Who Decides Which Emojis You Get on Your Smartphone?
The Unicode Consortium does a lot of good for the world. It’s thanks to the efforts of this mostly volunteer organization that smartphone users can type in Chinese and rest assured that it’ll be readable on any other device. For speakers of obscure languages like Fulani, the consortium’s work literally pulls a whole culture across […]
What the Touchbar Means for iOS and OSX App Users
There’s been talk of iOS and OSX merging into a single operating system for some time now. Many iPhone app developers here in NYC believed that the new Macbook might offer a clue as to if and when it would finally happen. The release of the new Macbookdidn’t disappoint, and the “touch bar” at the […]
Facebook Messenger Launches In-App Games to Take on Apple
It sometimes seems like Facebook gets a cut of virtually every market these days, from media to communication. One market they’ve had trouble breaking into, however, is the mobile gaming industry — particularly ironic, for anybody that’s tired of getting Farmville requests from vague acquaintances. With the launch of “Instant Games” within the Messenger app, the […]
What Happens to Workers in an AI Economy?
If you were in Pittsburgh in the past couple months, you might have spotted one of Uber’s self-driving cars — or even had one stop to give you a ride. The opt-in program, conducted under the careful watch of trained real-person driving assistants, was for many NYC app developers a glimpse of the future. Futurologists […]
App Developer Challenges: Writing Helpful Bot Dialogue
The chatbot trend has been burning for a while now, and one of the biggest challenges facing app developers who jump into the fray isn’t entirely a question or programming. Instead, it’s a question of writing. Dialogue isn’t simple, and the trope of the anti-social hoodie-and-flip-flops San Francisco app developer doesn’t exactly lend itself to […]
Instagram Introduces In-App Shopping for Brands
If Twitter is the poster child of angry users and poor monetization attempts, Instagram is the opposite — a massive mobile app startup that’s somehow perfectly balanced monetization and user experience. That balance in on display currently as the company just launched “shoppable tags,” which allow select brands to display purchase information embedded within tags […]
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 […]
The NYPD Just Got Smartphones: Not the Brand You’d Expect
The Windows Phone accounts for less than 1% of the US smartphone market. That might seem like a death sentence for app developers on the platform, but it has a ring of opportunity for an unexpected group: namely, the New York Police Department. The department has been working directly with app developers in NYC to […]
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 […]
Want to Get into Y Combinator? Check out This Data.
Jared Friedman of Y Combinator has shared a fascinating talk that looks at formerly closed data from Y Combinator companies and applications throughout the program’s history, uncovering some fascinating trends in tech funding and cultural interests. For Los Angeles app developers, the presentation is a gold mine of inspiration and “food for thought” about how […]