Top 10 News 2025 – The trends on iX Developer: Little AI, lots of security

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As every year, as the end of the year approaches, we are excited to see which news items performed best and attracted the most readers. These reports also reflect the trends that have been driving the developer scene throughout the year.

Surprisingly, one topic was not as dominant as we expected, namely Artificial Intelligence. While there were many reports and much to cover about it, none made it into the Top 5. The best-performing AI news was about LLM privacy and can also be categorized under security.

Most successful AI news came from the fringe or meta areas, such as security, the future of work, or corporate policy. Only one AI news item from the core area made it into the Top 10: Mozilla's LLM API. The first news about coding assistants follows at position 53 with Google Jules. Much suggests that this topic is currently overestimated in public media discourse.

Security and Open Source

By a large margin, two articles on Supply Chain Security were clearly at the top. This clearly represented the main interest of our visitors in 2025. Security articles also run via heise security and receive additional attention through it.

As in the previous year, topics related to Open Source were also in high demand. This time, the focus shifted somewhat to the aspect of licenses and specifically the associated corporate policy. Many operators are turning their backs on the pure Open Source idea and restricting its use, sometimes less, sometimes more painfully. The step by Broadcom to make Bitnami images and Helm charts paid caused a lot of anger. There was also a lot of rumbling in the Ruby community.

TypeScript and Rust were the programming languages in focus and – quite surprisingly – Delphi, which celebrated its 30th birthday in 2025.

Speaking of celebrations: We wish all readers a happy new year and a happy and satisfying year 2026.

Rank 10: 3.1 million malicious fake stars discovered on GitHub

The coveted stars on GitHub are supposed to show how popular a project is – the more, the more popular and also more reputable it appears. But this impression could be deceiving. Analysts from StarScout discovered thousands of fake accounts distributing millions of stars to boost certain repos. As expected, these served questionable purposes such as phishing, game cheats, or crypto bots. Although GitHub has deleted the accounts, the scam is likely to continue to be used, similar to fake reviews in online shopping. The stars serve as a trust mark only to a limited extent.

• Date: January 3, 2025
• Comments: 58

Rank 9: Delphi turned 30 years old

I particularly enjoyed this report, as I went through my first loops with Pascal in school, with large floppy disks and orange text on a monochrome monitor. With the switch to Windows, the name changed thirty years ago from Pascal to Delphi, and a story with ups and downs began. The language has its fan base, especially due to its simple functions for creating native interfaces. In September 2025, version 30 was quietly released.

• Date: February 14, 2025
• Comments: 243

Rank 8: TypeScript ten times faster with Go

Strictly speaking, it's not TypeScript itself that has become faster, i.e., the execution, but the compiler, which can be a significant relief for developers on larger projects. Microsoft has rewritten the compiler in Go, significantly increasing its performance. The current version of VS Code supports this as an extension for the first time. Some compilation examples show the speed gain: the VS Code codebase with 1.5 million lines takes about 7.5 instead of 77.8 seconds on Microsoft's test machine.

• Date: March 12, 2025
• Comments: 65

Rank 7: One API for all – Mozilla ends LLM chaos

With the Python tool any-llm, Mozilla simplifies the work for developers and creates a unified API for many LLMs that can now be managed and swapped centrally. Developers don't have to write a separate adapter for each model, and the tool informs them when endpoints or protocols have changed. An optional gateway handles budget, key, and tenant management. The list of connected providers is long and includes Anthropic, Azure, Databricks, Deepseek, Gemini, Groq, Hugging Face, Llama, Mistral, Ollama, Perplexity, Watsonx, and others, either locally or from the cloud.

• Date: November 7, 2025
• Comments: 17

Rank 6: LLM operators extensively collect and share personal data

The fears of many AI users have come true: LLM operators collect extensive data and not only use it for their own purposes but also share it with third parties. At the time of the study, the French provider Mistral handled data most carefully, and Meta the worst – which is not surprising. During model training, all providers are generous with personal data and essentially take whatever they can get. For user inputs, only Claude refrains from data collection entirely, while ChatGPT, Copilot, Mistral, and Grok at least offer an opt-out option.

• Date: July 2, 2025
• Comments: 55

Rank 5: Android: Google bans anonymous apps

On certified Android devices, users will no longer be able to install apps from unverified providers. Sideloading, i.e., installing outside the Play Store, will remain possible, but not anonymously. This is what Google announced in the summer. Verification must be done with an ID or, for companies, with a business registration. After criticism, Google has since partially backed down. Experienced users will be able to install unverified apps with special security mechanisms. Furthermore, hobby developers will be allowed to distribute their apps to a small circle of users.

• Date: August 26, 2025
• Comments: 318

Rank 4: Broadcom makes Bitnami paid – how will Open Source react?

Many Open Source enthusiasts lament that more and more providers are weakening their licenses or withdrawing them completely. One such case was provided by Broadcom, which made the Bitnami images and charts, popular among developers, paid. In an interview, heise developer spoke with Johannes Kleinlercher about how the industry can react to such occurrences. He criticizes: "However, Broadcom's rumored pricing models are likely not designed to appeal to the masses, even though many contributors have contributed to the quality of Bitnami charts and images in the past."

• Date: August 15, 2025
• Comments: 90