Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

The first time I showed the Palm phone to the TechCrunch staff, they were excited. At the very least, it was a unique take on the category, designed to be a second phone for those moments that didn’t require a larger, bulkier device.

But reality set in pretty quickly. The device’s capabilities were severely limited by a number of factors, including size. The biggest issue, however, was a Verizon exclusive that only let users purchase the device as a second handset tied to an existing account.

Back in April, the company announced that the 3.3-inch phone could be purchased as a standalone device — albeit still through Verizon or US Mobile. Today, it’s expanding that, making the handset available unlocked, so it will work with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and MetroPCS SIMs.

The phone’s available “at only” $350. That’s cheap compared to many full-sized, mid-tier handsets, but cheapness is certainly a relative concept. It still seems like a lot for a second phone, and while it’s certainly adorable, I’d strongly advise against anyone using it as a primary handset. Heck, it’s not even all that great as a standalone MP3 player.

If you’re still interested, you can pre-order it today — and Palm will throw in a $30 leather case with neck and wrist lanyards. It starts shipping in six to eight weeks.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Palm’s tiny phone is available unlocked at 0

Following in the footsteps of AT&T and Verizon*, Sprint is now offering an LTE tracker. The matchbook-sized device, simply called Tracker, provides real-time location tracking on Safe + Found app.

Sprint’s new Tracker

The Tracker competes with Tile, but instead of Bluetooth, Sprint’s device uses 4G LTE, GPS and Wi-Fi location services, so it can be used to track things, people or pets that might travel a significant distance away, compared to a range of 100 ft to 300 ft for Tile (depending on the version). The Tracker is manufactured by Coolpad and users need to pay $2.50 per month for 24 months to cover the cost of the device, plus an additional $5 per month to connect it.

AT&T and Verizon both launched LTE trackers over the past year and Apple is also rumored to be working on a tracking device that connects to iPhones, based on an asset package for pairing devices by proximity spotted in the first beta of iOS 13 by 9to5Mac.

*Disclosure: TechCrunch is part of Verizon Media, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Sprint is the latest telecom to offer a tracking device that uses LTE

Following a string of trade restrictions from the U.S., China’s telecoms equipment and smartphone maker Huawei expects its revenues to drop $30 billion below forecast over the next two years, founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei said Monday during a panel discussion at the company’s Shenzhen headquarters.

Huawei’s production will slow down in the next two years while revenues will hover around $100 billion this and next year, according to the executive. The firm’s overseas smartphone shipment is tipped to drop 40%, he said, confirming an earlier report from Bloomberg.

That said, Ren assured that Huawei’s output will be “rejuvenated” by the year 2021 after a period of adjustment.

Huawei’s challenges are multifaceted as the U.S. “entity list” bars it from procuring from American chip makers and using certain Android services, among a list of other restrictions. In response, the Chinese behemoth recently announced it has been preparing for years its own backup chips and an alternative smartphone operating system.

“We didn’t expect the U.S. to attack Huawei with such intense and determined effort. We are not only banned from providing targeted components but also from joining a lot of international organizations, collaborating with many universities, using anything with American components or even connecting to networks that use American parts,” said Ren at the panel.

The founder said these adverse circumstances, though greater than what he expected, would not prevent the company from making strides. “We are like a damaged plane that protected only its heart and fuel tank but not its appendages. Huawei will get tested by the adjustment period and through time. We will grow stronger as we make this step.”

“Heroes in any times go through great challenges,” reads a placard left on a table at a Huawei campus cafe, featuring the image of a damaged World War II aircraft (Photo: TechCrunch)

That image of the beaten aircraft holding out during hard times is sticking to employees’ minds through little motivational placards distributed across the Huawei campus. TechCrunch was among a small group of journalists who spoke to Huawei staff about the current U.S.-China situation, and many of them shared Ren’s upbeat, resilient attitude.

“I’m very confident about the current situation,” said an employee who has been working at Huawei for five years and who couldn’t reveal his name as he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. “And my confidence stems from the way our boss understands and anticipates the future.”

More collaboration

Although 74-year-old Ren had kept a quiet profile ever since founding Huawei, he has recently appeared more in front of media as his company is thrown under growing scrutiny from the west. That includes efforts like the Monday panel, which was dubbed “A Coffee With Ren” and known to be Ren’s first such fireside chat.

Speaking alongside George Gilder, an American writer and speaker on technology, and Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, Ren said he believed in a more collaborative and open economy, which can result in greater mutual gains between countries.

“The west was the first to bring up the concept of economic globalization. It’s the right move. But there will be big waves rising from the process, and we must handle them with correct rather than radical measures,” said Ren.

“It’s the U.S. that will suffer from any effort to decouple,” argued Gilder. “I believe that we have a wonderful entrepreneurial energy, wonderful creativity and wonderful technology, but it’s always thrived with collaboration with other countries.”

“The U.S. is making a terrible mistake, first of all, picking on a company,” snapped Negroponte. “I come from a world where the interest isn’t so much about the trade, commerce or stock. We value knowledge and we want to build on the people before us. The only way this works is that people are open at the beginning… It’s not a competitive world in the early stages of science. [The world] benefits from collaboration.”

“This is an age for win-win games,” said one of the anonymous employees TechCrunch spoke to. He drew the example of network operator China Mobile, which recently announced to buy not just from Huawei but also from non-Chinese suppliers Nokia and Ericsson after it secured one of the first commercial licenses to deploy 5G networks in the country.

“I think the most important thing is that we focus on our work,” said Ocean Sun, who is tasked with integrating network services for Huawei clients. He argued that as employees, their job is to “be professional and provide the best solutions” to customers.

“I think the commercial war between China and the U.S. damages both,” suggested Zheng Xining, an engineer working on Huawei’s network services for Switzerland. “Donald Trump should think twice [about his decisions].”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Huawei says US ban will cost it B in lost revenue

The latest report from renowned Apple leaker Ming-Chi Kuo already has an eye on 2020 and beyond. The news lines up with other reports around future iPhones, noting that the high-end versions of the handset are set to get 5G in the second half of next year. By 2021, all models are set to be on-board with the next-gen wireless standard.

The report is in line with recent rumors that have the company holding off on 5G until 2020. That puts Apple somewhat behind the curve of a number of Android manufacturers that have been racing to get the technology to market. Of course, those companies (including Samsung, LG and even OnePlus) may be putting the cart before the horse, with wireless carriers providing extremely limited access to the tech through the end of 2019.

Apple’s push into 5G is believed to be a primary driver behind the company’s recent decision to make nice with Qualcomm, though Kuo believes that the company is shooting for 2022/2023 to begin manufacturing its own wireless chips. That would help Apple further divorce itself on reliance from third-party component makers, which seems to have been the plan all along.

The report has Apple continuing to release three models of iPhone later next year. The list includes 5.4-inch and 6.7-inch OLED models, making the smaller iPhone even smaller and the larger even larger. The XR successor, meanwhile, would maintain a 6.1-inch display, getting upgraded to OLED next year, while only offering up an LTE modem — a move that could muddy the waters a bit for consumers.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | 5G reportedly coming to premium iPhones in 2020, all models in 2021

Amazon’s two-year-old Instagram competitor, Amazon Spark, is no more.

Hoping to capitalize on the social shopping trend and tap into the power of online influencers, Amazon in 2017 launched its own take on Instagram with a shoppable feed of stories and photos aimed at Prime members. The experiment known as Amazon Spark has now come to an end. However, the learnings from Spark and Amazon’s discovery tool Interesting Finds are being blended into a new social-inspired product, #FoundItOnAmazon.

Amazon Spark had been a fairly bland service, if truth be told. Unlike on Instagram, where people follow their friend, interests, brands like they like, and people they find engaging or inspiring, Spark was focused on the shopping and the sale. While it tried to mock the Instagram aesthetic at times with fashion inspiration images or highly posed travel photos, it lacked Instagram’s broader appeal. Your friends weren’t there and there weren’t any Instagram Stories, for example. Everything felt too transactional.

Amazon declined to comment on the apparent shutdown of Spark, but the service is gone from the website and app.

The URL amazon.com/spark, meanwhile, redirects to the new #FoundItOnAmazon site — a site which also greatly resembles another Amazon product discovery tool, Interesting Finds.

Interesting Finds has been around since 2016, offering consumers a way to browse an almost Pinterest-like board of products across a number of categories. It features curated “shops” focused on niche themes, like a “Daily Carry” shop for toteable items, a “Mid Century” shop filled with furniture and décor, a shop for “Star Wars” fans, one for someone who loves the color pink, and so on. Interesting Finds later added a layer of personalization with the introduction of a My Mix shop filled with recommendations tailored to your interactions and likes.

The Interesting Finds site had a modern, clean look-and-feel that made it a more pleasurable way to browse Amazon’s products. Products photos appeared on white backgrounds while the clutter of a traditional product detail page was removed.

We understand from people familiar with the products that Interesting Finds is not shutting down as Spark has. But the new #FoundItOnAmazon site will take inspiration from what worked with Interesting Finds and Spark to turn it into a new shopping discovery tool.

Interesting Finds covers a wide range of categories, but #FoundItOnAmazon will focus more directly on fashion and home décor. Similar to Interesting Finds, you can heart to favorites items and revisit them later.

The #FoundItOnAmazon site is very new and isn’t currently appearing for all Amazon customers at this time. If you have it, the amazon.com/spark URL will take you there.

Though Amazon won’t talk about why its Instagram experiment is ending, it’s not too hard to make some guesses. Beyond its lack of originality and transactional nature, Instagram itself has grown into a far more formidable competitor since Spark first launched.

Last fall, Instagram fully embraced its shoppable nature with the introduction of shopping features across its app that let people more easily discover products from Instagram photos. It also added a new shopping channel and in March, Instagram launched its own in-app checkout option to turn product inspiration into actual conversions. It was certainly a big move into Amazon territory. And while that led to headlines about Instagram as the future of shopping, it’s not going to upset Amazon’s overall dominance any time soon.

In addition to the shifting competitive landscape, Spark’s primary stakeholder, Amazon VP of Consumer Engagement Chee Chew departed at the beginning of 2019 for Twilio. While at Amazon, Chew was heavily invested in Spark’s success and product managers would even tie their own efforts to Spark in order to win his favor, sources said.

For example, Amazon’s notifications section had been changed to include updates from Spark. And Spark used to sit a swipe away from the main navigation menu on mobile.

Following Spark’s closure, Amazon’s navigation has once again been simplified. It’s now a clutter-free hamburger menu. Meanwhile, Amazon’s notifications section no longer includes Spark updates — only alerts about orders, shipments, and personalized recommendations.

In addition, it’s likely that Spark wasn’t well adopted. Just 10,000 Amazon customers used it during its first 24 hours, we heard. With Chew’s departure, Spark lost its driving force. No one needed to curry favor by paying it attention, which may have also helped contribute to its shuttering.

6/14/19, 10:20 PM ET: Updated with further context after publication.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Amazon Spark, the retailer’s two-year-old Instagram competitor, has shut down

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1. Telegram faces DDoS attack in China… again

The popular encrypted messaging service Telegram is once again being hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in Asia as protestors in Hong Kong take to the streets.

As they look to evade surveillance measures by government officials, Telegram is one of the tools that organizers have turned to. Four years ago, a similar attack struck the company’s service, just as China was initiating a crackdown on human rights lawyers in the country.

2. Bird confirms acquisition of Scoot

This acquisition means Bird may finally get to operate shared electric scooters in San Francisco.

3. LaLiga fined $280K for soccer app’s privacy-violating spy mode

Users of the LaLiga app were outraged to discover the smartphone software does rather more than show minute-by-minute commentary of football matches: It can use the microphone and GPS of fans’ phones to record their surroundings in a bid to identify bars that are unofficially streaming games.

4. Google leaks its own phone

Details of the Pixel 4 have been swirling around this week, so Google decided to just leak the design of its next phone via its official Twitter account, revealing the backplate and new camera module on the smartphone.

5. NFC gets a lot more powerful in iOS 13

This opens up a range of new application possibilities, Apple said, including the ability to create apps that read passports and contactless smart cards and interact with NFC-enabled hardware.

6. Facebook collected device data on 187,000 users using banned snooping app

The social media giant said in a letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s office — which TechCrunch obtained — that it collected data on 31,000 users in the U.S., including 4,300 teenagers. The rest of the collected data came from users in India.

7. Uber’s annual flying taxi summit reveals Uber Air has a ways to go

We talked to Uber Director of Engineering for Energy Storage Systems Celina Mikolajczak at the company’s third annual Elevate Summit in Washington, D.C. this week. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Daily Crunch: Telegram faces new attack in China

Why is there no app where you can follow party animals, concert snobs or conference butterflies for their curated suggestions of events? That’s the next phase of social calendar app IRL that’s launching today on iOS to help you make and discuss plans with friends or discover nearby happenings to fill out your schedule.

The calendar, a historically dorky utility, seems like a strange way to start the next big social network. Many people, especially teens, either don’t use apps like Google Calendar, keep them professional or merely input plans made elsewhere. But by baking in an Explore tab of event recommendations and the option to follow curators, headliners and venues, IRL could make calendars communal like Instagram did to cameras.

“There’s Twitter for ‘follow my updates,’ there’s SoundCloud for ‘follow my music,’ but there’s no ‘follow my events’ ” IRL CEO Abe Shafi tells me of his plan to turbocharge his calendar app. “They’re arguably the best product that’s been built for organizing what you’re doing, but no one has Superhuman’d or Slack’d the calendar. Let’s build a super f*cking dope calendar!” he says with unbridled excitement. He’ll need that passion to persevere as IRL tries to steal a major use case from SMS, messaging apps and Facebook .

Finding a new opportunity for a social network has attracted a new $8 million Series A funding round for IRL led by Goodwater Capital and joined by Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins. That builds on its $3 million seed from Founders Fund and Floodgate, whose partner Mike Maples is joining IRL’s board. The startup has also pulled in some entertainment and event CEOs as strategic investors, including Warner Bros. president Greg Silverman, Lionsgate Films president Joe Drake and ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman to help it recruit calendar influencers users can follow.

Filling your social calendar

In Shafi, investors found a consummate extrovert who can empathize with event-goers. He dropped out of Berkeley to build out his recruitment software startup getTalent before selling it to HR platform Dice, where he became VP of product. He started to become disillusioned by tech’s impact on society and almost left the industry before some time at Burning Man rekindled his fever for events.

IRL CEO Abe Shafi

Shafi teamed up with PayPal’s first board member Scott Banister and early social network founder Greg Tseng. Shafi’s first attempt Gather pissed off a ton of people with spammy invites in 2017. By 2018, he’d restarted as IRL, with a focus on building a minimalist calendar where it was easy to create events and invite friends. Evite and Facebook Events were too heavy for making less formal get-togethers with close friends. He wisely chose to geofence his app and launch state by state to maximize density so people would have more pals to plan with.

IRL is now in 14 states, with a modest 1.3 million monthly active users and 175,000 dailies, plus 3 million people on the waitlist. “Fifty percent of all teens in Texas have downloaded IRL. I wanted to focus on the central states, not Silicon Valley,” Shafi explains. Users log in with a phone number or Google, two-way sync their Google Calendar if they have one, and can then manage their existing schedule and create mini-events. The stickiest feature is the ability to group chat with everyone invited so you can hammer out plans. Even users without the app can chime in via text or email. And unlike Facebook, where your mom or boss are liable to see your RSVPs, your calendar and what you’re doing on IRL is always private unless you explicitly share it.

The problem is that most of this could be handled with SMS and a more popular calendar. That’s why IRL is doubling-down on event discovery through influencers, which you can’t do anywhere else at scale. With the new version of the app launching today, you’ll be recommended performers, locations and curators to follow. You’ll see their suggestions in the Explore tab that also includes sub-tabs of Nearby and Trending happenings. There’s also a college-specific feed for users that auth in with their school email address. Curators and event companies like TechCrunch can get their own IRL.com/… URL people can follow more easily than some janky list of events of gallery of flyers on their website. Since pretty much every promoter wants more attendees, IRL’s had little resistance to it indexing all the events from Meetup.com and whatever it can find.

IRL is concentrating on growth for now, but Shafi believes all the intent data about what people want to do could be valuable for directing people to certain restaurants, bars, theaters or festivals, though he vows that “we’re never going to sell your data to advertisers.” For now, IRL is earning money from affiliate fees when people buy tickets or make reservations. Event affiliate margins are infamously slim, but Shafi says IRL can bargain for higher fees as it gains sway over more people’s calendars.

Unfortunately, without reams of personal data and leading artificial intelligence that Facebook owns, IRL’s in-house suggestions via the Explore tab can feel pretty haphazard. I saw lots of mediocre happy hours, crafting nights and community talks that weren’t quite the hip nightlife recommendations I was hoping for, and for now there’s no sorting by category. That’s where Shafi hopes influencers will fill in. And he’s confident that Facebook’s business model discourages it moving deeper into events. “Facebook’s revenue driver is time spent on the app. While meaningful to society, events as a feature is not a primary revenue driver so they don’t get the resources that other features on Facebook get.”

Yet the biggest challenge will be rearranging how people organize their lives. A lot of us are too scatterbrained, lazy or instinctive to make all our plans days or weeks ahead of time and put them on a calendar. The beauty of mobile is that we can communicate on the fly to meet up. “Solving for spontaneity isn’t our focus so far,” Shafi admits. But that’s how so much of our social lives come together.

My biggest problem isn’t finding events to fill my calendar, but knowing which friends are free now to hang out and attend one with me. There are plenty of calendar, event discovery and offline hangout apps. IRL will have to prove they deserve to be united. At least Shafi says it’s a problem worth trying to solve. “I know for a fact that the product of a calendar will outlive me.” He just wants to make it more social first.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Calendar influencers? Event social network IRL raises M

Target Circle and TapHeaven announced they’re merging into a single company under the Target Circle brand.

TapHeaven co-founder and CEO Chris Hoyt, who is becoming chief growth officer at the combined organization, said the two companies have been “trying to solve the same problem” — namely, eliminating many of the inefficiencies in the mobile advertising business.

Hoyt said that for Target Circle, that meant trying to “unify this fragmented ecosystem into a single dashboard for contracts, invoices and offers.” And for TapHeaven, that meant a focus on automation, resulting in the launch of what the company calls a “command center” for user acquisition, where advertisers can optimize their ad campaigns “at the source level, by country” while getting high-quality traffic without fraud.

The companies also complement each other geographically — Target Circle is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, while TapHeaven is headquartered in San Francisco.

According to Hoyt, they first came across each other because they were talking to the same mobile studio about supporting the launch of a new game, and it became clear they “both had the same vision for our businesses, the same future with a unified dashboard wrapped in automation and machine learning to simplify and help the ecosystem perform for these advertisers.”

Target Circle founder and CEO Heiko Hildebrandt will continue to serve as chief executive for the combined companies — in the announcement, he said TapHeaven allows the company to “strengthen and expand its technology in the automation of advertising and fraud prevention and resolution.” Meanwhile, TapHeaven executives Brian Krebs and Jeremy Jones will become CIO and chief of user experience, respectively.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Moving forward, Hoyt said Target Circle will continue to support its existing products while focusing on the new UA Command Center as “the future of our business.” He also suggested that the platform could help advertisers move away from Facebook and Google, allowing them to get the performance they need from other ad networks.

“What impact this is going to have on the market is really lifting up the rest of the ecosystem,” he said. “I feel like Facebook and Google have had their day, a little bit … With the serious things that are going on with these companies, advertisers are desperate for the answers to where [else] can they spend their money and diversify their portfolio.”

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Target Circle and TapHeaven team up in a mobile marketing merger

AT&T has cancelled early orders for the Samsung Galaxy Fold.

Tom’s Guide first reported the cancellation, noting that AT&T said the Galaxy Fold would be available again to order as soon as Samsung announces a new launch date. AT&T is offering $100 in credit to those whose orders it has cancelled.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold was originally scheduled to launch on April 26. However, early reviews indicated there were issues with the phone, which Samsung initially said was the fault of reviewers. The company eventually decided to postpone the launch and get back to the drawing board.

Earlier this week, a Samsung rep told Cnet that it would announce timing on the nearly $2,000 phone “in the coming weeks.”

However, AT&T’s move here suggests that it may be a while before the Galaxy Fold resurfaces, if at all.

Samsung itself asked customers who pre-ordered to confirm that they still want the device following the review period. On May 24, Best Buy cancelled all pre-orders of the phone.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | AT&T cancels Samsung Galaxy Fold orders

The growing presence of encrypted communications apps makes a lot of communities safer and stronger. But the possibility of physical device seizure and government coercion is growing as well, which is why every such app should have some kind of self-destruct mode to protect its user and their contacts.

End to end encryption like that you see in Signal and (if you opt into it) WhatsApp is great at preventing governments and other malicious actors from accessing your messages while they are in transit. But as with nearly all cybersecurity matters, physical access to either device or user or both changes things considerably.

For example, take this Hong Kong citizen who was forced to unlock their phone and reveal their followers and other messaging data to police. It’s one thing to do this with a court order to see if, say, a person was secretly cyberstalking someone in violation of a restraining order. It’s quite another to use as a dragnet for political dissidents.

This particular protestor ran a Telegram channel that had a number of followers. But it could just as easily be a Slack room for organizing a protest, or a Facebook group, or anything else. For groups under threat from oppressive government regimes it could be a disaster if the contents or contacts from any of these were revealed to the police.

Just as you should be able to choose exactly what you say to police, you should be able to choose how much your phone can say as well. Secure messaging apps should be the vanguard of this capability.

There are already some dedicated “panic button” type apps, and Apple has thoughtfully developed an “emergency mode” (activated by hitting the power button five times quickly) that locks the phone to biometrics and will wipe it if it is not unlocked within a certain period of time. That’s effective against “Apple pickers” trying to steal a phone or during border or police stops where you don’t want to show ownership by unlocking the phone with your face.

Those are useful and we need more like them — but secure messaging apps are a special case. So what should they do?

The best-case scenario, where you have all the time in the world and internet access, isn’t really an important one. You can always delete your account and data voluntarily. What needs work is deleting your account under pressure.

The next best-case scenario is that you have perhaps a few seconds or at most a minute to delete or otherwise protect your account. Signal is very good about this: The deletion option is front and center in the options screen, and you don’t have to input any data. WhatsApp and Telegram require you to put in your phone number, which is not ideal — fail to do this correctly and your data is retained.

Signal, left, lets you get on with it. You’ll need to enter your number in WhatsApp (right) and Telegram.

Obviously it’s also important that these apps don’t let users accidentally and irreversibly delete their account. But perhaps there’s a middle road whereby you can temporarily lock it for a preset time period, after which it deletes itself if not unlocked manually. Telegram does have self-destructing accounts, but the shortest time you can delete after is a month.

What really needs improvement is emergency deletion when your phone is no longer in your control. This could be a case of device seizure by police, or perhaps being forced to unlock the phone after you have been arrested. Whatever the case, there need to be options for a user to delete their account outside the ordinary means.

Here are a couple options that could work:

• Trusted remote deletion: Selected contacts are given the ability via a one-time code or other method to wipe each other’s accounts or chats remotely, no questions asked and no notification created. This would let, for instance, a friend who knows you’ve been arrested remotely remove any sensitive data from your device.
• Self-destruct timer: Like Telegram’s feature, but better. If you’re going to a protest, or have been “randomly” selected for additional screening or questioning, you can just tell the app to delete itself after a certain duration (as little as a minute perhaps) or at a certain time of the day. Deactivate any time you like, or stall for the five required minutes for it to trigger.
• Poison PIN: In addition to a normal unlock PIN, users can set a poison PIN that when entered has a variety of user-selectable effects. Delete certain apps, clear contacts, send prewritten messages, unlock or temporarily hard-lock the device, etc.
• Customizable panic button: Apple’s emergency mode is great, but it would be nice to be able to attach conditions like the poison PIN’s. Sometimes all someone can do is smash that button.

Obviously these open new avenues for calamity and abuse as well, which is why they will need to be explained carefully and perhaps initially hidden in “advanced options” and the like. But overall I think we’ll be safer with them available.

Eventually these roles may be filled by dedicated apps or by the developers of the operating systems on which they run, but it makes sense for the most security-forward app class out there to be the first in the field.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Every secure messaging app needs a self-destruct button