Tech News – Page 7 – by Arlin Schaffel

The App Store is booming again, and AI may be why

According to a new analysis from market intelligence provider Appfigures, worldwide app releases in the first quarter of 2026 were up 60% year-over-year across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play. That percentage was an even higher 80% when looking at the iOS App Store alone. In April 2026 so far, the total number of app releases is up 104% across both stores compared to the same time last year, and up 89% on iOS. As Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Greg “Joz” Joswiak, quipped In a recent interview: rumors of the App Store’s death in the AI age “may have been greatly exaggerated.”
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/18/the-app-store-is-booming-again-and-ai-may-be-why/

Humanoid robot sprints to victory in Beijing, beating human half-marathon record

A humanoid robot that won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing on Sunday ran faster than the human world record in a show of China's technological leaps. The performance by the robot marked a significant step forward from last year's inaugural race, during which the winning robot finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds.
https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/humanoid-robot-sprints-victory-beijing-beating-human-half-132179294

Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new product for creating quick visuals

image via techcrunch.com

Anthropic announced on Friday that it’s launching Claude Design, a new experimental product that lets users create visuals like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more using Claude. The company says Claude Design is intended to help people like founders and product managers without a design background share their ideas more easily.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/17/anthropic-launches-claude-design-a-new-product-for-creating-quick-visuals/

Canva’s AI assistant can now call various tools to make designs for you

Canva is leaning into this paradigm in the latest version of its Canva AI assistant, which uses its AI model to let users create editable designs with text prompts. Users can describe what they want it to make, and the bot will call the required tools and come up with a few options. The assistant uses layers to make designs, which gives users the flexibility to tweak different aspects of the final product as they see fit.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/canvas-ai-assistant-can-now-call-various-tools-to-make-designs-for-you/

Microsoft’s new Xbox Gamepad Cursor adds a virtual mouse to handhelds

Microsoft has started testing its own virtual mouse cursor inside its Xbox mode for Windows-based handhelds. The new Gamepad Cursor option provides a quick way to turn the left stick of a handheld like the Xbox Ally X into a virtual mouse.
https://www.theverge.com/news/910901/microsoft-xbox-gamepad-cursor-windows-handhelds

To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain

But since the appearance of ChatGPT, the instructor’s job isn’t just to teach the subject and frantically attempt to keep every student’s plate spinning. Increasingly, it’s to moonlight as a detective and prosecutor because students without the motivation to do the work don’t have to skip it anymore. They can turn in a work-shaped simulacrum almost as easily. And a substantial number do—in a recent College Board survey of 600 high school students, 84 percent said they had used generative AI for schoolwork.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/to-teach-in-the-time-of-chatgpt-is-to-know-pain/

Cloudflare made a WordPress for AI agents

image via theverge.com

Cloudflare, the cloud provider that connects millions of sites to the internet, wants to “fix” another digital giant: WordPress. It announced a new open-source system, called EmDash, that’s supposed to address the “core problems that WordPress cannot solve” — and they want to do it by allowing AI agents to take control of your website.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/909730/cloudflare-emdash-wordpress-community