Lightship: Niantic empowers developers to start building the real-world metaverse

Niantic is opening its Lightship platform to empower developers to start building their visions for the real-world metaverse.

Metaverses have become an increasingly hot topic, especially since Facebook announced it was changing its company name to Meta to show its new focus.

As the creator of the world’s most popular AR game, Pokemon Go, it’s unsurprising that Niantic also wants to play its part in bringing metaverses to reality.

John Hanke, Founder and...

8 November 2021 | API

Akamai’s latest solution counters the growing security threat to APIs

Akamai has launched App & API Protector, a new solution for protecting APIs and web applications.

Last month, Akamai released its 'API: The Attack Surface That Connects Us All' report which highlights the challenges that organisations face in the modern threat landscape. The expert analysts at Gartner even report that APIs will be the most frequent online attack vendor by 2022.

App & API Protector aims to counter such threats with a solution that detects up to...

8 November 2021 | API

SmartBear releases its 2021 State of Software Quality | API survey

SmartBear has debuted the 2021 edition of its State of Software Quality | API survey report.

The company has been releasing its report since 2016 so has accrued deep insights that are valuable to the development industry. This year’s report features responses from over 1,600 global API professionals and spans more than 17 different industries.

The headline takeaway is that just over half (51%) of respondents started creating APIs in the last five years—indicating...

5 October 2021 | API

Developers can finally release their own Tiles for Wear OS

Google continues to remind us that it hasn’t forgotten about Wear OS and will now allow developers to release their own Tiles for the wearable platform.

After years of relatively minor updates, many people wondered if Google was giving up on wearables. Then, in May, Samsung announced that it was ditching Tizen for its upcoming Galaxy Watch 4 and would be joining forces with Google to reboot and co-develop Wear OS.

Naturally, long-suffering fans have been given a spark...

11 August 2021 | API

Google Cloud defines core tenets with new ‘Google Enterprise APIs’ label

Google Cloud API

The Google Cloud Platform has a reputation for instability thanks to the short lifespan of many of its APIs, but Google hopes to fix this through a new set of tenets designed to restore trust in its development process.

Having relabelled its suite of products as ‘Google Enterprise APIs,’ the tech giant plans to be more transparent with and supportive of customers.

Google summarised its new philosophy in a recent blog post as such:

“The burden is on us: Our...

28 July 2021 | API

Thousands of developers are benefiting from OS Data Hub one year after launch

Ordnance Survey has provided an update on its OS Data Hub one year after its initial launch on 1 July 2020.

OS Data Hub provides developers with the organisation’s renowned open and premium mapping data through a suite of APIs.

Charley Glynn, OS API Product Manager, said:

“For those developers that will be searching for a map API or an address API, they are more likely to land on our pages now and discover the OS Data Hub. It is a much nicer shop window...

1 July 2021 | API

APImetrics launches premium API performance monitoring service

APImetrics has launched a premium version of API.expert, a service that monitors over 2000 APIs across many vertical markets.

The service is $100 per year and enables developers to keep track of the performance from mainstream API providers such as Netflix, Slack, and Microsoft, to more specialist and smaller vendors.

David O'Neill, CEO of APImetrics, said;

“APIs have become an essential part of the tech landscape, with more and more critical and essential...

25 June 2021 | API

HARMAN’s Ignite Store Developers Portal provides a hub for Android Automotive devs

Samsung subsidiary HARMAN has launched the Ignite Store Developers Portal, a hub for the Android Automotive developer community.

HARMAN is traditionally an audio company but began its transition towards offering connected services in 2015 following the acquisitions of Redbend and Symphony Teleca. The following year, HARMAN acquired automotive cybersecurity firm TowerSec.

The company now has years of experience in the automotive industry and launched the HARMAN Ignite...

20 April 2021 | Android

Google looks set to finally release the Tiles API for WearOS

Google appears to be gearing up to finally release the Tiles API for its WearOS wearable platform.

Compared to Apple’s WatchOS, developments for WearOS are so few and far between that it often feels that Google has given up.  However, it’s clear Google hasn’t fully thrown in the towel when it comes to its wearable platform.

In 2019, (yes, 2019…) Google announced ‘Tiles’ for WearOS. Tiles are essentially widgets which offer glanceable information to the...

5 January 2021 | API

Cross-platform graphics API Vulkan is now ‘ray-tracing ready’

The Khronos Group has announced that Vulkan’s SDK, tools, and drivers are now “ray-tracing ready” for developers.

Vulkan is an open-source and interoperable alternative to graphics APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, and Metal. Ray-tracing, meanwhile, is touted as the next big advancement in the visual fidelity of graphics, especially for games.

“4A Games was one of the earliest adopters of hardware-level ray-tracing by developing the first real-time raytraced global...

16 December 2020 | API