Apple released earnings for its fiscal second quarter today, reporting revenue of $58 billion, a decline of 5% from the year-ago quarter, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.46, down 10%. International sales accounted for 61% of the quarter’s revenue.

The market apparently approves. Apple’s shares have jumped $10 apiece since the earnings were released, putting the company in spitting distance of the $1 trillion market cap it has been flirting with since last August.

The earnings are also in line with the guidance that Apple had provided during its last earnings call. In late January, per Apple’s guidance for the second quarter, it had estimated that its revenue would fall between $55 billion and $59 billion, its gross margins between 37% and 38%; its operating expenses between $8.5 billion and $8.6 billion; and that it would see other income of $300 million.

In a release, the company did not break out iPhone sales, which have come under pressure. Instead, CEO Tim Cook tried focusing attention on other aspects of the company’s business. “Our March quarter results show the continued strength of our installed base of over 1.4 billion active devices, as we set an all-time record for services, and the strong momentum of our wearables, home and accessories category, which set a new March quarter record,” said Cook in the release. “We delivered our strongest iPad growth in six years, and we are as excited as ever about our pipeline of innovative hardware, software and services. We’re looking forward to sharing more with developers and customers at Apple’s 30th annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.”

Apple had a tough 2018, with iPhone sales in the last quarter of the year falling 15% from where they’d been at the end of 2017 owing in part to stalled demand in China. Overall, sales in China fell a whopping 27% between the end of 2017 and the end of 2018, from $18 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2017, or 20% of the company’s total revenue during the period, to $13.2 billion, or 16% of the total.

Apple has blamed softening consumer demand in China’s market for its woes, but it hasn’t given up on the country; it can’t afford to, given its potential. In fact, earlier this month, to goose demand, Apple trimmed by up to 6% prices on the iPhone, iPad and other products it sells in China, according to Xinhua, the state-run news agency. The move was ostensibly triggered by China reducing its value-added tax, which is akin to sales tax in the U.S., to 13% (from 16%).

Devices have been tough for everyone. As we reported yesterday, Alphabet’s Q1 earnings were a disappointment for Wall Street primarily because of the company’s ad revenue shortcomings but also because of a stagnating global smartphone market that has impacted virtually all players. (CEO Sundar Pichai cited “year over year headwinds” when referring to the company’s smartphone line.)

Indeed, as widely anticipated, hardware proved a mixed bag for Apple in the second quarter. In the meantime, Apple has dramatically increased its focus on its services business. Roughly a month ago, the company announced a credit card in partnership with Goldman Sachs and Mastercard that’s designed for the iPhone and works with the Wallet app. It also officially unveiled it streaming initiative, Apple TV+, which is coming this fall and will be supported through an ad-free subscription.

Apple announced last year that its fiscal fourth quarter of 2018 was the last quarter in which it would report detailed iPhone figures, which may frustrate current and potential shareholders.

As famed VC Bill Gurley noted in a series of tweets earlier today, “Interesting to see very large companies get away with a lack of segment disclosure. AWS for a long time was not broken out. Mixing search and YouTube revenues makes no sense for $GOOG, and is quite unhelpful to investors trying to understand the company . . .Our much smaller companies are routinely told by their auditors and the SEC that they need to provide segment analysis, but it seems remarkably unfair when a company the size of Google with a segment as large as YouTube (~$20B) are not held to same standard.”

We’ll have more on Apple’s earnings for you soon.

The aggressive push by Silicon Valley companies and Chinese firms to win India, one of the last great growth markets, has decimated many local businesses in recent years. With each passing day, Amazon is closing in on Walmart-owned Flipkart’s lead on the e-commerce space. Uber is fighting with Ola for the tentpole position of the ride-hailing market; and Google and Facebook dominate the ads business, to name a few. But a handful of companies in India have not only survived the growing competition, but they have built businesses that are positively thriving.

Media conglomerate Times Internet, one such company, says that its properties now reach 110 million users each day and 450 million users each month. To put this in context: Facebook and Google have about 300 million monthly active users in India. Facebook, which is mired in controversy over the spread of misinformation on WhatsApp in India (and other regions), has not revealed its growth in the nation in last two years. But in a marketing pitch, the juggernaut says its family of apps (marquee Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram) reach 350 million users in the nation each month.

In a rare industry move, Satyan Gajwani, vice chairman of Times Internet, shared an overview of the conglomerate’s business on Tuesday, revealing the ever growing tentacles of its ambitions.

If the numbers are so huge, why self-publish? Gajwani declined to comment but his company is in a unique situation. For all its scale, Times Internet remains one of the least talked about conglomerates of its size in the country. Most news organizations in India compete with its media outlets, which may explain why it is under-reported in the press.

The subsidiary of 181-year-old Bennett Coleman and Company Limited (popularly known as Times Group) operates more than three dozen properties, including newspaper Times of India, online outlet Indiatimes, advertisement business Colombia, venture arm Tventures, and streaming services Gaana and MX Player. And nearly all of these properties are growing, Gajwani said.

For instance, Times Internet’s news outlets have amassed 265 million monthly active users. The Times of India, the country’s most read newspaper and news website, alone has 212 million monthly active users, up by 44% since last year. Times Internet’s regional digital periodicals such as NewsPoint, Navbharat Times, Maharashtra Times, Vijay Karnataka now have 122 monthly active users, he said.

Music streaming service Gaana, which raised $115 million from Tencent and others last year, reached 100 monthly active users in March this year, the service announced last week. MX Player, a video playback app that doubles as a streaming service that Times Internet acquired for some $140 million last year, is one of the most popular Android apps in emerging markets.

During the first month of ongoing IPL cricket tournament, one of the hottest events in India, 118 million users tuned into Times Internet’s Cricbuzz, a news and entertainment service dedicated to sports. As the ecosystem of mobile gaming begins to gain major traction in India, Times Internet says it is building a portfolio of apps in this space, too.

Its lifestyle properties such as MensXP, iDiva, and Whats Hot have 40 million monthly active users and its videos clock more than 200 million views each month. These properties are exploring an additional revenue channel by selling products directly to customers, Gajwani told TechCrunch in an interview.

Times Internet vice chairman Satyan Gajwani

Moving beyond ads

Chasing that avenue illustrates Times Internet’s growing push to grow its business beyond ads. Most of Times Internet’s properties are built on top of ads and don’t cost users anything for access. Its own advertising business, called Colombia, now supplements some advertisement on its network and is used by more than a dozen outside brands including Ola, ABP News, and Hotstar.

But online advertising still can’t compete with those of TV and print in India, Satish Meena, an analyst with research firm Forrester told TechCrunch. So in recent years, Times Internet has announced a number of subscription services across many of its properties.

“Especially for premium publishers, an ads-only business model is not likely to last or sustain in the long run,” Gajwani said. Last year, Times Internet announced Times Prime, a subscription bundle that includes access to premium version of Gaana, an ad-free experience on Times of India, and discounts on a number of third-party services such as food delivery Swiggy, retailer BigBasket, and theatre chain PVR Cinemas. Gajwani said Times Internet has hit a million customers across its subscription services.

Part of Times Internet’s push to expand its revenue channels is its growing focus on Tventures, its VC fund that made early investments in a number of startups including edtech startup Byju’s and logistics startup Delhivery, two unicorns. It has also invested in ride-hailing service Shuttl, and cricket fantasy app MPL among others.

Gajwani said Tventures looks at “use cases that can benefit from its growing network.” And that’s one of the big advantages of Times Internet’s scale. The properties they own enjoy great advertisement benefits across its sprawling network. “There are very few companies — with exception of Google and Facebook — that have our level of scale,” Gajwani said.

Times Internet, which employs over 5,000 people, also operates Times Bridge, an investment firm that ties with international brands to help them launch in India. Some of its strategic partners include Uber, Airbnb, and Coursera. It also partnered with a number of news outlets including Business Insider, TechRadar, Huffington Post (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon Media Group), AdAge, PCMag, and Gizmodo Media properties Lifehacker and Gizmodo to launch them in India.

But it isn’t all success, there have been less successful ventures particularly in the media segment.

The Indian versions of Lifehacker, Gizmodo, TechRadar, and PCMag failed to attract significant audiences in the nation and have already closed shops. Huffington Post ended its partnership with Times Internet in 2017 and it now wholly controls Huffington Post India.

Gajwani admitted that Times Internet realized working with some niche publishers isn’t so sustainable. “We have some partnerships that we maintain that are doing well such as Business Insider,” he added. Today, Times Internet is no longer primarily looking at publishers for future partnerships, and instead focusing on “platforms and technologies.”

A couple of hiccups aside, the biggest challenge for Times Internet going forward is generating sufficient revenue from ads and convincing enough users to become paying customers. Times Internet generated $202 million in fiscal year 2018 at a loss of $23 million, according to regulatory filings. In an interview last week, Gaana CEO Prashan Agarwal said his music streaming service, which dominates the market but is not profitable, will introduce a number of premium plans across a wide range of price tiers to attract users.

Gajwani said he also hopes to build Colombia into one of the biggest ad networks in India and tap 20 million paying subscribers by 2023. He said some properties within Times Network could raise additional cash from outside investors in the coming future.  These are ambitious goals, but Times Internet is one of the few firms in India that realistically has a shot at co-existing with dominant overseas tech platforms.

• Walli (Free) – Walli is a free wallpaper app that lets artists share photographs and artwork that can be used as your iPhone or iPad background. Walli has content organized into categories, plus there’s a search tool and options for viewing recent, popular, and featured content. Walli offers all free content and displays ads in the app.
• Unsplash (Free) – Unsplash is a community-based image sharing app that provides royalty-free photographs for you to use as wallpaper or for other purposes. It’s not focused solely on wallpapers, but there’s an interesting range of content and a huge number different options. There are featured categories along with a robust search tool for finding just what you’re looking for. Along with an iOS app, Unsplash also has a website so you can get Mac wallpapers too.
• Vellum Wallpapers (Free) – Vellum is an app that aggregates wallpapers from a variety of sources, so it offers a good range of different wallpaper options. Some of the content overlaps with the other wallpaper apps we’ve mentioned, but it also has unique wallpapers you won’t find elsewhere. It has a nifty blurring tool for cutting out details on a wallpaper you might want to use as a background for the Home screen, so app names and icons won’t be hard to see. It’s free, but you can remove ads for $1.99.
• Atlas Wallpaper (Free) – Atlas is a unique wallpaper app that’s designed to let you create a wallpaper based on a map anywhere in the world. You can search for a specific location, see a general overview map, and then customize the color palette to create unique wallpaper maps.

Along with the apps mentioned above, Reddit can be a great resource for new wallpaper content, specifically in the /r/wallpaper subreddit, and just a simple Google search for images can also be helpful if you’re looking for something more specific.

Do you have favorite wallpaper app or resource that we didn’t mention? Let us know in the comments.