The CORONA virus pandemic has affected all sectors over the course of 2020;
In addition, clashes between developers, Apple and Google have led to policy changes for both The App Store and Google Play, and technology has also been at the forefront this year in geopolitics, with TikTok becoming the focus of controversy between China and a few countries, led by the United States, among other developments.
Harvest 2020.. The most important developments in the technology world this year:
1- The rise of video conferencing applications:
With everyone at home in response to closures taken by many countries to reduce the spread of THE CORONA virus, video conferencing applications have increased to carry out many actions, such as: communication between family members or teams, online learning, as well as access to medical advice and other uses.
Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams have seen a very high download rate from global users, with more than 62 million downloads downloaded in the third week — from 14 to 21 — in March, according to App Annie.
China tightens its grip on technology companies:
China has introduced new regulations targeting anti-competitive practices in the country's Internet industry, which aims to control how technology companies share consumer data, and to form alliances and acquisitions that limit competition.
China is seeking to limit the growing influence of Chinese technology companies, such as Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, including the Chinese government's suspension in February of ant group's planned $37 billion initial public offering, which was on its way to being the largest in the world, just two days before the start of stock trading in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
3- Facebook launches a supervisory board to oversee it:
After nearly two years of debate and controversy, Facebook has almost completed the creation of a new oversight board, an independent body with the ability to bypass Facebook's most controversial decisions on exciting and controversial content, and the committee will be made up of outside experts — with about 40 members — whose task is to consider users' requests to remove publications or groups from the platform.
As of December, Facebook's oversight board announced six cases to be reviewed to rule whether the removal step was fair, and the committee noted in its official blog that there have been more than 20,000 cases referred to it since last October, and that it will give priority to cases based on the magnitude of the impact on a large number of users.
4- Criticizing Apple's new privacy feature:
Apple has launched a new update for the operating system (iOS 14) iOS 14 contains a new feature that allows the user to control who follows them online, through two options to choose from, one of which: explicit rejection and blocking of any application that tries to track them online in order to collect their personal data to target them with ads, this feature found rejection and strong opposition from technology companies related to their business model ads, which led Apple to postpone its launch to early next year developers to give time to make the necessary changes.
Among the technology companies that objected to this feature is Facebook, which said that this feature will boost Apple's profits more than protect the privacy of users, as it will force developers to charge for subscriptions or in-app purchases, and then Apple will benefit indirectly because it gets commission from in-app purchases in its App Store.
5- Facebook is struggling to launch its digital currency:
Facebook has renamed its digital currency by a new name, Diem, in a renewed effort by the company to win regulatory approval and emphasize the independence of the project, where the company said it acts as a digital currency, provides an alternative to the U.S. dollar and other currencies, and hopes to launch it in 2021 after obtaining regulatory approval.
The new name is an alternative to libra, announced by the company in June 2019, where the company's ambitions to launch its virtual digital currency have found opposition from many countries, including the United States and the European Union, on the grounds of lack of regulations and measures to protect user data, damage to financial stability, and undermine government control over monetary policies.
6- App developers criticize App Store policies:
Complaints against Apple's App Store policies are renewed after video game maker Epic Games, the developer of the popular Fortnite game, merged its payment system into its app store, in defiance of Apple's app store policy, under which the company gets 30% of its first-time in-app purchases and subscriptions.
As a result, many app developers have criticized the commission — though not taking the same step — as too expensive and will undermine their growth, and to avoid further criticism, Apple has reduced the commission to 15% for app developers earning less than $1 million a year, saying, "This is a move to help small developers get more resources for investment and business growth."
7- Developing contact tracking applications:
Many countries have relied on technology to reduce the spread of THE CORONA virus by developing contact tracking technology, with some countries creating their own applications for this, but most have encountered countless problems by providing false data or raising privacy concerns.
As a result, in a rare collaboration between Google and Apple, Google and Apple have jointly developed a technology that allows government health applications to accurately track users via Android and iOS operating systems when they are infected or in contact with mers-CoV, using bluetooth connectivity instead of GPS to enable governments to identify and track people living with HIV using Android and iPhone.
Application wars:
The year 2020 saw many problems with the ban on applications in many countries, with India banning many Chinese applications that reached more than 100 applications due to national security concerns, a few weeks after a border clash between the two nuclear-armed countries broke out in a disputed Himalayan region that killed 20 Indian soldiers.
Similarly, TikTok, owned by China's Bytedance, has faced countless problems in many countries around the world for the pretext of maintaining national security, and the conflict between the U.S. and Chinese governments has reached the point where the administration of outgoing President Donald Trump has asked the authorities to remove it from app stores or sell it to a U.S. company, and the legal battle in the United States continues to this day.
0 Comments