Tag: Apps

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Subscription service for Mac apps Setapp extends to teams

Setapp, the Spotify of Mac apps, is launching a new subscription plan specifically designed for teams. It is currently available as a public beta. As a reminder, Setapp lets you download and use 160 apps for a flat subscription fee. You don’t need to pay for major updates and there’s no in-app purchase.

Anybody can sign up to a Setapp account for $9.99 per month, or $8.99 per month with annual subscriptions. There are also family plans for three users and five Macs for $19.99 per month.

As the name suggests, Setapp for teams is a new offering specifically designed for companies. It costs $8.99 per user per month. You’ll find the same app library whether you have an individual Setapp account or a business account.

The new offering makes it easier to manage software licenses. There’s a unified billing and administration panel that lets you add and remove users over time.

Apps include Ulysses, PDFpen, ForkLift, Mindnode, iStat Menus, etc. It has become a sort of mini Mac App Store without any paid download. Every time you need a new app to achieve a specific task, you can open Setapp and search the app library to see if there’s an app that can do that for you.

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Arweave’s Permaweb blockchain can host sites & apps forever

What if you could pay now to store something online permanently? You could preserve a website against censorship, save legal contracts, or offer an app even after your company fails. That’s the promise of Arweave‘s Permaweb.

The startup has built a new type of blockchain that relies on Moore’s Law-style declining data storage costs. Users pay a few hundred dollars upfront (about half a cent per megabyte), and the interest accrued by the excess payment will perpetually cover the costs of shrinking storage prices.

The Permaweb quietly launched last June. Over 100 permanent apps have been built on Arweave’s infrastructure including an email client in the last six months, while 50,000 objects were stored on the Permaweb in October alone. As long as some node operators keep hosting the data on unused hard drive space, they keep getting paid, and the sites, apps, or files remain available. Instead of needing some special blockchain browser to access what’s stored, the Permaweb can be accessed through traditional web browsers and URLs.

Arweave founder Sam Williams

The potential of the Permaweb has attracted $5 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Crypto, and joined by other top blockchain investors Union Square Ventures and Multicoin Capital who’ve exchanged the cash for tokens from Arweave. Those tokens, and the rest Arweave is sitting on, could become increasingly valuable if the Permaweb becomes popular.

“Arweave’s mission is to become the new Library of Alexandria” Arweave founder Sam Williams writes, “but invulnerable to the pitfalls of centralised points of failure, ensuring that humanity’s shared knowledge and history is available to all future generations.”

Filling Orwell’s Memory Hole

The idea spawned from a slew of PhDs dropouts trying to address the fake news problem. They figured if sites or articles could be stored permanently in their original form, they couldn’t be changed or eradicated by a future despot.

The team discovered blockchains could handle this at small scale. But to decentralize large amounts of data, they developed a special kind of blockchain where miners are rewarded for storing a random old block from the chain, not just the most recent one. That meant the more of the total blocks they stored, the more they’d stand to earn.

After going through TechStars Berlin and recruiting some of their accelerator-mates, Arweave launched the Permaweb mid last year. Those who want to store something download a free Chrome, Firefox, or Brave browser extension, fund their wallet, and make a one-time payment. For example, here’s a permanently hosted forum that won’t disappear like many online communities have over the years.

While pricier than alternatives like AWS in the short-term, the Permaweb could theoretically keep files alive forever. Williams says that data storage costs have declined around 30% per year for a while, but the decentralized network would still be able to cover costs as long as that rate doesn’t fall lower than 0.5%. “If we dropped below 0.5% storage cost decline, then really, really bad things will have happened to humans.” And even then, today’s payments would cover 200 years of storage.

Another benefit is that users of applications can choose to use the original version of a Perma app instead of an updated one. That way if a developer polluted later versions with ads or privacy invasions, users could rely on the old one.

An important concern is that the Permaweb could be used to enable piracy. But Williams tells me the majority of node operators have to vote to approve hosting a file, so they could refuse copyrighted music or revenge porn. And anyways, torrenting is a free and so likely more appealing to pirates. We’ll see if other players try to crash into the market with a similar concept and trigger a perma pricing war.

Arweave likens itself to an Uber for storage, matching users needing to save files with those with excess storage capacity. But it acts as if there’s no middleman like Uber taking a cut. Instead the startup will sell tokens as necessary to stay funded until the network is sufficiently decentralized and runs itself.

“A lot of crypto projects are long on white papers but short on code. Arweave was the opposite” says Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger. His fund tried out the Permaweb by storing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ongoing measurements of carbon dioxide — something climate change deniers might want to suppress.

The goal was always to stop misinformation. Williams concludes “We think that we’re closing what Orwell called the memory hole so people can’t change what was said, so everyone can see it that way in the future without the possibility of redaction or censorship.”

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Arweave’s Permaweb blockchain can host sites & apps forever

What if you could pay now to store something online permanently? You could preserve a website against censorship, save legal contracts, or offer an app even after your company fails. That’s the promise of Arweave‘s Permaweb.

The startup has built a new type of blockchain that relies on Moore’s Law-style declining data storage costs. Users pay a few hundred dollars upfront (about half a cent per megabyte), and the interest accrued by the excess payment will perpetually cover the costs of shrinking storage prices.

The Permaweb quietly launched last June. Over 100 permanent apps have been built on Arweave’s infrastructure including an email client in the last six months, while 50,000 objects were stored on the Permaweb in October alone. As long as some node operators keep hosting the data on unused hard drive space, they keep getting paid, and the sites, apps, or files remain available. Instead of needing some special blockchain browser to access what’s stored, the Permaweb can be accessed through traditional web browsers and URLs.

Arweave founder Sam Williams

The potential of the Permaweb has attracted $5 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Crypto, and joined by other top blockchain investors Union Square Ventures and Multicoin Capital who’ve exchanged the cash for tokens from Arweave. Those tokens, and the rest Arweave is sitting on, could become increasingly valuable if the Permaweb becomes popular.

“Arweave’s mission is to become the new Library of Alexandria” Arweave founder Sam Williams writes, “but invulnerable to the pitfalls of centralised points of failure, ensuring that humanity’s shared knowledge and history is available to all future generations.”

Filling Orwell’s Memory Hole

The idea spawned from a slew of PhDs dropouts trying to address the fake news problem. They figured if sites or articles could be stored permanently in their original form, they couldn’t be changed or eradicated by a future despot.

The team discovered blockchains could handle this at small scale. But to decentralize large amounts of data, they developed a special kind of blockchain where miners are rewarded for storing a random old block from the chain, not just the most recent one. That meant the more of the total blocks they stored, the more they’d stand to earn.

After going through TechStars Berlin and recruiting some of their accelerator-mates, Arweave launched the Permaweb mid last year. Those who want to store something download a free Chrome, Firefox, or Brave browser extension, fund their wallet, and make a one-time payment. For example, here’s a permanently hosted forum that won’t disappear like many online communities have over the years.

While pricier than alternatives like AWS in the short-term, the Permaweb could theoretically keep files alive forever. Williams says that data storage costs have declined around 30% per year for a while, but the decentralized network would still be able to cover costs as long as that rate doesn’t fall lower than 0.5%. “If we dropped below 0.5% storage cost decline, then really, really bad things will have happened to humans.” And even then, today’s payments would cover 200 years of storage.

Another benefit is that users of applications can choose to use the original version of a Perma app instead of an updated one. That way if a developer polluted later versions with ads or privacy invasions, users could rely on the old one.

An important concern is that the Permaweb could be used to enable piracy. But Williams tells me the majority of node operators have to vote to approve hosting a file, so they could refuse copyrighted music or revenge porn. And anyways, torrenting is a free and so likely more appealing to pirates. We’ll see if other players try to crash into the market with a similar concept and trigger a perma pricing war.

Arweave likens itself to an Uber for storage, matching users needing to save files with those with excess storage capacity. But it acts as if there’s no middleman like Uber taking a cut. Instead the startup will sell tokens as necessary to stay funded until the network is sufficiently decentralized and runs itself.

“A lot of crypto projects are long on white papers but short on code. Arweave was the opposite” says Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger. His fund tried out the Permaweb by storing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ongoing measurements of carbon dioxide — something climate change deniers might want to suppress.

The goal was always to stop misinformation. Williams concludes “We think that we’re closing what Orwell called the memory hole so people can’t change what was said, so everyone can see it that way in the future without the possibility of redaction or censorship.”

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Huawei calls hackers to Munich for secret bug bounty meeting

Chinese tech giant Huawei has asked some of the world’s best phone hackers to a secret meeting in Munich later this month as the company tries to curry favor with global governments, TechCrunch has learned.

Sources with knowledge of the November 16 meeting said Huawei will privately present its new bug bounty program, which would allow researchers to get financial rewards for submitting security vulnerabilities. The sources said the bug bounty will be focused on past and future mobile devices, as well as its new mobile operating system, HarmonyOS, Huawei’s Android competitor.

Other phone makers, including Apple, Google, and Samsung, also have bug bounties.

The move comes at a time of increased pressure on Huawei over its links to the Chinese government. Huawei has denied U.S.-led claims that it could be forced to spy on behalf of Beijing. But that hasn’t stopped the federal government from imposing sanctions and obstacles from operating in the United States. That pressure has led companies like Google from pulling its support for Android, which Huawei relies on for its phones, prompting the tech giant to find or build alternatives.

One source described the event as similar to a secret meeting hosted by Apple in August, in which the tech giant handed its most prized security researchers special “dev” iPhones to hack and find security weaknesses.

The source said that Huawei’s bug bounty meeting was likely a way to show governments that it’s willing to work with hackers and security researchers to bolster the security of its products.

Huawei, which also makes networking equipment for telecom networks, came under fire by U.K. authorities earlier this year for failing to address “serious and systematic defects” in its software at a time it’s trying to prove it’s technologies are do not pose a national security threat.

Chase Skinner, a spokesperson for Huawei, did not respond to a request for comment.

FCC proposes rules requiring telcos remove Huawei, ZTE equipment

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Pigeon, a ‘Waze for public transit’ from Google’s Area 120, expands across the U.S.

Crowdsourced transit app Pigeon, developed within Google’s Area 120 lab for experimental projects, is today rolling out to five new cities across the U.S., in addition to New York — including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Unlike traditional transit apps that rely on schedules and updates from a local transit authority, Pigeon takes more of a Waze-like approach where commuters help one another by reporting delays, crowds, and other issues.

The result is a transit app that can better inform users about unexpected incidents, as well as real-time crowds and offer more context about delays. The app will also send out alerts to users about things like power outages or major service changes, in addition to personalized alerts sent before commuters leave their home or office so they can plan around the delays, reroutes or weather-related incidents.

While the app’s goal is to offer better transit information to riders, it’s also working to develop a community within Pigeon.

Similar to Waze where users establish profiles and communicate with friends, Pigeon offers a social component. Users can post not only about delays, but also other transit happenings with both comments and images. These reports are then shared along a rider’s route in an activity feed.

For example, users may post about dirty or unsafe conditions, crowds, or escalator outages, then share a photo along with that information. But some of the posts may be more positive — like those applauding a local entertainer or noting a cute dog.

If anything, Pigeon could encourage more of these kinds of social posts as its users, unlike on Waze, aren’t stuck behind the wheel and only able to quickly tap a button to share a report with the crowd.

However, even users who don’t want to contribute directly can benefit from the app’s push notifications about unexpected delays and incidents.

The app was developed internally at Google, through its in-house incubator Area 120, and launched to New York users in September 2018. (TechCrunch actually spotted it go live in May 2018, but Google wasn’t sharing much information at the time.)

Since then, Pigeon has helped its early adopters across hundreds of thousands of transit trips each month, the company says. It’s also releasing an NYC Subway Insights Report detailing some of those learnings — like which lines had the most rush-hour delays or most crowds, which station was reported to be the hottest in the summer, and more.

Google’s app isn’t alone in tackling public transit from a new angle. Startups like Transit, Moovit, Citymapper, and others are also participating in this space — sometimes with their own crowdsourced components.

Today, Pigeon is live on iOS in these half-dozen U.S. cities and supports transit information for subway, bus, rail, ferry and cable car.

Android users can sign up for the waitlist to be alerted as to when Pigeon becomes available.

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Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

Though the social media landscape is dominated by a few major players, consumers still seem to want something new and different. Just look at TikTok.

Today, a new social app is launching called Friended, which is taking an altogether different strategy when it comes to connecting people online. Friended was started by Thumb cofounder and CEO Dan Kurani, Friended wants to give users a deeper and more meaningful connection to one another, which the company believes they crave.

On Friended, users can post to the community about what they’re thinking or feeling. But rather than catalyze a ‘town hall’-style group conversation, members of the community can respond privately to that post, offering their insights, anecdotes, or advice.

The idea is to give people a chance to share how they really feel in a vulnerable, one-to-one setting. In playing around with the app, I had conversations with people about how to make friends in NYC and why it sometimes feel like others don’t care about us as much as we care about them.

Anyone can respond to a thread, and comments on threads can be liked by the poster or respondent, but from the moment a response comes through, that conversation is one-on-one and private.

“People feel more lonely now than ever before,” said Kurani. “Part of the blame is the social media algorithms that only promote people’s highlights for more ad impressions. It’s isolating to see everyone’s happy moments, and, then get silence when you share something vulnerable. But, it’s also just plain hard to open up and share your feelings because of the pressure to be perfect.”

Because Friended wants to be a place where you always have someone to talk to, the company has eliminated ads as a possible revenue stream. Instead, the company is working to implement a premium tier.

Right now, users can only post a conversation starter every eight hours. The premium tier, which costs $4.99/week, allows users to post as frequently as they want, and also includes a few other premium features like the ability to talk to people in your location.

Friended has raised a $500K seed round from investors such as Jonah Goodhart, Dr. Lara Otte, Jared Fliesler, and Bobby Goodlatte. Though the company won’t disclose monthly active user numbers, it did say that it has 500,000 registered users with an average of 11 sessions per day per active user during its beta. More than 2.5 million messages were sent last month.

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Gradeup raises $7M to expand its online exam preparation platform to smaller Indian cities and towns

Gradeup, an edtech startup in India that operates an exam preparation platform for undergraduate and postgraduate level courses, has raised $7 million from Times Internet as it looks to expand its business in the country.

Times Internet, a conglomerate in India, invested $7 million in Series A and $3 million in Seed financing rounds of the four-year-old Noida-based startup, it said. Times Internet is the only external investor in Gradeup, they said.

Gradeup started as a community for students to discuss their upcoming exams, and help one another with solving questions, said Shobhit Bhatnagar, cofounder and CEO of Gradeup, in an interview with TechCrunch.

While those functionalities continue to be available on the platform, Gradeup has expanded to offer online courses from teachers to help students prepare for exams in last one year, he said. These courses, depending on their complexity and duration, cost anywhere between Rs 5,000 ($70) and Rs 35,000 ($500).

“These are live lectures that are designed to replicate the offline experience,” he said. The startup offers dozens of courses and runs multiple sessions in English and Hindi languages. As many as 200 students tune into a class simultaneously, he said.

Students can interact with the teacher through a chatroom. Each class also has a “student success rate” team assigned to it that follows up with each student to check if they had any difficulties in learning any concept and take their feedback. These extra efforts have helped Gradeup see more than 50% of its students finish their courses — an industry best, Bhatnagar said.

Each year in India, more than 30 million students appear for competitive exams. A significant number of these students enroll themselves to tuitions and other offline coaching centers.

“India has over 200 million students that spend over $90 billion on different educational services. These have primarily been served offline, where the challenge is maintaining high quality while expanding access,” said Satyan Gajwani, Vice Chairman of Times Internet.

In recent years, a number of edtech startups have emerged in the country to cater to larger audiences and make access to courses cheaper. Byju’s, backed by Naspers and valued at over $5.5 billion, offers a wide-ranging self-learning courses. Vedantu, a Bangalore-based startup that raised $42 million in late August, offers a mix of recorded and live and interactive courses.

Co-founders of Noida-based edtech startup Gradeup

But still, only a fraction of students take online courses today. One of the roadblocks in their growth has been access to mobile data, which until recent years was fairly expensive in the country. But arrival of Reliance Jio has solved that issue, said Bhatnagar. The other is acceptance from students and more importantly, their parents. Watching a course online on a smartphone or desktop is still a new concept for many parents in the country, he said. But this, too, is beginning to change.

“The first wave of online solutions were built around on-demand video content, either free or paid. Today, the next wave is online live courses like Gradeup, with teacher-student interactivity, personalisation, and adaptive learning strategies, deliver high-quality solutions that scale, which is particularly valuable in semi-urban and rural markets,” said Times Internet’s Gajwani.

“These match or better the experience quality of offline education, while being more cost-effective. This trend will keep growing in India, where online live education will grow very quickly for test prep, reskilling, and professional learning,” he added.

Gradeup has amassed over 15 million registered students who have enrolled to live lectures. The startup plans to use the fresh capital to expand its academic team to 100 faculty members (from 50 currently) and 200 subject matters and reach more users in smaller cities and towns in India.

“Students even in smaller cities and towns are paying a hefty amount of fee and are unable to get access to high-quality teachers,” Bhatnagar said. “This is exactly the void we can fill.”

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CTO.ai’s developer shortcuts eliminate coding busywork

There’s too much hype about mythical “10X developers”. Everyone’s desperate to hire these ‘ninja rockstars’. In reality, it’s smarter to find ways of deleting annoying chores for the coders you already have. That’s where CTO.ai comes in.

Emerging from stealth today, CTO.ai lets developers build and borrow DevOps shortcuts. These automate long series of steps they usually have to do manually thanks to integrations with GitHub, AWS, Slack, and more. CTO.ai claims it can turn a days-long process like setting up a Kubernetes cluster into a 15-minute task even sales people can handle. The startup offers both a platform for engineering and sharing shortcuts, and a service where it can custom build shortcuts for big customers.

What’s remarkable about CTO.ai is that amidst a frothy funding environment, the 60-person team quietly bootstrapped its way to profitability over the past two years. Why take funding when revenue was up 400% in 18 months? But after a chance meeting aboard a plane connected its high school dropout founder Kyle Campbell with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, CTO.ai just raised a $7.5 million seed round led by Slack Fund and Tiger Global.

“Building tools that streamline software development is really expensive for companies, especially when they need their developers focused on building features and shipping to customers” Campbell tells me. The same way startups don’t build their own cloud infrastructure and just use AWS, or don’t build their own telecom APIs and just use Twilio, he wants CTO.ai to be the ‘easy button’ for developer tools.

Teaching Snakes To Eat Elephants

“I’ve been a software engineer since the age of 8” Campbell recalls. In skate-punk attire with a snapback hat, the young man meeting me in a San Francisco mission district cafe almost looked too chill to be a prolific coder. But that’s kind of the point. His startup makes being a developer more accessible.

After spending his 20s in software engineering groups in the Bay, Campbell started his own company Retsly that bridged developers to real estate listings. In 2014, it was acquired by property tech giant Zillow where he worked for a few years.

That’s when he discovered the difficulty of building dev tools inside companies with other priorities. “It’s the equivalent of a snake swallowing an elephant” he jokes. Yet given these tools determine how much time expensive engineers waste on tasks below their skill level, their absence can drag down big enterprises or keep startups from rising.

CTO.ai shrinks the elephant. For example, the busywork of creating a Kubernetes cluster such as having to the create EC2 instances, provision on those instances, and then provision a master node gets slimmed down to just running a shortcut. Campbell writes that “tedious tasks like running reports can be reduced from 1,000 steps down to 10″ through standardization of workflows that turn confusing code essays into simple fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions.

 

The CTO.ai platform offers a wide range of pre-made shortcuts that clients can piggyback on, or they can make and publish their own through a flexible JavaScript environment for the rest of their team or the whole community to use. Companies that need extra help can pay for its DevOps-As-A-Service and reliability offerings to get shortcuts made to solve their biggest problems while keeping everything running smoothly.

5(2X) = 10X

Campbell envisions a new way to create a 10X engineer that doesn’t depend on widely-mocked advice on how to spot and capture them like trophy animals. Instead, he believes 1 developer can make 5 others 2X more efficient by building them shortcuts. And it doesn’t require indulging bad workplace or collaboration habits.

With the new funding that also comes from Yaletown Partners, Pallasite Ventures, Panache Ventures and Jonathan Bixby, CTO.ai wants to build deeper integrations with Slack so developers can run more commands right from the messaging app. The less coding required for use, the broader the set of employees that can use the startup’s tools. CTO.ai may also build a self-service tier to augment its seats plus complexity model for enterprise pricing.

Now it’s time to ramp up community outreach to drive adoption. CTO.ai recently released a podcast which saw 15,000 downloads in its first 3 weeks, and it’s planning some conference appearances. It also sees virality through its shortcut author pages, which like GitHub profiles let developers show off their contributions and find their next gig.

One risk is that GitHub or another core developer infrastructure provider could try to barge directly into CTO.ai’s business. Google already has Cloud Composer while GitHub launched Actions last year. Campbell says its defense comes through neutrally integrating with everyone, thereby turning potential competitors into partners.

The funding firepower could help CTO.ai build a lead. With every company embracing software, employers battling to keep developers happy, and teams looking to get more of their staff working with code, the startup sits at the intersection of some lucrative trends of technological empowerment.

“I have 3-year-old at home and I think about what it will be like when he comes into creating things online” Campbell concludes. “We want to create an amazing future for software developers, introducing automation so they can focus on what makes them such an important aspect. Devs are defining society!”

[Image Credit: Disney/Pixar via WallHere Goodfon]

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Google Play’s U.S. Store adds a rewards program with points for purchases, downloads & more

Google Play is incentivizing app usage and more with the launch of a new rewards program, Googe Play Points, that will allow you to earn points for everything you do on the Google Play marketplace from downloading new apps to subscribing to services to buying movies, books, and more. Users can redeem the points earned in the program for things like in-app purchases of characters, gems and other items in apps like Candy Crush or Pokémon Go, for example. Play Points can also be turned into Google Play Credit then put towards renting a movie or buy an audiobook, Google says.

The program had launched in Japan and South Korea, in September 2018 and April 2019, respectively. But this the first time it’s arriving in the U.S.

It’s also been slightly tweaked in terms of point value and levels for its U.S. launch.

The new U.S. program has four levels — Bronze through Platinum. You move up as you earn more points. At the higher levels, you’ll also earn weekly prizes.

The point value begins at $1 USD for the Bronze level and goes up to $1 for 1.4 points at Platinum.

Special events may be hosted where you’ll have the opportunity to earn more points than usual. For example, for this kickoff week, everyone will earn 3x the usual Play Points on everything they buy.

In addition, users can donate their points to support a charitable cause, like Doctors Without Borders USA, Save the Children, or the World Food Program USA. These nonprofits will rotate over time.

A program like this gives Google more control over its marketplace, as it can turn the dials to boost engagement by offering rewards to its users. Participating apps benefit because it can drive customers to their app, where they’ll eventually spend more money over time.

Google is already familiar with how to incentivize users through gamification techniques — it rewards Local Guides for contributing to Google Maps, for example, with nothing more than badges a handful of small perks.

The same goes for Play Points — these rewards are relatively small in scale, but could create a much larger incentive, by comparison, to download, play, and purchase from Google Play.

Google Play Points will be available over the next week. The program is free to join and there’s no ongoing fee. To access Play Points, just go to the menu in the Play Store app and tap on “Play Points.”

 

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The Google News mobile app now supports bilingual users

Google News is going bilingual. The company announced this morning a new feature that will allow users to update their Google News settings to support two languages instead of one, in an effort to better serve the more than 60% of people worldwide who speak and read news across two more languages.

The change means you won’t have to constantly toggle between two languages in order to keep up with news that’s being covered elsewhere. This is particularly important for those who have moved to a different country, but want to keep up with their news from back home, as well as in places where it’s common for people to speak multiple languages.

Google cites the ability to read both English and Hindi news at the same time as a key example.

The update won’t impact your other personalization preferences, Google notes — it will just pull in more stories that match the topics and interests you care about.

The changes follow a larger revamp of the Google News product and destination website that’s been underway for over a year. At Google’s developer conference in 2018, the company announced its plans to leverage A.I. technology to help select which stories were shown first and how the news selection would be customized to each user, while not trapping them in so-called “filter bubbles” where they don’t have access to fact checks or the other side’s opinion.

That A.I.-powered version of the Google News app rolled out last spring. 

More recently, Google revamped the Google News tab on the desktop to organize articles in a card-style layout, which was meant to improve readability and better highlight the publisher sources.

Today’s new bilingual feature, however, is aimed at the Google News mobile app user base.

Google says the feature is available now across 141 countries and 41 languages on the Google News app for both iOS and Android. (On the desktop, you still have to pick just one language, we found.)

The company notes that being able to read news in other languages can also help people widen their perspective on issues.

“There’s still lots more to do to help connect people with quality and trustworthy news on the issues they care about, but we hope today’s update will make it easier to connect with different cultures and perspectives from the comfort of your device,” Google says.