Oja bags $3.4M to build an online supermarket for ethnic products

As investors continue to pour billions into super speedy on-demand grocery delivery — trying to dislodge the dominance of traditional supermarket giants via a hyper convenience lever (whipping up some local opposition to their 24/7 dark stores and delivery methods in the process) — other entrepreneurs are spotting opportunities to slow things down a little. […]

Instagram’s creator subscriptions nearing launch, App Store listing reveals

Instagram earlier this year said it would explore the idea of creator subscriptions and was later spotted developing a feature that would offer exclusive Stories that were only visible to a creator’s subscriptions. Now, it seems, the company is poised to launch creator subscriptions into broader testing. According to two third-party app intelligence services, Instagram […]

Apple says App Store won’t close to developers over holidays, as in previous years

Apple says it won’t be closing down the App Store to developer submissions over the holidays, as it has in previous years. The policy change will be welcomed by developers who often fear that they’ll be blocked from being able to issue emergency bug fixes or other critical updates during one of the busiest seasons […]

Disney+ is launching a special IMAX format for 13 Marvel movies

Disney+ is bringing IMAX’s Expanded Aspect Ratio across 13 Marvel movies on its platform on November 12. The new format means that viewers will see smaller black bars in certain scenes. The company says IMAX’s Expanded Aspect Ratio is 1:90:1 and offers up to 26% more picture for select sequences. It’s also closer to the […]

Twitter is rolling out a feature to make it easier to search a user’s tweets

Some Twitter users on iOS are starting to get access to a feature that makes it easy to search an individual user’s tweets. For those with access, when you navigate to a user’s profile, you’ll see a search icon in the top right corner of the screen on the user’s profile banner, next to the […]

Zepto, a 10-minute grocery delivery app in India, raises $60 million

Two 19-year-old entrepreneurs, who previously collaborated on a number of projects including a ride-hailing commute app for school kids and left Stanford last year to pursue a new startup, said on Sunday they have raised $60 million to disrupt India’s overcrowded and highly-competitive grocery delivery market. Glade Brook Capital led Zepto’s first institutional financing round, […]

This Week in Apps: SharePlay arrives, Android Dev Summit wraps, Snap and TikTok go to Congress

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. […]