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Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

We’re a pre-seed startup thinking about sponsoring an early employee’s H-1B visa to stay in the U.S. and work for us.

How does the process work?

— Seeking in San Mateo

Dear Seeking,

Thank you for granting peace of mind to your employee by planning now for H-1B sponsorship. This step means a lot to professionals early in their careers, many of whom paid full tuition for their U.S. bachelor’s and master’s degrees in order to have this chance.

Your startup can certainly register your employee for the H-1B lottery sometime in Q1 2023, but the government has not yet said when the registration window opens. If your employee is selected in the lottery, your startup can prepare, submit, and pay the required fees to U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for an H-1B filing.

I highly recommend working with an experienced startup immigration attorney to support the process, particularly since USCIS tends to scrutinize early stage companies more. An attorney can help you avoid missteps and submit a strong visa application while staying within your budget.

Consider the level of service you need

Most immigration attorneys charge flat fees for their services, but the fees, level of service, responsiveness, and the amount of counseling and guidance can vary significantly, so look for a law firm that meets your needs. It’s also important to find an attorney you feel comfortable with.

It’s never too early to start preparing

Start assembling the documents you will need to submit as soon as you can. Your startup will need to be incorporated and receive its tax ID number from the I.R.S. to prove that it is capable of sponsoring an individual for an H-1B. This needs to be done before your company submits a Labor Condition Application (LCA), which is also sent to the Labor Department. This application cannot be submitted more than six months before your employee will begin working on an H-1B.

An approved LCA must be submitted with your H-1B petition to USCIS. In addition to your startup’s tax ID, you’ll need some basics such as:

Dear Sophie: When can I register my employee for the H-1B lottery? by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

It may seem like SaaS is everywhere, but there’s one sector that’s been slow to adopt it — manufacturing.

By itself, manufacturing drives almost 11% of the U.S. economy, contributing $2.77 trillion to GDP as of Q2 2022. All that activity also uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of greenhouse gasses. But if manufacturers could wring out extra production from their existing factories, they could go a long way to trimming the sector’s carbon footprint.

SaaS startup Guidewheel’s co-founder and CEO Laura Dunford had previously worked in manufacturing, and she knew just how inefficient plant operations could be. When equipment broke, it was often logged on paper or in spreadsheets, and much of the collation and analysis was done manually. Not only did these tasks take up the plant manager and maintenance staff’s valuable time, they also slowed production because machines were down longer than they needed to be.

Existing systems were “heavyweight and not a perfect fit for our size of operation,” Dunford told TechCrunch. That, along with the potential for energy and carbon savings, was what drove her and her co-founder Weston McBride to start Guidewheel, which allows factories to connect and monitor any piece of equipment from the cloud. TechCrunch has exclusively learned that the company has closed a $9 million Series A-1 led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

“Manufacturers care about whether their equipment is running as it should, because they only make money when their equipment is running and producing,” Dunford said.

“Of course, we’ve seen more and more customers who really care about the energy side. Two reasons there: One is the pressure from investors or customers, or the ability to open up new channels. There’s a lot of excitement. The second is that increasing cost pressure — energy is a big cost for a lot of the manufacturers we work with — has created another tailwind,” she added.

Guidewheel doesn’t lead its sales pitches with the energy savings. Usually, just being able to minimize equipment downtime is more than enough to get customers on board. After that, Dunford said companies continue to find ways to wring more out of their equipment, improving things like runtime, production costs, or overall equipment effectiveness by 10%–20%, sometimes more.

Guidewheel lands $9M Series A-1 for SaaS that boosts manufacturing and trims carbon emissions by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back toEquity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week,Natasha is bringing one of her favorite panels from Disrupt to your ears. She sat down with Clubhouse co-founder and CEO, Paul Davison, to talk about the core of Clubhouse, competition, and the impact of hype.

The conversation touches on the company’s hyper growth, celebrity power, and navigating social platforms and social patterns, with a round of questions from the audience at the end. If you love the conversation, share it with a friend. And if you want more on Clubhouse, Natasha dove deeper into the conversation here.

Equity drops every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us onApple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has agreat show on crypto, ashow that interviews founders, ashow that details how our stories come togetherand more!

The impact of hype with Clubhouse’s Paul Davison by Theresa Loconsolo originally published on TechCrunch

Global payments giant Visa says it will invest $1 billion by 2027 to expand its investments in Africa amidst a digital payments boom on the continent.

Visa chief Al Kelly announced this pledge on Wednesday during the U.S.-Africa Business Forum, a sub-event in the broader U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, a three-day event where U.S. President Joe Biden invited heads of state and senior government officials from Africa to discuss several issues ranging from food security to climate change.

“Visa has been investing in Africa for several decades to grow a truly local business, and today our commitment to the continent remains as firm and unwavering as ever,” said the Visa CEO in a statement. “Every day, Visa supports digital commerce and money movement in every country across the continent, and Africa remains central to Visa’s long-term growth plans. We look forward to continuing to work closely with our partners to advance the financial ecosystem, accelerate digitization and to build resilient, innovative, and inclusive economies that will create shared opportunity and further spur Africa’s digital economy.”

Per the statement, the pledge will further scale Visa’s operations in Africa and deepen collaboration with strategic partners, including governments, financial institutions, mobile network operators, fintechs and merchants.

There are currently over 500 million people in Africa that are underbanked or unbanked, less than 50% of the continent’s adult population have made or received digital payments and more than 40 million merchants do not accept digital payments, according to Visa. After several years of investing via various partnerships and thus playing a significant part in Africa’s current digital payments boom, the payment giant believes this new investment, spread over five years, will further facilitate additional opportunities to expand financial inclusion on the continent.

“Africa is experiencing an unprecedented digital acceleration, with a growing number of consumers, merchants and businesses realizing the benefits of secure and convenient digital payments to fuel commerce and money movement,” said Aida Diarra, the senior vice president of Visa sub-Saharan Africa. “Over the past year, Visa has continued growing our investment in Africa through new offices, new innovations and solutions, and programs that are directly supporting financial inclusion. The investment pledge outlines our long-term commitment to Africa and the work we will do to help advance the financial ecosystem.”

As Diarra stressed, Visa, as part of its commitment to seeing the continued growth of digital payments (including the immense opportunity crypto payments) in Africa, has increased its number of offices across the continent to 10, recently establishing local operations for the first time in Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. These offices support payments in 54 countries, Visa noted. Other strategic investments underscored by the firm to advance its Africa expansion include opening an innovation studio in Nairobi this April; introducing newer options for consumers and merchants to make and receive payments, such as the Tap to Phone; integrating Visa Direct, its global money movement network, into African solutions; and running the Visa Everywhere Initiative program, where various African startups have showcased their payment innovations.

Visa to invest $1B in Africa over the next five years by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

Redwood Materials said Wednesday it will build a new battery materials and recycling facility on a 600-acre campus near Charleston, South Carolina that will eventually employ 1,500 people and make enough cathode and anodes components to supply one million EVs annually.

Little is known about the incentives deal the company struck with the state. However, Redwood, a battery materials and recycling startup founded by former Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel, has agreed to spend at least $3.5 billion in the area within the decade. Notably, the company said its entire South Carolina operations will be 100% electric and won’t use any fossil fuel in its processes. Straubel emphasized to TechCrunch that they are not even pulling a gas line to the site.

The campus located at Camp Hall in Berkeley County will produce 100 GWh of cathode and anode components per year, the company said, which is enough to power more than one million EVs. Lithium-ion batteries contain three critical building blocks. There are two electrodes, an anode (negative) on one side and a cathode (positive) on the other. Typically, an electrolyte sits in the middle and acts as the courier to move ions between the electrodes when charging and discharging. Cathode foils, which account for more than half the cost of a battery cell, contain lithium, nickel and cobalt. Redwood is able to capture all of those materials through its battery recycling and processing.

Redwood added that there’s potential to expand its operations at the site to several hundred GWh annually to meet future demand. And that might happen considering the growth in EV industry and the site’s proximity to Redwood’s existing partners like Toyota, Volvo, Panasonic and Envision AESC, all of which have a strong foothold in this region.

Redwood plans to break ground in the first quarter of 2023 on its phased buildout. The company aims to have its recycling process running by the end of 2023 with anode and cathode component production to follow.

The announcement highlights the explosive growth within Redwood Materials, which last year raised $700 million in a Series C round led by funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates and that included Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Baillie Gifford, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Fidelity.

Earlier this year, Redwood landed a multibillion-dollar deal to supply Panasonic Energy of North America with cathode material for battery cells produced at a new factory currently under construction in Kansas. The new $4 billion Panasonic factory, which will be larger than the Tesla Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, is expected to begin mass production of its “2170” cylindrical lithium-ion batteries by March 2025.

Today’s announcement is also reflective of a bustling battery ecosystem that has expanded as automakers scramble to lock in supply chain as EV production ramps up.

While factories are popping up globally, it’s been particularly active in North America. That pace of new battery facility announcements in North America has accelerated since the August 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, a massive bill that includes number of climate and energy provisions as well as places new domestic production and material sourcing requirements on EVs to qualify for a $7,500 federal tax credit.

“The Inflation Reduction Act has really accelerated even what was already a fast process of a lot of companies locating or expanding battery production in the U.S., Straubel told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “You’re now seeing announcements every week and a good number of those are landing in the Southeast, or the so-called ‘battery belt’ between Michigan and Georgia.”

Redwood Materials is headquartered in Carson City, Nevada, where several years ago it began recycling the scrap from battery cell production at the Sparks, Nevada Gigafactory then extracting and processing materials like cobalt, nickel and lithium that are typically mined, and then supplying them back to Panasonic.

Redwood Materials to build multibillion-dollar factory in the U.S. “battery belt” by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

In 2005, three entrepreneurs — Vadim Vladimirskiy, Stuart Gabel and Niall Keegan — co-founded Adar, a Chicago-based company providing “streaming IT” and IT-as-a-service products mainly to small- and medium-sized businesses. Just over a decade later, Adar created an internal division, Nerdio, focused on helping other managed service providers move their customers to the cloud.

Recognizing an opportunity for further growth, Vladimirskiy and Nerdio’s co-founder, former Microsoft exec Joseph Landes, decided to spin-off Nerdio as a separate company and sell Adar to a private equity firm in January 2020. They contributed significantly to Nerdio’s first funding round in February of that year, which proved to be a wise bet. Nerdio today closed a $117 million Series B round led by Updata Partners that brings the company’s total raised to $125 million.

Vladimirskiy, speaking to TechCrunch via email, said the proceeds will be put toward Nerdio’s customer acquisition, product R&D and hiring efforts. “The market timing for this investment is ideal,” he added. “As many businesses are coming out of the pandemic with a new affinity for hybrid and remote work, modern technologies that can best enable the secure and efficient delivery and management of digital workspaces are in high demand.”

Nerdio’s platform lets customers deploy, manage and cost-optimize virtual desktops running in Microsoft Azure, extending the capabilities of Azure Virtual Desktop, Microsoft’s cloud-based system for virtualizing Windows. With auto-scaling, “license optimization,” security and compliance, and monitoring and reporting features beyond what Microsoft offers natively, Vladimirskiy claims that Nerdio can deliver significant cost savings while “non-disruptively” layering on top of existing Azure Virtual Desktop deployments. (Nerdio runs in a customer’s own Azure subscription as an Azure-based application.)

“With Nerdio, every deployment or management task in Azure Virtual Desktop can be done in a few clicks and by any level of IT staff,” Vladimirskiy said. “With powerful policy and access management features and RBAC roles, we’re providing a safety net for organizations employing the future generation of IT to fully grasp the power and value of Azure without getting lost in its complexities.”

Vladimirskiy said that business really took off during the pandemic as enterprises, affected by pandemic-related shutdowns and the subsequent move to hybrid and remote work, began to explore virtual desktop solutions for their workforces. Survey data illustrates the dramatic shift. A 2020 poll by TrustRadius, the business tech review site, found that over 50% of businesses expected to increase their spending on remote desktop software into the next year.

Between February 2020 and this month, Nerdio experienced an astounding 2,000% increase in annual recurring revenue, according to Vladimirskiy, and now has more than 5,000 customers, including managed service providers and system integrators. Meanwhile, Nerdio’s pool of channel partners grew to more than 1,000.

“[During the pandemic,] everyone, all at once, had to find solutions that allowed their workforce to continue working and to do so securely from their homes. As such, both manage service provider and enterprise adoption have been significant,” Vladimirskiy said. “We have been able to maintain capital efficiency and ensure we’re set up for success, even during times of economic uncertainty.”

It likely helps that Nerdio has a close working relationship with Microsoft. The startup has a number of Microsoft veterans on its board of directors, including Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft’s former head of global channnel partners, and it’s regularly featured in the tech giant’s marketing materials.

It also helps that Azure Virtual Desktop is seeing swift uptake, in spite of competition from incumbents like VMware and Citrix. An early 2022 survey from eG Innovations and AVD TechFest of around 500 organizations found that 58% intend to have Azure Virtual Desktop installations running within two years. The survey suggests that Azure Virtual Desktop is finding a niche with small businesses that normally wouldn’t consider Citrix or VMware because of cost or other constraints.

“In the managed service provider space, we don’t really see anyone else out there providing managed service providers the custom capabilities we do around cost and time management and scalability,” Vladimirskiy said. “Not only do we make Azure and its virtual desktop services palatable from a time and resource perspective — with Nerdio, every deployment or management task in Azure Virtual Desktop can be done in a few clicks and by any level of IT staff — but we address arguably the biggest inhibitor to adoption of these native technologies, which is cost.”

Nerdio, based in Skokie, Illinois, currently has a team of 100, which it plans to roughly double next year.

Nerdio lands $117M to build management tools on top of Azure Virtual Desktop by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Deepika Padukone’s skincare startup 82°E, pronounced Eighty Two East, said Wednesday it has raised $7.5 million in seed funding, as the Bollywood star makes further push into the startup world.

DSG Consumer Partners and IDEO Ventures are among those who backed 82°E, said the startup, which began offering self-care products such as moisturisers and sunscreen drops to consumers in over 30 countries last month.

82°E says its products are formulated in-house by R&D experts and feature “time-tested Indian ingredients.”

“Jigar [Shah, the other co-founder] and I envisioned this brand as an extension of my personal as well as professional journey,” said Padukone in a statement.

“We set out to launch products which are high-quality, high-performing and an authentic reflection of my beliefs and practices. In this endeavour, we aim to make the practice of self-care simple, joyful and effective for all. With our launch category of skincare products, we have rigorously sourced, carefully crafted and clinically tested our products to achieve lasting results. I am honoured to have investors of global repute join us in our vision to establish 82°E as a modern self-care brand born in India for the world.”

The tech-savvy star, who is among the highest paid actresses in India, has emerged as a prolific investor in recent years. In 2017, she launched KA Enterprises, a fully-owned holding company, through which she has backed several startups including unicorn online beauty store Purplle, satellite, aerospace manufacturing firm Bellatrix, yoghurt firm Epigamia and pet store Supertails.

Bollywood stars and cricketers including Shahid Kapoor, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Virat Kohli, Anushka Sharma, Hardik Pandya, and Priyanka Chopra have made over a dozen investments in recent years, sometimes in a sweat equity arrangement where they endorse the brand and collect part of the fee as shares.

Bollywood star Deepika Padukone’s skincare startup attracts VC backing by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

EnCharge AI, a company building hardware to accelerate AI processing at the edge, today emerged from stealth with $21.7 million in Series A funding led by Anzu Partners, with participation from AlleyCorp, Scout Ventures, Silicon Catalyst Angels, Schams Ventures, E14 Fund and Alumni Ventures. Speaking to TechCrunch via email, co-founder and CEO Naveen Verma said that the proceeds will be put toward hardware and software development as well as supporting new customer engagements.

“Now was the right time to raise because the technology has been extensively validated through previous R&D all the way up the compute stack,” Verma said. “[It] provides both a clear path to productization (with no new technology development) and basis for value proposition in customer applications at the forefront of AI, positioning EnCharge for market impact … Many edge applications are in an emerging phase, with the greatest opportunities for value from AI still being defined.”

Encharge AI was ideated by Verma, Echere Iroaga and Kailash Gopalakrishnan. Verma is the director of Princeton’s Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education while Gopalakrishnan was (until recently) an IBM fellow, having worked at the tech giant for nearly 18 years. Iroaga, for his part, previously led semiconductor company Macom’s connectivity business unit as both VP and GM.

EnCharge has its roots in federal grants that Verma received in 2017 alongside collaborators at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. An outgrowth of DARPA’s ongoing Electronics Resurgence Initiative, which aims to broadly advance computer chip tech, Verma led an $8.3-million effort to investigate new types of non-volatile memory devices.

In contrast to the “volatile” memory prevalent in today’s computers, non-volatile memory can retain data without a continuous power supply, making it theoretically more energy efficient. Flash memory and most magnetic storage devices, including hard disks and floppy disks, are examples of non-volatile memory.

DARPA also funded Verma’s research into in-memory computing for machine learning computations — “in-memory,” here, referring to running calculations in RAM to reduce the latency introduced by storage devices.

EnCharge was launched to commercialize Verma’s research with hardware built on a standard PCIe form factor. Using in-memory computing, EnCharge’s custom plug-in hardware can accelerate AI applications in servers and “network edge” machines, Verma claims, while reducing power consumption relative to standard computer processors.

In iterating the hardware, EnCharge’s team had to overcome several engineering challenges. In-memory computing tends to be sensitive to voltage fluctuations and temperature spikes. So EnCharge designed its chips using capacitors rather than transistors; capacitors, which store an electrical charge, can be manufactured with greater precision and aren’t as affected by shifts in voltage.

EnCharge also had to create software that let customers adapt their AI systems to the custom hardware. Verma says that the software, once finished, will allow EnCharge’s hardware to work with different types of neural networks (i.e. sets of AI algorithms) while remaining scalable.

“EnCharge products provide orders-of-magnitude gains in energy efficiency and performance,” Verma said. “This is enabled by a highly robust and scalable next-generation technology, which has been demonstrated in generations of test chips, scaled to advanced nodes and scaled-up in architectures. EnCharge is differentiated from both digital technologies that suffer from existing memory- and compute-efficiency bottlenecks and beyond-digital technologies that face fundamental technological barriers and limited validation across the compute stack.”

Those are lofty claims, and it’s worth noting that EnCharge hasn’t begun to mass produce its hardware yet — and doesn’t have customers lined up. (Verma says that the company is pre-revenue.) In another challenge, EnCharge is going up against well-financed competition in the already saturated AI accelerator hardware market. Axelera and GigaSpaces are both developing in-memory hardware to accelerate AI workloads. NeuroBlade last October raised $83 million for its in-memory inference chip for data centers and edge devices. Syntiant, not to be outdone, is supplying in-memory, speech-processing AI edge chips.

But the funding it has managed to secure so far suggests that investors, at least, have faith in EnCharge’s roadmap.

“As Edge AI continues to drive business automation, there is huge demand for sustainable technologies that can provide dramatic improvements in end-to-end AI inference capability along with cost and power efficiency,” Anzu Partners’ Jimmy Kan said in a press release. “EnCharge’s technology addresses these challenges and has been validated successfully in silicon, fully compatible with volume production.”

EnCharge has roughly 25 employees and is based in Santa Clara.

EnCharge AI emerges from stealth with $21.7M to develop AI accelerator hardware by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Today, Tinder launched a new “Relationship Goals” feature that allows users to display their dating goals on their profile, whether they’re looking for a “long-term partner,” “long-term, but open to short-term,” “short-term, but open to long,” “short-term fun,” “new friends,” or “still figuring it out.”

Tinder’s new addition aims to help users find connections that better align with what they’re looking for. Users can go to settings to add a Relationship Goal to their profile. As shown in the image above, each option comes with an emoji and is displayed as a colorful banner on the top of your profile, above the “About Me” section. The app will also have new weekly check-in prompts to remind users that they can change their Relationship Goals selection if their opinion on dating has shifted.

Starting today, the feature is starting to roll out to users in many countries, including the U.S., and will become available to everyone on January 5, 2023.

“This feature was developed in response to a shift we’ve seen among our members. Young singles, who make up a majority of Tinder, are increasingly becoming more intentional with who they spend their time with. In fact, 72% of Tinder members said they’re looking for someone who knows what they want,” Kyle Miller, Vice President of Core Product at Tinder, said in a statement.

When testing “Relationship Goals,” Tinder found that over 50% of users opted to use the feature option on their profile, the company wrote in today’s announcement.

Match Group, which owns Tinder, launched a similar profile feature on Hinge earlier this year called “Dating Intentions,” letting users display on their profile what they want in a relationship, such as “life partner,” “long-term,” “long-term, open to short-term,” “short-term, open to long-term,” “short-term” and “figuring out my dating goals.”

Tinder now has these same options, except for “life partner,” which was replaced with “new friends” and “short-term fun,” since Tinder is often used for hookups and situationships. According to Tinder’s 2022 “Year in Swipe” report, more than half of Tinder users are 18-25 years old, with many young daters swaying towards casual dating—a.k.a. situationships.

More recently, Tinder’s sister dating app, Hinge, launched a “Relationship Type” feature that allows users to add either “monogamous,” “non-monogamous” or “figuring out my relationship type” to their profiles. It’s unknown if Tinder plans to launch a similar feature. However, this could help non-monogamous users find like-minded matches on more traditional dating apps that tend to skew towards monogamous dating.

Tinder launches ‘Relationship Goals’ to follow in sister dating app Hinge’s footsteps by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

After vehemently fighting ‘sideloading’ alternative app stores on the iPhone, Apple is now apparently looking to allow them with iOS 17, which will come out next year, to comply with European laws. The report from Bloomberg also noted that Apple is exploring opening up its camera and NFC (Near Field Communication) stack to developers.

Apple’s walled-garden approach has so far mandated that iPhone users must only download apps from Apple’s own App Store. Android, on the other hand, allows users to install third-party app stores on their devices.

The Bloomberg report states that Apple’s sideloading project has already started under the company’s engineering VP Andreas Wendker, who reports to Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior VP of Software Engineering. The project also reportedly involves senior executives such as Jeff Robbin and Eddie Cue.

Europe’s Digital Market Act (DMA) will come into effect next year, and companies will have until 2024 to comply. Under the new rules, Big Tech must allow alternative app stores on their platforms to provide users with more choice, and it’s likely that Apple is now preparing to comply.

Apple has already committed to supporting USB-C due to the EU’s push to standardize charging ports. Now, with the DMA on the horizon, this could force the Cupertino-based company to allow sideloading too.

A win for developers?

If Apple opens to other app stores, developers won’t have to pay a 30% (or in some cases 15%) fee to the tech giant for in-app purchases. This could appease a lot of companies — including Spotify, Tinder/ Match Group, and lately, Twitter — who have criticized Apple’s fee structure.

Apple currently allows some developers to use third-party payment systems in certain markets — for example, all developers in South Korea and dating app developers in the Netherlands. However, they still have to pay Apple a hefty fee.

If the DMA forces Apple to allow third-party app stores in the EU, there is every chance that regulators elsewhere will follow suit, and Apple’s current work to enable sideloading in iOS 17 could be extended to support other jurisdictions too.

This news comes as Portugal-based Aptoide, an alternative app store for Android, is launching an iOS version for jailbreakers. The company’s co-founder and CEO Paulo Trezentos told TechCrunch that he believes Apple will indeed open to third-party app stores.

The Bloomberg report also noted that the new EU rule could strong-arm Apple into opening up more parts of its ecosystem, including the camera, NFC stack, and browser engine.

Currently, all browsers on iPhone, including Chrome and Firefox, have to use Apple’s WebKit engine. But Apple is considering removing that construct. We might have to wait for Apple’s official announcement to see how other engines could work on iOS and what features that could enable in other browsers.

Opening up the NFC stack could mean that aside from Apple Pay, other payment companies could integrate their services for tap-to-pay. Apple has already faced criticism from the EU, which said in February that a standard tech for contactless payment like NFC should be open to all providers. This could allow Apple’s competitors like Stripe and Square to build their own integrated solutions for iPhone.

Apple’s reluctance

Apple’s executives have constantly opined how bad sideloading would be for user’ security. It even introduced a developer mode in iOS 16 to prevent users from “inadvertently installing potentially harmful software on their devices.” Issues including sideloading and App Store fees have been the center of focus in Apple’s long-standing Epic fight too.

In both Netherlands and South Korea, where Apple has been forced to open its platform just a little, the company has made it arduous for developers to adopt third-party payment systems. It mandated that app makers must show elaborate warnings to users when they are about to use an alternative payment system, and in some cases, Apple has asked them to submit a separate app file for a particular market.

While it’s technically complying with local regulators’ rules, the company is creating friction so that developers reconsider switching their payment system.

Similarly, if Apple does open things up to comply with EU regulation for iOS 17, it could choose to make life difficult for both developers and consumers, meaning that only the most technologically savvy users will choose to sideload. What’s more, the company could display banners and warnings about using third-party app store, deterring would-be switchers from sticking with Apple’s App Store.

The Coalition for App Fairness — a collective fighting against Big Tech platforms such as Apple and Google for fairer distribution, with members like Basecamp, Match Group, and Spotify — said in a statement that the reports about Apple allowing sideloading “is an admission that they have a chokehold on the competition.”

“It is clear that Apple will only yield their control over the distribution of apps on iOS devices, and their exertion of gatekeeper power within the App Store, in response to pressure from policymakers. The European Union’s passage of the Digital Markets Act is forcing Apple’s hand, and strong enforcement of the law is vital to leveling the playing field for developers in the mobile application ecosystem,” it said.

The organization urged lawmakers in the U.S. to take note and pass the Open App Markets Act (OAMA) — which could force Apple and Google to allow third-party app stores, sideloading, and alternative payment systems — as quickly as possible. Epic’s Tim Sweeney threw his hat into the ring too, urging Congress to step up and follow Europe’s lead.

Apple didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s questions at the time of publishing, but will update here if or when we hear back.

Apple will reportedly allow sideloading apps with iOS 17 by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch