation managers with valuable data about how people get around their cities and communities — all free for these governments and public agencies to use, once they’re approved for access by Strava.
The company’s uptick in new user adds in 2020 is likely due at least in part to COVID-19, which saw a general increase in the number of people pursuing outdoor activities, including cycling and running, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic when more aggressive lockdown measures were being put in place. As we see a likely return of many of those more aggressive measures due to surges in positive cases globally, gym closures could provoke even more interest in outdoor activity — though winter’s effect on that appetite among users in colder climates will be interesting to watch.
Strava’s app is available free on iOS and Android, with in-app purchases available for premium subscription features.
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Google takes aim at ‘beauty filters’ with design changes coming to Pixel phones
Google is taking aim at photo face filters and other “beautifying” techniques that mental health experts believe can warp a person’s self-confidence, particularly when they’re introduced to younger users. The company says it will now rely on expert guidance when applying design principles for photos filters used by the Android Camera app on Pixel smartphones. In the Pixel 4a, Google has already turned off face retouching by default, it says, and notes the interface will soon be updated to include what Google describes as “value-free” descriptive icons and labels for the app’s face retouching effects.
That means it won’t use language like “beauty filter” or imply, even in more subtle ways, that face retouching tools can make someone look better. These changes will also roll out to the Android Camera app in other Pixel smartphones through updates.
The changes, though perhaps unnoticed by the end user, can make a difference over time.
Google says that more than 70% of photos on Android are shot with the front-facing camera and over 24 billion photos have been labeled as “selfies” in Google Photos.
Image Credits: Google
But the images our smartphones are showing us are driving more people to be dissatisfied with their own appearance. According to the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, 72% of their members last year said their patients sought them out in order to improve their selfies, a 15% year-over-year increase. In addition, 80% of parents said they’re worried about filters’ impact and two-thirds of teens said they’ve been bullied over how they look in photos.
Google explains it sought the help of child and mental health experts to better understand the impact of filters on people’s well-being. It found that when people weren’t aware a photo filter had been applied, the resulting photos could negatively impact mental well-being as they quietly set a beauty standard that people would then compare themselves against over time.
Image Credits: Google
In addition, filters that use terminology like “beauty,” “beautification,” “enhancement” and “touch up” imply there’s something wrong with someone’s physical appearance that needs to be corrected. It suggests that the way they actually look is bad, Google explains. The same is true for terms like “slimming,” which imply a person’s body needs to be improved.
Google also found that even the icons used could contribute to the problem.
It’s often the case that face retouching filters will use “sparkling” design elements on the icon that switches the feature on. This suggests that using the filter is making your photo better.
To address this problem, Google will update to using value-neutral language for its filters, along with new icons.
Image Credits: Google
For example, instead of labeling a face retouching option as “natural,” it will relabel it to “subtle.” And instead of sparkling icons, it instead shows an icon of the face with an editing pen to indicate which button to push to enable the feature.
Adjustment levels will also follow new guidelines, and use either numbers and symbols or simple terms like “low” and “high,” rather than those that refer to beauty.
Image Credits: Google
Google says the Camera app, too, should also make it obvious when a filter has been enabled — both in the real-time capture and afterwards. For example, an indicator at the top of the screen could inform the user when a filter has been turned on, so users know their image is being edited.
In Pixel smartphones, starting with the Pixel 4a, when you use face retouching effects, you’ll be shown more information about how each setting is being applied and what specific changes it will make to the image. For instance, if you choose the “subtle” effect, it will explain that it adjusts your skin texture, under-eye tone and eye brightness. Being transparent about the effects applied can help to demystify the sometimes subtle tweaks that face retouching filters are making to our photos.
Face retouching will also be shut off in the new Pixel devices announced on Wednesday, including the Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5. And the changes to labels and descriptions are coming to Pixel phones through an upcoming update, Google says, which will support Pixel 2 and later devices.
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Google Cloud gets a premium support plan with 15-minute response times
Google Cloud today announced the launch of its premium support plans for enterprise and mission-critical needs. This new plan brings Google’s support offerings for the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in line with its premium G Suite support options.
“Premium Support has been designed to better meet the needs of our customers running modern cloud technology,” writes Google’s VP of Cloud Support, Atul Nanda. “And we’ve made investments to improve the customer experience, with an updated support model that is proactive, unified, centered around the customer, and flexible to meet the differing needs of their businesses.”
The premium plan, which Google will charge for based on your monthly GCP spent (with a minimum cost of what looks to be about $12,500 per month), promises a 15-minute response time for P1 cases. Those are situations when an application or infrastructure is unusable in production. Other features include training and new product reviews, as well as support for troubleshooting third-party systems.
Google stresses that the team that will answer a company’s calls will consist of “content-aware experts” that know your application stack and architecture. As with similar premium plans from other vendors, enterprises will have a Technical Account manager who works through these issues with them. Companies with global operations can opt to have (and pay for) technical account managers available during business hours in multiple regions.
The idea here, however, is also to give GCP users more proactive support, which will soon include a site reliability engineering engagement, for example, that is meant to help customers “design a wrapper of supportability around the Google Cloud customer projects that have the highest sensitivity to downtime.” The Support team will also work with customers to get them ready for special events like Black Friday or other peak events in their industry. Over time, the company plans to add more features and additional support plans.
As with virtually all of Google’s recent cloud moves, today’s announcement is part of the company’s efforts to get more enterprises to move to its cloud. Earlier this week, for example, it launched support for IBM’s Power Systems architecture, as well as new infrastructure solutions for retailers. In addition, it also acquired no-code service AppSheet.
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Google picks up Microsoft veteran, Javier Soltero, to head G Suite
Google has hired Microsoft’s former Cortana and Outlook VP, Javier Soltero, to head up its productivity and collaboration bundle, G Suite — which includes consumer and business tools such as Gmail, Hangouts, Drive, Google Docs and Sheets.
He tweeted the news yesterday, writing: “The opportunity to work with this team on products that have such a profound impact on the lives of people around the world is a real and rare privilege.”
Some news on the professional front… I’ve joined Google to lead the G Suite team! The opportunity to work with this team on products that have such a profound impact on the lives of people around the world is a real and rare privilege. I’m excited to get to work. pic.twitter.com/D0lMY81PXv
— Javier Soltero
(@jsoltero) October 21, 2019
Soltero joined Microsoft five years ago, after the company shelling out $200M to acquire his mobile email application, Acompli — staying until late last year.
His LinkedIn profile now lists him as vice president of G Suite, starting October 2019.
Soltero will report to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian — who replaced Dianne Green when she stepped down from the role last year — per a company email reported by CNBC.
Previously, Google’s Prabhakar Raghavan — now SVP for its Advertising and Commerce products — was in charge of the productivity bundle, as VP of Google Apps and Google Cloud. But Mountain View has created a dedicated VP role for G Suite. Presumably to woo Soltero into his next major industry move — and into competing directly with his former employer.
The move looks intended to dial up focus on the Office giant, in response to Microsoft’s ongoing push to shift users from single purchase versions of flagship productivity products to subscription-based cloud versions, like Office 365.
This summer Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced that its cloud business unit had an $8 billion annual revenue run rate, up from $4BN reported in early 2018, though still lagging Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
He added that Google planned to triple the size of its cloud sales force over the next few years.
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Google announces Action Blocks, a new accessibility tool for creating mobile shortcuts
Google today announced Action Blocks, a new accessibility tool that allows you to create shortcuts for common multi-step tasks with the help of the Google Assistant. In that respect, Action Blocks isn’t all that different from Shortcuts on iOS, for example, but Google is specifically looking at this as an accessibility feature for people with cognitive disabilities.
“If you’ve booked a rideshare using your phone recently, you’ve probably had to go through several steps: unlock your phone, find the right app, navigate through its screens, select appropriate options, and enter your address into the input box,” writes Google accessibility software engineer Ajit Narayanan. “At each step, the app assumes that you’re able to read and write, find things by trial-and-error, remember your selections, and focus for a sustained period of time.”
Google’s own research shows that 80% of people with severe cognitive disabilities, like advanced dementia, autism or Down syndrome, don’t use smartphones, in part because of these barriers.
Action Blocks are essentially a sequence of commands for the Google Assistant, so everything the Assistant can do can be scripted using this new tool, no matter whether that’s starting a call or playing a TV show. Once the Action Block is set up, you can create a shortcut with a custom image on your phone’s home screen.
For now, the only way to get access to Action Blocks is to join Google’s trusted tester program. It’s unclear when this will roll out to a wider audience. When it does, though, I’m sure a variety of users will want to use of this feature.
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Downloads needed to rank No. 1 on App Store is down 30+% since 2016 for apps, up 47% for games
With the App Store’s big makeover in fall 2017, Apple attempted to shift consumers’ attention away from the Top Charts and more toward editorial content. But app developers still want to make it to the No. 1 position. According to new research from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower, it’s become easier for non-game apps over the past few years to achieve the top ranking.
Specifically, the firm found that the median number of daily downloads required for non-game applications on the U.S. iPhone App Store to reach No. 1 decreased around 34%, from 136,000 to 90,000 in 2018, then increased a little more than 4% to 94,000 this year.
At the same time, the number of non-game installs on the U.S. App Store had increased by 33% between Q1 2016 and Q1 2019.
These findings, Sensor Tower suggests, indicate that the U.S. market for the top social and messaging apps has become saturated, with downloads for top apps like Facebook and Messenger decreasing over time. In addition, no other apps have found the same level of success that Snapchat and Bitmoji did back in 2016 and 2017, the report adds.
For example, Messenger saw 5 million U.S. App Store installs in November 2016 while Bitmoji and Snapchat passed 5 million installs in August 2016 and March 2017, respectively. And no other non-game app has topped 3.5 million installs in a single month since March 2017.
Meanwhile, the decline in downloads needed to reach the No. 1 spot on Google Play was even more significant.
The median daily downloads for the top non-game app decreased by 65%, from 209,000 in 2016 to 74,000 so far in 2019.
Similarly, the store saw a decrease in installs among top apps, including Messenger, Facebook, Snapchat, Pandora and Instagram. Messenger, for example, saw its yearly installs fall by 68% from nearly 80 million in 2016 to 26 million in 2018.
Games
With mobile games, however, it’s a different story across both app stores.
On the Apple App Store, it has taken 174,000 downloads for a game to reach the top of the rankings on any given day in 2019 — 85% more the 94,000 installs required for non-game app to reach the top of the charts.
This figure also represents an increase of 47% compared to the 118,000 median daily downloads required to top the charts back in 2016, Sensor Tower said.
In part, this trend is due to the rise of hyper-casual gaming. So far in 2019, 28 games have reached the No. 1 position on the U.S. App Store, with hyper-casual games making up all but four of those. And of those four, only Harry Potter: Wizards Unite spent more than one day at the top of the charts. Meanwhile, hyper-casual games like aquapark.io and Colorbump 3D have spent 25 and 30 days at No. 1, respectively.
On Google Play, the median daily installs to reach the No. 1 position increased from 70,000 in 2017 to 116,000 so far in 2019, or 66% growth. Overall game downloads, however, decreased 16% from 646 million in Q1 2017 to 544 million in Q1 2019.
Similarly, 21 out of the 23 games that reached the top spot this year have been hyper-casual titles, like Words Story or Traffic Run.
Breaking the top 10
While topping the charts has gotten easier for non-game apps over the years, breaking into the top 10 has gotten more difficult. Median U.S. daily installs for the No. 10 free non-game app increased 11%, from 44,000 in 2016 to 49,000 in 2019.
On Google Play, median daily installs for non-game apps fell nearly 50%, from 55,000 median daily installs in 2016 to 31,000 in 2019.
For games, the No. 10 game’s spot on the App Store increased from 25,000 median daily installs in 2016 to 43,000 so far in 2019, and Google Play saw 26% growth, from 27,000 to 34,000 during the same period.
Categories making the Top 10
In terms of breaking into the top 10 by category, Photo & Video apps on the App Store present the most challenge. The category where YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat reside saw a median daily amount of more than 16,000 downloads for the No. 10 app.
This was followed by Shopping (15,300 daily downloads for the No. 10 app), Social Networking (14,500), Entertainment (12,600) and Productivity (12,400).
On Google Play, Entertainment apps — like Hulu, Netflix and Bitmoji — need around 17,100 U.S. installs in a day to reach the top 10. This is followed by Shopping (10,800), Social (9,100), Music (8,200) and Finance (8,000).
Beyond the U.S.
Outside the U.S., a non-game app needs approximately 91,000 downloads to reach the top 10 on the App Store in China — higher than the 49,000 installs needed in the U.S. For games, the U.S. is the most difficult to crack the top 10, with a median of 43,000 daily downloads for the No. 10 game.
On Google Play, India required the most downloads to reach the top 10, with apps needing 256,000 downloads in a day and games needing 117,000 downloads.
Of course, the App Store’s ranking algorithms — nor Google Play’s algorithms — don’t rely on downloads alone to determine an app’s ranking. Apple takes into consideration downloads and velocity, among other undocumented factors. Google Play does something similar.
But these days, developers are more concerned with showing up highly ranked in app store searches than they are on top charts, where they’ll need to consider numerous other factors beyond downloads — like keywords, description, user engagement and even app quality, among other things.
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Google Fit comes to iOS
Google today announced that Google Fit, the company’s fitness tracking app that launched on Android back in 2014, is now available on iOS.
It definitely took Google a while to bring the app to iOS. Until today, the only way to get your Fit data on your iPhone was in a special section of the Wear OS app on the iPhone. Without a Wear OS device, though, that section would’ve been empty.
If you’ve seen the Fit app on Android, then the iOS version will look very familiar. It features the same focus on Move Minutes and Heart Point, as well as the ability to pick up different activities based on your movement. You can also connect the app with apps connected to Apple Health like Sleep Cycle, Nike Run Club or Headspace can also sync with Google Fit.
Indeed, as a Google spokesperson told me, all of the movement data in the app also comes from Apple’s Health app — or from a Wear OS smartwatch, though few iOS users have opted to cross streams and use a Wear OS watch with their iPhones.
Since Apple Health already tracks your movement data, I’m not sure all that many iOS users will make the switch to Google Fit. It’s still good to see Google bring its service to this competing platform for those who maybe use multiple devices
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Apple’s iOS will now confirm you meant to subscribe to that app
Apple has added another step to prevent users from accidentally signing up for an iOS app’s subscription — or, from being tricked into it by a scammy app not playing by the rules. The company recently rolled out a subscription confirmation dialog box that pops up as one final step to ensure you meant to opt in to the subscription being offered.
The change to iOS was first spotted by app developer David Barnard on Twitter and reported by Apple news site 9to5Mac.
Whoa! Apple added an additional confirmation step for subscriptions. This new alert comes after you confirm with Touch ID/Face ID. I hope they address this in a more elegant way in iOS 13, but I’m thrilled Apple took a definitive step to curb scam subscriptions.
@pschiller pic.twitter.com/oktaEVdx0o
— David Barnard (@drbarnard) April 11, 2019
The new confirmation box is a welcome addition, considering how many users were accidentally subscribing — particularly those with Touch ID-based phones who were trying to exit to the Home screen. Instead, they were giving the app permission to sign them up by placing their finger on the Home button, which triggered the Touch ID authentication process.
The update also arrives following several changes Apple has made to subscriptions in recent months to address problems around scammy subscriptions.
A good number of developers — especially those in the Utility category — were using sneaky tricks to tap into the subscription craze to bank thousands and even millions of dollars per year. Some apps would intentionally confuse users with their design, or make promises of “free trials” that converted in only a few days, or used other misleading tactics to get users to subscribe.
This left many consumers feeling they had been duped into paying, and a host of angry App Store reviews followed. The scams could have had a broader impact on the subscription economy, if Apple had allowed them to go unchecked, as consumers would have become wary of ever signing up for anything as a result.
That would have been a problem, given how subscriptions have become a big business for the App Store. According to one forecast, they are poised to grow to $75.7 billion by 2022, in fact.
However, Apple has since begun to crack down on bad actors, while also making subscriptions easier to manage by iOS users.
In January, it rolled out new developer guidelines to more clearly spell out what is and is not allowed; and in February it updated iOS to reduce the number of steps it took to get to your subscriptions, so you could more quickly and easily cancel them.
I decided to test Apple’s subscription confirmation on my iPhone 6S running iOS 10.3.3, and… I didn’t give Apple enough credit yesterday! The change was done server side, so it works on all iOS versions. It also cancels when you press the home button. Once again,
— David Barnard (@drbarnard) April 12, 2019
Now, the new dialog box will ensure that users understand they’re opting in to a paid subscription, with a message that reads:
“Confirm Subscription. The subscription will continue unless canceled in Settings at least one day before a subscription period ends.”
Apple didn’t formally announce the change, but it appears to have rolled out sometime in the last week, reports say.
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Gmail turns 15, gets Smart Compose improvements and email scheduling
Exactly 15 years ago, Google decided to confuse everybody by launching its long-awaited web-based email client on April 1. This definitely wasn’t a joke, though, and Gmail went on to become one of Google’s most successful products. Today, to celebrate its fifteenth birthday (and maybe make you forget about today’s final demise of Inbox and tomorrow’s shutdown of Google+), the Gmail team announced a couple of new and useful Gmail features, including improvements to Smart Compose and the ability to schedule emails to be sent in the future.
Smart Compose, which tries to autocomplete your emails as you type them, will now be able to adapt to the way you write the greetings in your emails. If you prefer “Hey” over “Hi,” then Smart Compose will learn that. If you often fret over which subject to use for your emails, then there’s some relief here for you, too, because Smart Compose can now suggest a subject line based on the content of your email.
With this update, Smart Compose is now also available on all Android devices. Google says that it was previously only available on Pixel 3 devices, though I’ve been using it on my Pixel 2 for a while already, too. Support for iOS is coming soon.
In addition to this, Smart Compose is also coming to four new languages: Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.
That’s all very useful, but the feature that will likely get the most attention today is email scheduling. The idea here is as simple as the execution. The “Send” button now includes a drop-down menu that lets you schedule an email to be sent at a later time. Until now, you needed third-party services to do this, but now it’s directly integrated into Gmail.
Google is positioning the new feature as a digital wellness tool. “We understand that work can often carry over to non-business hours, but it’s important to be considerate of everyone’s downtime,” Jacob Bank, director of Product Management, G Suite, writes in today’s announcement. “We want to make it easier to respect everyone’s digital well-being, so we’re adding a new feature to Gmail that allows you to choose when an email should be sent.”
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Google will bring its Assistant to Android Messages
It’s only been a few weeks since Google brought the Assistant to Google Maps to help you reply to messages, play music and more. This feature first launched in English and will soon start rolling out to all Assistant phone languages. In addition, Google also today announced that the Assistant will come to Android Messages, the standard text messaging app on Google’s mobile operating system, in the coming months.
If you remember Allo, Google’s last failed messaging app, then a lot of this will sound familiar. For Allo, after all, Assistant support was one of the marquee features. The different, though, is that for the time being, Google is mostly using the Assistant as an additional layer of smarts in Messages while in Allo, you could have full conversations with a special Assistant bot.
In Messages, the Assistant will automatically pop up suggestion chips when you are having conversations with somebody about movies, restaurants and the weather. That’s a pretty limited feature set for now, though Google tells us that it plans to expand it over time.
What’s important here is that the suggestions are generated on your phone (and that may be why the machine learning model is limited, too, since it has to run locally). Google is clearly aware that people don’t want the company to get any information about their private text chats. Once you tap on one of the Assistant suggestions, though, Google obviously knows that you were talking about a specific topic, even though the content of the conversation itself is never sent to Google’s servers. The person you are chatting with will only see the additional information when you push it to them.
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