Apple Acquires Buddybuild
Buddybuild (via Juli Clover, Hacker News, Reddit):
We’re excited to share that the buddybuild team has joined the Xcode engineering group at Apple to build amazing developer tools for the entire iOS community.
We’ve always been proud to be a Canadian company, so we’re also pleased that we will be staying right here in Vancouver — a hotbed of developer and engineering talent.
[…]
As of today, we are no longer accepting new customers. Existing Free Starter plans and Android app development will be discontinued on March 1, 2018.
On the one hand, this is good news because Xcode’s continuous integration needs lots of work. On the other hand, it sounds like this is the end of the Buddybuild product that people loved. I’ve been using Jenkins, which is a good, but it requires Java and is not especially easy to use or integrated with Xcode. On the plus side, it’s open source and so unlikely to strand its users like Buddybuild did.
Awesome! Apple just acquired some software I depend on. I look forward to uninterrupted service, followed by stability improvements and amazing new features!
- Nobody
Sadly, this means BB can no longer be used for open source projects 😢
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 be fixed or for exciting things to happen. Agility and innovation of a startup basically ends when Apple assimilates a service.
From the blog posting it is also not very clear what will happen to existing iOS customers. Can I upgrade my plan? Can I expect service? Will the existing infrastructure be maintained?
Update (2021-03-02): Sami Fathi:
Vancouver-based app startup, Buddybuild, will officially shut down in the fall of this year following Apple’s acquisition of the company in 2018.
In an email sent to existing customers, Buddybuild says that services will no longer be supported as of March 31, 2021, and updates ceased. By the fall, the company will shut down operations altogether.
