In 1987 he had a problem displaying images on his Mac, so he created an app. Today it is the most used image editor in history

Maybe with Nano Banana There are people who have banished Photoshop, but the image editor is the tool that has accompanied photography professionals for decades, almost on par with their camera. In fact, it achieved something only within the reach of very few technological products: becoming a verb and even enter the dictionary. We Photoshop an image and Google it on the internet. Like many other milestones, Photoshop was born by chance: It was the result of a screen that did not know how to show grays. In figures. In these almost 40 years of Photoshop’s life, the editor has been accumulating astronomical data of its progress. Its launch price in 1990 was $895. No joke, it would be equivalent to $2,100 today. It has never been a home software but a professional one. Adobe closed last year with record turnover of 23.77 billion dollars. In 2024 billing was of 21,510 million dollars, of which subscriptions represented 20,521 million dollars. In 2013 Adobe played all its cards on the subscription. Time has proven him right: in twelve years it went from 4,000 million annual billing to almost 24 billion in 2025. How it all started. It’s 1987 and Thomas Knoll was pursuing a doctorate at the University of Michigan in computer vision. Then he had a problem: his Mac Plus had a monochrome screen unable to display grayscale images, only pure black and white. So he wrote a few lines of code to fix it. He called it Display. His little program did the trick, but that was it: he had no intention of commercializing it. The one who did have a nose for the business was his brother John, who at that time worked at Industrial Light & Magic (George Lucas’ company in charge of making Star Wars special effects): convinced him to develop the entire program. Brothers and partners, they sold the license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. From layers to AI. Photoshop 1.0 would see the light of day in February 1990 as an editor that required only 2MB of RAM and an 8 MHz processor to run, the minimum specifications for a Mac. To put it in context: today Photoshop recommends 16GB of RAM, 8,000 times more. It included tools as iconic to its users as the lasso or the magic wand. But if there was a technical leap that made the difference, those were the very useful capes: they arrived in 1994 with Photoshop 3.0. Before layers, the editor was destructive: each change overwrote the original image. Almost 20 years later, another functional milestone would arrive: the arrival of AI with Generative Fillthat is, being able to add or delete objects with a prompt. Despite the controversy over authorship and the future of retouchingits numbers were incontestable: in April of last year it had already generated more than 22,000 million images since its launch, according to Adobe. The risky move to the subscription model. Before the tricky decision to include AI in its suite, Adobe made another risky move: in 2013 and when we had still succumbed in subscriptionocracyannounced that it would stop selling its Photoshop on a license forever and start renting it. At that time almost 50,000 customers signed a petition against of this decision and its shares fell 12%. Once again, time and pocketbooks seem to have proven them right: they have multiplied their income by six. In Xataka | 16 years ago a student from Barcelona was looking for an easy way to edit PDFs. The website he created is one of the most viewed on the internet In Xataka | 30 years ago he created a player for the university: today his app has more than 6 billion downloads and is still free and without ads Cover | University of Michigan

Apple Music will come to the app to offer the next step

TikTok has become more than just a platform for short videos: for millions of people it is the place where they discover new music. Songs that appear in “Para ti” can go from being a viral fragment to becoming a global hit in a matter of hours. That role as a great musical showcase has redefined how songs are released and promoted in the industry. Apple Music seems to have taken note of that dynamic and is now committed to going one step beyond discovery. The novelty. “Play Full Song” seeks to shorten the journey between the moment someone discovers a song on TikTok and the moment they decide to listen to it in its entirety. From now on, Apple Music subscribers will see a dedicated button on their “For You” or sound details page, from which they can open an Apple Music player to listen to the full track. By tapping it, the user can play the track and continue listening to recommendations within the service. TikTok also adds that users will be able to save songs in “Your Music” and add them directly to their Apple Music lists. An agreement that goes through Apple Music. Although the button appears within TikTok, the complete playback is not done on the social network itself. The function uses MusicKit, Apple’s technology that allows you to integrate your catalog into other applications, so the song is played in Apple Music and listens are counted in that service. The important detail is that the integration is linked only to Apple Music. According to TechCrunchother streaming services, including Spotify, do not currently have an equivalent option to listen to full songs from TikTok. This integration does not appear in a vacuum. TikTok has been incorporating tools designed to connect the virality of its videos with streaming platforms for some time. One of them is “Add to music app”, a function that allows you to save songs discovered on TikTok directly to music services to listen to later. In parallel, the company has also explored other paths, such as its attempt to launch its own streaming service, an initiative that ended up closing. Since then, the strategy seems to focus on reinforcing its role as a discovery point that connects with other platforms. Music is also heard in community. The announcement also includes a feature called “Listening Party,” designed to bring artists and fans together for a shared listening session. During these sessions, fans can listen to songs in real time while interacting with each other and the artist themselves. TikTok describes the initiative as a new social way to experience music within the platform. Together, these tools aim at the same objective: reinforcing TikTok’s role as a meeting point between musical discovery, reproduction and direct relationship between artists and audience. Images | TikTok In Xataka | Netflix spends 17 billion on producing content and YouTube does it for free. And that’s why YouTube is winning the game

A startup from Malaga is the most used European AI app in the world according to Andreessen Horowitz. It’s called Freepik

The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has prepared its already traditional ranking with the world’s top 100 end-user AI applications. There are many predictable ones in the top positions, but we are surprised because among the top 15 is none other than freepikthe platform created by the Malaga startup of the same name. Freepik in the world top. On the list we have many usual suspects (and some not so usual) in the top positions, but one of the big surprises on the list It is the Freepik platformwhich is ranked number 11 and is the only representative of our country in that ranking. But besides that, it is the first of all Europeans included on the list. This specific list is made with the number of unique monthly visits as a criterion. USA dominates. In that list the dominance of apps from American companies is clear, and only the Chinese one DeepSeek sneaks into the top 10 list. Here ChatGPT dominates the ranking with Gemini and Canva completing the podium, but it is surprising to see the relevance of Grok, ahead of Claude. And Google shines with its own light. Within the list, the presence of Google is also notable, which has four tools on that list: Gemini (in number 2 on the list), Google AI Studio (10), Google Labs (25) and the splendid NotebookLM (30). Most of these apps come from the US. Graphic: Xataka with Gemini. Data: Andreessen Horowitz. China tightens. It may seem that China’s role here is less relevant than it should be, but it must be taken into account that many Chinese startups focus on platforms and applications for the Chinese market. Even so, there are clear protagonists such as Capcut and Doubao (ByteDance), Qwen and Quark (Alibaba), Kimi, Kling, Cutout and of course the aforementioned DeepSeek. Europe has its protagonists. Freepik is the clear standout on this list among the European AI applications, but there are others that stand out and manage to make it onto the list such as Photoroom (France), Turboscribe and Veed (United Kingdom), Remove.bg/Kalleido (Austria) and another standout, ElevenLabs (based in London). An evolution towards hybrid apps. As Andreessen Horowitz points out, three years ago the distinction between “native AI” products and traditional software was clear. Today that barrier has disappeared, since massive tools like CapCutCanva or Notion have integrated generative AI as the core of their experience and revenue engine. They have taken advantage of their inertia, they have adapted and they have won. In mobile apps the ranking changes, and a lot. The most popular AI mobile apps in the world based on their number of active users each month is very different. Here Freepik disappears from the list, for example, and it is China that totally dominates with 22 of the 50 apps (44%). The US has 13 apps on the list (26%), while Europe only has four (8%) and other countries share the other 11 (22%). Here China benefits from its huge user base, who also very frequently use AI applications for all types of functions. ByteDance is especially eye-catching and has five apps on the list (CapCut, Doubao, Cici, Hypic and Gauth). Divergence of approaches. In general, all apps try to build user loyalty through their ecosystems and try to integrate more and more things so that one does not leave them. However, there are important approaches among some such as ChatGPT, very oriented towards being a “super app” for mass consumption, and Claude, from Anthropic, which focuses on professional and technical users. AI wants to be almost invisible. AI is no longer a destination, a website to go to, but is becoming part of the experience, a function integrated into the application. Thus, it now resides directly in the browser, in development environments or in office suites. In Xataka | The war between Anthropic and the Pentagon points to something terrifying: a new “Oppenheimer Moment”

Running clubs have become Gen Z’s favorite dating app

Dawn breaks and the parks begin to fill with runners. The alarm clock has rang early, it’s time to lace up your sneakers and go out to add kilometers. At the end of the route, still with heavy breathing and sweat on the forehead, the modern ritual demands to open the phone. But the goal is no longer to swipe profiles on a dating app from the comfort of the couch, but to upload the workout to Strava accompanied by a selfie or a clever title. Those who do it know perfectly well that there is someone on the other side paying attention. As a young runner confessed In a report published by the magazine ellethe intention to be seen is undeniable: “One hundred percent. Whether it’s a long run or a pretty outfit, there have been times when I’ve thought: he’s going to see this.” This scene, which is repeated every morning and afternoon in any city in the world, illustrates a massive paradigm shift. In a world where love seemed to have been trapped in algorithms, paywalls and cold screens, Generation Z has decided to return to the streets, the asphalt and the sports clubs. At first glance, Strava is a tool purely technical: GPS maps, average paces and gradients. However, the data confirm a sociological phenomenon. According to the Year in Sport: Trend Report from 2025 issued by Strava itselfone in five Gen Z respondents said they have gone on a date with someone they met through a club running. The same document reveals that the creation of new clubs on the platform multiplied by 3.5 in the last year. The transition from miles to romance has its own mechanics. As the German edition of Runners Globalgive a Kudo (the equivalent of a “like” on Strava) has become the new super-like. Tyler Swartz, founder of the Endorphins running club, points out that “Having multiple points of contact with someone is a great way to build trust.” After a group run, following each other on the app allows you to stay on each other’s radar without the pressure of an exchange of phones. The platform itself has witnessed (and facilitated) this shift. When Strava introduced direct messages (DMs) at the end of 2023 Intended to “coordinate flings,” it took younger users just a couple of hours to turn it into a new avenue for flirting, coining icebreakers like, “At your pace or mine?” Unlike Tinder’s visual catalog, seduction here is behavioral. A report from Trail Info highlights that in this network “People observe before they speak.” Knowing that someone runs four times a week at 6 in the morning says much more about their lifestyle, their discipline and their perseverance than an empty 150-character biography. The collapse of dating apps and the search for the authentic This exodus towards asphalt cannot be understood without analyzing the collapse of the previous model. Young people are tired of swiping profiles. According to a survey of Forbesmore than 75% of Generation Z suffer from burnout by using dating apps, feeling like they are not making genuine connections. Even Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Match Group (parent of Tinder and Hinge), admitted that these applications They are perceived today as a “numbers game” that prioritizes metrics over experience. The financial consequences are palpable. Tinder has experienced a decline sustained in its paying users, falling below the 10 million barrier, dragging Match Group shares into a free fall from their 2021 highs. The exception to the rule, paradoxically, It’s Facebook Datingwhich is gaining traction among 18- to 29-year-olds, primarily because it is completely free compared to its competitors’ subscription models. In contrast, the social sports business is flourishing. A report of Financial Times details how Stravawhich closed the year with 180 million users worldwide, is preparing its IPO on Wall Street under the leadership of its new CEO, Michael Martin, with a valuation that already exceeded $2.2 billion in previous rounds. The British media Guardian frame this phenomenon in the rise of calls Hobby Apps (hobby apps). Platforms like Letterboxd (for movie buffs), Goodreads (for readers) or Strava itself are absorbing users who are fleeing the toxic public square of X (formerly Twitter) or TikTok. They are friendly spaces, strongly moderated by their own common interests, where the debate focuses on passions and not on cultural wars. All this has changed the rules of seduction. Today, asking for a face-to-face date terrifies a generation paralyzed by the fear of rejection. We live in what is defined as the “paradox of preparation”: 80% of Gen Z want to find true love, but only 55% feel ready for a relationship. They are terrified of “public failure”, preferring the eternal groping on Instagram or the soft launch (announce a couple ambiguously on social networks to avoid giving explanations if they break up). Serena Kerrigan, content creator, sums it up perfectly: the apps dating dan cringe (grima) because they feel “like a job interview.” In real life, traditional flirting is mutating into absolute pragmatism. In fact, a trend on the rise is the choremancing (the union of chore —task— and romance). New dates no longer consist of going to a candlelit dinner, but rather going to the supermarket together or assembling an Ikea piece of furniture. It’s the ultimate filter: seeing how the other person manages stress, logistics, and teamwork in the real world. In this context, running clubs fit perfectly. As one attendee relates for the magazine MensXPshowing up sweaty and out of breath instantly breaks the ice. There are no Instagram filters to help when you’re trying to catch your breath; the façade disappears and authenticity takes over. Wellbeing as a new rebellion: the natural ecosystem of Gen Z It is quite complex to decipher Generation Z (and even more so from the perspective of an editor millennial), but there is a common thread that explains everything: well-being has replaced the culture of the night. Strava’s annual report sheds devastating information for the traditional leisure … Read more

Google wants you to spend more time in its app store. So he’s going to turn it into TikTok

At the end of 2023, Google warned: at some point the discovery of applications through short videos in the Play Store would be enhanced. A pilot test began in the United States under the name “Play Report”, giving maximum prominence to certain selected applications through short videos in vertical format. What began as a pilot test appears to have worked successfully. The company just announced a package of news that will come to Android and, among them, is this type of videos. The fact that. Google is going to introduce Google Play Shorts. Their name does not deceive: they are short format videos in which we will be shown the content and operation of the applications. As soon as we open the application, we will see them playing, so the first question we ask ourselves is whether it will be possible to eliminate its autoplay to save data. Because. Google is not hiding, it wants us to be able to check how an application works without having to leave the Play Store. Until now, if we wanted to consult about any app we used to close the store, look for information in another source, and return to download it. The objective of the Play Shorts is that we have enough hook with the video, and we go on to download the application directly. As. The videos will be integrated into the apps section itself, they will not have an independent section. Or, in other words, a priori they seem inevitable. We will open the Play Store and at the beginning we will have these Play Shorts. They will be integrated into the app files themselves but, to boost downloads, there will be an installation button in the video itself. When. “Soon.” The key here is that the function has come out of pilot testing and will soon arrive on Android. Over the next few weeks, and through a server update, these new ads will progressively appear. TikTokizing Play Store. While the European Union puts infinite scroll in the spotlightGoogle has just added it to its most used application. Once we enter Play Shorts, we can slide down to see more and more applications, a format identical to that of TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. Image | Google In Xataka | The science of “doomscrolling”: how technology hacked psychology so we can’t let go of our phones

OpenAI had to choose between being the star app of the US army and its users. And the users have chosen for it

Last Saturday there were 295% more uninstallations of the ChatGPT mobile app in the United States. Many users felt terrible that OpenAI reached a theoretically unethical agreement with the US Department of Defense to replace Anthropic, and they have punished it with a “Cancel ChatGPT” movement on social networks which has also had an impact on those uninstallations. what has happened. The consulting firm Sensor Tower, which monitors the status of mobile application stores, has indicated that the ChatGPT uninstall rate has increased by 295% on Saturday, February 28 compared to the previous day. Normally, the uninstall rate is around 9% from one day to the next, but that day it was clear that many users decided to get rid of the app at the same time. The reason is obvious. The Pentagon vs. Anthropic. The pentagon it had been months working with Claude, Anthropic’s AI, which was already used on classified documents. Anthropic had made it a condition not to use its AI for mass espionage and the development of autonomous weapons, but the Department of Defense (DoD, which many now call the “War Department”) wanted Anthropic remove those limitations. Anthropic refusedand that’s where OpenAI comes in. and opportunistic. Sam Altman first praised Anthropic’s stance. A few hours later he announced that they had reached an agreement with the DoD to replace Claude with ChatGPT. This has been widely criticized for OpenAI’s lack of ethics and opportunistic attitude, and led to a “ChatGPT cancellation” movement which has had an immediate impact on the downloads and uninstallations of this chatbot. Altman wants to clear things up. He OpenAI announcement It was unclear whether OpenAI actually imposed the same limits that Anthropic had imposed, but Altman soon announced that had added amendments to the agreement to avoid any confusion. Apparently they have been added protections against mass surveillancebut nothing is mentioned about the development of lethal autonomous weapons. Punishment for OpenAI. Not only has it been noticeably uninstalled, but in the opinions of the ChatGPT app many users have given a single star out of five in a very high proportion: those bad opinions grew by 775% on Saturday and then by 100% on Sunday according to Sensor Tower. Five-star reviews fell by 50%. Claude has overtaken ChatGPT in downloads as a result of the latest events with the Pentagon. Source: Appfigures. And Claude already surpasses it in downloads. Another consultancy that monitors the download market, appfiguresindicated that on Saturday Claude’s downloads surpassed those of ChatGPT in the US for the first time. In fact, Claude has become the most downloaded app in at least six countries outside the US: Belgium, Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland. Streisand Effect. We are facing another case of Streisand effect: trying to censor certain information or a certain company ends up being counterproductive. The Pentagon tried to make Anthropic the bad guy, but what has happened is that the company is now seen as the great defender of ethics and “AI alignment.” This has made people perceive it as a more morally respectable option than ChatGPT. But Anthropic has problems. According to Reuters Several US government departments and agencies have made the switch to OpenAI and have begun to stop using Anthropic models for their work. That is already a problem for Anthropicbut even more so is the fact that their recent investment round, in which they raised 60,000 million dollars, could be in danger. If the DoD decides to label Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” its contracts and agreements with dozens of companies would be at risk, and its own future as a company would be at risk. It would be an extraordinary measure and it seems unlikely that the US would go to that point, but nothing is certain today. Image | Village Global In Xataka | The war between Anthropic and the Pentagon points to something terrifying: a new “Oppenheimer Moment”

Today its app has more than 6,000 million downloads and is still free and without ads

There is software so good that it is difficult to believe that it is free because it constitutes an almost anachronistic technological rarity: an echo of that Internet that no longer exists, where valuable information ran through forums far from ruthless algorithms and the perennial interest in monetizing everything. VLC is probably the most extreme case: a free, ad-free, all-terrain player without a corporate owner that has been essential for anyone who watches videos for almost three decades. In figures. Some data that show the impressive evolution of the project in these 30 years: At CES 2025VLC announced two things: the arrival of AI subtitles and that the figure had risen to 6 billion downloads. In March 2024, the official download figure It was 5,000 million. Of those 6 billion downloads, 4.8 billion correspond to Windows. MacOS is much further away, with 380 million, according to data from the VideoLAN statistical system. The beginnings were difficult: in 2009 and after more than a decade of development, version 1.0.0 of VLC was published. A university project. VLC was born in 1996 at the École Centrale Paris, one of the great French technical schools. The VIA Centrale Réseaux computer club wanted to modernize the campus network, an outdated LAN that made any transfer very slow, but needed a technical argument to justify it. The solution was develop an application to broadcast and display network video that would consume enough bandwidth to make the update inevitable. More specifically, there were two programs: the VLS server (VideoLAN Server) and the VLC player client (VideoLAN Client). They were designed with a modular architecture to be able to adapt them to different operating systems without rewriting the entire code, something they would appreciate later. In 1998 they achieved the first successful broadcast and playback in MPEG-2 format. The liberation of being open source. In the beginning, VLC belonged to the university in a closed way, but the students struggled for years to convince the institution to release the project. In 2001, got it: Obtained the free and open source software license GNU General Public License. This decision was a turning point, a real catalyst for everyone from around the world to contribute, going from a university project to something in the community. Of course, when the Free Software Foundation published the new GPLv3, VLC did not update for a practical matter: I had too many collaborators and libraries to get the yes and along the way I would probably have worsened their compatibility. Goodbye to the Ecole. In 2009, VLC graduated from the École Centrale Paris and completely disassociated himself from the academic organization. Since then it has been managed by a non-profit organization, the VideoLAN Organization and which has one of the people who started the project as president, Jean-Baptiste Kempf. It was not a bed of roses. In 2010, VLC arrived on the Apple App Store, but a few months later He was removed due to problems with his license.. Its license at the time, GPLv2, required that the software be completely free of restrictions, something incompatible with Apple’s distribution conditions. The team had to relicense the VLC engine with a more permissive license (LGPL) compatible with App Store policies. Of course, it was a long and legally tortuous process (it required the consent of its authors). VLC finally returned to the Apple store in 2013. Advertising? No, thanks. VLC is free and has no ads by philosophy, as Kempf tells it in this video. For its co-creator, money can be a prison, a limitation if it becomes his main objective. In short: monetizing the most important thing means that the software and its users take a backseat. And there has been no shortage of offers. When we asked Jean Bastiste Kempf for these offers, he confirmed it to us: “We received several offers to buy VLC or to receive millions a year, but that meant adding some type of crapware either adware on users’ computers (changing the home page, inserting ads on web pages, toolbars, etc…), and we reject it. Basically, even if everyone does it, it’s making everyone’s life worse. It’s unethical, and we didn’t do it.” He summed up his philosophy in one sentence: “the search for money cannot be done at any price.” Your business model. The million dollar question if VLC does not have ads or charge a subscription or have premium payment options is: how does it make money? Essentially, in two ways: through donations from its users and with VideoLabsa business branch that has first class clients like Microsoft, Acer or Amazon. Despite its enormous volume of downloads, VLC maintains a light structure, since it is supported by a community of volunteers. In Xataka | 16 years ago a student from Barcelona was looking for an easy way to edit PDFs. The website he created is one of the most viewed on the internet Cover | Ibrahim Boran and By Axelle Manfrini (Wikipedia)

In 2013, WhatsApp cost almost one euro. And nothing prevents Meta from charging for the app again in 2026

There was a time when WhatsApp was paid. This was more than ten years ago, before Goal was done with the application and ended up completely changing its structure over time. The latest beta of the app leaks something that seemed inevitable after the arrival of the announcements: a paid subscription to avoid them. He leak. WhatsApp has two versions, the stable and the beta. It is common for the code of the next beta versions to be leaked, giving us a preview of the functions that will end up reaching the final app. And the latest leak points in a very specific direction. Since you recently removed your WhatsApp account from your Accounts Center, the price of your subscription for no ads in Status & Channels has decreased. Review your subscription to accept the new price of %1$s/month; or choose to use Status & Channels free of charge with ads. Additionally, Android Authority has managed to force the code so that the app displays a message in its interface about the possibility of canceling the subscription. WHATSAPP Tricks and tips to HIDE YOURSELF TO THE MAXIMUM and maintain your PRIVACY A plausible hypothesis. So far, practically all the WhatsApp code leaks have ended up materializing: either as functions tested in the beta version, or as features that have ended up reaching the final version. One of them has been the introduction of advertising in the app, which for now is limited to statuses, promotional channels and channel subscriptions. In the case of states, the operation is very similar to what Meta applies on Instagram, interspersing ads every certain number of publications. So… what if I don’t want ads? What do you give me in exchange?. If Meta wants to implement a subscription system with any modicum of success, it will have to offer more than just removing ads in return. The subscription opens the door to new WhatsApp functions, and a business model similar to that of Telegram with its premium version. One in which the app can continue to be used without any inconvenience in the free version, but which opens the door to benefits and a better experience if we check out. Because. If the question is why Meta may intend to charge you for WhatsApp, the answer is very easy: it needs money. In 2014, Facebook paid nearly $1 billion for WhatsApp. Almost 10 years later, He had barely recovered 10% of what he paid for it.. The company continues to need ways to make the investment profitable, and betting on a subscription model is a necessary plan. Image | Xataka Mobile In Xataka | WhatsApp Web: What it is, how it is used and comparison with the mobile app

The number of new apps coming to the App Store has skyrocketed. We have a culprit: “vibe coding”

The arrival of tools based on generative artificial intelligence has caused a real explosion in mobile application stores, especially since we have development environments with AI that allow us to create and deploy applications without needing to know programming. According to data from venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), new apps launched in the iOS App Store in the United States increased 60% year-on-year in December, after remaining practically stagnant for the previous three years. The accumulated year-on-year growth in the last twelve months reaches 24%. The person responsible has a name: the “vibe coding“, that way of programming in which AI does much of the work. What is happening. 2025 has been the year in which “sensation programming” has exploded. And it is that in environments of ‘agentic programming‘ or vibe coding, just explain to an AI tool what application you need and the machine takes care of writing the code. Platforms like CursorBolt, Google AI StudioClaude Code or V0 have democratized app creation to the point that anyone with an idea can turn it into a working prototype without writing a single line of code. This opens many doors, as thousands of new developers without technical training are publishing applications in stores. That’s also a problem. Going back to 2008. As points out a16z, the situation evokes the early days of the iPhonewhen Apple launched its SDK and in a matter of months went from 500 applications to downloads that exceeded 1,000 million. That ecosystem ended up generating hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. Here the phenomenon is even more overwhelming, since the creation of applications is no longer ‘limited’ to experienced developers, which means that in an afternoon we can create any simple app, as long as we know what to ask of the AI. Image: a16z The problem. Things are clear: you will not be able to create a complex application in one sentence. And now he told us Miguel Ángel Durán, a software engineer known as midudev, in March of last year: “don’t think that just saying something without knowing anything about programming is going to give you the next Airbnb.” As my colleague Javier Pastor mentioned some time ago, the case of Leoa user who created an entire SaaS platform with vibe coding and even got paying customers, perfectly illustrates the risks, since two days after bragging about his achievement, he had to ask for help because his app displayed public API keys, had an easy-to-jump paywall, and crashed his database due to basic programming errors. Quality matters. “You can do very basic things. We have tried Cursor, Bolt, etc., and you reach a level that one may think is advanced, but in reality what usually happens is that they are cloning a Github repository and changing its colors,” we say. counted Some time ago Daniel Ávila, co-founder of CodeGPT. There is a flood of low-quality apps, much more than before, since now many more inexperienced people can easily publish them in any app store. And the problem is that many of these applications do not even reach the prototype level, being unfinished products that work superficially and then end up accumulating all kinds of technical errors. Even worse if the app has a paywall. Between optimism and caution. “Vibe coding is super interesting to extend the prototyping of ideas and empower people,” we say. explained last year Nerea Luis, doctor in computer science. But he also recognizes that “it has risks” because completing these projects requires knowledge that neither the user nor the AI ​​possess. On the other hand, Omar Pera, Chief Product Officer of Freepik, was more optimistic: “vibe coding turns top engineers into 2x or 3x engineers.” Does it democratize access to application development? Yes, of course. The problem comes when the AI-generated application of someone without experience goes from a project to learn, as a hobby, or as an app development for one’s own use, to a project that encompasses more ambition and seeks to attract many clients. Cover image | James Yarema In Xataka | We believed that the AI ​​talent war is about engineers and developers. Actually, it’s about plumbers and electricians.

They live glued to an app looking at the sky as if it were 1939

Greenland had been installed for decades in a feeling of security, as if its geography and distance protected it from everything, and that certainty was has suddenly broken: in a matter of days the population has gone from joking that “nothing ever happens there” to talking seriously about evacuation, preventive flight to Denmark, or what will happen to their children if one day they wake up being “Americans”. Live in fear. counted on an extensive report the Guardian that these days on the island we are grappling with a question: how do we survive psychologically when a military threat stops being a movie and becomes a concrete possibility. The impact is not only political: insomnia, anxiety, daily nervousness, questions that are not answered with speeches but with emergency plansand the feeling that no one is prepared for something they have never experienced, because Greenland has no historical memory of modern invasions and its public life was built precisely on the idea that the world was far away. Look at the sky like in 1939. The British media recalled the parallelism. The most powerful image of this moment is civil surveillance become routine: inhabitants of Nuuk following flights on applications, observing the port and the sky as if waiting for a storm that has not yet struck, interpreting every movement as an omen, getting scared by a plane transport that takes off from a nearby base and fearing that it is the beginning of “the inevitable.” That wait has something from 1939 not because of the exact military comparison, but because of the emotional climate: the certainty that we are entering a dangerous time, the impression that prior guarantees They are no longer useful, and the feeling that the coup (if it comes) will not be diplomatic. In this tension, the telephone becomes a domestic radar and life becomes tiny. The threat of “necessity”. The key to fear is not just that there is strategic interests in the Arctic, but the language coming from Washington sounds like appropriation and force: the idea that Greenland is “necessary” for American security, even if it is part of the kingdom of Denmark, shifts the debate from the political to the existential. When a power speaks like this, the smaller population automatically feels powerless, and that feeling repeats. At that point, even the hope that everything remains rhetoric no longer calms its inhabitants, because the recent precedent of harsh interventions feeds the idea that the unthinkable is no longer impossible, just a matter of time. The Thule base in the United States Diplomacy to the limit. The encounters that youtook place in Washington They offer momentary relief because they suggest dialogue, but what remains is a cold feeling: the fundamental disagreement and, at its core, the American position have not been resolved. hasn’t changed. The presence of top-level figures adds gravity and uncertainty, because it is not perceived as an exchange between allies, but as an asymmetric negotiation where one party feels they can “afford” to impose conditions. Even when the tone first becomes somewhat conciliatory (Trump vaguely promising that “something will come out”), the underlying message remains disturbing: options are not ruled out, Denmark’s inability to deal with Russia or China is insisted on, and the idea that American control would be the solution is maintained, which for Greenlanders sounds less like protection and more to substitution. The European military turn. The great visible change has come in the last few hours, when Europe has begun to put troops in Greenland: France, Sweden, Germany and Norway have announced sending military personnel on a reconnaissance mission in Nuuk, and Denmark frames it as part of an effort to explore security options in an Arctic increasingly disputed by Russia and China. It is a movement that, by itself, is already historic in terms of atmosphere: Greenland goes from being a remote territory with a discreet military presence to becoming a Allied deployment scenario and a narrative of “reinforcement” that is normally associated with “hot” borders, not with an ice capital where public life breathed calm. People notice the change in the most basic: more flights, more ships, more uniforms, more signs that something is moving beneath the surface. The exceptional within NATO/EU. What is striking is not only the shipping itself, but what it represents: the idea of ​​deploying European forces in a territory linked to NATO and the EU sphere as a preventive response to a political crisis with the United States is something that break the script usual of the alliance, where military reinforcement is intended against external threats, not to manage the risk of an internal struggle. Although it is presented as recognition and training before Russia and China, the social perception is another: This happens because there is a specific threat and because time seems to speed up. In other words, the deployment suggests that Europe is trying to convert the symbology in deterrence: demonstrate presence, unity and material reality on the ground so that the discussion stops being just a game of statements. Fear of another colonization. Furthermore, beneath geopolitics lies a deeper wound: the memory of Danish colonization and the fear of repeating the pattern with another “owner.” For part of the Inuit population, the idea of ​​“another colonization” is not a metaphor, it is rather a real ghostand that is why fear is not expressed only in terms of sovereignty or resources, but also human: what will happen to studies, rights or daily life or identity. The crisis, paradoxically, also activates a reinforcement indigenous identitya more marked cultural separation with respect to Denmark and a visceral rejection to be treated as an interchangeable object in a global conversation where Greenland appears as a “prize” mineral and strategic position. A disturbing conclusion. Deep down, what emerges is an uncomfortable truth that the population perceive clearly: in a world where we are seeing invasions, wars and border changes, “international legality” not enough as an emotional shield, and that is why … Read more

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