Apple Acquires Burstly to Provide Support for App Developers

Burstly and TestFlight provide support for developers and the App Store ecosystem in the form of beta testing services, app monetization, and analytics. TestFlight began as a technical hack that included over-the-air updates for enterprise apps. In 2011, the two companies merged to become Burstly, which Apple has now acquired. Development support is a much needed component of Apple’s system. Apple App Store customers spent more than $10 billion in 2013, with 3 billion app downloads in December alone.

“In essence, TestFlight arose because of a failure on Apple’s part to properly support the needs of developers,” suggests The Next Web. “Apple’s acquisition of Burstly feels like an admission of guilt on the iOS maker’s part that it did in fact neglect the beta testing component of the app development stack.”

When TestFlight joined Burstly in 2011, they created the FlightPath service to assist developers with analytics. This program helps developers with every part of creating an app including building it, releasing it, and understanding its position in the marketplace, and how to monetize it.

“If integrated properly at Apple, each of these pieces will become even greater resources for iOS developers,” reports TNW. This acquisition gives Apple and its App Store an even greater competitive advantage over Google and the Android development community. Not only does this prevent Android developers from using the Burstly software, it also helps support developers to create apps solely for the Apple App Store.

The main concern of developers about this acquisition is that Apple is going to alter the useful TestFlight software.

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