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- What's Appening: NFTs Hit the AppStore 🎟️ 💸
What's Appening: NFTs Hit the AppStore 🎟️ 💸
AppStore NFTs, Teams Live Language, Twitch Streaming Big, Coinbase Dev Platform
3Advance Team
September 27, 2022
News in apps delivered weekly to your inbox on 🌮 Tuesday.
NFTS ALLOWED IN APPSTORE WHILE APPLE CONTINUE TO TAKE EXTORTIONATE FEES
👀 TLDR:
In this week’s What’s Appening, we’re calling out Apple for their continued In-App Purchase Heist, but at least we’ll soon see more NFTs appear in native apps. Meanwhile, Microsoft Teams auto-translates languages, Twitch beats out YouTube (again) and Coinbase releases its web3 Developer Platform.
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Takes 🎬
👮♀️💰 Apple allows NFTs But Maintains 30% AppStore Fee on Transactions
We’re covering a familiar battle this week in What’s Appening, but this time with a twist of web3. As you probably know by now Apple takes a 30% cut on digital asset purchases made via the AppStore (or 15% on the first $1M of post-commission sales). Google Plays (see what we did there?) the same game, and it’s been driving app creators mad for years. Some of the biggest complaints have led to legal action, such as the Epic Games vs Apple saga, and there have been signs that things may change in the future. Changes are not coming quick enough though, and to date, many web3 upstarts have simply abandoned native apps and focused on HTML5 and responsive web apps. There has also been confusion as to whether Apple will even allow NFTs for sale within native apps. Over the last few weeks though there has been some movement. Apple has finally confirmed that NFTs will be allowed for sale, but the catch is not just the fee itself, but how it must be charged - in USD (or national currency) only, not in crypto. This introduces more challenges to the majority of the NFT ecosystem that trades in ETH. Some are however cheering on this clarity, for NFTs do not exist only to be sold. As Gabriel Leydon, founder Digidaigaku, put it, we’re “happy to give Apple a 30% cut of a free NFT”. Touché, Gabriel. #AppleGonnaTake Read more here.
📰 💪 The Best of the Rest – Other News:
Teams Launches Live Language Captions: Microsoft has confirmed its new live captions feature for Teams, allowing for instant live translated captions in a range of languages. Get the story here.
Meta Gets Sued (Again): Facebook users have filed a lawsuit against Meta. What’s it done this time? The lawsuit alleges that the company evaded Apple App Tracking Transparency rules and tracked users’ data anyway. Read about it here.
Epic Makes Big Metaverse Investment: Epic Games and others have made a $30 million investment in Hadean, a spatial computing startup, to build infrastructure for the metaverse. Read about that one here.
Universal Studios and NFTs: What would you want from your family theme park trip? A Halloween-themed NFT scavenger hunt, of course. Find out about it here.
BeReal Clone from TikTok Surging in Popularity: TikTok Now – TikTok’s BeReal tribute act – is gaining a lot of popularity, particularly outside the US. Get the details here.
🧐 Stat of the Week – 5.64B hours
📺👾 Number of hours streamed (live) on Twitch in Q2 2022
Twitch, owned by Amazon, has made its success from charismatic gamers live streaming as they play. It's amazing to see just how much activity is happening over on Twitch and also fascinating to compare it to YouTube’s 1.13B hours over the same period. This is a space expected to continue to grow, but will Twitch maintain its 5x dominance over YouTube. Perhaps, but YouTube won’t be the only competition Twitch faces in the coming years. #TwitchTowersYouTube Read more here.
🕸️ What’s dAppening?
A dApp is a decentralized app. Here’s the latest in web3, NFTs and blockchain apps.
🔨🕸️ Coinbase Cloud – Blockchain Infrastructure Service Launches Web3 Developer Platform
Coinbase is so much more than a cryptocurrency exchange, and we have to give it a lot of kudos for its commitment to fostering web3 adoption. In fact, it has a stated goal of becoming the AWS of web3. One under-the-radar way it is succeeding in this is through Coinbase Cloud, its blockchain infrastructure service, which was launched last year. Now Coinbase Cloud comes equipped with a new developer platform (termed Node), which will allow users to create and monitor dApps and other web3 applications on the Ethereum blockchain. Nodes follow a simplicity-first approach to web3 development, giving developers easy access to APIs for NFTs, powerful data indexers, and other tools for their dApps. There’s both a free and paid version of Node, with the former looking quite generous in what it offers developers hoping to bring products to the web3 marketplace. Top work from Coinbase here 👏👏. #NodeOfApproval Read more here.
Meanwhile at 3Advance...
We’re off to NOLA! Yes, the 3Advance team is having our first major gathering in almost three years! The pandemic rocked us to the core, and we’re a whole lot different than we were in 2019 when we celebrated the holidays at Mess Hall in DC. But while we no longer have an office, our culture is alive and well. 17 of our team members will be arriving into the Big Easy - coming from England, Ireland, Costa Rica and across the US. We’ll be celebrating the growth of the team, our improved process, and our renewed focus. Yes, there may be a Sezerac or two, and there will certainly be Po-Boys! But first stop, Preservation Hall for some New Orleans jazz. Look out for the photos next week! #3AdvanceinNOLA🎺🥃
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