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Telegram Premium appears in beta with exclusive reactions and stickers
It looks like the app is getting ready to make money off of you
For as robust of a messaging app as it is, Telegram does need to make money. The company made moves to monetize its platform last year through ad sales and extra features tailored towards massive group channels. But if the latest beta of its iOS app is indicative of anything, average users may soon be asked to pay to get more out of their experiences, too.
Square Enix announces plans to release two new ARPGs for mobile, starting with Trials of Mana
Echoes of Mana is slated for a 2022 release, and Trials of Mana is now available for pre-registration
Square Enix recently held a livestream celebrating the 30th anniversary for the Mana series, and so some fresh announcements are on offer. We've learned that remastered action-RPG Trials of Mana is coming to Android on July 15th for $23.99, but there's also a new offshoot game made explicitly for mobile called Echoes of Mana, which will land sometime in 2022 as a free-to-play release. There's also a Mana anime series in the works called Legend of Mana - The Teardrop Crystal, which will pick up after the events of Legend of Mana.
Twitter thinks you will pay it to undo your bad tweets (instead of just deleting them for free)
Twitter Blue is official, coming to Canada and Australia first
After nearly a year of rumors and hints — not to mention a pricing leak earlier this week — Twitter has finally announced a paid tier for anyone who just can't get enough of their feed. It's coming to Canada and Australia first, with a couple of long-requested power features locked behind a monthly subscription.
Premium Twitter Blue subscription launch looks imminent
The company appears to have pushed official details a bit early
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Twitter seems to be prepping for the launch of Twitter Blue, a premium package of features including the ability undo certain tweets, organize favorite posts into collections, and utilize its recently acquired Scroll paid newsfeed service, at least for iOS.
Spotify Premium Duo comes to the US and 54 more markets
The couples plan is now widely available across North America, Europe, and Asia
For couples who live together, the Spotify Family plan has been a good way to save a few pennies on your subscription, but the Premium Duo plan announced last year offered up the chance to save even more. Until now, it's only been available in select countries, but it's just arrived in the US as well as 54 other markets across the globe.
24 Hour Fitness offers premium app features for free as it temporarily closes clubs due to COVID-19
Helping you take your workout home
While what feels like half of Europe has already imposed closures and restrictions on non-essentials stores, public spaces, and fitness studios, this phase of the COVID-19 response is only starting in the US. The second largest fitness chain in the country, Fitness 24, has decided to take the step proactively and closed all of its locations Monday, March 16. In order to keep you fit in the meantime, the company offers premium content in its 24GO app free of charge.
YouTube naturally wants to keep its creators from opting for third-party membership providers like Patreon as ad revenue on the video site continues to fall. Paid features like Super Chat and Super Stickers helped ease the situation by forging another stream of revenue for content creators. The two monetization options will now be available to video makers from 9 additional countries.
For years and years now, mobile users have clamored for the same experience watching YouTube on their small devices as they have on a computer. You can keep YouTube playing and switch to another tab or app, you can resize that window and open another one side-by-side, and all of that without paying for a subscription. On mobile, however, non-paying users had to wait until 2016 and YouTube's multi-window support to be able to do something else while watching a video. If you wanted more perks like background playback and picture-in-picture, you had to be a Red, now Premium, subscriber.
After making headlines for the wrong reasons earlier this year, Strava is hoping its new membership plan will create some positive buzz for the popular social fitness app. Strava Premium is being replaced by Summit, a customizable model with three different packs.
YouTube may officially hold the crown for different service names, as long as you count the ones that appeared and never seem to launch. When the YouTube Red name first turned up, everybody was rightfully skeptical, but it turned out to be the ultimate replacement for the "Music Key" subscription. In just the last few months, we've seen the names Plus, Premiere, and Remix pop up, but none have yet to evolve into a final name. Yet another name from the thesaurus is joining the list, but this time, it's probably serious. Say hello to YouTube Premium.
Spotify has been working with Hulu on its $4.99 "Spotify Premium for Students" plan for nearly a year now, but the music streaming service is now introducing Hulu integration to non-students as well. At $12.99, it's not nearly as good of a deal as the student plan, but it's a nice discount for those who already have Hulu or want to give Hulu a shot. Plus, existing Premium subscribers can try Hulu out for three months for just $0.99.
Some users have been seeing these green suggestions when performing a search on the Play Store app for almost a year, but the feature began rolling out more widely in June (I still don't have it). However, it only seemed to provide keywords to further specify your search, not proper filters to separate the results according to price. Now it looks like Google is testing the latter kind.
You've probably heard of TuneIn. It's that app that some kids these days think of as the radio (not to be confused with the static that old people are still able to get their cars to produce). TuneIn lets you stream stations from all over the world, regardless of how far outside of their coverage area you may be.
The Doom series is perhaps one of the most iconic in gaming, so much so that it's been ported and hacked onto just about every platform and gadget imaginable. There are plenty of unofficial ways to play Doom on Android, but today owners of NVIDIA's SHIELD Android TV and SHIELD Tablet (and sadly, no one else) get a chance to own the entire series in a single package. Doom 3: BFG Edition is now available on the Play Store for $10.
CloudMagic Reveals Monetization Strategy With New Pro Account Costing $4.99 A Month Or $44.99 A Year
The CloudMagic Android app is capable of managing multiple email accounts from a single location, and by indexing your messages on its servers, it can provide significantly faster search results than much of the competition. The experience is free, but now the company has unveiled how it plans to make money going forward—by encouraging power users to sign up for a pro account.
Evernote premium users on Android are now receiving a feature that can take the frustration out of managing a stack of business cards. Instead of storing them all someplace never to be seen again, people can use the app to take a picture of the card and have the information digitized into a note, with Evernote automatically populating the appropriate contact fields.
It's challenging to differentiate yourself in a field crowded by the likes of Evernote, Todoist, and Wunderlist. All of these services can manage your lists just fine, and they can each sync across whichever devices you want them to. So what does Any.do have up its sleeve for its big 2.0 release?
Tactical strategy is an interesting hybrid game genre, combining the thinking and placement of a strategy title with the turn-based combat and slow burn improvements of an RPG. AntiSquad Tactics is the first original take on squad strategy we've seen in a while, and unlike games such as X-COM, it's designed for mobile first. But what might interest the purist gamers in the audience is that AntiSquad is available in both a free-to-play and a premium version.
A shadowy figure stalks through a top secret missile facility while weapons-grade lounge music plays in the background. Nationalist propaganda lines the halls and the livery of gun-toting soldiers, ignored by our clandestine hero. He glides in, achieves his objective, and slips out, never intending any unnecessary harm... but not afraid to bust out the hardware or hand-to-hand skills if necessary. It sounds like the opening to a Connery-era Bond flick, but it also describes CounterSpy, a new PlayStation Vita port from developer Dynamighty and published by PlayStation Mobile.
Many game developers these days are going free-to-play, permitting people to download their creations for free only to nickel and dime them for additional lives, time, characters, levels, coins, or anything else that may be required to make the experience actually enjoyable. In an interview with Pocket Gamer, Double Stallion, the team behind Big Action Mega Fight, explained how it decided to buck this trend by turning their freemium game into a premium one - and how they ultimately ended up making more money in the process. Going forward, the crew has decided that it's done making free-to-play games.