SINGAPORE – Apple on March 5 opened its first developer centre in South-east Asia in the Republic to better support the hundreds of thousands of developers in the region who create apps to work on its hardware.
The 20,000 sq ft facility at Fusionopolis in one-north is Apple’s fourth developer centre in the world, joining those in its global headquarters in Cupertino in the United States, Bengaluru in India, and Shanghai in China.
Apple will hold in-person sessions, labs, workshops and consultations designed for teams of all sizes and at all stages of app development. According to Apple, the hundreds of thousands of developers in South-east Asia are behind more than 90,000 apps available on its App Store.
At the Singapore centre, developers will also have access to global Apple staff to fine-tune their applications. Developers will also have access to the latest devices such as the Apple Vision Pro, an extended reality headset that is currently available for sale only in the US, to test their applications.
Extended reality technologies combine physical and digital environments to create an immersive experience. Extended reality is an umbrella term for immersive technologies such as virtual reality and mixed reality.
In the past, developers had to travel to Cupertino to get direct support and access to the latest Apple hardware.
Ms Oflavia Veranez, senior product designer of Mindvalley, a learning platform based in Kuala Lumpur that focuses on personal development and self-care improvements, said that having a developer centre in Singapore will be logistically more efficient for her and her team.
Some of her team members can even fly back to Malaysia within an hour over the weekend to see their family members if they were in Singapore for work, said Ms Veranez.
In February, Mindvalley launched an immersive meditation and personal development feature on its app for Apple Vision Pro, allowing the headset’s users to meditate in virtual environments such as forests, deserts and mountains.
When designing the app, Ms Veranez said it was difficult to visualise the user’s experience on the Vision Pro headset relying solely on online tools such as design guidelines for visionOS, the operating system of Vision Pro.
With hands-on trials in test labs and in-person assistance available at the developer, they would have been able to develop their products faster.
Another company that finds the new developer centre to be useful is Screening Eagle, a Swiss company with its software headquarters based in Singapore. It uses various technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging scans (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scans to detect hidden hazards like pipes and voids within concrete, to improve the safety of construction projects.
Mr Craig Rice, the chief executive officer of Screening Eagle Singapore, said that in 2018, Apple released a new iPad Pro and ARKit 2.0, a framework that allows developers to work with augmented reality, with improved 3D object detection. It provided the accuracy and image stability that Screening Eagle needed for its ground penetrating radar (GPR) iPad app.
As it entailed new hardware and software specifications, his company sent a team to Cupertino for a few weeks to get direct support from developers at Apple.
With the developer centre in Singapore, it will be much easier for the company to collaborate with experts at Apple, as Screening Eagle Singapore is located in Fusionopolis as well.
“It’s a big, big win for us to have it right next door to us,” Mr Rice said.
Mr Steven Zhang, the engineering manager of Screening Eagle, added that he and his colleagues can now bounce ideas off the Apple team after showing them their product or feature at the centre and receive feedback on whether their software prototypes are feasible and how they can be improved.
Mr Jakob Lykkegaard, founder of game developer Lykke Studios, said that his team in Thailand had previously used Singapore primarily for promotional purposes.
“We would fly into Singapore mainly when we were launching new games or when there were press events, because everything development-related had been (done in the) US,” said Mr Lykkegaard, whose company created Stitch, a puzzle game that won the Apple design award for inclusivity in 2023.
The developer centre in Fusionopolis would be a place where his team can go to for events and to collaborate with other developers and to share knowledge, he said.
For the schedule of sessions, labs, workshops, and one-on-one consultations, go to https://developer.apple.com/events/developer-centers/.
