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Apple acquires Buddybuild

buddybuild.com

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Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#61

Post by gk1 »

wwilson wrote: post #57
gk1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was doing marketing/growth consulting for FoundationDB when they were acquired by Apple. The product was shut down overnight. Compared to that, a two-month notice seems generous.

(Former FoundationDB employee). Where did this dumb meme come from? First of all, FoundationDB was not a service, so there was nothing to "shut down". It's true we stopped selling the product to new customers, and we no longer offered free downloads under the community license. However those with existing licenses were able to continue running the product (and in fact some of them do to this very day). What's more, t…

> I'd expect slightly better treatment of a former customer.

1) Apple--who I assume made the decision to end the service abruptly--was not my client.

2) I'm making objective statements. I'm not making a judgement of whether it was smart, foolish, fair, unfair, etc. Actually I was very happy for the FDB team and stay in touch with some of them.

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#62

Post by IBM »

izacus wrote: post #34
IBM wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't believe that at all. The obvious reason why they discontinued Android support is because Apple isn't interested in continuing the existing B2B business. They're interested in the technology and the team and they're likely to integrate it into their own developer tools and offer them for free.

Why would Apple invest resources into making developer tools for other platforms? What's the real upside if Buddybuild continued as is and they tried to scale it up? Hundreds of millions in revenue per year? That's a drop in the bucket. Buddybuild's value is strategic, not because it was going to make a financial difference to Apple.

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#64

Post by scosman »

Illniyar wrote: post #25
sidlls wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

But would you really setup a CI process to automatically build that app? (and one that'll probably cost you at least a 100$ a month)

I would. Every time. I've been happy with bitrise if people are looking for mobile CI alternatives: https://www.bitrise.io/

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#65

Post by nsarafa »

JoshuaWeberMSFT wrote: post #12
CameronBanga wrote: post #7

If anyone has a good Android (or even iOS) replacement, share here? I know myself and likely many others will be looking to migrate this month.

AppCenter.ms has many similar features and supports iOS, Android, Windows, ReactNative, Xamarin, and others. [Disclaimer: As I'm a PM on the AppCenter team I'll leave evaluation of goodness to others :)]

Our team uses Buddy Build currently. Interested in integrating Microsoft App Center. Would love to see a comparison of Buddy Build against the ms App Center service

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#66

Post by nsarafa »

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #9

2 months is not enough time for people to find alternative solutions.

I think its better to rip off the bandaid. I lived through the Facebook Parse shutdown with a production app where the drama was strung out over a year, resulting in service outages, poor messaging from parse/facebook, and a lot of general anxiety about migrating etc.

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#67

Post by MarkyC4 »

scosman wrote: post #64
Illniyar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But would you really setup a CI process to automatically build that app? (and one that'll probably cost you at least a 100$ a month)

I would. Every time. I've been happy with bitrise if people are looking for mobile CI alternatives: https://www.bitrise.io/

Bitrise has been great for us at work as well, but we're beginning to investigate Microsoft's CI platform since we build web/desktop apps as well, which aren't a first class citizen in Bitrise.

Fwiw: We also wish there was a way to publish test/linting results (you can make it an artifact, but it won't load assets, so you're stuck zipping and downloading or publishing to your own managed Web server)

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#68

Post by peteretep »

favorited wrote: post #39
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, becau…

At that point, is there much point in using Jenkins? Aren't there much lighter weight alternatives?

Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild

#70

Post by hobofan »

viktorbenei wrote: post #18
CameronBanga wrote: post #7

If anyone has a good Android (or even iOS) replacement, share here? I know myself and likely many others will be looking to migrate this month.

Bitrise.io ! ;) (CTO here) Added bonus: most of our tools are open source, e.g. you can use the same runner which we use to run the builds on our build VMs ( https://www.bitrise.io/cli ) to run the bitrise config/build anywhere the CLI can run. Happy to answer any questions!

+1 from a customer! For general CI I'm a big fan of CircleCI, but for mobile builds and integrations to the relevant CD services Bitrise was much much easier to set up.
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