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You might figure the biggest U.S. banks would have some of the most secure mobile apps. Spoiler alert: not so much.

New findings from security firm Zimperium, shared exclusively with TechCrunch, say most of the top banking apps have security flaws that put user data at risk. The security firm, which has a commercial stake in the mobile security business, downloaded the banks’ iOS and Android apps and scanned for security and privacy issues, like data leaks, which put private user data and communications at risk.

The researchers found most of the apps had issues, like failing to adhere to best coding practices and using old open-source libraries that are infrequently updated.

Some of the apps were using open-source code from GitHub from more than three years ago, said Scott King, Zimperium’s director of embedded security.

Worse, more than half of the banking apps are sharing customer data with at least one advertiser, the researchers said.

The researchers, who didn’t name the banks, said one of the worst offending iOS apps scored 86 out of 100 on the risk scale for several privacy lapses, including communicating over an unencrypted HTTP connection. The same app vulnerable to two known remote bugs dating back to 2015. The researchers said the risk scores for the banks’ corresponding Android apps were far higher. Two of the apps were rated with a risk score of 82 out of 100. Both of the apps were storing data in an insecure way, which third-party apps could access and recover sensitive datas on a rooted device, said King.

One of the Android apps wasn’t properly validating HTTPS certificates, making it possible for an attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack. Several of the iOS and Android apps were capable of taking screenshots of the app’s display, increasing the risk of data leaking.

Zimperium said two-thirds of the Android banking apps are targeted by several malware campaigns, such as BankBot, which tricks users into downloading fake apps from Google Play and waits until the victim signs in to a banking app on their phone. Using an overlay screen, the malware campaigns steal logins and passwords.

The security firm called on banking apps to do more to bolster their apps’ security.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the home of open-source projects like Kubernetes, today announced that Apple is joining it as a top-level Platinum End User Member. With this, Apple is joining 89 existing CNCF end-user members like Adidas, Atlassian, Box, GitHub, the New York Times, Reddit, Spotify and Walmart.

Apple, in typical fashion, isn’t commenting on the announcement, but the CNCF notes that end user memberships are meant for organizations that are “heavy users of open source cloud native technologies” and that are looking to give back to the community. By becoming a CNCF end-user member, companies also join the Linux Foundation .

As part of its membership, Apple also gets a seat on the CNCF’s Governing Board. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomerdoron, a senior engineering manager at Apple, will take this seat.

“Having a company with the experience and scale of Apple as an end user member is a huge testament to the vitality of cloud native computing for the future of infrastructure and application development,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We’re thrilled to have the support of Apple, and look forward to the future contributions to the broader cloud native project community.”

While you may not necessarily think of Apple as a major open source company, the company has open sourced everything from the XNU kernel that’s part of the Darwin operating system to its Swift programming language. The company has not typically participated all that much in the open source cloud infrastructure community, though, but today’s move may signal that this is changing. Apple obviously runs its own data centers, so chances are it is indeed a heavy user of open source infrastructure projects, though the company doesn’t typically talk about these.

After a weekend of press events, E3 officially kicks off in earnest this morning. Nintendo continued its tradition of starting the show off with its customary Direct streaming event. Aside from a brief Doug Bowser/Bowser Koopa mixup at the top, there was very little executive chatter, with the company instead focusing on trailers.

And that’s for the best. There was a LOT crammed into less than an hour here (a nice change of pace after last night’s Square slog). Though, as usual, it was a mix of new and old, with a few surprises sprinkled throughout.

Here’s the best of what Nintendo had to offer this year at E3.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons – The big news here, sadly, is a delay. The long awaited new addition to the Animal Crossing franchise has been pushed back to March 2020 in order to tweak the title. We got a nice new trailer out of it, at least.

Zelda: Link’s Awakening – Not gonna lie — excited about this remaster for the Switch. The new version of Link’s Awakening is due out on September 20.

Luigi’s Mansion 3 – I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this time to mention Gooigi, Luigi’s gelatinous clone. Still no exact date for the haunted house game, which is set for release some time this year.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild sequel – The company closed things out with a pretty big teaser. The Switch’s first blockbuster, Breath of the Wild is getting a sequel. Not much in the way of gameplay footage, or anything else, really. Just a not that the title is “now in development.” Better than nothing, I guess.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics – In time for the upcoming Netflix reboot series, Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal is getting its very own Switch title later this year.

Contra: Rogue Corps – The Switch is about to get a whole lot of Contra. In addition to a post-apocalyptic entry, the classics of the series are being reissued on the Switch later this year.

Collection of Mana – Speaking of collections of beloved franchises, Square’s Secret of Mana series (including Trials of Mana) is getting a full collection for the Switch, two years after arriving in Japan.

You might have notice something funny if you visited TechCrunch dot com this morning (aside form the usual dryly hilarious tech commentary, that is). Our site, along with others, was hit by a major issue to WordPress’s VIP Go platform. For now, you’ll have to settle for a potted plant in place of our normal elucidating commentary. At least the image is reasonably zen.

We, like the rest of the impacted sites, are investigating the issue at present. Though things appear to have resumed normal functionality (which is why you’re reading this on our site, instead of our Tumblr, where it was originally published).

The company offered a comment to TechCrunch this morning, noting, “We’re currently experiencing issues affecting sites hosted on the VIP Go platform. This is affecting multiple sites. Our team is working swiftly to resolve this across all affected sites.” Essentially the same thing it posted to its own service site this morning.

The issues are impacting other large sites as well, including 9to5 Mac, which noted that it has “reverted to default WordPress theme until the issue is resolved.” More details as we get them.

Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant faces a massive challenge: Operating not only as a multi-lingual product, but also ensuring that all regional variants of languages it supports are well understood by Alexa, too.

To help accomplish that, Alexa has been retrained entirely for every variant needed – a time- and resource-heavy activity. But a new machine learning-based method for training speech recognition created by Alexa’s AI team could mean a lot less rework in building out models for new variants of existing languages.

In a paper presented to the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Amazon Alexa AI Senior Applied Science Manager Young-Bum Kim and his colleagues laid out a new system that was able to demonstrate improvements in accuracy of 18 percent, 43 percent, 115 percent and 57 percent respectively on four variants of English (from the U.S., the U.K., India and Canada) used in the trial.

The team managed this by implementing a means through which it can tweak its learning algorithm to focus its attention more heavily on just a locale-specific model when it knows in advance that answers to requests from users made in that domain are highly-region specific (ie., when asking to find a good nearby restaurant) vs. when the results are going to be relatively similar regardless of where the request is being made.

Alexa’s team then combined their locale-specific models into one and also added in their location-independent model for the language, and found the improvements measured above. 

Basically, this means they can save work by leveraging a common base and only focusing on adding differentiation for stuff that changes significantly in terms of what kind of answers it’ll prompt Alexa to give region-to-region, which should make Alexa smarter, faster and more linguistically flexible over time.

Dropbox is evolving from a file storage system to an enterprise software portal and collaboration workspace. Today it launches this new version of Dropbox that lets you launch apps with shortcuts for Slack and G Suite, search across all your files inside your other enterprise tools, and communicate and comment on your team’s work. The new Dropbox launches today for all of its 13 million business users across  400,000 teams.

The launch includes deep integrations with Slack so you can comment on files from within Dropbox, and Zoom so you can video chat without leaving the workspace. Web and enterprise app shortcuts relieve you from keeping all your other tools constantly open in other tabs. And Dropbox is launching a new desktop app for all users.

CEO Drew Houston described how people spend 60% of our office time on work about work like organization and communication instead of actually working — a marketing angle frequently used by task management startup Asana. He pointed out that it’s easier to find info from the public than our own company’s knowledge that’s scattered across our computers and the cloud. The “Finder” on our computers hasn’t evolved to embrace a post-download era. Now Dropbox wants to be both your file tree, your finder, and your desktop in the cloud.

Fans had few expectations rolling into Nintendo’s E3 Direct that were more pronounced than hopes for more details on Animal Crossing for Switch.

We got some insight into the title’s storyline, but the bigs news is that the originally announced 2019 release timeframe is getting pushed back. Now, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, as its being called, will be released March 20, 2020.

“To ensure that this game is the best it can be, we must ask you to wait a little bit longer than we thought,” Nintendo executive Yoshiaki Koizumi said during the company’s presentation.

In terms of game details, it looks like you begin the game being flown to a deserted island courtesy of character Tom Nook’s “Nook Inc. Deserted Island Getaway Package.” From there, it seems that a lot of the gameplay should be pretty familiar, chatting with animals, getting them out of jams, customizing things, feeding Tom Nook’s perverted brand of capitalism etc. etc.

The gameplay seems to incorporate many of the evolutions the series has seen in the past few games, including Nintendo’s mobile title. You can craft furniture and really change the outdoor environments. It looks like there’s some significant updates to multiplayer as some of the footage multiple human characters onscreen, there still seems to be a good deal we don’t know.

The delay is disappointing news, especially after Nintendo’s announcement that Metroid Prime 4 had to restart development. It’s of course positive to keep the quality of titles high, but it seems Nintendo is having some issues keeping their core IP on track for the original estimated release dates.

Mobile gaming continues to hold its own, accounting for 10% of the time users spend in apps — a percentage that has remained steady over the years, even though our time in apps overall has grown by 50% over the past two years. In addition, games are continuing to grow their share of consumer spend, notes App Annie in a new research report out this week, timed with E3.

Thanks to growth in hyper-casual and cross-platform gaming in particular, mobile games are on track to reach 60% market share in consumer spend in 2019.

The new report looks at how much time users spend gaming versus using other apps, monetization, and regional highlights within the gaming market, among other things.

Despite accounting for a sizable portion of users’ time, games don’t lead the other categories, App Annie says.

Instead, social and communications apps account for half (50%) of the time users spent globally in apps in 2018, followed by video players and editors at 15%, then games at 10%.

In the U.S., users generally have 8 games installed per device and globally, we play an average of 2 to 5 games per month.

The number of total hours spent games continues to grow roughly 10% year-over-year, as well, thanks to existing gamers increasing their time in games and from a broadening user base including a large number of mobile app newcomers from emerging markets.

This has also contributed to a widening age range for gamers.

Today, the majority of time spent in gaming is by those aged 25 and up. In many cases, these players may not even classify themselves as “gamers,” App Annie noted.

While games may not lead the categories in terms of time spent, they do account for a large number of mobile downloads and the majority of consumer spending on mobile.

One-third of all worldwide downloads are games across iOS, Google Play, and third-party app stores.

Last year, 1.6+ million games launched on Google Play and 1.1+ million arrived on iOS.

On Android, 74 cents of every dollar is spent on games with 95% of those purchases coming as in-app purchases not paid downloads. App Annie didn’t have figures for iOS.

Google Play is known for having more downloads than iOS, but continues to trail on consumer spend. In 2018, Google Play grabbed a 72% share of worldwide downloads, compared with 28% on iOS. Meanwhile, Google Play only saw 36% of consumer spend versus 64% on iOS.

One particular type of gaming jumped out in the new report: racing games.

Consumer spend in this subcategory of gaming grew 7.9 times as fast as the overall mobile gaming market. Adventure games did well, too, growing roughly 5 times the rate of games in general. Music games and board games were also popular.

Of course, gaming expands beyond mobile. But it’s surprising to see how large a share of the broader market can be attributed to mobile gaming.

According to App Annie, mobile gaming is larger than all other channels including home game consoles, handheld consoles, and computers (Mac and PC). It’s also 20% larger than all these other categories combined — a shift from only a few years ago, attributed to the growth in the mobile consumer base, which allows mobile gaming to reach more people.

Cross-platform gaming is a key gaming trend today, thanks to titles like PUBG and Fortnite in particular, which were among the most downloaded games across several markets last year.

Meanwhile, hyper-casual games are appealing to those who don’t think of themselves as gamers, which has helped to broaden the market further.

App Annie is predicting the next big surge will come from AR gaming, with Harry Potter: Wizards Unite expected to bring Pokémon Go-like frenzy back to AR, bringing the new title $100 million in its first 30 days. The game is currently in beta testing in select markets, with plans for a 2019 release.

In terms of regions, China’s impact on gaming tends to be outsized, but its growth last year was limited due to the game license regulations. This forced publishers to look outside the country for growth — particularly in markets like North America and Japan, App Annie said.

Meanwhile, India, Brazil, Russia and Indonesia lead the emerging markets with regard to game
downloads, but established markets of the U.S. and China remain strong players in terms of sheer numbers.

With the continued steady growth in consumer spend and the stable time spent in games, App Annie states the monetization potential for games is growing. In 2018, there were 1900 games that made more than $5 million, up from 1200 in 2106. In addition, consumer spend in many key markets is still growing too — like the 105% growth in two years in China, for example, and the 45% growth in the U.S.

The full report delves into other regions as well as game publishers’ user acquisition strategies. It’s available download here.

The Internet Trends Report — everyone’s favorite slide deck — is back. Bond Capital founder and former Kleiner Perkins general partner Mary Meeker made her presentation on stage at Vox/Recode’s Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona on Tuesday.

Meeker first crafted a report of this kind, which highlights the most important statistics and technology trends on the internet, in 1995.

It’s been a busy past year for the former Morgan Stanley analyst, who since releasing the 2018 internet trends report last May, exited Kleiner Perkins and raised more than $1 billion for her debut growth fund, Bond.

We’ll be back later with a full analysis of this year’s report. For now, here’s a look at all the slides. You can view the full internet trends report archive here.

This story is updating.

Growth Pilots is one of the more exclusive performance marketing agencies in San Francisco, but they know how to help high-growth startups excel at paid marketing. CEO and founder Soso Sazesh credits his personal experiences as an entrepreneur along with his team’s deep understanding of high-growth company needs and challenges as to what sets Growth Pilots apart. Whether you’re a founder of a seed or Series D stage startup, learn more about Growth Pilots’ approach to growth and partnerships.

Advice to early-stage founders

“I think a lot of times, especially at the early stage, founders don’t have a lot of time so they’re willing to find the path of least resistance to get their paid acquisition channels up and running. If things are not properly set up and managed, this can lead to a false negative in terms of writing off a channel’s effectiveness or scalability. It’s worth talking to an expert, even if it’s just for advice, to ensure you don’t fall into this trap.”

On Growth Pilots’ operations

“Something we pride ourselves on is working with relatively few clients at a time so we can really focus all of our team’s efforts and energy on doing the highest quality work. Each of our team members works on a maximum of two to three accounts, and therefore they’re able to get very invested in each client’s business and integrated into their team. We really try to simulate the internal team dynamics as much as possible and pairing that with our external capabilities and expertise.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.

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Interview with Growth Pilots Founder and CEO Soso Sazesh

Yvonne Leow: Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into growth.

Soso Sazesh: I grew up in northern Minnesota where there is no tech industry whatsoever and then after high school, I came out to Silicon Valley and got exposed to the epicenter of the technology industry. I became very interested in startups and hustled to find startup internships so I could get experience and learn how they operated.

After a couple of startup internships, I got accepted to UC Berkeley and that gave me even more exposure to the startup ecosystem with all of the startup events and resources that UC Berkeley had to offer. I worked on a couple of startup projects while I was at UC Berkeley, and I taught myself scrappy product management and how to get software built using contract developers.