All posts tagged: developers

The App Store is booming again, and AI may be why

The App Store is booming again, and AI may be why

Published by skeptic

Everyone said AI would kill apps. Instead, new app launches are soaring. According to a new analysis from market intelligence provider Appfigures, worldwide app releases in the first quarter of 2026 were up 60% year-over-year across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play. That percentage was an even higher 80% when looking at the iOS App Store alone. In April 2026 so far, the total number of app releases is up 104% across both stores compared to the same time last year, and up 89% on iOS. As Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Greg “Joz” Joswiak, quipped In a recent interview: rumors of the App Store’s death in the AI age “may have been greatly exaggerated.” Image Credits:Appfigures These findings come amid concerns that the rise of AI chatbots and agents would ultimately see users turning away from apps — a theory that’s already being floated by those in the industry, like Nothing CEO Carl Pei, who is focused on building a smartphone for the AI era. The New York Times also reported …

‘Tokenmaxxing’ is making developers less productive than they think

‘Tokenmaxxing’ is making developers less productive than they think

Published by skeptic

There’s an old saw in management: What you measure matters. And, typically, you get more of whatever you’re measuring. Software engineers have debated productivity metrics for decades, starting with lines of code. But as the new generation of AI coding agents delivers more code than ever, what their managers ought to be measuring is less clear. Enormous token budgets — essentially, the amount of AI processing power a developer is authorized to consume — have become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley developers, but that’s a very weird way to think about productivity. Measuring an input to the process makes little sense when you presumably care more about the output. It might make sense if you’re trying to encourage more AI adoption (or selling tokens), but not if you’re trying to become more efficient. Consider the evidence from a new class of companies operating in the “developer productivity insight” space. They’re finding that developers using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate a lot more accepted code than they did before. But they …

Apple Seeds Second iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5 Betas to Developers

Apple Seeds Second iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5 Betas to Developers

Published by skeptic

Apple today seeded the second betas of upcoming iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5 updates to developers for testing purposes, with the software coming two weeks after Apple released updated first betas. Registered developers can download the betas from the Settings app on the iPhone or iPad by going to the General section and selecting Software Update. iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5 do not include new Siri capabilities, suggesting any ‌Siri‌ updates are being held until iOS 27. The Maps app has a Suggested Places feature for recommending locations to visit nearby based on trends and recent searches, plus Apple is laying the groundwork for ads in the Apple Maps app. Apple is continuing to test end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for RCS messages between iPhone and Android users. Apple included the feature in the iOS 26.4 beta, but removed it before the update launched to the public. In the European Union, Apple is testing proximity pairing, notification forwarding, and Live Activities for third-party wearables like earbuds and smartwatches. The functionality will allow third-party wearables to have many …

Your developers are already running AI locally: Why on-device inference is the CISO’s new blind spot

Your developers are already running AI locally: Why on-device inference is the CISO’s new blind spot

Published by skeptic

For the last 18 months, the CISO playbook for generative AI has been relatively simple: Control the browser. Security teams tightened cloud access security broker (CASB) policies, blocked or monitored traffic to well-known AI endpoints, and routed usage through sanctioned gateways. The operating model was clear: If sensitive data leaves the network for an external API call, we can observe it, log it, and stop it. But that model is starting to break. A quiet hardware shift is pushing large language model (LLM) usage off the network and onto the endpoint. Call it Shadow AI 2.0, or the “bring your own model” (BYOM) era: Employees running capable models locally on laptops, offline, with no API calls and no obvious network signature. The governance conversation is still framed as “data exfiltration to the cloud,” but the more immediate enterprise risk is increasingly “unvetted inference inside the device.” When inference happens locally, traditional data loss prevention (DLP) doesn’t see the interaction. And when security can’t see it, it can’t manage it. Why local inference is suddenly practical …

Docker isn’t just for developers — I’m a regular user and it changed how I run apps

Docker isn’t just for developers — I’m a regular user and it changed how I run apps

Published by skeptic

Docker had been sitting in my mental “not for me” folder for years. Right next to Kubernetes, enterprise dashboards, and anything that sounds like it requires a Slack channel just to exist. It had that aura. Containers, images, orchestration. Words that don’t just suggest complexity, they announce it. So I ignored it. Until I got tired of my system doing that subtle Linux thing where nothing is technically broken, but something is definitely off. I saw apps stepping on each other, and felt dependencies shifting under my feet. That creeping feeling that installing one more thing might be the thing that finally makes everything weird. Docker didn’t fix Linux. It just removed most of the reasons I was side-eyeing it. Since I’ve already written a few Docker articles and gotten one joint comment from you guys, here’s what Docker is! Docker sounds complicated, but it really isn’t It’s just apps in isolated boxes that don’t touch your system Afam Onyimadu / MUO Here’s Docker without the TED Talk. A container is just an app packaged …

Say a Prayer for This Startup That’s Replacing Its Developers With OpenClaw

Say a Prayer for This Startup That’s Replacing Its Developers With OpenClaw

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech OpenClaw fever is still going strong in tech circles. The open source AI agent, much hyped for “actually doing things,” has been embraced by many programmers to automate parts of their workflow. But could they be automating themselves out of a job? That’s not a possibility that seems to bother the co-founders of the Silicon Valley startup JustPaid, who brag they’ve used OpenClaw to create an entire software engineering team made of seven fully autonomous AI agents. That’s what’s they’re claiming, at any rate. Vinay Pinnaka, a cofounder and the company’s chief technology officer, told The Wall Street Journal that they built the agents by combining OpenClaw’s capabilities with Anthropic’s AI coding tool Claude Code. OpenClaw functions as the “brain that decides what needs to happen,” and Claude Code is “the hands that do the coding work,” he explained. The non-human helpers, in just a month since being deployed, have built ten major features, each of which would’ve …

Apple Seeds Second iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5 Betas to Developers

Apple Seeds Revised iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5 Betas to Developers

Published by skeptic

Apple today seeded revised first betas of upcoming iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5 updates to developers for testing purposes, with the software coming four days after Apple seeded the initial betas. Registered developers can download the betas from the Settings app on the iPhone or iPad by going to the General section and selecting Software Update. It’s not clear why Apple has seeded new beta updates, but there may be a bug fix that couldn’t wait for the second beta. iOS 26.5 and iPadOS 26.5 do not include new Siri capabilities, suggesting any ‌Siri‌ updates are being held until iOS 27. The Maps app has a Suggested Places feature for recommending locations to visit nearby based on trends and recent searches, plus Apple is laying the groundwork for ads. Apple is again testing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for RCS messages between iPhone and Android users. Apple tested the feature in iOS 26.4, but removed it before the update launched. In the European Union, Apple is testing proximity pairing, notification forwarding, and Live Activities for third-party wearables …

How AI has suddenly become much more useful to open-source developers

How AI has suddenly become much more useful to open-source developers

Published by skeptic

imaginima/ iStock / Getty Images Plus via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Top open-source maintainers find that AI has suddenly become much more useful. There are still legal and ‘AI slop’ problems to overcome. By year’s end, AI programming tools should be much more reliable. With open-source software running pretty much everything, you might think that multiple developers maintain most of the important programs with help from corporate sponsors. You’d be wrong. As Josh Bressers, VP of security at software supply-chain company Anchore, pointed out last year, the vast majority of open-source projects, 7 million out of 11.8 million programs, have only a single maintainer. You might think that those programs are obscure or no longer used. You’d be wrong about that, too.  Also: 7 AI coding techniques I use to ship real, reliable products – fast Bressers looked closely at the JavaScript NPM ecosystem and found that, among the projects downloaded over a million times a month, “about half of the 13,000 most downloaded NPM packages are [maintained …

Apple Requires App Developers to Declare Regulated Medical Device Status in EEA, UK, and U.S.

Apple Requires App Developers to Declare Regulated Medical Device Status in EEA, UK, and U.S.

Published by skeptic

App Store product pages will now display whether an app is a regulated medical device, Apple said today. The designation will be shown in the ‌App Store‌ in the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom, and United States. According to Apple, regulated medical device apps may function on their own or as part of a system for medical purposes like diagnosis, prevention, monitoring, and treatment of diseases and physiological conditions. The apps may require registration or authorization from regulatory bodies like the Food and Drug Administration. App developers who distribute Health and Fitness or Medical apps in the EEA, UK, or U.S. will need to provide a regulated medical device status in ‌App Store‌ Connect, along with associated regulatory information. Apps that are marked as containing frequent references to medical or treatment information in the Age Rating questionnaire in ‌App Store‌ Connect will also need to provide the regulated medical device status. Apple says the status is required for new apps that meet either criteria as of today. Existing apps will need to provide a …

Gamers Hate Nvidia’s DLSS 5. Developers Aren’t Crazy About It Either

Gamers Hate Nvidia’s DLSS 5. Developers Aren’t Crazy About It Either

Published by skeptic

After a day of widespread, overwhelming pushback, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doubled down and said gamers are “completely wrong” about DLSS. (You know how much gamers love being told that they’re wrong.) But developers at Capcom and Ubisoft say they didn’t even know what the tech demo would look like and, according to Insider Gaming, found out about it the same time everyone else did and were just as surprised. (Nvidia, Ubisoft, and Capcom did not immediately get back to our request for comment.) “I think the reaction from gamers is understandable,” Marwan Mahmoud, a game developer at Incrypt, wrote in an email to WIRED. “Some games started relying too heavily on these technologies instead of focusing on proper optimization. From a developer perspective, it feels a bit different, because you see DLSS as a tool that helps rather than a core solution.” The problem for many people, developers included, is the one-size-fits-all approach of a technology that can adjust visuals across various game types. “The artist has a style, the artist has an art …