Today’s topics include Google announcing general availability of its App Maker development tool, and Qualcomm remaining in the server business.
Google on June 14 announced general availability of App Maker, a low-code application development tool that it first launched in beta back in November 2016. App Maker is designed to help professional developers and business professionals who don’t have a formal coding background build custom applications without necessarily requiring help from IT.
In the new version, Google has added several new features and improved upon existing ones, including adding integrated support for Cloud SQL for customers of Google Cloud Platform. Organizations can also connect their own database to any app developed with App Maker thanks to new support for a “Bring Your Own Database” capability.
Finally, Google has improved the templates, drag-and-drop design and declarative data modeling capabilities in App Maker to enable faster app development.
Qualcomm isn’t getting out of the server processor business after all.
Bloomberg in May reported that Qualcomm officials were looking to sell or shut down its server chip business, focusing instead on such areas as smartphones and other mobile devices, the internet of things, and networking. However, Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon, speaking with Reuters last week, said the company will continue making server chips, although he added that the strategy for the business has changed somewhat.
Qualcomm will cut some jobs in the business group and will move the group into the vendor’s CDMA Technologies unit, which is responsible for the company’s mobile phone chips. In addition, the focus of the business will be on hyperscalers and major cloud vendors, Amon said, pointing to such Chinese companies as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. The chips will be sold there through a joint venture in China.