This Week in Apps: App Store advertising expands, Google Play plans for safety, Epic v. Apple trial begins
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 continues to grow, 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.
What you need to know
Apple has apologized to the developer of an indigenous language app mistakenly removed from the App Store..
The Sm algyax Word app has now been restored.
Apple has apologized to the developer of an indigenous language app after mistakenly removing it from the App Store.
A free Indigenous language app developed by a first-year UBC student from Prince Rupert, B.C. is up and running again after Apple mistakenly accused the young developer of dishonest and fraudulent acts. One day I just got an email from Apple and it was all gone, Brendan Eshom said. All my hard work was gone that I had spent almost half a year on.