Self-hosted simulator tool cuts test device carbon footprint by nearly 4x

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A mobile development team built Tapflow, an open-source tool that streams iOS simulators and Android emulators to any browser via a URL, reducing the need for physical test devices. The motivation was initially practical — physical test phones sat largely unused in a drawer and were inaccessible to non-developers — but a carbon analysis revealed a significant environmental angle. Apple's own lifecycle data shows that 74–79% of a device's total carbon footprint is generated during manufacturing, meaning unused or rarely used test phones carry nearly their full environmental cost. Annualised modelling shows four physical test devices produce around 68.2 kg of CO₂e per year, compared to just 17.9 kg when using simulators on an already-owned Mac. The difference stems almost entirely from avoided manufacturing emissions, making hardware utilisation a key factor in reducing a mobile team's carbon impact.

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Stoa Markets Launches GPU and AI Server Trading Marketplace with $300M First-Month RFQs

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

How a Workflow Library Fixes Claude Code's Data Science Reliability Gaps

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

AI Stack's Profit Paradox: Infrastructure Earns Big While Model Makers Lose

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

RapidFort Launches Runtime Tool to Monitor Open-Source Packages in Production

RapidFort announced RapidFort Runtime at Black Hat USA, a read-only monitoring tool designed to track its hardened open-source packages once they are running in production environments. The tool continuously watches workloads, detects changes, and surfaces what the company describes as actionable mitigations for DevOps and platform teams. Unlike enforcement-based security agents, Runtime does not block activity but instead focuses on providing visibility into drift between what was originally deployed and what is actually executing on a given pod. RapidFort positions the product as an extension of its existing business of selling reduced, hardened builds of common open-source components. Key details such as pricing, general availability, orchestrator support, and the sourcing of its mitigation feed have not yet been publicly disclosed.

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