In February, Microsoft snapped up Xamarin— a hot startup that makes it super simple for developers to write an app once and have it run on any device or web browser.

At today's Microsoft Build event Microsoft cloud boss Scott Guthrie shared the company's master plan for Xamarin. And judging from the applause, that plan has developers very hyped.

The short version is that Xamarin is now integrated with Microsoft's mega-popular Visual Studio, the software that developers use to write yet more software. What's more, that integration is totally free, Guthrie says, even for developers using the free Visual Studio Community edition. 

That means developers now have a way to easily build PC, Mac, Android, and iPhone apps, all from Windows, and all for free. 

Plus, Microsoft is releasing Xamarin's code as open source, meaning that any developer anywhere can look under the hood to see how it works and tweak it to their own needs — or, hypothetically, bring it even beyond Windows. 

It's all part of Microsoft's play to attract as many developers to Windows as possible. Just yesterday, Microsoft announced that the mega-popular Bash command line interface is coming from Linux to Windows.

Xamarin also makes it fairly trivial to bring apps to the Windows Store app market for PC and smartphones. That's a good thing because Microsoft has struggled to get developers on board with its smartphone business.

The clear hope is that by bringing Xamarin to Visual Studio, it'll be the carrot that gets tons of developers over to Windows, whether or not they're actually building PC apps. From there, Microsoft is banking that they'll stick around and make more Windows apps and use more Microsoft Azure cloud services, and so everybody wins.

SEE ALSO: This is the news that got the biggest applause at Microsoft's big event today

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NOW WATCH: A YouTuber turned a hoverboard into a flying cloud, and people went crazy for it

In the summer of 2012, Rainforest was struggling.

Rainforest CEO Fred Stevens-Smith and cofounder Russell Smith had been accepted into Y Combinator, the prestigious startup mentorship program.

But its core product — a service to track how much money a company was spending on the Amazon Web Services cloud — just wasn't coming together into something people actually wanted or needed. Friends and colleagues alike were skeptical of how this would shake out.

"Everyone was like, 'this is stupid, stop,'" Stevens-Smith recalls. 

Frustrated, Stevens-Smith sent a blast e-mail out to Rainforest's beta users, the CEOs of friendly companies, and his fellow Y Combinator startups, asking a simple question: "What problem do you have that you'd pay $1,000 a month for?" 

The replies were almost unanimous: They needed help with "quality assurance," also called QA, where human testers rigorously test every pixel of a software product to make sure it's ready for their customers. Stevens-Smith realized that they were finally onto something and signed up 9 customers from that e-mail alone. 

Fast forward four years, and now, Rainforest employs 58,000 testers — strangers from around the world employed on a case-by-case basis who can test any app's new features or design and deliver feedback in half an hour or less. And it's gone beyond $1,000 a month, with its basic plan starting at $10,000/month.

"Our business sounds like one of those classic 'this doesn't sound like a good idea' things," says Stevens-Smith.

Still, it's a model that has plenty of believers: Rainforest has raised $16 million in investment capital, including a $12 million infusion from Bessemer Venture Partners in February of 2016. Hot startups like Zenefits and Soylent are among Rainforest's customers.  And it's on track to be profitable by the end of this year, says Stevens-Smith.

Testers on demand

"We think of ourselves as the objective feedback platform," says Stevens-Smith. 

When you sign up for Rainforest, you're connected with a company representative who helps you break down exactly what kinds of things you need to test in your app, such as "sign up for a new account," and "try to find the help button." You can also specify which devices and browsers test in, so you can see if a button on your service works on the Chrome browser but breaks on an iPhone.

Then, the magic happens. Whenever a Rainforest customer needs to run one of those tests, they just push a button. Rainforest's technology goes out and automatically posts the test on gig sites Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower, which let people complete short, simple tasks for money. 

The tests are designed to be super-focused and very short. Rainforest's software monitors the tester's behavior and it's delivered back to the customer as soon as Rainforest has gathered enough useful input. It's all done in an hour, and then the developer can go back to tweaking it as necessary. 

With 58,000 Rainforest testers all over the world who have taken on these assignments, the testing gets done fast. Half of those testers are in India and Eastern Europe, Stevens-Smith says. 

Fees for the testers are paid out automatically once they complete the test. Fred Stevens-Smith says the wages are generated algorithmically based on demand, and range from $1.50 to $2 an hour up to $7 or $8 an hour, depending on how many Rainforest tasks they've previously completed and the quality of their work.

"The hard thing we've done is automate the management," Stevens-Smith says.

Artificial lab rats

Products like Stripe and Amazon Web Services changed the face of technology, Stevens-Smith says, by making it incredibly easy to take payments or set up a server without the need for you to set up that infrastructure yourself.

In the same way, Rainforest wants to eliminate the need for companies to have their own QA team, which can both be costly and limiting. If you're a small startup, you probably don't have the budget to hire a dedicated tester. If you're a bigger company, you're still going to run into limits with how much the QA department can test at once.

The big idea is to make it faster, easier, and cheaper for companies to test concepts so they can push them into the real versions of their software. It's not quite as easy as setting up an Amazon Web Services account, Stevens-Smith says, but it's getting more automated all the time.

In fact, he says, Rainforest is working to train artificial intelligence to do this kind of testing. Right now, it's still the early phases, with Rainforest's AI slowly learning how real humans use apps. But within the next 18 to 24 months, Stevens-Smith says that he's hoping to get Rainforest's testers to be 80% robots, 20% humans.

"That's kind of the next step," Stevens-Smith says.

SEE ALSO: How companies really choose between Amazon, Microsoft, or Google in the cloud wars

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NOW WATCH: This hotel is underneath a waterfall in the middle of the Chilean rainforest

Facebook's F8 developer conference kicks off Tuesday morning in San Francisco, and the world's largest social network is expected to announce a bunch of new products and features.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took he stage at 10am Pacific Time. You can watch a live stream video of Zuck's keynote, featuring other top Facebook execs, right here:

The news so far:

• As expected, Zuckerberg revealed "Messenger Platform," a tool for app developers to build intelligent chatbots for people to interact with businesses straight in Facebook Messenger. He showed it off by ordering flowers via 1-800-Flowers, in Messenger, without picking up a phone. 
• Zuckerberg announced that the company's 10-year roadmap is to "Give everyone the power to share anything with anyone." That means getting more people online — and building the tools to share new kinds of content, like virtual reality, with friends and family. 
• WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger handle 60 billion messages a day — three times the number of traditional text messages.
• Facebook is opening up the Facebook Live API, so that developers can stream Facebook Live video from other apps and devices. Zuckerberg showed it off with a quadcopter drone streaming video live to Facebook.
• Zuckerberg teased Aries and Terragraph, two new cutting-edge solutions for delivering internet services to underserved areas like subsaharan Africa. 
• In the future, Zuckerberg says, Facebook will use artificial intelligence to read news articles and display the most relevant ones to you in the News Feed.
• All attendees of the F8 conference are getting a free Samsung Gear VR virtual reality headset and Samsung phone with which to use it. 

Setting the scene

Here's what the scene is like at San Francisco's Fort Mason center, where developers from all  over the world are gathering for the big event. 

The lines started early:

Here's the stage where Zuckerberg and other execs will soon appear:

Mark Zuckerberg posted this pic to his timeline as he readies himself for the big event:

For the second year in a row, Facebook is holding its developer conference at San Francisco's scenic Fort Mason center, a former military base that's right on the waterfront. It's a pretty nice spot:

There are light breakfast treats available to stave off any hunger pangs:

The most popular attraction so far is the Four Barrel coffee kiosk, where attendees can order lattes, cappuccinos and even an old fashioned, regular cup of joe:

Here's where guests pick up their badges and other material for the big event:

SEE ALSO: Facebook is succeeding where Google should have dominated

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NOW WATCH: Forget Snapchat — you can send self-destructing videos from your iPhone

Facebook is famously obsessed with efficiency, always searching for better, faster, and cheaper ways to serve its 1.5 billion users worldwide. 

After all, explained Facebook software engineer Bert Maher on stage at today's F8 developer conference, the social network's mission is to bring people together.

"It's really hard to do that if your users are staring at a spinner," says Maher.

And so, as part of its never-ending battle to maximize performance of its smartphone apps, Facebook today introduced ReDex: A free, Facebook-made tool that can hugely speed up Android apps, with minimum effort from the developer.

Internally, Facebook is using ReDex for its own Android app. On Android phones from 2015, ReDex speeds up the time to open the Facebook app by 15%. On Android phones from 2011, ReDex makes it 25% faster to open the app up. And the app itself is another 25% responsive. 

Under the hood, ReDex optimizes an Android app's bytecode — the thin, rarely-considered layer of code that sits between an app and the operating system.

By reconfiguring that bytecode on the fly, ReDex can make it something that's a little more palatable to Android. Crucially, it does it without requiring any changes to the app itself or to the Android operating system. Just drop ReDex into your app, Maher says, and it gets faster.

"It transforms bytecode magically into better bytecode," Maher says.

And beyond just the performance, Maher says, ReDex also cuts down on an app's size, which is a boon to Android users with data plan limits. 

ReDex is released today as open source, meaning it's free for every developer everywhere to download, try out, and customize to their heart's content. It joins other popular Facebook-grown tools like React Native as an olive branch to developers, and possibly a way to recruit talent. 

SEE ALSO: The 'risky bet' that saved Facebook hundreds of millions of dollars

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NOW WATCH: Facebook is teaming up with Samsung to change the way we watch videos

Facebook has finally unleashed Messenger Platform, letting developers build chatbots — intelligent software that lets you get stuff done just by sending text messages.

It's a big moment for chatbots, which tech luminaries like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former Evernote CEO Phil Libin praise as the next big thing in computing. And investors are pouring cash into startups that promise to ride the wave.

Which makes it even weirder that Facebook's introduction of the Messenger Platform feels a little tepid.

Rather than follow in Microsoft's footsteps and pitch chatbots as a transformational shift that will change the future of computing, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is billing them as a better way to interact with businesses and go shopping. There's not even an app-store-like listing of available bots to see them in one place.

Facebook has proven over the years that it's not stupid, so you can rule out the possibility that Zuckerberg and company simply haven't realized the potential that chatbots have to make computing more accessible to the masses.

The real answer looks to be a little more complicated. With Messenger Platform, Facebook Messenger gets to be a little bit more like an operating system. Libin even called chatbots the most exciting thing since the iPhone.

That means Facebook has to be very careful about how it promotes its new Messenger platform, given its reliance on Apple — which makes the iPhone. And it makes diplomacy crucial: Facebook needs Apple and the iPhone to keep growing Messenger, even as it's demonstrating the potential to be a major rival.

A bite from Apple

Apple's strategy to date has been massively successful, but it hinges on a series of interdependencies.

Most of Apple's record-breaking revenues come from sales of the iPhone. People like the iPhone in large part because of the App Store, the only legitimate way to get iPhone apps. And Apple takes a 30% cut of all App Store purchases.

It gives the App Store a unique gravity that makes it the center of the universe for developers, who need it to sell their apps, and users, who need it to get apps.

Once people have a bunch of iPhone apps, they're more likely to upgrade to another iPhone rather than start from scratch on an Android phone or any other wannabe upstart phone platform. It's in Apple's best interest to keep the App Store strong and well-stocked.

Chatbots, like those debuted by Facebook today, present an alternate path for users and developers. At risk is Apple's stranglehold on the world of apps, and maybe over the smartphone market itself.

Chatbots abide

To hear Nadella tell it, the appeal of chatbots is that they can make it much easier for normal, nontechnical humans to interact with web services. Our first experiences with Facebook's chatbots don't really bear that out, but oh well.

From Facebook's perspective, it's a way to get you to spend even more time in Messenger and the social network's other apps. It combines shopping and communication — two of the biggest reasons people use the internet in the first place. Better yet, it all lives inside the Messenger app, no additional downloads required.

It means that Messenger becomes a Swiss army knife: In theory, a useful bot can replace any app. If you're on a slow data connection, or simply don't want to download another app just to shop at a particular store or to try a new service, a chatbot is ideal.

But "replacing an app" is exactly what Apple doesn't want.

If people start to use Facebook's chatbots instead of apps, then suddenly the Apple App Store gets a lot less central to the conversation. And Apple has shown little expertise in either advanced cross-platform messaging or artificial intelligence, meaning that an Apple-created competitor to Facebook's chatbot play may be far off, if it happens at all.

Developers may like the fact that the chatbots they build for Messenger can work across all types of devices, whether it's an iPhone, an Android phone or, really, anything with a browser. That eliminates the need to build different versions of apps for different operating systems, saving time and effort.

And if a Facebook Messenger chatbot works on literally everything, and users love Facebook Messenger, then why bother going through the Apple App Store at all?

Without the App Store as an anchor, Apple's strategy loses an important advantage.

Which could explain Facebook's trepidation to call the Messenger Platform a revolution. Facebook Messenger still needs the iPhone — and Android — to grow, thanks to that same App Store through which new users download the core Facebook and Messenger apps.

Too much chatbot hype, and Apple might suddenly have cold feet about continuing to promote Facebook, in the App Store and through its integrations with iOS. But keeping it low-key means that people can come to it in their own time. And maybe the revolution will come before Apple even fully realizes it's happening.

SEE ALSO: CHATBOTS EXPLAINED: Why Facebook and other tech companies think they're the biggest thing since the iPhone

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NOW WATCH: Facebook’s new Oculus headset will make you feel like you’re floating in space

While Facebook is dreaming of a future without apps, it is also reminding developers to buy its mobile-app install ads.

That was one of the funny contrasts Tuesday at the first day of Facebook's F8 developers conference in San Francisco.

During the keynote, the social-media giant laid out its vision of the future, including a new platform to let businesses build so-called chatbots to automate conversations through its Messenger app.

"This is the start of a new era," Messenger chief David Marcus told Wired, describing how he thinks we're hurtling toward a future in which messaging apps will become the hub for all our activity, eliminating the need to download outside apps.

He built this case onstage by describing how most people spend all their time in a small group of their favorite apps and hate installing new ones.

"We download fewer and fewer apps, and we certainly don't allow push notifications apps for new downloaded apps anymore," Marcus said.

The takeaway: Developers should start building into Messenger to embrace the future.

But the tone was decidedly different during a later panel on driving growth with mobile-app ads, when Facebook told app developers how great its ad products were for driving downloads and engagement.

After all, "87% of time spent on mobile is in apps," product manager Jehan Damji said onstage.

But as Marcus suggested, most of that time is spent in only a few apps (80% of mobile time is spent in a user's top three apps, according to ComScore).

Facebook's platform has driven 2 billion app installs and has 25,000 active advertisers. It can charge significantly more for them than it can for other ad units, which made mobile-install app ads one of Facebook's fastest-growing and most lucrative businesses.

Facebook will surely keep trying to persuade businesses to use its services even as it tries to usher in the future. Facebook loves talking about its 10-year road map, and it considers its big Messenger dreams a five-year project, not something that's ready now.

But it was a funny contrast attending both talks in the same day and seeing Facebook use the same auditorium to talk about the impending irrelevancy of apps and then, a few hours later, all the reasons app developers should be plowing in money to promote their apps.

SEE ALSO: Facebook wants to completely revolutionize the way you talk to businesses

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At today's Facebook F8 conference, the social networking company announced a key partnership with Microsoft designed to give Windows 10 a little more love from developers.

Facebook's mega-popular and free React Native tool helps developers build slick mobile apps for iPhone and Android. Wednesday's partnership bring the tool to Windows 10's Universal Windows Platform, too. 

For those many developers with existing React Native apps, it means an easier way to bring their apps to Windows 10 and its 270 million-plus users — across PCs, phones, tablets, and soon, the Xbox One console. 

For developers already writing code for Windows 10, it means they can integrate all or some of React Native and give their apps some Facebook-powered sheen. 

React Native has a huge and thriving community of more than 250,000 developers, Facebook's Christine Abernathy claimed on stage at F8 today. Facebook also says that there are 500 apps on the Apple App Store using React Native. Now, it's easier than ever for them to bring their apps to Windows 10.

That's important to Microsoft, which has been struggling to attract apps to the Windows Store app market. Microsoft has made similar moves towards helping developers bring their existing iPhone and old-school Windows software to Windows 10, too. 

Microsoft and Facebook have a long history of collaboration and partnerships — indeed, Facebook is one of the few big tech companies that's committed to supporting Windows 10 with dedicated apps.

 But the latest tie up with Facebook represents yet another example of the lengths the newer, cuddlier Microsoft will go to partner with anyone and everyone if it makes developers happy. 

SEE ALSO: Facebook's CTO just used a virtual reality selfie stick and people went nuts

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NOW WATCH: I found 9 years' worth of messages hidden in my secret Facebook inbox

Over the weekend, Ars Technica reported that there are some solid signs that the Google Play app store could be coming to Google Chrome OS devices, including the lightweight Chromebook laptops.

It's the latest in a long string of reports showing that Google is looking to merge its two operating systems— the wildly popular Android and more niche Chrome OS — into one super-product that takes the best from both and that can comfortably live on phones, tablets, and laptops alike. 

That shift comes amid a larger industry move in the same direction. With a unified operating system, developers can build an app once and sell it across multiple platforms with minimal changes to the code, broadening their customer base. That's desirable for the tech titans of the world, as a well-stocked app store can make or break a product. 

"The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are users," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in 2015.

Microsoft long had separate operating systems for PCs, phones, tablets, and video game consoles, but the company is now consolidating around the new Windows 10 operating system. If you buy a new Dell PC, an Xbox One video game console, a Surface tablet, a Lumia phone, or the HoloLens holographic goggles, you're getting a Windows 10 device. 

Even underdogs like Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, a free operating system that's popular among software developers, have gone a similar path. Whether you're using Ubuntu to power your laptop, supercomputing cloud infrastructure, or a robotic spider, it's all the same Ubuntu under the hood.

Indeed, it's looking like the idea of a custom operating system for each individual device is kind of passe. 

An Apple away

But there's one huge holdout: Apple, the most valuable company in the world, has no fewer than four distinct operating systems across devices. Macs get OS X, iPhones and iPads get iOS, the Apple Watch gets WatchOS, and the Apple TV gets tvOS.

In fact, it sometimes feels like Apple is actively running away from the trend. Last week, Apple announced that it was actually making life more difficult for cross-platform developers by requiring that Apple Watch developers put in the extra work to make their apps run natively on the watch itself.

It's hard to blame Apple for being gunshy about this trend. Microsoft's unified Windows strategy looks great on paper, but has been struggling to make a big dent in the hearts and minds of developers and users alike. Canonical is currently unprofitable across the business. And Google is only now starting to cautiously dip its toes in this water. 

Still, the App Store is a big part of the appeal of the iPhone, and it's in Apple's best interests to keep it strong. So it seems a little weird that Apple wouldn't be actively investing in simplifying matters for the people who are actually building the software that makes the iPhone machine hum.

There are some extremely early signs that Apple is starting to work on this problem. The iPad Pro, Apple's latest tablet, is pitched as a laptop replacement with an optional keyboard accessory.

Meanwhile, rumors have swirled for years now that Apple will move the MacBook to an ARM-based processor chip, similar to the one used by the iPhone. That ARM processor would make it much easier to build the framework for iPhone apps to run on a Mac, and vice versa.

And so it's possible, though very far from certain, that Apple could be working on a kind of converged operating system — similar to Microsoft's Windows 10 strategy, with one operating system across Mac, iPhone, and hybrid-style computers like the iPad Pro. 

Then again, Apple's current approach is clearly working, given the company's massive success. If the strategy ain't broke, Apple may not see a reason to fix it.

SEE ALSO: The end of the Xbox 360 is the end of an era for Microsoft

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NOW WATCH: Watch the head of the FBI reveal how much they paid to hack into the San Bernardino iPhone

What's on the minds on London's developers at the moment?

Quite a lot, as it happens.

The city's tech scene is at a pivotal moment, continuing to boom even as the country debate's its future in the European Union, a decision which will have huge implications for the future health of the industry. Meanwhile, radical new formats and mediums are starting to be explored in earnest, from artificial intelligence to virtual reality.

At Google's annual I/O Extended event in London, Business Insider sat down with a handful of exciting London Android developers and CEOs, from luxury smartphone business Vertu to fast-growing language learning app startup Memrise. We wanted to hear what they're excited — and worried — about over the year ahead.

Here's what they said.

People want to hear more about Artificial Intelligence (AI) ...

I'm really excited to see that Google are making a concerted effort to help developers writer contributions to AI, and this is a huge opportunity for the future ... In the future everyone's going to be a programmer, not because they can write code but because they can be a psychologist for AI ... I'm saying the jobs of the future are going to be people speaking to AI to move it toward what they wan, so you're going to be programming by kind of feeding this AI niche.

— Kevin McDonagh, organiser of London Android meetup group Londroid, CEO of development studio Novoda

Services is a really big part of our point of difference, and I think what can be done potentially in the future with AI in services is really exciting.

— Mark Hill, programme director for luxury Android smartphone company Vertu

... But virtual reality isn't for everyone (yet).

I think it's a very interesting platform, but we're still super early in mobile. We think of mobile as the fundamental computing platform for the next five-to-ten years.

— Ed Cooke, CEO of language-learning app company Memrise

The big thing for us is probably virtual reality ... lots of cool hype at the moment ... we have one of our games in virtual reality and is going to be released in July for cardboard and Samsung gear — maybe later ... VR as you know is a very immersive experience for the user so all of our games have a health component; it's been shown in scientific studies that VR can actually improve the benefits of the games such as the ones we offer.

— Kevin Shanahan, product manager at brain-training app Peak

I think with Vertu we like to let a technology or a new innovation like that mature before we jump in. I think that's kind off been the case with wearables, where it's still quite a young category, and when you are looking to take something and refine it — make it more luxurious, more durable — you want that stability to build on. So I think VR is probably even more young than something like wearables. 

— Mark Hill, Vertu

London has significantly matured since the early days of Android.

With all technologies, as they mature to begin with it's the hackers, the hacks all the way through, hacks from the bottom to the top and they're just trying, experimenting. But as the community, as the platform stabilises so do the people and their contributions and the aspirations ... the people who come into the community now, they're looking to build great apps for consumers for purpose. And the reality is in the world in which we live in 2016, more people use and have higher expectations of apps, and Android has matured with that curve ... the engineers have matured with the platform.

— Kevin McDonagh, Londroid, Novoda

Last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a televised interview that Apple was going to be around for the next "thousand years."

"We are not here for a quarter or two quarters or the next quarter or the next year to next year, we are here for [a] thousand years, and so we're not about making the most, we're about making the best," Cook said.

Nowhere was that more evident than at Apple's annual developers conference, which kicked off in San Francisco on Monday.

The assortment of product updates and new features unveiled at the event will be available to consumers in a few months. But a close look at some of the things Apple introduced reveal a strategy that's much more far-sighted than the next iPhone release.

So while Wall Street worries about whether iPhone sales will drop in 2016, Apple leadership is laying the groundwork that it hopes will let it continue to dominate the tech industry for decades to come.

Hook them while they're young

Cook didn't spend much time onstage on Monday, instead turning over many of the demos and announcements to his growing stable of lieutenants.

But one of the announcements he personally gave was a curious one. Swift Playgrounds, an extremely fun looking iPad app to teach children basic programming. In Swift Playgrounds, kids will learn programming concepts to help a tiny alien collect some gems.

Children aren't really Apple's core market — few 10-year-olds have $650 for a new iPhone, after all. But if there's one certainty about children, it's that they'll eventually grow up — and when they do, Apple wants them to be fluent in its programming language.

Now that's long-term planning: spending to educate young people so that you'll be able to replenish your workforce for years to come.

Platforms on platforms

Apple made a big deal at the event about how it now has four main computing platforms: one each for wearables, smartphones, desktop computers, and big screens like televisions.

But Apple actually sneakily introduced even more new platforms on Monday. In addition to the big ones for maps, Siri voice assistant, and messaging, Monday's keynote heralded the official arrival of HomeKit for smart-home notifications, one-touch checkout for Apple devices on the web, and the phone app as an interface for other apps.

All of these new platforms have one thing in common: They are designed to attract outside software developers who will create the next generation of apps and services in which Apple is the center of gravity.

Another example: gesture-recognizing APIs for the Apple Watch, so that one day you might be able to control computers by waving your arms. You probably won't be doing that in the next year, but maybe by 2018 it will seem like second nature.

"We recently asked if Apple gets platforms. Apparently it does based on the litany of technologies being opened up to developers," wrote UBS analyst Steven Milunovich.

You can check out all of Apple's platforms at its new API reference page.

Getting it right

Every big tech company, from Google to Facebook, is building up an arsenal of artificial-intelligence technology right now, bulking up for what many believe will be the next big paradigm in computing.

To some observers, Apple looked like it was falling behind.

The message on Monday was that Apple was simply taking the time to define its own philosophy to AI and get it right.

Apple sneaked in, unmentioned during the main event, a set of tools for developers to make apps that use cutting-edge artificial-intelligence techniques.

And the company mentioned once again that it has an approach to data that goes far beyond the anonymized approach of rivals like Google and Facebook. Apple calls it "differential privacy," and although what it entails isn't clear yet, Apple is doing cutting-edge research so it can take advantage of AI without the pitfalls of massive data collection.

Analyst Jan Dawson wrote shortly after the keynote:

Though Google is arguably the leader in machine learning and artificial intelligence, Apple is showing that it's perfectly capable of innovating in these areas too. But it's doing it in a way that's in keeping with its privacy stance, by keeping personal information on devices and not sharing it with third parties.

Apple's not worried about falling a few months behind Google or Facebook in the AI race. It's playing a long game. And in the worst-case scenario, with its massive cash pile, Apple can spend money buying AI technology and talent to catch up.

Nothing revealed during Apple's keynote is immediately available for consumers. But that's not the point to a high-level programmer's conference like WWDC.

By 3016, or even 2026, people might look back and see that Apple planted the seeds for an important long-term technology — but whether that's voice, messaging, maps, or one of the myriad lower-key additions Apple made on Monday remains to be seen.

SEE ALSO: Apple just renamed one of its oldest and most important products

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NOW WATCH: Taylor Swift rapped and then fell off a treadmill in a new Apple Music ad

Slowly but surely, the traditional notion of the computer is dying. 

Since the advent of the Apple II and the rise of the mass-market consumer PC, you hear "computer" and you think "monitor, mouse, keyboard," in some variation. 

But ever since the iPhone first launched in 2007, there's been a shift, first away from the PC and toward tiny, pocket-sized computers with touchscreens.

And then, as processing power got cheaper and the internet got more ubiquitous, we got something else entirely.

Thanks to the rise of gadgets like the Amazon Echo, Google Chromecast, Microsoft HoloLens, the Nest thermostat, and Facebook's Oculus Rift, that's no longer the case. A computer can be something you talk to in plain speech, or that you wear on your face. It can be little more than a screen, or have no screen at all. 

Now a computer can look like literally anything and go anywhere. It's only the beginning.

For Microsoft and Apple, the two companies synonymous with the PC, this transition presents something of a crisis point. They've spent the last several decades carefully cultivating communities of developers writing the software that makes the world hum. Now the rug hasn't quite been pulled out from under them, but the potential is there.

Against this backdrop, the two long-time frenemies are each preparing their master plans to make sure they each come out on top of computing's huge shift — no matter which gadget turns out to be the next big thing.

Apple

Apple is in a unique situation, as an immensely profitable company that also controls relatively little of the market.

Microsoft Windows still controls the vast majority of the PC market. And Google's Android is the dominant power in the smartphone world, and it's only growing, especially in the developing world.

Android and its continued growth is enough of a threat as it is — developers will always be drawn toward building software for the largest audience possible. With the future of computing a continually shifting target, Apple has to make sure that no matter what, people keep building apps for iPhone. 

The solution Apple hit upon is typically elegant: Swift, the Apple-created programming language for writing iPhone apps that developers of all shapes and sizes have quickly come to love. 

Swift has won accolades and support from the world of app developers by virtue of simply being better, faster, and easier to learn than other options.

Apple has been pitching Swift as the language of choice for people, especially kids, learning to code. And by releasing the language freely as open source, Apple has ensured that Swift has gone beyond the iPhone to platforms including Android and Linux.

The trick here, though, is that Swift was designed to run on an iPhone. So any code that's written in Swift, for any operating system, at any point in time, would be way easier to bring to the iPhone than it would otherwise.

It turns the iPhone into kind of a default landing zone for Swift apps, no matter which way the winds blow in the larger tech space. And if Apple ever releases a new platform — for instance, a hypothetical virtual-reality headset or a car — it would support Swift in the same way.

Microsoft

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft sees the future as involving a lot of Windows.

With Windows 10, Microsoft consolidated the phone, tablet, PC, video-game console, holographic goggles, and smart-home gadget operating systems into one mega-platform. 

So rather than push one cross-platform programming language, as Apple is doing, Microsoft is standardizing on one operating system.

Microsoft envisions Windows 10 as the operating system that underpins every single one of the next wave of devices. One platform, one easy way to bring apps to Windows, no matter what kind of device they're using — or so goes the party line.

But really, Microsoft is playing a deeper game too: Microsoft has been slowly but surely releasing all kinds of awesome tools for free to the developer world, notably Xamarin — which lets you write an app once and quickly bring it anywhere, from Windows to the web to iPhone to Android. Developers love it.

The key there is that Xamarin, and a bunch of Microsoft's other tools like Visual Studio, make it stupid easy to use the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to provide the brains for any app — from data storage to processing big chunks of data. 

From Microsoft's perspective, then, it can provide the tools that developers want to use, even if they're not coding for Windows (though Microsoft sure hopes they will). So long as Microsoft provides even a piece of the architecture for that app, they still win, and they still stay relevant no matter which way the winds of tech blow.

In short, what we're seeing is the two biggest names in computing hunkering down as they prepare for massive shifts that could go any which way. The big bet underlying both Microsoft and Apple's strategy is that regardless of what happens, they'll each have a way to win. Or at least, not lose.

SEE ALSO: Google and Amazon are slowly killing the gadget as we know it

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NOW WATCH: An Apple demo froze during the big WWDC keynote and nobody noticed

Most people don't read the change notes when their iPhone or Android apps update — nobody's got time for that.

That's why many companies have started to post short and simple app release notes for their apps, such as "bug fixes," instead of detailing every little change. Facebook is particularly well-known for doing this. 

Some people have a problem with this! For example, TechCrunch published an article last November titled: "App release notes are getting stupid."

Sarah Perez writes: 

It seems that once you’re a certified “big company,” having to actually detail which bugs just got squashed is no longer your job.

More importantly, the lack of detail in release notes makes a statement about what a company thinks of its user base ... 

It's a valid point. But in the most recent changelog for its Amazon iPhone app, Amazon fired back, saying that "in reality, most of the work app developers do are 'bug fixes.'"

Here's the entire note:

Have you ever wondered why so many app releases just say something like "bug fixes"? Well, let us explain.

Bug fixes may sound like the most unglamorous thing in the world. In reality, most of the work app developers do are "bug fixes." That just means that the app should run smoother, take up less space, and help you shop faster and smarter than ever. The boringness of "bug fixes" are actually foundational for an easy to use app. New features are great, but a well running app is even more important.

Each bug fixed makes for a better app on your phone. And better apps mean happier people. And happier people equals a better world. So I guess you could say that while you're going about your day today, we have developers working hard to make the world a better place, one bug at a time.

Have a happy day!
Amazon

SEE ALSO: Kanye West already made these changes to 'The Life of Pablo' while no one was looking

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NOW WATCH: How to use Facebook’s awesome new 360-degree photo feature

Software developers are in higher demand than ever — even interns at tech companies are drawing ridiculous salaries.

Amid that mad rush for talent, companies are turning to $2 billion startup GitHub, the so-called "Facebook for programmers," to identify and recruit the very best of the very best.

So if you're looking to hone your skills and get a top tech job, you could do worse than looking at the hottest programming languages on GitHub. 

Without further ado, here are the top programming languages on GitHub, according to data released this week.

SEE ALSO: This is what it's like to travel the world on a global Pokémon Go adventure

No. 15 — TypeScript: This Microsoft-developed offshoot of the mega-popular JavaScript programming language only started in 2012, but programmers like how it's designed to build large applications for the modern web.

No. 14 — Swift: Apple's homegrown programming language for iPhone apps only started in 2014, but it's already attracting a huge cult following. Lyft recently rewrote its entire iPhone app in Swift, and saw huge boosts in performance.

No. 13 — Scala: Companies like Airbnb and Apple have taken to this language, started in 2001, designed to be faster and easier to write than the ubiquitous Java.

It was during his freshman year of high school that Amit Kalra started falling behind in math class.

But it wasn't because he couldn't handle it. Kalra, now 16, had been transferred to a new school where he was put into an algebra class he had already taken. And by the time he convinced his mom to put him back in the old school, he was halfway behind in geometry, a subject he wasn't familiar with.

"I started struggling," Kalra told Business Insider. “I was on my own. I didn’t know anyone in the class.”

Most kids would have given up and resigned themselves to summer school, or maybe even studied extra hard just to get by.

Kalra decided to build an app that would do all his math homework for him.

The coding of '6284 Calc'

In May 2015, Kalra started working on what would become his iOS app, 6284 Calc. Needless to say, it's not like any other calculator app you've ever seen.

That's because it's specifically made to take the guesswork out of algebra, geometry, calculus, and other subjects, by allowing users to input the values into the given formula, letting the app do the rest. And for a one time in-app purchase of $1.99, it will even give you all the steps it took to get there.

"What if this app just does the work for them?" Kalra asked of students who may be struggling like he was, thinking they might just skip homework. "They just have to spend five minutes a day entering values. It’s better than turning in nothing.”

Kalra didn't have much iOS coding knowledge before 6284 Calc, except for little test projects like a random lottery number generator app he built for his dad. He ended up teaching himself how to code by downloading an ebook and experimenting.

But just roughly four months after he began, Kalra released 6284 Calc — the numbers represent M-A-T-H on a telephone keypad — and he's been updating it ever since.

“Every time I learn something in class, the first thing I do instead of doing the homework, I would actually go work on it in the app first," he said.

Since the app's release, it's had about 30,000 downloads, though Kalra has done little marketing other than to text all his friends to try it out.

It also caught the attention of Apple, which invited him to attend the Worldwide Developer Conference earlier this year.

Going from gamer to coder

Kalra's story of app coding goes back a little bit further to when he was a typical teenager playing video games. One of his favorites was Roblox, a massive multiplayer online game that allows players to explore inside a virtual world.

And as most teens can relate, his parents weren't all that approving of his hobby. "What are you doing all day?" was a common refrain. But he learned that he could also build his own worlds and games inside Roblox when he was 12, so he downloaded an ebook and decided to give it a shot.

"That's where my interest for coding came in," Kalra said, since Roblox encourages "you to make your own games.”

It took him about six months. The result was Parkour City, a big open city-like space where users could jump around and do all kinds of flips and other moves. Though it's taken a while to get noticed, this summer it hit the 1 million visit mark, and it's been on Roblox's top charts.

I asked Kalra what he's planning to do after high school. He said that for now, 6284 Calc is his main focus, but he might try to work on something new. Though plans to go to college might not be in the cards: “I don’t know if college would be beneficial to me," he said.

For a teenager who can download some books and just figure things out, that calculation may turn out to be just right.

SEE ALSO: Stop worrying about hackers stealing the election

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NOW WATCH: Former Navy SEAL Jesse Ventura says 'American Sniper' Chris Kyle shouldn't be remembered as a hero

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On Tuesday, mobile marketing platform Swrve launched an in-app messaging solution aimed at helping developers better engage with users, according to Venture Beat.

In-app messages or notifications are alerts that are served only while the app is in use. Swrve's product will benefit app users, app publishers, and Swrve itself.

When used effectively, in-app messaging can be a powerful engagement tool across three main segments of an app user's life:

• Onboarding: Publishers that implement in-app messages to send new users welcome messages reduce the likelihood of consumers quitting the app within 30 days by 50%, according to Urban Airship.
• User engagement: In-app messaging can be used to coax app users into engaging with an app. In fact, Conversations users saw at least a 200% increase in engagement on average, Swrve notes. For example, European airline Ryanair used Conversations to build a survey that saw response rates lift from 0.7% to more than 60%.
• User re-engagement: Because consumers automatically receive in-app messages, publishers can target in-app messages specifically to consumers who have opted out of push notifications to convince them to begin using the feature.

In-app messaging enables app publishers to stand out in the overcrowded app market. App users are spending more of their time in a smaller number of apps, heightening competition for mindshare. For example, US smartphone users spend half their time in just one app, 18% of their time in the second most-used app, and 10% in the third, comScore data shows. The decline to almost nothing is rapid after that. App publishers can use these tools to inform a user of newly available app upgrades, the addition of new features, or promotional deals.

Providing an in-app messaging solution will also provide Swrve with robust user data. This will help the company create more personalized and targeted campaigns in the future, potentially resulting in a higher conversion rate for app advertisers. 

Mobile-app makers and content creators are vying for consumer attention in a crowded and noisy market.

Even if an app can stand out enough to prompt a consumer to download it from among a list of millions, it then faces the challenge of enticing him or her to use it enough times to recuperate development, maintenance, and marketing costs. To make matters worse, those marketing costs have hit record-high levels over the past year as discoverability has become more challenging.

And while consumers are spending more time in apps, most of that time is spent in a few favorites. Consumers spend almost three-quarters of their total smartphone app time in just their three favorite apps, according to comScore. 

But it's not all doom and gloom: There are numerous tools at a publisher's disposal to engage and re-engage consumers, and there are new products and solutions coming to market that can help alleviate some of the issues around this app engagement crisis.

Jessica Smith, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on app engagement that explores the current state of the app market, the issues around engaging consumers, and the tools at a publisher's disposal. It also identifies best practices for the implementation of some app engagement tools, and presents the pitfalls that some publishers fall into in this pursuit. 

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• The app market today is challenging and volatile. It's difficult to stand out, and most apps have to be offered for free in order to entice consumers who have too much supply to choose from. This puts greater emphasis on engaging consumers after they've downloaded an app in order to recoup costs. 
• Consumers are more difficult to engage today, as most have dozens of apps installed on their devices yet spend most of their time in just a select handful of favorites. 
• There are numerous solutions at hand for mobile app publishers and content creators seeking to engage consumers. Push notifications, in-app messaging, and app message centers with badges are three tools publishers can use to engage consumers. 
• While many publishers mistakenly rely solely on push notifications for app engagements, this is a poor practice because many consumers don't allow push notifications and those that do can easily be overwhelmed when they receive too many. 
• The best solution often includes leveraging two or three of these tools to engage consumers with the right message at the right time. The technology in this market has grown increasingly sophisticated, and publishers that don't diversify their approach run the risk of annoying their consumers to the point of abandonment. 
• There are emerging engagement technologies that will change the current app engagement norms and present new ways for app publishers to communicate with users. The mobile ecosystem is changing quickly as technology improves and consumers become more comfortable conducting more activities on mobile devices.

In full, the report:

• Identifies the major challenges in today's app market and explains why employing good app engagement practices is more important than ever before.
• Presents the major app engagement tools currently available.
• Examines the pros and cons of each app engagement tool while outlining some pitfalls that publishers encounter in implementing them. 
• Prescribes best practices for adopting various app engagement tools or strategies. 
• Assesses how the market will likely change over the next five years as emerging technologies change both consumer behavior with mobile devices and introduce new tools with which to engage consumers. 

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. »Learn More Now
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LONDON — A Ukrainian tech company hit by raids from security forces in recent months is planning to spend tens of millions on acquisitions across Europe.

Lucky Labs, which develops software for the gaming and gambling industries, is looking to buy up companies worth between $20 million (£15.8 million) and $30 million (£23.7 million) in Britain, Latvia, and Germany.

A company spokesperson said the number of deals will "likely be in the low to mid-single digits" and will be funded from private cash reserves. Lucky Labs is targeting startups in the gaming and gambling sector.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Kiev, Lucky Labs employs around 500 staff and has developed more than 100 games and products for companies like Playson and AdWise.

Rustam Gilfanov, Lucky Labs cofounder, says in a press release announcing the acquisition plans: "We are keen to continue growth into international markets with a focus on the UK, Germany and Latvia, where we have noted particularly ambitious start-ups doing some fantastic things."

A company spokesperson said Brexit has not put off Lucky Labs and said the fall in the pound since June's referendum on EU membership, in fact, made Britain more attractive to invest in.

The spokesperson said: "Regardless of Brexit the UK is an attractive target market for us due to the quality of the software companies here, but, yes a cheaper pound is certainly an added incentive.'"

Lucky Labs has been hit by Ukrainian security service raids in recent months. Authorities have accused the company of financing terrorism and the raids, in which servers were seized, appear to be part of a wider crackdown on tech businesses in Ukraine.

A spokesperson for Lucky Labs said the accusations were unfounded and were a symptom of a business dispute. The spokesperson told Business Insider: "There is no truth whatsoever to the allegations against the company. Mr Tokarev [Lucky Labs' cofounder] and Gilfanov are in the midst of a longstanding dispute with a former business partner who is believed to be behind this negative and libellous media campaign. Lucky Labs has full confidence that the company will be cleared of any wrongdoing."

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NOW WATCH: A penny costs 1.43 cents to make — here’s what the rest of US currency costs

Joel Spolsky was blogging before it was called "blogging."

Back in 2000, Spolsky was the founding CEO of Fog Creek Software, a startup that got its beginning building tools for software developers. He began writing his thoughts about running a company, working for and competing against Microsoft (he was on the Excel team back in the 1990s), and other topics of interest to the programming community, in a space called "Joel on Software."

Some of those posts got a million readers or more, Spolsky tells Business Insider. 

Even more than a decade later, they're fascinating and useful for anybody in tech startups — my favorite, "Fire and Motion," takes a lesson Spolsky learned in the Israeli army and applies it to startup productivity — but Spolsky has moved far beyond blogging.

In 2008, he and business partner Jeff Atwood leveraged Joel on Software's popularity to create a Q&A site for developers, Stack Overflow, which quickly grew to prominence thanks to the relevance of its answers (and subsequent high placement in organic search results on Google). They expanded that product into the Stack Exchange Network, which includes other Q&A sites, as well as job-hunting tool Stack Overflow Talent.

That network now gets more than 100 million visitors a month, says Spolsky, but the most remarkable part is that they're completely free of the trolling, hate speech, and other deplorable behavior that plagues almost every other large online community, from Reddit to Twitter to every single website's comments section. 

How did Spolsky do it? By paying attention to history and actually trying to learn from the mistakes of his predecessors. As he put it: 

"Long before I started Stack Overflow I read this post by Clay Shirky called A Group is its Own Worst Enemy....He investigated early online communities, forums, and discovered that everybody that built one of these communities or was involved in it observed the same thing, which is the community starts out great when it’s small, but at some point the bored teenager wanders in or the first troll, and then these communities all exhibit the same problems when they get larger. To his chagrin, they would all write essays and academic papers about what went wrong with their community and the only thing that these papers showed clearly is that they hadn’t read all the previous papers by all the other people that tried to build online communities and observed the exact same thing. So they were pretending that they had just discovered America when there were already 30 other papers in the literature of that exact syndrome."

With Stack Overflow, Atwood and Spolsky built in rules from the beginning to prevent the site from being destroyed by trolls or spammers. For instance, they instituted something called the Penalty Box: if a user exhibits bad behavior like spamming the site with the same question over and over again, or gets a lot of complaints, or even just shows no interest in learning or improving, they're suspended from being able to post on the site. If they keep it up, their account is deleted.

Earlier this month, Fog Creek hired blogger and online activist Anil Dash as its CEO in part because of his work helping Stack Overflow maintain its compass:

"One of the things I love about him is that he is very dedicated to social justice in software. He’s been on the board of Stack Overflow for a long time and Stack Overflow has never had a hate speech problem."

Spolsky will remain CEO of Stack Overflow, which now has 300 employees.

Silicon Valley and the squishy, icky problems of morality

So why do so many other online communities miss the mark?

Spolsky took the example of Twitter, which tries to have it both ways: on one hand, it's making editorial decisions regularly, like which user accounts to verify, but it's also pretending to be a completely value-neutral service "like the phone company."

There have been similar problems at other online giants throughout the history of the internet: Facebook publishes obviously fake news stories in the same font as every other kind of content because of a once-upon-a-time "design decision," and Google refused to suppress an anti-Semitic site that appeared at the top of search results for the word "Jew" in 2004.

"Maybe Silicon Valley likes to believe in the neutrality of technology in some way, or they just don’t want to think about those problems, or they don’t want to think of the implications of the problems."

There's a growing cultural backlash against this amoral Silicon Valley view of the world — Recode's Kara Swisher recently wrote that the tech industry's blithe attitude toward automating people's jobs is akin to the self-indulgent boys who were turned into jackasses in "Pinnocchio," while VC Roger McNamee recently wondered to Fortune's Erin Griffith if we're about to see a big wave of fraud exposed at venture-funded startups: “What if Theranos is the canary in the coal mine?”

The bigger danger is that this attitude paves the way for worse, as organizations ask programmers to perform unethical or illegal acts, and the banality of the daily work makes it easy to say yes. Where's the line? When do people say stop? As Spolsky recounts:

"Why did the Nazis all go along with [Hitler's] plan? That was a huge question people could not understand, how the entire German nation went along, and the shocking part of it was the banal stuff. There are exhibits in the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem showing the IBM punchcards for the databases that are tracking people that are put into ovens, and the idea that there are people doing this everyday, boring, mundane office work that was comparable to any other kind of mundane, boring, office work and not really understanding — or certainly understanding but somehow allowing it to happen because it was just punching cards."

The tech industry loves to pretend everything it does is ever and always new, with each generation casting itself as the saviors from past generation's mistakes. But history does have valuable lessons for anybody willing to learn and pay attention. 

SEE ALSO: Programmers are having a huge discussion about the unethical and illegal things they’ve been asked to do

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NOW WATCH: Here's why Boeing 747s have a giant hump in the front

Though it has been around for over a decade, the video game Roblox— for smartphones, PCs, and game consoles — might still be flying under your radar.

This is especially true if you're, say, older than 13.

On Tuesday, Roblox, already profitable, announced a $92 million round of venture-capital funding led by Snapchat investor Meritech Capital Partners and Index Ventures.

And the company has big plans to extend its "free market" into wild areas beyond games.

Roblox is already a massive hit, with 48 million monthly players, up to 1 million of whom are logged on simultaneously during peak times, and it is growing fast. That puts it only slightly behind the 55 million monthly players most recently claimed by Minecraft, the phenomenon on which Microsoft bet $2.5 billion.

More impressive, Roblox is creating a new generation of entrepreneurs. Roblox is entirely user-generated, with players of all ages able to program and sell their own games and items within the game itself. Today, there 1.7 million developers who are creating things within Roblox.

In other words, it's more than just a game.

"It's also a free market that works remarkably well," says CEO David Baszucki.

Baszucki says some developers are making $50,000 a month creating things within the game, at the high end. Back in 2015, too, Business Insider spoke to a 17-year-old who had made $100,000 in two years from Roblox. And Baszucki says that even younger kids are getting in on it, with a 13-year-old player recently using his Roblox creations to fund a family trip ... to the annual Roblox convention, naturally.

Now, Roblox is gearing up to give its players an even bigger entrepreneurial opportunity, and sell their virtual worlds to the biggest audience yet.

Co-experience

To Baszucki's mind, Roblox is already more than a game: It's a platform for "human co-experience."

Popular Roblox games and worlds can get as many as 30,000 players at any one time, with players flocking to new, cool experiences, says Baszucki.

A lot of those experiences tend towards the relatively mundane. Some of them let players simulate going to high school, or working in a restaurant, or playing house. More extreme ones simulate surviving a natural disaster.

While the game supports more action-packed experiences, a lot of the most popular ones are a little more laid-back.

Baszucki says this speaks to the simple need for young people to have a safe place to hang out with their friends. In a world where kids seem to be increasingly busy in the real world, the virtual world is a solid substitute.

"Roblox provides a world where kids can get together and socialize in hundreds of different settings," Baszucki says.

The way that developers make money is similarly low-key: The game's currency, Robux, can either be earned by playing, or purchased with real money. When players spend their Robux in a virtual world, the original developer gets a cut. In the popular "Roblox High School" world, for instance, players can spend Robux on new cars or music, earning the original creators a share of the sale.

The next step

Popular games, including "Roblox High School," create cult fanbases around themselves.

The whole Roblox world extends to YouTube, where players upload very popular videos, almost like sitcoms, that take place in player-created worlds. For instance, this one, made by YouTube channel "The Pals," has almost 5 million views:

For Baszucki, there's no reason why worlds created in Roblox couldn't be huge media brands unto themselves. Minecraft and Pokémon turned into vast cross-media empires, so why not "Roblox High School" or anything else made in Roblox?

And so while a lot of the new funding will go into infrastructure, hiring, and overall expansion of the business, Baszucki says the next big step from a philosophical perspective will be to help its developers market their creations and license out their intellectual property. Besides, who better to make new hit media properties for kids than kids?

"The more we can make our developers famous, the better," Baszucki says.

Roblox has already made its first steps with this strategy. Just recently, Roblox released its first line of action figure playsets, all of which have characters licensed from Roblox developers. Worlds like "Roblox High School,""Work at a Pizza," and even well-known players like Matt Dusek are represented by these figures. And Baszucki says they're selling "really, really well."

Going forward, Baszucki says, the game plan is to keep iterating on the game itself while it looks for new opportunities to help turn its developers into media moguls. Roblox has gotten this far by helping developers, and Baszucki says there's no reason to stop and make its own IP now.

"We could never match the creativity and scale of the hundreds of thousands of developers on the platform," he says.

SEE ALSO: This 16-year-old kid fell behind in math class, so he built an app to do it for him

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NOW WATCH: 6 reasons why 'Minecraft' is so incredibly popular

There’s a lot going on in console gaming right now: The Nintendo Switch is off to a seemingly hot sales start, both Sony and Microsoft are hopping on the “mid-generation update” bandwagon, and the PlayStation VR appears to be holding its own.

But for all this newness in the living room, the people that actually make games are still far more likely to work with the tried-and-true PC. This chart from Statista shows the gap: According to a January survey by the Game Developers Conference, 53% of the 4,500 game developers surveyed said they are currently working on a game for the PC or Mac, compared to 27% for the PlayStation 4, 22% for the Xbox One, and 3% for the then-unreleased Switch.

This won’t come to a surprise to those who follow the industry — many of those surveyed are independent developers, and the low barrier to entry and high potential rewards of a PC platform like Steam are typically more welcoming to their pursuits. The PC market also tends to welcome a more diverse set of games, from the weird to the comedic to the hardcore. This doesn’t mean the PC is better, but it does serve as a reminder that the video game industry is much broader than headlines can sometimes suggest.

SEE ALSO: Facebook is taking ‘inspiration’ from Snapchat wherever it can

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NOW WATCH: A former iPhone factory worker explains how they keep the new iPhones a secret

Steve Jobs has a famous quote that lays out a perfect metaphor for the future of laptops and desktops.

Jobs said in 2010:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.

If this metaphor were reality, and laptops really were trucks, then the parking lots at Apple headquarters would be filled with pickups, not Teslas. Because basically everyone who works for Apple in software development is spending their days on a Mac — they're not coding on iPads.

John Ternus, Apple's vice president for hardware engineering for Macs, said so in a briefing earlier this week. "Some of our most talented folks are working on the Mac," Ternus said, according to Daring Fireball. "I mean, quite frankly, a lot of this company, if not most of this company, runs on Macs. This is a company full of pro Mac users."

On Tuesday, Apple reaffirmed its commitment to its oldest product line. It updated its trucks.

The current lineup of Mac Pros got the latest components, Apple teased a faster iMac model, and also made vague promises about an expandable, redesigned Mac Pro coming next year, for the most demanding users.

The reason that Apple is breaking with tradition and talking about upcoming products is because pro users are essential to Apple. They make up a small proportion of Apple users — 30% of Mac users, Apple estimates, which is a fraction of the number of iPhone users.

But Apple is not necessarily worried about video editors or artists, like Microsoft is targeting with the Surface Studio. It needs to keep the Mac strong because the Mac is what every single serious iPhone developer uses.

Currently, Apple's software for making software, Xcode, is only available on the Mac, and there's no iOS version. Apple is planning for a day when software development is done on tablets and phones, releasing the educational programming app Swift Playgrounds last year, but most developers still require a hardware keyboard, a command line, and a Unix-like environment, like macOS provides. 

“I think if you use Xcode downloads as a metric, it’s possible software developers are actually our largest pro audience. It’s growing very quickly, it’s been fantastic,” Apple software SVP Craig Federighi said at the Mac briefing. 

Some other Mac stats Apple shared on Tuesday:

• 80% of Macs sold are laptops, and 20% are desktops.
• It's a $25 billion run rate business on its own based on holiday quarter sales, which were up 20% annually. That's no iPhone business, but it would still be a Fortune 500 company on its own.

Developers, developers, developers

Developers are critical to Apple. The number of great apps available for iPhones and iPads is one of the biggest reasons to pay more for an iPhone over an Android phone. Apple likes to tout the job creating effects of software development for the iPhone, most recently saying that there are 627,000 jobs attributable to the "iOS ecosystem."

Do most developers need a pro machine with beastly GPUs and CPUs, like Apple is promising the launch in the future? No. Most developers can make apps and other software on Apple's laptops, and the company knows this.

But increasingly, next-generation experiences, like Apple CEO Tim Cook is fond of talking about, will require lots of power to do 3D-rendering. Apple wants to make sure that people can do AR and VR development on Macs. Plus, if you've ever spent time with software engineers, you know that a lot of them like to have a lot of horsepower on their daily rig.

So Apple can't get rid of Macs, even though they're dwarfed by the size of the iPhone business, because they're trucks. Developers are using those trucks to build the mountain of iPhone, and Apple's moat, and that's why the company won't be abandoning the Mac anytime soon.

SEE ALSO: I'm not going back to Apple after using Windows 10 for a year

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