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Apple acquires Buddybuild
151–160 of 170 posts
Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild
#152Earlier 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.
It's another reason to not do business with smaller companies. Especially if their idea is good, you can only wonder, when will they be bought out and my workflow will be (temporarily) disrupted? I think Buddybuild was the only service with a free tier. For folks that aggressive bootstrappers (like myself), it's just another nuisance. And even for people who were paying -- they are still as equally as disrupted.
Bitrise.io also have free 200 builds/month.
Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's another reason to not do business with smaller companies. Especially if their idea is good, you can only wonder, when will they be bought out and my workflow will be (temporarily) disrupted? I think Buddybuild was the only service with a free tier. For folks that aggressive bootstrappers (like myself), it's just another nuisance. And even for people who were paying -- they are still as equally as disrupted.
Bitrise.io also have free 200 builds/month.
Thank you for calling out a potential replacement service. Building iOS apps is certainly tricky (can't get Mac OS into the cloud easily), so these free-tier CICD services really are great for those creating new, smaller apps and are getting on their feet.
Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you know a good one, definitely let me know. Generally the only constraints are open source with a permissive license & on-premises installs. One benefit is it can already integrate with whatever else is out there. When we switched from GitLab to GitHub Enterprise at work, our CI environment just needed to point somewhere else.
Why did you switch from GitLab? What should we improve?
Nothing! GitLab was great. But we had several GitHub, GitLab, & Stash instances, and there was a push to consolidate onto one platform. Not sure why we consolidated onto GitHub over others, but that was above my pay grade :)
Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Testflight is completely useless now.
Testflight is extremely useful if you want to test your production build before releasing it to the public. Before Apple bought it there was no way to test the exact same build before releasing it on the App Store.
There are no-bullshit alternatives out there now.
Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Is this referring to free apps, paid apps, or both? I've had a paid app on both stores for about six years now and in my experience the iOS version makes about 10x the Android version every year. Many other developers have reported a similar discrepancy.
Sorry should have clarified, I am taking about freemium apps , both subscriptions and IAPs. Don't have data on paid apps.
Also I am talking about app that are well monetized and advertised so you have an level comparison instead of chart positions giving and sustaining a significant lead on one platform just by some fluke.
Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's interesting. I am admittedly using my recollection of data I saw a year or so back. Has the fraction of iOS users who pay gone down or the fraction of Android payers gone up?
Conversion on android has gone up, along with users on high-end android devices. At the same time CPI on iOS has gone up.
Speculation: iOS users may be running into app fatigue and just don't want to install new apps anymore.
Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
The logic still applies. 1. Start with platform you're most comfortable with. 2. Iterate on product until you have a winning formula 3. Replicate on 2nd platform to double revenues Building is a lot easier than identifying what to build, better to speedily experiment on one platform.
In my opinion the new logic is build in React Native (unless your app fits in the 10% of use cases that won't work well with RN), then deploy to both at once. We have had excellent results.
My take is that RN is great for demo apps or simple UIs, but I would not choose it for a production app where performance matters (ie. using camera, audio, custom controls, platform-specific SDKs, multi-threading, etc). You're definitely going to do heavy lifting in native code, and a hybrid app quickly becomes a mess. Dealing with multiple environments and super slow build times in Xcode will seriously slow down development cycles.
IMO RN is no exception to the Simple vs Easy trade-off [1] Not to mention using RN gives FB a legal blank check from your company [2]
[1] http://chrisfrost.com/wp-content/uploads/SimpleVsEasy-478x51...
[2] https://medium.com/@raulk/if-youre-a-startup-you-should-not-...
Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion the new logic is build in React Native (unless your app fits in the 10% of use cases that won't work well with RN), then deploy to both at once. We have had excellent results.
I'd say RN won't work well in 99% cases.
Could you elaborate?
Re: Apple acquires Buddybuild
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
We put off an Android version of our app for nearly two years to concentrate development on the iOS version, and the numbers we get from our Android version - less than 10% of the market and 1% of the subscriptions - prove that was the right thing to do. We'd drop Android completely as the wasteland it is if not for the PR optics of having it.
Putting off the Android version for two years is a great way to have your potential Android audience move on to your competitors and squander any marketing and networking effect. Noone remembers your app exists after a few months, why did you expect anyone to give a damn about your product after two whole years?!
Our app is in the top 10 grossing apps in the Apple App Store and we market it aggressively. Android users are just not as lucrative or numerous as Apple ones.
During that two year delay we made the iOS version a quality product instead of having our attention divided by another platform that delivers less than 10% of the userbase. It was the right move.