Google launches its AI vibe-coding app Opal in 15 more countries (techcrunch.com)

Google is expanding Opal, its AI “vibe-coding” no-code app builder, to 15 more countries including Canada, India, Japan, Brazil and Singapore, bringing easy AI-driven app creation to a broader global audience. Launched in the U.S. in July, Opal turns plain-text descriptions into mini web apps using Google’s internal models and a visual editor that exposes inputs, outputs and generation steps. Users can click any step to inspect or edit prompts, publish apps to the web, and share links for others to run them with their Google accounts. Google says early adopters built unexpectedly sophisticated and practical tools, prompting the wider rollout. The update also tightens Opal’s developer UX and runtime: a revamped, intentionally no-code debugging experience surfaces errors inline and lets users run workflows step-by-step or tweak specific steps in a console; steps can now execute in parallel to support more complex pipelines. Core responsiveness was improved too — creating a new Opal used to take up to five seconds or more and now starts faster, lowering friction for iteration. For the AI/ML community, Opal represents another push toward democratizing model-driven app prototyping (alongside Canva, Figma and Replit), accelerating real-world experimentation and user-driven prompt engineering without requiring programming skills.