Sensor Tower: Lensa tops the US App Store charts with 3.6M installs in December; app saw 12.6M global installs in Dec. so far, up 600% from last 11 days of Nov. (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Sensor Tower: BeReal has passed 53M installs, its MAUs are up 2,254% since January, and ~9% of its active installs on Android opened the app every day in Q3  —  Gen Z social media app BeReal encourages its users to take a photo every day — a format designed to create a daily habit.

Melissa Heikkilä / MIT Technology Review:
A reporter tries Lensa, but unlike her male peers whose avatars were astronauts, warriors, and the like, many of hers were “pornified”, with 16 of 100 topless  —  My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.

Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Descript, the AI-powered media editing app founded by Andrew Mason, raised a $50M Series C led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, bringing its total funding to $100M  —  Descript, the audio and video editing platform founded in 2017 by former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, has raised $50 million …

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:
PhotoRoom, which is bringing generative AI to its photo editing app for e-commerce vendors and SMBs, raised a $19M Series A; the app has 7M MAUs, 40M+ downloads  —  French startup PhotoRoom has raised a $19 million Series A funding round.  The company develops a popular photo editing app for e-commerce vendors and small businesses.

Kif Leswing / CNBC:
Sensor Tower: Apple’s App Store net revenue fell by around 5% in September, the steepest drop since 2015, as gaming revenue declined by 14%  —  – Apple’s App Store revenue declined about 5% in September, according to Morgan Stanley, the steepest drop since the bank started modeling the data in 2015.

Mia Sato / The Verge:
Sensor Tower: TikTok Now, the BeReal clone debuted on September 18, is in the top 10 social networking apps in 39 countries and the top 100 apps in 24 countries  —  The TikTok Now feature was first announced last week and is built into the TikTok app for US users.