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Apple acquires Buddybuild

buddybuild.com

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Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#31

Post by pm90 »

st3fan wrote: post #29

I'm happy for the founders, this is probably a good and profitable exit for them. But as a customer I am really sad and disappointed. Apple has a very bad reputation when it comes to taking over products like this. TestFlight is the prime example. TestFlight basically disappeared for a year until coming back as a more limited and slower Apple branded service. And by slow I mostly mean, it takes 6 months for bugs to b…

Apple is notoriously bureaucratic. So its not surprising that innovation is stifled. I really hate this duality b/w innovation and stability... perhaps if more startups were focused on longer term survivability, it would be better for society overall?

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#33

Post by rectang »

jakobegger wrote: post #8

I recently posted an „Ask HN“ asking for a flexible CI system. Most of the suggestions were proprietary hosted SaaS solutions. I was sceptical, and things like that keep me sceptical. Sure, setting up a CI system yourself is maybe a bit harder than using a hosted solution. But if the provider decides to change their offering, you are in big trouble. You‘ll need to spend a lot of time switching to a new sevice, migrat…

This is where open source projects with open governance offer peace of mind over proprietary offerings. Community stakeholders get a say in how the project evolves -- decisions are not made solely on what offers the best value for the platform's investors.

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#34

Post by izacus »

IBM wrote: post #23
izacus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much most larger apps/agencies do development for both platforms. iOS usually gets a bit of a higher priority, but Android is just too big to ignore. Solutions that support both are thus more popular and better idea - but Apple obviously is using all kinds of tactics to discourage development for competing platform. Even buying companies and shutting down their Android (TestFlight is another example).

It's silly to think Apple buying Buddybuild is to discourage development for other platforms for the reason you stated, there are plenty of competitors to both TestFlight and Buddybuild. They bought these two companies because they want to enhance their own developer tools.

Yeah, I might have worded that poorly - buying Buddybuild almost certanly wasn't to interfere with Android development.

Immediately killing all Android related functionality is to discourage that development though.

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#35

Post by threeseed »

rectang wrote: post #33
jakobegger wrote: post #8

I recently posted an „Ask HN“ asking for a flexible CI system. Most of the suggestions were proprietary hosted SaaS solutions. I was sceptical, and things like that keep me sceptical. Sure, setting up a CI system yourself is maybe a bit harder than using a hosted solution. But if the provider decides to change their offering, you are in big trouble. You‘ll need to spend a lot of time switching to a new sevice, migrat…

This is where open source projects with open governance offer peace of mind over proprietary offerings. Community stakeholders get a say in how the project evolves -- decisions are not made solely on what offers the best value for the platform's investors.

Far more nuance is needed here.

There are plenty of open source projects where the decisions and roadmap are decided in private and based on financial motivations. In fact most of the company sponsored projects are like this eg. Spark, Cassandra.

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#36

Post by 27182818284 »

TruthSHIFT wrote: post #14
mullingitover wrote: post #6

And just like that, by dropping Android support, Buddybuild goes from viable solution to total non-starter. Does any serious mobile app development these days really go all-in on one platform?

Yes, iOS first is still extremely common.

First, but not exclusively. As a long time complainer about the iOS-first mindset I used to keep a spreadsheet actually of how long the Android versions of apps were delayed.

I don't recall many iOS and iOS only apps. There was just generally and Android time-tax that Android users had to wait through.

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#37

Post by pbhjpbhj »

IBM wrote: post #23
izacus wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much most larger apps/agencies do development for both platforms. iOS usually gets a bit of a higher priority, but Android is just too big to ignore. Solutions that support both are thus more popular and better idea - but Apple obviously is using all kinds of tactics to discourage development for competing platform. Even buying companies and shutting down their Android (TestFlight is another example).

It's silly to think Apple buying Buddybuild is to discourage development for other platforms for the reason you stated, there are plenty of competitors to both TestFlight and Buddybuild. They bought these two companies because they want to enhance their own developer tools.

Surely Apple are throwing away a lot of the value of what they just bought; does profiting from that harm their own developer tools. IMO that seems almost impossible, the only harm is to protect their eco-system from competition; ergo the reason to stop supporting other eco-systems is to harm the competition?

Couldn't they fork the project, keep everything but the name for themselves and set a single guy on maintenance; wouldn't that enhance their own developer tools just as much?

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#38

Post by starshadowx2 »

threeseed wrote: post #35
rectang wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where open source projects with open governance offer peace of mind over proprietary offerings. Community stakeholders get a say in how the project evolves -- decisions are not made solely on what offers the best value for the platform's investors.

Far more nuance is needed here. There are plenty of open source projects where the decisions and roadmap are decided in private and based on financial motivations. In fact most of the company sponsored projects are like this eg. Spark, Cassandra.

"open source projects with open governance"

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#39

Post by favorited »

jakobegger wrote: post #8

I recently posted an „Ask HN“ asking for a flexible CI system. Most of the suggestions were proprietary hosted SaaS solutions. I was sceptical, and things like that keep me sceptical. Sure, setting up a CI system yourself is maybe a bit harder than using a hosted solution. But if the provider decides to change their offering, you are in big trouble. You‘ll need to spend a lot of time switching to a new sevice, migrat…

I've built several Jenkins-based CI systems at work. Once you know how to not shoot yourself in the foot, it's really easy. I have 2 cardinal rules:

1) Don't run any jobs on the master box – master is just a web server + master Jenkins app server 2) All build scripts should be part of the project, not configured CI

#2 is the more important. Jenkins jobs at my work used to have tons of configuration and plugins, because the person setting up the CI would see (for example) an "Xcode plugin," and (naturally) decide to install and use that. That was a nightmare because of transient dependencies (and conflicts), and now configurations like "project file name" were spread across multiple jobs. Now we just have similar build scripts in each project, which has the additional benefit of letting developers run builds and tests locally the same as they run in CI. Jobs are tiny, and all the CI configuration has to do with CI things, like schedule, branch, archiving, notifications, etc.

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#40

Post by Pharaoh2 »

sidlls wrote: post #15
mullingitover wrote: post #6

And just like that, by dropping Android support, Buddybuild goes from viable solution to total non-starter. Does any serious mobile app development these days really go all-in on one platform?

If I were to seriously attempt to commercialize the toy apps I build for my kids/family I'd go iOS first easily. People with Apple devices are far likelier to pay, and Android development is, in my view, an inferior experience (although Kotlin makes it marginally less so these days).

This may have been historically true, but our internal data shows us that starting early 2017, people in tier 1 countries were equally likely to pay and have comparable LTV on both platforms.

And if you also going to launch in EU/Australia/Canada, you will have a nearly 50-50 split of ios and android users on a platform neutral app.

So the classical logic of implementing on iOS first doesn't really apply anymore. Now its more, implement first on the platform you are comfortable with but don't forget about the other platform because there is a equal amount of money to be made there...

PS: Data excludes low end iOS and android devices. (< SE, old iPads/iPods, old and cheap android devices). These devices have extremely low conversion on both platforms anyway.

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