This Week in Apps: Sneak peek at TikTok shopping, new iOS and Android betas, kids’ app Prodigy hit with FTC complaint
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020.
Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.
Triller Denies Inflating App User Count By Millions to the Public thewrap.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thewrap.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Triller’s top executive appears to have acknowledged the company s messy history with reporting how many users it has. According to the
Billboard, the music video app has “reported higher numbers of monthly active users to the public than it reports to rights holders.”
When pressed by
Billboard on the claims, the company didn’t deny it. Instead, CEO Mike Lu provided a statement that “there is no legal definition of MAU/DAU” and added that the company had stopped sharing user metrics altogether. “For example, if someone is trying to compare TikTok s MAU/DAU to ours which means they are saying we have the same definition of MAU/DAU there is an inherent misunderstanding about Triller s business and business model. It’s like trying to compare a fish and a bicycle,” Lu told the publication.
Triller app on a smartphone.
“There is no legal definition of MAU/DAU,” says Mike Lu, Triller CEO. “We are an open ecosystem … Triller s value is in monetizing users, not MAU or DAU.”
Short-form video app Triller has reported higher numbers of monthly active users to the public than it reports to rights holders, a source with direct knowledge of the situation tells
Billboard and Triller doesn’t deny it.
The Los Angeles-based company, expected to go public in coming weeks as part of a special purpose acquisition company, known as a SPAC, claimed in a press release it had over 26.5 million monthly active users in December 2019, but a source with direct knowledge says the company’s user base was around half of that in January 2020. In July 2020, Triller claimed in a press release it had hit 50 million monthly active users, noting it had grown 600% year-over-year.