HockeyApp Joins Microsoft

http://hockeyapp.net/blog/2014/12/11/hockeyapp-joins-microsoft.html

by davidbarker • 12 years ago

160 64 12 years ago

This is really interesting. Microsoft has HockeyApp and Apple has TestFlight. I wonder if this is a push on their part to enhance the testing tooling available for Windows Phone.

binarymax• 12 years ago

Microsoft's strategy is shifting away from Windows Phone only, and is working hard on getting their non-windows software stack on all devices. While it will probably help windows phone tooling, Microsoft is painfully aware of the small market share WP has compared to iOS and Android.

bugsense2• 12 years ago

Wow, this was unexpected, congrats to HockeyApp team! What they have built is impressive. No VC funding, no bs, just awesome work and great community.

andyjohnson02• 12 years ago

I just signed-up with HockeyApp this morning and have been very impressed with the experience. Congratulations to the team!

Previously we'd been using TestFlight for iOS and the PLsy Store's built-in beta-test functionality for Android, but it is convenient to have one service that supports a range of mobile OSs and a lower-friction deployment process.

When TestFlight was bought by Apple, they fairly quickly abandoned support for non-iOS pltforms. I'm confident that Microsoft isn't short-sighted enough to do something similar.

NicoJuicy2• 12 years ago

Microsoft realizes it has to be cross platform... Most important change since the new CEO arrived :)

scholia8• 12 years ago

Except that change was already well under way long before the new CEO arrived ;-)

chillax• 12 years ago

From: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2014/12/08/microso...

"We will integrate HockeyApp into the Application Insights service in Visual Studio Online to expand Application Insights support for iOS and Android." Seems to me they're positioning themselves for more cross platform development.

wclax04• 12 years ago

Congrats guys. We use HockeyApp and love it!

woogle4• 12 years ago

I'm not sure it is a good news.

In one hand it's great to hear that Analytics will be added and cross support is still important.

But in the other hand, it puts developers in inconfortable position. Should we still use HockeyApp for our iOS apps? Depend on a tool owned by a concurrent of your target platform is not so safe on a long term sight..

untog2• 12 years ago

I'm not too worried about it. After all, MS has released Office on iOS, and partnered with Xamarin for iOS development. They'd be insane to buy HockeyApp then kill everything it has and replace it with a Windows Phone only solution.

It's weird, but MS is almost one of the best large companies to do cross-platform dev with these days.

woogle4• 12 years ago

I agree with that, but things may be different in 2 years. And MS is also the company that gains the most money with each Android phone sold.

giulianob• 12 years ago

Considering Microsoft's strategy lately has been to provide cross platform support, I wouldn't assume that iOS is out of the picture unless there is an announcement. Look at Microsoft Band for example, it supports iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. Also the biggest news lately was .NET going cross platform and will run on OSX and Linux.

woogle4• 12 years ago

Why downvotes? I'm only asking questions. Yes, MS strategy is cross-plateform. Now. But in a few years, who knows what MS goals will be?

IMO, taking 10 minutes to think about is not lost time.

pbz• 12 years ago

I didn't down vote, but you're not just asking questions; you're masking a statement in form of a question.

andyjohnson02• 12 years ago

Downvotes are possibly because your comment could be read as instinctively/tribally anti Microsoft.

Yes, MS and Apple are competitors. But what would they have to gain by shutting-down iOS support? People would just move to TestFlight (Apple owned), which would gain MS noting at all and probably earn them some justifiable bad feeling.

Nadela-era Microsoft is looking to be a different and more open beast than the Gates and Balmer era company.

Edit: I didn't downvote you.

blowski• 12 years ago

When you're in such an unstable environment as using a 3 year old startup to build apps for a 7 year old OS, I don't think that worrying about 2 years down the line is really worth it.

If Microsoft hadn't bought them, what would Hockey look like in 2 years? What will iOS look like in 2 years?

untog2• 12 years ago

Yes, MS strategy is cross-plateform. Now. But in a few years, who knows what MS goals will be?

Equally, HockeyApp exists. Now. But in a few years, who knows where they'll be?

Basically, betting long-term on a startup is a bad bet. So you want them to be acquired by someone. I'm not sure who else out there would be better.

tehcodez• 12 years ago

Remember when Apple bought test flight? That sure worked out well for people building apps for multiple platforms. I'm sufficiently concerned.

smackfu• 12 years ago

I really doubt Microsoft is going to make it Windows Phone only. Windows Phone is just not that valuable as a platform.

scholia8• 12 years ago

Windows Phone and tablet software is free as in beer ;-)

scholia8• 12 years ago

Apple uses software to sell hardware, and usually stops supporting other platforms when it buys things. That's how its closed, proprietary world works.

Microsoft makes its money from software not hardware, and most of it comes via third parties not direct sales. It licenses most of its software across multiple brands of hardware, and it's been supporting non-Windows platforms (in the form of Mac OS and iOS) for a long time. It's already hosting Linux on Azure.

It's not going to close off markets for doctrinaire reasons, only if there's no money in them...

CmonDev• 12 years ago

I was afraid it's another of those HTML5 hybrid providers, but it's actually something useful.

gtop• 12 years ago

Awesome, hope they keep supporting iOS and Android distribution.

pistle• 12 years ago

It fits nicely within the dev story around getting .net and C# running across platforms along with the Xamarin partnership. With testflight evaporating, this is a logical acquisition. Does it make sense to keep it open to native devs? Sure. They can have ramps placed in front of them for using Azure and various telemetry solutions.

dharma1• 12 years ago

Also used to use Testflight when they still did Android, and signed up with Hockey App yesterday. Hope the Microsoft acquisition doesn't mean that I'll have to find another beta testing platform again!

coldcode2• 12 years ago

Been using Beta by Crashlytics since Apple screwed up TestFlight. If MS does continue to support iOS maybe I will switch to that.

faizmokhtar• 12 years ago

How is your experience so far? Is it much easier? Been using Crashlytics mainly for the crash reports, never tried anything else.

coldcode2• 12 years ago

I use it for Enterprise apps mostly to send to myself. Internally we have a website where people can get our apps but for testing on multiple devices it's OK. Haven't tried it on a lot of users though. TestFlight was awesome but now it's mostly horrible once Apple made it so painful.

danabramov• 12 years ago

HockeyApp is awesome. They're very supportive, and the tooling itself is very good. Happy for them!

brianobush• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with hockey...

Avalaxy• 12 years ago

Not even with ice hockey!

guiomie• 12 years ago

Ahaha. Yah I was surprised to see no relation. Or perhaps there is one that we don't know ? I thought maybe they were a Canadian company, but they don't seem to be...

skyebook• 12 years ago

I believe I've read in the past that its a play on "Ad-Hoc".

Yes, also disappointed its not about hockey.

jeremy_wiebe• 12 years ago

If they aren't hockey related, at least they could have gone all out with hockey branding and terminology!

vm• 12 years ago

Microsoft is back for acquisitions! This is good for everyone working on tech startups.

Recent buys: Acompli - Dec 1, $200M / Aorato - Nov 13, $200M / Equivio - Oct 8, $200M / Mojang (Minecraft) - Sept 15, $2.5B

Microsft even started accepting Bitcoin today and recently did a major BD deal with Dropbox. Zombie no more.

neves• 12 years ago

Hey, the business reason to buy it is clear. Nobody develops for Windows Phone, but everybody has the burden to develop for two plataforms: iOS and Android. If MS lower the burden and automatically makes it very, very easy to develop for Windows Phone, they will finally have some decent software in their plataform.

hluska• 12 years ago

That's a good, concise explanation of a potential strategy. Excellent job!

bugsense2• 12 years ago

MS will buy Xamarin next. VS is free now, you will deploy your app to tester with Hockey, test it, monitor it and then offer you Azure Mobile Services

Immortalin• 12 years ago

MS won't buy Xamarin unless someone else is planning to buy it. They probably have some sort of exclusive agreement to give MS priority when buying. It is simply cheaper for MS to let Xamarin run itself than to take it under the wing of MS.

realharo• 12 years ago

I've always wondered, if MS want more apps to support their platform, how come they're the only mobile OS (including the obscure ones) that doesn't support OpenGL ES? Way to shoot themselves in the foot...

hdivider• 12 years ago

Great news.

What I love about HockeyApp (vs TestFlight) is that I don't really have to bother with the App Store Review Guidelines.

Makes testing much faster. Plus, they show they care when it comes to integration: tons of help, plus a special wizard to make it easy.

thijser• 12 years ago

It's interesting to see the consolidation in this space. HockeyApp is the #2 most used crash reporting library for Android according to our stats: http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/tag/crash-reporting/... The #1, crashlytics, was acquired in early 2013 by Twitter, and BugSense was acquired by Splunk.

robertwalsh0• 12 years ago

"What browsers work with HockeyApp? We have developed and tested with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari." Kinda funny.

maresca• 12 years ago

I had used HockeyApp for 3 months while testing my current set of mobile apps. I had used it to test an iPhone app and it was terribly painful. Those pains were mostly from Apple's end though. Once I had found out Apple bought TestFlight, I canceled my HockeyApp subscription. Does anyone have any input on the comparison of HockeyApp and Play Store beta testing for the testing process of android apps?

sreejithr• 12 years ago

"When we founded our company, our intent and mission was to always stay indie."

You sold out, dude.

tdicola• 12 years ago

Everyone has a price. Everyone.

busterarm• 12 years ago

Especially me. I'm even cheap!

Lightbody• 12 years ago

You say it like it's some mark of shame.

They built a product, found success, a bigger company wanted it, and then found more success via acquisition.

What's wrong with that?

_random_• 12 years ago

He identified a strong discrepancy between their vision and their decision. What's wrong with that?

filmgirlcw• 12 years ago

Congrats to Michael and team on this! After Apple bought TestFlight and relaunched their testing offering this year at WWDC, it was clear Hockey would have a problem competing in the Apple device space (even though I think their product is superior to what TestFlight was -- haven't used the new TestFlight enough to compare).

The tools are great for users and developers and I think this will be great for Microsoft. Glad to see it end up in good hands.

Truly a great service.

kyberias• 12 years ago

It wasn't easy to find out what HockeyApp actually does. Here's some information buried in their site:

http://support.hockeyapp.net/kb/about-general-faq/general-qu...

Pephers• 12 years ago

I found it quite easy to find on the front page of their website, http://hockeyapp.net/features.

HockeyApp Joins Microsoft

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