Technology

PayPal is revamping its mobile app. Again. In an effort to keep pace with newcomers like the bank-owned Zelle, PayPal says its new app will focus on making it easier to use its core features & that is, sending and requesting money. That means many of the apphomescreen buttons & like Offers, Donate, Order Ahead and others are being tucked away underneath a new &More& menu to eliminate some of the clutter.

The PayPal homescreen had gotten a little too busy with all the extra features it has been promoting, which aren&t central to the PayPal experience. For example, it threw in a button suggesting &Invest with Acorns,& aftertaking a stakein the mobile investing app that rounds up purchases and automatically invests the extra change on your behalf. It has been pushing its Order Ahead functionalityfor years, even though no one thinks to launch a payments app when they&re hungry. Now these buttons no longer get top billing and valuable homescreen space.

Above: PayPalapp today, before the update

However, even though PayPal is removing a lot of these extras from the homescreen, itnot actually giving its &Send& and &Request& buttons more room. In fact, they&re getting a little less.

Today, those buttons are in the center of the homescreen, hosted in a big, greenish-blue banner. The updated app relocates them to a bottom bar.

However, it reverts the appcolor scheme to PayPalmore familiar dark blue-and-white branding, so the relocated buttons are actually easier to see.

The homescreen instead dedicates most of its room to a new personalized notifications section.

Here, users will see alerts about money they&ve received or payment requests from others in big, blue cards you can swipe through horizontally. Below this, is a strip of profile icons and names of those you&ve recently paid & the theory being that PayPal is often used among the same set of family, friends or businesses. This makes it easier to make your next payment to one of your ®ulars.&

Beneath this strip, your PayPal balance is displayed, while other notifications and settings are accessed through small buttons at the top of the screen, as before.

The overall design feels more in tune with PayPalbrand than the last update. Though the prior big revamp, which was over two years ago, modernized things up a bit, it did so with too-light icons, small fonts and odd, off-brand color choices.

PayPal says the new app is rolling out now on Android to select markets, including Australia and Italy. It will then roll out to the U.S. and other markets worldwide, followed by a release on iOS.

T-Mobile has confirmed hackers breached its systems.

The cell giant,currently merging with Sprint, said in a statement that hackers customer stole names, billing zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, account numbers, and account type — such as if an account was prepaid or postpaid — in what the company described as an &unauthorized capture of data.&

No customer financial or billing data was compromised, the company said.

Itnot known when the breach occurred but the unauthorized access was detected and shut down on Monday.

A T-Mobile spokesperson told TechCrunch thatthe breach was &discovered and stopped very quickly,& and &affected a small number& of customers.But Motherboard reported that a spokesperson said about 3 percent of the company77 million users were affected — some 2 million accounts.

T-Mobile began notifying customers of the breach Friday morning with a text message sent to affected accounts. But that drew ire from some, who said the shortlink in the text message looked like phishing.

So @TMobile have been sending out a breach alert (a legit one) using a short URL and a number of people think it#phishing.

Why BECAUSE IT LOOKS LIKE PHISHING! https://t.co/5fZJxaKszd

— 𝐎𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡 (@olihough86) August 24, 2018

This is the latest in a string of security incidents at T-Mobile in the past year.

In May, a security researcher found a security weakness in a T-Mobile subdomain used by staff, which returned customer data without requiring a password. It was similar to a vulnerability found in another T-Mobile system reported by Motherboard some months prior, which exposed customers& email addresses, their billing account numbers, and the phoneIMSI numbers.

T-Mobile and other carriers earlier this year were also forced to stop sharing customer location data with third-parties, after Democratic senatorRon Wydencriticized the cell giants for the practice.

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunchventure capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we had a full house which was super great. TechCrunchConnie Loizos and Sarah Buhr held down the fort in San Francisco along with our guest, Susan Mac Cormac, a partner at Morrison Foerster where she works on some of the most interesting deals in the private capital space. I dialed in from the home office in Providence.

It was good that we had eight hands ondeck as there was more than enough news to go around. We started with the recent executive changes at Zoox, an autonomous car company that came up on the show a few weeks back when it raised $500 million.

The firm is now down its CEO after he was ousted after the round. In the founder-friendly era that we find ourselves in at the moment, this is High Drama.

Next up was the #breakingnews concerningEventbrite, which filed to go public just before we recorded. My initial notes are here, but we&re stillfar from knowing where the unicorn will price. That means ithard to say much today, aside from the fact that the company appears to be in more than rude enough health for a flotation.

And then, the megarounds. There were three:

• Slack is richer and more valuable than everafter raising over $400 million at a valuation of more than $7 billion. The news surprised precisely no one, but itagain amazing to see how the enterprise chat app and budding productivity platform can raise as much as it wants, whenever it wants. The new round, of course, came after Slack put $250 million in its pockets last year. (Heresome quick math on its new valuation, just for fun.)
• One Medical picked up $350 million of its own, though the company doesn&t get all the money. It$220 million for One Medical itself, and $130 million for extant shareholders in the premium medical service.
• Getaround raised $300 million led by SoftBank (which also invested in Slack, of course). SoftBank2017 and 2018 investment cadence are already the stuff of legend. How the firm will do when returns are tallied isn&t settled, though some early wagers are bearing fruit as we noted on the show. Getaround faces competition from rival peer-to-peer car sharing service Turo, which also raised this year.

All that and we managed1.7 jokes and 2.3 puns.

We&ll be back in a week, and don&t forget that we are coming to you live at Disrupt in about two weektime. Stay cool!