Hereanother edition of &Dear Sophie,& the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

&Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,& says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. &Whether you&re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.&

&Dear Sophie& columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie: I have an H-4 visa and work authorization. I currently have a job thatconsidered nonessential during the coronavirus emergency. If I get laid off, I would need unemployment assistance while I look for another job.

Would getting unemployment benefits hurt my or my spousegreen card petition under the new public charge rule?

— Nonessential in NorCal

Dear Nonessential:

Thanks for your timely question. The short answer is no, getting unemployment benefits alone right now won&t jeopardize your or your spousegreen card. This is because receiving unemployment benefits, getting tested for coronavirus and seeking emergency medical treatment (even if itcovered by Medicaid) are all exempt from consideration as government benefits under the new public charge rule.

Immigration officials have long had the authority to deny individuals a visa or green card if they are likely to be dependent on public benefits. The new public charge rule, which went into effect on February 24, expands the factors immigration officials will consider. An additional form seeking health and financial information must now be submitted with most visa and green card applications. Immigration officials will use that information to determine whether applicants are or are likely to become dependent on government benefits.

If you have received a public benefit in the past, your application won&t necessarily be denied, but given whatat stake, itimportant to consult an experienced immigration attorney.

Individuals who will be subjected to the increased scrutiny of the expanded public charge rule are:

With large majorities of all children (70% in the U.S. and U.K.) staying home from school during the COVID-19 crisis, use of digital media properties popular with kids has soared. Screen time among kids in the U.S. is up 50% according to research by SuperAwesome .

This adds momentum to a space that has already been rapidly evolving amid greater protections on childrendata privacy, increasing popularity of gaming, the rise of subscription bundles, and the influence of independent content creators.

TechCrunch will host a live webinar panel tomorrow (April 8) at 11:15am PDT / 2:15pm EDT about the current state of childrenmedia with three leaders in the industry:

• Craig Donato, Chief Business Officer of Roblox, the $4 billion gaming platform that counts the majority of US kids age 9-12 among its active users.
• Nancy MacIntyre, Co-Founder - CEO of Fingerprint, a leading subscription video and gaming service for children.
• Dylan Collins, Co-Founder - CEO of SuperAwesome, the London-based creator of &kid-safe& adtech and privacy tools.

Extra Crunch members will be able to submit questions to the panelists using the Zoom dial-in information posted below. For other TechCrunch readers, we will have a YouTube live stream ready to go to join, which we will post on TechCrunchTwitter page.

Dial-in information

Today, Facebook quietly released a new app for couples. Called Tuned, the new release is a multimedia messaging app designed to help significant others communicate.

The app is available for download in the U.S. and Canada, app analytics firm Sensor Tower tells us. Tuned was developed and released by FacebookNew Product Experimentation (NPE) team. The division is — as the name suggests — very experimental and thus a bit quicker to pull the plug on projects if they don&t show traction.

The Tuned app arrives during a very interesting time for couples. Couples that live together are spending every waking moment in each otherpresence in the midst of quarantine and could probably never have less of a need for an app like this. For couples that don&t live together, theremore of an appeal, as people are emboldened to build out digital toolsets to stay close with their partners during an unprecedented time.

The app is by all means just a messaging app thatmore focused on pushing updates and stickers to a singular person. Users can also integrate the app with Spotify to share songs, or use dedicated widgets to share how they&re feeling or what they&re up to. The company refers to the appfeed as &scrapbook-style.&

Itnot integrated with the companydating platform, Facebook Dating; in fact, the most interesting quality of the app is the sheer lack of Facebook tie-ins.

For years, Messenger was the testing bed for Facebooksocial curiosities, but Messenger became too important and users weren&t responding positively to constantly seeing nominal changes in an app they frequently used. The issue is Facebook doesn&t have a default experimentation app anymore, and so these NPE team releases kind of force Facebook to get by with less user data and make judgment calls on how fast functionality can develop when starting from a standstill. Itunclear how successfully this strategy is progressing. NPE Teamonly other release thatstill available, a Pinterest competitor named Hobbi, was released two months ago and has only received one review on the App Store — a one-star review.

Just like in almost every other industry, therebeen a rash of layoffs among newer space startups and companies amid the novel coronavirus crisis. But Relativity Space has managed to avoid layoffs — and is even hiring, despite the global pandemic. Relativity CEO and founder Tim Ellis cites the companyfocus on large-scale 3D printing and its adoption of cloud-based tools and technologies as big reasons why his startup hasn&t felt the pinch.

Because Relativityforthcoming launch vehicle is almost entirely made up of 3D-printed parts, from the engines to the fuselage and everything in between, the company has been able to continue producing its prototypes essentially uninterrupted. Relativity has been classified an essential business, as have most companies operating in anything related to aerospace or defense, but Ellis said that they took steps very early to address the potential threat of COVID-19 and ensure the health and safety of their staff. As early as March 9, when the disease was really first starting to show up in the U.S. and before any formal restrictions or shelter-in-place orders were in effect, Relativity was recommending that employees work from home where possible.

&We&re able to do that, partially because with our automated printing technology we were able to have very, very few people in the factory and still keep printers running,& Ellis said in an interview. &We actually even have just one person now running several printers that are still actually printing — itliterally a single person operating, while a lot of the company has been able to make progress working from home for the last couple of weeks.&

Being able to run an entire production factory floor with just one person on-site is a tremendous competitive advantage in the current situation, and a way to ensure you&re also respecting employee health and safety. Ellis added that the company has already been operating between multiple locations, including teams at Cape Canaveral, Florida, as well as at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and at its headquarters in LA. Relativity also had a further distributed workforce with a few employees working remotely from locations across the U.S, and it focused early on ensuring that its design and development processes could work without requiring everyone to be centrally based.

&We&ve developed our own custom software tools to just streamline those workflows, that really helped,& Ellis said. &Also, just being more of a cloud-enabled company, while still complying with ITAR and security protocols, has been really, really advantageous as well.&

In addition to their focus on in-house software and cloud-based tools, Ellis credits the timing of their most recent round — a $140 million investment closed last October — as a reason they&re well-situated for enduring the COVID-19 crisis. He says that Relativity not only managed to avoid any layoffs, while sending out new offers, but they&re also still paying all employees, including hourly workers, their full regular wage. All of this stems from a business model that in retrospect, seems prescient, but that Ellis says actually just has significant advantages in todayglobal business climate by virtue of chance. Still, he does believe that some of Relativityresilience thus far signals some of the biggest lasting changes that will result from the coronavirus pandemic.

&What itreally going to change […] is the approach to global supply chain,& he said. &I think theregoing to be a big push to have more things made in America, and then less dependence on heavy globalization across supply chain. Thatone you thing we&ve always had with 3D printing — not only is it an automated technology, where we can have very few operators still making progress even during times like like this and printing some of the first-stage structures of our rocket — but on the supply chain side, just having simpler supply chains with fewer vendors and different types of manufacturing processes means itmuch less likely that we&ll see very significant supplier and supply chain interruptions.&

Meanwhile, while Ellis says that ultimately they can&t predict how the coronavirus crisis will impact their overall schedule in terms of planned launch activities, which includes flying their first 3D-printed vehicle in 2021, they anticipate being able to make plenty of progress through remote work and a production line that can easily comply with social isolation guidelines. Partner facility shutdowns, including the rocket engine test stand at Stennis, will definitely have an impact, but Relativityresilience could prove a model for manufacturing businesses of all stripes to emulate once this moment has passed.

SpaceX has been resupplying the International Space Station (ISS) since it began flying cargo missions on behalf of NASA in 2012. Now, the version of the Dragon capsule that SpaceX first employed to fly those missions is retiring, after one of the spacecraft based on that design splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday afternoon, having returned from the ISS.

This marks the completion of CRS-20, the 20th Commercial Resupply Services mission that SpaceX has flown for NASA. The Dragon had been docked at the ISS since March 9, after taking off from Cape Canaveral on March 7. It was the last use of this model of Dragon, which also means it was the last time a SpaceX Dragon will need the assistance of the robotic Canadarm appendage used by the Space Station crew to facilitate docking & the newer iterations of Dragon, including Crew Dragon, use an automated docking process to attach to the orbiting science facility.

Prior to its return, the Dragon used on this flight was loaded up for cargo for the return trip, including experimental materials and results that will be studied by researchers on the ground. This capsule also already made the flight previously to the ISS on two separate occasions, including for CRS-10 and CRS-16, making its retirement flight a hat-trick for the spacecraft.

Next up for SpaceX is Demo-2, the first ever crewed flight of a Dragon to the ISS, which is currently planned for mid-to-late May. Cargo missions will also continue, with the next tentatively set for October 2020.

Last month, it was reported that digital locker service Movies Anywhere was working to launch a movie-sharing feature called &Screen Pass.& At the time, the feature was only available in limited, private beta testing with a plan to fully roll it out late summer or early fall. But as a result of increased demand from consumers stuck at home under government lockdowns and quarantines, Movies Anywhere has rushed to launch the sharing feature into an open, public beta.

The Movies Anywhere app today allows consumers to access their purchased movies from across a range of services, including iTunes, Vudu, Prime Video, YouTube, Xfinity, and many others. Today, the app is jointly operated by Disney, Universal, WB, Sony Pictures, and 20th Century Fox. An earlier 2014 version of the service was called Disney Movies Anywhere, but it later migrated to a new platform in 2017 and the app was rebuilt to serve the expanded group of operating partners. The two are related efforts, but much different businesses.

Movies Anywhere had been developing the movie-sharing feature with plans for a later launch. But the overwhelmingly positive response to its testing encouraged the company to move up the launch even further.

Screen Pass will allow Movies Anywhere users to loan out only 3 movies per month to family and friends. The movies can then be watched across the Movies Anywhere platform.

To share the title, you can view eligible titles from a new section under &My Movies& in the app, then click the Screen Pass icon on the title you want to share and provide the details. Movies can be sent out over text, email, or message and the recipient has a week to accept the share.

The shared movie will effectively work like a movie rental, as recipients will have a limited time to watch — in this case, up to 14 days. Once the movie is started, recipients have 72 hours to finish watching. But unlike a rental, itfree to share a movie and free to watch.

Only some titles will be &Screen Pass-eligible& at launch and they aren&t able to be saved for offline viewing. Only purchased movies can be downloaded, the company says. To use the feature, the Movies Anywhere account will also need to belong to a U.S. resident.

Screen Pass is currently supported on a range of popular movies, including &The Fate of the Furious (F8),& &Tombstone,& &Logan,& &Wonder Woman,& &Trolls,& &The Lego Movie,& &Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,& &Groundhog Day,& &Rushmore,& the &Harry Potter& movies, &Jason Bourne,& &Elf,& &Sing,& &Role Models,& &Bad Moms,& &Happy Feet,& &Ready Player One,& &Speed,& &The Karate Kid,& &Back to the Future,& and others. In total, around 80% of movies available in Movies Anywhere are Screen Pass-eligible, or over 6,000 titles.

Users who want to join the public beta test can sign up using this link. Users can also accept a Screen Pass from a current beta participant, which then opts them into the beta testing group, too.

The company does not have a planned commercial launch date yet for the feature.

Update, 4/7/20, 3:12 PM ET: Screen Pass now works on Roku; during the private beta it did not. We&ve corrected this.