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Atom Finance’s free Bloomberg Terminal rival raises $12M
If you want to win on Wall Street, Yahoo Finance is insufficient but Bloomberg Terminal costs a whopping $24,000 per year. That’s why Atom Finance built a free tool designed to democratize access to professional investor research. If Robinhood made it cost $0 to trade stocks, Atom Finance makes it cost $0 to know which to buy.
Today Atom launches its mobile app with access to its financial modeling, portfolio tracking, news analysis, benchmarking and discussion tools. It’s the consumerization of finance, similar to what we’ve seen in enterprise SaaS. “Investment research tools are too important to the financial well-being of consumers to lack the same cycles of product innovation and accessibility that we have experienced in other verticals,” CEO Eric Shoykhet tells me.
In its first press interview, Atom Finance today revealed to TechCrunch that it has raised a $10.6 million Series A led by General Catalyst to build on its quiet $1.9 million seed round. The cash will help the startup eventually monetize by launching premium tiers with even more hardcore research tools.
Atom Finance already has 100,000 users and $400 million in assets it’s helping steer since soft-launching in June. “Atom fundamentally changes the game for how financial news media and reporting is consumed. I could not live without it,” says The Twenty Minute VC podcast founder and Atom investor Harry Stebbings.
Individual investors are already at a disadvantage compared to big firms equipped with artificial intelligence, the priciest research and legions of traders glued to the markets. Yet it’s becoming increasingly clear that investing is critical to long-term financial mobility, especially in an age of rampant student debt and automation threatening employment.
“Our mission is two-fold,” Shoykhet says. “To modernize investment research tools through an intuitive platform that’s easily accessible across all devices, while democratizing access to institutional-quality investing tools that were once only available to Wall Street professionals.”
Leveling the trading floor
Shoykhet saw the gap between amateur and expert research platforms firsthand as an investor at Blackstone and Governors Lane. Yet even the supposedly best-in-class software was lacking the usability we’ve come to expect from consumer mobile apps. Atom Finance claims that “for example, Bloomberg hasn’t made a significant change to its central product offering since 1982.”
The Atom Finance team
So a year ago, Shoykhet founded Atom Finance in Brooklyn to fill the void. Its web, iOS and Android apps offer five products that combine to guide users’ investing decisions without drowning them in complexity:
- Sandbox – Instant financial modeling with pre-populated consensus projections that automatically update and are recalculated over time
- Portfolio – Track your linked investment accounts to monitor overarching stats, real-time profit and loss statements and diversification
- X-Ray – A financial research search engine for compiling news, SEC filings, transcripts and analysis
- Compare – Benchmarking tables for comparing companies and sectors
- Collaborate – Discussion boards and group chat for sharing insights with fellow investors
“Our Sandbox feature allows users to create simple financial models directly within our platform, without having to export data to a spreadsheet,” Shoykhet says. “This saves our users time and prevents them from having to manually refresh the inputs to their model when there is new information.”
Shoykhet positions Atom Finance in the middle of the market, saying, “Existing solutions are either too rudimentary for rigorous analysis (Yahoo Finance, Google Finance) or too expensive for individual investors (Bloomberg, CapIQ, Factset).”
With both its free and forthcoming paid tiers, Atom hopes to undercut Sentieo, a more AI-focused financial research platform that charges $500 to $1,000 per month and raised $19 million a year ago. Cheaper tools like BamSEC and WallMine are often limited to just pulling in earnings transcripts and filings. Robinhood has its own in-app research tools, which could make it a looming competitor or a potential acquirer for Atom Finance.
Shoykhet admits his startup will face stiff competition from well-entrenched tools like Bloomberg. “Incumbent solutions have significant brand equity with our target market, and especially with professional investors. We will have to continue iterating and deliver an unmatched user experience to gain the trust/loyalty of these users,” he says. Additionally, Atom Finance’s access to users’ sensitive data means flawless privacy, security, and accuracy will be essential.
The $12.5 million from General Catalyst, Greenoaks, Global Founders Capital, Untitled Investments, Day One Ventures and a slew of angels gives Atom runway to rev up its freemium model. Robinhood has found great success converting unpaid users to its subscription tier where they can borrow money to trade. By similarly starting out free, Atom’s eight-person team hailing from SoFi, Silver Lake, Blackstone and Citi could build a giant funnel to feed its premium tiers.
Fintech can feel dry and ruthlessly capitalistic at times. But Shoykhet insists he’s in it to equip a new generation with methods of wealth creation. “I think we’ve gone long enough without seeing real innovation in this space. We can’t be complacent with something so important. It’s crucial that we democratize access to these tools and educate consumers . . . to improve their investment well-being.”
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Can a games platform tackle kids’ anxiety about having to do math?
You know that feeling when you look at your bank statements and try to figure out what on earth is going on? Or when you do your taxes? It turns out this isn’t just an insignificant feeling, but a scientifically recognized anxiety. Mathematics Anxiety (MA) is defined in research literature as feelings of concern, tension or nervousness experienced in combination with math in ordinary life and in academic situations.
And it is, in fact, a widespread worldwide problem that can cause damaging effects throughout life. If your population is too scared to add up and subtract, your economy will suffer. Badly. Some 17 million adults in the U.K. (49% of the working-age) have a numeracy level expected from primary school children. This results in a £20 billion loss to the U.K. economy a year, according to one study. If that’s just the U.K., imagine what the figures must be for other countries?
If people weren’t so anxious about doing math, then we’d probably also have more tech workers. More than three-quarters (77%) of children with high math anxiety are — when tested — between normal to high achievers on curriculum math tests. So this anxiety prevents students from entering STEM fields when in fact they would be perfectly able to perform well in these fields.
The problem is down to the amygdala, the same part of the brain that responds to fearful situations. It shows a heightened response in children with high math anxiety (as if it’s a physical danger) and triggers a fight-or-flight response.
The origins of Math Anxiety are rooted in the prevalence of accumulated negative math learning experiences by around six years old. So if you could get kids comfortable with math by age six, then you’d boost the economy and society.
Now, to address this problem, two young math-savvy mums have co-founded a startup, Funexpected, to tackle this worldwide problem.
Their solution is a “multisensory” iOS app offering a new approach to learning, which has achieved significant early success. Inside the first month of its launch, Apple featured the app among its “Best of September” and “New Apps We Love” in the U.K. and “Best Apps for Kids” and “Awesome Kids Apps” categories in App Stores of more than 60 countries.
By late October this year, the startup had been selected as an ed tech innovator for the EDUCATE programme led by the UCL Institute of Education, considered by many to be the leading U.K. research accelerator into ed tech. And as of last week, Apple Stores will feature the Funexpected app on the stores’ native devices, among Prisma, Alterlight, Headspace and other big names.
Furthermore, next year, Dor Abrahamson, professor of cognition and development at the UC Berkeley School of Education, plans to create a game for the app.
The bootstrapped startup, founded by Natalia Pereldik (after she left investment banking) together with friend Alexandra Kazilo, has now seen its app downloaded more than 35,000 times in over 50 countries in four weeks after the launch.
So what does it do?
The app itself is a collection of 11 games located across the landscapes of Japan, Egypt and Greenland. Children tap, cut, slide, grab and move animated on-screen objects to propel the story forward, such as by feeding a monkey with the correct amount of juicy berries gathered from various branches or learning logic by catching the right type of fish with a net and filling a fish pond. Parents can use it with their kids as well. The app runs a subscription-based model of £3.99 a month ($5.25) or £31.99 a year ($42.10).
It’s tackling a big market. The global mobile learning market was valued at $10.93 billion in 2016 and is projected to reach $179.21 billion by 2025.
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Snapchat Cameo edits your face into videos
Snapchat is preparing to launch a big new feature that uses your selfies to replace the faces of people in videos you can then share. It’s essentially a simplified way to Deepfake you into GIFs. Snapchat Cameos are an alternative to Bitmoji for quickly conveying an emotion, reaction, or silly situation in Snapchat messages.
Some French users received a test version of the feature today, as spotted by Snap enthusiast @Mtatsis.
Snapchat Cameo makes you the star of videos
TechCrunch reached out to Snap, which confirmed existence of Cameos, and that the feature is currently testing in limited availability in some international markets. The company provided this statement: “Cameos aren’t ready to take the stage yet, but stay tuned for their global debut soon!”
@snapologie Cette fonctionnalité viens d’apparaître sur mon Snap ça s’appelle Caméos pic.twitter.com/F8bIrhbptb
— Arthur
(@gartr268) December 6, 2019
Vous avez Cameo sur snap ou je suis la seule? Je pleure de rire pic.twitter.com/G7E3ZKAilz
— Aca (•‿•) (@toddflanderrs) December 7, 2019
C’est la meilleure invention que snap est jamais faite #cameo #snapchat pic.twitter.com/EcRQmGoFsV
— FiLiPpinHo
QLF (@gregv_) December 7, 2019
How To Make Snapchat Cameos
With Cameo, you’ll take a selfie to teach Snapchat what you look like. Then you choose if you want a vaguely male or female body type (no purposefully androgenous option).
Cameo then lives inside the Bitmoji button in the Snapchat messaging keyboard. Snapchat has made a bunch of short looping video clips with sound that you can choose from. Snapchat will then stretch and move your selfie to create different facial reactions that Cameo can apply to actors’ heads in the videos. You just pick one of these videos that now star you and send it to the chat.
Cameo could help Snapchat keep messaging interesting, which is critical since that remains its most popular and differentiated feature. With Instagram and WhatsApp having copied its Stories to great success, it must stay ahead in chat. Though in this case, Snap could be accused of copying Chinese social app Zao which let users more realistically Deepfake their faces into videos. Then again, JibJab popularized this kind of effect many years ago to stick your face on dancing Christmas elves.
Snap is only starting to monetize the messaging wing of its app with ads inside social games. Snap might potentially sell sponsored, branded Cameo clips to advertisers similar to how the company offers sponsored augmented reality lenses.
Cameo could put a more fun spin on technology for grafting faces into videos. Deepfakes can be used as powerful weapons of misinformation or abuse. But by offering only innocuous clips rather than statements from politicians or pornography, Snapchat could turn the tech into a comedic medium.
[Image Credit: Jeff Higgins]
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Daily Crunch: Uber reveals sexual assault numbers
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
1. Uber reveals thousands of sexual assault reports last year
Uber just released its first-ever safety report, stating that it received 2,936 reports pertaining to sexual assault in 2017, which went up to 3,045 in 2018 (these are U.S.-specific numbers). At the same time, Uber says there was a 16% decrease in the average incident rate.
While traditional taxis also have their safety risks, those numbers are still quite troubling. It’s worth noting, though, that the company has implemented some safety measures designed to help prevent sexual assault.
2. Niantic is working with Qualcomm on augmented reality glasses
To be clear, you’re not going to be booting up Pokémon GO on a pair of Qualcomm/Niantic AR glasses this Christmas. Moving forward, though, Niantic will be working with Qualcomm to flesh out the reference hardware for augmented reality glasses.
3. Netflix earmarks $420M to fight Disney in India
“This year and next year, we plan to spend about Rs 3,000 crores developing and licensing content and you will start to see a lot of stuff hit the screens,” said CEO Reed Hastings at a conference in New Delhi.
4. Airbnb officially bans all open-invite parties and events
The new policy seeks to prevent certain guests from hosting events not approved by hosts — such as a recent Halloween party hosted at a California Airbnb rental in which five people were killed.
5. Inside VSCO, a Gen Z-approved photo-sharing app, with CEO Joel Flory
Known to many only because of this year’s “VSCO girl” meme explosion, the company has long been coaxing the creative community to its freemium platform. Turns out, if you can provide the disillusioned teens of Gen Z respite from the horrors of social media — they’ll pay money for it.
6. This Lego Cybertruck is one even Elon can love
While Lego’s take on the Tesla Cybertruck design seemed to be purely for the LOLs, a remarkably faithful representation has been submitted to the official Lego Ideas crowdsourcing website.
7. Scammers peddling Islamophobic clickbait is business as usual at Facebook
A network of scammers used a ring of established right-wing Facebook pages to stoke Islamophobia and make a quick buck in the process, according to a new report from The Guardian. But Devin Coldewey argues that this is less a vast international conspiracy and simply more evidence that Facebook is unable to police its platform to prevent even the most elementary scams. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
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Canva introduces video editing, has big plans for 2020
Canva, the design company with nearly $250 million in funding, has today announced a variety of new features, including a video editing tool.
The company has also announced Canva Apps, which allows developers and customers alike to build on top of Canva. Thus far, Dropbox, Google Drive, PhotoMosh and Instagram are already in the Canva Apps suite, with a total of 30 apps available at launch.
The video editing tool allows for easy editing with no previous experience required, and also offers video templates, access to a stock content library with videos, music, etc. and easy-to-use animation tools.
Meanwhile, Canva is taking the approach of winning customers when they’re young, with the launch of Canva for Education. It’s a totally free product that has launched in beta with Australian schools, integrating with GSuite and Google Classroom to allow students to build out projects, and teachers to mark them up and review them.
Canva has also announced the launch of Canva for Desktop.
As design becomes more important to the way every organization functions and operates, one of the only barriers to the growth of the category is the pace at which new designers can emerge and enter the workforce.
Canva has positioned itself as the non-designer’s design tool, making it easy to create something beautiful with little to no design experience. The launch of the video editing tool and Canva for Education strengthen that stance, not only creating more users for the platform itself but fostering an environment for the maturation of new designers to join the ecosystem as a whole.
Alongside the announcement, Canva CEO Melanie Perkins has announced that Canva will join the 1% pledge, dedicating 1% of equity, profit, time and resources to making the world a better place.
Here’s what she had to say about it, in a prepared statement:
Companies have a huge role to play in helping to shape the world we live in and we feel like the 1% Pledge is an incredible program which will help us to use our company’s time, resources, product and equity to do just that. We believe the old adage ‘do no evil’ is no longer enough today and hope to live up to our value to ‘Be a Force for Good’.
Interestingly, Canva’s position at the top of the design funnel hasn’t slowed growth. Indeed, Canva recently launched Canva for Enterprise to let all the folks in the organization outside of the design department step up to bat and create their own decks, presentations, materials, etc., all within the parameter’s of the design system and brand aesthetic.
A billion designs have been created on Canva in 2019, with 2 billion designs created since the launch of the platform.
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Netflix earmarks $420M to fight Disney in India
Netflix continues to bet heavily on India, one of the world’s largest entertainment markets, where it competes with more than three dozen rivals, including Disney.
Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, said on Friday that the company is on track to spend 30 billion Indian rupees, or $420.5 million, on producing and licensing content in India this year and next.
“This year and next year, we plan to spend about Rs 3,000 crores developing and licensing content and you will start to see a lot of stuff hit the screens,” he said at a conference in New Delhi.
The rare revelation today has quickly become the talk of the town. “This is significantly higher than what we have invested in content over the past years,” an executive at one of the top five rival services told TechCrunch. Another industry source said that no streaming service in India is spending anything close to that figure on just content.
While it remains unclear exactly how much capital other streaming services are pouring into content, a recent KPMG report estimated that Hotstar was spending about $17 million on producing seven original shows this year, while Eros Now had pumped about $50 million into its India business to create 100 new original shows. (The report does not talk about licensing content expenses.)
Netflix, which entered India as part of its global expansion to more than 200 nations and territories in early 2016, has so far produced more than two dozen original shows and movies in the country and inked partnerships with a number of local studios, including actor Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment.
Hastings said several of the shows the company has produced in India, including A-listed cast thriller “Sacred Games” and animated show “Mightly Little Bheem,” have “traveled around the world.” More than 27 million households outside of India, said Hastings, have started to watch “Mighty Little Bheem,” a show aimed at children.
Netflix, which is expected to spend about $15 billion on content globally next year, has never shared the number of subscribers it has in India. (It has over 158 million subscribers globally.) But the company’s financials in the country, where it employs about 100 people, have improved in recent quarters. In the financial year that ended in March, the company posted revenue of $65 million and profit of about $720,000 for its India business.
The big, big, big Indian market
India has emerged as one of the last great growth markets for global technology and entertainment firms. About half of the nation’s 1.3 billion population is now online and the country’s on-demand video market is expected to grow to $5 billion in the next four years, according to Boston Consulting Group.
But the propensity — or the capacity — of most of these internet users to pay for a subscription service remains significantly low. Most services operating in India today generate the majority of their revenue from ads. And others, which rely on a recurring model, are making major changes to their offerings in the nation.
To broaden its reach in the nation, Netflix earlier this year introduced a new monthly price tier — $2.8 — that allows users in India to watch the streaming service in standard quality on a mobile device. (The company has since expanded this offering to Malaysia.)
Netflix competes with more than three dozen on-demand video streaming services in India. Chief among its competitors in the nation is Disney’s Hotstar. Hotstar’s content includes live TV channels, streaming of sports events and thousands of movies and shows, many syndicated from global networks and studios such as HBO and Showtime.
The ad-supported service offers more than 80% of its catalog at no charge to users and charges 999 Indian rupees ($14) a year for its premium tier.
Among the licensed content that Hotstar — or its operator Star India — owns in the country includes rights to stream a number of cricket tournaments. Cricket is incredibly popular in India and has helped Hotstar set global streaming records.
In May this year, Hotstar reported that more than 25 million people simultaneously watched a cricket match on the platform — a global record. The service, at the time, had more than 300 million monthly active users.
Commenting on the competition, Hastings said the next five to 10 years is going to be “the golden age of television” as “unbelievable and unrivaled levels of investment” go into producing content. “They are all investing here in India. We are seeing more content made than ever before. It’s a great export,” he added.
Disney+, the recently launched streaming service from the global content conglomerate, is set to be available in India and Southeast Asian markets next year through Hotstar, TechCrunch reported last month.
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300M-user Imgur launches Melee, a gaming meme app
Ten years after its debut, 300-million-monthly-user Imgur is one of the last massively popular yet unpersonalized home pages on the internet. Because everyone sees the same upvoted posts when they open Imgur, it creates a shared experience full of inside jokes and running gags. But while you can switch to a feed of topics and creators you follow, Imgur has focused on a one-size-fits-all approach over catering to niche audiences.
The gaming community deserved better, and Imgur needed to seize this opportunity. Video and board game tags were the most popular on Imgur, with 46% of users following them. Esports, Twitch and streaming stars like Ninja have gone mainstream. And there’s a whole world of esoteric memes about absurd in-game moments, highlights from epic wins and commentary about the industry. That stuff gets diluted and buried on cross-functional apps like Imgur, is tough to easily browse on Reddit and oftentimes content about all games is mashed together, even though you might only play certain ones.
That’s why today, Imgur is launching Melee, the company’s first app beyond its flagship product. Melee lets users subscribe to the games from which they love to get a feed of memes and gameplay clips. It’s an elegant way to prevent you from seeing jokes you don’t understand or feats of skill you don’t care about. You also can scroll through a popular post’s feed if you’re curious about unfamiliar games. Melee debuts today on iOS, with an Android version coming in Q1 2020 and a desktop version down the road.
“Gamers are constantly taking recordings and screenshots of the games they’re playing,” Imgur founder and CEO Alan Schaaf tells me. “But we found that there’s no place for gamers to share those clips. We want to give these highlights a home.” If 92% of surveyed Imgurians consider themselves “gamers,” and the average one already spends 30 minutes per day on Imgur despite it being a general-purpose image-sharing network, there was clearly room to build something just for them. Schaaf says “Imgur is interested in building things that the internet wants.”
There’s an immediate in-group feel when you play with Melee. Whether you’re into Fortnite, Smash Bros. or Dungeons & Dragons, you can find your people to geek out with. There’s certainly already forums on Reddit, Memedroid and elsewhere dedicated to specific games, but those can get a bit exhausting. Melee keeps things spicy by combining in one feed content about your picks. It’s actually a savvy way to browse any genre of memes. I could see Melee expanding into letting you follow your favorite TV shows, movies and bands… or someone else might with a copy of its format.
I was glad to hear that Imgur took safety seriously with Melee after stumbling into building messaging into its main app without proper protections in 2016. It has multiple layers of community and staff moderation, will remove obscene content and won’t tolerate bullying. That’s critical in the gaming space, which has a nasty habit of turning toxic. If Imgur can keep things on the rails, it plans to monetize Melee with the company’s expertise in display ads.
Eventually, Schaaf hopes Melee can also help up-and-coming game streaming stars find a following, since on Twitch and YouTube they’re often overshadowed by the biggest stars. “If you start a stream today, you have virtually no chance of attracting an audience and competing in this market. Streamers need a place to post their gameplay in order to grow their audience on streaming platforms,” Schaaf tells me. “Melee is that place.” He plans to add more robust profiles and ways for broadcasters to promote their streams in 2020. Viewers will benefit as Melee lets them bypass watching a multi-hour stream just for the best parts.
Imgur remains one of the biggest internet communities no one talks about, despite being a top 15 most popular site in the U.S. according to Alexa. Schaaf bootstrapped the company from his bedroom and beyond for the first five years before taking a $40 million Series A in 2014 from Andreessen Horowitz. Now it’s focusing on becoming a more lucrative business. The startup took a $20 million funding round from strategic partner Coil, which is going to help Imgur launch a premium subscription tier to its free site.
Imgur started at the end of the web era, and took years to build a full-fledged mobile app. Melee is truly mobile first, and offers a lifeboat to Imgur in case its original tribe disperses. It’s a smart way to harness the massive untapped energy of gamers, the way Instagram harnessed our newfound phone cameras. Finally, meme culture is getting purpose-built social networks.
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Finally, an official Craigslist app
Fancy websites and services come and go, but Craigslist endures. And now one of its main shortcomings is fixed: there’s an official app. Currently available for iOS and in beta for Android, the app provides a true-to-form Craigslist experience: useful, unfussy and anonymous.
There isn’t much to say about the app beyond that it faithfully replicates the website, down to the color scheme. All categories of posts are available to browse or search; you can favorite things, save searches and change the way results look. Different categories have their pertinent settings, so when you look for a car you’ll get odometer, model year and so on the way you do on the site.
No account is required at all to browse listings or contact sellers, and conveniently all their contact info pops up easily, letting you email, text or call as desired.
Obviously the web app is still perfectly serviceable, and some may even prefer it. But it’s nice to have a native app, if only to deter the imitation Craigslist apps that piggyback on the popularity of the original no-frills listings.
The app was released yesterday and is already climbing the charts. Grab it today and start looking for free furniture!
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Instagram finally launches 13+ age checkups
Instagram is done playing dumb about users’ ages. After nine years, Instagram is finally embracing more responsibility to protect underage kids from the problems with social media. It will now ask new users to input their birth date and bar users younger than 13 from joining. However, it won’t be asking existing users their age, so Instagram will turn a blind eye to any underage kids already amongst its 1 billion members.
Instagram will later start using age info to offer education about settings and new privacy controls for younger users. It’s also adding the option to only allow people you follow to message you, add you to a group or reply to your Story.
Yesterday we published an opinion piece noting that “Instagram still doesn’t age-check kids. That must change.” after receiving no-comments from Instagram after mobile researcher Jane Manchun Wong spotted Instagram prototyping an age-check feature. As the code she found indicated, Instagram will keep your birthday and date private, and sync it with your Facebook profile if you link your accounts.
Instagram had fallen far behind in protecting underage users. It’s relied on ignorance about users’ ages to avoid a $40,000 fine per violation of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act that bans services from collecting personal info from children younger than 13. “Asking for this information will help prevent underage people from joining Instagram, help us keep young people safer and enable more age-appropriate experiences overall,” Instagram notes.
Facebook, Snapchat and TikTok already require users to enter their birth date as soon as they start the signup process. TikTok built a whole separate section of its app where kids can watch videos but not post or comment, after it was fined $5.7 million by the FTC for violating COPPA.
As for why it took so long, an Instagram spokesperson tells TechCrunch, “Historically, we didn’t require people to tell us their age because we wanted Instagram to be a place where everyone can express themselves fully — irrespective of their identity.” That seems like a pretty thin excuse.
Adding the age check is a good first step for Instagram. But it should consider how it can do more to verify the ages users enter and keep out those who don’t belong exposed to strangers across the app. Moving in line with industry standards is attaining minimum viable responsibility. But an app so appealing to younger users and that deals in such sensitive data should be leading on safety, not just following the herd.
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Android’s ‘Focus Mode’ exits beta, adds new scheduling features
Google is expanding its suite of “Digital Wellbeing” tools for Android devices with a new feature, Focus Mode, launching today. This feature allows users to turn off distractions — like social media updates or email notifications — for a period of time, so you can get things done without interruption. Focus Mode was first announced at Google’s I/O developer conference this May, and has been in beta testing until now, Google says.
Unlike Do Not Disturb, which can mute sounds, stop vibrations and block visual disturbances, Focus Mode is only about silencing specific apps.
Within the Digital Wellbeing settings, users select which apps they find most distracting — like Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, games or anything else that tends to steal their attention. These apps can be paused temporarily, which stops those apps’ notifications. Plus, if you try to open the app, Focus Mode reminds you they’re paused.
During beta testing, Google said tester feedback led to the creation of a new enhancement for Focus Mode: the ability to set a schedule for your app breaks. This allows you to continually block app notifications for the days and times you choose — like your 9 AM to 5 PM working hours, for example.
There’s also a new option to take a break from Focus Mode, which allows you to use the blocked apps for a time, then return to Focus Mode without entirely disabling it to do so. In addition, if you finish your work or other tasks early one day, you can now turn off Focus Mode for that day without breaking its ongoing weekly schedule.
The Focus Mode feature is one of now many investments Google has made into its comprehensive Digital Wellbeing feature set, which was originally introduced at Google I/O 2018 but initially only on Pixel devices. Since then, Google has expanded access to Digital Wellbeing features and further integrated its features — including parent control app Family Link — into the Android OS.
It has also developed digital well-being apps outside of its core Digital Wellbeing product, with October’s launch of a handful of well-being experiments. This set of apps included a notification mailbox, unlock clock and even an easy way to print important information from your phone so you don’t have to keep checking your device throughout the day, among other things.
Elsewhere across Google’s product line it has developed settings and controls devoted to well-being, like YouTube’s reminders to “take a break,” automations for Gmail, downtime settings for Google Home and more.
Google says the new version of Focus Mode exits beta testing today and is rolling out to all devices that support Digital Wellbeing and parental controls, including Android 9 and 10 phones.
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