Many users did not receive the feature immediately after it went live even after updating their app several times but now most users across Android and iOS seem to be getting it finally.
This Week in Apps: App Store advertising expands, Google Play plans for safety, Epic v. Apple trial begins
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.
After facing a long suspension, WhatsApp on Wednesday said it is finally launching its Payments service in Brazil as part of a gradual rollout.Brazil s Central Bank had blocked the service in June 2020, citing concerns about competition in the .
(Photo : Pexels/Anton) WhatsApp Pay Brazil
After one year, WhatsApp payments are available in Brazil again. The Facebook-owned chat platform has relaunched the feature in the country.
Brazil served as the launching pad for WhatsApp s mobile payments, then it rolled out in India a few months later, but its central bank forced the service to suspend its payment feature just a few months after its launch.
WhatsApp Payments Back in Brazil
The banking authority only gave WhatsApp the approval to facilitate Visa or Mastercard-backed peer-to-peer payments this March after looking into whether it meets all of the rules regarding competition, efficiency, and data privacy.