Mobile Phone

  A new app called Fabric aims to make it simpler for parents to plan for their family’s long-term financial well-being. The goal is to offer parents a one-stop-shop that includes the ability to ability for term life insurance from their phone, create a free will in about five minutes, …

  PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash. The acquisition, which is PayPal’s largest to date, will give the payments giant a foothold earlier in the customer’s shopping journey. Instead of …

Facebook’s NPE Team, a division inside the social networking giant that will build experimental consumer-facing social apps, has now added a third app to its lineup with the launch of meme creation app Whale. Currently, the app allows users to decorate photos with text and stickers in order to create …

  Twitter’s radical “Hide Replies” feature, one of the biggest changes to how Twitter works since the invention of the Retweet, is now available to Twitter’s global user base. The company says the feature will roll out to all Twitter users across platforms by today, with only one slight tweak …

  Verizon was the first US carrier to make a big push into 5G network technology. Its rival ATT has had 5G almost as long, but customers still can’t buy 5G devices on ATT’s network. Verizon, meanwhile, is loading its lineup with as many 5G phones as possible. Now, you …

At Microsoft’s Ignite conference this month, the company announced a new vision for its personal productivity assistant, Cortana — one which aimed to make it more useful in your day-to-day work, including email, but one which also saw Microsoft scaling its ambitions back from Cortana as a true Siri, Alexa …

  Google Maps will soon begin testing a new feature that’s more common to social networks like Facebook, rather than a maps app: the ability to find and follow other users. In Google Maps’ case, it’s specifically rolling out the ability to follow top “Local Guides” — its community members …

  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. What are developers talking about? What do app publishers and marketers need to know? How are politics impacting the App …

  The age of foldable phones is upon us, whether you like it or not. Just a few days after Motorola unveiled its revived foldable Razr, Huawei has finally launched its first foldable phone, the Mate X. However, it’s only on sale in China without Google apps. Any plans to …

  Google has decided to deploy the Rich Communication Services (RCS) protocol on its own after waiting for years for carriers in the US to do so instead. While SMS has been a phenomenally successful message protocol, it dates to the mid-1980s. RCS is intended to be a replacement, but …