developer

The amount of money Apple has paid to developers continues to soar, with the company having already distributed $8 billion to app makers, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said today.

Cook, speaking during a Goldman Sachs conference, said Apple has "enormous momentum" in the smartphone market, and a big reason for that is the ecosystem around the company's devices.

"We built an ecosystem that is the best customer experience on the planet," Cook said.

The $8 billion compares to Apple's comments in January that the developers had made more than $7 billion from Apple'… Read more

Come May, Kindle Fires users can pocket virtual coins to spend on their favorite apps.

Announced today, Amazon Coins is a new type of virtual currency developed by the retail giant. The coins will be used to purchase Kindle Fire games, apps, and in-app items from the Amazon Appstore.

To kick off the currency in May, Amazon will offer shoppers tens of millions of dollars of free Amazon Coins to spend on Kindle Fire apps. The company will also let customers buy more coins directly through their Amazon accounts.

Amazon sees the currency as a boon for developers, as it … Read more

In case you weren't sure, Microsoft wants you to really, really understand that Internet Explorer 10 isn't just any old update to the much-maligned browser. The latest example: "modern.IE," a set of tools to help Web developers that the company announced today.

"It's still too hard to test sites across the different OSes and browsers," Ryan Gavin, Internet Explorer's general manager, said in a phone interview with CNET yesterday. "On our part, we can encourage best practices. We know we can do better here, so we're providing the tools … Read more

LAS VEGAS -- Alec Saunders needed a little bait.

Soon after Saunders took over the developer relations team, he asked Research In Motion's then co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in October 2011 for 25,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. When Lazaridis asked why, Saunders said he intended to give them away.

"His jaw just dropped to the floor," Saunders told CNET. "He stood there flabbergasted."

Lazaridis ultimately agreed, and Saunders began giving PlayBooks out to developers. He followed that up by giving away more than 8,000 units of RIM's Dev Alpha devices, which ran an early … Read more

After taking heat for shutting off some apps' access to friend-finding data, Facebook says it's just protecting its assets.

The social network published a blog entry today, explaining that it's changed its policies to clarify this stance. Facebook didn't respond to press inquiries yesterday about why it had shut off access to its application programming interface, or API, for a number of apps. Access to the API allows developers to add features like Facebook logins and Facebook friend searches.

Facebook's director of platform partnerships and operations, Justin Osofsky, wrote in the blog that the company has … Read more

Research In Motion will hold its apparently final BlackBerry 10 "Portathon" this weekend.

Running from 9 a.m. PT today to 8:59 p.m. PT tomorrow, the event will allow developers to port their applications available on other mobile platforms to BlackBerry 10. Each approved app will net the developers $100, up to a maximum of 20 applications. To sweeten the pot even more, RIM will enter all developers who submit five or more apps into a drawing for a free BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device.

RIM has been running Portathon events for the last several weeks … Read more

Work is an overrated concept, created by those in power to subjugate those who are trusting or have several children.

This might, at least, have been the thinking of a developer who believed he had found a magical ruse to prevent him from being subjugated.

As The Next Web tells it, relying on a case study presented by the security team at Verizon, the gentleman in question was very interested in Reddit, eBay shopping, and watching cat videos during working hours.

So he allegedly outsourced his work to China. Yes, all of his work. He did nothing at all -- workwise, that is, according to Verizon.… Read more

Google is opening up Google Play to allow all developers who worked on a particular app to chime in to address comments from users.

Last June, the search giant first started to let people with Top Developers badges respond to user comments. But now the company is expanding that program so that any developer can respond regardless of status, according to The Next Web.

The feature isn't yet available to all developers but is on its way. A Google spokesperson told TNW that "the feature originally rolled out to top developers, and we're gradually expanding it to … Read more

LAS VEGAS--If you want to make money off of apps, you must develop for mobile, right? Wrong, says SweetLabs' Chester Ng, who points to his company's success with its OpenCandy project to help developers earn a living.

The problem is both cultural as well as logistical, Ng said in an interview outside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Desktop software, especially on Windows, has a long history of being developed as freeware. But pitching a secondary software purchase to the user during the installation process had been poisoned, he said.

"The problem is that developers don't like the … Read more