Apple Acquires Vancouver Startup Buddybuild

Apple has acquired Vancouver-based startup, Buddybuild, as confirmed by the iPhone maker to TechCrunch.

According to the publication, Apple says the Buddybuild team, which consists of 40 or so engineers, will remain in British Columbia. Buddybuild dubs itself as a “mobile iteration platform,” and the move looks to make it easier for developers to create and update apps for Apple devices.

Buddybuild separately confirmed the acquisition in a blog post, saying:

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.

The buddybuild service will remain available to existing customers to build, test, and ship iOS apps to testers through buddybuild.com.

The team also says as of today, they are no longer accepting new customers, while existing free starter plans and their Android app development services will be shutdown on March 1, 2018.

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.

Buddybuild was founded in 2015, by former Amazon employees Dennis Pilarinos and Christopher Stott.