Virtual phone number apps are gaming the App Store with duplicates

If you’ve searched the App Store for an app to get a second phone number, chances are you found dozens of apps with very little differences. A handful of companies are spamming the App Store with duplicated apps. This strategy is against Apple’s rules.

The App Store Review Guidelines are detailed rules that define what you can and cannot do on the App Store. As soon as you sign up for a developer account and submit an app to the App Store review team, you agree to comply with those rules. It’s a long document, but the rule 4.3 titled “Spam” is straightforward:

Don’t create multiple Bundle IDs of the same app. If your app has different versions for specific locations, sports teams, universities, etc., consider submitting a single app and provide the variations using in-app purchase. Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, and Kama Sutra apps already. Spamming the store may lead to your removal from the Developer Program.

A tipster looked at a specific category in the App Store — VoIP apps that let you get a second phone number, send and receive calls and texts from that new number. I looked at that category myself and here are the results of my investigation.

Companies don’t even try to hide the fact that have submitted multiple versions of the same app with different names and icons. But core features remain the same. Apple hasn’t enforced its own guideline properly and developers took advantage of that grey area.

Example 1: TextMe

As you can see on the company’s website, TextMe currently operates three apps and is open about it — TextMe Up, TextMe and FreeTone. These three apps all have an average of 4.7 stars in the App Store with hundreds of thousands of reviews in total.

The wording is slightly different for each app. TextMe Up lets you “call & text anyone in the world from your mobile, tablet, and computer”, while TextMe lets you “get a new phone number and start texting and making calls for free” and FreeTone is all about “[enjoying] free calls & texts to the phone numbers in the US and Canada”.

But if you look at the App Store screenshots, the company doesn’t even bother changing the screenshots or marketing copy.

“Our apps have a different marketing target,” TextMe, Inc. co-founder and co-CEO Patrice Giami told me in a phone interview. “They share the same code base, but we can activate or deactivate some features in order to differentiate the apps. We manage that depending on the competitive environment and if we need to optimize distribution.”

Giami also believes that his company complies with the App Store guidelines. “Apple is doing a very systematic review — we’re constantly scrutinized because we release a lot of app updates. We’ve never been flagged or contacted by Apple — they’ve never said that we’re releasing complete clones of the same app,” he said.

TextMe uses the same developer account for its three apps, Text Me, Inc. Apple could easily compare those apps if it wanted to.

Example 2: BinaryPattern and Flexible Numbers LLC

This case is a bit more sophisticated. The company behind those apps has two different developer accounts and tried to differentiate its App Store listings a bit. Similarly, buttons and colors slightly vary from app to another, but it’s the same feature set.

Here are a few screenshots I took:

Texting/Calling Phone Burner

Smiley Private Texting SMS

Texting Shield – Phone Number

Burner Phone Numbers SMS/Calls

Business Line Phone Number

I’ve reached out to BinaryPattern/Flexible Numbers and haven’t heard back.

Example 3: Appsverse Inc.

This time, Phoner, Second Line and Text Burner all share the same developer account. Even though these apps let you do the same thing, Appsverse has released its app in three different App Store categories — utilities, productivity and social networking.

By doing that, the company’s apps appear in multiple categories. Text Burner is #88 in social networking, Second Line is #74 in productivity and Phoner is #106 in utilities.

It seems a bit counterintuitive as Appsverse splits their downloads between multiple apps. But I believe the main reason the company is releasing multiple apps is for keyword optimization and App Store search results. It then picks a different category for each app, but it’s a side effect.

Appsverse has sent me the following statement:

“The guideline promotes a healthy App Store ecosystem that is good for both developers and users. It prevents proliferation of similar apps that does not have a differentiation in business model, features, use cases and demographic appeal.”

Example 4: Telos Mobile and Dingtone Inc.

On paper, Dingtone and Telos look like two different apps from two different companies. I downloaded the Dingtone app and signed up with my email address. I then downloaded the Telos app and signed up with the same email address. Here’s the message I got:

I’ve reached out to Telos/Dingtone and haven’t heard back.

A level playing field

Those companies haven’t done anything illegal. They took advantage of Apple’s lack of oversight on an App Store rule. Releasing multiple versions of the same app is a great App Store optimization strategy. This way, you can pick a different name, different keywords and different categories. Chances are potential customers are going to see your app in their App Store search results.

While Apple is usually quite strict when it comes to App Store guidelines, it hasn’t enforced some of them. And this is unfair for app developers who play by the rules. They can’t compete as effectively with companies that know that they can ignore some rules.

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Facebook announces new program for premium video ads

Facebook is expanding its efforts around premium video advertising with a new program called Facebook Showcase.

This follows the announcement last fall of what the company calls In-Stream Reserve advertising — video ads with a curated list of hundreds of publishers, at a set price, with Nielsen-verified audiences. In fact, Facebook said at a press event today that In-Stream Reserve ads are reaching nearly 100 million U.S. viewers each month.

“That’s TV-like scale,” said Head of U.S. Agency Sales Erik Geisler (pictured above). He added that Facebook offers an effective way to reach the younger audiences that are moving away from linear TV, since 43 percent of In-Stream Reserve viewers are between the ages of 18 and 34.

How does Showcase change things? It combines this video advertising with the ability to run ads on a specific content category (including sports, fashion/beauty and the new additions of food and news), and to exclusively sponsor individual shows. And now advertisers can buy those ads for the 2019-2020 broadcast year.

“It takes In-Stream Reserve from a quarter-by-quarter opportunity [to something] more in line with the upfronts,” Geisler said.

Matthew Henick, Facebook

Facebook’s video destination Watch doesn’t exactly seem like a runaway success. In fact, Digiday just reported that Facebook won’t be renewing two-thirds of the news shows that it commissioned for Watch. However, Matthew Henick, who leads Facebook’s content and planning strategy, said he actually expects news content on Facebook to grow.

“We’re not cutting two-thirds of what our final output would be, we’re reexamining previous commitments,” he said.

More broadly, Facebook has said that Watch is attracting 400 million viewers who are watching at least one minute of video each month, and 75 million viewers who are watching at least one minute per day. And those daily viewers are actually averaging 20 minutes per day.

Henick said that there are “three main pillars” to Facebook’s video strategy: community, interactivity and the ability to “co-watch” a show with others.

He also announced a new animated comedy called “Human Discoveries,” which will star Zac Efron and Anna Kendrick and premiere sometime this year, while also revealing more details about Facebook’s upcoming revival of “The Real World” — apparently it will also be streaming old seasons of the show, as voted on by Facebook users.

And while Watch is at the center of Facebook’s premium video strategy, it’s worth noting that Showcase ads aren’t limited to Watch; they can be viewed across Watch, the News Feed and Facebook Pages.

Facebook Watch is finally growing as payouts get spread thin

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Google’s new AI grammar checker are now live in Google Docs

Google today announced that its new machine learning-powered grammar checker is now live in Google Docs. The company first introduced this new feature at Cloud Next 2018, but it lingered in early access ever since.

Grammar checkers are nothing new, of course, and even Docs itself has long had one. What’s new here is that Google uses machine translation techniques to find obvious mistakes (see headline) as well as more subtle issues. It’s one thing, after all, to compare words in a dictionary to what you’re writing and mark up mistakes. It’s another to understand complex grammar rules, which can vary by region and style. The company claims that its machine translation technique is able to catch these kinds of issues because they are very hard to encode as a set of hard rules.

“Using machine translation, we are able to recognize errors and suggest corrections as work is getting done,” G Suite product manager Vishnu Sivaji explains in today’s announcement. “We worked closely with linguists to decipher the rules for the machine translation model and used this as the foundation of automatic suggestions in your Docs, all powered by AI.”

What Google is essentially doing here is training a model with correct sentences and then using the same kind of models it would use for translating sentences from English to French to translate incorrect sentences into correct ones.

Google Docs gets an AI grammar checker

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Google’s Flutter toolkit will get web-based dev tooling

Google today launched version 1.2 of its Flutter cross-platform UI framework at MWC Barcelona. With this, Flutter now features support for Android App Bundles, Google’s latest technology for packaging Android apps more efficiently and for creating instant apps, too. In addition, the framework lays the groundwork for helping developers accept in-app payments and adds a number of new web-based tools, too.

It’s only been a couple of months since the Flutter team shipped version 1.0. In case you are wondering what happened to version 1.1: that was last month’s beta release and the team plans to ship roughly one 1.x update every month.

Unsurprisingly, this update comes with the usual stability and performance updates, as well as the latest Dart 2.2 SDK (by default, Flutter apps are written in Google’s Dart language), but the team also notes that it worked hard to improve iOS support, too, with support for floating cursor text editing, for example.

While Flutter always focused on mobile, the team also recently started talking about building desktop apps with the framework. To prepare for that, version 1.2 now features new keyboard events and mouse hover support. Project Hummingbird, the Flutter team’s project for bringing Flutter to the web, will also become available as a technical preview in the next few months.

As far as the new dev tools go, it’s worth noting that Google already built Flutter support into Android Studio and added tools for Microsoft’s increasingly popular Visual Studio Code. Now, it’s also building new web-based programming tools, the Dart DevTools. These run locally and include a widget inspector, a timeline view, a source-level debugger and a logging view.

For now, these tools are officially in preview and are available for installation alongside the existing VS Code and Android Studio extensions and add-ins.

“We plan to invest further in Dart DevTools as a first-class unified tool for Flutter developers, and as integration for web-based experiences improves, we plan to build these services directly into tools like Visual Studio Code,” the team notes in today’s updates.

In addition to today’s launch, the Flutter team also announced a new contest: Flutter Create, which challenges developers to build something “interesting, inspiring and beautiful” with Flutter using 5K or less of Dart code. Among the prizes is a $10,000 iMac Pro, which, at 128 GB of RAM, isn’t likely to struggle with that 5K code base.

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Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI fund, leads $7M investment in English learning app Elsa

Google’s Gradient Ventures, the search giant’s dedicated AI fund, is casting its eye to Asia after it led a $7 million Series A round for Elsa, a startup that operates an app for English language learners.

The deal is Gradient’s first in Asia, and it includes participation from existing investors Monk’s Hill Ventures and SOSV. Elsa has now raised $12 million raised to date.

Elsa was founded in 2015 as a way to help non-English speakers improve their accent and general speaking ability. Vu Van, CEO and one half of the founding team, is a Vietnamese national who, despite being fluent in English, struggled to be understood after moving to the U.S. to study and then work. Together with speech recognition researcher Dr. Xavier Anguera — the startup’s CTO who leads its Portugal-based tech team — Van started Elsa to help people in the same predicament.

“I was very good at grammar, reading and writing but I realized people had a hard time understanding me because I had a very strong accent and my pronunciation wasn’t proper,” Van, who is based in San Francisco but travels extensively, told TechCrunch in an interview. “This impacts confidence when you apply for jobs or are even just meeting friends.”

“There are so many English learning solutions but they are mostly focused on expanding vocabulary or grammar, very few deal with pronunciation,” she added.

Elsa uses voice recognition and AI to grade a user’s speaking versus standard American English (and I thought us Brits were the global standard…) giving them a score at the end. That helps track their progress, while it focuses on pronunciation with a detailed review on how a user is speaking.

The service uses a freemium model that grants users full access to 1,000 courses for around $3-6 per month depending on the length of the package they opts for. That ranges from one month of access to 12 months. New content is added every week, Van said.

With this money in the bag, Elsa is going after growth in a number of its most promising markets.

The service has users in over 100 countries, but Vietnam is its top market with two million paying users. Partly because is it us Van’s home market, Elsa has doubled down on Vietnam with a local sales team and localized payments, including the likes of bank transfers and local wallets.

That’s the blueprint for expansion in its next three target countries; Japan, Indonesia and India. Already, Esla has opened an office in Tokyo and it is planning to introduce more localized content for Japanese users. Similar efforts will happen in Indonesia and India, where Van said the app sees strong engagement and downloads without any paid marketing efforts.

Elsa is also working on expanding its content from English to include other languages. Spanish is currently on the horizon and the company is already preparing the backend technology to make it possible.

“We have to build the voice recognition technology to recognize those languages accurately. We have the infrastructure but now just need to collect voice data to train the model,” explained Van.

Vu Van started Elsa in 2015 with Dr. Xavier Anguera to help non-English speakers improve their accent and general speaking ability.

Beyond geographic expansion, Elsa is also going after schools and classrooms. Already, in Vietnam, it is working with a handful of schools who have added the app to their classroom work. The company allows schools to upload their specific content or curriculum to Elsa to make it part of a student’s homework or assessment. Teachers can see if a student has completed oral homework, and the app grades their efforts.

“We want to help these teachers help their students,” Van said. “Even with the best intentions, they simply can’t teach speaking.”

The model for the education push sees schools pay a licensing fee per student, which Van said is subsidized while uploading their content is free.

Snagging investment from Gradient is a notable achievement for Elsa, but it will also allow the startup to tap into the company’s talent, too. That’s because Gradient operates a rotational program that allows Google employees to spend three to six months working at portfolio startups on secondment. That process hasn’t kicked off for Elsa just yet, but Van is hopeful of securing an engineer who might otherwise be prohibitively expensive for her company.

Gradient Ventures was founded in 2017 and this deal is the fund’s 18th, according to Crunchbase. Its previous investments include Canvass Analytics and Test.ai.

The Elsa team

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Light is expanding from smartphone cameras to self-driving cars

This year’s MWC has been very much the beginning of a new phase for Light. Until now, the Palo Alto startup has been best know for its 16-lens DSLR competitor, an utterly fascinating, if not particularly practical device.

At this week’s show, however, we’re seeing a wholly different side of the company, one focused on partnerships. The event has seen the company announce three big ones — Nokia device maker HMD, Chinese handset company Xiaomi and Sony, whose component manufacturing division will be teaming with Light to develop advanced modules for its near-near-ubiquitous camera hardware.

It’s a promising new start for the five-year-old company, and one that could help Light become a major player for mobile cameras, going forward. In an interview, CEO Dave Grannan told TechCrunch that the trio of deals are just the beginning, with more partnerships planned for a 2019 announcement.

The Nokia 9 is the first product of these deals. Announced at the show this week, the five-camera limited edition flagship is the product of a module that appeared last year, utilizing the array to create complex composite image similar to sorts of RAW shots one takes with an SLR. It’s one of a number of different array that can utilize Light’s technology to build a better mobile multi-camera system.

“When we started light five years ago, it wasn’t obvious that we would build a dedicated camera to begin with,” Grannan tells TechCrunch. “We realized that we really needed to build a reference device. Something to show the world what could be done. The idea from the first days was to prove to the world that it could be done and then start licensing our technology into other verticals starting with mobile phones.”

The proof-of-concept 16 camera system was always meant to be a limited edition product, according to the executive, and it ultimately sold out of its initial run. That number was in the tens of thousands, according to Grannan, though he won’t go into any more detail beyond that.

He was happy to discuss the startup’s future, however. In July, light raised a whopping $121 million, led by Softbank, bringing its total funding up to $181 million. It was the CEO Masayoshi Son who suggested the next step in the company’s evolution, moving to autonomous vehicles. While Light would be a new entrant in a field that already involves dozens of focused startups, Grannan believes it can offer imaging systems at a fraction of the cost of current LIDAR rigs — at around $5,000 apiece.

Light also plans to expand into security cameras, helping systems better process the information they collect. For now, however, it’s focused on mobile. And in spite of a push toward a more software focused approached to mobile camera improvement, Grannan believes that phone camera arrays will continue to expand — though perhaps not quite to the 16-camera level Light implemented on its own devices. Currently the company is working on a nine-camera module.

“Within a couple of years, three cameras will seem quaint,” Grannan says. “People are going to need this approach because it’s never good enough with imaging.”

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Tinder launches a Spring Break mode

Tinder, the dating app company which, as of late, has been more fully embracing its status as the preferred hook-up app of choice for the younger generation, is today launching a new feature designed for its college-aged Tinder U users: Spring Break mode. The feature will allow students to swipe through potential matches before heading out to their Spring Break destination.

Here’s how it works.

From March 4 through March 31, 2019, Spring Break mode will go live in Tinder offering 20 popular destinations, including Cabo, Lake Havasu, Las Vegas, Miami, New Orleans, Puerto Rico, Puerto Vallarta, San Diego and others. To opt in, Tinder U users will need to look for the Spring Break card while swiping.

When they see it, they can then select their Spring Break destination to see who’s going. This destination will then be shown to potential matches through a badge on their profiles.

The idea, says Tinder, was inspired by trends the company was already seeing in product usage during this March time frame, when there would be huge upticks in some cities and locations. For example, South Padre Island experienced a 100x increase in activity in March 2018 compared to the previous month; Panama City saw a 10x increase; Destin Beach a 6x increase; and both Cabo San Lucas and Lake Havasu saw a 2x increase.

In addition to using its own data from past spring breaks, Tinder also consulted with its Tinder U users about which destinations to include.

“Spring Break, like Tinder, is a staple for many college students across the country,” said Jenny Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer at Tinder, in a statement. “We’ve historically seen huge upticks in Tinder usage during Spring Break in these destinations, and we are excited to give users the unique experience to connect before they pack their bags,” she said.

The new feature is one of several ways that Tinder is focusing on its more casual use case, as of late. Last November, the company told investors during its Q3 earnings that it would begin marketing the app as a way to enjoy the “single lifestyle” – that is, catering to a younger demographic’s demand for wanting to date around while in their 20’s – before they’re ready to settle down.

Tinder had also begun an online publication, Swipe Life, and is running various advertising campaigns, related to this initiative.

For years, Tinder had tried to downplay the app’s more casual nature, but it’s now able to change course due to its acquisition of dating app Hinge. Similarly aimed at younger users and millennials, Hinge is focused on creating relationships, not hook-ups. That frees up Tinder to refocus on what it does best: quick matches.

Tinder parent Match Group had hinted at its plans for Tinder U, during its earnings call earlier this month.

“In 2019, we are planning to solidify our leadership position among college students by expanding Tinder U to cover even more schools throughout the U.S. while also launching Tinder U in select international markets,” said Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg, speaking to investors. “We’re also expanding marketing through our on campus brand ambassadors and social media influencers. Expect to see more events and marketing tied to the school social calendar such as Rivalry Week and Spring Break,” she noted.

However, by shifting focus more towards a younger, less established customer base, Tinder could be challenged on the revenue side as college students are less likely to have disposable incomes for things like a paid Tinder Gold subscription. Instead, Tinder will need to generate revenue from these users through in-app purchases – like Boost and Super Like (the latter which is often used by mistake, turning it into a running joke on the dating app.)

Tinder said it was considering a wider range of a la carte features in the future, and plans to focus on this aspect of its service, as well, in 2019.

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Tinder launches a Spring Break mode

Tinder, the dating app company which, as of late, has been more fully embracing its status as the preferred hook-up app of choice for the younger generation, is today launching a new feature designed for its college-aged Tinder U users: Spring Break mode. The feature will allow students to swipe through potential matches before heading out to their Spring Break destination.

Here’s how it works.

From March 4 through March 31, 2019, Spring Break mode will go live in Tinder offering 20 popular destinations, including Cabo, Lake Havasu, Las Vegas, Miami, New Orleans, Puerto Rico, Puerto Vallarta, San Diego and others. To opt in, Tinder U users will need to look for the Spring Break card while swiping.

When they see it, they can then select their Spring Break destination to see who’s going. This destination will then be shown to potential matches through a badge on their profiles.

The idea, says Tinder, was inspired by trends the company was already seeing in product usage during this March time frame, when there would be huge upticks in some cities and locations. For example, South Padre Island experienced a 100x increase in activity in March 2018 compared to the previous month; Panama City saw a 10x increase; Destin Beach a 6x increase; and both Cabo San Lucas and Lake Havasu saw a 2x increase.

In addition to using its own data from past spring breaks, Tinder also consulted with its Tinder U users about which destinations to include.

“Spring Break, like Tinder, is a staple for many college students across the country,” said Jenny Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer at Tinder, in a statement. “We’ve historically seen huge upticks in Tinder usage during Spring Break in these destinations, and we are excited to give users the unique experience to connect before they pack their bags,” she said.

The new feature is one of several ways that Tinder is focusing on its more casual use case, as of late. Last November, the company told investors during its Q3 earnings that it would begin marketing the app as a way to enjoy the “single lifestyle” – that is, catering to a younger demographic’s demand for wanting to date around while in their 20’s – before they’re ready to settle down.

Tinder had also begun an online publication, Swipe Life, and is running various advertising campaigns, related to this initiative.

For years, Tinder had tried to downplay the app’s more casual nature, but it’s now able to change course due to its acquisition of dating app Hinge. Similarly aimed at younger users and millennials, Hinge is focused on creating relationships, not hook-ups. That frees up Tinder to refocus on what it does best: quick matches.

Tinder parent Match Group had hinted at its plans for Tinder U, during its earnings call earlier this month.

“In 2019, we are planning to solidify our leadership position among college students by expanding Tinder U to cover even more schools throughout the U.S. while also launching Tinder U in select international markets,” said Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg, speaking to investors. “We’re also expanding marketing through our on campus brand ambassadors and social media influencers. Expect to see more events and marketing tied to the school social calendar such as Rivalry Week and Spring Break,” she noted.

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OnePlus, EE and Qualcomm starts a contest for 5G apps

Today at MWC Barcelona OnePlus CEO Pete Lau unveiled an initiative to spur apps for 5G networks. The timing is right, too. With 5G launching around the world this year, carriers, phone makers and consumers alike have yet to develop a killer app for the massive increase of speed provided by 5G. Basically, OnePlus is asking for help developing uses for 5G.

OnePlus sees a lacking of imagination around 5G in the long term. Speaking on a panel, CEO Pete Lau stated he does not believe people have thought enough about how 5G can change lives in the long term.

This contest will select 20 finalists, who will get OnePlus devices. The winners will get a trip to OnePlus HQ and access to 5G testing labs, and support from Oneplus and EE.

Such contest were common around the launch of 4G as mobile device makers were attempting to bolster app marketplaces. But 5G apps, could look much different from 4G apps as much of the processing is offloaded to a central data center instead of happening on the device.

The promise of 5G is nearly here, but it will take initiatives and programs like this one from OnePlus to help make the possibilities clear to consumers.

Earlier this week OnePlus, along with nearly every other mobile phone maker, unveiled a 5G device.

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OnePlus, EE and Qualcomm puts a call out for 5G apps

Today at MWC Barcelona OnePlus CEO Pete Lau unveiled an initiative to spur apps for 5G networks. The timing is right, too. With 5G launching around the world this year, carriers, phone makers and consumers alike have yet to develop a killer app for the massive increase of speed provided by 5G. Basically, OnePlus is asking for help developing uses for 5G.

OnePlus sees a lacking of imagination around 5G in the long term. Speaking on a panel, CEO Pete Lau stated he does not believe people have thought enough about how 5G can change lives in the long term.

This contest will select 20 finalists, who will get OnePlus devices. The winners will get a trip to OnePlus HQ and access to 5G testing labs, and support from Oneplus and EE.

Such contest were common around the launch of 4G as mobile device makers were attempting to bolster app marketplaces. But 5G apps, could look much different from 4G apps as much of the processing is offloaded to a central data center instead of happening on the device.

The promise of 5G is nearly here, but it will take initiatives and programs like this one from OnePlus to help make the possibilities clear to consumers.

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Huawei’s folding Mate X: a closer look

Yesterday gave us a closer view of the Samsung Galaxy Fold. Of course, there were still a plate of glass, a security rope and a few feet between us and the device. Huawei, thankfully, was a bit more willing to grant us access to their own foldable, the Mate X at a closed door meeting earlier this morning.

There were still ground rules for the foldable. Namely, a Huawei rep was driving the whole thing. Limited interaction with the device itself was allowed, but he was doing most of the navigating and all of the folding. While the product is pretty close to final, there’s still some work to be done before bringing it to market, and in Huawei’s words, the company wanted to give us “the best possible experience.”

In this case, that mostly means knowing the limitations of what the near-final product can actually do. For now, that means web browsing, some photography and opening up Google Maps — which, to be fair, comprises a fairly large chunk of what people will actually be doing with the product.

That said, there’s a lot to account for with a new form factor. After all, phone makers have gotten really good at working with a defined two-dimensional plan, a decade after the introduction of the first iPhone and Samsung Galaxy device. Folding, flipping and bouncing between screens presents all sorts of new challenge.

That said, in the demo at least, things seemed pretty smooth here. The device was pretty responsive in a less controlled environment than we’d previously seen it — or, for that matter, the Fold — in. There were few moments and some blank screens for half a second or so, however, when the apps had to jump screens. All of which is to see the Mate X is real. I’ve seen it, and am so far pretty impressive with the execution.

The product design, too, is quite well thought out. The product is surprisingly thin both folded and unfolded, and elements like the fold over camera lip, which offers a place to grip (a la the lip on the rear of the Kindle Oasis) are nice touches.

The screen, too, looks quite nice at first glance. That said, as with all of the foldable we’ve seen to date, capturing a glare from overhead light picks up crinkles on the display, along with a large seam in the middle, where the device folds over. You can’t feel them with your finger as you glide over to touch, but it’s easy to imagine how messy all of this could ultimately look after a few years of use.

The system also works when folded at a 90 degree angle, which could prove useful for future executions that Huawei is looking into. It’s clear that this is just the beginning of not only the form factor, but practical applications. It’s going to be watching developers figure out all of the stuff they can do with the product.

That “still early days” approach also to price point. Huawei acknowledges that the device is prohibitively expensive at ~ €2,200. That price includes the design to add 5G to the product — notably, there is no non-5G version planned, unlike the Galaxy Fold. That will no doubt make the Mate X even more of a niche product, until the next-gen cellular service rolls out for more users.

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In a way, the Mate X is a proof of concept — albeit proof that the thing can be relatively mass produced. At double the cost of a high-end flagship, I don’t expect the company plans to sell a lot of these, but the more it’s able to scale, the lower the price will ultimately be.

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