:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/59601005/Zuckerberg_F8.0.jpg)
Facebook is getting into the dating game. Kicking off the company’s annual F8 developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said there are 200 million users on Facebook who list their relationship status as “single.” The new Tinder-killer will live inside the app, and Zuckerberg said that it won’t be visible to friends or family, and won’t pair you with your existing friends. News of Facebook’s new feature caused the stock of Tinder-owner Match Group to quickly droop. The other big news of F8 Day 2: Zuckerberg announced that, for the first time, Facebook users can opt out of the company’s data gathering practices, which it uses to sell targeted ads. You can watch the F8 livestream here. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
[Want to get the Recode Daily in your inbox? Subscribe here.]
Off the F8 stage, Zuckerberg had more to say about Facebook: At Off the Record, an annual gathering of journalists and media executives, Zuckerberg said yesterday that Facebook won’t be replicating the cable/pay TV model and will remain a free, ad-supported service, and that the company is spending so much money hiring moderators to review political ads that it will cancel out the revenue those ads generate in this year’s election cycle. He said he was reasonably confident that Facebook would be able to thwart efforts by “state actors and fake news trolls” to interfere in the upcoming U.S. elections, but said he also assumes that Facebook will see more attacks than it did two years ago. [Peter Kafka / Recode]
Any hope that Apple’s sleek iPhone X would drive oversized growth in iPhone shipments can be put to rest. Announcing its Q2 results, Apple said it shipped 52.2 million iPhones in the March period, the first full quarter of iPhone X availability. That’s 3 percent year-over-year unit growth — hardly the “super cycle” of upgrades that many analysts had buzzed about; just three years ago, iPhone shipments were growing at 40 percent. Otherwise, the company’s financials were fine — its “other products” category, which includes Apple Watch and AirPods, grew 38 percent year over year last quarter to nearly $4 billion. And Apple, which has been buying back shares like crazy, just launched another $100 billion repurchase program. [Dan Frommer / Recode]
Looks like Snapchat’s much-talked-about app redesign isn’t doing the trick, if you go by Snap’s Q1 report, which showed weak earnings and poor user growth. The company blamed the revenue on “seasonality and our redesign” — here’s why the redesign didn’t work. More concerning was the fact that Snapchat added just four million new users over the quarter — analysts were hoping for a jump of seven million users. [Rani Molla and Kurt Wagner]
Last month, Spotify went public; today, the streaming music company presents its first-ever earnings report. Spoiler: The company gave a preview of its upcoming numbers a few weeks ago, so it’s unlikely that Spotify is going to miss its goals, which include paid subscriber totals of 73 million to 76 million and gross margins of up to 24 percent. Absent any headline-making results, today’s report and earnings call will provide investors a first chance to measure Spotify’s Daniel Ek as the CEO of a public company. [Peter Kafka / Recode]
Tesla has very publicly grappled with a slew of struggles, including manufacturing issues, another Autopilot-related fatality and a battle with a government agency. Today, when the electric vehicle manufacturer releases its first-quarter earnings, CEO Elon Musk will have a lot of questions to answer, especially as the company has stumbled in its attempt to meet the ambitious manufacturing goals he has set for the mass-market Model 3 — and it still has yet to turn a profit. Wall Street is looking for a loss of $3.37 per share on revenue of $3.17 billion. [Johana Bhuiyan / Recode]
After months of acquisition talks, Birchbox has found a buyer: One of its own investors, the hedge fund Viking Global Investors. The beauty startup recently engaged in serious talks with QVC in what would have essentially been a fire sale. Viking Global will invest around $15 million of new cash into Birchbox, which was once valued at nearly $500 million and currently has tens of millions of dollars in debt. Birchbox’s other investors, including Accel Partners and First Round Capital, are expected to walk away with nothing. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
Top stories from Recode
It costs $199.
“The leaves us with no choice but to fire you,” the letter to HealthTap CEO Ron Gutman reads.
Ronan Farrow hints that “there will be more to say” about why NBC killed his Harvey Weinstein story.
On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, the journalist talked about “the question of the complicity of the media and the role the media played in keeping this quiet for as long as it was quiet.”
This is cool
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
