Key takeaways for developers and businesses from Apple, Microsoft, and Google developer conferences

This time of the year, developers and businesses constantly look to improve their products based on the latest tech offerings from major mobile and cloud platforms. The tech announcements provide a considerable value differentiator in the product offering.

Overall, no new major announcements were made exclusively this year, however, more demonstrations were given on how their products are built using their tech stack.

Grouped all the major areas at a high level and listed below as quick snippets.

1. Personalization – often done in the cloud in a centralized way through models and analytics, there was a significant emphasis on how the big tech companies are trying to change the way personalization works by performing on-device machine learning to let the user do their tailor-made personalization to choosing the ads to be served based on the user interest.
2. User experience – User journey on the product combined with providing useful alerts to increase the engagement and awareness of the product. Bringing everything and everyone together rather than addressing each form factor individually. Equal representation of all the skin tones across all the touch points in the business. Making the products even more accessible to the majority of the population.
3. Developers connect – Easier ways to connect with the engineers of the platform and more developer resources made available. Developer onboarding time for a new project is dramatically reduced by packaging all the tools needed for developing in the cloud. More advancements are made for increasing the productivity and quality of the deliverables by introducing AI pair programmers. The design to code to prod time is much reduced with the new tools.
4. Identity store – Trying to eliminate identity theft by forcing the users to mandatorily start enrolling in MFA by simplifying the process of using MFA. De-identifying the data from the user to reduce the targeted personalization. Passkeys are introduced to securely share the credentials across different devices. Passwordless logins with passwords residing on the device help in almost zero compromises of the credentials since the credentials never leave the device.
5. Cloud – Focus on the core application and product development with containers and serverless computing. Emphasize the importance of microservices and the orchestration. With more and more clouds getting into a hybrid with edge computing, very less latency can be achieved. The target latency of less than 200 ms has been set as the industry standard. Utilizing purpose-built services from the cloud providers for rapid application development.
6. Data – It is the core of any business. Data should be made available to the user in the easiest way possible. The concept of multi-search, conversations, and contextual references are super highlighted. Users should be able to gain access to the data in the easiest ways possible across multiple form factors. Similarly, users should feel complete control of the data that is being captured. Higher importance was given to the concepts of protected computing, on-device data processing, and less data on the cloud.
7. Security – This can be classified into A) security of the application, B) security of the infrastructure, and C) security of the data. Cyber attacks are on the rise day by day. Some of the goals of these attacks are not to steal the data but to prevent the data from being accessed by the user. The goal is to bring down the site. Advanced DDoS protection, and anti-automation solutions are highly encouraged at the infrastructure level. Complete encryption of data at transit and data at rest using custom keys with periodic key rotation for data security. Zero trust and MFA for application-level security.
8. Ubiquitous computing – This is the heart of application development. In the case of mobile apps, you want the app to be running in different form factors. Also, seamless transition of the user journey when the user moves from one form factor to the other. In the case of the cloud, you want to serve as many form factors as possible and support multi-tenancy as well as white-labeled solutions.

Quick links to the developer conferences –

Google IO ’22 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP-nMZpLM1A

Apple WWDC ’22 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5D55G7Ejs8

Microsoft Build ’22 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GonrcDal3QU&ab

Share the features that you found interesting and that you plan to implement in your products.

Happy learning!