Happy Monday! Unless you're Great Britain, that is... Wikipedia has resorted to asking users searching "2022 UK government crisis" to be more specific about exactly which crisis they're referring to. Never a confidence-inspiring sight when Wikipedia creates a new landing page just to help users navigate to the right debacle...

Wait... They shipped what!?

Apple is rolling out new App Store ad formats.

Details: Apple informed developers about two new ad formats going live:

• Today tab: Ads on the App Store's main tab

• "You Might Also Like": Ads on individual app store pages

Why it matters: Apple is becoming an ad company. The company's ATT privacy changes sneakily gave its own ad business a huge leg up, and Apple continues to make the most of its preferential advertising data treatment by launching new ad products.

Apple's getting more aggressive about it too. The "You Might Also Like" ads let companies place ads on a competitor's app store page. Every company with budget in a competitive industry will likely opt in to this more adversarial form of running ads.

Separately, last week I wrote about how more and more companies are turning to ads to unlock additional growth. Apple now sits squarely in that category, along with the likes of Uber, Lyft, Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Walmart, and many others. Dear Meta and Google, the floodgates have opened.

Features & products hot off the press

Big tech

• Meta now blocks all accounts from a user you block

• Google Assistant launches breast cancer awareness features 

• YouTube Premium increases family plan price by nearly 30% 

• Microsoft works on a PC manager app to boost computer performance  

• Meta announces AI speech translation for unwritten languages 

• Uber pilots electric cab offering in India 

General and early-stage

• Rippling launches a new global payroll product 

• Telegram to ship a username auction platform 

• Maro unveils a tool for schools to screen student mental health

• Disney launches web3 music experience 

• Pocket Casts open sources its mobile apps for podcasting

Getting 1% better at building product

• Prioritization - It's not prioritization until it hurts, by Ami Vora 

• User psychology - Using behavioral science to improve your product, by Kristen Berman

Broader tech happenings

• It's not me, it's you. Stripe starts strategically pruning its workforce

• Bye bye Karl. Snap closes its "lightly used" SF office

• The godfather. OEMs are too scared of Google to build Amazon TVs

• Cash money. Taylor Swift's new album is the priciest ever sold by Tencent

• It was fun. Amazon shuts down Fabric.com, a major online fabric store 

Courtesy of mindless Twitter scrolling

@johncutlefish

@programmerhumor

And that’s a wrap for today. Stay tuned for more!

- Amol