The dev team at InnterSloth revealed that the hyper-popular Among Us would not get a direct sequel any time soon. This announcement was delivered on September 23, 2020, as the first game (Among Us) was living in a golden age - it's EXTREMELY popular right now. This first online-centered game is so extremely popular that its developers have decided to stay dedicated to updating, rather than creating a whole second game.
We live in an app-centric world, not just on smartphones but also on desktops and even on TVs. We have, in other words, become dependent on these apps, as well as the services that power then remotely, and, in the final analysis, on the developers that create these experiences. Although statistically the mobile platform, Android apps haven't exactly been the most enjoyable to develop, something that Google's new Jetpack Compose toolkit is aiming to fix once and for all.
Oculus Connect 2020 is now no longer an event, as the name of the event has been changed to Facebook Connect. Facebook introduced "the new Facebook Reality Labs" at the same time as they've announced a re-naming of the annual Oculus developer event. This new event will begin in a "virtual" format - though not entirely in the virtual reality realm.
Today the Apple vs Epic Games war is ramping up a bit, with Epic claiming that Apple is about to ban Unreal Engine from all Apple platforms. Epic broke Apple's rules by placing in-app purchases in their game Fortnite, resulting in Apple removing the game Fortnite from their app store. Apple apparently also aims to remove all Epic Games software from their platforms, including development tools for Unreal Engine.
Google has been heavily pushing Chromebooks and Chrome OS almost as the all-in-one computer system you'll ever need, especially with the upcoming support for running Windows applications (at least on the enterprise). As a software platform, however, Chrome OS's story has never really been complete and that is manifested in the lack of quality or even notable apps and games for Chrome OS. Google is finally adding a new chapter to that story with ChromeOS.dev, its new one-stop-shop to help developers get up and running on making software for Google's OS.
If you've been waiting for Microsoft's latest Flight Simulator release, the time is close at hand. Today the folks that run the development of Microsoft Flight Simulator revealed that they'd reached an important milestone. Alpha 5 was was released this week, on the 9th of July, 2020, and Closed Beta was moved into final testing!
As the rumors had claimed, Apple is officially transitioning its Mac products to its own silicon, a transitional process the company expects will take around two years to fully complete. Amid the many details about this new hardware and plan was mention of the Developer Transition Kit (DTK), a product that will help developers build and test their Universal 2 apps for use with the new systems.
Apple has detailed just how WWDC 2020 will run, the first of its annual developer events to be carried out entirely online. The 31st year of the Worldwide Developer Conference, it'll kick off on June 22 and run through to June 26, Apple says, with arguably the most eagerly-anticipated entry on the schedule being the Special Event Keynote held at 10am PDT on day one.
This week Bungie announced that they'd be moving beyond the traditional model for games - beyond what we've come to expect from any major gaming developer. In the past, they'd release a new game every year, or a new game every few years. This was fine, when games were offline - and it's been acceptable even through more than two decades of Massively Multiplayer Online Games. With Destiny 2, Bungie's changed the way gamers will expect games to evolve.
Today Apple revealed the Password Manager Resources open source project to assist in the development password management systems of all sorts. This new system was made by Apple to be open sourced in order to invigorate the global digital community with password management protocol that's as secure as today's tech will allow. This system from Apple allows developers to integrate website-specific requirements used y the iCloud Keychain password manager "to generate strong, unique passwords."
Features of the next major version of Android have begun to leak courtesy of intrepid developers bent on access as soon as possible. Documentation of the features we're seeing today are public, but activating said features isn't quite so simple as a quick tap of a PDF. This new API and the feature's we're seeing here will be present in a future version of Android, hopefully very soon, but for now they're relatively hidden.
Microsoft has revealed its plan to close the gap between Windows app developers, with Project Reunion aiming to make a common platform for new software. As it stands, Windows developers could be creating Win32 apps with the Windows API, or UWP apps using the Universal Windows Platform APIs.