LaunchKit, a set of tools that helps developers launch their apps, announced on Wednesday that it has now been acquired by Google. The company has also open-sourced all of its products and services for any developer to use and modify. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Initiated in early 2015, LaunchKit has offered four major tools that are extremely useful and are now available for developers to… develop. The company was co-founded by Brenden Mulligan, Taylor Hughes, and Riz Sattar, who had previously worked together in building Cluster and a number of other apps for both iOS and Android.
LaunchKit’s tools have helped over 50,000 mobile developers focus on what the pivot of their apps is both on Android and iOS. The company’s four major tools are a Screenshot Builder for easily creating annotated screenshots for Apple’s and Google’s store, an App Website Builder that helps create responsive landing pages for new apps, a Review Monitor for tracking reviews in Apple’s App Store and a Sales Reporter for keeping track of all your sales.
Its Screenshot tool has also managed to create a record breaking 1,500,000 screenshots and more. Its tools have also been used to build over 8,000 websites. These tools were used in many successful apps such as Cluster, Screenshotter, ChurchSnaps, Homeroom, Tripcast, Daily Kiddo etc.
“Today, we’re excited to announce that the LaunchKit team is joining Google! We’ll be joining their Developer Product Group, which is committed to building amazing developer tools, and we’ll be taking everything we’ve learned building LaunchKit and continue our mission at an even larger scale,”
the blog post announcing the development reads.
As we focus our efforts on building great developer tools at Google, we also want to make everything we’ve built at LaunchKit even more accessible. As of today, we’ve open sourced our services so anyone can set up their own instance of our tools! As for the official LaunchKit service, it will continue to operate independently for existing users for the next 12 months, then it will be discontinued.
All these tools have now been open-sourced for anyone to work with. In fact, the creators have also written a couple of how-to guides for developers.
Now that Google has acquired the platform, the company will look to integrate these features into Google products. The team now works under Google’s Developer Product Group and will probably aim to promote its tools for integration in Android apps.
The team said, following this acquisition, all of LaunchKit’s services will remain online for the next 12 months before being discontinued.
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