What Would Happen If Capital Hill Ran the US Like a Startup?
Government is often slow and difficult to understand. Tech moves quickly and is relatively simple to comprehend. Most importantly, consumers tend to get the feeling that tech products put the user first, while government “products” could care less. Because of this difference, mobile app developers are often fond of the idea that the US should […]
UK Data Spying Case Shocks and Outrages Tech Community
While much of the app development community assumes the Snowden disclosures only really applied to NSA operations in the US, the UK was also found to be conducting illegal data collection operations. From 1998 to 2015, the UK’s collection program collected massive amounts of private data including location and call records from every phone in […]
What’s better for developer productivity: music or silence?
The question of what music is best for triggering app developer productivity — if any at all — is a debate that has raged on since, if not the dawn of time, at least the introduction of the iPhone. Every developer is likely to have their own answer, but there are a few trends that […]
Hackers Wreak Havoc Using IoT Exploits
This past Friday, much of the United States’ internet access came to a crashing halt. Services like Twitter, Spotify, Reddit and Netflix were rendered inaccessible because of a Mirai botnet attack on servers owned by Dyn (the source code was actually released a few weeks ago and the creator of the code, a hacker dubbed […]
What the Last.Fm Security Breach Says about Mobile Privacy
“We are currently investigating the leak of some Last.fm user passwords. This follows recent password leaks on other sites, as well as information posted online. As a precautionary measure, we’re asking all our users to change their passwords immediately.” This statement was released way back in 2012, but it’s just this week that the full […]
How To Keep Data Harvesters Away From Your App’s API
Your app is a vault, filled with valuable data. Custom content. User emails. Images. Videos. Losing any of these things could be “game over” for a mobile app developer. The bad news is, all this data is readily available via your app’s APIs. API data harvesting is surprisingly common as a “growth hacking” tactic — […]
Y Combinator to Build “ultimate Full-Stack Startup”: A City
Y Combinator made a controversial announcement last week that their nonprofit arm would begin research towards building an entire city from scratch. The accelerator’s mobile app development projects have raised record-setting returns for the group, fueling a multi-million dollar nonprofit fund which Y combinator president Sam Altman hopes to grow to 100 million in coming […]
Google Launches Hardware Initiative to Teach Kids Code
Google just launched a new hardware initiative, Project Bloks, with the aim of expanding youth exposure to coding principles through “tangible coding.” Unlike the software-based coding systems mobile app developers who work with kids might be familiar with, tangible coding systems represent coding concepts — objects, binaries, if/then statements — as physical objects that can […]
Entrepreneurs vs Appreneurs: What Makes Startups Different
If you keep up with the tech scene, chances are you’ve heard the term “appreneur.” While it’s often used interchangeably with “entrepreneur,” mobile businesses are actually radically different from other entrepreneurial endeavors. That isn’t to say it’s easy. In fact, mobile startups have never faced tougher odds. For those who have the right mix of […]
Apple Watch Apps Blaze the Trail for Wearable Developers
The Apple Watch has been on the market long enough now that it’s begun to lose the new gadget glow. This is good for iOS and Apple Watch developers. Soon it will have completed the transition from “toy” to “tool,” offering developers much more long-term value in building relationships with users. Early apps for the […]