Apple Acquires App Development Platform Buddybuild

Similar to the other tech titans, Apple is always acquiring startups and established companies to engineer extra features and products in-house. Sometimes, it’s much more cost-effective and efficient to buy an existing organization rather than hire them to do the work for you. Apple’s newest acquisition, Buddybuild, is a great asset to their app development team and toolset.

The app tools startup describes itself as a “mobile iteration platform.” Buddybuild focuses on improving the time it takes to develop, launch, and maintain apps. Apple says the team will remain in British Columbia, a statement which the startup happily welcomed.

Apple vs Android

Buddybuild’s tools will roll into Xcode, Apple’s development suite. Although there is no known timeline or financial terms behind this acquisition, Buddybuild’s service will continue for its iOS customers.

However, Android app developers will no longer be allowed to access to Buddybuild’s Android development features after March. Apple has a habit of removing Android compatibility in products that each acquired company offers, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Apple’s app store generates more revenue than Google’s Play store, so Apple’s investment is forward-thinking in a lot of ways. Excluding China, Apple accounted for $11 billion of $17 billion of app purchases in Q3 of 2017. That’s a large majority of the market share.

On the other hand, Google’s Play store generates more downloads than the Apple app store, so Android users appear to be a little more adventurous and experimental than their iOS counterparts. This recent announcement to remove Android support significantly cuts down the amount of user data that Buddybuild would be able to obtain.

Investing in People

Buddybuild hopes that this acquisition results in higher-quality candidates from around the Vancouver area since the company won’t be moving to join other San Francisco-based app developers. The company commented that it’s “always been proud to be a Canadian company.” Buddybuild, whose clients are major Silicon Valley players like Slack, Reddit, and Mozilla, was founded in 2015 by two former Amazon employees, Dennis Pilarinos and Christopher Stott.

The addition of Buddybuild’s tools to Apple’s software development suite as well as the company’s shift in focus to Apple-only will expedite the iOS development process. Hopefully, this will lead to an improvement in the quality of apps you see in the app store. We can’t wait to try out Buddybuild’s toolset in Xcode. Let us know what you think of this acquisition in the comment section below!