While most Apple acquisitions become public knowledge shortly after they happen, there are acquisitions that go largely under the radar until months or years afterwards. TechCrunch has recently learned of one such acquisition, which may have happened in 2013. Apple is said to have purchased Ottocat, a small startup specializing in search technology.
Ottocat's technology is said to be behind the "Explore" app discovery function in the App Store. The Explore tab in the iOS App Store lets users find apps in different categories plus nearby apps.
TechCrunch has learned that Apple quietly bought a startup called Ottocat some time ago, which had developed a system to organize and surface apps on the app store based on "nested" categories of increasing specificity. A version of that system now powers the "explore" tab in Apple's app store.
According to TechCrunch, though there's little evidence on LinkedIn to suggest the acquisition happened, Ottocat co-founder Edwin Cooper was the author of a patent that was granted to Apple, which Cooper appears to have filed as an Apple employee. The patent, "System and Method for Divisive Textual Clustering by Label Selection Using Variant-Weighted TFDIF," which is related to the App Store's explore feature.
TechCrunch has some information on how Ottocat worked, explaining that its technology aimed to introduce categories for better app discovery to assist users looking to find apps in specific areas when they didn't have an app in mind to search for, which sounds very similar to what the Explore feature in the App Store does.
The premise was to do away with keywords by categorizing apps into increasingly more specific subcategories that worked on a "drill-down" principle -- eliminating the guesswork and potential inaccuracy of keywords altogether.
The Ottocat website originally went down in October of 2013, so that may have been around the time that the acquisition occurred. The original error message stated "Ottocat is no longer available," but the website is now completely defunct. Explore was announced as an App Store addition in June of 2014.
Thursday November 6, 2025 11:12 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple today updated its trade-in values for select iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch models. Trade-ins can be completed on Apple's website, or at an Apple Store.
The charts below provide an overview of Apple's current and previous trade-in values in the U.S., according to its website. Maximum values for most devices either decreased or saw no change, but the iPad Air received a slight bump.
...
Wednesday November 5, 2025 11:57 am PST by Juli Clover
The smarter, more capable version of Siri that Apple is developing will be powered by Google Gemini, reports Bloomberg. Apple will pay Google approximately $1 billion per year for a 1.2 trillion parameter artificial intelligence model that was developed by Google.
For context, parameters are a measure of how a model understands and responds to queries. More parameters generally means more...
Monday November 3, 2025 5:54 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Following more than a month of beta testing, Apple released iOS 26.1 on Monday, November 3. The update includes a handful of new features and changes, including the ability to adjust the look of Liquid Glass and more.
Below, we outline iOS 26.1's key new features.
Liquid Glass Toggle
iOS 26.1 lets you choose your preferred look for Liquid Glass.
In the Settings app, under Display...
Thursday November 6, 2025 2:45 pm PST by Juli Clover
Apple is promoting the new Liquid Glass design in iOS 26, showing off the ways that third-party developers are embracing the aesthetic in their apps. On its developer website, Apple is featuring a visual gallery that demonstrates how "teams of all sizes" are creating Liquid Glass experiences.
The gallery features examples of Liquid Glass in apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac. Apple...
Friday November 7, 2025 6:40 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple's online store in the U.S. is suddenly offering a pack of four AirTags for just $29, which is the same price as a single AirTag.
This is likely a pricing error, and it is unclear if orders will be fulfilled. Apple has not discounted the AirTag four-pack in any other countries that we checked.
Delivery estimates are already pushing into late November to early December, suggesting...
Thursday November 6, 2025 4:37 am PST by Tim Hardwick
Apple in iOS 26.2 will disable automatic Wi-Fi network syncing between iPhone and Apple Watch in the European Union to comply with the bloc's regulations, suggests a new report.
Normally, when an iPhone connects to a new Wi-Fi network, it automatically shares the network credentials with the paired Apple Watch. This allows the watch to connect to the same network independently – for...
Thursday November 6, 2025 4:08 pm PST by Juli Clover
IKEA today announced the upcoming launch of 21 new Matter-compatible smart home products that will be able to interface with HomeKit and the Apple Home app. There are sensors, lights, and control options, all of which will be reasonably priced. Some of the products are new, while some are updates to existing lines that IKEA previously offered.
There are a series of new smart bulbs that are...
Wednesday November 5, 2025 3:54 pm PST by Juli Clover
It's been over a decade since Apple's HomeKit smart home platform launched, and it is overdue for an update. HomeKit and the Home app can no longer keep up with AI-powered solutions from other companies like Google and Amazon, but that's set to change with a smart home revamp that Apple has planned for 2026.
Home Hub
Apple is working on a home hub or "command center" that will serve as a...
I'd like to see Apple find a way to make this kind of intelligent app organisation help us organise our apps on each device. Our iPads have hundreds of apps, and it makes sense to have similar apps grouped together on each screen. Manually dragging each app between 10 different screens is laborious and prone to frustration (apps sometimes refusing to go where you want, flow on effects when an app goes where you didn't mean it to, sometimes weird and unpredictable placement of apps that were previously hidden when you hit the maximum number of screens, etc). Managing apps has become the most cumbersome thing about using an iOS device IMO. I'm surprised Apple hasn't responded to this challenge with a really clever Apple-like solution yet.
Too bad they didn't have some sort of folder-like system that you could drag everything into, with custom names and everything.
I guess we'll have to wait and see what Apple has in store for us when iPhone OS 4 rolls out.
Can you purchase apps and selectively install to any owned device from any browser like Google Play?
The closest you can do to this is selecting "Automatic Downloads" on the iOS device in Settings > iTunes & App Store. This way when you purchase an app on another device, it will begin to download automatically on said iOS device. You cannot selectively send to a specific device.
Remember Apple's exclusive license for Liquidmetal--all that initial speculation and excitement from 5 years ago? So when that stuff officially starts showing up in Apple products, that will really blow people's minds....(Yup, still waiting.)
