Tink, the European banking platform, partners with British incumbent NatWest

It’s easy to push a narrative of fintech upstarts versus the big incumbent banks, but the more subtle reality is that as well as competing on numerous fronts, there are partnerships being formed across the board. The latest such move sees Tink, the Sweden-based banking platform that raised €56 million in new funding in February, partner with British bank NatWest.

The agreement gives NatWest access to Tink’s Personal Finance Management (PFM) and “Data Enrichment” products, which will be integrated into NatWest’s core mobile banking app. This will allow NatWest to improve its mobile banking offering by giving NatWest customers personalised insights into their finances based on transaction history. The features built with Tink’s technology are planned to go live in Q4 2019.

The bigger picture is that by partnering with Tink, NatWest is aiming to meet increased customer expectations with regards to digital financial services. Undoubtedly, a plethora of fintech startups and challenger banks have raised the UX and feature bar significantly in the U.K. and right across Europe, not least via high quality mobile apps and better use of data, while incumbent banks have been scrambling to catch up.

“Historically banks have tried to build everything themselves, but we are now seeing a big shift where they want to partner with the best to propel development, quickly launch new features and stay competitive,” Tink co-founder and CEO Daniel Kjellén tells me.

“Today more and more banks choose to leverage the external building blocks that’s available to them and add in-house uniqueness on top of that. We’ve seen the same development when it comes to hosting – banks are now choosing cloud-based solutions such as AWS instead of on-premise solutions”.

To that end, although originally launched in Sweden in 2013 as a consumer-facing finance app with bank account aggregation at its heart, Tink has since repositioned its offering to provide the same underlying technology and more to banks and other financial service providers.

Through various APIs, Tink provides four pillars of technology: “Account Aggregation,” “Payment Initiation,” “Personal Finance Management” and “Data Enrichment.” These can be used by third parties to roll their own standalone apps or integrated into existing banking applications.

Along with NatWest, Tink has partnerships with a number of other banks including Klarna, BNP Paribas Fortis, ABN AMRO, SEB and Nordea.

Meanwhile, PFM (personal finance management) functionality in some form or another can now be found in numerous banking apps and fintech chatbots, and I put it to Kjellén that a PFM feature is now a commodity. He pushes back.

“It’s true that customer’s expectations on digital banking services are increasing and incentivising the incumbents to develop their PFM tools at a more rapid pace than before,” he says. “But the future where PFM is completely data-driven and where product recommendations, advice and decisions can be put on autopilot is still very far from a commodity”.

“The most advanced players are now building products that… take their PFM apps from being read-only to data-driven and actionable. It’s this combination of functionalities that will be game-changing for the industry”.

Heetch raises $38M to take on Uber in French-speaking countries

With Uber just days away from going public, a small challenger has raised some funds of its own to take it and the rest of the field on in francophone markets. Heetch, a ride-sharing platform based out of Paris with operations across France and French-speaking Africa, has picked up a Series B of $38 million, at a valuation that we understand to be around $150 million.

Very small potatoes compared to the $90 billion value some have ascribed to its much larger competitor. But the list of Heetch’s investors — a combination of strategic and financial players — speaks to both the untapped opportunity that investors (and founders) think still exists in the wider market, and the fact that many believe that Uber doesn’t address everything and everyone, and there remains room for more companies to approach the need to transport people in different ways. (Indeed, others like Gett, which this week announced a $200 million round, also capitalising on these gaps.)

The round is being led by Cathay Innovation and Total Ventures (the investment arm of the oil and energy giant), with participation from existing shareholders Idinvest Partners, Innov’Allianz, Alven, Felix Capital, and Via-ID, and it brings the total raised to around $70 million (following from previous rounds of $12 million in 2017 and $20 million in 2018). The funding will be used to bring Heetch to more markets — today it is in France, Belgium, Morocco and the Ivory Coast, and the plan is to expand Algeria, Cameroon and Senegal later this year — as well as to continue hiring, particularly engineers in Paris.

It helps, too, that Heetch has had its share of interest from acquirers over the years, including — our sources tell us — an approach from one of the world’s biggest ridesharing platforms. (It was rebuffed on the low price offered.)

Heetch was started in 2013 by Teddy Pellerin and Jacob Matthieu to fill what it saw as a clear gap in the market in Paris: providing rides to 20-somethings back to the outskirts and suburbs of Paris after late nights out in clubs in town — a market that was not being served by other taxi companies, nor by public transport.

As Pellerin, who is now the CEO, describes it, Heetch took a casual approach to solving this casual passenger problem: the idea was to make the service truly peer-to-peer, by bringing on drivers that were the same age and just like the people that were being driven (they might have been coming home from the same clubs).

The idea caught on virally with its user base — would you expect anything less of a service aimed at millennials? But, alas, not with the regulators, who shut down the service for not using licensed drivers.

Ironically, it was just then that Heetch got approached to be acquired, and also was picking up its earliest funding from Felix.

“We took a different approach when we backed them,” said Antoine Nussenbaum, who led the deal for Felix. “We were making a strong statement: we believe that in service categories that feel commoditised, you can build a specific community and experience, and that has been more than proven to date with Heetch.”

In fallow mode, the company rebuilt itself with a refocus on working with professional drivers, but while also trying to keep some of the ethos that made it stand out from others like Uber and the other big player in the market in France, the Daimler-majority-owned Chauffeur Prive (which earlier this year rebranded to Kapten). By continuing to serve younger users; driving to parts of the wider metro area that others would not; by taking a smaller cut from the drivers in order to incentivise them to drive with Heetch over others; and by taking a “nice guy” approach to the business.

“We are more like Lyft,” Pellerin said. “We have a friendly service, with good interactions between riders and drivers. We are also better at servicing younger users because we are a bit cheaper.”

And it added a twist: it saw a chance to export its model to other francophone markets where public and private transportation infrastructure were not overly developed, and its app could be minimally adjusted to work. These days, Pellerin said that while Paris is still Heetch’s biggest market, its second-largest today is Casablanca in Morocco (and Brussels in Belgium is third).

Ironically for a company that got its start by clearly violating local regulations, one notable aspect of how Heetch is growing is that today it’s adjusting its model to tailor it to the regulatory and other requirements in each country, which might include working with professional drivers, or even painting cars a specific color in order to operate a livery service.

Interestingly, there is another way that the company is different from Uber (which racked up $1 billion in losses last quarter): it’s close to becoming profitable, Pellerin noted, in the four markets where it is active today.

“We are very proud to join forces with Heetch and its talented team. We are convinced of Heetch’s potential and believe in its development strategy in Europe and Africa, a region we monitor closely. Millions of Africans will be able to benefit from Heetch’s services. This investment fits perfectly with our investment thesis around mobility and complements our global portfolio in the space which includes Drivy-Getaround, Momenta, Glovo, and OnTruck,” said Jacky Abitbol, Partner at Cathay Innovation, in a statement.

Educational gaming platform Kahoot acquires math app maker DragonBox for $18M

Kahoot, the popular e-learning platform that provides a range of games to teach subjects (it has described itself as the “Netflix of education”), has made its first acquisition: it has acquired DragonBox, a startup that builds math apps, for $18 million in a combination of cash and shares.

Åsmund Furuseth, Kahoot’s CEO and co-founder, said in an interview that the deal was being done at an uptick to Kahoot’s previous valuation of $376 millon; the bigger company is now creeping up to $400 million.

It’s a relatively strong exit for DragonBox, which had raised less than $500,000 since 2012 primarily from going through incubators and accelerators, according to PitchBook.

The plan will be to bring DragonBox — which, like Kahoot, has roots in Norway — on wholesale to continue growing DragonBox’s existing business, as well as to supplement Kahoot’s offering. Today the smaller startup already has millions of users in Europe, including schools that use it to teach K-12 math curriculum subjects, but alongside that it will also to start to develop more educational content for the main Kahoot platform.

That Kahoot platform up to now has grown organically through a combination of both Kahoot-created, and user-created content (users can build their own games on Kahoot); as well as through serving two markets: K-12 users, and enterprise customers for corporate training. Furuseth sees DragonBox as supplementing the first of these, specifically by helping it expand into more parent-led and home learning that supplements what children might be getting in classrooms.

That’s an area where Kahoot already has a sizeable business. Furuseth said that of the 1 billion plays that its platform saw in 2018, 700 million came from K-12 classrooms, 30 million came from enterprises, and the rest — around 270 million — came from people using Kahoot at home, playing around 100 million games. That speaks to an opportunity to build more content to serve that third sector, which is where DragonBox will fit.

“Since day one, DragonBox has made learning math more fun and engaging for children around the world. Together with Kahoot!, we will enable millions of more users to enjoy learning math in an awesome way,” said Jean-Baptiste Huynh, math teacher, CEO and co-founder of DragonBox.

Furuseth added that the company is also looking at making further acquisitions to continue growing Kahoot alongside its own organic growth, tapping into the fact that there are dozens of smaller startups in the world of education that will be challenged to scale up on their own. (Not the small number of enterprise users in the mix today: my guess is that’s an area where the company may try to grow through more bolt-on businesses.)

“In general, it’s hard for many small and even successful ed-tech companies to reach a large mass of users because it’s difficult to cut through the noise,” Furuseth said in an interview. “We think our brand can help by reaching out with more learning experiences now and in the future.”

Under Furuseth as CEO, the company has been trying to tap into that also by way of a new accelerator that it launched last year called Ignite, which it sees partly as a way to help grow those businesses, as well as a way to find promising startups that it might worth with or acquire itself.

Sharp will resume selling its smart TVs in the US this year

Good news for U.S. consumers, the smart TV market is about to get more competitive after Sharp announced plans to resume selling TVs in America before the end of this year.

The Japanese firm quit the U.S. in 2015 when crumbling finances threatened its very existence. It was bailed out by Hon Hai Precision — the Taiwanese manufacturing firm better known as Foxconn — in a $3.5 billion deal that attracted controversy inside Japan, where a home-backed agreement had been preferred by many. Still, under new management, it is seeking expansion to continue its rebound.

Sharp sold its license to China’s Hisense when it exited, and this week it said that it has struck a deal to regain it, although the terms have not been disclosed.

That relationship is certainly frosty: Sharp sued the Chinese firm, which is state-owned, alleging that it had put Sharp’s badge on sub-quality products. The suit was dropped at the beginning of last year. Sharp said at the time that it intended to return to the North American market itself, and now it has the deal it required.

Sources told Reuters that the firm may also be considering other markets in the Americas beyond the U.S, Hisense also acquired its rights for that region, but the U.S. market is obviously the headline expansion.

For now, Sharp said it will bring TVs to market that combine 5G, AIoT — a buzzy acronym that stands for ‘artificial intelligence of things’ — and 8K/4K picture quality. We’ll have to wait for more on what the exact product line-up will look like.

Disney reports strong second-quarter, but takes $353 million write-down on Vice

Walt Disney Co. is writing down its investment in Vice Media for the second time in less than a year. In its otherwise upbeat second-quarter earnings report, the company said it was taking an impairment of $353 million for Vice.

This follows the $157 million write-down Disney disclosed during its fourth-quarter earnings report in November. Vice Media was valued at about $5.7 billion post-money in June 2017 and raised a total of $1.4 billion in funding, including $500 million from Disney in 2015. Last week, however, the Wall Street Journal reported that the media company had taken $250 million in debt financing from investors led by George Soros as it tries to find a way to reverse its slowed growth and stalling traffic.

Disney owns 21% of Vice, in addition to smaller stakes through 21st Century Fox, which it acquired in March, and A&E Networks, a joint venture between Heart Corporation and Disney-ABC Television, one of its subsidiaries.

The Vice write-down was a low point in an otherwise strong quarter for Disney. The company reported a 3% increase in revenue to $14.9 billion and earnings per share of $1.61, beating analysts’ expectations. It also announced three new “Star Wars” films will be released starting in December 2022, along with a roster of other upcoming titles that includes “Cruella” and the “Avatar” sequels.

TechCrunch has contacted Vice Media for comment.

In a statement to Business Insider, a Vice spokesperson said it is “on target to meet, if it not exceed, its financial targets for the third straight quarter,” adding that “our new executive team’s strategic plan is well underway and with the recent capital rise, we will continue investing in the long-term growth of our five global businesses—television, studio, digital, news and our advertising agency, Virtue.”

‘Weird Cuts’ is Google’s new AR experiment that lets you cut out pieces of reality to make collages

In addition to preserving art and historic landmarks around the world, Google’s Arts & Culture division also likes to collaborate with artists to experiment with integrations between technology and art. The latest of these efforts, a new AR app called “Weird Cuts,” was formally introduced this evening at the Google I/O developer conference. The concept for the app was created by artists Zach Lieberman and Molmol Kuo, and was developed with the support of Google Arts & Culture. And it’s definitely an odd (but also fun) tool for playing around with augmented reality — without having any sort of real intention in mind beyond “making weird AR collages.”

Experiments like this, though seemingly lighthearted, are important in terms of getting a better understanding of a new technology, and how people want to interact with it. Today, many AR apps are built for specific purposes — like placing furniture in a room to see how it goes with your existing décor, or getting up-and-close with something you normally couldn’t otherwise — like the great, white shark shown in AR during yesterday’s Google I/O keynote.

Weird Cuts, meanwhile, doesn’t have any higher aim beyond just having fun and being creative.

The app consists of two modes — a cutout mode and a collage mode.

The idea is that you should walk around and collect a bunch of different materials from the world in front of your camera’s viewfinder while in the cutout mode. These images are cut into shapes that you then assemble when you switch to collage mode. To do so, you’ll arrange your cutouts in the 3D space by moving and tapping on the phone’s screen.

You can also adjust the shapes while holding down your finger and moving up, down, left and right — for example, if you want to rotate and scale your “weird cuts” collage shapes.

The end result is a sort of multi-dimensional work of “art” (or perhaps, bit of nonsense, depending on your skill level) created with the found objects and your own improvisational efforts.

The new app, which is published by the artists but credits Google Arts & Culture, is a free download on Google Play.

Pearl, the healthcare spinout from LA-based AI startup, GumGum, raises $11 million

GumGum, the Los Angeles-based startup that’s spent the past decade applying machine learning technologies to advertising and sports, has spun out a new healthcare startup focused on the dental industry called Pearl.

The company has raised $11 million in financing from undisclosed strategic investors and Craft Ventures, the investment firm set up by former Yammer founder, David Sacks.

GumGum’s co-founder, Ophir Tanz, stepped down from the adtech giant to run the new startup last month, while GumGum’s president and chief operating officer, Phil Schraeder took the reins as chief executive at GumGum.

“This idea was seeded within GumGum,” says Tanz. “I started the process of collecting dental x-rays over three years ago.”

GumGum’s strategy has been to build out a holding company of computer vision driven businesses, Tanz says. Both its portfolio of services for advertising and for sports franchises have become profitable on their own, and the opportunity in healthcare was too tempting of a target to pass up.

For Tanz, the decision to set up Pearl as a separate business was necessary for the new company to be able to focus on a huge opportunity to transform a portion of the healthcare industry that has remained largely untouched by machine learning applications.

It’s also a space that’s ripe for technology to come in and give a more clear-eyed assessment of patient health than the industry standard currently provides.

“We are isolated from the larger health-care system. So when evidence-based policies are being made, dentistry is often left out of the equation,” Jane Gillette, a dentist in Bozeman, Montana, who works closely with the American Dental Association’s Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry, told “The Atlantic” recently. “We’re kind of behind the times, but increasingly we are trying to move the needle forward.”

Pearl may be one way to move that needle.

It’s also a return to the family business, for Tanz, whose father worked as a dentist for decades.

“The thing with dentistry is that it’s always somehow the forgotten medicine, but it’s such a massive market opportunity,” says Tanz. 

Machine learning in the dental business can achieve four main objectives, says Tanz. It can reduce fraud for insurers, validate the performance of dentists in networks that are being created through the consolidation of small practices by large private equity firms, and automate workflows inside the dental office.

Imagine having diagnostics tools integrated with medical devices through software that can be distributed and updated remotely, giving practitioners the best quality information. That’s the goal for Pearl, Tanz says.

Eventually, the company will look to expand to other verticals within healthcare, but for now, the new money is focused on building out its toolkit for teeth.

“We’ll expand beyond dental eventually,” says Tanz. “We’re going to be focused on dentistry and the dental category and the laboratory for quite a while.”

The company is coming to market with three products: “Second Opinion”, which scans x-rays and identifies pathologies and anatomy to ensure a proper diagnosis; “Practice Intelligence”, which delivers advanced analytics for dental practices and groups to deal with patients more effectively; and “Smart Margin”, which provides feedback on intraoral scans for dental restoration and manufacturers.

“Pearl will have an immediate positive impact on the dental category,” said Tanz, “It will streamline tedious, repetitive tasks, enhance profitability across dentistry, and, most importantly, it will improve the standard of care by validating diagnoses, removing large elements of uncertainty from the dental equation.”

Google to allow users to pay for Android apps using cash

Today, the Android platform sees more app downloads than iOS, but Apple’s App Store continually dominates in terms of revenue. Now, Google is aiming to narrow the revenue gap by introducing a new way for users in emerging markets to pay for apps: with cash. The company today announced it’s launching “pending transactions,” which offers users different ways to pay that don’t require a credit card or any other traditional form of online payment.

Lack of access to credit is one of many reasons why users in emerging markets gravitate towards free-to-play and ad-supported games and applications, instead of paid downloads and in-app purchases.

To address this problem, Google has already rolled out other payment options over the years — like support for eWallets, UPI in India, and carrier billing, for example. Over the past year, it’s added 20 more carrier billing partnerships, bringing the total number of carriers supporting this option to over 170 worldwide, to reaching over a billion users through this one billing option.

But carrier billing isn’t a universal option, and it’s not always a preferred one.

To reach those users who rely more on cash, Google is now rolling out another payment option.

“We know that emerging markets are a key area of growth for you all, which is why we’re excited to announce ‘pending transactions,'” said Aurash Mahbod, the Director of Engineering responsible for the Play Store and Games on Google Play, speaking at the Google I/O Developer conference today.

“This is a new class of delayed form of payment – like cash, bank transfer and direct debit,” he explained.

The option gives an Android user the ability to choose an alternative payment method at checkout when paying for an application or in-app purchase. Instead of charging an attached credit card, for instance, the user can instead opt to receive a payment code which they can use to pay for their purchase using cash at a nearby store.

Once at the store, the user shows the payment code to the cashier and pays. Within 10 minutes after completing the transaction, the user will receive their purchase and an email with their proof of payment. (The fine print notes this can take up to 48 hours, at times, however).

While this makes paying for apps and updates easier for cash-only Android users, if they later want a refund, they won’t get cash back — only Play Store credit.

 

The Pending Transactions option is one of several updates arriving in the new Google Play Billing Library (version 2.0), but is the most interesting in terms of what it means for increasing the number of paid transactions in emerging markets.

Another notable update is the option, “Subscribe & Install”, which offers users a free trial subscription at the same time they install the app — all in one click of a button.

This feature is currently available in Early Access, and partners who have used the option are seeing an average of 34% growth in paid subscribers, Google said.

The Google Play Billing Library 2.0 — now the official way to integrate apps with Google Play Billing —  is available now in Java, with C++ and Kotlin support coming soon.

More information about the new options will be posted to the Android Developers site here.

Execs at Mobike, the bike sharing startup, are raising $20M to buy out the European business by end of June

Some big changes are afoot for Mobike, the Chinese bike-sharing company that was acquired by IPO-bound on-demand service startup Meituan-Dianping for $2.7 billion last year. Mobike executives in Europe are raising $20 million from outside investors as part of a plan to spin off the European operation. Under the deal, Mobike would not completely divest from the spun-out division: it would retain a 49 percent share.

It had previously been reported that the company is in the process of spinning off its European operations as part of a wider retreat from global operations. Our sources have confirmed that the outside investment and spinoff would value the European portion of the business at between $80 million and $100 million.

A source close to the company also tells us that the deal is expected to close by the end of June. The plan is for Paul Zhu, currently European regional general manager for Mobike, to become CEO of the new EU Mobike.

Mobike has operations in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands, but it is not clear how many users it currently has in the region, or indeed globally. As it has shuttered operations in some cities in the region — most recently in Newcastle in the north of England — Mobike is also slowly rolling out services elsewhere — for example, this week in Padua, Italy.

Steve Milton, a UK spokesperson for Mobike, declined to comment for this article.

Bike-sharing startups, in which people use apps to find, ‘unlock’ and pay for bike rentals, were hailed as the next hot area for on-demand transportation for urban dwellers, following on from the fast growth of car-based services like Uber and Lyft (and more recently followed by scooters and e-bikes). Dozens of bike startups were collectively pumped up with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding as they ramped up their inventories to compete against each other.

It turned out to be a bubble in the making. In the worst-case scenarios, hundreds of basic, bright bikes filling city streets led to vandalization and clutter. In the best-case scenarios, some of the biggest startups, like Mobike, Jump and Motivate, eventually were acquired — in their respective cases to Meituan, Uber and Lyft. Still, among those and others like Ofo that remained independent, there have been wobbles, and others that appeared to have crashed out altogether.

Yet as e-hailing companies continue to diversify and expand into multi-modal transportation, there will be more acquisitions.

We understand that Careem, the Dubai-based transportation startup that itself is getting acquired by Uber for $3.1 billion, is buying a bike-sharing startup focused on the Middle East region (which means contenders could include Nextbike, Cyacle, and Byky). The deal is expected to close in coming days and may likely come into its own when a bike deal Careem announced at the end of April with the Dubai transport authority takes shape.

Meituan, which is now publicly traded and is valued at around $42 billion, more recently said it would rebrand Mobike to Meituan Bike, which will not only bring it closer to the parent company, but further distance it from Mobike’s earlier aggressive expansion and some of the bad reputation it picked up along the way.

Its international footprint isn’t the only thing that’s been slashed. Hongji Bike — co-founded by the original co-founder of Mobike — said it had picked up a number of engineers from the company to ramp up its efforts to build bikes, scooters and other personal vehicles for a variety of on-demand transportation startups. (Its customers include Lime, which ordered 40,000 scooters from it last year, the company said this week.)

What Pixel 3a tells us about the state of the smartphone — and Google

Announced yesterday at Google’s opening I/O keynote, the Pixel 3a arrives at a tenuous time for the smartphone industry. Sales figures have stagnated for most of the major players in the industry — a phenomenon from which Google certainly isn’t immune.

CEO Sundar Pichai discussed exactly that on the company’s Q1 earnings call last week. “While the first quarter results reflect pressure in the premium smartphone industry,” he explained, “we are pleased with the ongoing momentum of Assistant-enabled Home devices, particularly the Home Hub and Mini devices, and look forward to our May 7 announcement at I/O from our hardware team.”

That last bit was a clear reference to the arrival of the new budget tier of Google’s flagship offering. The 3a is a clear push to address one of the biggest drivers of slowing smartphone sales. With a starting price of $399, it’s a fraction of the price of top handsets from competitors like Apple and Samsung.

There’s been a fairly rapid creep in flagship prices in recent years. Handsets starting at north of $1,000 hardly warrant a second glance anymore, while many forthcoming foldables are hovering around double that.

As Google VP of Product Management Mario Queiroz told me ahead of launch, “The smartphone market has started to flatten. We think one of the reasons is because, you know, the premium segment of the market is a very large segment, but premium phones have gotten more and more expensive, you know, three, four years ago, you could buy a premium phone for $500.”

Inflated prices have certainly made device purchases more burdensome for buyers. That, coupled with a relative lack of compelling new features has gone a ways toward slowing down upgrade cycles, hurting sales in the process.

I’ve enjoyed my early hands-on time with the 3a — more to come on that later. It’s important to note the different factors that have allowed Google to get to this stage. A key driver is, of course, Google’s purchase of massive R&D resources from HTC. That result of HTC’s dip into sub-replacement level hardware manufacturer has resulted in the ability to develop hardware in house, on the relatively cheap at a new campus in Taipei.

Also important is Google’s ongoing quest to further uncouple the importance of hardware from smartphone upgrades. The company’s big investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence particularly are driving many of the innovations best demonstrated on the imaging side of things. Devin captured this sentiment in this piece written in the wake of the iPhone XS announcement.

Notably, the Pixel 3a has essentially the same camera hardware as the pricier 3. Google cut some corners here, but that wasn’t one. There are still and will continue to be some limitations to what the 3a is able to do, based on processing power, but the line between what the two devices can do is already pretty blurry when it comes to taking photos.

There’s another factor that’s been looming over Pixel sales in all of this — but for several reasons, Pichai wasn’t ready to discuss it on the call. For years, the line has been hampered by carrier exclusivity, something that feels like it ought to be relegated to the smartphone past.

Certainly that sort of arrangement makes sense for young companies like OnePlus or Palm, which are looking for a way into a market, while seeking to maintain manageable growth. But Google certainly has the resources to grow outside of a single carrier deal. And the fact of the matter (as Huawei has discovered the hard way) is that carrier distribution and contracts as still key drivers of smartphone distribution here in the States, even as most manufacturers also offer unlocked devices. I suspect those upfront costs are enough to make many consumers do a double take — even though we all know in our hearts the contract is ultimately where they get you.

Thankfully, Google announced that it will be making the Pixel 3 and 3a available on a lot more carriers, starting this week. That move ought to have a marked impact on the Pixel’s sales figures going forward. The addition of Sprint and T-Mobile among others means a lot more retail shelf space and ad dollars across the U.S. Devices are a harder sell when your average consumer has to go out of their way to find them — not to mention the difficulty of convincing users to switch carriers for a new device.

I’d caution against using Q2 results as a direct measure of the 3a’s appeal and Google’s move toward a six-month device release cycle. At this early stage it’s too early to uncouple that from new customers who are coming on board courtesy of those carrier additions. Even so, the device is an interesting litmus test for the current state of the smartphone, right down to the return of the headphone jack.