Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.The app industry saw a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s “State More

Facebook today unveiled Coronavirus Community Hub on Messenger that offers tips, authoritative information and other resources to help people stay connected and informed about the coronavirus outbreak, weeks after launching a similar information hub on WhatsApp, its other messaging service.The launch of the coronavirus hub on Messenger, used by more More

Ryoma Ito Contributor Ryoma Ito is co-founder of MakersPlace, a community empowering the world\'s digital creators. In prior roles, he co-founded a B2B e-commerce subscription business servicing 100k+ online merchants, was VP of Product at Specialdeals and was employee No. 1 at two venture-backed startups, one of which was acquired by Groupon. The More

Social media companies have been hard at work to make sure they play a helpful rather than harmful role in disseminating news and information about the coronavirus pandemic. Today, Twitter took an extra step beyond its own platform to put its efforts into the wider, already under-pressure world of journalism. More

Big tech has been making a huge effort to mobilize its power to help people work better together to battle the ongoing coronavirus pandemic — whether it’s creating search and information portals or making sure the most authoritative voices are surfacing above the noise, or gathering compute power to supercharge More

Coronavirus quarantines are hurting local businesses, but Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger wants to help them keep revenue rolling in. Krieger and his wife Kaitlyn this week launched SaveOurFaves, a directory of Bay Area restaurants selling gift certificates to offset lost income amidst ‘shelter in place’ orders across the More