Google should be no stranger to those familiar with the search company as an entity who routinely picks up smaller companies to join their team and make their products and services better. Although Google is no longer the parent company to all things associated with it, as that title now falls to Alphabet, Google still has companies under its wing and the latest to become a part of them is a company called Divshot, which is focused on helping app developers create visually striking and sleek looking apps, utilizing easy-to-use tools like drag and drop functions. Although now part of Google, Divshot will be joining on under the umbrella of Firebase, which is Google’s development platform for app developers that they picked up last October.
This won’t be the first time Firebase and Divshot have collaborated on development efforts, as Firebase had previously sponsored a hackathon put on by Divshot called the Static Showdown. According to one of Divshot’s cofounders, more than half of the participants in the showdown used the Firebase development platform for their creations. Although Divshot is currently still up and running, CEO Michael Bleigh states that they will be discontinuing the use of Divshot products and services beginning in the middle of December this year on December 14th, 2015.
Divshot is already starting to bring their expertise to the Firebase team with an announcement that they are launching a new command-line interface for the Firebase platform today. With this in place, developers will be able to do things locally as the new command line is powered by a local static web server. Although Divshot seems to be heavily focused on the future of things in their new home, they’re also not forgetting about existing Divshot customers, and are giving them tools to make an easy transition over to Firebase hosting services with a migration guide to help them along the way, which they state should be a fast and unencumbered process because many of their customers are developers already using the Firebase platform. In regards to the announcement about the move and why they decided to join Firebase, Bleigh mentions that “Both teams share a passion for creating fantastic developer experiences, and now we’re moving forward together toward that common goal.”