App developer Crowdaa raises €1.2 million and plans a U.S. expansion | TechCrunch
Crowdaa is an app that allows non-developers to easily create and release apps on the mobile store.
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Crowdaa is an app that allows non-developers to easily create and release apps on the mobile store.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
This latest release, one of many announcements from the Google I/O 2024 developer conference, focuses on improved battery life and other performance improvements, like more efficient workout tracking.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, the tech giant has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others, according to reports from affected employees shared on social media. Google confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch, but not the specific teams, roles or how many people were let go.
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” said Google spokesperson Alex García-Kummert. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers,” he added.
The company clarified that the layoffs were not company-wide but were reorgs that are part of the normal course of business. Affected employees will be able to apply for other open roles at Google, we’re told.
In one X post, a PM from Flutter and Dart said the layoffs had affected “a LOT of teams,” and that “lots of great projects lost people.”
“We’re sad, but still cranking hard on I/O and beyond,” wrote Google PM Kevin Moore in the Flutter development community on Reddit, where he added that Flutter and Dart weren’t affected any more or less than other teams. “We know ya’ll care SO MUCH about the project and the team and the awesome ecosystem we’ve built together. You’re nervous. I get it. We get it. You’re betting on Flutter and Dart. So am I. So is Google,” he said.
Google also told TechCrunch that Flutter will have new updates to share at I/O this year.
In a separate post on Reddit, another commenter noted the Python team affected by the layoffs were those who managed the internal Python runtimes and toolchains and worked with OSS Python. Included in this group were “multiple current and former core devs and steering council members,” they said.
Meanwhile, others shared on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, where a Python team member detailed their specific duties on the technical front and noted that, for years, much of the work was done with fewer than 10 people. Another Hacker News commenter said their early years on the Python team were spent paying down internal technical debt accumulated from not having a strong Python strategy.
“[D]espite the understaffing, we had managers who were extremely good about maintaining work/life balance and the ‘marathon, not sprint’ approach to work. As I said in another comment, it’s the best job I’ve ever had, and I’ll miss it deeply,” they wrote.
“Python was one of the very first languages used widely at Google. It was the last major backend language to get a language team,” the user, gpshead, also said.
Though Google didn’t detail headcount, some of the layoffs at Google may have been confirmed in a WARN notice filed on April 24. WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs. In the filing, Google said it was laying off a total of 50 employees across three locations in Sunnyvale.
CNBC reports that a total of 200 people were let go across Google’s “Core” teams, which included those working on Python, app platforms, and other engineering roles. Some jobs were being shifted to India and Mexico, it said, citing internal documents.
On social media, commenters raised concerns with the Python layoffs in particular, given the role that Python tooling plays in AI. But others pointed out that Google didn’t eliminate its Python team; it replaced that team with another group based in Munich — at least according to Python Steering Council member Thomas Wouters in a post on Mastodon last Thursday.
“It’s a tough day when everyone you work with directly, including your manager, is laid off — excuse me, ‘had their roles reduced,’ and you’re asked to onboard their replacements, people told to take those very same roles just in a different country who are not any happier about it,” he said.
Google said it would support all affected employees, in line with local requirements, by providing them with time to search for different roles at Google or elsewhere, access to outplacement services and severance.
Article originally published April 29, 2024, 11:32 AM PT. Updated with new info from CNBC on May 1, 2024, 1:55 PM ET.
Pour one out for CodeWhisperer, Amazon’s AI-powered assistive coding tool. As of today, it’s kaput — sort of.
CodeWhisperer is now Q Developer, a part of Amazon’s Q family of business-oriented generative AI chatbots that also extends to the newly-announced Q Business. Available through AWS, Q Developer helps with some of the tasks developers do in the course of their daily work, like debugging and upgrading apps, troubleshooting, and performing security scans — much like CodeWhisperer did.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Doug Seven, GM and director of AI developer experiences at AWS, implied that CodeWhisperer was a bit of a branding fail. Third-party metrics reflect as much; even with a free tier, CodeWhisperer struggled to match the momentum of chief rival GitHub Copilot, which has over 1.8 million paying individual users and tens of thousands of corporate customers. (Poor early impressions surely didn’t help.)
“CodeWhisperer is where we got started [with code generation], but we really wanted to have a brand — and name — that fit a wider set of use cases,” Seven said. “You can think of Q Developer as the evolution of CodeWhisperer into something that’s much more broad.”
To that end, Q Developer can generate code including SQL, a programming language commonly used to create and manage databases, as well as test that code and assist with transforming and implementing new code ideated from developer queries.
Similar to Copilot, customers can fine-tune Q Developer on their internal codebases to improve the relevancy of the tool’s programming recommendations. (The now-deprecated CodeWhisperer offered this option, too.) And, thanks to a capability called Agents, Q Developer can autonomously perform things like implementing features and documenting and refactoring (i.e. restructuring) code.
Ask a request of Q Developer like “create an ‘add to favorites’ button in my app,” and Q Developer will analyze the app code, generate new code if necessary, create a step-by-step plan, and complete tests of the code before executing the proposed changes. Developers can review and iterate the plan before Q implements it, connecting steps together and applying updates across the necessary files, code blocks and test suites.
“What happens behind the scenes is, Q Developer actually spins up a development environment to work on the code,” Seven said. “So, in the case of feature development, Q Developer takes the entire code repository, creates a branch of that repository, analyzes the repository, does the work that it’s been asked to do and returns those code changes to the developer.”
Image Credits: Amazon
Agents can also automate and manage code upgrading processes, Amazon says, with Java conversions live today (specifically Java 8 and 11 built using Apache Maven to Java version 17) and .NET conversions coming soon. “Q Developer analyzes the code — looking for anything that needs to be upgraded — and makes all those changes before returning it to the developer to review and commit themselves,” Seven added.
To me, Agents sounds a lot like GitHub’s Copilot Workspace, which similarly generates and implements plans for bug fixes and new features in software. And — as with Workspace — I’m not entirely convinced that this more autonomous approach can solve the issues surrounding AI-powered coding assistants.
An analysis of over 150 million lines of code committed to project repos over the past several years by GitClear found that Copilot was resulting in more mistaken code being pushed to codebases. Elsewhere, security researchers have warned that Copilot and similar tools can amplify existing bugs and security issues in software projects.
This isn’t surprising. AI-powered coding assistants seem impressive. But they’re trained on existing code, and their suggestions reflect patterns in other programmers’ work — work that can be seriously flawed. Assistants’ guesses create bugs that are often difficult to spot, especially when developers — who are adopting AI coding assistants in great numbers — defer to the assistants’ judgement.
In less risky territory beyond coding, Q Developer can help manage a company’s cloud infrastructure on AWS — or at least get them the info they need to do the managing themselves.
Q Developer can fulfill requests like “List all of my Lambda functions” and “list my resources residing in other AWS regions.” Currently in preview, the bot can also generate (but not execute) AWS Command Line Interface commands and answer AWS cost-related questions such as “What were the top three highest-cost services in Q1?”
Image Credits: Amazon
So how much do these generative AI conveniences cost?
Q Developer is available for free in the AWS Console, Slack and IDEs such as Visual Studio Code, GitLab Duo and JetBrains — but with limitations. The free version doesn’t allow fine-tuning to custom libraries, packages and APIs, and opts users into a data collection scheme by default. It also imposes monthly caps, including a maximum of 5 Agents tasks (e.g. implementing a feature) per month and 25 queries about AWS account resources per month. (It’s baffling to me that Amazon would impose a cap on questions one can ask about its own services, but here we are.)
The premium version of Q Developer, Q Developer Pro, costs $19 per month per user and adds higher usage limits, tools to manage users and policies, single sign-on and — perhaps most importantly — IP indemnity.
Image Credits: Amazon
In many cases, the models underpinning code-generating services such as Q Developer are trained on code that’s copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Vendors claim that fair use protects them in the event that the models was knowingly or unknowingly developed on copyrighted code — but not everyone agrees. GitHub and OpenAI are being sued in a class action motion that accuses them of violating copyright by allowing Copilot to regurgitate licensed code snippets without providing credit.
Amazon says that it’ll defend Q Developer Pro customers against claims alleging that the service infringes on a third-party’s IP rights so long as they let AWS control their defense and settle “as AWS deems appropriate.”
Ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, the tech giant has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others, according to reports from affected employees shared on social media. Google confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch, but not the specific teams, roles or how many people were let go.
“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” a Google spokesperson said. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers.”
The company clarified that the layoffs were not company-wide but were reorgs that are a part of the normal course of business. Affected employees will be able to apply for other open roles at Google, we’re told.
In one X post, a PM from Flutter and Dart said the layoffs had affected “a LOT of teams,” and that “lots of great projects lost people.”
“We’re sad, but still cranking hard on I/O and beyond,” wrote Google PM Kevin Moore in the Flutter development community on Reddit, where he added that Flutter and Dart weren’t affected any more or less than other teams. “We know ya’ll care SO MUCH about the project and the team and the awesome ecosystem we’ve built together. You’re nervous. I get it. We get it. You’re betting on Flutter and Dart. So am I. So is Google,” he said.
Google also told TechCrunch that Flutter will have new updates to share at I/O this year.
In a separate post on Reddit, another commenter noted the Python team affected by the layoffs were those who managed the internal Python runtimes and toolchains and worked with OSS Python. Included in this group were “multiple current and former core devs and steering council members,” they said.
Meanwhile, others shared on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, where a Python team member detailed their specific duties on the technical front and noted that, for years, much of the work was done with fewer than 10 people. Another Hacker News commenter said their early years on the Python team were spent paying down internal technical debt accumulated from not having a strong Python strategy.
“…despite the understaffing, we had managers who were extremely good about maintaining work/life balance and the ‘marathon, not sprint’ approach to work. As I said in another comment, it’s the best job I’ve ever had, and I’ll miss it deeply,” they wrote.
“Python was one of the very first languages used widely at Google. It was the last major backend language to get a language team,” the user, gpshead, also said.
Though Google didn’t detail headcount, some of the layoffs at Google may have been confirmed in a WARN notice filed on April 24. WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs. In the filing, Google said it was laying off a total of 50 employees across three locations in Sunnyvale.
On social media, commenters raised concerns with the Python layoffs in particular, given the role that Python tooling plays in AI. But others pointed out that Google didn’t eliminate its Python team, it replaced that team with another group based in Munich — at least according to Python Steering Council member Thomas Wouters, in a post on Mastodon.
“It’s a tough day when everyone you work with directly, including your manager, is laid off — excuse me, ‘had their roles reduced,’ and you’re asked to onboard their replacements, people told to take those very same roles just in a different country who are not any happier about it,” he said in a Mastodon post last Thursday.
Google said it would support all affected employees, in line with local requirements, by providing them with time to search for different roles at Google or elsewhere, access to outplacement services and severance.
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