Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global …

Aheadworks Abandoned Cart Email Magento 2 Extension
Every store owner faces the situation when online shoppers leave their carts after adding some products. For an ecommerce merchant, the result of such customer’s behavior is the loss of sales and profit. With the Magento 2 Abandoned Cart Email …

A new type of supply-chain attack with serious consequences is flourishing
Enlarge (credit: Przemyslaw Klos / EyeEm / Getty Images) wrote earlier this week. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

As the Texas power crisis shows, our infrastructure is vulnerable to extreme weather
On Valentine’s Day, a rare burst of Arctic air spread across the central US and into Texas, dropping temperatures there into the single digits and nearly causing the state’s power grid to collapse. A state known for its abundant energy …

How Rani Therapeutics’ robotic pill could change subcutaneous injection treament
A new auto-injecting pill might soon become a replacement for subcutaneous injection treatments. The idea for this so-called robotic pill came out of a research project around eight years ago from InCube Labs—a life sciences lab operated by Rani Therapeutics …

How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you
In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference next week, researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage: Data …

Oppo’s expanding phone can grow and shrink on demand
A smartphone with an expanding display that can grow and shrink on demand has been demonstrated by Chinese phone-maker Oppo. The device has a flexible display that rolls up inside the device, letting the screen expand from 6.7in (17cm) to …

Why reopening US schools is so complicated
Across the country, schools are wrestling with the difficult choice of whether to reopen, and how to do it with reduced risk. In Kalamazoo, Michigan—not far from one the main sites where Pfizer is frantically manufacturing vaccines—they plan to stay …

NFTs, explained
Arc, a visual artist from Saudi Arabia, was initially skeptical of how cryptocurrency could be adopted in the art world. He didn’t know much about the technology and was doubtful of its reputation. Last year, a representative from KnownOrigin, a …