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Today, Apple announced its list of App Store award winners for this year along with the top chart for most downloaded apps and games across free and paid categories. These awards include apps for all of the company’s platforms including the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple TV. For 2022, the social network app BeReal won the app of the year award for iPhone, while the notetaking app GoodNotes 5 won the crown for the best iPad app.

Synium Software GmbH’s MacFamilyTree 10 — a visual family tree exploration app —was noted as the top Mac of the year; TelevisaUnivision Interactive’s Vix streaming service was awarded the top Apple TV app for elevating Spanish-language stories; and Gentler Stories’ Gentler Streak, an exercise and fitness tracker, was awarded the best Apple Watch app of the year.

Electronic Arts’ Apex Legends Mobile snagged the top iPhone game award while X.D. Network Inc.’s Moncage got the top iPad game title. Other gaming winners include Inscryption from Devolver for Mac, El Hijo from HandyGames for Apple TV, and “Wylde Flowers” from Studio Drydock for Apple Arcade. Shenzhen Tencent Tianyou Technology’s League of Legends Esports Manager won the China app of the year.

BeReal was a social media sleeper hit this year forcing giants like TikTok and Instagram to ape the format. The France-based company originally launched the app in 2020. But its format of getting an alert at random times of the day to post a photo combining front and back cameras within two minutes became popular this year. It’s a stark departure that a social app won the best crown app this year as compared to the last two years’ top apps “Toca Life World” (a Kids’ app) and “WakeOut!” (a workout app). In its blog post for awards, Apple described BeReal as an app to provide”an authentic look into the lives of their family and friends.”

“This year’s App Store Award winners reimagined our experiences with apps that delivered fresh, thoughtful, and genuine perspectives,” CEO Tim Cook said in a statement, “From self-taught solo creators to international teams spanning the globe, these entrepreneurs are making a meaningful impact, and represent the ways in which apps and games influence our communities and lives.”

Last year, Apple had a bonus section called “Apps that brought us together.” So this year, it has introduced a “Cultural Impact” section to honor some apps that had a “lasting impact on people’s lives and influenced culture.” The list includes How We Feel Project’s How We Feel app for logging in daily emotion-based check-ins; Rise-Home Stories Project’s Home Stories Project to highlight stories of systemic housing injustices and their impact on people of color; Locket Labs’ Locket Widget to allow live photo sharing between friends and family through a home screen widget; Vitalii Mogylevets’s hydration tracking app Waterllama; and ARTE Experience’s Inua – A Story in Ice and Time to explore historical events from Inuit tradition.

App Store has had a challenging 2022 with an impact on revenue and regulatory battles. It had to allow developers to use third-party systems for in-app purchases in regions including South Koreaand the Netherlands (just for dating apps). The U.S. and the EU are also looking at ways to control app distribution monopolies across different app stores. These regulations could force Apple to loosen some rules around how it allows app distribution and payments on the App Store.

In March, Apple allowed “reader apps” — apps that give users access to digital content like music, books, and videos — to include external links for users to create and manage their accounts. In June, the company relaxed some of its rules around binary content in the app, using HTML5, and lottery and donation-related apps. In October, it cracked down on NFT functionality within apps, restricting developers from using digital collectibles to unlock new features. Plus, it also mandated that any NFTs purchase system must you Apple’s in-app purchase mechanism, and give a commission to the company. It also updated its guidelines to specify that it will take a cut for buying social media post boosts within the app.

Apple also released the top downloaded apps and games across free and paid categories for the year. Here are the top apps in the US:

Apple announces winners of the App Store Awards for 2022 by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Most large restaurant chains across Africa have grown accustomed to using legacy systems and point-of-sale providers to manage operations. However, for smaller restaurants — which represent the biggest segment of this $50 billion industry — these systems can be rather expensive and do not adequately cater to their needs; thus, they stick with running operations manually.

Orda, a Nigerian food tech platform that provides a cloud-based restaurant operating system to solve these issues for small, independent restaurants, is announcing that it has secured a $3.4 million seed investment. The two-year-old startup raised $1.1 million in pre-seed funding this January, bringing its total funding raised this year to $4.5 million.

Its clients are mostly small and medium-sized restaurants. With limited access to technology, these restaurants typically resort to using offline methods, including pen and paper, for things like manual reconciliation and inventory management. Orda’s operating system allows these businesses to handle these parts of their business online, as well as get access to other features, including kitchen display systems, accounting software and integrations with food aggregators such as YC-backed Chowdeck, Bolt Food and Glovo.

“We take an interesting approach to software and helping restaurant owners set up,” chief executive officer Guy Futi told TechCrunch in an interview. “Our software digitizes the process of those who write things in hand and helps them figure out their inventory management and recipe yields.”

Futi said Orda has witnessed tremendous adoption among small restaurants in its two markets, Nigeria and Kenya, and claims the startup might have reached product-market fit already. His conviction lies in the number of vendors it has pulled in, about 600, and the pace at which the food tech onboarded them, in less than a year.

The chief executive said there are “hundreds more” in the pipeline waiting to be onboarded, as Orda plans to serve more than 1,000 restaurants by the end of Q1 2022. Orda’s transactions have also increased too. It now processes over 50,000 orders weekly for its vendors, 5x what it recorded as of this January, with its gross merchandise value (GMV) increasing 30% month-on-month. “We’re seeing fast-paced growth in Nigeria and Kenya with a retention rate of above 95%,” Futi added.

Orda’s pricing model allows restaurants to choose between three payment plans: N1,000 (~$1.54), N5,000 (~$7.69) and N20,000 (~$30.76) to access different parts of the software, ranging from order management and an omnichannel to integrations with food aggregators and delivery platforms and setup personnel. Revenue has increased as a result, growing 30% month-on-month, according to Futi.

Despite this growth, building solutions for these African restaurants, especially without a playbook, has come with its fair share of constraints. For instance, Orda has had to configure its cloud-based solution to work offline and let restaurants continue to log data in times when internet access is poor.

Meanwhile, Orda intends to add more functionalities to the platform, particularly around financial products as it looks to power lending and payments for its customers. The platform already processes payments for 10% of its vendors, according to Futi, and might begin a major rollout by Q2 next year.

Building and scaling out its payments feature is one of the food tech’s objectives with this new investment. Others include expanding its network of restaurants and continuing its pan-African expansion drive (into South Africa and much later, Ivory Coast). It has beefed up its leadership team to that effect, bringing personnel: Afua Ahwoi, head of operations and strategy (ex-Goldman Sachs) and Modesola Osasomi, head of growth (ex-Barclays Bank) for its next growth phase.

Africa’s food tech platforms, despite playing in a nascent ecosystem, are catching the eye of investors these days. In addition to the aforementioned Glovo and Jumia Food, newer upstarts such as Chowdeck and Foodcourt, which help restaurants make online deliveries, have received backing from global investors like Y Combinator, while others like Vendease, OneOrder and TopUp Mama that provide food supplies to restaurants and handle their supply chains have raised significant capital themselves.

Asked whether Orda intends to venture into these other categories, Futi said that such a business decision wouldn’t be ideal as it will veer the startup off its course of building software. “Globally, you see that Sysco isn’t in the same vertical as Toast,” said the founder who launched the startup with Fikayo Akinwale, Mark Edomwande, Kunle Ogungbamilaand Namir El-Khouri. “If there’s some sort of collaboration with other players, we’ll be open to that. But from our position, building the right software takes you deep down the rabbit hole and that requires focus.”

Emerging market investor Quona Capital co-led the round with New York-based FinTech Collective. Other investors include existing ones such as LoftyInc Capital, Enza Capital and Norrsken Foundation, as well as new venture capital firms like Outside VC and Far Out Ventures.

Here’s what Kofoworola Agbaje, senior investment associate at Quona Capital, said on why her firm is backing the food tech: “When a restaurant owner moves from pen and paper to a fully automated digital platform, it’s incredibly empowering. Suddenly they have insights available to them that can improve their productivity and margins, enabling them to grow their businesses. A solution like Orda can have an outsized impact on small and medium-sized restaurants and the livelihoods of those who operate them.”

Orda raises millions to digitize African restaurants with its cloud-based operating system by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch

If your favorite music festival’s lineup didn’t live up to your expectations this year, don’t worry; a new app called Instafest will create a music festival poster for you based on your Spotify listening habits.

The free web app, created by developer Anshay Saboo, is pretty straightforward to use: sign in with your Spotify account, and it will generate a poster based on the artists to whom you most listened. You can customize the poster based on time intervals — last four weeks, last six months, and all time.

You can also select different styles of posters such as Malibu Sunrise, LA Twilight, and Mojave Dusk. Instafest app also calculates what it calls “Basic Score,” that might give you bragging rights about the niche music choice. The lower the score, the more niche your music festival is.

Once you generate the poster, you can choose to rename your music festival, hide/show your username, and hide/show your Basic Score. If you want to remove support for this app, you can follow this guide to revoke access.

Saboo told TechCrunch that he got the idea of the app while thinking about what Coechella’s lineup would look like if he picked the artists.

“I had the idea when I was in bed scrolling through TikTok one day, I saw people were posting videos from Coachella and I started thinking about how I would set the Coachella lineup if I could pick the artists. The thought process led to me thinking about generating a music festival graphic using a Spotify integration, and I built off from there,” he said

The developer is already working on adding support for more platforms. The site already lets you generate a festival poster using your Last.fm listening history and support for Apple Music support is in the works. Saboo wants to add support for music streaming services such as YouTube Music, Deezer, and Amazon Music down the road, he said, but cautioned that it may take some time as not every platform’s APIs are as friendly as those of Spotify.

Saboo is currently focusing on maintaining the app and adding more integration that makes sharing users’ festival lineups more fun. He said while it’s too early to comment on long-term plans, he is exploring possibilities of making a music-based social network around festival graphics generation.

Within hours of launch, Instafest has become a popular talking point on social media. Folks are posting their lineup to show off their good (or trash) taste in music. Saboo told TechCrunch that more than 5 million people have generated their Instafest poster.

The Instafest app seems like a mirror version of the Lineupsupply app, which lets you create playlists through music festival posters. So, if you like someone’s Instafest poster, you can use the LineupSupply app to make a playlist.

The app’s launch comes days before Spotify releases its Wrapped for users — showing customized listening habits across music and podcasts for each user — drops. So in a way, this feels like a Spotify Wrapped before Spotify Wrapped.

Instafest app lets you create your own festival lineup from Spotify by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch