by David I | Oct 24, 2017 | Developer News, Developer Programs News, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Newsletter |
In today’s interconnected world, companies in all industries need to publish APIs and cultivate a developer community to access and use them. To be competitive today, attracting and supporting developers is essential. The key to cultivating a vibrant developer community that uses your APIs and supports your platform is a good developer relations program. “Developer Programs and APIs in the News” is a series of news items from developer programs around the world.
Developer Programs and APIs in the News
Amazon – October 24, 2017 – Introducing the All-New Amazon Appstore for Android Devices – “Today we’re excited to announce the all-new standalone Amazon Appstore mobile app for Android. The Amazon Appstore is available on millions of Amazon Fire TV, Fire tablet, and Android devices in 236 countries and territories. The new mobile app is redesigned from the ground up, allowing customers to enjoy the same apps and games that they engage with on Fire TV and Fire tablets on their mobile phones.”
Google – October 24, 2017 – Gmail Add-ons framework now available to all developers – “Now anyone can start building a Gmail add-on. Gmail Add-ons let you integrate your app into Gmail and extend Gmail to handle quick actions.”
Apple, GE – October 18, 2017 – Apple and GE partner to bring Predix industrial apps to iPhone and iPad – “Apple and GE today announced a partnership to deliver powerful industrial apps designed to bring predictive data and analytics from Predix, GE’s industrial Internet of Things (IoT) platform, to iPhone and iPad. The two companies unveiled a new Predix software development kit (SDK) for iOS, which gives developers the tools to make their own powerful industrial IoT apps.”
Google, JFrog, Red Hat, IBM, Black Duck, Twistlock, Aqua Security, CoreOS – October 12, 2017 – Introducing Grafeas: An open-source API to audit and govern your software supply chain – “Building software at scale requires strong governance of the software supply chain, and strong governance requires good data. Grafeas is an open source initiative to define a uniform way for auditing and governing the modern software supply chain. Grafeas (scribe in Greek) provides organizations with a central source of truth for tracking and enforcing policies across an ever growing set of software development teams and pipelines. Build, auditing and compliance tools can use the Grafeas API to store, query and retrieve comprehensive metadata on software components of all kinds.”
Google – October 12, 2017 – Introducing Android Instant Apps SDK 1.1 – “Since our public launch at Google I/O, we’ve been working hard to improve the developer experience of building instant apps. Today, we’re excited to announce availability of the Android Instant Apps SDK 1.1 with some highly-requested features such as improved NDK support, configuration APKs for binary size reduction, and a new API to maintain user’s context when they transition from an instant app to the installed app.”
Dialogflow, API.AI – October 10, 2017 – Introducing Dialogflow, the new name for API.AI – “We realized that we were doing so much more than just providing an API. So with that, we’d like to introduce Dialogflow – the new name for API.AI.Our new name doesn’t change the work we’re doing with you or our mission. Our mission continues to be that Dialogflow is your end-to-end platform for building great conversational experiences and our team will help you share what you’ve built with millions of users.”
Apple – October 6, 2017 – Creating and Promoting Your AR Apps – “ARKit lets you seamlessly blend realistic virtual objects with the real world, so you can take your apps beyond the screen. Use these resources to learn how to clearly indicate when the user enters AR, show users what to expect from your AR experiences with app previews, and build Face Tracking support for iPhone X.”
Google – October 4, 2017 – Apps for the Google Assistant: new languages, devices and features! – “As you may have seen, it’s a big day for the Google Assistant with new features, new devices and new languages coming soon. But it’s also a big day for developers like you, as Actions on Google is also coming to new devices and new languages, and getting better for building and sharing apps.”
Twitter – September 25, 2017 – Refreshing and bringing together our developer resources – “Today we are launching developer.twitter.com — replacing and bringing together gnip.com and dev.twitter.com — as a complete reference center for Twitter’s developer platform. The new site will be a hub for all developer resources. Whether integrating with Twitter for the first time, or innovating and scaling solutions for your customers, you can look to developer.twitter.com as a place to learn, to manage tools and APIs, and to engage with the Twitter developer community worldwide.”
Apple – September 19, 2017 – The All-new App Store is Here – “The App Store has grown beyond anything we could have ever imagined. And now, with daily stories by our editors, a dedicated Games tab, lists for all kinds of apps, and much more, this beautiful new design provides an amazing place to highlight your incredible work — and help customers discover new apps and games.”
Telstra – September 12, 2017 – Welcome to the new T.DEV! – “At Telstra we’re embarking on a new journey to connect you, the developer, to our services. We realise the importance developers have in coming up with new innovations, in growing new businesses and by shaping the world as we all move up the stack. Telstra is getting closer to developers in a big way, and in some ways we’ve already been talking with developers for a long time through programs.”
Amazon – September 7, 2017 – Export your Amazon Lex bot schema to the Alexa Skills Kit – “You can now export your Amazon Lex chatbot schema into the Alexa Skills Kit to simplify the process of creating an Alexa skill. Amazon Lex now provides the ability to export your Amazon Lex chatbot definition as a JSON file that can be added to the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK). ”
Microsoft – August 28, 2017 – Introducing the Xamarin Certified Mobile Professional Badge – “We’re pleased to introduce a new certification level at Xamarin University, the Xamarin Certified Mobile Professional! This badge will be our initial certification level for developers to demonstrate fundamental competency in Xamarin mobile development.”
Arduino – July 28, 2017 – A New Era for Arduino Begins Today – “This is the beginning of a new era for Arduino in which we will strengthen and renew our commitment to open source hardware and software, while in parallel setting the company on a sound financial course of sustainable growth. Our vision remains to continue to enable anybody to innovate with electronics for a long time to come.”
Samsung – June 21, 2017 – A Must Watch for Game Developers: The Seven Rules of Monetization – “In what was a jam-packed hour, Oscar spoke about the importance of learning through experimentation, failure and data, offering expertise and examples designed to help developers avoid the mistakes he’s seen throughout his almost 20 years in monetization and social freemium game design.”
Send me your Developer Programs News!
If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news.

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
by David I | May 26, 2017 | APIs, Developer Programs News, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
In today’s interconnected world, companies in all industries need to publish APIs and cultivate a developer community to access and use them. To be competitive today, attracting and supporting developers is essential. The key to cultivating a vibrant developer community that uses your APIs and supports your platform is a good developer relations program. “Developer Programs and APIs in the News” is a series of news items from developer programs around the world.
Developer Programs and APIs in the News
Twilio – May 25, 2017 – Twilio Announces Proxy — Next Generation API for Building Private and Moderated Conversations with Customers – “Twilio, the leading cloud communications platform for developers, today announced Twilio Proxy, a new API to power private text and voice conversations between a customer and a mobile worker. Any business with a mobile workforce can now enable workers to connect with customers using their own device, while providing a layer of privacy and security to both the worker and the customer.”
Microsoft – May 24, 2017 – Microsoft R Open: The Enhanced R Distribution v3.4.0 is now available – “Microsoft R Open, formerly known as Revolution R Open (RRO), is the enhanced distribution of R from Microsoft Corporation. The current release, Microsoft R Open 3.4.0, is based the statistical language R-3.4.0 and includes additional capabilities for improved performance, reproducibility and platform support. Just like R, Microsoft R Open 3.4.0 is open source and free to download, use, and share.”
Google, IBM, Lyft – May 24 2017 – Introducing Istio: A robust service mesh for microservices – “Google, IBM, and Lyft are proud to announce the first public release of Istio: an open source project that provides a uniform way to connect, secure, manage and monitor microservices. Our current release is targeted at the Kubernetes environment; we intend to add support for other environments such as virtual machines and Cloud Foundry in the coming months.”
Amazon AWS – May 22, 2017 – New AWS Training and Certification Portal – “The new AWS Training and Certification Portal allows you to access and manage your training and certification activities, progress, and benefits – all in one place. Previously, you had to rely on multiple websites to find and manage training and certification offerings. Now you have a central place where you can find and enroll in AWS Training, register for AWS Certification exams, track your learning progress, and access benefits based on the AWS Certifications you have achieved.”
Google – May 18, 2017 – What’s next for Google payment and loyalty experiences – “Yesterday, we announced the Google Payment API, which lets people pay in app or online with any verified credit or debit card saved to their Google Account, via products like Google Play, Chrome and YouTube.”
JetBrains – May 17, 2017 – Kotlin on Android. Now official – “Today, at the Google I/O keynote, the Android team announced first-class support for Kotlin. We believe this is a great step for Kotlin, and fantastic news for Android developers as well as the rest of our community. We’re thrilled with the opportunities this opens up. For Android developers, Kotlin support is a chance to use a modern and powerful language, helping solve common headaches such as runtime exceptions and source code verbosity.”
Google – May 17, 2017 – Build and train machine learning models on our new Google Cloud TPUs – “We’re excited to announce that our second-generation Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) are coming to Google Cloud to accelerate a wide range of machine learning workloads, including both training and inference. We call them Cloud TPUs, and they will initially be available via Google Compute Engine. Each of these new TPU devices delivers up to 180 teraflops of floating-point performance. As powerful as these TPUs are on their own, though, we designed them to work even better together.”
Silver Spring Networks – May 16, 2017 – Silver Spring Networks Expands IoT Developer Program – “Silver Spring Networks, Inc. announced the extension of its developer program with the introduction of a new developer portal, developer kits and a simulation tool for application development. Silver Spring aims to accelerate innovation for the Internet of Important Things. Support for the Arduino developer environment, the simplification of software tools, and the new developer portal will broaden the potential devices and applications that can integrate Silver Spring’s IoT technology into solutions for utilities, cities and industrial companies.”
Google – May 16, 2017 – Introducing Google Cloud IoT Core: for securely connecting and managing IoT devices at scale – “Announcing a new fully-managed Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service called Google Cloud IoT Core. Cloud IoT Core makes it easy for you to securely connect your globally distributed devices to GCP, centrally manage them and build rich applications by integrating with our data analytics services. When used as part of a broader Google Cloud IoT solution, Cloud IoT Core gives you access to new operational insights that can help your business react to, and optimize for, change in real time.”
Microsoft – May 10, 2017 – Azure Cosmos DB: The industry’s first globally-distributed, multi-model database service – “Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Azure Cosmos DB. Azure Cosmos DB is the first globally-distributed data service that lets you to elastically scale throughput and storage across any number of geographical regions while guaranteeing low latency, high availability and consistency – backed by the most comprehensive SLAs in the industry. Azure Cosmos DB is built to power today’s IoT and mobile apps, and tomorrow’s AI-hungry future.”
Oracle – May 10, 2017 – Oracle API Platform Cloud Enables Customers to Drive Business Transformation and API-First Thinking – “Oracle today expanded Oracle Cloud Platform’s integration offerings with the availability of Oracle API Platform Cloud Service. Bringing together leading API-first design and governance capabilities from recently acquired Apiary and API management from Oracle, the new cloud service delivers end-to-end capabilities for designing, prototyping, documenting, testing, and managing the proliferation of critical APIs.”
Unsplash – May 9, 2017 – The Unsplash API is now open & free – “It’s never been easier to make something awesome with Unsplash photos. Oh boy. The moment you’ve been waiting for is finally here. Assuming you’ve been waiting for us to make an announcement about the Unsplash API… Or were you expecting something else? A .gif perhaps? Have we satisfied your .gif cravings? Good, now let’s get down to business: the Unsplash API is now 100% open and free to outside developers.”
NVIDIA – May 8, 2017 – NVIDIA Releases VRWorks Audio and 360 Video SDKs at GTC – “NVIDIA is making VR more immersive, and VR development easier, with the release of VR audio and 360-degree video stitching as part of our VRWorks software development kit. The VRWorks Audio SDK provides real-time ray tracing of audio in virtual environments, and is supported in Epic’s Unreal Engine 4. The VRWorks 360 Video SDK addresses the complex challenge of real-time video stitching.”
Google – April 27, 2017 – Introducing the Google Assistant SDK – “With this SDK you can now start building your own hardware prototypes that include the Google Assistant, like a self-built robot or a voice-enabled smart mirror. This allows you to interact with the Google Assistant from any platform.”
Shopify – April 20, 2017 – Building for Developer Success with Shopify’s Newest APIs – “In building more paths to more entrepreneurs, we hope you can use these new APIs to help pave the road for entrepreneurial success. To make marketing better for merchants, and to improve how these apps show their strength, we’re introducing the Marketing Events API. With the new Reporting API, we’re giving all developers the ability to generate customized, app-specific reports.”
Apple – April 20, 2017 – Introducing LivePhotosKit JS – “This new JavaScript-based API makes it easy to embed Live Photos on your websites. In addition to enabling Live Photos on iOS and macOS, you can now let users display their Live Photos on the web.”
Facebook – April 18, 2017 – Messenger Platform 2.0 Debuts at F8 – “Today at F8, we introduced Messenger Platform 2.0, a new suite of tools that gives you the ability to build richer experiences, get discovered, and extend the conversational, visual and social capabilities of your bots. With more than 1.2 billion monthly users and over 100,000 monthly active bots, we are focused on learning and building for our developers.”
TeleSign – April 18, 2017 – Taking on the $8B Communications Platform as a Service Market – “Today we open our premium global network, proprietary data intelligence and innovative communications and security APIs, enjoyed by 20 of the 25 largest brands in the world, to a wider developer audience for the first time via a new self-service portal at www.telesign.com/go”
Apple – April 11, 2017 – What’s New in TestFlight – “TestFlight in iTunes Connect now provides multiple build support, enhanced group capabilities, and improved tester management—making it even easier to test your apps. TestFlight now lets you distribute and test multiple builds at the same time, so testers can choose from a number of builds to test.”
Send me your Developer Programs News!
If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news.

David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/